Few people are as enduring, well known or as entertaining in our Toronto Irish community as Frankie Benson.

The Belfast-born entertainer and broadcaster can very rightly claim to have both seen and done it all during his time here in Canada, watching the Irish emigrant community grow by leaps and bounds and becoming an important part of our new adopted country. Next year, 2006, marks the fortieth anniversary of his arrival in Canada.

Benson was more than generous in his time with the Toronto Irish News, when he sat down with us for one of the longest interview sessions in our publication's recent history. (Not surprisingly, Frankie pre-dates even our own existence; his picture is in our first edition!) The two interview sessions, totaling about ten hours, were conducted at Lar na nGael, the Irish Centre in Brampton and at the Belfast Lounge in Mississauga this past November. While he is perhaps the most recognizable face on the Toronto Irish scene, he is more than just the affable bearded musician and personality that many of us have come to know. Behind him, there is also quite the story. Frankie Benson grew up in his grandparent's house on the Antrim Road in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on July 4th, 1942.

"It was a big day in my mother's life," Benson says with a wry, knowing smile, belying his trademark humour. But for his mother, Josephine Mahony, it must also have been a day tinged with sadness as well. Her husband, John Benson, a sailor on the oil tankers that helped supply Britain during the Second World War, had died at the age of 24 two months earlier. Frankie's older brother, Sean, was born on July 2nd, 1941. Frankie's mother had grown up on York Lane behind St. Patrick's Church in the older part of the city.

As he grew up, the war raged on, and Belfast was not immune to German air raids targeting the city's mills, shipyards and bomb factories. "I remember I'd be playing in bombed out houses," he says. His family periodically had to be evacuated from the city during air raids, and flee into the countryside. His mother, who passed away four years ago, remembered looking down on the sight of Nazi planes blitzing Belfast. Though the war in Europe came close to home for the Bensons, Frankie's young life was not without levity, music and song.

"My mother sang quite a bit," says Frankie, remembering his early musical influences. "I'd make up wee daft songs when I was four, sing 'em in the house." Among his other unusual musical training was learning to yodel at a young age. "I?m trying to teach my granddaughter how to yodel and it's a mess! Oh, the noise out of her!" he says with a laugh. As he grew older, Frankie continued his love of music by singing on street corners with his friends. "Boys singing songs that were on the hit parade that day, that was the craic," he remembers.

His grandfather, Davy Mahony, "worked for the same company for 60 years, The Gift House of Ulster." He worked as a china packer from his 20s until his death at the age of 86, when "he collapsed on the way to work. He was a smashing man." Frankie also noted how generous his grandfather was. "Whatever he had, the rest of the street had. When no one else was working, he was working," he says. Because of his grandfather's job at the china company, Frankie's boyhood home had better china than many of the merchant princes of Belfast, except that all the Benson china was mostly chipped.

During his two weeks holidays in August, Frankie's grandfather would take him around Ireland, hitting the sights from Donegal to Cork, and Dublin to Galway, staying in bed and breakfasts, farmhouses, and seeing things "you'd never see again." As he was growing up, old superstitions still held sway in his part of Belfast. His mother would often take him around the neighbourhood to visit people who were sick with whooping cough, and make him blow into their mouths. His mother explained to him that "You have a special gift because you were born after your father died." This folk belief, called The Gift of the Thrush (throat), was not only believed to endow the gifted person with a charm for curing whooping cough, but also bestowed the person with talent as a singer or speaker.

Frankie's school days were less charmed though. "I hated school. I couldn't wait to get out of school," he says. "I was bored in school." When it came to learning lessons from his school books, he remembers thinking "I have better stories in my head!" The schooling itself wasn't bad, "I just wasn't interested." He remembers looking out the window at the birds and saying "I wanna be one of you guys."