Note Mike — I would like to send this email to friends if you approve.
— alan skeoch
THE UNDERSIDE OF TORONTO AS LIVED BY MIKE IKEDA
alan skeoch
october 9, 2025
“My mother would shred some white bread and put it in a bowl with milk and sugar. That would be dinner some nights. Other nights we got one egg each.”, said Mike
Ikeda as he reminisced about living Parkdale in the 1960’s. He has lived his whole life in the shadowy underside of 31 countries but he has not
forgotten Parkdale CI and Cebrynsky, the Vice Principal that suspended him…Grade Ten was the end of his life as a scholar in the formal sense. Too bad really. Mike could have been another John Steinbeck or Hugh Garner.
Yesterday Marjorie and I sat on a park bench with Mike Ikeda at Parkdale Collegiate. (October 8, 2025)
“I had a great time meeting you and Marjorie yesterday.”, said Mike as he remembered what happened to him decades ago. He was not bitter
which surprised me. He was upbeat, full of laughter and wonderfull stories.like the day “Drago scored a bag of marijuana and dumped the
bag on the table for his friends to roll.
“Top grade stuff boys…help yourselves.”
“looks like tea leaves crumbled to me,” said Mike Ikeda who had just been suspended from PCI.
“Not so, this is the best…light up.” And so they did. Fifteen year old tough Parkdale kids. Poverty home lives.
“Tastes like tea leaves!” they agreed with Mike.
some laughed. Drago did not laugh. He planned to get even.
WHO IS MIKE IKEDA — AND WHY SHOULD I CARE ANYWAY
Mike Ikeda was not one of my students at Parkdale. Wish that were not so. I like to think I would have
rescued him from a lifetime on the run. Maybe…maybe not. Mike grew up in poverty. He had to work
or starve. His mother, who he felt sorry for, had fled from North Bay just after her mother died and
her father suggested “You will have to assume wifely duties if you plan to stick around here.” She knew
what that meant so fled south to the seedy Parkdale part of West Toronto. No education. No skills.
No future. That defined the rest of her life. Mike and his sister came along in due course. His father
was a Japanese cook and gambler…an itinerant father who spent his time and his money with horses at
Woodbine and Dufferin racetracks. So Mike’s mom was on her own with two kids to raise and no
income. So she often had to live on strips of bread soaked in milk.
My role in Mike’s life is minor. I did recognize he knew the underside of Toronto
and said ‘mike, why don’t you write your life story. You have seen and done things that most Canadians
could only imagine.’
So Mike did. He cloistered himslef away and wrote this 800 page biography. HE is now living
in a toronto homeless shelter. Everything he owns can be fitted into a/ locker. Does Mike feel sorry for himself. Not in the least but he knows he will have to pack up soon. “Too expensive to live here.”
I cannot put the book down — just read the first 120 pages about Parkdale and the Green Dolphin.
WHERE CAN MIKE’S BOOK BE PURCHASED?
AMAZON
THE ODYSSEY OF MIKE IKEDA
800 PAGES — $42.95.
$42.95
Last words: Mike’s book — Cover design by a fellow homeless
shelter resident…a graphic artist whose arthritis has crippled him.
