Category: News Article Page 1 of 13

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.

By Gregory Clark, July 16, 1932.

The country has decided to stay home in the evenings.

All over the province, community dance halls are appearing. Not only in towns and large villages but just at wide places in the road.

I am not going to predict the dawn of a new age in country life. Highways are not going to be broken up. Motor trucks are not going to be prohibited. Mail order business is not going to be banned. The return of Merrie England and maypole dancing on the green is not immediately in prospect.

But something is certainly happening to Ontario rural life as the result of eggs at 5 cents a dozen and potatoes at 7 cents a bag.

Clareville¹, for example, is a tiny village located just where the country begins outside Toronto. It is not fifteen miles from the edge of the big city. But no adventurous suburban bungalows, the lonely heralds of the big city’s march, mar the purely country scene.

In the night, I stood under the elms with one of the principal farmers of the district, listening the strains of “Darling Nellie Gray” coming from the brightly lighted community hall of Clareville which is now in its first summer season.

“For years,” said this farmer, who prefers to be nameless, “our youngsters have been driving into the city for their evenings. Of course, we older ones have been driving into town for our shopping, so we can’t kick. Anyway, we didn’t know who they were mixing with. They got city manners, city airs and city discontent. We were kind of proud when they got city jobs.

“It was bad. The people they got in with aren’t as good as the people we have right around here. Those city jobs weren’t so good as these green fields, even if we can’t sell anything off them. But here is something good and enduring. That’s why I say that community hall and that music and those kids dancing in there, together are mighty good things.”

These are bad times for a small community to build a community hall. But Clareville didn’t do that. They just shifted an old one to a new position.

When concrete highways come to a village, they often turn the village back-end foremost. Away off the main drag, there stood an old abandoned hall built by the Sons of Temperance² or the Sons of Rest, or something, in the year 1860.

“We held three street dances,” said Mrs. E. J. Gamble, whose family run the general store, “last summer, and netted $300, which went a long way toward moving that old hall out to the highway. It has been all painted up, covered with that new roofing material, and a maple floor installed.”

Here and there, you can see old beams, withered and weathered, and on them carved initials of men who were boys in the sixties³. Over the stage in the new hall is a quaint old framed sampler that stood, 70 years ago, above the platform of the Sons of Temperance. It says, worked in colored wool, “Welcome to All.” And whether Merrie England and the maypole are returning to Clareville or not, at least Clareville has enough sentiment and humor to replace that old sampler right over the stage where sits an orchestra playing “Oop-boop-a-doop,” and where, in 1932, dance the young people of the townships who, until two years ago, turned their back on Clareville at twilight and fled eagerly toward that dull glow in the skies, Torontowards.

To get our story and photographs, we I went up only the one wandering country highway. At Bolton, we found, in this village of 700 souls, a fine new white dance hall, all windows and glistening floor, run by the Clark Brothers of the Bolton hotel. They call the dance hall Bolton Casino.

“Until we erected this hall two years ago,” said one of the brothers, “you could shoot a cannon up the main street of Bolton on a Saturday night. Now you have to go into second gear to get through at all, if you want to get through.”

Re-Opening the Village Hall

On Wednesday nights they have old-time dancing, with an orchestra from either Toronto or Brampton. On Wednesday nights the entrance is 20 cents for the whole evening. On Saturday nights, it is modern dancing, and admission is free, but dancing costs three for a quarter.

“For miles around,” said the brothers, “people come to town Saturday evening for their shopping and to sit in the hall and see the young people dance and listen to the music. The place is filled with children and old people all sitting and playing around, and 300 people is nothing to have in here. The town is crowded, busy and cheerful. We have city people, strangers, drive up and spend the evening with us. It looks as if the tables were turned: a few years ago we all drove to Toronto for the evening. Now Toronto is coming out to the country for the evening.”

As we drove out the highway, Tom Wilson, The Star Weekly photographer at the wheel, we passed literally of motor trucks loaded with cattle.

They were all stepping at a fast pace. Tom Wilson is a farmer on the side, and knows all about alfalfa and can tell a Durham cow when he sees it.

“What’s all this racing to Toronto with cattle?” I asked.

“You see,” says Tom, “either in last night’s paper or over the radio in the market reports, there was a report of a 15 cents a hundred rise in the price of cattle. So all these farmers are rushing to town at top speed to try and get that extra 15 cents a hundred. All they are doing, really, is to race at top speed to knock the price down, to glut the market, to take off not only that 15 cent increase but to kick the price fifty cents lower than it was yesterday.”

“That’s what highways are doing for the farmer?” says I.

“And trucks,” says Tom.

Coming home from the north that evening we passed the trucks homeward bound. A lot of them still had the cattle in them, and the drivers, the farmers, had a funny look on their faces.

“It’s the same with potatoes, eggs, everything,” said Tom.

“It’s the same with people,” added the proprietor of a curious little dance hall, sanctuary, poet’s corner and hide-away called the Log Cabin located on a lonely road amidst the cedar and balsam woods somewhere cast of Orangeville and somewhere north of Palgrave. “You can get here in an hour and you can get away from here just as fast. In the days when men had to walk, there were many lovely places in the world. Buggies came along, and the places got further apart. Nowadays, the places to stop are few and far between, because nobody stops any more.”

The village of Loretto is situated up on the edge of the sand hills where rises the Nottawasaga river going northward to the Georgian Bay. Few people pass that way because there are so many inviting turns to the east and west on the resolute road to Loretto. Back of the general store, which is of brick, with carved wooden fringes on all its gables, there is a stable, now no longer used, and above it a dance hall that has been reopened, all the old stuff stored in it carted away, and a new maple floor laid.

“The hall has been closed for years,” says the general merchant of Loretto. “Back before the days of motor cars it was busy with meetings of all kinds, dances, lectures. It has been locked and forgotten for twenty years. The last couple of years, we decided we had to have a hall again. And here it is. We don’t have dances every week, but at the rate things are going, we soon will have. Our orchestra are all local boys, from surrounding villages. So far, our local orchestras are made up of one boy from one village with a banjo and one from another village with a saxophone, and so on. But you can get real good orchestras now from some of the towns. It’s just like old times again.”

Barn Dances Come Back

Barn dances, which, in the tawdry twenties, almost passed out of fashion, have I come back with a great rush all over the older part of the province.

“As many as three a week,” says W. A. Irwin, justice of the peace and hotelkeeper of Palgrave. “Most of them are real old-fashioned barn raisings, since the farmers are going in for erecting their own barns with the help of the community, as in the earlier days. When barns were erected by barn companies instead of out of the bush lot, the dances died away. Now the farmers are putting up the barns in the old-fashioned way, to save money, and old-fashioned ways are coming back with them.

“But,” added the justice of the peace, “so successful is the barn-raising dances that there have been some cases of people giving follow-up dances, just for the fun of it. And along north of here, some farmers have actually staged barn dances and charged a small admission and made money out of it. It is unquestionable that something is going on in the country that has nothing to do with the cities and towns.”

The road we followed was not a tourist highway. No mention is being made here of the halls being built at all the summer resorts, at Wasaga Beach, at Thamesford, a few miles out of London, where a handsome new hall has gone up to attract city people out to the country. What is arresting is the fact that at places far off the beaten track, community life is reassembling itself after the scrambling effect of the past couple of decades. It costs so much in gas to drive to a more or less distant resort or town, so much for admission to the larger halls, that an evening for young people will run into two or three dollars a head. And two or three dollars is a lot of eggs or hog on the hoof.

Near Loretto we talked to a young man who had a team doing something to a washout on the road.

He had old overalls, a hay hat, a corn cob pipe and the homeliest looking boots on I ever saw. So perfect a specimen of the city man’s idea of a happy farmer was he that we stopped to talk with him. He wasn’t doing anything anyway; just standing behind his handsome bay team and looking at the morning.

He needed a shave and his face was red and healthy. His eyes were happy and gray.

“Boys,” he said, “you come to the right man. I had a job in the city until six months ago. A mechanic’s job. I was having a fine time, movies, dancing, working for somebody I never saw and thinking I was alive. Just the way you do, I lost my job. I broke my back trying to find another. And then all of a sudden, I saw how silly and cheap the city is, so you should have seen me beat it back here to the country I was born in!

“Listen: the girls are prettier in the country than they are in the city and they’ve got more brains. They’re not checking up on what you spend on them all the time. They know more about work. None of them is dreaming about being either a movie actress or the wife of a millionaire. They’re full of fun. A barn dance! Boys, what a gang, and none of this silly feeling of going around in circles in your good clothes with a girl you don’t respect. When you come into a barn dance you look around and say to yourself, boy, I guess your future wife is sitting in here. You can’t do that in the city! No, sir!

“And work! Every day you can do something to make money or to improve your property. It may be only a little thing and you can take your time about it and there is fun in it. But you know who you are doing it for. Number One.

“I’m tired of city people. Hens in a chicken run. That’s them. Any time I take a girl into town from now on is to show her what a silly bunch of punks they are in the city.”

With great joy he drew a package of tobacco out and filled his corn cob. It was a stage corn cob. This young, happy man was an actor. He was glorying in the feeling of being a farmer. He rubbed his big boots lovingly on the dirt road. He leaned his elbow against the horse, as much as to say, lookit, I got friends. He dropped into a sing-song country voice until he forgot and let the clipped city way of speech emerge.

And when we left him Tom Wilson, the farmer on the side, had a flushed look, and stared about at the fields and farm houses with a curious expression on his face.

“Funny,” said Tom, “but when you talk to these people out in the country you start right away thinking slow, talking slow, moving slow, and everything feels good inside of you.

“I wonder,” says he, “if we haven’t made a mistake?”

And when we passed through village and town in the evening and saw the young people and the old people talking of things we did not know and laughing at jokes we should never hear, we felt a little humble coming on to the straight stretch of concrete that leads down cold and swift into the city.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. They get the name right in the photo description, but wrong throughout the article. It is Claireville. ↩︎
2. The Sons of Temperance was a brotherhood of men who promoted the temperance movement.   ↩︎
3. The 1860s. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, July 5, 1924.

Ralph Connable’s Puckish Pranks at Expense of Well known Citizens, Afford No End of Fun – Delights in Exposing the Four Flush – A Master in the Art of Disguise

It was the rush hour in the shower bath room I of the Lambton Golf and Country Club.

In from their game, half a hundred members were splashing and toweling vigorously, standing in Grecian statuary groups about the locker room and the showers recounting the tales of the day’s sport, others hurrying their ablutions so as to join the ladies on the clubhouse verandah.

The door from the outer world quietly opened.

And in walked a lady!

A lady of vampish and rakish demeanor. A lady in a huge picture hat, a green blouse, a short sport skirt disclosing flaming red silk hose, her face painted and powdered.

And undismayed by the scene before her, the half hundred men in a state of nature, she advanced into the locker room and headed down the aisle of lockers for the shower room.

The members fled in every direction, shouting, exclaiming, hiding behind lockers, diving under tables.

The lady reached the shower room. Thunderation and pandemonium broke loose. The gents under the showers screamed and ducked and fled.

“I’m looking,” said the apparition, in a shrill voice, “for my gentleman friend.”

Then she turned, and started with the utmost plomb from the room.

Colonel Goodie Gibson, clad in a Turkish towel, strode up to the lady, and in an accusing voice, looking her in the eyes, exclaimed:

“I know you! I know those eyes-“

“Well, you certainly should, colonel,” retorted the lady in a loud voice, “We’ve been out together often enough.”

But the jig was up.

Before the lady could make her escape a band of scantily clad husky men had seized the frail form and were tearing at her garments, pawing at her hat, and generally treating her in a most unladylike and ungentlemanly fashion.

But when the hat came off a wig came with it, and there before, the shouting multitude was disclosed the close cropped white head of Ralph Connable, the most incorrigible, irrepressible, practical joker in the city of Toronto.

A Man of Many Activities

Ralph Connable is the head of the great Woolworth organization in Canada – which should be quite enough to squelch the spirit of the average man. In addition to handling the executive work of the greatest chain store system in the dominion, he finds time to be a front rank Rotarian, to devote many hours over a long period of years to promoting public golf courses in Toronto – being the founder and the mainspring of the present Humber Valley course, and to entertain lavishly in his fine home on the Hill.

And on top of all that he has the reputation of the greatest practical joker in the city, whose name is connected with some legend or other in the minds of every business man in the city.

Mr. Connable has no hesitation about dressing up. He has devoted a good deal of time to developing disguises for himself and others for the sport of playing jokes. He has had for several years a set of fake false teeth which all his friends know well. He had them made by a dentist to fit over his own teeth. They are crooked and of the variety known as “buck” teeth, and they render him utterly unrecognizable even by friends.

He also carries a set of disreputable old grey whiskers. By putting in the teeth and slapping on the chin whiskers, Ralph Connable can transform himself in an instant from the snappy big business executive into a pathetic and dowdy old man.

He was a guest at one of the Toronto golf clubs which aspires to be THE club, the elect and exclusive club of the city. It is one of the customs of this club for everyone to gather on the verandah overlooking the eighteenth green, to observe the play of the members. It is a sort of social ceremony to be sitting on that verandah.

Such little social holinesses as this are the meat Mr. Connable loves above all delicacies.

Coming over the hill to the eighteenth hole, when all the wit and beauty and wealth of this club was posed on the verandah, he inserted his teeth, donned his, whiskers, and, bending nearly double, he played the last hole looking like a doddering old man of ninety-eight. The verandah was scandalized at such a golf performance by so old a man, and was thrown into a heap when Mr. Connable removed the disguise and bowed to the gallery.

Last year in Montreal he was drawn to play in the golf tournament against a Mr. Gneddiger. a wealthy fur merchant of Montreal. They had a good game, but Mr. Connable was defeated by his partner. Mr. Gneddiger thanked Mr. Connable for a fine game, invited him to come and see him every time he was in Montreal, and so forth, and they parted. When taking the train at the clubhouse station half an hour later Mr. Connable, disguised with the teeth, stepped up and greeted Mr. Greddiger and asked him what kind of a game he’d had.

“Oh, not so bad,” growled Mr. Gneddiger, in the tone of one who had been bored for the last two hours.

“Who were you playing?”

“Oh, a fellow from Toronto – fellow named Connable!” said Mr. Gneddiger.

“Why,” exclaimed Mr. Connable, removing the disguise, “I thought you said we had a fine game!”

Without a word. Mr. Gneddiger walked down to the far end of the platform and was seen no more.

The Three Bearded Footmen

Mr. Connable used to chum around with Sir John Eaton and is a great friend of Lady Eaton. At the Eaton mansion, Mr. Connable was always impressed by the retinue of butlers, footmen and servants that waited on table.

On one occasion he had Lady Eaton and another lady who was a guest of Lady Eaton’s to his home for dinner.

When the guests were all seated for dinner no servants appeared. The party waited for several moments, and nothing happened.

In some embarrassment, Mr. Connable begged to be excused, and went from the dining room.

In an instant, in came a servant in full evening dress, with a huge black beard down to his waist, followed by the maids, and bearing on a tray the first course, which was handed about by the maids.

The impressive looking footman left the dining room and then Mr. Connable appeared, all beaming, and rejoined his guests at table.

The next course was again delayed. No servants appeared. Expressing apologies once more, Mr. Connable again left the table to see what was wrong, and hardly had he left the room before in walked a more imposing footman than the last, a man with a huge bushy red beard and fierce red hair, bearing the second course. As soon as he retired from the room Mr. Connable promptly appeared and took his place at table.

By this time the guests as well as Mr. Connable’s family were in something of a state.

When the third course failed to appear, and Mr. Connable left the room, and a waiter with a huge beard a bright bluish tint entered, Lady Eaton could no longer retain her mirth and she burst out laughing.

The blue bearded footman, with an angry gesture, snatched off the beard, disclosing Mr. Connable as the functionary himself.

“There you go!” cried Mr. Connable. “Spoiling everything! I go to your house and a whole t army of servants comes marching in. Then you come to my house and I try to put up a little impression and you go and give it all away…!”

 But before the evening was out, the strangers present were thoroughly acquainted with their host.

At the Montreal tournament mentioned above, Mr. Connable, with his whiskers on, and collar turned up, asked A. E. Ames if he could carry his bag. Mr. Ames refused.

“I’m an old man and I have to make my living,” whined Mr. Connable.

“But there’s no need to carry it,” said Mr. Ames, distressed. “Where would you carry it?”

“You darned old tightwad,” said Mr. Connable.

And when Mr. Ames turned indignantly, it was Ralph Connable that was facing him.

Cold Shouldered at Church

Mr. Connable set out, a couple of years ago, to visit the various churches of the city dressed as a poor man, to see what reception he would have, and he intended to give the results to the newspapers. But he was so successful, both ways, that he made up his mind not to go any further with it, as the papers would not print the names of the churches where he received the cold shoulder.

Two churches – big north end churches – gave Mr. Connable an unmistakable snub. Three smaller churches took him to their bosoms.

In old clothes, looking as decrepit as possible, he visited a certain uptown church, was shudderingly showed into a back seat by an outraged usher, and when after the ceremony Mr. Connable tried to enter into the fellowship of the little fraternization which takes place in the aisles and vestibule, was snubbed flatly by managers and members alike.

A week later, in his silk hat and frock coat, Mr. Connable was greeted effusively by the same usher, was conducted to a front seat and was welcomed warmly by managers and members after the service.

“That’s one church,” says he, to his acquaintances, “I didn’t go to again.”

In three small churches he was welcomed, accepted, given treatment in his old clothes that could not have been exceeded for politeness and cordiality if he had had on his topper and cutaway.

He takes a puckish delight in disclosing the four flush.¹

He had a neighbor, the story goes, that bragged of his charity. Not a churchgoer, but a charitable man. In a Salvation Army hat that had been given him to help in a Salvation Army drive, Mr. Connable called to see this neighbor, and was refused any assistance. He then disclosed himself as Ralph Connable. The same neighbor had a visit from him dressed as a tramp, who came to the back door and begged a meal. He was driven off with a threat of the police. Again he disclosed himself as the neighbor.

Keeper of the Hounds

 At one of Sir John Eaton’s dinner parties, Ralph Connable protested to Sir John that all these common fellows went in to dinner ahead of him, and what he craved was some distinction, some badge of rank that would entitle him to enter immediately behind Sir John.

So Sir John dubbed him Keeper of the Hounds, though Sir John didn’t have a hound to his name, and this entitled the wearer of the title to precede all the common herd to the dinner table.

As a lark, Mr. Connable had cards engraved “Ralph Connable, Keeper of the Hounds to Sir John Eaton.”

Once crossing the border at Detroit, he got into a slight difficulty with the customs officers, and happening to have one of these cards amongst his others, he tendered it to the officers who exclaimed, on seeing the title:

“Is that so!”. Waved his hand, ignored the trouble, and spent a pleasant few minutes listening to Mr. Connable telling about the vast pack of huge hounds Sir John kept, hundreds of hounds, thousands of hounds.

One of his staff in the Woolworth organization is a teetotaler. He was making a trip to the States, and was sitting talking with a group of men in the chair car when the inspector, coming along and opening his bag, disclosing to all eyes a large empty quart whiskey bottle right on top of the contents of the bag.

There was no need to query who had done the trick.

A Caller for Mr. Mathews

Mr. R. C. Mathews of Toronto is a gentleman of dignity. He was seated in the chair car of the New York train just before it pulled out of the Union Station, the car was filled with Toronto people, everyone alert for the beginning of the journey, when in rushed Mr. Connable bearing a huge bandbox, and exclaiming loudly:

“Oh, Mr. Mathews, Mr. Mathews!”

He rushed up and laid the box down beside Mr. Mathews’ chair where all could see and began rummaging in it.

“I had a terrible time,” cried Mr. Connable. “I hunted all over the city. I’ve been in every store on Yonge street, but I got it. I got it!”

And he produced from the box triumphantly a large celluloid collar.

Ignoring Mr. Mathews’ bewildered protests he held up the collar admiringly.

“All you have to do is give it a lick and a wipe on your sleeve and it’s as good as new.”

The train started, and Mr. Connable, protesting that it was no trouble, no trouble at all, fled from the car.

Mr. J. Macdonald, head of the big dry-goods of house of that name, is a fancier of fancy vests. He has a collection of them of which he is very proud, made of strange and beautiful materials, and Mr. Macdonald wears them in public without a qualm.

One day Ralph Connable landed into the club wearing the most eye-puncturing vest conceivable, a vest of dark velvet, brocaded, and embroidered with silk flowers and patterns in scarlet, green, blue and gold. It was a beautiful vest, a gorgeous vest, and with his coat thrown open, proudly, he stalked through the club, and bowed most ostentatiously to Mr. John Macdonald.

Not only did the vest outrival anything Mr. Macdonald had ever appeared in, but this magnificent waistcoat was of velvet all around, and was embroidered at the back as well as in the front, to prove which Mr. Connable, in the dignified precincts of the club, removed his coat and paraded about the rooms, and taking particular pains to pass Mr. Macdonald.

Censured the Road Hog

Mr. Connable is an ardent motorist and drives a huge Pierce-Arrow very skillfully. Motoring out to golf one day, he got behind a Ford that did not make way when he tooted his siren, but merely put on speed and held to the centre of the road. Mr. Connable horned again and again, but the Ford refused to give way.

So he laid one wheel off the pavement and got past by a swift maneuver, then he turned his huge car across the highway, blocking the Ford’s way, and stepped out.

Drawing a pair of handcuffs from his pocket, he advanced to meet the Ford.

“Why didn’t you make way?” he demanded.

“Well, I was going at the legal speed. I don’t have to make way if I go at the lawful speed,” answered the other, eyeing the handcuffs with some alarm.

“I’ve a good mind,” said Mr. Connable, jangling the handcuffs thoughtfully, “to place you under arrest.”

He made no claims to being a magistrate or a policeman. He let the handcuffs do the talking.

“It is motorists like you who create all the trouble on the highways,” went on Mr. Connable. “You ought to know that the law is that when another motorist signals to go by, you must let him pass. You look like a decent sort of fellow, so I will let it pass. But if I ever hear of this again it will go hard with you.”

Pocketing the handcuffs, he got into the car and drove sadly on.

This Time Joke was on Him

 He was summoned for speeding near Oakville. When he appeared before the court he was asked if he had anything to say.

“Indeed I have!” exclaimed Mr. Connable. “Judge, were you ever attacked by a swarm of bees?”

“Bees!” said the court.

“Yes, sir, great big bumble bees, hundreds of them, swarms of them. Here I was quietly driving along the highway when suddenly a swarm of bees attacked me, and I put on speed, and they pursued me, and the faster I went the faster they followed, and I HAD to step on it, judge, to get away…”

The judge studied the defendant intently.

“Did you get stung?” asked the judge at last.

“No,” admitted Mr. Connable.

“Well, then, you will be now: Twelve dollars and seventy-five cents please,” announced his worship.

Another time, Mr. Connable was summoned for speeding out Whitby way. To this court he said, in extenuation of his offense:

“Yes, Judge, I was speeding.

“But only last week the Ontario Motor League, of which I am a member, sent around letters, asking us to send in the numbers of motorists we saw speeding or driving recklessly, so that the league could help put an end to that great public menace.

“Well, sir, judge, if a fellow didn’t go whizzing past me on your highway out there, at a fearful rate, so, remembering my duty to the Motor League, I pursued him in order to get his number. And that was, when your policeman took my number.”

“Did you get the other man’s number?” asked the judge.

“No, on account of the dust, I didn’t.”

“Well, you look like an honest fellow,” said the judge. “Case dismissed.”

But the fun and frolic in the make-up of Mr. Connable are simply the surplus flow from his heart of the milk of human kindness which makes him one of the city’s greatest philanthropists, whose name is on every worthy subscription. If not on the list of the committee, who feels no compunction about assisting personally in drives and campaigns, who takes the most practical personal interest in his hundreds of employees, and who has been put, as every golfer in this city knows, to no small expense of money and time in the effort he has been making for the past ten years to secure for Toronto free public, golf courses.

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Editor’s Notes:

1. Four flush is an old-fashioned word meaning a bluffer. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, March 1, 1952.

To offset the rigors of civic life, Ontario’s Premier Frost¹ holds sessions of his Kitchen Cabinet in a country cabin

An Old Ontario Expression

Premier and Mrs. Frost were in Port Arthur and Fort William not long ago in connection with a civic function. At the reception, a little old lady came up and, after a few minutes conversation, said to Gertrude Frost:

“Everybody told me how plain you were. I’m so happy to find it is true.”

Mrs. Frost patted her hairdo, and, at the first opportunity, looked at herself in her compact. For down around Lindsay, “plain” means only one thing. It means “homely.”

A few minutes later, the little old lady’s husband presented himself to Mrs. Frost.

“When my wife told me how plain you are,” he confided to the prime minister’s wife, “I knew you wouldn’t mind me coming up and speaking to you.”

It then dawned on Mrs. Frost, who is a highly personable woman, that in the Port Arthur and Fort William idiom, “plain” means “unaffected.”

With a large wicker market basket on his arm, the Prime Minister of Ontario² reaches into his pocket for his keys.

The contents of the basket are discreetly hidden under a green cloth.

The prime minister is a big, strongly-built, long-legged man who walks with a barely perceptible limp. He is wearing old hunting clothes – canvas pants, a hip-length quilted hunting jacket, red-lined cap and lumberman’s rubbers. All nicely worn.

He finds the keys and selects one. With it, he opens the back door of the log cabin, set deep in the snow. It is not one of these fancy imitation log cabins; its timbers are more than a century old and they are chinked roughly, in the old fashion.

Inside, it is icy cold. But the prime minister lets out a hearty yell, and the two or three men coming through the snow behind him echo the cheer.

They are what is called his Kitchen Cabinet. They stamp into the room.

The log cabin consists of three rooms. In the far-end one are two double beds, with homemade quilts on them. This middle room we are in has three rocking chairs in it, a bench, a couple of less noble chairs and a Quebec heater³, which the prime minister immediately attacks, with kindling in his hand.

The other end room of cabin is the kitchen, small because of the largeness of the cook stove.

The No. 1 man of the prime minister’s Kitchen Cabinet the Minister, let us say, of Cuisine – is Col. George Weeks, manager of the Victoria and Grey Trust Co., of Lindsay, Ont., a 30-year chum of the prime minister. The others in the party might be Jack Deyell, who owns a printing business in Lindsay, or Judge McGibbon, or Ernie Fee, of Fee Motors, Ltd., Lindsay. They dump down their parcels and haversacks. The minister of cuisine takes the prime minister’s wicker basket off the table and carts it into the kitchen, along with his own packages. He whips off the green cloth.

Four steaks, maybe, or a large hunk of peameal bacon: chops maybe, thick; loaves of bread, pickles, potatoes, onions.

“Wow!” says the prime minister, looking in from the middle room, where the fire is now hustling.

“Aaaah!” says the minister of cuisine, unwrapping his own contribution to the kitchen table, which may be more steaks, or a hoarded roast of venison. And he attacks the big stove with kindling.

The weekly meeting of the Kitchen Cabinet is now in session. To this log cabin, with one or two or three of his oldest friends. Leslie Frost, landslide prime minister of Canada’s richest and most industrialized province, comes every weekend from the capital city of Toronto, where he has no home but only a hotel room.

You might suppose this log cabin is away in the wilderness. It is only 10 miles from Lindsay, which is the Frost home, and Lindsay is 78 miles from Toronto. Not merely is it only 10 miles from Lindsay, it is only 100 yards from the Frost summer cottage on Pleasant Point, Sturgeon Lake. Some miles away in the Haliburton backwoods, Leslie Frost found an old pioneer log house, built of broad-axed square timbers. He had the timbers brought down to the open field behind his summer home, and the cabin was erected. It is his hideaway. And unless the business before the Ontario Legislature is really desperate, every weekend of the year, session or no session, and no matter how cold the winter, Leslie Frost, in his fishing clothes or his hunting clothes, in season, beats it away from the great world in which, almost unwillingly but certainly without any great intention, he finds himself enormously involved.

Not every weekend does he take his friends. Often it is his wife, Gertrude, who goes with him to the sanctuary of the log cabin. Whatever it is that Frost has got which so attracted the Old Man Ontario spirit of the Ontario voters last November that they returned his government to power with the overwhelming majority of 81 seats out of the 92, it is here in the quiet that he keeps it alive and unimpaired.

And it was here, in one of the three big rocking chairs of the middle room, that I talked to him, sitting in his mother’s old rocker, in an attempt to get a sort of profile of this small-town lawyer who guides, if he does not indeed control, the destiny of an enormously wealthy and tremendously expanding industrial province.

In the first place. he is not a small-town lawyer. That is one of those handy newspaper phrases that are entirely misleading. More misleading though enthusiastic descriptions have been uttered of Leslie Frost than of most contemporary public men. They say he is a great, good-natured, easy-going character. But he can get as mad as a hornet. And no less easy-going man ever chased an elusive phrase through 40 pounds of legal volumes. He is an insatiably curious and tireless man.

As for being a small-town lawyer, he and his brother, the late Cecil Frost, KC, who was his partner in Lindsay ever since they graduated together from Osgoode Hall in 1921, were two of the best-known lawyers in Canada – in courts of all degrees, in city and town – and built up a law practice and an insurance business that was so lucrative that everybody in politics knows it was a great personal sacrifice for him to enter politics at all

Sitting there in his old hunting clothes in the big rocking chair, he nonetheless conveys the impression of all these very misapprehensions: he does seem like a big, easy-going, kindly country lawyer. He resembles physically and very remarkably the English actor, Michael Redgrave, whom I met last summer.

His speech is quiet and filled with plain English. It is full of such phrases as “You’re right!” and “That’s a fact!” or “Now, let’s see!”

He is no orator, no spellbinder, either on the platform, in the courtroom or in a log cabin. He has a habit of pausing abruptly in the midst of an easy and casual flow of words. He reflects. Like a hunter following a track, you see him scanning the ground. Then he proceeds with what he has to say.

And after a little while with Leslie Frost, the characteristic that you have been puzzling to find becomes suddenly clear.

He may be a lawyer, he may be a businessman, he may be a politician – but what he is, above everything, is a wise counsellor. It was in that character that he built up, with his brother, a prosperous legal practice in Lindsay. It was with that characteristic that he made himself countless personal friends in Lindsay and throughout the counties of Victoria and Haliburton, in all the little villages and hamlets with such endearing names as Manilla, Little Britain, Fingerboard, Coboconk, Omemee, Buckhorn, Janetville, Norland, Elsie.

He was 39 years old, and with no thought of public life in mind, when his reputation as a wise counsellor and the wide local popularity it had inspired, shoved him into an election in 1934. That was in the whoop and hurrah of the Hepburn era. Frost was beaten. But in 1939, he was elected. From his first entry into public life, he was earmarked for office. Though in the Opposition in 1939, he was delegated by George Drew, the Conservative leader, to be financial critic of the government. And when, in 1942, Drew formed a government, Leslie Frost was appointed provincial treasurer and minister of mines.

That was in the midst of war. But it was also, in some sense, the real beginning of that enormous industrial expansion of Ontario, caused by war production, which has not slackened since. And to get this man, rocking in a chair in a log cabin, into full focus, the simplest thing to do is to state in plain figures the rather staggering statistics of the money he as provincial treasurer, has had to find, account for, provide and spend in the 10 years he has been provincial treasurer, and the three years he has been prime minister.

This is what has happened in Ontario, in its expansion as an industrial province, since he took over the account books:

In the last year of the Hepburn regime, the budget showed Ontario’s expenditures for 1942 were $96,337,015.

Frost’s budgets show the subsequent provincial expenditures to have risen from $92,000,000, when he took over, to $250,000,000 last year! This year’s budget, to come down soon, will be bigger still.

How does all this spending jibe with the figure of that good gray character, Old Man Ontario? Since 2,000,000 of Ontario’s 4,500,000 people live on the land, and since a great many of the other 2,500,000 who live in communities are village and small-town people, how does it come about that the man who handles the spending of all that money was returned to power in a political landslide? Don’t the little people worry about money any more?

Well, in the nine years of Frost budgets, there never was one cent of deficit. Each year there was a surplus, ranging anywhere from $1,000,000 to $25,000,000.

And here, in a rocking chair in his old hunting coat, with the Quebec heater humming, sits the man who has to say “Yes” and “No.”

I had the budget statistics in my notebook as we talked. And I told him I was trying to rationalize them in terms of a small-town lawyer. Frost smiled and shoved his hunting cap back on his head, as though the room were getting warmer now.

“Well,” he said, “there were quite a few people elected besides me last November.”

Which is true. He has a fine company of men in his cabinet; and, because of his characteristic habit of consulting high, wide and handsome, has many a good adviser among the rank and file of the membership of the House. He sits in his cabinet as the chairman. And if he is a wise counsellor by nature, habit and training back in Lindsay. Little Britain, Omemee. Buckhorn and Fingerboard, it is not much of a move to become a wise councillor at the big table in Queen’s Park.

Besides which, of course, he has his Kitchen Cabinet. Every weekend.

“In 30 years,” says Col. George Weeks, who is the cook at the log cabin and a very gifted cook against whom even Mrs. Frost is not keen to compete – “in 30 years, there has never been a political gathering of any kind at that summer cottage or that log cabin. Now, mind you, I don’t say we don’t talk politics. But there has never been a gathering of politicians.”

In fact, it goes farther than that. With very few exceptions, Leslie Frost has never invited any of his political colleagues down to Pleasant Point. It is strictly a retreat, a hideaway from the big world. And on the couple of occasions on which big shots in the business or political world were so ill-advised as to come down uninvited and unheralded to the log cabin, just to “drop in” on Leslie Frost, they got what might be called a frosty reception. His cronies say that the premier never gets mad about big things but always about little things like that.

Two years ago. Premier Frost’s large, amiable imperturbability was broached by one of the more gadfly members of the Opposition in the Legislature, and he lost his temper in the sudden, spectacular fashion common to the imperturbable. The account of it made the headlines, of course. And a couple of days later, he got a personal note from the late Mackenzie King, perhaps one of the last such letters the old statesman wrote, in which he cautioned Frost against allowing anything to shake his temper, and to be sure to take plenty of relaxation away from the pressure of office. Premier Frost treasures that letter among his most precious possessions.

“As a matter of fact,” he admitted, in the old log cabin, “I have to confess I try to model my own political life on that of Sir John A. MacDonald and Mackenzie King. I have read all their speeches, studied their lives, to try to convert, into terms I can understand, their political attitudes to what is good for Canada and good for us all.”

Leslie Frost is 56 years old. He was born in Orillia, Ont. He and his brother, Cecil, who was a year and 10 months younger, went to World War I as lieutenants and came home captains, both badly wounded – Leslie with a severe hip injury that hospitalized him for 17 months. He and Cecil, most devoted brothers, went to Osgoode Hall, in Toronto to study law, and then bought a practice in Lindsay, a town not far from Orillia, in which they were on familiar ground.

They married sisters, the daughters of John Carew, MLA, of Lindsay. The Frost boys being the sons of “Daylight Bill” Frost, of Orillia, who held nearly all the elective offices in that municipality, there was consequently a fairly lively awareness of politics in the whole Frost-Carew family setup. Cecil became mayor of Lindsay and president of the Ontario Conservative Association. But Leslie was approaching middle age before he even thought of entering public life.

Leslie and Gertrude Frost, therefore, have no great pretensions about public life or politics. They have no children. They have never set up a home in Toronto, despite Frost’s 10 years of service as a cabinet minister and prime minister. They have a beautiful red brick house in Lindsay, a cottage down on Pleasant Point located exactly on the site of a former small settler’s cabin which, in 1921, the two young captains home from the wars rented and lived in, six months of the year, commuting each day by steamboat up to Lindsay, until they got their law and insurance business perking.

And they also have this log cabin in which the so-called small-town lawyer, who only gets mad at little things, can, each weekend, take wise counsel with himself, his wife and his old, old friends, so that, on Mondays, he can go back happy to his office as chief administrator of a $250,000,000-a-year enterprise – a province bounding ahead into an industrial destiny that beggars the dreams of only 10 years ago.

About the only thing Premier Frost didn’t like about last November’s election was that he missed the deer hunt.

“What kind of a deer hunter is he?” I asked one of his cronies.

“Awfff!” snorted his friend. “About the same as he is a fisherman.”

“And what’s that?” I asked.

“Instead of sitting still and fishing,” explained his chum, disgustedly, “he keeps saying, ‘Well, I think I’ll just row around that next point and see what’s beyond there…’ The man is desperately curious. Hunting, he’s always got to see over the next hill. I never saw such curiosity. Of course, he gets his deer, too.”

“And fish?” I queried.

“Oh sure,” admitted the friend. “That is, unless he comes across some old ruined log shanty, or hears of an Indian burial ground or something. The guy is a historian gone wrong.

There isn’t an old homestead, a pioneer family, a long-abandoned lumber camp or sawmill within miles and miles of Lindsay that Les Frost doesn’t know all about. He can give you the vital statistics, names, dates and every last pernicketty particular…”

I might conclude this sketch of Premier Frost with the remark that while I called uninvited at the log cabin on Pleasant Point, he did not get mad, but, on the other hand, offered me a lift back to Toronto in his car. He drove me right to my home, away across the other side of town, and then, at my invitation, came in and shook hands with my wife and daughter, just to show them what a big guy I am to have prime ministers trotting me around.

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Editor’s Notes: This article appeared in Weekend Picture Magazine.

1. Leslie Frost was Premier of Ontario from 1949 to 1961. He became Premier when we was elected leader of the Conservatives on May 4, 1949 after George Drew resigned to run for federal office. His first election as Premier occurred on November 22, 1951, a few months before this article. ↩︎
2. The term “Prime Minister of Ontario” remained in colloquial use until the government of Bill Davis formally adopted the usage of the term Premier in 1971. ↩︎
3. A Quebec heater historically refers to a type of tall, cylindrical, cast-iron wood or coal-burning stove used for heating homes and cabins.
   ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, February 27, 1915.

One-Fifth of Enrolment Will Possibly Enlist in Canadian Expeditionary Forces.

Sturdy Patriotism of President Falconer Largely Responsible for Splendid Showing.

Not more than three months ago a good many men were looking slant-eyed at the University of Toronto, sniffing and snouting excitedly, and demanding the instant pulverization, of three very inoffensive professors who were so unfortunate as to be of German blood. Some members of the University’s own governing board publicly denounced the gentle and humane way in which the three professors were side-tracked, and demanded that the president accord them the very treatment the abhorred Germans would have doled out had the incident been in a German town. The result of that whole affair left a very unpleasant regard for the University in a section of the public mind. Varsity was quietly labeled as a secret hotbed of sedition, whose staff was in sympathy with Germany.

Let those who have been so loud in condemnation of the president and his “half measures” turn an eye on Varsity to-day. So far, one hundred and eighty-six students who have already enlisted have been granted their year – that is, marked as having passed the examinations they would have been trying this coming April. Eighty-six of these are with the first contingent and are now somewhere in the fighting zone. One thousand eight hundred students are enrolled in the Varsity Officers’ Training Corps and are drilling and attending military lectures. Each day sees another batch of men applying at the registrar’s office for permission to go to the front. With the closing of the term in April and with the opening of a training camp outside the city exclusively for Varsity men, the number of students actually going to the front will be, according to the word of a man intimately identified with the military movement at Varsity, not two hundred, as it now is, but six hundred, which is one-fifth of the male attendance at Varsity.

A Patriotic Centre

For the fact is, despite the snuffings and snoutings aforesaid, which were mostly on the part of those who fancied they could discredit certain members of the governing board of Varsity for political reasons, the University is one of the most practically patriotic centres in Canada. There is a daily practice of patriotism in drills and in attendance on dry technical lectures on military topics. What other body of men – banks, factories, shops, foundries -would so unanimously devote its leisure to drilling? And the drilling has not ceased with the novelty of it.

The handling of the military movement at Varsity is a delicate job. In a body of young men in which there is fraternity, rivalry, and ambition, it is no easy matter for one man to see another don a uniform and depart amid applause. The wonder is, indeed, that when one Varsity man went, the whole establishment didn’t go! There are, therefore, many sensitive young men at Varsity to-day. How to make it easy for the students to go and yet not force them into going, how to maintain the proper display of patriotism without making several thousand sensitive young fellows feel that they are committed, is the big problem at Varsity, the man who is handling it, and handling it successfully, is President Falconer.

Difficulties Increased

The difficulties facing President Falconer were tremendously increased by the German professors affair. War-time and an uncertain public temper: a deficit of $80,000, to be paid by a publicly controlled Government: and three Germans to be disposed of with the assistance of a warring board of governors! Of course, we now admit that the president took the only course in keeping with British fair play. But starting with such a muddle, the whole situation at ‘Varsity has been easy matter to handle, and to have got 200 away already and the whole institution maintaining a natural pitch of patriotic spirit, is the neatly diplomatic and tactfully developed situation to the credit of President Falconer.

It is planned to open a training camp exclusively for Varsity men after the close of the year, in May. It will be somewhere outside the city, possibly at Long Branch or Niagara. It will be conducted by the Officers’ Training Corps under Col. Lang. As many as want to go to the front can then go, and, considering the need in the Imperial army of men not only trained as officers, but as engineers, surveyors, linguists. doctors, and all branches of education ‘Varsity will no doubt see her opportunity.

The Faculty of Medicine has done most in recruiting. The Medical College, by no means the largest college. has sent over 60 students and members of the teaching staff. Arts have not done so well, considering their numbers. But the Arts enlistments will no doubt be swelled by Victoria College, which has taken the greatest interest in the military movement. The opening of the training camp will without doubt see 600 recruits from ‘Varsity.

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.

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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.

1. It’s harder to guess who some of these early celebrities are, especially if he only gives single names, and does not mention the time period they were famous, since these ones might have been in the recent (for him) past. ↩︎
2. Another mystery, I don’t know what this is. ↩︎

Things Have Greatly Improved of Late, But There Is Still Considerable Confusion as to Authority, and Our Heroes and Their Families Suffer – Suggestions as to Remedying Conditions.

By Gregory Clark, December 18, 1915.

Toronto, the city that Ottawa called “the place that put the kick in kick,” has already begun to speculate as to how long the present organization for the care of returned soldiers can last. That it fails utterly to recognize the tremendous proportions and the hidden dangers of the problem is evident from the fact that no permanent and far-reaching plans are being laid, even though the problem is already posed in no small figures. That the present organization is shifting of responsibility from one place to another until no responsibility remains is pitifully plain.

It is six months since the first of our heroes began return to us. Three of those six months were passed in what might be called indifference to the problem. Originally the returning men were landed at Halifax, lodged in a jail, given a typewritten sheet of flimsy paper that purported to be a discharge, and were so launched over the Dominion home. After a few weeks the Discharge Depot at Quebec began to deal exclusively with the men. It was hopelessly undermanned. What short-sighted, foolish, and ineffectual means were taken by the Discharge Depot to cope with the problem are well-known now that the tragedy, oft-repeated, of sick men being discharged and left to court death with their own devices.

The last three months have seen the awakening. These tales of woe, of consumptives discharged, of money promised but never coming, have been written up fully in the press, despite very plausible charges that the press was attempting to hamstring the Government.

Now, after six months of battle with the problem the soldier who returns has a much better and more considerate reception than his comrades who preceded him. When he lands at Halifax, instead of being lodged in Melville Prison or on the docks, he is taken by train to Quebec in the best of coaches, and three square meals. At Quebec a sufficiently increased staff of doctors meet him. If, like 75 per cent. of returned soldiers, he is in need of medical care, he is sent forward to a central convalescent home. In the past he would have been lodged in none too clean immigration sheds, taken before a medical board, given his discharge, and a sum of money, and tuned adrift. Now he travels with a party to the convalescent home. He is enrolled on the books, and allowed to go home for a few days. His money is forwarded to the divisional officers. Thus far all is ship-shape. He is the charge of a well-conducted system. He cannot, even if he will, go out and kill himself by superinducing pneumonia or tuberculosis.

Discharge Depot Regulations

These matters are very clearly dealt with in the regulations of the Discharge Depot at Ottawa, which are here given for the first time:

Class No. 1: Men who are cured and ready for discharge are given discharge with pay and arrears, also fifteen days advance pay, so as to enable them to procure a situation in civil life, and, if deemed necessary, one pair of boots and their choice of a civilian suit of clothes and overcoat or the regulation allowance of $13.00 for purchase of same.

“Class No. 2: Men suffering from complaints which will probably respond under treatment or who require time and rest to be restored to normal health; men in this class are privileged to go to a Military Hospital or Convalescent Home, or if the case appears to be one which could be so disposed of, will be permitted to return to their homes and families until formally discharged. They are entitled to pay and arrears to date and advance pay for one month; boots, if required, and their choice of either civilian clothes or an allowance of $13.00 for same, and are not given a Discharge Certificate, but instead, a descriptive certificate stating that the holder is in Class No. 2, and entitled to the privileges provided for in such class.

“Class No. 3: Men permanently disabled in such a way as to be not likely to be needing other treatment, such disability having been caused by military service. Men in this class are riven a Certificate with a description of the individual and stating that he is in Class No. 3. He is given pay and arrears to date, with advance pay for one month; pair of boots, if necessary, and is choice of civilian clothes or an allowance of $13.00 for same. In the case of the above class an advance in cash, not to exceed $20, will be paid to every man, and immediately upon departure of the men from Quebec, a cheque for a sum not exceeding $100.00 will be forwarded to the A.A.G.¹ of the Division to which the man belongs issuable to him on reaching home, after his case has been dealt with by the Division authorities. Each man’s address and last pay certificate will be immediately forwarded from the Discharge Depot at Quebec to Ottawa, where a special branch has teen formed to handle all future, payments.”

Things are Better Now

The scores who returned before this new order of things have a terrible tale of suffering and neglect to tell. It is a joyful thing to be able to say that at last after months of neglect, these splendid fellows are being looked out for. Numbers of them have been taken into the military hospitals. The others, who are not so badly off in health, have received the back pay that has been so outrageously neglected.

But this is only the medical side that is so excellent. May it improve! May it continue the good work! And no doubt it will under the guidance of Lieut.-Col. Marlow, the A.D.M.S., whose ideas have been largely followed out in the recent reorganization of the system. It is proposed to institute a series of branch convalescent homes all over the Province. And a further improvement is that the Discharge Depot is to move over to Liverpool, and all the clerical work will be done on board ship, so that the returned men will have no heel-kicking to do around to do around Quebec.

The fault, however, lies in the fact that there is no central head, no single office or officer responsible for this great work that will be with us for a generation. The Military Hospitals Commission was appointed by the Government to deal with the problem generally. Then sub-commissions requested in the Province, and the Soldiers’ Aid Commission was appointed to deal with the problem generally. Then the municipalities were requested to do a little something, and the Mayor of this city appointed a Soldiers’ Welcome Committee, and a military secretary, who opened a special office in the City Hall where returned soldiers are directed.

A Confusion of Authorities

Thus, the Military Hospitals Commission wrote the returned soldiers for full particulars. The Soldiers’ Aid Commission wrote likewise and enclosed a blank form of questions to the number of dozens to be filled in. The city wrote to returned soldiers asking them to enrol on a list in the City Clerk’s office. Military Hospitals Commission has a local office.

From the Military Hospitals Commission, from just plain Militia Department, from the Pensions and Claims Board, and from the Paymaster-General, the returned soldier receives equally authoritative letters. When it comes to his writing, he has not the faintest idea to which he should refer. He is confused by the multiplicity of departments, the variety of authorities. It is an almost unheard of thing for a man to receive an answer to a letter within a week. And I have seen answers coming a month after the original letter was sent.

Such confusion must surely go. The duty of attacking and solving the problem is certainly the duty of the State. And the only solution can be in the formation of a distinct department, or at least a very distinct branch of the Militia Department, with powers over the pay, pensions, and medical departments. The longer we dawdle along under the present system and larger the problem becomes, the harder will it be to break away from it in time to avoid the great dangers and the grave injustices and cruelties that are in it.

No scattered commissions, not knowing what the other is doing, but a single, clearly defined department. permanent and fully manned, with its officers, in every city and town. The Pensions Board cannot deal with the problem. For it is vastly greater than mere pensioning. It is the reinstatement into civil life of those whom the State has removed from civil life. It is the fathering of those forever helpless in the nation’s name. It is the work of re-making as many as possible into contributors again to the nation’s life.

Permanent Jobs Wanted

The present system is so vain. The human element has gone out of it. Money is being sent, very late. Jobs are being got by the Provincial organization, the Soldiers’ Aid Commission. But what is a temporary job? The men must be re-made fit to go into a job permanently. Christmas mails are not forever. But remade muscles, remade lungs, built by a period of rest with a liberal allowance, and then a job that to the best of the commission’s and the soldier’s belief is a permanent job – these are different matters. The State must remake the man and then find him one job. If the commissions flutter about, getting job after job or giving money in place of lacking jobs to men, all will end in disillusionment, disgust, confusion.

Samples of the confusion arising out of too many authorities are not scarce. One man who was given subsistence for three. months was neglected for one month, left on his uppers, in fact. When he raised complaint the medical officers of the division came to him and said, “If you are too sick to work, then enter the convalescent home.”

The soldier had a wife and three children to support. He was doing it at the expense of his health, which was officially marked “unfit,” from wounds and trench exposure. The military officials, however, acting on the belief that it is safer to discount such cases as this as false, put it up to the man. He entered the home. His wife and three children went unprovided for. He had written to the Militia Department, to the Hospitals Commission, and to the Pay Department about his case. He did not receive money for his family until his story was printed in The Star Weekly and Daily Star.

In such a case as this the divisional authorities were in no way to blame. Not until the recent reorganization of the Discharge Depot were the divisions fully notified of their returned men.

Princess Pat a Peddler

Another case in point is that of a Princess Pat man whom I discovered peddling metal polish.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked.

“To make ends meet,” said this man who had taken part in some of the greatest battles around Ypres.

From his papers I learned that he had come home in October, was discharged, and was recommended to have $50 a month for three months. He received his $50 in October, but in November he only received $30. He wrote at once to Ottawa and received a reply from Mr. E. H. Scammell, secretary of the Military Hospitals Commission, explaining that $20 had been deducted on account of assigned pay for August and September, 1914, over a year ago, which had not hitherto been deducted from pay.

“I have a wife and six children. I unable even to do the lightest kind of work, but seeing that the officials do not consider these things and send me only $30 for the month, rent and all, I am obliged to peddle metal polish.”

“Man, didn’t you write back and explain at once?” I cried.

“Oh, yes,” said the soldier.

But he got no reply. Furthermore, he is of the opinion that there was no such thing as assigned pay that early in the war. It was, he believes, instituted later.

The Militia Department is overloaded, as it is, with the business of sending soldiers away from Canada. That department at least cannot be blamed for regarding the returned soldiers as of secondary importance There should be department to consider the returned soldier as of prime importance. It should take charge of every soldier the moment he is released from the hospital in England, and should thereafter never let go until the man is fit again, working at a job; or, if unfitted for life, pensioned and cared-for for life. There should be none of these horrible cases of neglect. There should never be a soldier peddling pencils because his money did not come from Ottawa. There should be no referring from one department to another, long, dreadful days to the returned men: light, busy, chatty, and talk full days for the officials.

The Soldier Who Spat Blood

I shall not soon forget an experience in this regard. At the street entrance of the Toronto office of one of the committees I met a returned soldier coming out.

“Hello, Bill!”

“Hello,” said Bill, the soldier with three wounds and destroyed lungs. “I’ve just been listening to a lady and gent telling me I’m no soldier. Why? Because I grew peeved when they said, for the fourth time in ten days, that they had written to Ottawa about my case. I want money! My kids need food! My God!”

And in a sort of fury he spat.

He spat blood!

When I reached the offices the soldier had come from I was assured that the soldier was a kicker and a drinker, and a greedy grasper-

“He is a hero, twice in action, thrice wounded, and now in our midst with tuberculosis on him,” I pointed out.

“Well, we’ve written to Ottawa and that’s all that can be done,” replied the officials.

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Editor’s Notes: The Department of Soldiers’ Civil Re-establishment was only established in 1918 to handle the major problem of returning Canadian servicemen to civilian life after the First World War. In 1928 it merged with the Department of Health to form the Department of Pensions and National Health. The department of Veterans Affairs was not created until 1944.

1. The Assistant Adjutant General. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, October 3, 1925.

War Cries, Battles and Other Disturbances at University of Toronto Now Regulated By Students’ Council – Ruffianism Abolished by Democratic Rule – Varsity Made Safe for Male Shingle and Marcelle

A terrible thing happened up on the campus of the University of Toronto the other day.

A student yelled “Yah!”

Right out loud.

It was a most disgusting exhibition. He was rough-looking sort of person. Large, bony, with big thick shoulders and thick legs.

The campus was crowded with students at the time, passing to and fro respectably, to their lectures. They were models of deportment. Most of them had the latest Oxford bags¹ on, and nearly a hundred per cent. of them were wearing their hair long and slick², in the very best manner. Contrasted with them stood this thick person of whom he are about to speak.

We will call him Buck.

Buck walked, perfectly composed, half-way across the campus. He was wearing a nondescript sort of blue suit the trousers of which clearly showed the shape of his legs. His cap disclosed the fact that his hair was cut short and bristly. On his face was a look of puzzlement.

Then Buck suddenly stopped in his track. Glared about him at the throng.

Then he reared up on his toes, threw his arms high in the air, and in a hoarse, deep, brutal voice yelled:

“Yah!”

Of course, after the students had picked themselves up off the ground, there was a momentary outbreak of protest and just indignation. But five members of the Students’ Administrative five members of the Students’ Administrative Council who were amongst those affected by this terrible breach of the peace were first to collect their senses and remind the throng of students of the amenities.

“Steady, fellow students!” cried out one of these officers. “Stand fast! Remember the constitution!”

And all the students quieted their voices and brushed off their Oxford bags in silence.

The officials of the Students’ Administrative Council gathered in a body near Buck, where he stood all alone amidst the throng, and then they approached him.

“Do you realize,” said the spokesman, standing forth a safe distance from Buck, they fearing for his sanity. “Do you realize that you are guilty of a grave offense against the laws, not to mention the honor and dignity of this great university of which we assume you are an undergraduate?”

Buck opened his large mouth, full of big, strong teeth, but then closed it without emitting another of those fearful yells.

“Presuming you to be a freshman and unacquainted with the regulations and interior administration of this great university, we ask you, will you come, without the use of force, to be instructed in the laws of this institution?”

“What if I don’t?” answered Buck in a loud voice.

“Then,” said the spokesman in a gentle and sweet voice of warning, “we will be obliged to call a policeman.”

Wild Buck Swiftly Tamed

So they led Buck, at a safe distance, all the throng following wonder and dismay, to the University College, where on the walls appeared this notice:

“Students who take part in disturbances or offensive contests unauthorized by the Students Council will be liable to a heavy fine not exceeding $50.00³ each.

“R. Falconer, President.”

Buck read the above, removed his cap and reverently scratched his hard, bristly head.

Several dozens of the students were crowding around the councillors, crying out that their Oxford bags had been damaged by falling down when this frightful yell stunned them. “Compensation,” they kept crying. “Recompense for damages!” And one poor fellow showed how the yell had caused him to lose the $12 marcelle wave⁴ in his hair that he had got only last week.

But the councillors spoke to the mob of angry students and pleaded for Buck that he did not know the law. That was really, no excuse, of course. But still, there you are. Even in a self-governing country, there are those who escape the law.

Nothing like this has been heard of for several years. It is sincerely hoped that no further Bucks will appear amongst the student body of this great institution of learning. Buck has not been seen since the episode, and it is generally thought that he has left the university for some other, where his extraordinary qualities will not get him into trouble.

The incident demonstrates the most interesting fact about the University of Toronto. It is the most civilized university in the world. All the excesses that used to be linked with college students have been abolished. That roughness and intolerance that once upon a time shamed the fair name of learning has been dissipated. How? By the winning of self-government by the students.

While Sir Robert Falconer signs the warnings that are plenteously distributed all over the university buildings, the students themselves solemnly elect the Students’ Administrative Council, a body representing all colleges in the distinguished galaxy of colleges, and this council disciplines the students.

It shows the power of self-government to quell savage tribes. As you can see from the notice signed by Sir Robert, disturbances and offensive contests may still be held, but “with the authorization of the Students’ Council only.” You may apply to the council to hold an offensive contest. You may or may not get it, as the grave deliberations of the council may decree. In the old days of benevolent despotism, when the president ruled the roost, there were all kinds of terrible excesses. The world was certainly not safe for the cake-eater as it is to-day on ‘Varsity⁵ grounds. The students’ council has made the male shingle and the marcelle wave perfectly safe.

Old Relic of Barbarous Days

The last, dying gesture of old college rascaldom occurred four years ago, when a few returned soldiers, who had not had time to complete their university courses owing to an out break of ruffianism in which they felt impelled to take part, returned to their alma mamma to finish their education.

A relic of past barbarous days is an old ramshackle one-story wooden building hidden in behind New Trinity and south of the athletic stadium. This is called the old temporary gym. It is used for storage purposes and for holding. such “disturbances and offensive contests” as the students’ council may agree to on application and after due deliberation.

The sophomores of one of the faculties – we will spare their blushes by refraining from naming the faculty – got permission, just for old times’ sake, to hold an initiation of freshmen in this old building. Permission, sad to relate, was granted.

The freshmen of that year were invited to attend and be initiated.

Now these freshmen, amongst whom were a lot of rough, demobilized soldiers, had no idea of the great reform which had been effected in ‘Varsity. They thought an initiation was an initiation.

So the sophomores locked and barred themselves in the old Rough House, as the ramshackle building is called, and invited the freshmen to come in.

The freshmen attempted a frontal attack. Then some old soldier devised a gas attack. They made up some ammonia solution, climbed to the roof of the building and poured it through the holes in the roof.

They nearly killed the sophomores. A tragedy was narrowly averted. But the freshmen, so dim is the primitive mind, deemed it a victory. They gained entry into the Rough House, and all the sophomores went home to bed.

This incident, of course, is never referred to in polite academic circles. It is blamed on the war.

Three years ago the dental sophs took the freshmen and removed all their boots and threw them out an upper story window into College street.

The students’ council at once took action on this dastardly outbreak of hoodlumism, and fined every soph. the sum of $2.

Two years ago the medical faculty held a little celebration and then formed up and went on an entirely unauthorized parade down Yonge street. They raided the Italian fruit stores along the way and threw vegetables all about.

The students’ council at once called an emergency session and called the whole faculty before them. After a long and grave study of the crime, they fined the medical students who went in the parade three hundred dollars, collectively.

How do they collect the fines, you ask?

The students’ council does not permit a student to write his exams until he has paid the fine. It is quite simple.

When you consider the precedent set by the past, it is a wonderful thing the students have done in discipline by self-government. When you count up the suits of clothing destroyed even within the past fifteen years, it would fill the old Rough House.

Historic Cases of Ruffianism

 Here are certain historic cases.

The Model School Fence for example. Around the Model School on Gerrard street ran a drunken wooden fence that was unpainted, awry, staggered. For years the public and press cried out against it. Then one Hallowe’en, the students went down and held a bonfire. That was all.

The late Dr. Beattle Nesbitt was connected with an outrage that is remembered, even unto this day. A cow weighing fourteen hundred pounds, was somehow carried up the narrow stairway of the Old Grey Tower, and there left to moo and wail a greeting to the president the next morning. How they got it up was a mystery. For it took a gang of twenty workmen with block and tackle to get it down. It is the only time in the history of the place that a cow has ever been in the Old Grey Tower.

The picket fence around the athletic grounds, where the stadium now is, was burned year after year on Hallowe’en. It was one’ of the normal expenses of higher education, the renewing of that fence.

Theatre night used to be a night when everybody in Toronto used to try and get tickets to the show. The students’ atrocities in the theatre on these occasions used to be the talk of the town. Extraordinary sorts of confetti rained down from the gods. Strange musics afflicted the air.

But one night, the students poured flour down out of the gods. It was about this time Toronto began to feel that after all, there is nothing greater than property. The show chosen by the students for their theatre night was “The Middie Man” with E. S. Willard. When the riot and confusion was at its height, Mr. Willard rang down the curtain and came to the front.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said he, “I have come a long way to make this my humble offering of the drama. When I learned that the students had chosen to attend my poor performance as their annual theatre night, I was greatly flattered. But it seems I have been guilty of misunderstanding. It appears that the students have come with the intention of presenting the entertainment, not I. I have rung down the curtain to allow these gentlemen to file out of the theatre, and as they pass the box office, each will receive his money back.”

Dead silence for a moment. Then a burst of tumultuous applause – from the gods. Mr. Willard had won. The students were perfectly quiet for the remainder of the show.

Theatre night now – if they still have theatre nights – they do not form up on the campus and march in a body. The students go individually, with their girls.

Students didn’t have girls in other days, They couldn’t be afforded.

There was at one time a chiropodist on College street whose sign was a huge human foot, gilded. A small select society was formed at the university which for the purpose of the moment called itself Order of the Boot. The large gilt foot disappeared never to be seen again of mortal eye. It decorated a room in a residence.

Signs are safe to-day. It was only 1910 that no student felt he was a student until sundry street car signs, “keep out,” “office of the president,’ and similar notices graced their studies. Recently, a stop and go signal, complete taken by students. The police sent word they wanted it back. They got it back.

Initiation Now Means Less

The Literary Society for long years annually elected its moral suasion committee from the largest and heftiest members of each party. At the Lit elections, these two moral suasion committees met to settle their differences by moral strength alone. Their fights were epics. Hoses usually played a large part. It was about the time that self government was imposed on the student body that the Literary Society voted to do away with the moral suasion committees as not being in keeping with the dignity of the society. Now they have got the dignity, at least.

Serenading the ladies residences, St. Margaret’s College and other girls schools within reach of the campus used to be the gallant way in which incognito gentlemen used to pay their respects to the girls. This had the advantage of being collegiate. To-day, the student in his wide pants and oiled hair takes his lady to a dance pavilion. Yelling Adeline under school windows however, was cheaper. A college education to-day is not so rough but more expensive than it used to be.

No Man’s Land is the more modern name for that bit of road that lies between the east door of the Engineering Building and the south door of the Medical Building. Across, this space of road, hundreds of fierce battles have been fought. For some reason, probably propinquity, engineers and doctors seem to hate each other. Between lectures, groups of Meds and Engineers would gather at their respective doors. Taunts would be hurled. Then insults. Depending on the weather and the barometric pressure, these rival groups would or would not go any further than taunts. When they did, woe betide the poor Arts men who might be in the neighborhood. Being known to neither side, both sides regarded them as enemies, in the fierce hand-to-hand that would follow. The writer had the distinction of having a thumb-full of shoe blacking smeared into his right eye by the eminent school battler. Bull Ritchie who weighed, dry, nigh unto three hundred pounds. And the writer started out merely as spectator, Arts.

When these battles started, all yearly differences and antipathies were wiped out. For example, it might be School Freshmen and Meds third year that were engaged. But no sooner did battle engage than the roars and groans of the battlers would be heard in lecture rooms and corridors within the separate strongholds. And out would rush school men of all years to the side of their detested Freshmen, and Meds Freshmen would with swelling pride come to the defense of their conceited Third Years men.

And the late Dean Galbraith himself would have to come out, armed with a hose, perhaps, to put an end to the little difference.

A Freshman used to be an object of intense physical repugnance to his elders. The only parallel is the feeling in a small boy’s soul when a new baby arrives in the house. No Freshman could be allowed to join the sacred circle without having a few mushings to indicate to him his physical deficiencies. For a university is a place of the intellect.

All this is gone. The parable of our good simple friend Buck and his indiscreet “Yah” illustrates what self government can do to a wild people.

If Buck yells “Yah” a second time, he is likely to be fined fifty dollars by a grave assembly of his peers.

Initiation, too, has fallen upon materialistic times. Initiation means initiation fees.

The dollar has tamed Varsity.

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Editor’s Notes:

1. Oxford Bags were very baggy trousers popular with male students at the time. ↩︎
2. Slicked back hair using pomade or other oils was also the style at the time. ↩︎
3. $50 in 1925 would be $915 in 2025. ↩︎
4. On the subject of hair, Marcel waves were more common on women, but some men had them too. ↩︎
5. Varsity was a generic term used at the time for the University of Toronto. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, September 26, 1914.

Toronto Archimandrate¹ Says Bulgarians Are Looking to Great Britain to Save Independence Of the Small Nations From Victorious Russia – Bulgaria a Democratic Nation.

If the great war goes as it should go – in favor of the allies, a problem as great, if not greater than the struggle itself, will arise out of that much-troubled and troublous region, the Balkans. If the Germans are defeated, Austria will have to give back the territory it has taken from the Balkan States, and Russia’s insistent demands for a Mediterranean port may have to be accorded more than the usual attention they have had in the past.

The gravity of the situation may be gathered from the explanation of it given by the Archimandrate Theophilact, the Greek Orthodox priest-missionary for Toronto and the district about it.

“The feeling in the Balkans,” said the Archimandrate, “is first, pro-Russian, and second, pro-British. Russia comes first, because of the ties of Slav blood. Although there had been, previous to the war, some hard feeling between the Balkan States, it took but little time for them to agree on friendly relations with the allies, though menaced by Austria on their borders.”

“The complexity of the situation does not arise, however, until the issues of the war are considered. Bulgaria is the most important State, because of its progressiveness and its firm, immoveable policies. Now, Bulgaria has set forth these two issues:

“The powers must agree to the revision of the Bucharest Treaty, must agree to the formation of a Balkan League, giving Macedonia to Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina to Servia, Transylvania to Roumania, and Epeira to Greece; thus setting the States of the league on their old and sound basis.”

“Or, as the second issue, if the Bucharest Treaty is not revised, and there is no Balkan League, then Bulgaria, as the pivotal state, must form a strong alliance with those powers that most favor her national aspirations. And those powers, there is little doubt, will be Britain and France.”

“For, although the Balkans are now pro-Russian first of all, they see quite well the menace of Russia – the menace of a conquering Russia, empowered to make great demands, one of which may be an extension of her territory southward through the Balkans.”

They Look to Britain

To Britain, then, who does not want our territories, but who does want our independence, to checkmate the moves of other world powers, we look for our guarantee of liberty. In fact, we place utter confidence in Britain, because we feel sure Britain could do nothing else but guard our independence, to protect her in the Suez.

“We feel that while Britain is helping us, she is helping herself. Good! We say! That smacks of plain-dealing, of honesty. But Russia whispers to us of Pan-Slavism. And Germany and Austria pats us as a man pats a horse on the back preparatory to straddling it!

“We Bulgarians are what might be called realists! The business-like attitude of Britain appeals to us. Race ideals and race movements do not sway us. We are looking for real, material things. After centuries of being battered and torn and our garments apportioned, we cannot be blamed for seeking material good.

“And so,” said the archimandrate, “on my last visit to Sofia, I found English ideas uppermost. English is the principal study in the colleges. England’s history and politics usurp the public attention. I found myself in general respect because I spoke English. I had the entree to the best circles.

“It is somewhat disconcerting to me to see the extent of the ignorance in Europe and America regarding Bulgaria. Of course, the ‘atrocities’ printed largely during the Balkan wars were shown to be ignorant lies by the Carnegie report. But it is not generally known that women’s suffrage has a stronghold in Bulgaria, that not even the most inaccessible hamlet is without a school, that elections are as fair as in England-that the whole tone is utterly democratic.

Governed by the People

Why, the Greek Church in Bulgaria is governed by the people. From priest to bishop, the clergy is elected. For instance, I studied for the priesthood, and then, upon qualifying, I offered myself as candidate for one of the towns or churches. There is an election every four years. Bishops and more famous priests, however, are usually elected for life.

“In the Parliament of 205 deputies, 37 are Social Democrats, 14 are democrats, 47 are agriculturals, or representatives of the farmers.

“Our literature has only been on a firm foundation for about 100 years. Turkish influences were too powerful against it in preceding centuries. Even now our literature is profoundly influenced by Russian and French literature.”

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Editor’s Note: This is just a news story by Greg after the first world war started, and before he signed up.

1. The Archimandrite is a leader in the Orthodox Church. ↩︎