This illustration accompanied an article by Gil O’Mourne about the number of sandwiches Torontonians eat.
Author: admin Page 1 of 111
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, January 16, 1943.
“Hooray!” yelled Jimmie Frise, waving a letter.
“Surely not,” I said. “Surely no good news!”
“My Aunt Judy,” cried Jim excitedly, “has got her arthritis back.”
“Back?” I protested. “Is that good news?”
“It’s an ill wind,” said Jimmie, bringing the letter over, to read to me, “that blows nobody good. Listen to this:
“‘Dear Jim:
“‘When you were a boy you used to come over and help me with my churning. Now, when every pound of butter is a real part of the war effort, my arthritis has come back and I simply can’t churn. If you have any weekends free these times you could drop around and visit your old auntie and at the same time do a bit of war work that is sorely needed.'”
Jimmie waved the letter joyously and executed a few dance steps around the office.
“But, Jim,” I interposed, “why all the excitement? This can mean nothing to you. Your Aunt Judy can’t let you have any more butter than you can buy at any store.”
“What?” snorted Jim. “You mean my Aunt Judy, on the farm, can’t give away any butter? Even to her favorite nephew?”
“Not a fraction of a pound,” I assured him solemnly.
“Don’t be foolish,” said Jim. “Don’t tell me the law has invaded the sanctity of the farm home and the family.”
“Your Aunt Judy,” I announce “if she made a single pound of butter that she failed to report to the government, would be a bootlegger, a moonshiner…”
“A buttershiner!” said Jim. “Don’t tell me that’s the law.”
“That is the law, my lad,” I asserted. “And if you don’t believe me, call up the local office of the wartime prices and trade board.”
“But it’s preposterous,” scoffed Jim. “Butter!”
“That’s what the boys who drink booze said when prohibition came in,” I explained. “But it’s preposterous, they said. Liquor!”
“Don’t try to compare booze and butter,” declared Jim warmly.
“Why not?” I inquired. “If what you like is taken away from you, you are indignant. A great gulf has divided those who wanted booze from those who hated booze. A vast gulf filled with the darkness of misunderstanding. But now, when a comfortable dowager who hates booze but loves butter is faced with being deprived of what she loves, she has the heaven-sent chance to try to understand the agony and trickery and schemery of a booze hound who tried to beat the law. Let all people of good-will beware of buttershining. Let all who love justice for others be just to themselves and stick to half a pound of butter per person per week.”
“Poor Aunt Judy,” said Jim tenderly. “She’s got the arthritis back.”
Law and Intention
“Snap out of it, Jim,” I warned him. “You thought it was a wicked and vicious thing not only for bootleggers to operate but for people to patronize bootleggers. If I remember you right, you used to claim that it was not the bootleggers but the people who patronized bootleggers on whom the real guilt lay. So don’t go around trying to bootleg the odd pound of butter in the delusion that it is merely butter. The greatest weakness in human nature is the notion that your case is different. But I say unto you that it is purely a moral question and a patriotic question. Have you got the guts to stick to half a pound a week? Or are you, like a lot of smart people, a little lacking in guts which you make up for by smartness?”
“I was hoping,” sighed Jim, “that you and I could go out to Aunt Judy’s tomorrow for the week-end and churn her butter.”
“Jim,” I said, “if you don’t believe me, call up the wartime prices and trade, board office. It is contrary to the intention of the law even to beat up a little butter with an egg-beater or electric mixer…”
“Where could you get the cream?” demanded Jim.
“Cream off the top of the milk bottle,” I announced.
“But look,” protested Jim. “If a quart of milk has certain food values in it, and if I prefer to use those food values by beating up little butter instead of drinking the milk-“
“Don’t squirm,” I warned him. “That’s the way the old bootleggers and moonshiners used to think. They used to say: Here I have a few bushels of potatoes. What does it matter whether I boil the potatoes and eat them or let them ferment and drink the alcohol out of them? The law is the law. The intention is the intention. To help fight this war, the government has organized certain controls, many of them as little and apparently meaningless as a spike or a switch on a railway track, but without which the whole system cannot operate.”
“So if I cheat on butter,” mused Jim, “I might as well cheat, say, on making cartridges. I might as well fill cartridges with sand instead of cordite.”
“Correct,” I said. It is time we all started playing the game. We are needed, up till now, to let the airmen and sailors and soldiers play the game for us. Leave it to the soldiers. They volunteered, didn’t they? But now it begins to seep into us that we all have to take a piece of the war. I heard a dandy at lunch yesterday. A man who hates Mackenzie King got going as usual. And the man lunching with him interrupted him mildly and asked, ‘By the way, how much do you get for that?’ ‘That what?’ inquired the other. ‘That stuff you are spouting about Mackenzie King? How do you mean?’ demanded the other indignantly; ‘how much do I get for it?’ ‘Well,’ said the other fellow, ‘don’t tell me you are doing it for nothing when there are guys in Buffalo and Detroit and all along the border who would gladly pay you $15 a week to go around spreading that kind of stuff. Why, the Germans have spent millions of dollars all over the world hiring people to do that work. Don’t tell me you are working for the Germans for nothing!'”
“What happened?” asked Jim, delighted.
“The luncheon broke up,” I advised.
“Well, sir,” said Jim, “you’ve certainly taken the joy out of life regarding Aunt Judy.”
“Ah,” I said, “but I still think you should go and help your Aunt Judy do her churning. It is less than 30 miles out. It is a little used branch line of the railroad. I’ve been on that train when there weren’t two dozen passengers. In fact, churning up a batch of butter strikes me as a very useful activity for a couple of city men on a week-end, with nothing better to do.”
“A couple of city men?” inquired Jim happily.
A Useful Activity
So we left on the noon train and arrived at Aunt Judy’s farm before 2 p.m. And she was very delighted indeed to see us.
“I sort of knew you would come,” she cried.
And we took our coats off and put on the aprons Aunt Judy laid out for us. In the outer kitchen, back of the main farm kitchen, we found the churn on its sawhorse legs standing ready. It was a regular barrel which rocked violently when you turned the crank. A little window in it allowed you to peek and see how the butter was coming.
“You will have to wait about an hour,” explained Aunt Judy, “while I set the cream out to come to room temperature. It’s cooled now, so if you’ll just lift it into the room…”
So Jim and I carried the pails and cans of cream from the cream shed into the kitchen. and poured most of it into big pans and open dishes, the sooner to reach room temperature. And Aunt Judy took us into the main kitchen, where we sat in rocking-chairs around the big stove and talked about butter.
“Do you know,” said Aunt Judy, who is very prominent in the Women’s Institute and reads all sorts of encyclopaedias and almanacs, “that Canadians are probably the biggest butter eaters in the world?”
“Aw, now,” cried Jimmie.
“Even in the United States,” declared Aunt Judy, “where they have the highest standards of living in the world, the per capita consumption of butter is only 17½ pounds per annum.”
“Holy smoke,” said Jim. “Is that all they use? Why, that’s only a third of a pound of butter per person a week.”
“Then what are we Canadians kicking about,” demanded Jim, “at a half a pound per person per week?”
“In Britain,” went on Aunt Judy, “the per capita annual consumption is about the same as the United States, between 17 and 18 pounds a year.”
“And what do we use in Canada?”
“In Canada,” declared Aunt Judy triumphantly, “we consume 27 pounds per capita per year! Ten pounds per person more than the United States, 10 pounds more than the British Isles. We are a butter-guzzling race, we Canadians!”
“Maybe it is because we are a northern race,” I suggested. “Look at the Eskimos. They need fat so badly they eat raw seal blubber.”
Aunt Judy’s Churn
“We Canadians,” said Aunt Judy, “are terrific cake eaters. We cook with butter, where more frugal nations use cheap fat. We soak butter into our potatoes. We slather bread with butter. We have a beaver for our national symbol. We would be more honest if we had a pound of butter on our coat of arms.”
“Well, then,” said Jim, “I don’t feel so bad about being cut down to half a pound. But I’ve seen my family use six pounds a week for the six of us. A pound a week per person.”
“That’s not uncommon,” agreed Aunt Judy, “the lavish way we cook and prepare our meals. Canadians, I imagine, have the highest standard of living in the world, when it comes to the domestic side.”
“What a right little, tight little island we are in Canada,” I smiled, thinking of our vast size and our little scattered population all busily greasing its insides with choice butter.
So we went into the outer kitchen and got to work.
“It’s the simplest thing in the world, making butter,” said Aunt Judy. “Just pour in the cream. Start the churn. And after while you see flecks of butter appearing on the little glass window. Keep right on. And at last, you take off the lid and there’s your butter, solid gobs of it, floating on top of a lot of buttermilk.”
Into the barrel churn we poured the thick sweet cream.
“With sour cream,” announced Aunt Judy, “the way the factories do, they have to doctor the cream up with bacilli.”
“Ugh,” I said.
“But creamery butter made from fresh cream,” said she, “keeps in storage far better than butter made with sour cream. The Danes proved that. They set the pace for the whole world in butter. When I was a girl, butter used to be highly colored and salty. The Danes started to show the whole world how to make butter with its natural lovely pale yellow color, its waxy texture and hardly any salt at all. That’s the way I make it.”
We put the lid on the churn and clamped it down. And, while Jim started the crank, I gathered the big wooden bowl and the big wooden spoon like a ladle, and rubbed salt into them so the butter wouldn’t stick.
All that butter is, is cow grease and elbow grease. The cow gives milk. Aunt Judy puts the milk in the separator and takes out the cream. And Jimmie and I supplied the elbow grease. Turn about.
“It takes,” said Aunt Judy, “27 pounds of milk to make one pound of butter. When the cream’s taken out, you have the milk left. And when you take the butter out of the cream you have the buttermilk left. But it’s really very simple.”
And simple it was. Jimmie cranked until he was flushed. Then I cranked until I was flushed. It took about four flushes each and then the little flecks of butter started to appear in the small glass window in the churn. First, the cream turns to whipped cream. Then the water in the cream, which is what cream mostly consists of after all, begins to come loose from the steadily whirling and crashing contents.
The Final Spurt
You could even tell by the feel of the churn, as it swung and banged, that there was something lumpy developing inside.
When we unscrewed the barrel lid of the churn there, floating on the top, was the gorgeous, pale yellow mass of the butter, with the buttermilk streaming and draining off it.
“Okay,” said Jim, seizing the big wooden bowl. “Scoop her out.”
And with the wooden scoop I lifted the butter, taking the big gobs first and the lesser gobs until I finally strained quite small globules and blobs off the surface of the buttermilk.
And with the wooden spoon Jimmie kneaded and patted and squeezed the butter in the bowl, forcing all the buttermilk out of the waxy mass. The exact amount of salt Aunt Judy had left in a dish, and this Jimmie kneaded and kneaded into the butter still in the wooden bowl.
Aunt Judy came back from feeding the chickens and supervised the cutting of the butter into pound “prints,” as she called them. There was a small wooden box, also salted so the butter would not stick, which we pressed into the mass, filling it. The box held exactly a pound of butter, and it had a false top with a handle. When the box was squeezed full you just held it over a square of wax paper and shoved down on the handle, forcing the pound of butter out, beautiful, yellow and pure, on to the paper.
The box also printed Aunt Judy’s name right into the butter.
Twenty-six pounds we got for the churning.
“And much as I’d love to reward you boys,” said she, “with a pound of butter each, I can’t do it. I have to have my license to make butter. I have to report every pound I make. I am allowed only half a pound a week per person in the family for myself. And I must turn in a coupon and a record of every pound I sell.”
“Don’t mention it,” said both Jimmie and I. “It was a pleasure.”
But we did lick our fingers.
And at supper, before we drove back in the cutter to catch, the 8.47, not a pat of our butter did Aunt Judy produce; but only the butter dish in which, carefully cut into squares, was some of Aunt Judy’s former churning.
“But,” said she, marching in with a huge white granite pitcher such as is used at church socials, “there is no rationing of buttermilk!”
And we drank most of the pitcher, full of the sweetest buttermilk that ever swelled your neck; and we each carried home a gallon jug of it.
Editor’s Note: This seems to be another war-time public service announcement, rather than one of their regular stories.
This illustration accompanied an article on the High Park Zoo.
The Toronto Railway Company had a franchise to run Toronto streetcars from 1891 to 1921. However, there came to be problems with interpretation of the franchise terms, for the city. A series of annexations, especially in 1908–12, significantly extended the city limits. After many attempts to force the TRC to serve these areas, the city created its own street railway operation, the Toronto Civic Railways, to do so, and built several routes. This comic shows that you would have to pay another fare to use the other system. In 1921, with the end of the franchise, the city merged TRC and TCR into the Toronto Transportation Commission.
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, January 12, 1946.
“This crime wave!” muttered Jimmie Frise, throwing the newspaper aside.
“It isn’t really a crime wave, Jim,” I explained. “It’s actually a part of the war. It’s like, after the storm, the swell still beating on the shore.”
“Do you mean,” demanded Jim, “that soldiers are perpetrating the crimes?”
“I certainly don’t,” I protested. “On the contrary; soldiers are sick and tired of violence. When I say part of the war, I refer to civilians. All the damage of war isn’t done to soldiers. Soldiers lose their legs and arms and lives. But civilians, even away off here in Canada where the war was only a radio program, become casualties, too.”
“How?” asked Jim.
“Morally,” I explained. “We think of criminals as being tough. They’re not. They are cowards. Without exception, they are weaklings. Could a man who wasn’t coward to his very roots go into a store, armed with a gun, and rob a defenceless man?”
“That never occurred to me,” said Jim.
“Is a coward tough?” I pursued. “I mean in the good sense of tough. It’s impossible! A man who will use violence against defenceless people shows right off that he has a yellow streak a yard wide.”
“That’s true,” exclaimed Jimmie.
“He will kick babies,” I said, “he will cheat at cards, he is just a cheap, third-rate lug. Without a hundred per cent. advantage over the man he is about to rob, such as a loaded gun or a black-jack in his hand, he wouldn’t dream of attacking even an old woman.”
“Did you never hear of a criminal who wasn’t a coward?” ruminated Jim.
“Never,” I said. “It takes a kind of perverted or hopped-up courage to commit a crime, I suppose. But always, the criminal makes mighty sure – by the most careful and cautious scouting – that the person he is about to attack is unarmed. And that he is armed.”
“Criminals, in their pictures, look tough,” suggested Jim.
Tough?” I cried. “I guess we don’t mean the same thing when we say tough. Oak is tough. Leather is tough. Good steel is tough. Good soldiers are tough. Criminals are about as tough as boiled spaghetti. Take another look at the next picture you see of a criminal. He has the mark of the coward all over him: the sly, timid eye, the slack mouth, the look of a mongrel that has just been knocked over by a truck. I tell you, the sooner we begin to think of criminal as being synonymous with coward, the sooner a lot of weaklings will realize what their fellow men really think of them.”
“I suppose a lot of criminals,” agreed Jim, “dramatize themselves in their own imaginations as being regular devils.”
“That’s where the war angle comes in,” I pointed out. “A man who imagines himself a regular devil – but who ducked and dodged and avoided going to war – has quite a lot of trouble imagining himself a devil. Conscience stirs, even in plain common crooks. And every time he sticks his chest out and looks at himself in the mirror, to see, if the regular devil is still there, he remembers how he ducked and dodged the war. Now what is the psychological effect of this? Why, he’s got to go out, with a loaded gun, and hold up the old lady who runs the candy store.”
“Aw,” protested Jim.
“During the war,” I explained, “crime subsides because the cowards who are the criminals are too busy ducking and dodging, too anxious to be unnoticed, to be very active. But when the war is over and the troops come home, and these same yellow-bellies have to walk the street amid thousands of he-men, in uniform and fresh out of uniform, they go through tortures. They’ve got to prove to themselves that they are rough, tough, shootin’ guys, too. So they go and shoot an elderly druggist.”
“I’d Blow Him Asunder”
“A lot of the new crop of criminals,” declared Jim, “are just youngsters.”
“The pity of that,” I agreed, “is that many of these kids, if they had been a couple of years older, would have enlisted and gone to war. Their whole being, their mind, heart, imagination, has been steeped in war. They gorged themselves on war literature. They saturated themselves in war movies. They played war games. Suddenly the war ends. They are frustrated. The very things that would have made them splendid soldiers now curdle in them. They have been nurtured for action – by every influence that could be brought to bear on them. Suddenly, all hope of action ends. They have to be good little boys again and fill their imagination with reading, writing and arithmetic, and the thrifty life.”
“And some of them,” surmised Jim, “go sour.”
“They have been nurtured for action,” I repeated, “over six furious years. From the age of 12 to 18. Some of them go looking for action. In crime.”
“But only the yellow ones,” said Jim.
“The ones that aren’t yellow,” I explained, “take hockey or skiing or even rabbit shooting”
“All I can say,” reflected Jim, “is that if a burglar walked in that door right now, I’d tell him to help himself. The situation is too tricky, these days, to monkey with.”
“I,” I stated firmly, “would blow him in two with my shotgun.”
“I’d rather,” countered Jimmie, “collect my burglar insurance than have my widow collect my life insurance.”
“If a few stout citizens,” I submitted, “would just blow a few of these valiant gunmen in half with a double-barrel shotgun loaded with No. 4 shot, there would be a sudden sharp decline in hold-ups.”
“You’re on delicate ground there,” warned Jim. “Even a citizen, in his own home, is not allowed murder even a burglar.”
“An armed burglar!” I protested.
“Suppose,” said Jim, “your house was entered by a thug, armed with a gun, who wakened you and robbed you. Suppose, then, that as the robber fled, you grabbed your shotgun from the closet, ran to the bedroom window and shot the armed burglar as he ran. You’d be arrested.”
“I’d take a chance,” I insisted. “I’d like to give a burglar a load of No. 4 right in the umbilicus.”
“Umbil- what?” protested Jim.
“That’s the technical word for where I’d like to give him the load of No. 4,” I elucidated.
“For one man,” said Jim, “who would use his pistols, guns and rifles to shoot a criminal, there are 20 who leave their weapons loose around the house for criminals to steal – and so arm themselves.”
“If criminals knew,” I countered, “that every home, store and office in the country was armed with a loaded gun, they wouldn’t be so confident walking in.”
“Common sense tells you,” asserted Jimmie, “that guns lying around loose are an advantage to the criminal.”
“Common sense tells me,” I retorted, “that we have just got through a dreadful war in which peaceful nations disarmed, while criminal nations armed. My theory is, teach every honest man to shoot. And let him have a gun in the house. It wouldn’t be long before the criminal population would be satisfactorily reduced.”
“Would you really shoot a burglar?” asked Jimmie earnestly.
“Right in the umbilicus,” I assured him firmly.
“Where is that?” asked Jim.
“It’s the small bull’s-eye on the solar plexus,” I explained, “that we all get when we’re born.”
“Ah,” cried Jim. Then he shuddered.
“What an awful place to shoot a guy!” he pleaded. “Wouldn’t you shoot him in the leg? That would hold him.”
“Probably if I aimed at his umbilicus,” I admitted, “I’d hit him in the leg anyway.”
Jim sat, listening to the silence of my house. My family was all out and Jim and I were sorting over my trout flies. After all, it is only 15 weeks until the opening of the trout season. Fifteen measly weeks! As Jim says; in 10 weeks, it will be only five weeks.
That’s the way to look at it.
Jim sat, listening. He glanced at the front windows. Then at the dining-room windows. While I transferred six Parmacheene belles from one fly box to another, where their color fitted more artistically, Jim got up and wandered over to the windows. I saw him trying the latches.
“What’s the matter?” I inquired. “Nervous ?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jim uneasily. “I sort of feel something in the air. I have the feeling somebody is watching this house.”
“What nonsense!” I laughed. “You’ve got the feeling I get when I read a murder mystery Every time I finish a murder mystery, I have to go all over the house, from cellar to garret, locking windows and double-locking the doors.”
Right on the Button!
“I was thinking more,” said Jim, coming back and sitting down at the trout-fly covered table, “of the sort of crazy guy you are. It would be just like you to grab a shotgun and shoot, somebody.”
“What of it?’ I demanded. “I’m an old soldier. I’ve done some shooting. And they weren’t criminals. You artillery guys do your shooting by remote control. You fire into the air at somebody six miles away. You’re abstract killers. We infantry have lost all our qualms.”
“Would you really, REALLY…?” begged Jim, leaning forward.
“Right,” I declared, “in the umbilicus!”
“Brrrrrr,” shivered Jim.
So we sat, with five fly boxes spread out in front of us, sorting them according to pattern, size and color. Among my flies, we found some with little ends of gut leader still knotted in the eyes. And this we removed with a needle and set those flies aside to be taken out to the kitchen later, to be held in the steam of the kettle. This renews the freshness of the feathers.
As we sat thus in pleasant reverie of fishing days gone and fishing days to come, we heard, with slight starts of nervousness, the frost cracking in the walls of my house. It is amazing how many sounds a house can make, when all else is still. Loud cracks, soft cracks, queer creeping sounds. Weird mutters, which might be the gas meter down cellar, or even the electric wiring taking a stretch, in the changing temperature of a house in winter.
Several times in 10 minutes, Jim and I both were galvanized by these mysterious little murmurs of sound, going on constantly, which I had never noticed before.
After a little while, I got up and looked out through the curtains of the living-room windows. Then I walked into the dining-room and examined the back garden.
“Spooky, isn’t it?” grinned Jim pallidly.
“It’s just what we’ve been talking about,” I said, having to clear my throat slightly before speaking.
We had got from the Montreals to the Grizzly Kings, and from the March Browns to the Invictas, when suddenly, without any warning, no sound of footfall in the side drive, we both heard the side door of my house quietly squeak open.
Without even a whisht, Jim and I looked at each other and froze.
From the hall leading to the side door, not a sound came. The door had opened, quickly, resolutely, Then absolute silence. The intruder was standing, at the open door, listening.
The silence was appalling.
Then, we heard him slowly, cautiously close the door.
Jim and I sat as if turned to ice.
Another long moment of deadly stillness. Not even the walls creaked.
And as clear as if our ears were fitted with amplifiers, we heard the cautious swish, swish of footsteps.
They were descending the cellar stairs!
I moved. Merely to relax.
Jim snatched my wrist.
“No gun!” he warned, soundlessly, forming the words with his mouth. “No gun!”
My heart was thudding right in my ears. I came out in a cold sweat.
“Don’t know where gun is!” I replied by the same system, framing the words right at Jim, but making no sound.
“Good!” signalled Jim in relief, leaning cautiously back so as to avoid squeaks from his chair.
Down cellar, a couple of vagrant knocks rose up through the floor.
“Hunting for the light switch,” I murmured.
“Ssshhhh,” warned Jim ever so softly.
I started slowly to gather my limbs together. They seemed to be scattered.
“What are you doing?” whispered Jim. “Where are you going?”
“Do you think,” I hissed back at him, at the same time doing a little more limb gathering, “I’m going to sit here?”
“He’ll have a gun,” warned Jim.
“I’ll creep upstairs and look for my shotgun,” I replied ever so softly. “Umbilicus. Right in the bull’s-eye.”
“Sit where you are,” gritted Jim fiercely. “He’ll go.”
“He’ll be up here, next,” I returned, “and when he arrives, I’ll be ready for him.”
I thought if I got upstairs, I would recover my muscles a little better. They seemed to have gone all weak; and my hands were tingly, as though asleep.
We listened. Another couple of knocks.
“Whatever he’s doing.” I muttered, “he can’t find it.”
There came a loud thump.
I stood up.
“Hey!” commanded Jim.
“Nobody,” I stated, catwalking towards the door, “is going to thump around like that in my house!”
“Are you crazy?” hissed Jim.
No Gun, No Black-Jack
But that thump had done it. So long as sounds are soft and sinister, you seem to be paralyzed. But a good loud knock brings reality back. A thump is all you need to rouse your ire.
I tiptoed down the hall to the head of the cellar steps. Jim was right behind-me.
We listened. Quite clearly came the sounds of somebody walking with shuffling feet around the concrete cellar floor.
On a nail, hanging in the cellar stairway, was an old battered coat of mine that I used for washing the car and such odd jobs in winter.
In the faint light coming down the hall, I lifted the coat off the nail and holding it in front of me, I started, tiptoe, down the steps. Jim was right behind me.
I could not exactly see the figure. It was too dark. Maybe a faint light came through the cellar windows. But I felt, rather than saw, a sinister shadow standing motionless near the foot of the cellar steps.
I crouched. I sprang.
The shade let out a wild, shrill yell.
But I was on him. My leap bore him down as easily, as lightly, as a clump of autumn weeds. The coat held ahead of me had enveloped him completely and we hit the floor with a terrific squash.
“Got him!” I roared, flattening him and spreading myself all over his prostrate form. “Light! Light, Jim!”
Jim found the switch cord.
From under me and the coat, arms and legs sprawled in complete surrender.
No gun, no black-jack was visible.
“Stand ready, Jim,” I commanded in a ringing voice.
Jim snatched a quart of blueberries off the shelf.
I leaped to my feet and snatched the old coat away.
The figure, face down on the concrete, rolled slowly and painfully over. And sat up.
It was Mr. Moodie! Old Mr. Moodie, who takes out the ashes in winter, and does the odd jobs.
“Mr. Moodie!” I cried in protest.
“Wha… what’s the… what..!” said Mr. Moodie.
“Mr. Moodie,” I accused firmly, “what do you mean, coming so quietly into the house like that. We thought you were a burglar!”
“I’m always quiet,” said Mr. Moodie, weakly.
“You… you crept in…” I complained.
“No,” said Mr. Moodie, still sitting, “I walked in, upright. I couldn’t find the light.”
Jim quietly put the blueberries back.
“But,” I expostulated, “you don’t usually come in the middle of the night…”
“I was feeling poorly,” said Mr. Moodie, “and I thought if I put the ashes out tonight, I could sleep in tomorrow…”
Jim and I assisted him to his feet and we went up to the kitchen and had a generally reviving cup of tea.
Some Make a Living Writing Speeches for Other Men to Deliver-Some, Again, are Handwriting Experts and Tree Surgeons – Some Catch Rats, and Others Collect Cigar Stubs.
By Gregory Clark, January 10, 1914.
In a city the size of Toronto there are many queer trades and professions, practised by only a few men, and preserved from becoming common trades by the narrowness of their scope and the smallness of their patronage. Among the strangest are the professional speech writers, of whom several are said to have plenty to do in Toronto, whose names, however, are little known except to some of Toronto’s best after-dinner speakers, who jealously guard the names of their particular geniuses. Mr. Arthur Hawkes the well-known politician and journalist, used to be, in his young days in the Old Country, one of these professional speechwriters. It was fine, says Mr. Hawkes, as well as inspiring, to go to a meeting and hear some dignified town councillor spouting forth your own words, swinging his arms according to your bracketed directions, and to hear him thunderously applauded at the end, into the bargain.
Another queer profession, one that in Toronto is practised by only two men, is that of the handwriting expert. He figures in law suits, trials. and in the preparation of criminal cases. The two Toronto experts are W. H. Shaw, of the shorthand school, and O. B. Stanton, the Yonge street stationer.
Mr. Stanton, and his father before him, have figured in many a famous criminal case in Toronto. The method used in determining whether, say, a cheque is a forgery or not, is to have a photographic enlargement of cheque and of a sample of the genuine signature made, many sizes larger than ordinary writing. With past experience and training, the handwriting expert goes to the particular letters and particular curves, and angles of letters, and compares the cheque with the genuine sample. He knows certain rules, chiefly common rules of simple psychology, which show him where a man cannot disguise his writing and these rules he explains to judge or jury.
In Europe, in Paris, principally. the study of hand-writing in relation to crime is highly developed.
Tracing a letter to a particular typewriting machine, a thing that figures In some criminal cases, is one expert profession. But the papers and samples have to be sent to New York from Toronto in cases of extreme doubt.
Tree Surgery
Tree-Doctoring and tree surgery is practised by three or four firms in Toronto. In Queen’s Park subjects of tree surgery can be seen – grand old oaks, with the side of their trunks filled in with black asphalt. If a gentleman falls in love with a tree under which he romped as a boy on the home farm, and wishes to have it placed on his front lawn in the city, for his children to romp under, these firms will undertake to transplant it – any number of miles.
In connection with the detection of crime, there is the finger-print expert, only one of which works in Toronto Mr. Hugh Duncan, of the Detective Department. He blackens the convicts’ hands, takes prints of them on paper, and these are considerably enlarged into photographs. These are kept on file.
In case a finger print is found on paper or an article of furniture connected with a crime, it is moistened, powdered lightly, and pressed on to paper. If it corresponds with the suspect’s finger print, it is regarded as most damaging evidence by the police.
Autograph hunting as a profession is said to have its exponents in Toronto, although no explicit examples are to be had. An amusing case is that of a Frenchman, Ludovic Picard, who made a steady income out of autograph hunting for many years. His most successful coup was accomplished with a letter in which he posed as “one of the unappreciated who is meditating suicide, and seeks for counsel and aid in this hour of sore distress.” This effusion drew a number of celebrities, including Beranger and Heine1. Lacordaire sent ten closely written pages, which were promptly converted into cash. Dickens also fell a victim, and took trouble to answer in French. Eventually Picard was shown up in the press by Jules Sandeau, and had to seek another occupation.
Rat-Catching
In the lower stratum of society, in the “submerged tenth,” a great number of queer professions flourish, none queerer being that of the professional rat-catcher, or “rat-eater,” as the police call them. Every big establishment has to have the services of these quaint professors, modified pied pipers. Eaton’s, Simpson’s, and the St. Lawrence Market find them indispensable. At night-fall these “rat-eaters” enter the darkened edifices, and in those nooks and crannies where their professional knowledge directs them, they set traps and lay poison. They are paid prices, ranging from 1 to 5 cents, according to the anxiety of the proprietors, per rat head.
The boot beggar’s queer trade borders close on vagrant crime or mendicancy. The boot-beggar calls at your door, a pitiable sight, with his toes protruding from dilapidated boots, and tearfully begs a pair of old boots. If you respond, as you are likely to do, he walks down the street to where his wife is standing, on the watch for a stray policeman, and hands her your boots to add to her already bulging apron-full. Detective William Wallace, of the Toronto staff, who is a devoted student of all these petty forms of crime and queer turns of human nature, says that the boot beggar averages 80 cents per pair for the old boots he gets for nothing, when, sold to the junk dealer.
Picking Up Cigar Butts
The city man who rises with the sun in the summer for the sake of health will often see a man much resembling the comic paper’s hobo, shambling along the streets picking up cigar-butts and cigarette ends. This is a profession, as they seldom smoke what they rescue from the gutter. Where the tobacco goes is a mystery to the police. But it is suspected that it goes whence it come back into the mouth of the smoker, in the form of a cheap cigar or cheap cigarette. These hoboes are “snipe-shooters” of the police lists.
The “finders” are closely allied to the “snipe shooters,” only they frequent the busy corners and fronts of hotels and theatres at daybreak; and carefully turn over the papers and rubbish in search of dropped coins and car tickets. It is surprising to learn from the police that these men “find” enough to make a living, miserable though it be.
The “pollackers” are other early birds, or early worms, as the case may be, who search through the garbage barrels of the city in search of tea-lead2, bottles, rags – all of which are merchandise in the eyes of the slum dwellers.
A profession that has a slight following in Toronto is that of “sandwiching”- being a human advertising board. Stray vagrants from London, where the human back is considered a good advertising ground, sometimes offer their services to Toronto firms.
Editor’s Notes: This is one of Greg’s earliest credited works in the Star Weekly. Sometimes when he was first credited, it was as Gregg Clark, like in this one. I’m not sure if that was a typo or he wanted to be called that initially.
Will science ever produce a car that won’t have to be pulled out of snowdrifts?
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, January 3, 1942.
“I hope we don’t hit any drifts,” said Jimmie Frise. “This car needs a carbon job.”1
“Or its clutch is slipping,” I suggested. “It certainly doesn’t seem to have the pep.”
“I guess the lucky people,” said Jim, “were those who bought early 1940 models. They got them before the war prices and taxes went on. And they’ll be good until the war is over, I hope.”
“Well, a lot of people,” I submitted, “are finding out how long a car will last. Before the war, as soon as a car needed a simonize job we turned it in on a new model.”2
“I hope I live long enough,” said Jim, “to see the period after the war. The wonders of the age we’ve lived through will be nothing to the wonders of the coming age. We’ve lived through one of the most glorious periods of history. We’ve actually seen the birth of the telephone, the radio, the airplane, the motor car, the highway and modern industry with all its marvels. We’ve been very fortunate.”
“We don’t realize,” I confessed, “the miracles we have seen.”
“But after the war,” pursued Jimmie, “as the result of the great discoveries of these war years, we are going to see an age that will make the past 50 years seem like the buggy age.”
“Science,” I admitted, “is boundless.”
“Think,” cried Jim, “what they must have found out about engines in the past year. Engines for planes, engines for tanks, engines for speedboats and warcraft. When the war ends, all those discoveries will have to be converted to the uses of peace. A 1945 model car3 is going to be something to see.”
“And to own,” I reminded him dismally.
“Aw, we’ll get back to normal,” assured Jimmie. “The only basis on which society can operate is that enough people should earn enough to buy what everybody se makes. Things look pretty grim and dreary now, but peace comes. And every peace we’ve had in the past 2,000 years, has been a better peace than the one that went before.”
“Hold on,” I protested. “Don’t try to tell me that the past 20 years, between our war and this one, was better than that golden age, the Edwardian age, from 1900 to 1914.”
Era of Emancipation
“Certainly I do,” said Jim. “Since 1918, hundreds of millions of human beings have been set free, for one thing. The Russians, the Chinese, or are you merely thinking of our own little neighborhood.”
“Excuse me, Jim,” I said humbly.
“Look at those cows,” said Jim, pointing to a herd of cattle that had been let out of the barn for a breath of winter sunshine and a drink at the water trough. “Even the cows look upon the past 20 years as the great era of emancipation. For in those years of peace, the science of vitamins was discovered.”
“What the Sam Hill have vitamins to do,” I demanded, “with cows?”
“My dear sir,” exclaimed Jimmie. “Do you mean to say you don’t know that cows get vitamins? Didn’t you know that hogs are dieted? Have you been eating eggs for the past 10 years without knowing that the average hen today has the services of a dietitian?”
“Dietitian?” I said, a little at a loss.
“My dear boy,” said Jim. relaxing at the steering wheel, “the day is gone forever when you just went out and tossed a forkful of hay to a cow. A cow is now fed according to its weight. All its food is measured. It gets no more a toss of hay, but so much hay and so much ensilage, so much oil cake and so much vitamin cake. So much cod-liver oil.”
“Jimmie,” I protested.
“It’s a fact,” cried Jim. “You might just as well go out of business as try to run a farm the old-fashioned way.”
“Maybe these millionaire farmers…” I started.
“No, sir,” declared Jim. “Every farmer has to be scientific or give up business. He can’t sell his beef or his milk in competition with scientifically-bred cattle if he doesn’t make a personal problem of each cow. Each cow today is a personality. In accordance with its weight and condition, it gets so much food and so much vitamin. It eats out of its own private manger. The same with hogs.”
“Do you mean to say the old-fashioned hog trough is gone?” I demanded.
“Gone,” insisted Jimmie. “Each hog has its own pen and its own trough.”
“Why?” I bewailed. “One of the most delightful institutions of country life has vanished if the hog trough is gone. When feeding time drew nigh, the sound of those hogs squealing and yelling and getting ready was a sound as characteristic of the country as a rooster’s crow. And the riot of pigs when the farmer approached with the pails of swill was one of the greatest lessons humanity has ever learned. Not to be like a pig is one of the first lessons a child learns.”
“Ah, well,” interrupted Jim, “science has carried us well past morals.”
“And the fight.” I insisted, “when the swill was dumped into the trough. The way those pigs jostled and heaved at one another and jockeyed and gulped. The way each pig tried at one and the same time, to guzzle all the swill he could and at the same time to prevent his neighbors on either side of him from guzzling. I love to watch pigs eat. I think there is more education in watching pigs than in going to school.”
“Well, those days are done,” declared Jim. “Each pig has his own pen. Each pig has his own trough. He gets exactly his right share. The old principle of letting a hog get all he could resulted in one or two fat hogs and a lot of lean hogs. What we want from a hog is size. We are not interested in his manners or morals. How fat is he? So we’ve worked out a plan whereby all hogs will be fat.”
“It’s terrible,” I enunciated. “It’s stealing their very character and nature from them. I bet in a few years, hogs will sicken and die. We’ll develop a race of high-strung, nervous hogs, lean and stringy, because we have interfered with their basic character.”
“Pooh,” said Jim. “The world has been sentimental about things like that for too long. Now we’re going scientific. You ought to see a modern chicken ranch. Each chicken has his own little stall.”
“Stall?” I cried. “A chicken in a stall?”
“Sure,” said Jim. “When I was a boy, we kept chickens, and before supper we used to go out with a pail of chicken-feed and holler chook-chook-chook, and tromp all directions the hens would come running like mad, the rooster leading. And as they came near, we would take the pail of feed and give it a fling and scatter the grain far and wide in the barnyard. That day is ended, too.”
“I’m dreadfully sorry to hear it,” I said earnestly. “I think that chicken-feeding time I was the most amusing hour of the day on the farm.”
“Sure it was,” said Jim, “but see what happened? The wise chickens used to get to know when feeding time was drawing near and they would start to gather in the barnyard. They learned to know when the lady of the farm appeared, from the back shed, with the pail of chicken-feed and they would start to run to get to a point of vantage. But the foolish chickens, the dreamers, the impractical chickens, were away off in the cabbage field, over the fence from the barnyard, absent-mindedly hunting grasshoppers and worms. Dreamy, hare-brained chickens, drowsily squawking away off in the field. And when that chook chook-chook rang out they had to wake up and run like the devil, down the cabbage rows, under the fence and come flying over the barnyard to get anything at all, if it was left after the wise chickens had had their fill.”
“It’s the way of the world, Jim,” I assured him. “The wise guys stay handy at feeding time. The dreamers are away out in the cabbage patch.”
Wanted: Eggs
“Yes,” conceded Jim. “But is it dreamers we want, amongst chickens? Or wise guys? It is neither. All we want from chickens is eggs. And food makes eggs. And we want all chickens to get the same amount of food, whether they are dreamers who wander off in the cabbage patch, or whether they are wise guys who linger handy when the feed pails are flung. A dreamy hen’s egg sells for just as much as a wise hen’s. And probably tastes no different. It is eggs we want. So we pen up our chickens, ration their feed, so that the dreamy hen gets just as much as the wisest hen.”
“Hard on me, Jim,” I cut in, “but don’t you realize that, this is interfering with the ancient laws of survival? It has taken millions of years to make hens as little wise as they are. What will happen to the poultry kingdom if you start rewarding chicken-headed chickens the same as the wise chickens?”
“It’s eggs we want,” declared Jim.
“Well,” I summed up, bitterly, “I seem to recognize in what you have told me about cows and hogs, and chickens, a certain resemblance to what is happening to human society. What they have tried out so profitably on cows and pigs and hens, they are starting to try out on us humans. We, too, are being rationed. We, too, are being penned. It is getting harder and harder for those of us who linger near the farmyard at feeding time to get more than the dreamy guys who wander afar in the cabbage patch. Like cows, to each according to his need; from each according to his means. We are being rationed according to how much we need and are being milked for all we are worth.”
“It makes better cows and hogs and chickens,” stated Jimmie. “Why shouldn’t the same principle make better men?”
“Jim,” I warned him, “there are certain principles of life laid down by nature. If you monkey with them, there is no telling what disasters may follow.”
“You’re a Tory,” said Jim.
“No, sir,” I replied. “I just happen to know that nature is vengeful.”
“Well,” said Jimmie, slackening the speed of the car, “here’s our first drift.”
And it was a dandy. One of those knife-edged drifts, about three feet deep, lying diagonally across the highway. It was undamaged. No car or sleigh had gone through it.
“Charge it,” I suggested.
“Did we bring a shovel?” inquired Jim.
“This is your car, you ought to know,” I reminded him.
“H’m, no shovel,” said Jim, slowly accelerating and then changing his mind at the last minute, and coming up to the drift so slowly that when we struck it, we stopped dead and the engine stalled.
“Back out,” I said, “and buck it.”
But the car would not back out. All drifts are the same. No matter how many times you come to one, you always make the same mistakes. I got out, shoved feebly, snow getting up my pants legs. Jim got out and waded around in the drift, as if that would do any good. We both got back in and Jim started the engine and backed and went forward, as far as gears were concerned, but the car never budged an inch.
“What a silly thing to do,” said Jim. “Why did you say to charge it?”
“You didn’t charge it,” I recalled to him. “You changed your mind at the last minute.”
“Well, I guess there is nothing for it,” said Jim, “but to go up to that farm house there and borrow the farmer’s shovel.”
“It would take half an hour to dig through this drift,” I protested.
“Would you rather just sit here until spring?” inquired Jim pleasantly.
So we waded across the drift and walked up the road a little way until we came to the farm lane. As we opened the gate, I saw three horses far up at the other end of the lane standing and looking at us. “Horses, Jim,” I informed him. “Horses won’t hurt you,” said Jim, who was born on a farm and therefore I trust him. “Come on.”
We started up the lane towards the farm house, which stood with that curiously solitary air that farm houses adopt in winter. The three horses wheeled sharply and stood staring down the lane at us with pricked ears and manes blowing in the wind.
“I like horses harnessed,” I happened to say.
“Pawff,” said Jim. “Horses never bother you.”
Suddenly the three motionless horses started to walk slowly towards us, their nostrils blowing snorts of steam and their hoofs making heavy sounds on the snow.
“Scare them, Jim,” I suggested.
Then the leading horse started to trot towards us and the others followed. All of a sudden they all started to gallop. And they charged straight down the lane at us.
“Whoa,” yelled Jim, masterfully.
But all three charged full tilt past us, as we leaped to the fence to let them pass. And as they passed, all three kicked up their huge feet and made swishes in the air, throwing clods of hacked snow in all directions.
I was already half over the fence.
“Jim,” I said. “Lookout.”
For the three horses, their ears wobbling forward and back and their eyes blazing, had all halted in a kind of shy jumble and were wheeling. Starting at a walk, then a trot, they suddenly burst into the gallop again and charged up the lane, lashing in the air with their hoofs as they passed us, snorting and stamping.
Jim took the fence much easier than I. With one hand on a post, he heaved his weight into the air and his long legs went soaring into space. But in his haste, Jimmie misjudged the height. Or maybe Jimmie just isn’t as young as he used to be. At any rate, one foot cleared the barrier nicely, but the other caught in the top wire. This dislodged his hold on the fence post, and Jimmie sailed through the air as pretty as you please. Down he went on the other side, sprawling face first in the snow. His nose carved a deep furrow through the new snow.
I managed to make the safe side of the fence as Jimmie finally lifted himself from the ground and began banging the matted snow off his clothes.
“They know you’re nervous,” explained Jim. “If they know anybody is nervous…”
“Would they know how brave you are?” I inquired sweetly.
“I Like Horses”
So we walked up to the farm and the dog heard us and barked the farmer out, and he came and met us. And when we asked to borrow his shovel, he said he would tow us out with the horses, because there was another and a worse drift a couple of hundred yards farther on.
“I’ll just tow you across my fields,” he explained. “I do it for everybody.”
And he went and got bridles and opened the lane gate and called the wild horses, and they came and very skittishly and jerkily submitted to the bridles and were led into the barn to be harnessed.
“You see,” said Jim, “if you know how to handle them, they’re like children.”
“Yes,” I said. “And they’re not fed any vitamins. They’re not kept in pens and doled out food.”
“All we want from horses,” countered Jim, “is work, not milk, not meat, not eggs, just work.”
“So,” I said, “we treat them, not like new-fangled beasts, but like old-fashioned human beings. And they work. And they kick up their heels. And they have fun.”
And like model children, in their harness two of them came out and walked eagerly down the lane and hooked on to our car and yanked it through the drifts, and the farmer charged only 50 cents, and the three of them went whooping back over the fields to the barn.
“I like horses,” I declaimed.
Editor’s Notes:
- Likely engine carbon cleaning. ↩︎
- This is hard to gauge, but I get the impression that more well-to-do people, including some middle-class people got a new car every year or two. Back in the early days of cars, there could be huge improvements in just a few years. Of course there would still be people who held onto a car until it fell apart, but the war forced everyone to keep what they had since civilian car production stopped for the duration. ↩︎
- A good guess by Jimmie. ↩︎
By Gregory Clark, January 3, 1931.
Lou Marsh all his life has looked as if he were going some place.
Even when he is only walking from the sporting department to the composing room he looks as if he were getting a kick out of it.
And all my life I have wished I could be going with Lou wherever he was going. But I knew my legs wouldn’t hold out.
The other afternoon Lou went charging by with a little cigar butt wedged in the corner of his jaw and looking even more than ordinarily marshy. And twenty years of silence went bust.
“Hey, Lou, how about taking me?”
Lou halted. He halts like a collision.
“How much money you got?” asked Lou.
“About ten dollars1,” said I weakly.
“Come on,” said Lou, charging for the elevator.
Out we galloped to the street, around a corner and into Lou’s car, where it was parked under a “Strictly No Parking” sign.
He drives the way he writes. Lou is largely responsible for the state of traffic in downtown Toronto. The swells he leaves last for hours.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Dufferin,” said Lou. “Harness races. We are going to buy a pool.”
“There isn’t any racing this time of year,” said I.
“Isn’t there?” said Lou. “There isn’t any racing any other time of year, you mean.”
“What kind of racing is it?” I asked, bracing my feet against the floorboards.
“Harness racing. Trottin’ races, pacers. On ice. On slush. In the mud. Big fat man sitting on a little wee bicycle down under the horse’s tail. All races run in heats.”
“What are heats?”
“Sections,” said Lou. “Like tripe. You pick a horse. It runs four races. Comes second each time and yet can still win the race. You get to like a horse that way. Fall in love with a horse.”
“I never knew about this,” said I.
“Lots of people don’t,” said Lou. “But lots of people don’t know about rasslin’.”
“I agree with you about rasslin’,” I said. “Rasslin’ is terrible.”
“Rasslin’ is the greatest sport in world,” said Lou.
“But—but,” I stammered, “I thought you—”
“Sure,” said Lou. “I changed my mind. Good to change your mind every once in a while. Like your shirt. It’s cleaner and it feels better.”
With a swish and a swoop we pulled up at Dufferin race track, bumped over the curb and pulled up on the boulevard.
Dufferin race track2 is a little merry-go-round track from a country fair dropped down right in the heart of Toronto. Its grandstand is a little grandstand exactly like the one at Birdseye Center. Its betting enclosures are fussy little barn-beamed stables without paint or varnish. Its judge’s stand is on this side, the crowd side, of the track, so that you can holler up to the judges if you are so minded. It is a little bit of home in the heart of the big city to thousands of lonely people from up-country.
And in the winter, when the trottin’ races are on, it is more like Coboconk or Omemee than ever.
A Hunch on Commodore Fish
If the ground in front of the grandstand gets muddy they just bring the straw out of the stables In wheelbarrows and make a sweet-smelling path of it so that you can get your overshoes or storm rubbers and maybe the back of your overalls into as near a homelike condition as possible. Lou said that was atmosphere. I don’t know what he meant.
Lou led me up to the gate, where a fellow in an old beaver coat was standing guard, taking your cash money.
“I’m the lieutenant-governor,” said Lou. “and this is my aide de cong.”
Lou crashes more gates than One-Eyed Connelly3.
“I never heard of you.” said the gateman, grinning and letting us past.
The boys who follow the trotting races are certainly worlds removed from the crowd you see at the common race tracks. There are no foreigners at the trottin’ races, no sports, no young brokers and no spats. The old beaver and coon coats are the only touch of the elegant. Plenty of peak caps with ear-flaps. Plenty of woolen mufflers. Pale faces, which are the majority at the Woodbine, cause you to go up to them, even if they are perfect strangers, and ask how they have been keeping lately.
It’s old home week when there is trottin’ at Dufferin.
The races hadn’t started when Lou and I got there, but there were several horses warming up on the track. Not the pretty sleek effeminate horses you see at the running races, but plain horses, just a little on the skinny side, with steam coming off them, sitting down behind them, on little gigs made with bicycle tire wheels, big fat men wearing rubber suits.
“Lou,” said I, “look at the gait of those horses!”
“Pacers and trotters,” said Lou. “Some roll like a woozy sailor. Action like a tandem bike, both legs together. A pacer puts both his right legs forward at the same time, then both his left. A trotter hits on all four corners alternately. But it’s a fast gait either way. They can sure pick ’em up and set ’em down fast when they’re let.”
He took me by the elbow add rushed me down past the grandstand to the little sheds at the north end where I could hear voices yelling.
In the gloom of the beamed sheds, with only rusty old braziers warming the air, a tight packed crowd was gathered around a sort of booth raised up, where men were chalking figures on a blackboard.
“That’s just Ching Hare takin’ bets on the heat,” said Lou, shoving me through the jam. “Come on down and buy a pool. That’s where you get some real gamblin’.”
At the back end of the sheds a pudgy little man with a hard hat over one eye, his coat open and thrown back and his hands jammed down into cross pockets in his pants, with watch-chain dangling across the bulge, was singing something. He was one of the sportiest, most charming little men you ever saw.
“Come—on,” he sang, “don’t—let—the—wheels—of—commerce stand—still! Who’ll buy—the—rest—of—this—pool? Take off your leather vests. Don’t—tell—me—that—you—are—going—to—let—a–chance—like—Bingo Boy—pass—by—for—a—buck—don’t—tell—me… Bingo Boy—Bingo Boy—best—horse—in—the—race… I just sold Molasses—there’s a sweet thing for you—for fifty for one if you like Bingo Boy. It’s the chance of your blooming life.”
Lou was studying his card.
“Look at that,” he said. “That one.”
I saw the name: “Commodore Fish.”
“A pure hunch,” said Lou. “Commodore for me, since I’m the admiral of the sea flea fleet. And fish for you. We’ll buy the pool on him.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“These fellows are selling pools,” said Lou. “When he finishes selling the pool he is on now we’ll up and say we will buy the pool on Commodore Fish—that’s in the third race—for twenty dollars. Then he will sell the other five horses in the race for whatever he can get. Maybe he will sell the other horses for two dollars each. That makes the pool thirty bucks. If our horse wins we take the whole pool.”
“That’s a lot simpler than ordinary betting,” said l.
“Simpler in more ways than you think,” said Lou.
Mingling With the Real Ammonia Boys
He listened while the quaint little man, who never took his hands out of his cross pockets, finished persuading the boys standing around to take up the rest of the horses in the pool he was selling. He had to lump the last three horses in one bunch and he sold them for two dollars the lot. The fellow who bought them had three chances for two dollars to win the race.
Then Lou stepped up.
“I’ll pay $20 for Commodore Fish in the third race,” said he.
“Twenty—dollars—on—the—Fish horse—in—the—third,” droned the little man. “I’ll get you thirty against that.” And right away several of the boys spoke up and took other horses in that race. The whole pool quickly came to fifty-six dollars.
“Not so good,” said Lou. I don’t like that. The boys don’t seem to like Commodore Fish. They jumped at our twenty.”
“Here’s my ten now,” said I.
“Listen,” said Lou, “Get out there and walk around the crowd and see what you can hear. Whenever you get close to anybody that smells strong of horse stay by him. The horsier they smell, the more they know. Some of them sleep with these skins. See if any of the real ammonia boys have anything good to say for Commodore Fish.”
I went out and mingled with the crowd.
I watched them run a heat. Instead of lining the horses up at a barrier they wheel them back, let them take off to a running start, and if they are in good order as they come past the judge’s stand the starter, yelling through a megaphone, shouts, “Go!”
it isn’t a good start, which happens three times out four, the starter up in the hencoop on stilts, hammers a little bell and the horses with their little buggies wheel around, go back down the track and try again.
It is the most personal sort of race.
“Come up that pole horse,” roars the starter as the horses come hurrying up for the running start.
But the pole horse always seems to be in trouble. It never does the right thing. But about the fourth or fifth try the starter gets tired and lets the race go anyway.
And while all these false starts are being made you hang over the rail studying the beasts and can get a good idea of which is the good one. Then you can run to the betting shed and get a bet up even after the horses have left the starting line.
I found one very horsey old man in a worn beaver coat.
“What about Commodore Fish in the third race?” I asked him.
“What about it?” demanded the old gent.
“Is he any good?”
“He’s the best horse in the race.” said the old chap, spitting brown. “He’s the best horse on the track, what’s more. I ought to know, cause I own him.”
So I hurried and told Lou.
Lou came and watched the heats with me.
“What do the horses wear all those garters and things for?” I asked Lou.
“To tickle them,” said Lou, “and make them step out smarter.”
“They’ve got a lot of junk on them,” said l.
“Everything but a windshield wiper,” said Lou. “Which is the thing they need most.”
It was very slushy that day.
A Swell Ride Anyway
One of the horses had a kind of billiard cue tied up along his neck and sticking up beside his head.
“That’s the pole horse, I suppose,” said l.
“Sure,” said Lou. He wears that billiard cue as a sign to the boys that he is shooting in this race.”
The fifth start was all jammed up, with Commodore Fish rushing three lengths ahead of everybody.
“If you don’t keep back of the pole horse I’ll attend to you.” roared the starter. “The next time you cone down in front I’ll set you down!”
The sixth start, Commodore Fish bounded away four lengths ahead of the field.
“Out!” roared the starter.
“Just a minute,” growled Lou, grabbing me by the slack of my chest. “Old man, I’m going to drive that hoss.”
And with a bound Lou was over the fence, dragging me out amongst the wheeling, plunging horses and little hissing wheels.
“Get out of your pew,” said Lou, jamming his Borsalino down over his ears. The driver in the messy rubber overalls got down with a grunt.
“Charley Snow says I’m to team him,” said Lou as he leaped into the seat of the tiny buggy. Charley Snow was the starter, so there was no argument.
“Get up there behind me,” said Lou to me, grimly. “Get some kind of a holt of me and hang on.”
“What’s the idea?” I whinnied.
“My neck’s to short to be a good trottin’ driver,” said Lou. “You perch there and tell me how they’re coming behind me. I’m going away on the Bill Daly.”
The horse wheeled. There a cloud of horses, slush, spray, snorting, yelling, and in wild howling rush we were away on Lou’s Bill Daly—whatever that is.
Away on the Bill Daly
A wild yell.
It sounded like “go.”
I heard no bell.
And all I could see was a blur of fence, a great cloud of slush behind me, and I hooked my heels into Lou’s pockets, slang my arms under his, and let her go.
We were yards ahead. Then all the other horses faded from view. We were going to win by a lap.
“Wow!” I howled into Lou’s ear. “Let her go!”
“How they coming?” shouted Lou., with the slush slashing past his head as he laid the gad. We were throwing up a bow wave like a coal barge cleaving a wake like a destroyer.
“They’re a mile back,” I yelled.
I felt the curve of the second turn. Then I felt Lou straighten up and heave on the reins. I looked over his entirely ruined shoulder. Ahead of us, on the home stretch, the other horses in the heat were just breaking away on the start.
Lou hauled Commodore Fish to a lope.
“Did you hear any bell?” he demanded grimly.
“l did not,” said l, angrily.
“Why didn’t you tell me they weren’t behind us?” roared Lou.
“I couldn’t see for the slush,” said I. “Anyway, I thought we were winning.”
Lou pulled the Fish horse up at the stables, where the old gent in the worn beaver coat and the fat man in the soiled rubber suit were waiting for us.
“Your ears,” said the old gent, kindly, “has got to be more or less trained to hear that bell.”
“If this guy hadn’t been betting against us in that pool,” said Lou, “he could have won the race.”
“He’s my son,” said the old gent, “and we allus splits our winnings.”
Lou was plastered with slush, hat and all. I was not much better off, on my exposed side.
“Well,” said Lou. “it was a swell ride anyway, wasn’t it?”
“It was great.”
“You couldn’t run out and hop on a bangtail lake that down at the Woodbine,” said Lou.
“Not with all those swells there,” said I.
“That’s why I like trottin’ races,” said Lou. “Something personal and intimate and easy going about it.”
“You’re covered with slush,” said I. “Your outside clothes are ruined.”
“And we lost ten bucks each,” said Lou.
“I paid you mine,” said l.
“Sure. But it was worth it, wasn’t it?”
“It’s been swell,” said I.
“I’ll take you lots of places if you like,” said Lou.
“That will be great,” said I, scraping off some of the slush. It had oats in it.
But once every thirty or forty years is often enough to go places with Lou.
When I see him going by with that look on his face from now on I am going to have an engagement.
Editor’s Notes: This is one of those pre-Greg-Jim stories with a different partner, this time Lou Marsh, one of the pioneers of sports journalism in Canada, working at the Toronto Star for 43 years. In 1931 he was the sports editor, a position he held until his death in 1936.
- $10 in 1931 would be $210 in 2025. ↩︎
- Dufferin Park Racetrack was a racetrack for thoroughbred horse races located on Dufferin Street in Toronto. It was demolished in 1955 and its stakes races moved to Woodbine Racetrack as part of a consolidation of racetracks in the Toronto area. ↩︎
- James “one-eyed” Connelly, “The World’s Most Notorious Gate Crasher” spent 40 years sneaking into boxing matches, baseball games, and political conventions. ↩︎