While early in his career, Jim was a staff artist and would design little illustrations as headings for sections for the Star Weekly.
Category: Miscellaneous Page 1 of 41
By Gregory Clark, Illustration by Jack Tremblay, October 9, 1965.
Greg’s dog is a quiet old thing, but when she smells a cat – look out!
Chelsea, our little Welsh corgi, is nine years old now, and has only the one bad habit.
If you allow seven years of our lives for a year of a dog’s life, then Chelsea is in her mid-sixties, and ought to have got over some of her earlier prejudices.
But no: as full of vim and muscle as ever, and with her sharp ears forever pointed forward in the position of eternal vigilance characteristic of corgis, she hates cats!
Hates? She has hysterics at the sight or sound of a cat. And since five of our surrounding neighbors are cat fanciers, Chelsea is subject to a lot of hysterics. Actually, she has never killed a cat. But many a cat has had one or two of its nine lives scared out of it by the rushing golden ball of fury that inhabits our back yard.
Chelsea, of course, is a house-and-garden dog. Except on her summer holidays, when she can range far and loose in a rocky splendor of porcupines, skunks, chipmunks, to all of which she pays polite and distant interest (it is cats she is looking for), she is never on the street except on leash. If we encounter a cat while out walking, it’s a fight to hold her.
Over the years, we have tried to inform her that cats have a place in the social structure. We have held family councils. We have most kindly drawn her attention to cats she had not already seen, saying “Nice kitty!” But what happens? Hysterics. Chelsea is of the opinion that cats are a menace to civilization, and she tries her best to convert us.
In the old days, when I shouted at her during one of her hysterics, she merely thought I was joining in the din.
So I devised a little scheme. I keep a quart milk bottle full of water on the table out on the back patio, with a small peanut-butter glass beside it. Whenever Chelsea goes into one of her cat tantrums, I get up and fling a glass of water at her. I always miss; for she is quicker than a squirrel. But the indignity of being sloshed with water seems to penetrate her fevered brain, and she comes and sits on the patio beside me, muttering and moaning her despair.
In the non-patio season, a glass of water carried smartly from the kitchen sink, or upstairs, from the bathroom and flung out a window, does the trick.
But in nine years, it hasn’t altered Chelsea’s opinion of cats one iota. She is, I am afraid, bigoted.
Last Sunday morning, it was so pleasant that I decided to have my breakfast on the patio amid the last asters of summer. It was around 10 o’clock, and very pleasant in the sabbath calm. I shared my toast crusts with Chelsea, and there wasn’t a cat or a worry in the world. When I decided to go up to the bathroom to shave, I called Chelsea’s attention to the sabbath calm and the golden beauty of the morning, and suggested she be a lady, for once, in consideration of the neighbors who might be sleeping in. Now, my bathroom has two of those quaint leaded-pane windows, the sills about chin-high to me. There is a radiator under them, which makes it impossible for anybody but a man 6½ feet tall to stick his head out and see into the side entrance, with its little wire gate.
I had hardly laid my razor out before there suddenly exploded, right under my open window in the side entrance, one of Chelsea’s hysterics.
Calmly, I filled the plastic mug off the bathroom glass shelf. Expertly, I tossed the water out the window, uttering, at the same time, the accompanying and traditional snarl of command:
“Gyaarr outa that, ya cat killer!”
(I forgot to mention earlier that I still have my old army voice, after 50 years; a sort of raspy roar.)
Chelsea instantly ceased her racket, and I hoped none of the neighbors had had to turn over in bed. By the slight scuffling sound below, I figured maybe this time I had caught Chelsea fair and square. However, when I went down after shaving and dressing, she was quite dry. I picked some asters and little ‘mums and took them in to the piano; and the peaceful sabbath drifted along.
It was Tuesday that I noticed something odd. Mrs. McCormack across the street was sweeping her front walk. I greeted her cordially, as usual.
She turned her back and went in.
Wednesday, I happened to hear the postman putting our letters through the slot and I got up and opened the door to say hello.
He stepped back and looked at me keenly.
“How are you keeping. Mr. Clark?”
“Fine, fine,” I said, picking up the mail. “How’s yourself?”
He gave me another long look and walked off.
Thursday, when I got on the bus, Wilkie, one of my around-the-corner neighbors whose yard abuts on mine, came running and climbed aboard behind me.
“Hello, there,” I said, heading for a vacant seat. To my surprise, Wilkie didn’t come and join me. He walked past me to another vacant double. I got up and joined him.
“How’s things?” I asked.
“Very well, thank you,” said Wilkie.
He was quite stiff.
I glanced at him. He was looking out the window.
“I say, old man,” I said, “is anything the matter? All right at home? The kids?”
“You know perfectly well what’s the matter,” said Wilkie.
“How do you mean?” I asked, shocked.
“The way you treated that young couple who just moved into our upper duplex,” said Wilkie. “It’s all over the neighborhood.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Throwing water on them, and swearing at them,” said Wilkie.
“Swearing at them? Water…?” I cried in astonishment.
“They wouldn’t even tell me what you called them,” accused Wilkie. “They said it was unprintable!”
“When? Where? Whaaa?” I responded.
“As nice a young couple as you ever met,” said Wilkie. “They were in my garden, and they saw you sitting on the patio in yours. And because they had been reading your stuff for years, and it was such a nice, quiet morning, they just thought they would walk around…”
“Chelsea!” I exclaimed so explosively that nearly everybody in the bus turned to look at me.
“It was Sunday?” I asked. “In the side entrance?”
“Yes,” said Wilkie, flatly.
Excitedly, agitatedly, holding a grip on Wilkie’s arm, I explained the whole thing: Chelsea and the milk bottle of water; the bathroom, and how high the windows are; how I fret over what the neighbors think of Chelsea and her hysterics.
“Surely,” I said, “surely you have seen me throwing a glass of water at Chelsea!”
“I can’t say I have,” said Wilkie, still stiff. “But I’ve often heard you swearing at her, and she stops suddenly.”
“SWEARING!” I protested. “All I do is growl! ‘Gyaarr outa that, ya cat killer!'”
Everybody in the bus turned and looked reprovingly at me. An elderly lady across the aisle got up and went to a vacant seat up near the driver. Wilkie’s office is two blocks in the opposite direction from mine when we get off the bus. I walked it with him, elaborating, clarifying.
“The poor souls!” I said.
“They thought you were some kind of a nut,” said Wilkie, softening.
So we shook hands at the entrance of Wilkie’s building.
“Look,” he said, “weather permitting, Sunday I will be having the usual barbecue in the garden, after church. You come. I’ll invite the neighbors. And you can meet the young couple upstairs.”
“Wonderful!” I thanked him. “And I’ll bring Chelsea.”
“Well, uh…” said Wilkie, the cat fancier.
“And demonstrate!” I explained.
Editor’s Note: This story appeared in May Your First Love Be Your Last (1969).
This illustration went with a story by Edith G. Bayne about a broke university student who had to raid a savings bank full of pennies to pay for his date. And to his horror, it was one of these “new establishments” that make you pay at the table rather than at the counter, so everyone could watch him pay with over 300 pennies. Luckily she thought he was just being hazed by older students.
Jim illustrated this story about William Southam, the newspaper magnate.
CLARK TELLS HOW ITALIAN GENERAL GIVES CAPTORS 7-COURSE LUNCH THEN MARCHES OFF TO OBLIVION
Waited, Napoleon-Like, Refusing to Deal With Mere Brigadier – Artillery Commander Eager to Have His Regiment Join Canadians at Once
EQUIPMENT FORGED IN CANADIAN PLANTS PLAYS VITAL ROLE IN MONTY’S ADVANCE
By Gregory Clark With the Canadian Army in Italy, Sept. 16 (1943)
A young lieutenant-colonel of Toronto is probably the proudest officer in the Canadian forces now at the end of a 10-day invasion of Italy. He is the officer responsible for the tremendous problem of supply and transport movement in this piece of the war in which no battle occurred and therefore in which the speed of the advance was beyond every possible calculation of the staff.
This has not been a war for soldiers carrying weapons. The fighting has been done by the soldiers with steering wheels in their tired and grimy hands. Fifty miles is accepted as the greatest distance between the front line and the rear base from which gasoline, oil and repairs give a foundation to all mechanical equipment. At times in the past week the distance was 175 miles.
He says the long and sometimes infuriating training of Canadian personnel in Britain is the explanation of the incredible success of all mechanical transport operations in this campaign, in which the number of vehicles which failed can be counted in a couple dozen. In Egypt and North Africa, Canadian-made vehicles won renown, but nothing in the desert compared with the cruelty to vehicles on tracks and wheels experienced in the mountains and the countless bypasses around German wrecked bridges and sheer cliff roads, where only bulldozers or trapeze artists might expect to pass.
Not One Vehicle Failed
The little flying column up the coast not only had no fatal casualties, but not one vehicle had failed.
When the lieutenant-colonel commanding that mixed force announced with considerable relief that the whole force was coming down out of the mountains to take over the final dash, his information was that the first troops would arrive in 48 hours, because they had to come straight out of the mountain over roads blasted and wrecked. In 36 hours not the first troops, but the whole force was out of the mountains and racing north.
Everybody here who shared in that operation is willing to split his share with every man and woman in Canada who had to do with the making of these trucks and carriers, or the materials with which they are made. It is 100 per cent. congratulation on Canadian war effort at home.
I am also prepared to say not a single man in the whole show went without food or water, not a single vehicle was ever held up for want of gasoline, which confirms the idea, pretty well assimilated in Britain before we left, that business men are wearing the staff badges in the Canadian army. This was more than a military exploit; it was business enterprise.
Open An Office
At every corner of the road, a business man, whether colonel or sergeant, turned up and opened his office on a stump or rock and went on day and night, with never a hitch.
Inspired traffic control seemed to bloom right out of all ranks, for whenever a truck or armored car halted on a road for whatever reason, instantly out jumped the spare driver to give all clear signals and direct traffic through. Even tired marching troops resting on a mountain roadside were never too tired instantly to detail a volunteer traffic control to give traffic signals to convoys storming past. What I mean to say is, when you get an army that seems to know what it is all about, from private to general, you have got an army.
Italian General Yields
Surrender of an Italian division commander and possession if not capture of three Italian submarines are highlights of the Canadian march up Italy’s unhappy and blistered foot.
When a certain famous Canadian regular regiment advanced to establish outposts, our patrols came upon the Italian divisional headquarters, General Guido Bologna with all his staff was awaiting the Canadians’ arrival. Surrounded by his staff and with his Napoleon- hatted carabinieri guard, Gen. Bologna made a picture for history, not unlike, yet not quite like, the famous painting of Napoleon on his way to St. Helena.
The general, a heavy-set blunt-featured officer, sat scowling and grim, with his staff of elegant, slim majors and colonels, many of them blond. The general haughtily ordered through his own interpreter to the Canadian patrols that he be taken to the Canadian commander and no one less.
Invited In To Lunch
Capt. N. Duncan Schreihauf of the advancing unit came up and took charge of the general and his staff and was invited by them in to lunch. Duncan says it was a swell lunch, consisting of seven courses. One of his staff was Col. Count Valfredo di Bonzo, artillery commander of the division, who enthusiastically proposed his complete artillery regiment join the Canadian division at once.
Duncan deferred accepting until the party met the general and then in three Italian cars with the Napoleon-hatted escort riding alongside, Gen. Bologna drove back to brigade headquarters through the whirling dust clouds of the Canadian advance. Here, standing apart with his hands clasped in front and head bowed while his elegant staff stood off to one side in graceful attitudes, the general refused to deal with a mere brigadier, insisted on presenting himself to a general.
There was an amusing contrast between the belted and bemedalled Italian staff officers and the Canadian staff officers in frowsy shirts and shorts and dusty unpolished shoes. Victory it appears is something else than spit and polish.
Unhappy Pilgrimage Set Off
After giving the matter some thoughtful consideration, the brigade staff came to a decision. They agreed to send the general south, so Capt. Hamish Macintosh was elected as escort to the general and his staff. Off down the road with their Napoleon hats, motorcycles and cars went the unhappy pilgrimage looking for a suitable dramatic setting in which to do their stuff and I regret very much to think they failed to find it.
When the Canadians advance it is more like a construction gang heading into a job than the antique profession of arms. These Canadians are no glamour boys at all. There are too many fleas, ticks and mosquitos, too much dust and too many Niagara gorges to go at in quest of a stage.
The submarine incident was not really a capture since the armistice days before had liquidated the Italian navy. But it is not often that infantry patrols have the pleasure of capturing submarines, so let us call it a capture for the purpose of future conversation around town when the boys get home.
Small reconnaissance patrols had reached a small port where the three small submarines with skeleton crews to guard them were waiting. Yelling and cheering the Italians accompanied the patrols down to the quays and in the name of the King our boys climbed on the conning deck of one and accepted grapes and peaches from the ardent sailors.
So here we climb and probe in a country fit for tourists with cameras rather than soldiers with guns. From our side we hear fragments of news of great doings by other armies. By all accounts they have found the Germans. So long and so dusty and steep are the roads behind us, that I and my fellow correspondents wonder if any of our stories are getting out at all. I feel like small boy dropping marbles down a dark and mysterious knothole from which no sound returns.
Editor’s Note: This was a part of Greg’s war correspondence work for the Toronto Star. Note that his name was often highlighted in the headline.
Arthur Meighen became leader of the Conservative and the Unionist Party, and therefore Prime Minister on July 10, 1920, when Robert Borden resigned. Frank Carvell was the Chief Commissioner of the Board of Railway Commissioners. The railway companies applied for a 35 per cent increase in rates, and as the above cartoon shows, this was not well received.
By Gregory Clark, September 3, 1927.
We show our visitors the Humber, but not the Don.
We parade them through Sunnyside, but we avoid the shady side.
We present to them the university, though the jail is a quite handsome building.
We drive them through miles of wealthy residential streets where nobody lives at all. And fail to show them the hundreds of miles of homely residential streets where people really live.
We show them the churches and say Toronto is the city of churches. We show them the trees and say Toronto is the city of trees.
But we fail to mention that Toronto is the city of policemen, the city of poles, telegraph poles, telephone poles, hydro poles, the city of parked cars, the city of licenses, drivers’ licenses, dog licenses, car licenses, liquor licenses, gun licenses, fishing licenses, the city of narrow streets.
We strive to show strangers that we have everything that everybody else has. We hide the things that are our own. We want them to think that Toronto is just like every other city. But we know in our hearts that it is strange, even to us.
For a dollar and a half you can get a two hour, twenty-two mile ride in one of the city’s own sightseeing coaches. They run you up Jarvis street, through Rosedale, calling out the names of the prominent and distinguished owners of some of the heaviest houses, across to Casa Loma, along Davenport road, down to High Park, the Humber, Sunnyside, the Lake Shore drive and back downtown. The shorter dollar drive takes in the university, parliament buildings and the “swell” residential regions.
But if you want to see what Toronto really is you must see not one but two of everything. For each cathedral you must see a mission. For each mansion you must see a four-roomed bungalow.
The Chicago man, sitting in the sight-seeing coach, thinks how different Toronto is from Chicago. The air is so pure and sweet. The Chicago man, however, does not know about West Toronto. He should be taken to the packing house district and he would feel quite at home. The story is that the Guelph train was reeling through the night on its way to Toronto. A country lady, amusing herself by counting the eggs in the basket on her lap, found a bad one. Yes, it was a bad one. She tossed it out the train window. But the wind of the train caught the egg and bore it in at another window further down, where the brakesman sat dozing, his lantern between his feet, his chin on his chest. The egg struck him on the chest.
Leaping to his feet and seizing the lantern, the brakesman shouted:
“West Toronto! West Toronto station!”
Gotham on Queen Street
“Take the New Yorker round about so that he never sees Queen street, east and west of Yonge, and he will feel he is indeed on foreign soil. But New Yorkers should be shown Queen street, a few blocks west or east of Yonge and he will think he is in Manhattan. For, despite all the ballyhoo about New York, despite all the rubberneck trips we have been taken on in New York, the fact is that the vast majority of the streets of New York are hardly distinguishable from Queen street in its shabbier stretches. The shops are the same, the things in the shops, the people, the language.
The Buffalo man has only to be taken south-east of the King Edward, instead of northwest, and he would think he was in Buffalo.
There are numerous parts of Rosedale which in the houses, gardens and everything but the pinched and limited space around them are almost as nice as Port Hope. Streets of bungalows north of St. Clair might have been taken holus-bolus1 from Kitchener, Oshawa, Stratford.
Toronto has so many things that nobody else has got that we ought to parade them before our guests. What do we want to do but give our visitors a true, honest opinion of the city?
Scores of cities and towns have rivers not unike the Humber, with parks along the banks and bungalows and boathouses and dance-pavilions. But how many cities have rivers like the Don?
The Don is peculiarly Toronto’s river. There is history written in its slow waters. One look at the Don and you can read the soul of Toronto. You can tell from it what kind of city government Toronto had fifty years ago, twenty-five, and to-day. The Don demonstrates the spirit of progress, which sets beauty and public health far above ugly commercialism. It tells of Toronto’s determination, for the job of cleaning up the Don to its present state of beauty must surely have been a desperate undertaking. Any city can have a Humber, especially if it has a few private citizens, with excellent real estate notions, to promote the beautification of it. But the Don’s development is solely to the credit of the city.
Why we take our guests out to the Humber, with its real estate opportunities so badly exposed, when we might show them the Don, with all its moral lessons. and not the slightest real estate suggestion about it save its upper and unseen reaches; is one of those mysteries.
The odd effect of a two hour sight-seeing tour of Toronto as offered by the spiel-coaches is to create an idea of smallness. The one hour cruise seems to bind the city into a town, a university town with a number of venerable churches fully thirty years old.
The emphasis is on the old. But Toronto is young. We wind around about Jarvis street, Rosedale, the lower edge of the Hill, with never a glimpse, a sensation of the enormous vista of Bloor street which flings itself across the city from the uttermost end of Danforth to the Islington end of Bloor. Yonge street, as far as the spieler indicates, is this funny little crowded street full of small shops, like any old cross street in the big cities. We do not show that Yonge street is a pavement that runs from Lake Ontario to North Bay, and beginning to be suburban Toronto nearly all the way.
Toronto of To-day
These deserted mansions bunched together in Rosedale are not Toronto. They are Toronto in 1900. Toronto, 1927, is the thousands of acres of streets and homes spreading away up Yonge street, the whole townships of happy bungalows to the west, the east. Sightseers in Toronto should be run from Islington to Scarboro along the one street, Bloor-Danforth. They should do Yonge street from the bay to Hog’s Hollow.
The Royal Bank could make a fat interest out of air if it would designate one of its elevators for tourists and run them to the roof to look out over the city.
Should we impress visitors with our sameness, our age, the wealth of individuals, or with our differences from other cities, our youth, the independence of hundreds of thousands of people who live far-flung in the finest suburbs there are in America?
The spielers on the coaches make a great point of calling attention to the T. T. C. car barns and the fine T. T. C. cars and so forth. If the spielers could run visitors through miles and miles of homes, and point out that it is the city’s wonderful transportation facilities that makes all this spread possible and renders unnecessary the piled-up apartments of the cities most of the visitors come from, T. T. C. would mean a great deal more than handsome car barns and pretty red cars.
Brownstone distillers mansions, colleges, churches, amusement parks – everything everybody else has got we show.
We speak of them in their own language. “The spire on that cathedral,” says the spieler, “is the tallest spire on the North American continent.”
And as the visitors all know that they have the tallest spire on the North American continent in their own home town it doesn’t matter.
We are shown a white candy box sort of a house and are informed that this is the home of the president of the Lizzie Maria candy works, whose stores downtown are decorated in much the same style as this house, and you will observe, ladies and gentlemen, that the number of the house is the same as the price of his candy per pound – forty-nine cents!
Maybe the guests would rather see the house Dr. Banting lives in – the savior of ten thousand lives per annum. Or the section of the city that was burned by the Americans in 1812. Or the site of the hanging of the rebels – just across the street from the tallest spire on the North American continent – rebels who dared to assert that Canadians should have representative government just as if they were a British people. Or maybe they would rather see the house the city did not present to George Young.
There is so much to see in a city of over ten churches and five picture shows that a reliable guide book cannot be prepared in news paper space. But the Toronto of the rubberneck wagons, the Toronto of the brief guide folders, the brownstone Toronto, the official Toronto, being no different from any other city in this part of the Caucasian world is far different from the Toronto that produces a strangely large share of world-renowned scientists, that marches the biggest Orange procession in the known world, that disappears in summer to the wilds, men, women and children, that operates the biggest annual world’s fair, that owns its public utilities, that won’t support a single cabaret or dive, that votes the same way forever, that had only five or six delicatessen stores and fills the early September air with the odor of preserving ketchup and gherkins and peaches, that is not American and not English, but something pretty much its very own.
And it never shows itself on the city hall steps, nor anywhere around the tallest spire in America, nor in pretentious residential neighborhoods, but is scattered and spread over thirty two square miles of city and another dozen square miles of suburb, very neighborly – over a fence, somewhat dour, not hospitable in the American fashion, yet not inhospitable in the least.
“A city,” old Col. Denison used to say, “unpopular both with burglars and commercial travelers.”
But intensely popular with some three-quarters of a million Torontonians.
Editor’s Note:
- Holus-bolus is an old-fashioned word that means all at once, all together. ↩︎
By Gregory Clark, August 29, 1925.
Nothing Anywhere That Equals in Size, Color, Imagination, Speed, and Smoothness, The Great Pageant Before the Grandstand at the Canadian National Exhibition – “Cully” Ross, Pageant-Master Supreme, Discusses Secrets of His Amazing Art
Toronto does not brag.
If she did there would have been a great deal more heard about the Biggest Show on Earth.
For the Biggest Show on Earth is held in the sixty-ninth largest city of the world – Toronto.
It is a show, a drama. A thousand actors perform in it. Four hundred musicians make the music for it. Its stage is eight hundred and fifty feet across. Its audience sits up to a fifth of a mile away from the centre of the stage. Other cities of the world have big shows – carnivals in Venice, fetes in Paris, religious processions in Tokio or Calcutta. But the Biggest Show on Earth is no rough-and-ready carnival, no come-as-you-please procession. It is a play, a pageant. It tells a story. It is a piece of stagecraft on a gigantic scale.
It is the pageant in front of the grand stand at the Exhibition.
Acres of stage, thousands of square feet of scenery, spotlights like cannon and floodlights like a storm of light, and a thousand actors without a spoken word to help them, smoothly performing the clear and sharp movements that will tell the furthest spectator, a thousand feet away, high in his twenty-five cent seat, the epic story of the building of empire and the founding of nation upon nation within an empire.
“Why,” asks a big theatrical man visiting the city to see this astonishing piece of stage-craft, “Isn’t this show advertised to the ends of the earth? It’s tremendous!”
The reason appears to be that the big show is done by Toronto people, from the trained dancers who make the beautiful ballet in the foreground up to the lone man who conceives. designs, executes, manages, directs it – Captain Cully Ross, of the Queen’s Own, pageant-master, director of all amusements and entertainment of the whole exhibition, who for thirty years has been doing his stuff for the great Canadian fair, and who is said to be the foremost pageant-master in America.
Because it is local the big show is taken for granted. When you see this year’s scene, St. Paul’s in the centre, with the streets of Old London spreading to right and left hundreds of feet, life size, it will be hard to realize that these are not actual buildings fading into the perspective. As all the nations of the empire on which the sun never sets begin to congregate in historical order against this scene, with their forty or fifty different types of costume, company after company of them, piling up the mighty story of the growth of the British nations, some sense of wonder at the skill back of this drama on the giant scale is certain to assail you.
Pageant Just 50 Minutes Long
The pageant at Wembley took six hours to unfold in two three-hour sessions on successive nights. The pageant at Toronto Exhibition takes in the neighborhood of fifty minutes, from the moment the eleven massed bands crash out the prelude to the scene until the curtain falls, so to speak, in a triumphant blaze of fireworks.
This fifty-minute pageant is one of the lessons Toronto has learned, via the shrewd showman gift of observation possessed by Captain Cully Ross.
He works from a central, picturesque idea, both in his scenery and his action, and then spreads about that central theme enough pageantry to make it graphic and vivid. He reduced the story of Cleopatra to fifty-two minutes. By one of those weird gifts he selected the Cleopatra story two years ago before King Tut’s tomb became the popular subject of the news, and by the time the pageant was presented it was right in the limelight.
“A pageant,” says he, “is a huge, simple, orderly drama, done in broad, swift strokes. To inspire the onlooker, it must not tire him.”
The grand stand show opens with a three-ring circus. For more than an hour acrobats, clowns and animals entertain the twenty-five thousand spectators. Then comes a few moments of community singing.
Why did Captain Ross introduce community singing before the pageant opens. Just an idle fancy? Ah, there is magic in the showman.
To dissipate the circus spirit into thin air, to make a break from clowns and fun-makers, to set the mind of the twenty-five thousand in tune for the stately magic of the pageant which is the biggest show on earth, these men who have made a science of the entertainment of the human mind and heart have introduced a few minutes of darkness. The lights that flooded the circus rings die down. In the gloaming, music, unseen musicians, swell forth old familiar tunes. In silence, the words of the songs are flashed on screens. Rollicky tunes to remind you you are on a holiday night, unbending. Then kindlier tunes near to the heart. Then semi-sacred songs, and even hymns, to make you rejoice in the velvet starry sky and the beloved kindly land that is being celebrated this night in excitement and music and the moving of great throngs. Hymns, songs, that you yourself are wheedled into singing. Then –
Then the magic lights strike into the dark and you see a fair and stately city. Nigh four hundred musicians, massed under Colonel Mackenzie Rogan, the greatest bandmaster in the British Empire, specially brought out from England just to conduct these hundreds of instruments. And the biggest show on earth, the glorification of Canada and the empire of which she is a member, has begun before your eyes, prepared and damp with the emotion of song.
Director Never in Evidence
To jam on a great jamboree of color and noise is one thing. To do what Captain Cully Ross does is another. You will see whether he is a great showman or not.
At pageants elsewhere in the world, a gentleman in a nice smart suit, evening dress if you like, will be seen standing in the foreground, between you and the stage, and with a stick, or a megaphone, he directs the stiff figures marching and countermarching about the vast scene. He is the pageant master. At the biggest show on earth, you will see no stage direction. Cully Ross is there, all right. He is on the stage. Sometimes he is a Zulu or a soldier (he’s worn the uniform since he was a boy bugler in the Northwest Rebellion) or an admiral or a high priest. So are his three assistant directors, scattered at strategic points around the acres of stage. But you will not see him nor them. It is a drama you are watching. Nothing mars the illusion of light and shadow, color and stately graceful movement.
Eight giant Nubian slaves are carrying a high priest in a sedan chair to the centre of the vast stage. They deposit the burden too soon and the sharp voice of Cully Ross, disguised as an acolyte or something cuts in – “Pick him up, boys! Pick him up!”
One of the giant Nubian slaves turns and says in an injured voice – “That’s all very well, Mr. Ross, but you don’t have to carry this big bullock around!”
One beauty of the pageant is that the asides are not heard by the audience.
This year’s pageant is called the “Ties That Bind.” From the earliest Anglo Saxons to the triumphs of Vimy and Jutland, the story of the building empire is told.
How far in advance these pageants are planned nobody knows. Captain Ross is always busy with his next one before the one in hand is off. In addition to the conceiving and designing of the pageant, he happens also to have full charge of every item coming under the head of amusement and entertainment in the whole exhibition, Midway, bands, street minstrels, all. But early in the spring, the scene painters are at work in their big studio in Hamilton, working out the eight hundred foot set in sections, eight by sixteen feet, to be set up piece by piece on the great scaffolding at the Exhibition Grounds. Weeks before the show opens, the dancers, actors and supers to the number of a thousand are chosen and being drilled.
The costumes are authentic. Willie Clarkson, the famous London costumer who has the finest collection of fancy dress, has supplied many of the pageant costumes in past years, the rest coming from big houses in Philadelphia. There is nothing shoddy and haphazard in the dress of these thousand actors two weeks.
“How on earth do you manage to get a thousand costumes from abroad and fit them to your regiment of actors?”
“Regiment is good,” said Captain Ross. “Anybody who has had much to do with the militia knows the business of fitting a costume. You see, you make sure there are no mirrors around, to begin with. Then you put the costume on the wearer, take a good handful of the slack at the back, so drawing it tight across the front. Then you say – ‘Splendid fit! Splendid fit! Take it! There you are!’ If you speak fast, pat it on his shoulders, and don’t let go the hold on the slack until he has looked up, he is out and gone with it in a twinkling. Fitting costumes is one of the arts.”
Plans Made Months Ahead
The secret of a good show is attention to detail. By getting his plans away in mid-winter, Captain Ross is ready for the details. In this show he wanted pigeons around St. Paul’s. How to get those pigeons in sufficient numbers and how to get them to fly at night, against all the laws of nature, is one of the details he has had to work out. It matches a problem of two years ago, when the Cleopatra pageant was the feature, when Captain Ross had to find a camel in four days. He got it.
Some of his vast company of actors get stage fright. One year, the Queen Mary of the pageant came forth ardently chewing gum. Yet in another, the Prince of Wales was so real, officers standing near sprang to attention as he passed by. In the Cleopatra pageant, there was a water scene on which, the Queen’s barge floated in. A prominent railroad man called Captain Ross over to enquire how many million gallons of water were required for that scene. He was dumbfounded when told that the water was merely mechanical lights rippling on canvas and that the Queen’s barge, floating so softly in, was being yo-heaved by a gang of stage hands from behind.
A Texan interested in the show business on the large scale, asked Captain Ross about the bands that play in the dark at the Dufferin gate bandstand at half past ten when the crowds are going home.
“Looks like a waste of money, playing a band at that hour, after the show’s all over,” said the Texan.
“Music lifts tired feet,” replied Cully Ross.
He hates to send the people home tired. His pageant is short and swift. He greets them on; the way home with music, instead of the weary sound of a thick throng plodding off into the dark, with the sound of sleepy children crying and all the let-down of departure from big day. He plays them out to the street cars, always merry and bright.
For the same reason, he makes his final Saturday night the most tremendous of the whole two weeks, spends extra money on the works, closes the show up with a bang. Don’t let your show die away on you, is one of his maxims. Look after the ends and the middle will take care of itself. The tune is kept to highest pitch right to the last minute.
There is psychology in the show business. It is largely the business of creating an illusion. To fill the hearts of twenty-five thousand people who have been making the rounds of the fair seeing the handiwork of the dominion, with pride. of their native land is the job of that pageant, with its music and splendor and story. It is the biggest annual show on earth. And it is made in Canada.
More illustrations from a story by Merrill Denison.
By Gregory Clark, August 9, 1924.
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?”
“No,” replied Cleo.
But, of course, you remember your history.