The Class : A Memoir of a Place, a Time, and Us Hardback

On Tuesday, September 6, 1960, the day after Labour Day, class 9G at Etobicoke Collegiate Institute in a suburb of Toronto assembled for the first time.

Its thirty-five students, having written special exams, came to be known as the 'Selected Class.' They would stay together through high school, with few exceptions.

They would spend more than two hundred days a year together.

Few had known each other before. Few have been in other than accidental contact in all the decades since.

Their ancestors were almost all from working-class backgrounds.

Their parents had lived their formative years through depression and war.

They themselves were born into a postwar world of new homes, new schools, new churches.

New suburbs. Of new classes like this one. Of boundless possibilities. When almost anything seems within reach, what do we reach for?

Ken Dryden was one of these thirty-five. In his varied, improbable life, he had wondered often how he had gotten from there to here.

How any of us do. He