Ken and Company

Their names were suggestive of their time and place. Those of the twenty-one girls tilted more to traditional choices, including three Margarets, three Joans, and two Kathys. Some of the fourteen boys had modern, saintless names — Daryl, Murray, Wayne — while Gord and Bruce were established Scottish Canadian favourites. Officially, based on a test and their standing in grade 8, these thirty-five grade 9 students who entered Etobicoke Collegiate Institute in September 1960 were called the Selected Class. Unofficially, they were known as the Brain Class.

The Brain Class had two Kens, one of them Ken Dryden — the future hockey star, lawyer, politician, professor, and author. In his ninth book, The Class: A Memoir of a Place, a Time, and Us, Dryden returns to his high school in what was then still a suburb west of downtown Toronto and to the boys and girls with whom he spent every...