Every Year a New Fashion in Youth Is Evolved, and This Season It Runs to Simplicity and Naturalness
“Pardon me, but aren’t you Miss Helen Brown, whom I met at Jackson’s Point two summers ago?”
“No.”
* * *
It is five fifteen.
The big Niagara steamer blows her exhaust, eager to be off into the wide blue water.
Yonge street belches down gay hundreds on to the wharf. The decks of the ship patter with feet. The captain appears on his high bridge. The streaming crowd from up dismissed Yonge street begins to hurry.
The captain on high addresses the wheelman. The wheelman toots a brief blast on the whistle.
The crowds begin to run.
We are off!
Always, somebody is left behind. Nearly always he is a youngish man with a bald head who looks as if he had been engaged to the girl he is with for fifteen years. He runs ahead of the girl, waving his hat. In vain. He returns to the girl with a crestfallen air and she pats his arm.
Or else, it is a couple of girls, large girls in orange dresses and white hats, who look like the girls who would naturally have bad tempered bosses, and who were held up until five ten to a couple of last minute letters.
They stand with their nice tasty boat lunches done up in candy boxes, wondering what they will do with them.
And the big ship backs out, wheels smoothly, grandly, and skims for the gap.
We are in search of the newest in youth.
Here it is midsummer of the year 1924 and youth so far has evolved nothing new. The short skirt of 1922, the knickers of 1923, the what of 1924?
Sheiks Out of Fashion
The decks are jammed with youth. Youth in pairs, sublimely alone in the midst of the crowd. Youth in groups, five girls to two fellows. Noisy youth and youth in deep silence. And then the jazz band speaks up.
It is a good band. It plays softly, with weird instruments. The trombone has a new dingus stuck into its horn which makes a sound that is new since 1916. Otherwise, it is the same African spine chiller we heard in the Savoy in 1916, when the street lights of London were dim, but the lights inside, ah, very bright.
From all decks of the white ship, troops youth. There is square of deck roped off.
They dance. Among them are the relics of the past. One sheik, his slick hair and side burns, his long coat and belled trousers strike an incongruous note. Two flappers, relics of that far distant year when a Mr. Lloyd George was known to everybody, dance about together, with little round colored caps on their bobbed heads.
The sheik, as he dances gravely and slowly about the deck, holding a slim girl at arms length, becomes ill at ease. He knows he is out of fashion. He was probably a noble sheik in his time, but his tribe has vanished.
The flappers, tiny little things with li’l girl voices and li’l girl mannerisms, are full of hope. They dance in each others arms right around the edge of the deck, where all the seated crowd of onlookers can see them best. They dance with exaggerated gestures. They show off. But not even the sheik sees them.
All eyes are seeking the newest in youth.
She – ah, yes, – she, of course, has bobbed hair. Her dress is yellow or coral or blue, plain, ankle length, short sleeved and beautiful.
She has a cool and steady gaze. She is neither bold nor coy. She is self-assured, at ease, quiet, modest, free, forthright, upright and downright.
She is the extraordinary, fortunate product of the flapper of two years ago and the neck-shaven, knickered boy of last year.
She is altogether an agreeable balm to the eye.
Graceful, Muscular Shuffling
He – there are a few he’s, but not enough to go around – is an obscure young man with no marked characteristics. The eccentricities of the sheik are missing. Only one on the whole deck wears patent leather dancing shoes. He has a tanned face. He looks as if he were taking an evening off from tennis or baseball or canoeing.
So they dance. Not in ten years has there been the slightest modification of the dance, unless it has been the elimination of all fancy steps, clutch holds and clinging.
The dance is simply a graceful shuffling around, softly, lithely, muscularly, to soft, lithe, muscular music.
If the band plays a fox trot or a waltz, there is not the slightest difference in the dancing, except that they shuffle to a slightly different beat. A deaf person could see no difference between a waltz and fox trot.
Some of the dancers affect fancy ways of holding hands, but they forget themselves and drop back after a minute into the simple, natural posture in which it is easiest to shuffle softly, lithely and muscularly.
The cling of the flapper, the fierce clutch of the sheik are gone. The heirs to the sheik and the flapper have entered a simple and wholesome estate.
The white ship reaches out into the wide blue. And long jovial rollers begin to dip the ship slowly up and down, up and down. Eccentric steps begin to appear in the dance. The taller and longer-legged dancers begin to execute rather woozy sways and unexpected side-steps.
A few elderly ladies retire from the deck with preoccupied expressions on their faces. A couple of the dancers produce raw lemons and begin sucking them as they sway about – to the confusion and embarrassment of the tall thin man sucking the saxophone.
The evening sun slopes downward, the band plays more spirited, less African tunes, the dancers shuffle with sense of adventure in every glide, and the big rollers of mid-Ontario wave the white ship gently, easily up and down, over and across.
Youth is off and away on its nightly escapade where music and coolness, color and the mysterious fall of night make the ancient and familiar setting.
Simplicity the Latest Style
Two ladies – they have on their gloves, so one can’t say whether they were maiden ladies or not – sit and watch the dancing, with shocked expressions in eyes that meet with meaning glances every minute, as regular as clockwork. But they never saw dancing since the schottische.
Two young fellows step up to two girls who are sitting:
“Pardon me, but would it be possible to ask you to dance?”
“May I introduce you to my mother, please?” replies the girl.
And an extraordinary procession – 1924, is it? – moves over the deck to where a middle aged lady is sitting amiably watching the dance.
The little flappers are still mechanically circling round and round the dancing enclosure, their little caps as pert as ever, though hours have passed, and they are unaware that they are dead and gone, and mere ghosts.
The sheik, with his slim Sheba, has departed with melancholy grace up the companionway to the top deck, where, in the darkness and wind and cinders, they can hold hands and speak in the Arabic phrases of yesterday, sotto voce, lest the deck patrol overhear.
And the newest in youth, in simple and unobtrusive costume, dances or sits about the deck, talking about this and that.
“Pardon me,” said Anthony to Cleopatra, “but are you not Phryne, whom I met two summers ago at the Villa Galata?”
Jimmie roared and waved and finally caught the captain’s eye.
By Gregory Clark, illustrated by James Frise, August 4, 1945.
“It’s great,” enthused Jimmie Frise, “to see new places, to get away from the familiar scenes…”
“What I don’t like,” I stated, “is this business of wasting most of the week-end travelling to a summer cottage. How far should a summer cottage be from the city?”
“Aw, don’t worry,” said Jim. “Perry does it every week. And you’ve seen the fish he gets.”
“Those two bass he gave us last week,” I admitted, “were the swellest bass I’ve eaten in years. Four pounds each. Like twins.”
“Perry,” said Jim, “has been trying to get us to come up to his place for over 10 years now,”
“And only the trouble of getting there,” I reminded him “has interfered.”
“The only place you get good fishing,” declared Jim, “is where it is hard to get at. Easy places to get at have all been fished out years ago.”
“As I understand it.” I figured, “we drive 140 miles. Then, we catch a steamer that only runs once a day. The steamer dawdles up through the lakes, stopping at every wharf it sees. We get to Perry’s place, providing the boat’s on time, about 6 p.m.”
“Well,” said Jim, “we have all that evening’s fishing. Perry says you can start fishing right in front of his cottage. It’s as good there as any place else. And then, we get up early in the morning and fish until 3 p.m., when we catch the steamer on the down trip.”
“And arrive back at the boat terminus after dark,” I muttered, “and drive all night.”
“Okay, if you’d rather not go,” moaned Jim.
“Now, now,” I exclaimed, “don’t let’s be hasty. I just want to consider the thing from every angle.”
“The world,” stated Jim, “is full of people like you. They want to consider things from every angle. They blather all around a subject until they take all the bloom off it. Here’s a swell week-end offered us, in one of the greatest fishing districts left in Ontario. Instead of jumping at it with enthusiasm and joy and good-will, we have to fiddle and diddle around, worrying and fretting about how long it is going to take us…”
“I’m a thinker, Jim,” I explained. “I’m the philosophic type. I like to weigh each problem in advance. For instance: how far should a summer cottage be from the city? That’s a question interesting tens of thousands of people.”
“The distance a summer cottage is,” announced Jim, “from a man’s city home depends entirely on what he wants. If he just wants a place away from the city, beside a lake where he can keep cool and go for a swim, and do little gardening and loafing around, why, his cottage should be about 40 miles away. And there are tens of thousands of people in that category. On the lakes 40 to 50 miles from Toronto, there are thousands of summer cottages.”
“They might better stay right at home in the city,” I put in, “as far as escape from the city goes. A lot of those summer resorts are mere residential suburbs of the city.”
“My Mind’s Made Up”
“There you go,” said Jim. “Trying to arrange other people’s lives. Don’t you see, it’s what people want that governs their habits and their conduct. You want fishing. Okay. You’ve got to go a lot farther than the man who doesn’t care a hoot about fishing.”
“But we don’t have to go as far as Perry goes,” I submitted. “Think of the hardship on his family. Having to go and exile themselves away off in some remote neck of the woods, cut off from easy access to all sources of supplies…”
“Perry gets fish,” pointed out Jim.
“But at what a price?” I cried. “Driving 140 miles there and back every week-end, dawdling up the lakes in a little pokey steamer…”
“You’d better make up your mind,” cut in Jim, “because Perry will be here any minute.”
“Oh, I’ve made up mind,” I assured him. “I’m going all right.”
And I carried my sport bag and fishing tackle out on to the veranda to be ready when Perry arrived.
Which he did in about 10 minutes and we flung our gear into his car and we were off in a cloud of exhaust fumes in less time than it takes to tell it.
“Are we late starting?” I inquired, as we sped through the city streets.
“No, plenty of time,” said Perry. “Only I’ve got to stop at a farm for a crate of eggs and some vegetables. And we’ve got to buy some supplies before we get on the boat.”
“Why don’t you lay in supplies in town here,” I inquired, “the night before?”
“I’ve got everything worked out to a system,” explained Perry. “I’ve been making this journey for nearly 20 years. I’ve got it all down to a science. I leave at a certain time. I get to the farm at a certain time. I arrive at the wharf at a certain time. I find if I do my shopping at the far end, I don’t forget as many things as I do if I shop in a hurry here Friday night.”
“Habit,” explained Jim.
“Yes, habit,” said Perry. “You get into a certain routine on these summer week-end trips to the cottage. If you don’t follow the routine, you’re always getting into a mess.”
We swerved violently around a truck.
“Shouldn’t you go slower in the city?” I suggested. After all, we can make up time once we get on the highway.”
“This is the way I always do it,” replied Perry. “I’ve got it down to a time table. I’ve got to be leaving the city limits at a certain time.”
“But you allow for emergencies?” I inquired. “For instance, a flat tire?”
“That’s in the schedule,” agreed Perry. “The reason I’ve got to leave the city limits at exactly 11 a.m. is to allow 20 minutes for a flat tire.”
“But if you don’t get a flat tire?” I asked.
“Then I have 20 minutes leeway at the other end,” explained Perry. “If I get a flat tire, then it’s nip and tuck. I’ve got 20 minutes less in which to buy supplies.”
“I’d hate to operate on a time table as strict as that,” I said, weakly, as we shot past a baker’s wagon and narrowly missed a kid on a bicycle.
Flat as a Pancake
“Woops,” said Perry, slacking speed slightly, but glancing at his watch.
“What you don’t understand,” cut in Jimmie from the backseat, “is that there is a lot of pleasure in working to schedules like this. Perry gets a kick out of beating the time table. It’s like a game.”
“Exactly,” said Perry. “But rest easy. I haven’t had a flat tire in the past three summers.”
“Then the law of averages is against us,” I stated grimly.
It was. Five miles outside the city limits the car began to sway on the road. Perry drove to the shoulder and when we got out, the left rear tire was as flat as a pancake. Perry leaped out and opened the back of the car. Whipped out his repair kit and jack. Jimmie and I, inspired by Perry’s alacrity, went into action, and while Perry kept checking his watch, we got the spare tire on in exactly 11 minutes.
“Nine minutes to spare,” breathed Perry excitedly, as he slammed the black lid down and scuttled around into the driving seat.
“Suppose you get another flat?” I inquired.
“Aw, cut it out,” cried Jim from the back.
“The law of averages,” said Perry, “is a million to one against two flats on one 140-mile trip.”
And the law of averages stood by us until we were past Orillia. Then there was a sudden loud wheezing sound, the car began to lurch dangerously, and in a cloud of dust we pulled up far over on the shoulder with one front wheel already half-way down the ditch.
“Aw, tough luck,” I said, after swallowing.
“Wonderful handling,” cried Jim. “Perry, you sure handled that blowout in wonderful style.”
“There’s a garage,” gasped Perry, leaping out, “about a third of a mile ahead.”
And already he was frantically thumbing the passing traffic.
“Get the spare off,” he cried, opening the back lid.
And as soon as we had the spare whirled off, Perry, with the spare resting against his knees, succeeded in halting one of the passing throng of cars.
“Mind the car,” he yelled, boarding the Samaritan’s car. “I will be back in a shake.”
“Jim,” I said, as Perry vanished, “we can never make it now. There is another 60 miles to drive. And the steamer leaves at 3 o’clock.”
“We’ll see, we’ll see,” soothed Jim.
So we sat on the running-board and watched the traffic. Some of it furiously hustling. Some of it dawdling.
“Give me the dawdlers,” I said. “They’ll get there.”
It was 40 minutes, long minutes, before a garage truck drove back down the road with Perry and the repaired spare.
With the garage man’s help, Jim and I, having already jacked the car up and got the blowout off, had, the spare back on in six minutes flat. We didn’t even fasten the blowout back on the spare rack.
“Okay,” gasped Perry, leaping into the driver’s seat.
Luck Fails Again
And the next 60 miles was a green nightmare, with the fields and woods whipping past my eyes as I slunk deep down in my seat so as not to see the traffic we were slashing through.
“No supplies,” gritted Perry through his teeth. “Won’t have time.”
“The boat will be gone,” I said thickly. “It’s 3 o’clock now.”
“About three times a season,” said Perry, “the boat is 10 minutes late on leaving. The law of averages can’t be against us all the way.”
But when we came over the last hill, there, a good three miles up the lake, was the steamer.
“Well!” said Perry cheerfully. “Maybe one of the launches from up the lake will be going our way.”
“When is the next boat?” I inquired.
“Tomorrow morning.” said Perry. “But we’ll get up. Don’t fret. There is always somebody going up.”
We drove out on the steamer wharf and dumped our baggage. Perry drove the car back to a parking lot.
“It looks pretty deserted to me,” I told Jim.
“Aw, now,” pleaded Jim. “Enjoy the adventure of it. Don’t you feel any thrill at battling against odds?”
“Not the slightest,” I assured him. “My blood pressure is up about 40 points.”
Perry came back in a few minutes.
“I’ve checked at the boathouses,” he said. “There isn’t any boat going up this afternoon. But the chances of somebody coming down from up the lake are still good. Let’s buy supplies…”
So we walked up town while Perry laid in the coming week’s provisions for his family exiled far away up the lakes.
When we got back to the wharf, one of the little boys who sells fishworms told us that a big cabin cruiser belonging to Mr. Bottleton had come and gone.
“Bottleton!” cried Perry in anguish. “Why, his cottage is less than a mile from mine!”
So we sat with our luggage and watched up the lake. Sundry launches, cruisers and small boats came and went, but all were local traffic to town.
“How about renting a rowboat,” I suggested, “and doing a little fishing around the bay here?”
“No fish in here,” said Perry disdainfully. “And besides, we might miss a connection.”
So there we sat on the wharf, or wandered over to watch the small craft coming or going, or talked with the little boys who sell worms. And at 7 p.m., Jim and I went up to the Chinese restaurant for a quick supper while Perry stood guard, and then he went and ate. And as dusk fell, I suggested:
“Okay, boys, let’s drive back to the city. We can take our time. We won’t have to rush…”
“What?” cried Perry indignantly. “And miss visiting my place, when we’re this close!”
So we went uptown and got rooms at the local hotel. We were too late for the movie. We promenaded through the main street, looking in the hardware store windows and then went to bed about 10 o’clock.
“Lend Me the Oars”
“The steamer leaves on Sundays at 7 a.m.,” said Perry as we went to bed. “Bright and early for us.”
We got up at 6, had a very sketchy breakfast in the hotel cooked and served by a sleepy lady who hadn’t wanted to get up at all. Down we charged to the dock, loaded our luggage and supplies aboard just as they were pulling up the gang-plank.
Perry was welcomed very familiarly by the six members of the ship’s company. He introduced us to the captain and all the deck hands.
“Goin’ up for a real stay this time?” said the captain.
“Just to see the folks,” said Perry. “We’re coming back with you tonight.”
“Ooooh,” said the captain soberly. “We don’t make the late run in August any more. We just go to the next stop north of you and turn around and come straight back.”
“But…” gasped Perry.
“It’s been on the notice board there,” said the captain, “all July. See? It says, curtailed service for August.”
“But… but…” said Perry.
“You’ll have about three-quarters of an hour,” assured the captain. “You’ll have time to run up to your cottage and come straight back.”
“Harrummff,” I cleared my throat.
But Jim stepped on my foot, hard.
So we sat on the deck and admired view as the little steamer huffed and puffed and shuddered and shook up through the lakes, stopping at every wharf it saw.
And when we arrived at Perry’s resort, he pointed out his boy, a brown-skinned little lad, among the handful of people waiting on the wharf.
We rushed our gear and supplies off. We grabbed armfuls and hurried down to the small dock where the boats were tied. Perry indicated his outboard skiff and we chucked the stuff in.
“Might as well leave our tackle on the wharf here,” I suggested. “Maybe, to save weight, I could just wait on the dock, eh?”
“Come on,” cried Perry, “have a look at my place, anyway.”
“I’ll run the engine,” piped up Perry’s small boy.
“Get away,” said Perry. “We’re in a rush.”
And he grabbed the starting cord, twiddled the levers and gadgets with trembling hands, and heaved.
We were off before the steamer backed out. About a hundred yards away from the dock, the outboard engine began to slow down and whine.
“What have you done to this engine?” yelled Perry fiercely.
“It runs okay for me,” murmured the little boy.
It died. Perry twiddled, yanked, peered in the gasoline hole, shook it, kicked it, and yanked, yanked, yanked.
We drifted down the channel past a couple of islands.
“I’ll take the oars,” I suggested.
“She’ll go in a minute,” puffed Perry. “Flooded, I guess. That’s what comes of letting kids fool with engines.”
“There’s our place now,” said the little boy politely, pointing around the end of an island.
We drifted another couple of hundred yards. Perry was still jerking and twiddling.
“I’d better get the oars out,” I repeated.
“Well…” said Perry, gazing towards his cottage. A group of ladies had appeared on the cottage dock. They were waving. Perry waved back and his face gleamed with a fond look.
But we were still 300 yards from the cottage when we heard the whistle of the steamer out in the big bay.
“Good grief!” cried Perry.
“Lend me the oars,” muttered Jim.
“Leave somebody at the oars,” I gritted, “who doesn’t go for schedules.”
And I really made that skiff whirl around, amid faint cries from the party on shore. And I really kicked up a spray as I made for the channel.
As we rounded the last bend, the steamer was reversing, the old boy on the wharf was flinging up the steamer’s rope. Jimmie got into the bow and roared and waved and finally caught the captain’s eye.
We transhipped at sea. Perry hugged his boy on behalf of the whole family and scrambled aboard the steamer last.
And as we stood on deck, gazing back at this beautiful though remote fishing country, we saw Perry’s little boy sitting in the stern of the skiff, the engine humming, and heading back down the channel, the cartons of supplies piled in the bow.
“Well,” said Jim enthusiastically, “we got the supplies through anyway!”
This was the last published comic by Jimmie before he signed up for World War 1. It was mentioned by a few sources that he had actually left the Toronto Star sometime after this date he apparently moved to Montreal to further his career at an engraving house. He signed up for service in the military for the overseas expeditionary force (69th Battery) on May 17, 1916.
I theorize that he left as the war propaganda cartoons he was tasked with after the war began in 1914 were tedious, much like this one, with emphasis on the heroic volunteers, the evil Kaiser, the brutal Germans, and the indecisive Americans.
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, July 27, 1935.
“On a day like this,” gasped Jimmie Frise, removing his tie and collar. “I wish I was an aviator. It must be swell up there about ten thousand feet.”
“Have you never been in an aeroplane, Jimmie?” I inquired.
“No, and never hope to be,” said he.
“I was going to suggest,” I said, “that just to get a cool breeze we might run up at noon to one of these aerodromes on the outskirts and take a buzz around. It costs only a couple of bucks.”
“One of my principles,” said Jimmie, “is always to keep at least one foot on the ground. I never even jump both feet at a time.”
“Flying is really very simple.” I elucidated. “It’s not like that old war stuff we used to watch from the mud. I often think the feeling we have about aeroplanes is due to what we saw in the war. Aeroplanes whizzing around the sky; and every day or two a rat-tat-tat in the sky to attract our attention, and then a long tumbling streamer of black smoke and a kind of ghastly silence all over the earth, while a million men watching swallowed the lumps in their throats, and even the birds stopped singing and the artillery forgot to shoot.”
“I remember that,” said Jim, absently. “I remember one time in the winter before Vimy seeing two of our old pusher aeroplanes, with two men in each of them, being shot down like old blazing rags by a regular bees’ nest of little fast German machines.”
“But once you take a flight,” I explained, “and feel the solid, smooth, powerful strength of the machine under you, you lose all that idea of fragility. You don’t even sense the height. It is like being in a fast boat, and you go bucking over the air waves.”
“I’ll stay on the ground,” said Jim, “no matter how hot it gets. Even if this old earth began to boil from within, I’d still keep my feet right on it.”
“Jimmie,” I said, “when your number is up, your number is up. You ought to know that.”
“I’d hate to have my number called,” demurred Jimmie, “about a mile in the air over Lake Ontario or something.”
“One thing the army did for us,” I offered, “was to make us fatalists. You remember that number up stuff? If a shell had our number on it, we were going to get it. I knew men that never spoke their regimental number out loud, for fear Fate or somebody would hear it and put it on a German bullet.”
“We sure were fatalists,” agreed Jimmie. “After the first few months, nothing mattered.”
“At Vimy,” I said, “the third day of the battle, a new machine gun crew came in with a Vickers and I had to place them and show them their field of fire. The sergeant set his gun up on the parapet1, and he and I stood on the little fire-step2 we had dug. We each had one foot on the narrow little step. We were side by side, the sergeant starting to feed his belt into the gun, while I pointed out the ground ahead of us. Two of his men were to my right. Three of his men were to his left. We were all in a bunch. We heard a shell coming. Snoring. A five-nine3, I think. Its snore rose to a buzz. We knew it was going to be close. We all crouched our heads. But the shell lit in the trench with us. It killed the sergeant beside me and all his five men, every last one. The men on my side and the men on his. But all It did to me was lift me about twenty feet and hurl me down the trench. I was not even scratched. The skirt of my trench coat was scorched brown in one place, but I was not even knocked unconscious. I still had my stick in my hand. Now, if you say a shell could do that, I’d refuse to believe you. All I can say is, that shell didn’t have my number on it.”
If Your Number is Up
“I guess everybody that is alive had experiences like that,” admitted Jim. “It’s a curious thing. Maybe you will be walking along the street and a milk bottle will fall off a window ledge of a ten-storey building you are passing. And all you were doing was going to buy some cigarettes.”
“It’s a queer thing,” I confessed, “but it only goes to show you how silly it is not to go up in aeroplanes. If you are going to get it in an aeroplane, you are going to get it in an aeroplane.”
“Yes,” said Jim, “but if you don’t go up in aeroplanes, that I one place you are not going to get it.”
“It would be swell to take a flight on a day like this,” I said. “Look out that window. Look at the lake. It is fairly blazing in the sun. But that shimmer you see isn’t from the lake. That’s coming from the street, twenty-two storeys below us. The town is baking.”
“What we might do,” suggested Jim, “is go for a sail. We can rent a dinghy.”
“Yes,” I said, “and one of those sudden squalls blow up, the kind we get on hot days like this.”
“Well, if you’re going to drown, you’re going to drown,” pointed out Jimmie.
“I’m no sailor,” I protested, “and anyway, it’s hotter out on the water than off it, we’d blister and there is no shade.”
“How about taking your little open car,” suggested Jim, “and going for a spin in the country?”
“The pavement is bubbling and the dust would be terrible,” I objected, “and besides, I never like driving on one of these torrid days, because everybody is half dead or asleep with the heat and I think driving in weather like this is more dangerous than at any time of the year. Think of blow-outs, for example!”
“If you are going to die in a motor crash,” stated Jim, “you are going to die in at motor crash.”
“I wish you wouldn’t be so suggestive,” I protested. “There ought to be something we could do to get out of this heat. We can’t work on a day like this.”
“Suppose we go down to the beach, somewhere, and just lie in the shade,” said Jim. “Down at the Beaches, at the east end, they I have the loveliest cool lake breezes and lots of big trees right beside the sand.”
“I heard of a girl,” I said, “who was walking on a Muskoka beach only two weeks ago. A lovely young girl. And she cut her foot on a tin can, and she got streptococcus and died.”
“If you are going to get it on the beach,” said Jim hollowly, “you are going to get it on the beach.”
“Personally.” I said rather anxiously. “I think it is as cool up here on the top of The Star building4 as anywhere, don’t you?”
“Don’t lean out any windows,” warned Jim, darkly.
“Aw, cut it out,” I cried. “You get a thing on your mind and you…”
“Who started this?” inquired Jim, perspiring. “Who tried to get me up in an aeroplane?”
“Let’s get out of here anyway,” I said, rising and putting on my coat. “I have a nasty feeling I want to lean out one of these windows.”
Life in Filled With Perils
So after a lot of dillying and dallying, and putting away pens and feeling in his coat pockets, Jim got his hat and we went down the elevator to the street. From Jim’s high eyrie5 in the top of The Star building, the elevator took us with immense speed, and I felt my heart clutching at the thought that maybe it might just be dropping.
We got out on the street, and motor cars went by with a hot wind wafting us and a street car clanged its bell angrily at nothing at all.
“Let’s go up the lane,” I said to Jim. “Those motorists slouched behind their wheels have a reckless look to me.”
Up the lane, which leads back out to Bay St., our path was barred by a pair of immense horses standing with a dray6 loaded with great rolls of newsprint. Jim, being an old artillery driver, walked calmly past them but one of the massive beasts, with every show of impatience, stamped a forty-pound hoof as Jim went by. I paused.
Jim looked back.
“Come on,” he sneered.
“I’ll meet you around the other way,” I said, because one of the horses had his eyes closed in a most secret and ominous fashion. I felt he was shamming.7
However, a pretty girl came along, and knowing even a horse wouldn’t kick a pretty girl, I sidled past alongside the girl.
In the lane, three newspaperboys were playing a game called tip-up8, which consists of hitting little short block of wood with longer sticks, making them hop into the air, when the player then smacks a la baseball. As Jim and I passed, the tip-up whizzed within a hand breadth of my face.
“Boys, have a care,” I warned them. “Do you realize that thing could put a man’s eye out? Don’t be fools. This life is filled with perils enough, as it is, without reckless boys knocking missiles within an inch of a man’s eyes.”
“Thooooop,” raspberried the newspaperboys, continuing their game.
“Don’t let this get on your nerves,” said Jimmie.
“It’s the heat,” I confessed. “I guess we shouldn’t talk about suggestive things on hot days.”
Bay St. loomed threateningly ahead of us as we came out of the lane. Cars screeched on their tires, brakes protested. Another boy on a bicycle whistled shrilly from behind and as I leaped aside he barely missed me.
“Steady, steady,” said Jim. “Another thing out of the war you ought to remember is don’t run, because you are as likely to run into trouble as away from it.”
So I shook my fist at the boy who was riding away looking back at me with an expression of immense contempt.
We stepped into Bay St.
“Wait a second,” I said, halting Jimmie. “Let’s take a glance up along these tall buildings to see if there are any milk bottles on the window sills.”
“Aw,” said Jim.
But I stepped to the curb to see better up the high cliffs of the buildings.
“Nix,” shouted Jim.
A car that was parked was now backing up and its fender grazed my leg.
“Jimmie,” I said, “let us go into some restaurant, and have some iced tea.”
“I say we get your little open car and go for a spin,” said Jim. “I don’t think you’re feeling very well.”
“I don’t feel I could drive.” I confessed.
More and More Jittery
“I’ll drive,” said Jim.
“Not in this life,” I assured him. “The last time I let you drive, you went into the ditch.”
“Come on, come on,” said Jim. “Let’s do something. Don’t stand there staring up at the buildings like that. People will think you’re off your nut.”
“Let’s cross to the east side,” I said. “There aren’t as many skyscrapers on that side.”
“But it’s the sunny side now,” protested Jim.
However, I preferred sunstroke to a milk bottle on the skull, so in a good wide pause in traffic, Jim and I skipped across.
“Tea,” I said, “iced, is good for the nerves.”
“You’ve got me jittery,” said Jim, looking up at high window sills, too.
We reached Adelaide, without anything very risky happening. Into the shade of Adelaide St. we turned, looking for a good iced tea restaurant, the kind where they give you a glass filled with hard blocks of ice and a pot of strong tea to pour over it yourself.
Cars whizzed and screeched, but we took the inside of the walk. Lanes led out, but we paused and looked carefully down each one. Swinging signs hung heavily overhead, but I kept my eye on them until we had safely popped under them.
Between watching the signs overhead and the window sills and looking for pieces of orange peel or banana skins underfoot, avoiding rusty iron gratings and keeping our left ears on the traffic and our right eyes peeled for lanes out of which cars might leap, we got to Yonge St., where the lazy tourists, in families strung along, slowly stroll.
“Jimmie.” I said, “maybe some of these visitors might have amoebic dysentery!”
“Listen,” hissed Jim. “You’re going to get some iced tea into you before…”
And seizing my elbow, he propelled me up Yonge St., amidst the slow moving and exhausted throngs. Careless of all traffic, looking neither up nor down, much less right or left, he shoved me hustling in search of a tea room.
“Jim,” I pleaded, “slow down, slow down. I’m boiling!”
Jim eased. He gave me a bitter look. Then his face froze into an expression of joy.
“Fire!” he yelled. “Fire!”
He snatched off my hat and flung it on to the asphalt.
My hat, my light gray hat, the one I had cleaned only two days before, was belching smoke out there where the traffic was rolling. A car ran over it.
“My hat,” I said numbly.
“If you are going to be burned to death,” said Jim, “you’re going to be burned to death.”
“What happened?” I gasped.
“A cigarette butt,” cried Jim, “cigarette butt dropped out one of those skyscraper windows.”
“I was looking for bottles,” I muttered.
“And a cigarette butt lands on your gasoliney old hat,” rejoiced Jimmie, “and makes you a torch.”
“What can we do to be safe?” I begged.
“Buy new hats,” thought Jim.
So the very next restaurant we went in and had iced tea.
Editor’s Notes:
A parapet was the name given to the front wall of the trench. ↩︎
A fire step allowed soldiers to stand up, peer over the protective sandbags (parapet), fire their weapons at the enemy, and climb out into No Man’s Land. ↩︎
A five-nine was a German “5.9-inch” (150 mm) artillery piece (which the Allies nicknamed “five-nines” ↩︎
The Old Toronto Star building was an Art Deco office tower at 80 King Street West and was the headquarters of the Toronto Star newspaper from 1929 until 1971. Greg and Jim had mentioned that their offices were on the top floor. ↩︎
Eyrie is a high-perched nest of a bird of prey, such as an eagle or falcon, typically built on a cliff, mountain, or tall tree. ↩︎
A dray is a flatbed cart usually pulled by big draft horses. It is interesting that horses would still deliver newsprint in 1935. ↩︎
“Doctor!” he yelled at the attendant. “Where’s the doctor live?”
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by Jim Frise, July 19, 1947.
“Vitamin pills,” suggested Jimmie Frise.
“No,” I corrected dismally, “vitamins are for the winter, when there’s no sun and no fresh vegetables.”
“You’ve got it wrong,” declared Jim. “The latest discoveries show that you need vitamins all the year round.”
“I feel,” I heaved, “exhausted. It’s the heat, probably. But I never felt the heat like this before.”
“To be a Canadian,” said Jim cheerily, “you’ve got to tough. You’ve got to be able to take the frigid cold of the Canadian February, and the tropic heat of the Canadian July. It isn’t every Tom, Dick and Harry who can be Canadian.”
“You mean to suggest…?” I accused.
“Any number of so-called Canadians,” stated Jim, “can’t take it. They go to Florida or California for the winter. And they go to far northern summer resorts for the summer. If it weren’t for modern means of travel, they’d be dead. A hundred years ago, when this country’s foundations were being laid, such people just died off. They were weeded out.”
“My ancestors,” I informed him, “were here 100 years ago. And they weren’t weeded out!”
“Probably,” said Jim heartily, “the weeding out process takes a little time. Three or four generations, maybe?”
I sagged back in my chair, a little shocked.
“I don’t feel, exactly,” I confessed, “as if I were going to die. It’s just a sort of limp feeling. Here it is Friday, and we’ve got to leave at five o’clock to drive 160 miles to your cottage. Through week-end traffic. Four long hours. Jim, I honestly don’t believe I can face it!”
“Aw, for Pete’s sake!” cried Jim, very athletic, “it’s the week-end at the cottage that restores your vigor. That’s the purpose of going to the cottage!”
“But it’s the getting there,” I submitted miserably.
“I’m driving,” reminded Jim.
“This summer cottage stuff is all very nice,” I parried,” but summer bachelors like us have to take an awful beating. We come down to the city and work like fools in all this summer heat. We eat at restaurants, where the food is just what you’d expect it to be in mid-summer, with the chef wishing he was away fishing. We spend five days laboring, and then we have to line up in that awful week-end traffic, and boll and sizzle and chisel and chivvy our way 100 miles or more through a sort of frenzied mob.”
“You can sleep,” offered Jimmie.
“I haven’t the energy to sleep,” I declared.
“Look,” said Jim. “Vitamins. You’ve got to take some of these new high-power vitamin pills. I heard a doctor in the drug store the other day talking about some new vitamin pill they’ve got. You can feel the effects of it – the lift – in less than half an hour!”
“Pawff!” I scoffed.
“It’s a fact,” cried Jim. “They’ve made some tremendous strides in the science of vitamins the past year or so.”
“Vitamin A, Vitamin B, Vitamin B One!” I recited derisively. “Jim, there are plenty of doctors who say this vitamin stuff is all bunk.”
“Sure,” agreed Jim, “and there are plenty of doctors who don’t believe in X-ray, or even surgery. You can always find doctors who disagree with everything new and scientific. I can find you doctors who believe everything is mental, and all you’ve got to do is get a man into the right frame of mind and Nature will heal him.”
“Let Nature heal me,” I muttered, loosening my shirt collar and mopping my brow.
“Look,” persisted Jim, “we’ll run over to Bill O’Neill’s and get you a bottle of these latest new vitamin pills. He’ll know them.”
“Personally,” I said, “I like to refer my health problems to a physician.”
“What nonsense!” exclaimed Jim. “Why go to a doctor when you can go to the doctors’ clearing house, the drug store? Listen: in every district there are, say, 20 doctors. Each has his own idea of how to treat various cases. Each sends his prescriptions into the drug store. Now, if you want to get the consensus of the doctors in the district, you go to the drug store. The druggist knows not only which is the most popular remedy among the local doctors. He also knows which remedy is working and which remedy is failing to work.”
“This is treason, Jim,” I declared.
“Maybe,” agreed Jim, “but it’s also common sense. Now, suppose there’s an epidemic of ‘flu in the neighborhood. Since the last ‘flu epidemic, we’ll say, there have been certain advances in medical science in relation to the treatment of flu. It’s been written up in the medical journals. Some of the doctors have read about it. Others have been playing golf or have been too busy to read. So, 20 doctors in the neighborhood go to work on the ‘flu epidemic. They send their prescriptions to the drug store. The druggist is naturally interested to see what the doctors are prescribing. He has to lay in in supplies of any new drugs required in the newest treatment. He keeps track of the results. Some of the cases require only one bottle of one thing. Other cases go on and on, consuming several bottles of some other treatment. Don’t you see that the druggist is the clearing house for all the latest dope in medicine?”
“This lethargy I feel,” I submitted, “may be due to some serious condition.”
“Aw, it’s just the heat,” snorted Jim, “plus your age, plus your extra fat, plus the way you eat.”
“I eat sparingly,” I declared, “in summer.”
“So sparingly,” agreed Jim, “that you probably haven’t given yourself enough energy-building food – enough vitamins – to carry you.”
I got up and retied my necktie. I put on my coat.
“Okay, come on,” I sighed. “We’ll try Bill O’Neill.”
Druggists are not allowed by law to prescribe their wares. To spare our old friend Bill the embarrassment of having to refuse us a prescription, Jim took the initiative, as we entered the cool and aromatic precincts of the corner drug store, and said to Bill:
“What’s this new vitamin pill that will pick you up when you’re all fagged out with the heat?”
Bill reached behind to the shelf and handed down a bottle of white, flat pills, like aspirin, only a little larger.
“I thought vitamin pills,” I protested, “were all transparent little jelly-looking things.”
“Not these,” said Bill.
“Are they any good?” I demanded.
“How would I know?” replied Bill. “They are made by a reputable firm. A lot of people buy them. I suppose they’re good.”
“Do I have to buy the whole bottle?” I asked, looking at the pencilled price on the label, which was astonishingly high.
“Oh, no, I can sell you a dozen,” said Bill.
So he put a dozen pills in small carboard box and I paid for them and we walked back to the house.
We had to pack our bags and change into our old clothes for the journey. I started the tap running, to let the water get cold and set the box of pills on the kitchen windowsill.
In a few minutes we had our bags in the hall and our canvas pants and shirts on, and I went to the tap, ran a glass of chilled water, took the pills off the windowsill, extracted two and downed them. They had a very nasty taste.
“Bitter,” I sputtered.
“I’ve always thought,” agreed Jim, “that the old fashioned vitamin pills were made too pleasant. For what a vitamin has to do, it ought to taste a little surprising.”
I slipped the box in my pocket and we carried our bags out to the car.
“In half an hour,” assured Jim, as we slid into our seats, “according to what I’ve heard of those pills, you’re going to feel like a new man.”
“By the way I feel,” I replied, “it’ll take more than two of them to lift me.”
So began the journey, out through half an hour of crowded city streets, with bad-tempered citizens either carrying home to get started on the regular Friday night exodus from the city; or those other less privileged citizens who can’t get away Friday, resenting the hurry of those of us obviously headed north.
The taste of the pills lingered in my mouth. It was a slightly bitter, slightly cloying flavor, and I wondered at any reputable pharmaceutical firm producing anything with quite so careless a taste.
As we emerged from the city on to the highway, where the endless procession of week-end traffic was already settling itself into its customary bad-tempered and restless tide, I sat up and listened to myself, as it were, to see if I could detect the first faint signs of the promised lift the pills would give me.
As a matter of fact, I felt slightly worse.
The lethargy and limpness of my legs, knees, elbows, neck and other joints was obviously more pronounced than when I had been in the shade and quiet of my house. And in addition to the lethargy, there was a slight uneasiness in my stomach as well as a ringing in my ears, and a feeling in my eyes as if my eyeballs were protruding.
“Has it started?” asked Jim brightly.
“Something has started,” I muttered, “but it isn’t good.”
“You’re probably an extreme case,” sympathized Jim. Maybe you need more than two. We’ll pull in at a hot dog stand up the way here, and you can take a couple more.”
“Not for a while,” I pleaded. “They taste awful. We’ll wait and give them a chance to work.”
So we bored on into the stampede. Cars cut in on us. We cut in on cars. The usual slowpokes held up the usual long columns of faster cars, and we had to edge and duck in and out to pass them.
“How about stopping at this next town,” inquired Jim solicitously, “and you can get a cup of tea to wash down couple more pills? The hot tea will make them work quicker.”
“And let all those slowpokes we’ve passed get ahead of us again?” I complained. “No, Jim, just keep on moving and let’s get this over with.”
“How do you feel?” asked Jim.
“Terrible,” I declared, sinking back into my corner. I tried to snooze. But the alarming sounds of the week-end stampede kept rousing me, and Jim’s style of driving furiously and then stamping on the brakes is not conducive to slumber.
We got 50 or 60 miles behind us and came to the main break in the highway, where much of the traffic goes east, while we continue north. The strain eased, and I sat up and breathed loud and deep.
“Ah, it’s started?” cried Jim cheerily.
“On the contrary,” I said hollowly.
So Jim, at the very next hot dog stand, swung in off the pavement.
“You sit right there,” he soothed, “and I’ll bring you a cup of tea.”
He brought tea for both of us.
“Here,” he said, when I took out the pill box, “let’s try a couple of those. Maybe they’ll work on me.”
I took two and he took two; and we downed them with the tea.
“Phthow!” spat Jim.” They sure taste nasty.”
So we headed back on to the road again, I slumping in my corner to await the lift; Jimmie occasionally emitting a “phthow!” or a “pfthooie!” in the silence.
Traffic was thinning, and it seemed to me Jim was driving slower.
“I feel terrible,” said Jim suddenly.
“No lift?” I groaned, sitting up.
“Let’s see that box,” said Jim, slowing the car. “I wonder what it was Bill gave us…?”
I handed him the pill box and he squinted at it.
And we very nearly went into the ditch!
“Cockroach poison!” yelled Jimmie in a strangled voice. “He’s poisoned us…!”
He ran the car on to the highway shoulder and stopped.
“My mistake,” I croaked, all becoming suddenly clear to me. “My mistake, Jim! I got the wrong box off the kitchen windowsill. There was a box of cockroach poison pills. They look exactly…”
“Quick!” shouted Jim, setting the car in motion. “Town! Next town! Nearest doctor!”
And feeling his throat with one hand and steering with the other, Jim drove like a Roman charioteer. Past cars we roared, in and out we wove as the old car shuddered. And I could feel the icy fingers of death toying with my throat, my heart, my stomach.
I was in no pain.
Jim lurched the car on to the gravel of the gas station on the outskirts of the town.
“Doctor!” he yelled at the attendant. “Where’s the doctor live?”
“Green house,” shouted the attendant. “First on the left past the post office!”
Through glazing eyes, I saw the town spin by and we whammed to a stop in front of a green house with “Dr. Macintyre” emblazoned on a brass plate.
Jim leaped around and opened my door for me. stumbled out and Jim led me, my legs folding under me, to the door. He rang the bell, supporting me.
The door opened promptly and there stood a grizzled gentleman in spectacles.
“Poisoned!” gasped Jim, heaving me through the doorway. “Both poisoned!”
“How?” said the doctor crisply.
“Cockroach poison,” whuffed Jim, handing the pill box to the doctor.
Dr. Macintyre went to the light and squinted at one of the pills narrowly.
“Nothing in these to poison you,” he said. “Nothing but boracic acid in them. Most cockroach poisons will make you sick. But not these. Just boracic acid.”
I felt the icy fingers release their clutch.
“Oh, doctor, are you sure …!” I cried.
He favored me with a chilly eye.
“Certainly I’m sure,” he replied, and, removing one of the pills from the box, he tossed it into his mouth and swallowed it.
“A good antiseptic,” he stated.
Well, he listened to my heart with a stethoscope, felt my pulse and looked at my tongue.
“Nothing the matter with you,” he said. “Maybe a little upset stomach. Maybe too much heat…”.
“Nothing the matter with you,” he said. “Maybe a little upset stomach.”
I began to feel a great lift. But it wasn’t vitamins. It was just the joy of being alive.
“That’ll be $2” said the doctor. “Now, I’ll tell you what you need. You need a good vitamin. Here’s one” – and he got up and went to his wall cabinet – “here’s a new one. It will give you a lift in half an hour….”
Even the quaint old sampler sign from the Sons of Temperance Hall is still displayed over the stage of the new Claireville community hall.
Three street dances in the village paid for moving this 75 year old hall into proper position to take part in the revived community life of Claireville
By Gregory Clark, July 16, 1932.
The country has decided to stay home in the evenings.
All over the province, community dance halls are appearing. Not only in towns and large villages but just at wide places in the road.
I am not going to predict the dawn of a new age in country life. Highways are not going to be broken up. Motor trucks are not going to be prohibited. Mail order business is not going to be banned. The return of Merrie England and maypole dancing on the green is not immediately in prospect.
But something is certainly happening to Ontario rural life as the result of eggs at 5 cents a dozen and potatoes at 7 cents a bag.
Clareville1, for example, is a tiny village located just where the country begins outside Toronto. It is not fifteen miles from the edge of the big city. But no adventurous suburban bungalows, the lonely heralds of the big city’s march, mar the purely country scene.
In the night, I stood under the elms with one of the principal farmers of the district, listening the strains of “Darling Nellie Gray” coming from the brightly lighted community hall of Clareville which is now in its first summer season.
“For years,” said this farmer, who prefers to be nameless, “our youngsters have been driving into the city for their evenings. Of course, we older ones have been driving into town for our shopping, so we can’t kick. Anyway, we didn’t know who they were mixing with. They got city manners, city airs and city discontent. We were kind of proud when they got city jobs.
“It was bad. The people they got in with aren’t as good as the people we have right around here. Those city jobs weren’t so good as these green fields, even if we can’t sell anything off them. But here is something good and enduring. That’s why I say that community hall and that music and those kids dancing in there, together are mighty good things.”
These are bad times for a small community to build a community hall. But Clareville didn’t do that. They just shifted an old one to a new position.
When concrete highways come to a village, they often turn the village back-end foremost. Away off the main drag, there stood an old abandoned hall built by the Sons of Temperance2 or the Sons of Rest, or something, in the year 1860.
“We held three street dances,” said Mrs. E. J. Gamble, whose family run the general store, “last summer, and netted $300, which went a long way toward moving that old hall out to the highway. It has been all painted up, covered with that new roofing material, and a maple floor installed.”
Here and there, you can see old beams, withered and weathered, and on them carved initials of men who were boys in the sixties3. Over the stage in the new hall is a quaint old framed sampler that stood, 70 years ago, above the platform of the Sons of Temperance. It says, worked in colored wool, “Welcome to All.” And whether Merrie England and the maypole are returning to Clareville or not, at least Clareville has enough sentiment and humor to replace that old sampler right over the stage where sits an orchestra playing “Oop-boop-a-doop,” and where, in 1932, dance the young people of the townships who, until two years ago, turned their back on Clareville at twilight and fled eagerly toward that dull glow in the skies, Torontowards.
To get our story and photographs, we I went up only the one wandering country highway. At Bolton, we found, in this village of 700 souls, a fine new white dance hall, all windows and glistening floor, run by the Clark Brothers of the Bolton hotel. They call the dance hall Bolton Casino.
“Until we erected this hall two years ago,” said one of the brothers, “you could shoot a cannon up the main street of Bolton on a Saturday night. Now you have to go into second gear to get through at all, if you want to get through.”
Re-Opening the Village Hall
On Wednesday nights they have old-time dancing, with an orchestra from either Toronto or Brampton. On Wednesday nights the entrance is 20 cents for the whole evening. On Saturday nights, it is modern dancing, and admission is free, but dancing costs three for a quarter.
“For miles around,” said the brothers, “people come to town Saturday evening for their shopping and to sit in the hall and see the young people dance and listen to the music. The place is filled with children and old people all sitting and playing around, and 300 people is nothing to have in here. The town is crowded, busy and cheerful. We have city people, strangers, drive up and spend the evening with us. It looks as if the tables were turned: a few years ago we all drove to Toronto for the evening. Now Toronto is coming out to the country for the evening.”
As we drove out the highway, Tom Wilson, The Star Weekly photographer at the wheel, we passed literally of motor trucks loaded with cattle.
They were all stepping at a fast pace. Tom Wilson is a farmer on the side, and knows all about alfalfa and can tell a Durham cow when he sees it.
“What’s all this racing to Toronto with cattle?” I asked.
“You see,” says Tom, “either in last night’s paper or over the radio in the market reports, there was a report of a 15 cents a hundred rise in the price of cattle. So all these farmers are rushing to town at top speed to try and get that extra 15 cents a hundred. All they are doing, really, is to race at top speed to knock the price down, to glut the market, to take off not only that 15 cent increase but to kick the price fifty cents lower than it was yesterday.”
“That’s what highways are doing for the farmer?” says I.
“And trucks,” says Tom.
Coming home from the north that evening we passed the trucks homeward bound. A lot of them still had the cattle in them, and the drivers, the farmers, had a funny look on their faces.
“It’s the same with potatoes, eggs, everything,” said Tom.
“It’s the same with people,” added the proprietor of a curious little dance hall, sanctuary, poet’s corner and hide-away called the Log Cabin located on a lonely road amidst the cedar and balsam woods somewhere cast of Orangeville and somewhere north of Palgrave. “You can get here in an hour and you can get away from here just as fast. In the days when men had to walk, there were many lovely places in the world. Buggies came along, and the places got further apart. Nowadays, the places to stop are few and far between, because nobody stops any more.”
The village of Loretto is situated up on the edge of the sand hills where rises the Nottawasaga river going northward to the Georgian Bay. Few people pass that way because there are so many inviting turns to the east and west on the resolute road to Loretto. Back of the general store, which is of brick, with carved wooden fringes on all its gables, there is a stable, now no longer used, and above it a dance hall that has been reopened, all the old stuff stored in it carted away, and a new maple floor laid.
“The hall has been closed for years,” says the general merchant of Loretto. “Back before the days of motor cars it was busy with meetings of all kinds, dances, lectures. It has been locked and forgotten for twenty years. The last couple of years, we decided we had to have a hall again. And here it is. We don’t have dances every week, but at the rate things are going, we soon will have. Our orchestra are all local boys, from surrounding villages. So far, our local orchestras are made up of one boy from one village with a banjo and one from another village with a saxophone, and so on. But you can get real good orchestras now from some of the towns. It’s just like old times again.”
Barn Dances Come Back
Barn dances, which, in the tawdry twenties, almost passed out of fashion, have I come back with a great rush all over the older part of the province.
“As many as three a week,” says W. A. Irwin, justice of the peace and hotelkeeper of Palgrave. “Most of them are real old-fashioned barn raisings, since the farmers are going in for erecting their own barns with the help of the community, as in the earlier days. When barns were erected by barn companies instead of out of the bush lot, the dances died away. Now the farmers are putting up the barns in the old-fashioned way, to save money, and old-fashioned ways are coming back with them.
“But,” added the justice of the peace, “so successful is the barn-raising dances that there have been some cases of people giving follow-up dances, just for the fun of it. And along north of here, some farmers have actually staged barn dances and charged a small admission and made money out of it. It is unquestionable that something is going on in the country that has nothing to do with the cities and towns.”
The road we followed was not a tourist highway. No mention is being made here of the halls being built at all the summer resorts, at Wasaga Beach, at Thamesford, a few miles out of London, where a handsome new hall has gone up to attract city people out to the country. What is arresting is the fact that at places far off the beaten track, community life is reassembling itself after the scrambling effect of the past couple of decades. It costs so much in gas to drive to a more or less distant resort or town, so much for admission to the larger halls, that an evening for young people will run into two or three dollars a head. And two or three dollars is a lot of eggs or hog on the hoof.
Near Loretto we talked to a young man who had a team doing something to a washout on the road.
He had old overalls, a hay hat, a corn cob pipe and the homeliest looking boots on I ever saw. So perfect a specimen of the city man’s idea of a happy farmer was he that we stopped to talk with him. He wasn’t doing anything anyway; just standing behind his handsome bay team and looking at the morning.
He needed a shave and his face was red and healthy. His eyes were happy and gray.
“Boys,” he said, “you come to the right man. I had a job in the city until six months ago. A mechanic’s job. I was having a fine time, movies, dancing, working for somebody I never saw and thinking I was alive. Just the way you do, I lost my job. I broke my back trying to find another. And then all of a sudden, I saw how silly and cheap the city is, so you should have seen me beat it back here to the country I was born in!
“Listen: the girls are prettier in the country than they are in the city and they’ve got more brains. They’re not checking up on what you spend on them all the time. They know more about work. None of them is dreaming about being either a movie actress or the wife of a millionaire. They’re full of fun. A barn dance! Boys, what a gang, and none of this silly feeling of going around in circles in your good clothes with a girl you don’t respect. When you come into a barn dance you look around and say to yourself, boy, I guess your future wife is sitting in here. You can’t do that in the city! No, sir!
“And work! Every day you can do something to make money or to improve your property. It may be only a little thing and you can take your time about it and there is fun in it. But you know who you are doing it for. Number One.
“I’m tired of city people. Hens in a chicken run. That’s them. Any time I take a girl into town from now on is to show her what a silly bunch of punks they are in the city.”
With great joy he drew a package of tobacco out and filled his corn cob. It was a stage corn cob. This young, happy man was an actor. He was glorying in the feeling of being a farmer. He rubbed his big boots lovingly on the dirt road. He leaned his elbow against the horse, as much as to say, lookit, I got friends. He dropped into a sing-song country voice until he forgot and let the clipped city way of speech emerge.
And when we left him Tom Wilson, the farmer on the side, had a flushed look, and stared about at the fields and farm houses with a curious expression on his face.
“Funny,” said Tom, “but when you talk to these people out in the country you start right away thinking slow, talking slow, moving slow, and everything feels good inside of you.
“I wonder,” says he, “if we haven’t made a mistake?”
And when we passed through village and town in the evening and saw the young people and the old people talking of things we did not know and laughing at jokes we should never hear, we felt a little humble coming on to the straight stretch of concrete that leads down cold and swift into the city.
Editor’s Notes:
They get the name right in the photo description, but wrong throughout the article. It is Claireville. ↩︎
The Sons of Temperance was a brotherhood of men who promoted the temperance movement. ↩︎
