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Troupe of Actors and Actresses Direct From China Present Drama Thousands of Years Old With All Color of the Orient

No Curtain – No Intermission – No Scenery – Property Man Always Moving About Stage Shifting Cushions, Covers, Etc.

Orchestra on One Side of Stage Provides Weird Music – Actors Sing in a High Falsetto – Gorgeous Costumes.

By Gregory Clark, June 10, 1922.

(Editor’s Note: since this was written over 100 years ago, the attitudes of a westerner to Chinese theatre emphasized the strangeness and the novelty of it all).

Is your appetite for amusement jaded?

Have you made the rounds of the entertainments Toronto provides and found them all flavored alike?

Then there is one thing you have overlooked. You haven’t seen the Chinese players at the National Theatre¹ in the heart of the Ward.

In a little old theatre, far off the well-beaten tall of amusement, there is going on every night before crowded houses of thrilled Orientals something so bizarre, quaint, beautiful and gorgeously colorful, that it stuns the senses of the few white people who have been fortunate enough to discover it.

It is a troupe of thirty Chinese actors and actresses direct from China, with a repertory of about forty of the classic tragedies and romances of Chinese literature. They have played in Vancouver and are spending a few weeks in Toronto before proceeding to the States.

They are playing to the Chinese, of course. Not a word and scarcely a movement of the play is intelligible to the stranger in the audience.

But to get the shock of your theatre-going life, you don’t need to understand it.

The gorgeous costumes, which make Oriental spectacles on the English stage seem tawdry, the posturing, miming and gesturing of the actors, the weird, shrill music and the constant din of the great brass gongs of the orchestra, creates a sensation that is new and fresh and stimulating to us who are the victims of realism on the stage.

For there is no atom of realism in the Chinese drama. It is a monstrous mixture of the ballet, pantomime, marionettes and grand opera, clothed in a symbolism that reaches back through the centuries. The Chinese stagecraft has not changed in a thousand years.

The Chinese players on Teraulay street² have not adapted themselves to the National Theatre. They have ignored the theatre. It has seats in it, and a stage. That’s all they need.

The rest is a simplicity that takes the breath out of you. There is no scenery, no curtain, the auditorium is not darkened. Stage and audience are both brightly lighted.

The orchestra does not sit in the pit. It sits on the stage, to one side. It is in shirt-sleeves. In slack moments of the play, while gorgeously garbed mandarins strut and posture in front of the ever-changing hangings on the back-wall of the stage, the orchestra lights up cigarets, or drinks from a dipper.

There is no curtain, and therefore no intermission. The Chinese play moves at furious speed. The property man is not off-stage, but is always on the stage, dressed in conventional black, a strangely intrusive figure among all the fantastic actors. But this property man manages the few properties required, which are a couple of small tables, three chairs, about fifty different silk curtains and a hundred gorgeous silk covers. Never leaving the stage for a moment, he quickly switches the scene from the home of a humble magistrate to the palace of the emperor in the capital, merely by changing the silk covers on the two tables and the three chairs, and the gorgeous curtains on the two entrances to the stage.

There is the reverse of realism for you. This property man and his properties occupy the center of the stage, and yet you are not supposed to see him. You are expected to have enough imagination to see that it is a garden on the stage, though not a stick or a twig is there to indicate it.

And when the two gorgeous lovers, in the midst of the imaginary garden, sing their formal love song, the orchestra in its shirt sleeves and suspenders ten feet from them, producing the weird music of the Orient, you must sustain the illusion when this black clad property man steps out, at the proper moment, and coming between the lovers, places a silken cushion for the girl to kneel on.

Your first moments of the Chinese drama will fill you with a confusion of amusement and alarm. All plays are accompanied by music. This music consists of the sound of two huge brass cymbals, one brass gong, one small ox-horn fiddle with a range of one octave, one small mud-turtle shell mandolin, a wooden banjo, and a time-keeper, which is the beating upon two hollow wooden boxes with bamboo sticks. At times, the string players lay aside their instruments and take up the pipes, which are much like a single pipe of the Scotch bagpipes, and have the same wild, uncertain note.

Parts of the play are sung to the sound of these instruments, and the rest is chanted to the endless accompaniment of the gongs and cymbals and the ox-horn fiddle. The gongs crash at the end of every line of verse, for the dramas are always written in verse.

To add to the westerner’s confusion at these crashing and screaming sounds, the actors do not sing or chant in a normal voice, but use a conventional stage voice, which is falsetto, both with the men and the women, with regular droppings of the voice to a low key for contrast.

Often, the voices cannot be heard at all, so high are they, and so violent is the musical accompaniment.

Everything is ruled by a conventionality that has the ballet and the pantomime outclassed for subtlety. There being no scenery, the actor comes on the stage, but is not seen by, and does not see the other characters on the stage, until he “enters” the imaginary room the others are in. This he does by lifting one foot, as if he were stepping over the door frame of the room. To see these actors all striding and mincing about the bare stage, lifting their feet over the door sill as faithfully as if the door were there, pushing the sliding panels of doors to and fro, manipulating the latches of gates thinner than air, come in prancing on imaginary steeds, which act must be performed just so, allowing the steed to caracole, and come to a spirited halt, then the rider throwing his leg over the saddle to dismount, and hanging his tufted whip on an unseen saddle horn, (the whip falling to the floor), needs an imagination to cope with it. It is so easy to be realistic, to have a stage crammed with realistic properties, instead of a couple of chairs, a few resplendent arrases of hand embroidered silk, and a thousand quaint gestures and postures.

Each actor, as he comes on the stage, is heralded by a tremendous to-do on the gongs. The greater the personage, the greater the racket. He advances to the front of the stage, and in a queer falsetto voice, in a monotonous rhythm, announces who he is and what he is about to do. Then he turns his back, lifts one foot as if stepping over the door frame, and is then supposed to be in the presence of the other actors.

Regardless of the action of the drama, the property man, who is not supposed to be noticed, keeps continually changing the magnificent curtains which cover the two entrances at the back of the stage. This change of curtains has nothing to do with the scenery. Like the music, it is merely something beautiful to attend the action of the play. And many of the curtains bear on them embroidered Chinese characters. These curtains are gifts to the company from audiences or individuals, and the writing on them expresses appreciation of the actors, collectively or individually. Combining, thus, entertainment and advertising.

The costumes are, one would say, the originals from which Chu Chin Chow³ costumes were economically copied. They are simply gorgeous.

There are several Chinese girls in the cast. Slight, inexpressibly/ graceful, mannered, swaying, the flowers of an ancient childlike civilization.

The scene shifts from the home of the hero to the high court of the province. It is managed thus: The actors march out the door on the right, and march in the door on the left. The property man has swiftly hung up two new and still more beautiful curtains. We have traveled a hundred miles.

We see them worshipping the ancestors before departing on a journey. We are present at the prayers before the execution of the heroine, when tapers are lighted and incense floats up, and to the weird tumult of the orchestra, with both big and little pipes going, the actors sing the prayers for all about to depart. Yet there, on one side of this artistic scene are the musicians in their shirt sleeves, in the full glare of the footlights, sweating hard; and the drab property man moves to and fro in the scene, a distressing embodied spirit.

This is the oldest drama in the world. It dates back beyond the Greek, beyond the sacred dancers of Israel. Surely we have got our ballet, our drama, our grand opera from these quaint people out of the east, though our stage carpenters and property men have made it for us so real that there is no more drama and no more imagination in it.

What of the audience? Out there in the lighted auditorium, the swarthy rows sit, thrilled, smiling at the antics of the comedian, who dances and postures like the Russians, who learned of the ballet across the Siberian plains from these yellow mannequins. At the love music, their faces light up with a strange look. It is queer, bitter music to a westerner. It is the love song of home to these stolid, peering Cantonese.

The audience is all munching something. Is it peanuts?

“No!” protests our guide and interpreter, “they are eating melon seeds, which it is customary to do at the theatre.”

Customary!

Custom, rule, convention, every gesture, every note of music, every syllable proclaimed just so, in high falsetto voice, after rules and customs laid down hundreds of years ago, unchanged and changeless, and full of a precise beauty swathed in riotous colors that must fill the white-clad angels with envy.

The Chinese drama, in its humble theatre and its homely surroundings, is a mental burr that sticks to the brain. It is meaningless to the stranger.

But he can’t forget it.

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Editor’s Notes:

1. The National Theatre started out as the Big Nickel and later became the Rio Theatre. It was at 373 Yonge Street and was torn down around 2019. ↩︎
2. Today, Terauley street is known as Bay Street. ↩︎
3. Chu Chin Chow was a musical comedy that was very popular from 1916 to the time of this article in 1922. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, April 3, 1926.

In Canada, here, we have ringside seats for one of the greatest spectacles in history.

For the next couple of generations, we are going to witness the drawing of the Melting Pot.

The United States, by restricting immigration almost to the vanishing point, has mixed in the last of the crude ore into her gigantic crucible. Now she is dropping in pinches of British, a dash of Scandinavian, a gram of German, as the chemist drops in traces of refining chemicals to flux the molten mass.

And we shall watch the great drama of the final drawing of the Melting Pot, the sparks, the pyrotechnic flames and at last the flow of gold, if any.

The first of the flares in this most colossal chemical enterprise is already lighting the sky low down on the horizon.

Round and around a fifteen-foot red brick wall marches a procession of two thousand men, women and children, two by two.

In the high wall are iron barred gates. In the gates stand squads of policemen armed with clubs. Past the policemen you can see a huge, silent, one-storey factory.

At the head of the straggling procession march a score of young men and half a dozen girls wearing brand new steel helmets and second hand gas masks.

The remainder of the motley parade are unarmed and unpicturesque in any way save by the fact that they represent thirty-seven different races of humanity.

As the helmeted head of the parade passes the main gate, the young men raise their voices and shout:

“Boo!  BOO!”

The insulting sound is instantly taken up along the straggling procession and a ribald roar passes around the tall brick wall.

“My country ’tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty…”

The young men in helmets and gas masks at the head of the procession burst into ironic song,

“My gondree tees off dee,

Svee land da da da da…”

That is what broad-faced man with a yellow mustache makes of it as he surges past in the endless shuffle.

What is all this? Is it an Olympic games parade of the nations of the earth? Is it a demonstration in behalf of the league of nations? No, it is just a picture of the big textile strike in Passaic, New Jersey.

Thirteen thousand workers are out. Seven great spinning mills stand practically idle. Freelance labor organizers from New York are in charge of the strike and are performing the newest stunts of high-class university trained industrial revolt. The mill owners will not have a word to say to the “outside agitators” who are leading the strike. Washington has agreed to an “investigation.”

New Kind of Labor Leader

In broad outline, the situation is this: textile workers are not highly skilled. There are about a million of them in the United States, only a small fraction of whom are organized into unions – the higher ranks, the few skilled artisans. In and around Passaic, New Jersey, an hour out of New York city, in Lawrence, Mass., Manchester, N.H., and in Philadelphia, hundreds of thousands of the simpler orders of textile workers earn their twenty-odd dollars a week. Poles, Russians, Hungarians, Austrians, Czechs and Italians, in the main.

The great textile industry in the United States has never had any trouble with its labor. For there was always an endless supply surging, sweeping like a tide through the wide open gate of the immigration ports. It only takes three or four weeks to make a textile worker. For the thirty-five years that the Botany Worsted Mills in Passaic have been functioning there has never been any lack of European peasants to be taken on and converted into textile workers in a fortnight.

But now the tide of peasants has ceased!

Last October, because its earnings had fallen from two million eight hundred thousand in 1923 to one million seven hundred thousand in 1924 and then to one million four hundred thousand in 1925, the Botany Mill made a wage cut of 10 per cent. This affected 6,400 workers.

There had been three strikes in Passaic since 1907. All had failed. Time after time labor organizations had tried to organize in Passaic – the Amalgamated Textile Workers, the United Textile Workers, the I.W.W., the Hungarian Workers’ Federation, the W.I.I.U. All had failed.

In November Albert Weisbord, a Harvard graduate, a Phi Beta Kappa, a twenty-five-year-old Jew who has publicly embraced the most advanced Labor theories up to, if not quite to, Communism, came over from New York and began organizing the United Front Committee. He called the strike. He organized the workers. He originated the stunts which have gained the strike world-wide publicity. If he succeeds in organizing a union in Passaic, it means that the million other unorganized textile workers in Lawrence and Manchester and Philadelphia will be organized. A new and powerful group will enter the stage of American labor politics.

“I wish to heaven,” said one of the mill owners of Passaic, “that we had helped some of those other more moderate unions to organize years ago, instead of fighting them. Now we have to contend with a man who reads messages of sympathy from Moscow to his meetings!”

The strike did not take long to get more than front page position in all the New York newspapers and half the papers of America. As soon as the strike was called Weisbord organized mass picketing of the big mills. He called meetings and after fervid and inflammatory speechmaking in English, Hungarian, Italian and half a dozen other languages, formed processions and marched through the streets of Passaic, Paterson, Lodi and Garfield – these textile towns run one into the other in that vast human map that surrounds New York city – and began to march around the buildings.

Steel Helmets and Gas Bombs

The idea was to excite those workers who had not yet struck into coming out. Two by two the strikers marched around the buildings, singing, booing, or in ominous and picturesque silence.

Politics, of course, plays a part in this strike as it does in all things American. The police officials are appointed by the party which is friendly to the large mill owning interests of the district. When this strike of Weisbord’s failed to dissolve as all other strikes had done, there was alarm and the association of textile manufacturers called on the police to control the demonstrations. On March 2, in the seventh week of the strike, when mass picketing had succeeded in bringing out thousands of workers who could no longer face the booing and singing and derision of the paraders, the police in Passaic at last made a forcible effort to halt the ever-growing processions.

The chief of police of Passaic on that day turned out his full force and tried to stem the parade as it marched to the Botany Mill. He may have been genuinely alarmed that this parade would attempt to do violence to the premises. At any rate, he threw two tear gas bombs which he had in his motorcycle sidecar with him. Then he ordered out the fire department and ordered the hose turned on the strikers. The police also obstructed the advance of the strikers and, according to affidavits, used their clubs freely.

Albert Weisbord – knowing that publicity was worth more to his cause than any other factor – immediately got over a supply of steel helmets and gas masks from New York. If the police clubbed heads, the heads would wear steel helmets. If the police would use gas bombs, the strikers would wear gas masks. If the police turn fire hose on the parade, the strikers would put women shoving baby carriages at the head of the procession.

The following day, March 3, the newspaper camera men of New York went wild. Here was a story the like of which had not been seen since the war for dramatic human interest. All the cameramen and movie men in New York were on hand in Passaic that next day for the parade of the strikers in steel hats and gas masks with baby carriages in the lead. What would the police do now?

It was, in a sense, comic what the police did. They attacked the camera men. The New York newspapers estimate the damage to still and motion picture cameras that day at $3,000. The police of Passaic had hired a number of rather humorous truck horses as mounts and rode the cameramen down. It was the worst error of a number of errors committed by the police, for it turned the sympathy of the New York papers definitely away from the police and the mill operators. “Cossack” and other strong words appeared in the newspaper headlines. What Weisbord wanted he got. The police were effectively stopped from any further forcible interruptions in the business of mass picketing. They arrested several people on a charge “of singing without a permit in the public streets.” But the strikers promptly retaliated with charges against Police Chief Cober and two constables for striking unoffending citizens with clubs. If nothing is done about the clubbing, it is more than likely nothing will be done about the singing in the streets.

Picketing by an Army

This mass picketing is a new thing in America. The police claim it is disorderly. But when the strikers neither sing nor boo, but simply march – at noon and closing hour – stolidly and in silence around the mills, they claim they are not disorderly and cannot be interfered with. And this mass of men, women and children has a profound moral effect on the couple of hundred workers who might still be in the mills on maintenance work.

So far the strikers are away ahead on points.

Now for the other side of the argument.

“The strike will not succeed – there will be no effective union formed – simply because there are thirty-seven races of people involved,” said Col. Charles F. H. Johnson, vice-president of the Botany Mills and principal figure amongst the mill owners.

Col. Johnson came into the textile business via the war. The Botany Mills as well as a number of other textile mills in the district were founded twenty to thirty years ago, by great German textile interests. They were controlled by Germans at the outbreak of the war, and the Botany Mill was taken over by the United States government when the war was entered and Col. Johnson was put in to take charge for the government. When the war ended, Col. Johnson was instrumental in securing for the former German owners the right to purchase back the property and with a syndicate of other Americans bought a considerable interest in the mills. At the same time, he and his syndicate acquired other textile properties in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Latvia and Holland. It is now an international concern.

“This affair at Passaic,” said Col. Johnson, “is not a strike but a Communist demonstration. We will not treat in any way with the outside agitators who have fomented the strike.”

Albert Weisbord is more than amused by the stand of the mill owners.

“I cannot understand this unreasonable antipathy of the proprietors towards outside agitators. Surely the proprietors are all from outside. Some of them come from New York but others come from as far outside as Germany. Then why object to the workers calling in outside help in the management of their affairs?”

“A friend of my family,” said one of the directors of the Botany Mill, “is a young woman who does social work teaching in poor districts. She came to me reproachfully, after the strike had taken on its spectacular proportions, and told me of the children of one of the families employed in our mill who were underfed, half clothed, dirty and uncared for and begged me to look at that one example of what I was doing as a proprietor of the mill. I have a good deal of this to bear. I cannot tell that young lady that the conditions in our mill are governed absolutely by the general conditions prevailing throughout the textile industry – that I have to compete with Lawrence and Manchester just as the workers have to compete with the workers in those textile districts. However, I did investigate this one outstanding instance. We found that the parents of these children had put aside some five thousand dollars in the bank and were preparing to return to the Old Country.”

Two tremendous facts, nevertheless, stand out from the Passaic strike.

American industry has been safeguarded for a great many years by the safe and sane organization of the American Federation of Labor. The radicalism which has deeply affected the political life of all the rest of the world in the past ten years through new philosophies of labor has been kept out of America. Now, even if this strike in Passaic fails, it is unquestionable but that the textile industry will have to be organized. The unlimited supply of raw labor which made the industry unorganizable has ceased. Therefore, on to the stage so long dominated by the A. F. of L. comes a powerful new body, thoroughly drilled in the new philosophies of labor and life.

That is one important thing.

The other is the Melting Pot is on the last, great boil.

“We have had no idea,” said Col. Johnson in a private interview, “to what an enormous extent the expansion of American industry and the creation of wealth has depended upon the constant flow of raw new labor into the country. That supply is already limited. Now, I do not at all admit the charges of the agitators who have seized upon our mills as the first demonstration of the new state of affairs in industrial America. Our mills are modern, up to date in every respect. Our wages are the equal of any other wages in the industry. When orders are slack, how can we employ workers full time?

“But I am aware – and I am not sure but that my discovery is shared by a very large number of industrial managers in the United States – that a revaluation of all values is imminent in America that the simple factor of the supply of workers having ceased is certain to create fundamental changes in industrial relations. And there has to be a lot of thinking done on all sides.”

America – where the cops have more personal power than peers of the realm of Britain -well, the cops got a set-back the day the Passaic strikers donned the steel helmets and gas masks.

America, with its twenty-five thousand new war millionaires, its colossal wealth produced endlessly by the tireless army of inspired workers flooding in all her gates – and now the army is in and wants to know, like Cromwell’s, about the rates of pay.

A Tremendous Industrial Problem

unlimited

In one hall in Passaic we saw a Hungarian speaker take the platform and start to address the meeting in his queer “nick-nock-nuck” language, to be greeted by a volley of hisses.

“What’s that?” we demanded of Margaret Larkin, the girl directing publicity for the strikers.

“Those are other nationals who want to hear their own language spoken.”

The Melting Pot is on the, boil. The crucible is full. The bellows are blowing the fire to silver heat.

“Hundreds of our workers,” said Col. Johnson, “have not yet drawn their last pay. They think that holds their job open. They tell us that as soon as the demonstrations die down, they will be overjoyed to come back to work for us at any old conditions.”

In one grey painted frame house, divided into three room family compartments, we found Daki Prizka sitting in his shirt sleeves facing his family, wife and six children. (His boy, being born in Passaic, may be a future president of the United States.)

Daki, frightened by the strike, frightened of the strike rations which friendly unions contributed – one New York bakery sent over six truck loads of bread – had just returned from New York, an hour away by bus, where he had secretly been looking for work.

New York had terrified him. Those tall temples in the sky, symbols of power and wealth illimitable – those thunderous streets – millions of cold-eyed, hasting tollers – Daki had gone into grim, terrible by-streets where he thought a job might be hiding in some sort of shame. But he found no man who knew his language. There were no jobs. He came home to the strike-broken town where his countrymen knew him.

“Bad!” said Daki. “Bad, bad, bad!”

One of his babies coughed rather terribly.

Daki is worried, Colonel Johnson is worried, Albert Weisbord has been worrying ever since he went to Harvard and began thinking about things.

“Are you a Communist?” we asked him.

“Twenty-five thousand war millionaires in the United States of America,” replied Weisbord, his cold eyes stilled behind scholarly spectacles. “The American Legion came into my meeting last night with a Stars and Stripes. They crashed their way up to the platform and held the flag up to me. In the tumult, I bent down and took it and held it to me. Everyone was still. The strikers were astonished. The Legion men were dumb. ‘Thank you, comrades,’ I said, in the quiet, ‘thank you for this flag. I accept it in the spirit in which it is given – symbol of the spirit of revolution in which it was born!’ Then they all went out.”

We have ringside seats for the most spectacular pyrotechnic display of the ages – the running off of the gold from the Melting Pot.

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Editor’s Note: This story is in reference to the 1926 Passaic textile strike, the first Communist-led work stoppage in the United States. 

By Gregory Clark, March 27, 1926.

“How would forty dollars a month and board do you?”

“Good stuff,” replied the unemployed and down-and-out young man in the government employment bureau – single, in good health and unaware of the source of to-day’s supper and to-night’s bed.

“All right; there’s a man here from an Algoma pulpwood camp looking for men…”

The lively expression on the unemployed young man’s face instantly fled.

“No, I don’t want to leave town… I got the prospect of a job as soon as spring comes…”

What is it about pulpwood and lumber camps that frightens the unemployed of the cities? What false traditions and misunderstanding fill the cities’ slushy and hopeless streets with jobless men all the long winter through when the beautiful northland, where every day is Christmas, calls in vain?

Is it the cold? The thin, dank cold of Toronto at ten above zero strikes closer into the bone than forty below in Algoma.

Is it the work? Of course, it may not be work they are looking for; 7 a.m. to supper time – those are the hours!

Is it the hard life? Oh, boy! – seven kinds of pastry not including pies; bunks about a red-bellied stove; a concertina droning and all voices raised.

What is it? Why should there be a single unemployed man in the south after the first snow falls in the great north country?

When the Lake Superior Pulp and Paper Company gave us a letter to their woods boss and we went a couple of hundred miles north from Sault Ste. Marie to see the first steps in the great pulpwood industry of Canada, we expected to find hard, strong men-who-are-men living a cold, rough life just for the glory of it and pitting their brute force against the cruel elements. Ralph Connor¹ and the movies had primed us for the big surprise,

Mile by mile, as we went north from the Soo, the country grew wilder, darker. The hardwood mountains gave way to the vast unbroken seas of spruce. Endless spruce, dark and motionless in the snow. The villages ceased and our stops were at little section houses. Even the section houses grew smaller, lonelier. The dark spruce was closing in.

“Mile 229 next stop,” said the conductor. “Do you know Fred Landry to see him? I’ll introduce you.”

Fred Landry is the woods superintendent for the paper company, boss of a whole township of this engulfing spruce. The train pulled up amidst little village of spotless white log houses in the snow – a Christmas card scene.

And the first thing we saw as we detrained with our packsacks and snowshoes was a young lady nine months old, wrapped in her shawl – Barbara, the little daughter of the assistant to the boss, out to see the choo-choo go by.

A Christmas Card Country

Well, here was our first shock. Something of what literature and the movies had bequeathed us was instantly and completely lost at the sight of this dainty baby. Fred Landry shook hands with us in a firm, friendly way. (“Landry,” had said a huge mackinaw figure in the smoking compartment, “drives his horse without a whip, you’ll see. He has funny dogs around him that no other man would keep for a minute. Somehow, he attracts to him the best damn cooks and foremen in the whole of Algoma. You’ll like Landry.”)

We liked Landry, a Nova Scotian, one of those dark men with about ten words an hour. His eyes have a permanent, silent smile in them. We met his wife, his assistants, in a log house the interior of which was simply the modern bungalow, even to the radio set. We went across the village square to the dining house.

“This,” said Fred Landry, “is just the headquarters, office, stores and so forth. The main camp where we are cutting is six miles back into the township.”

We visioned a long hike on foot by tote road.

“No, I’ve a horse and cutter.”

“Pretty rough going?”

“No, indeed; as fine a pavement as you will ever see; an ice road.”

“Ice?”

“Yes, we water the main road every day. The tractor hauling the pulp to the railroad needs a good pavement for its load.”

Pavements, tractors – and before us this dinner table heaped with such food as cafeteria proprietors aim at and never attain! Lumber camps must have changed since Glengarry days.

We walked through the sparkling afternoon (we get about two like it in a lucky winter down south) to where the horse and cutter were tabled near the ice road. There on the railroad siding lay a long train of empty flat cars waiting to be loaded from the ramp. We drove on to a pavement of ice, blue, hard, surely the slickest pavement man has ever invented. Standard width, it wound amidst the dark gothic spruce seeking the flattest levels. The little horse stepped out ahead of the red cutter. It was like driving straight into a Christmas card.

This road we have used now or five years,” said Fred Landry. “It takes years to cut a township. Each season we push the road back further into a fresh stand of pulpwood. We’ll be here another two years yet. Then when all the spruce is cut, we will move on to another stand, build new camps, new roads.”

“But has this been cut?” we asked, pointing to the dense thickets of evergreen on both sides of the road.

“This was cut five years ago.”

“Then you don’t clean it off?”

“No, indeed. We take only the big spruce. Plenty of young stuff is left to mature. In five years, that has taken on almost an untouched appearance. But you will see when we get back into the uncut stands that this section lacks the big spruce.”

Pulp Cutters Have Special Saws

After three or four miles through this enchanted green land on the sparkling blue pavement, we at last came to the water tank on sleighs – a huge home-made square box on runners that contains 3,000 gallons of water. It was hauled by a team of giant horses. Spouts of water were gushing on to the road to freeze hard and smooth between its banked-up kerbs of snow.

Then we reached the first piles of pulp wood. The wood is cut into four-foot lengths and stacked in neat piles on both sides of the ice road to await the big tractor and its trains of sleighs.

“Pulp wood is cut on two different plans. Sometimes the company cuts it, hiring the crews direct. Or contractors cut it,” said Landry. “In either case, the principle is the same. These crews are mostly Finns and Russians. In the. fall, when the cutting begins, we open camp and the crews arrive. Each contractor or gang is allotted a certain stand of spruce to cut. The main road is extended into these stands.

“Then the crews are stationed along the main road one man to a row. Pulp wood cutting is a one-man proposition. Each man is given a stand on the main road and he starts to cut in at right angles, using his one-man buck-saw – a Finn contribution to Canada’s pulpwood industry. He starts from the road with saw and axe and cuts a lane into the solid bush big enough for a sleigh to get up. He clears the brush and stumps and falls what spruce is in the road. Then he starts in on both sides of his lane, sawing down the spruce, limbing it with his axe, sawing it into four-foot lengths with his bucksaw and carrying it out to his lane and piling it ready for the sleighs to come and haul it to the main road.

“The cutting goes on until bout January. Each man is paid by the cord – $2.25 a cord, just now, and a good smart man can cut two cords a day. There are no gangs working and wasting time. Each man is alone in his lane off the main road, but he can see his neighbors a few yards off through the spruce. Picture it? – individual men driving their little roads off the main road and stacking, their spruce as they go.

“In addition to the incentive of pay, there is the rivalry of craftsmanship. There is great rivalry for the title of best cutter in the camp. It isn’t always the biggest or strongest man who stacks up the biggest piles, either.

“When the snow comes the contractor or the company sends in the small sleighs and they haul the wood out to the main road, where it is again piled – each man his own great pile with his number chalked on – and as soon as the cold weather arrives cutting ceases, the piece-work ends, and the cutters are taken on at a straight wage-$35 to $40 a month and board, to load. The loading and hauling consumes the rest of the season. The tractor -gasoline driven – can haul ten huge sleigh loads of six to seven cords a sleigh – sixty to seventy cords at a haul. Three trains of ten sleighs are kept busy by that tractor – probably the greatest modern addition to the lumber industry. When it delivers one sleigh train to the siding, the string just unloaded is picked up and hauled back into the far end where they are loading, and when it arrives there the third sleigh train is already loaded and ready to go out. We take out two loads a day, a hundred and ten to a hundred and twenty cords.”

Seven Kinds of Pastry

When we reached the main camp – all of logs and occupying a big clearing on the edge of a lake – the shadows were beginning to creep across the snow from the encircling forests of spruce. Smoke was climbing from the cook’s fires in the mess cabin. The camp was awaiting the return of the men from the bush.

“Come and taste a cup of tea and some of the cook’s art work,” said Fred Landry.

So help us, there were seven kinds of pastry heaped on those big refectory tables before us! Jam tarts, jelly tarts, jam roll, apple turnovers, plum turnovers, chocolate cake and caramel cake!

Then there were three kinds of pie – apple, raisin and red currant. Now, this was not the sort of fine, rough fare that you could properly apologize for two hundred and more miles north of the Soo. The pies and cakes were dainty as any you would get in a Toronto hotel. The pies were rich, brown, flaky – the kind that makes mother a legend in cities.

“What else do you give them to-night?” we asked the little French chef, who was watching us with interest.

“Beans,” he replied with a grin.

Ah, beans! We knew there would be a bit of the traditional lumber camp somewhere. The cook opened a huge iron kettle almost as big as an engine boiler and lifted out a plate of beans for us. Shades of Boston and the poor mushy dark brown fodder that passes as beans down in the effete and civilized south! These beans were as light as feathers, almost white in color, every bean as complete and unsquashed as when it came out of the bean bag. And the flavor, well, Boston beans have no more meaning for us. Give us lumber camp beans for a banquet!

“Hey! Go easy,” admonished Fred Landry. “This is only tea. You’ve got a dinner waiting for you back at headquarters, and we mustn’t insult the other cook!”

We shook hands very formally with the little camp chef.

Outside, with the rose-colored evening falling upon the world of white and dark green, the great tractor was coming past the main camp on its six-mile haul to the railroad. Behind it came ten huge sleighs – one tractor hauling sixty cords of pulpwood! It reached a slight unavoidable grade on the glassy ice road. The crew broke the sleigh train in half. Up went the first five loads, down the grade came the tractor and slid the second five sleighs into place, and then on its way! In the old days, double and treble teams of horses used to heave and tug at single loads through these miles of woods. It was more picturesque, but that was all.

The water tank is filled from holes cut in the lakes by a horse-windlass and a barrel. The road is repaved every day with polished glass.

Then out of the evening woods trooped the loading gang, its day done. These were all Finns. Broad-cheeked, blond northerners – splendid, monosyllabic fellows with only two faults recorded against them in all the north country: they don’t observe the game laws and they are slightly tinged with Red – that is, they are easily swayed by agitators, and strike without much difficulty. Another fault also heard against them from Canadian lips – they don’t mind work! But a feeling of envy filled our hearts when we saw these great, weary dumb giants sit down to the meals fit for demi-gods: a great envy – for we pictured the employment bureau in a far distant city, a grey, terrible scene, damp and smelly-a pitiful mob of shabby, hungry, ill-looking men leaning against soiled counters, waiting for something to turn up. These tousle-headed, wool-clad huskies of Finns, tucking into such a meal, with warm bunk houses to soothe their work-happy muscles. Already, a concertina was tuning up somewhere out in the Christmas scene. But the songs that were sung were unknown songs.

Lumber Camp Turkish Baths

Have we petered out? What these Finns are doing, the great grandfathers of the present Old Ontario were doing seventy-five years ago. The cities are betraying many a man out of his rightful inheritance. The Finns are taking the north country as they find it. The cities are filled with men wearing callouses on the soles of their feet.

“We sent a man down, to the cities,” said Fred Landry, as though reading our thoughts. “He couldn’t get any men.”

Despite the big tractor and its note of modernity, there are still no end of picturesque things in the great camp. One of the quaintest was the steam bath house. This, like the one-man bucksaw, is a gift of the Finns to Canada. No Finn will work in a camp without a steam bath house. This house is a low windowless log shanty, closely chinked. One whole corner is filled by a huge pile of stones, neatly piled over a hole or fireplace. The rest of the shanty is filled with benches. Early Saturday morning a fire is started in the fire-hole beneath the stones. It is kept afire all day long, until he stones are piping hot. Then the gang comes in from the bush and disrobes. They carry pails of water int the awfully hot shanty. The pails of water are thrown on the stones and the shanty fills with live steam. There the Finns – and all the rest of the camp to the boss himself – sit and stew for half an hour. The dirt is fairly gushed out of them by sweat. It is simply a Turkish bath. But it is a mighty sanitary one.

The blacksmith shop of a lumber camp makes everything from the huge runners for the wood sleighs to the sleighs themselves. Latches, windless beams, horseshoe nails, ten-ton water tanks – nothing is beyond the old-fashioned blacksmith whom the motor car has driven to his final halt in the lumber camp. He is a great man. He has a pile of iron bars and ingots. From them he will make you anything. We found him throwing together one of the gargantuan sleighs that follow the tractor over the ice highway. A little job like building a ship.

The bunk houses are like army huts, except that they are roomier and the bunks are bigger and more comfortable. Gas lanterns light the scene for the boys to read and write before “lights-out” at nine o’clock. The Daily Star arrives every day – just seven hundred miles!

“Well, it’s wonderful,” we said to Fred Landry, the boss of all these wonders. “Christmas every day.”

“It is a great life, he said quietly. “They grouse.”

“Just like the troops.”

“But we are all happy and healthy and it puts a spell on you.”

We drove away in the twilight down the road paved with palest green, between aisles of cathedral spruce and large silver stars snapping in the remote Algoma sky. We passed a little clearing where a Finn lived with his wife and sons. There was warm light in the windows and the bucksaws were hung by the door.

“They’re beginning to settle. He works with the gang and is doing a little clearing, too. His wife helps pile the pulpwood.”

We could now detect, in the dark woods, the tell-tale ghostly paths cut right and left, that showed the cutting done five years before. But the young spruce forest had already forgotten time and was busy restoring the great dark blanket of evergreen which, save for fire, lies over all that great lone land. At the railroad, a sleigh train was just being hauled on to the ramp. A loading crew stood ready to hand-heave the little logs from sleighs to flat cars to go down to the Soo where the company’s big paper mills are.

One year there were four hundred men in this camp – this township. The number changes with the season’s demand for pulpwood. But there are always Finns enough to supply the need for men – he-men, strong, willing men with a taste for producing wealth out of the raw.

Back at headquarters, with the radio bringing in comic cities and their inadequate compensation of sounds hundreds of miles to the south, Fred Landry showed us a map.

“After we’re through here, we’ll move up to one of these other townships.”

It is a great, romantic harvest – the beginning of the strange business that ends with this paper resting in your hands with this story and these pictures printed on it.

---

Editor’s Note:

1. Ralph Connor was an author of romanticized versions of the Canadian West. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, March 13, 1920.

The descriptions of the opening of the Ontario Legislature that appeared in the daily newspapers were written for The General Public. The following description of that ceremony is written for The Man on the Street, and is therefore addressed–

Dear Bill-

To get a picture of the opening of the Legislature you must imagine yourself in a large and prosperous Presbyterian or Methodist church of the late Victorian style of church architecture and decoration.

The Chamber in Queen’s Park, has not an arched roof, and instead of pews it has little old-fashioned, leather-topped desks. But in all respects it suggests, on opening day, a church gathering.

This may be due to the preponderance of women, dressed in their Sunday clothes. Or to the ornate brass chandeliers hanging from the fancy ceiling. Or to the numerous high court judges, justices and such officials as Mr. Speaker and the sergeant-at-arms, who wear black flowing gowns and those white two-piece bibs, and who, therefore, can’t be distinguished from ministers of the Gospel.

It is like the induction of a new preacher. The downstairs part, known as the “floor of the House,” is absolutely jammed with women, who fidget and whose multi-colored garments bewilder the eye. The galleries on all four sides are steep, at an angle of about 60 degrees. And they, too, are jammed with moving, fluttering women.

Down the centre aisle is a very churchy strip of dark red carpet leading to the Speaker’s throne; you might say pulpit.

The air is stuffy. A subdued buzz of feminine conversation fills the wide room.

You expect to hear the pipe organ boom gently forth every moment.

Instead, from the vestry, or whatever the Parliamentary term is for the rooms behind the Speaker’s chair, emerge the wives of the Cabinet Ministers. Mrs. Glackmeyer¹, wife of the sergeant-at-arms, welcomes each lady and escorts her to one of the front pews. The Ministers’ wives are thus placed in a conspicuous position, and the effect on the crowded congregation is precisely that of the arrival of the family of the new pastor at the induction service. Much rustling, much craning of necks and leaning forward and whispering among the rows and tiers of spectators.

A Burst of Applause

The church-like atmosphere is broken for a moment by the entry of Mrs. Drury², wife of the new Prime Minister. She is greeted by a burst of applause. But the arrival of ten dignified judges and justices in their ministerial garb restores at once the churchy illusion.

Three o’clock draws nigh. You begin to worry. Here are these hundreds of ladies jammed into the members’ benches. There is hardly room for Mr. Glackmeyer, the sergeant-at-arms, to hurry up and tie down the aisle, in preparation — Why so many women? Fifteen of them to one man!

Then, the door at the far end from the Speaker’s throne swings wide and in strides a dapper lieutenant. Following is Mrs. Lionel Clarke, wife of the Lieutenant-Governor, on the arm of Mr. Drury. The congregation Irises to its feet and applauds.

A moment of waiting, then the doors again swing wide, and up the purple carpet come the Lieutenant-Governor and the Prime Minister, again followed by a gorgeous array of generals, colonels and majors.

The House is on its feet. The ladies are thrilled. The craning, leaning. bobbing, rustling has grown furious.

Here the illusion of a church ceremony begins to fade.

The bevy of generals and colonels group themselves standing gracefully about the Speaker’s chair, in which sits the Lieutenant-Governor³. These doughty soldiers represent the majesty and force of the Government. They are all armed with swords, though it is safe to say, Bill, that these swords have never hurt anything yet, unless it was the wallpaper at home. General Sir Henry Pellatt, who was among the military escort, seems ill at ease. Does he fear for his liege, the Lieutenant-Governor, in this unprecedented assembly? Anyway, he tries seventeen different postures in the fifteen minutes he is in the chamber, first on one leg, then on the other; but not even the last one seems to suit, and he appears relieved when the Lieutenant-Governor leads the way out.

I was disappointed about the members. I thought we’d see some fun when the members arrived and found those hordes of women occupying their benches. But it appears that the members don’t sit in their proper places on opening day. They seclude themselves almost invisibly along the sidelines and behind pillars. Opening day is the ladies’ innings. When the Speaker calls for votes on some formal matter of ritual, he says-

“All in favor, say ‘Aye’!”

And you hear “Ayes” said shyly from all over the chamber. This immediately causes a great flurry among the spectators. For many of the ladies, who have been glaring at some impudent and insignificant male who has been trying to catch a glimpse of the proceedings, are horrified to hear him utter the “aye” of a member.

Not Much Punch in It

They talk about the ceremony still being observed, Bill, but it Is all very perfunctory and half-hearted. They seem to hustle it through, as if it embarrassed them. They don’t put any punch into it. You would see ten times the ceremony at any small-degree lodge meeting.

Nobody wears any regalia but the new Speaker, Mr. Parliament. And all he has on is the three-cornered black hat, the bib-and-tucker, the black, braided coat and Minister’s gown. You should have seen the expression on Mr. Tom Crawford, who was standing back in an obscure corner. Tom Crawford is not only an ex-Speaker of the Legislature, but a great Orangeman; and what he doesn’t know about ceremonial! Still, it wasn’t all the hustled ceremonial that brought the wistful expression to Mr. Crawford’s face.

The only other items of ceremonial are the great gold mace, which is a kind of a big club; the funny little sword worn on one pantleg by the old gentleman who carries the mace; and the business of having Mr. Clarke, the Lieutenant-Governor, solemnly march out of the room while the scattered members elect the Speaker, (which was all pre-arranged, anyway, as Mr. Parliament was all dressed up in those fancy clothes beforehand), and then solemnly return to the throne.

The only members in their desks were Premier Drury and Mr. Raney on the one side, and Mr. Dewart on the other. They carried on all the conversation, except the speech from the throne, which Mr. Clarke delivered.

It is all over in exactly one-half hour.

Then the session adjourns. A sneaky smell of coffee, tea and sandwiches has been creeping up into the Chamber the last few minutes, just as at a church social. When the adjournment is moved, the congregation rises, buzzes and files slowly in the direction of the smell.

A big part of the crowd, Bill, seemed to be present to size up the new Farmer-Labor Government. Some of them seemed disappointed when no breaches of urban etiquet were made. It is funny how the professional blatherskite class imagines no outsiders can engage in Government. There were several known has-beens scattered through of the House, whose faces betrayed a mixture of envy and curiosity. They grew pallid and limp as they searched in vain for one grain of hayseed, one wisp of straw, at which to grasp for conversational material for the next few weeks. But not one slip was made. The portrait of Wm. Lyon Mackenzie out in the corridor, cynical of expression enough, seemed to glow with unholy glee as the professionals filed dejectedly past him.

The Prime Minister was the most at ease of all the leading characters in the act. You could hear his voice clear, sharp-cut, and assured, while Mr. Dewart’s was high and muffled, and the others were indistinct.

Best-Dressed in House

And the lady spectators, many of whom were not members wives, but the usual representation of Toronto at this function, were a little taken back when the Ministers’ wives, with all ease and grace, took their place in the conspicuous centre of the scene. They were the best-dressed ladies in the House; not the most brilliant nor the most dazzling, but the most tasteful and dignified. What the Toronto ladies expected of the ladies of the U.F.O-Labor Government is hard to say. But by their neck-craning and staring, it appears they were taken aback.

Another item of interest, Bill, was the conduct of Mayor Church. Yes. he was there. He arrived at the main door just a moment before the entry of the Lieutenant-Governor. He didn’t get a hand, so I suppose his nerve left him, and he stayed by the door all the rest of the ceremony. The expression on his face as the gubernatorial party and escort of generals swept up the aisle with him on the side lines was rich. Here was a function at which he was merely a spectator. He must have felt strange. And it was a unique sight for Torontonians, too, after all these years. He was up by the throne the minute the session adjourned, but the crowd was too quick for him, and he only shook hands with fifteen or twenty.

The newspapers all talked about the “gowns” of the spectators. I counted one section of the House, and found 20 blouses. 11 suits and only three gowns.

But I think we’ll have to take a hand in this ceremonial business, Bill. If they are going to have ritual why not have it good? Take the bowing to the Lieutenant-Governor and Mr. Speaker, for instance, as they sit in the throne. Why, it would cause a scandal in our lodge. We’ll have to initiate some of these officials and show ’em what a real obeisance is like.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. Frederick Glackmeyer was the first Sergeant-at-Arms and served 57 years. He served through 16 different Legislatures, under 9 Premiers and 16 different Speakers.  ↩︎
2. They would interchange the term Prime Minister and Premier back then. Ernest Charles Drury was a farmer, politician and writer who served as the eighth premier of Ontario, from 1919 to 1923 as the head of a United Farmers of Ontario-Labour coalition government. ↩︎
3. The lieutenant governor at the time was Lionel Herbert Clarke. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, March 9, 1929.

“ALL swing out in your places ALL!

Allemany left with the lady on your left,

RIGHT to your honey and grand right and left,

Your right foot up and your left foot DOWN,

Hand over hand and so on around,

And hurry up boys or you’ll never git around!

And grab that calico and roll ‘er all around!”

If any of Toronto’s Hill-billies think they have a monopoly of whoopee, they have another blush coming.

You will not see whoopee at the Silver Slipper or the Palais Royale¹: nor at the elite ballrooms where those who dwell north of the parliament buildings commit their shuckings or comings-out; nor at King St. Childs nor anywhere those young people gather whose watchword is whoopee.

If you want to see real whoopee being made. you must go to one of those more democratic dance halls where the country square dance is being reintroduced.

When Henry Ford announced. four or five years ago, that the old-fashioned square dances had more in them than all the foxtrots, one steps and waltzes in the world, we all reflected that a man who was as right about motor cars as Mr. Ford must be wrong on all other subjects. We newspapermen were blamed at that time for making a rather feeble attempt to create a diversion by trying to revive a folk-habit that was as dead as the oil lamp.

But Henry was right again. The square dance, the country dance, is coming back.

Not in the country, where it never went out. But in the city. In literally dozens of Toronto dance halls, three or four square dances are part of every regular program. Three years ago, if anyone had suggested a square dance in such sophisticated company as you will find in a College St. or Dufferin St. dance hall, he would have been amongst the police court complainants the next morning. But in three short years the country dance has come home with a whoopee and a bang. You will see in Toronto to-day any amount of young men and women who never were farther into the country than Agincourt and whose ancestry has never tasted pump water for five generations trying to forget the languor of the one-step and concentrating with all their might on “rollin’ her around for the good of the floor.”

A week or two ago, the Vegetable Growers Association rented the Silver Slipper for a Wednesday night and invited the country gentry from all around to come in to town for a little real old time whoopee. An orchestra that can do hoe-down till the rooster crows was put in the place of that skilful spine-chiller of saxophone and highwayman guitar. A caller stood on a high platform ready to call off the figures and reels. And from Malton and Brampton, Georgetown and Kleinburg, Cooksville and Bolton, came the farmers by the hundred, to foregather in this palace of the modern dance. And the silken hangings and the jazz decorations shuddered and quivered and turned pale as the building rocked and thundered to the healthy dances in which men are gents and ladies are honeys.

That is the beginning. There were enough Toronto Hill-billies present that night to see the out-of-town people making real whoopee. And they went away entertaining curious and exciting thoughts. It will not be long now until square dances will appear even on the highly waxed floors where you can’t “Tamarack ‘er down on the old white pine” without spoiling the polish. It will only be a little while until no debutante will feel she is really “out” until she has participated in a country dance and touched the hands of all her multitude of guests in the really stately and very beautiful measures of an old-fashioned barn dance.

The National Dance of Canada

This writer has seen all kinds of national dances. In the course of newspaper work, a man is tipped off to go and see all kinds of Slav and Czechoslovak national dances being done “right here in Toronto.” And it is supposed to be very quaint and colorful. But the story we have been neglecting for years has been right at our door. The national dance of Ontario, of Canada and of America. For the same dances are done in Quebec and Alberta and Colorado as are done in Ontario. For stamping, they make the Russian dance seem sissy. For whirling, they make the Dervish dances seem timid. For whoopee, they seem to be proof that there is something in the air of a city that takes the ginger and life out of the best of us.

George W. Wade is the premier caller in Toronto. He and his hoe-down orchestra have been quietly riding along for two or three years on the mounting crest of the country dance’s popularity. To start with, most of their engagements were out in the towns. Their largest dances were in St. Catharines, Beamsville and such places as Columbus. Their competition in the smaller towns and villages were the old-time fiddlers and the local callers. But when a city band of hoe-down musicians and a caller who had picked up his art during his youthful travels all over Canada and the northern states began to compete with the limited musical accompaniment of the countryside, the return of the country dance to the city was coming in sight.

To-day, this band is one of many bands qualified to provide the stuff that makes the square dance. And amongst several dance halls that are specializing in country dances in Toronto, Mr. Wade’s company stages a regular weekly dance which attracts hundreds.

The night we attended this old-time dance, there were five hundred and fifty people dancing on the floor of the good-sized association hall. They were packed into every corner. There was not room for another set. Many were turned away.

Outside the hall were parked cars that were muddy with the highways from away up country. Yes, actually! There were country people who drove thirty and forty miles into Toronto to attend a barn dance in a city dance hall! After all, what is thirty miles to anybody now? An, hour or so in the car.

It used to be, a few years ago, a sort of good-humored idea for city folks to drive out into the country to attend an old-time dance. Now it is the fashion for the country people to drive into the city to attend an old-time dance!

It was a great sight. The public hall filled up rapidly with people of all ages. That sameness of age that is characteristic of city dance halls was strikingly absent. Grandmothers came and sat on the chairs along the side of the floor. They did not dance, but their families and friends formed their sets of four couples out on the floor where the old folks could watch them, with much clapping and much smiling and laughter. Middle-aged people were there to dance. Young people danced with them.

The very first thought that entered our heads as we looked down on the assembling throng of people was that this was some sort of a family gathering. There were parents and children uncles and nieces. You could see that. Family parties. And family parties, as you know well, the modern dance had just about scotched.

It’s a Real Old Hoe-Down

Well up at the far end of the floor, on the platform, sat the six musicians, a piano, two fiddles, a banjo and a guitar. And most important of all, the caller. Mr. Wade, leaning nonchalantly – and nonchalance is an essential part of the caller’s art as is the weirdly exciting rhythm of his voice – leaning gracefully against the piano.

The caller cried:

“Partners for a square dance.”

And in great excitement and laughter, with the fluttering of bright colored dresses, very different from the pale elegance of a ballroom’s color, with its ivories and golds and georgettes, the sets were formed. A set is four couples. And they form in a square, couples facing couples.

Then with a great bang. the orchestra started up its lively, old-fashioned and familiar strain. Above the loud shuffle and rhythm of the dancers’ feet, there rose the clear, droning baritone of the caller. In haunting, broken rhythm, with strange stresses and accents on certain words, some of it sung for a brief instant, some of it droned in perfect time to the music, some of it almost shouted, the control of the country dance proceeded.

For the caller actually makes the dance. Figure by figure, step by step, he intones the instructions for every single movement amongst these five hundred and more men and women all dancing for their lives and all doing it perfectly together:

“ALL swing out in your places ALL!

Allemany left with the lady on your left,

RIGHT to your honey and grand right and left,

Your right foot up and your left foot DOWN,

Hand over hand and so on around,

And hurry up boys or you’ll never git around!

And grab that calico and roll ‘er all around!”

The quick, flickering tune of the music. the vast swish, swish, of the dancers’ feet, punctuated with stamps when the caller demands it. Each set weaving, in and out, bowing to each other in quaint little gestures of “footin'” and ending with a swing – each gent seizing his lady and whirling her around.

The pattern of all these square dances is the same. The first “change” as it is called, puts each couple through the same figures. one after another. Then comes the second change of the dance, in which the caller puts not each couple but pairs of couples or four dancers through the same figures in turn.

And then comes the third and last phase, the “break-down.” This is the climax of the dance, in which the caller, with great smoothness and never a slip. puts not the couples but the entire set of eight through their figures, at ever increasing pace, with louder music, with cries and laughter from the dancers, through swift figures, more intricate than ever, until the dance ends in a great, whirling exciting whoopee. And instead of the little patter of polite hand-clapping that marks the end of the modern dance, there rises a tumult of cheers and girls’ laughter. No encore for that. Just cheering the caller and the fiddlers and themselves for a great old hop-down.

“The Gents Their Black and Tan”

In between the country dances, these city functions insert a fox trot or a waltz. And how stupid and dull it looks compared to the picturesque, leaping, exciting mass of movement that had been on the floor a moment ago. The pairs, all young folk, dawdle around, the floor, looking blankly over each other’s shoulders. The modern dance, if it is exercise, is an exercise for the legs from the knees down. The country dance is an exercise for every muscle in the body, up to the facial muscles and the scalp..

After having in recent years seen people pay money to sit in Massey Hall to watch Russians and Sticko-Bohunkians² and other nationals perform their national dances, we suggest that somebody rise up in our midst and put on an exhibition of native Canadian country dances. The least the Exhibition could do would be to set up amplifiers all over the Exhibition grounds, and on a special gala day, bust loose with music and a caller, and create the spectacle of “sets” forming up all over the lawns and pavements of the whole Exhibition grounds to do square dances on the green.

The Black and Tan is one that brought the most tremendous cheers at this country dance we attended on Bathurst St.

“Head couples out to the right and balance there,” was the first instruction of the caller. And the big room grew all alive with motion and color. Then the swing of the tune:

The ladles cross their lily white hands,

The gents their black and tan,

The ladies bow and the gents bow-bow

And turn them all around.”

And away they go, for five full minutes of increasing excitement and verve.

“Jump right up and come right down,

Hop up straight and come down eight,

Hurry up boys you’ll all be late,

Roll ’em all around on the garden gate!”

Or another version:

Hop right up and never come down,

Your band over heel and never come down,

Heavy on the white pine and ALL come down,

Tamarack ‘er down on the old pine floor,

Grab your honey and swing ‘er some more!”

And he has them coming down light on their toes until he calls them ALL to come down; and the beat of that tune is enough to make even a city slicker vault out of his side-line chair and join the fun.

Allemany left means to turn from your partner to the lady on your left, hook your arm through hers, swing around her and then take your own partner’s hand and swing past her, grand chain, right and left. first your right hand and then your left, weaving your way in and out past the others in your set, and when you reach your own partner again, you seize her with an expression of joy and “roll ‘er all around for the good of the floor.”

“Balance all” means that every couple does few little jig steps, facing their opposite couple.

Why Not Barn Dances for Debs?

But the king piece of the whole night of dancing was the “old-fashioned barn dance.”

The dancers formed in two huge circles. Ladies the outer circle facing in and gents in the inner circle facing out.

There was no calling out for this number. The orchestra played that well-known air, “Wall I Swan.”

And here was the whole measure:

Each couple hand in hand, all facing one direction, took two slow paces forward, two back, waltzed three steps. ran three quick steps for ward, three steps back, the gents side-stepped two slow paces inward away from their partners then took three quick faces outward again and took the next girl forward in the circle.

In effect, here was a great ring of people, moving slowly and rhythmically, closing in, opening out, like some gigantic flower moving its petals, and all the time, the gents moved forward, the girls staying on the same place, but each gent dancing for a few bars with a different gal in turn.

What a beautiful and stately sort of a dance for a deb dance! How could a girl more gracefully and graciously meet all the men! How completely social the old-fashioned barn dance is. The modern dance is mean and stingy and anti-social. The barn dance and the other round dances, meet everybody up with everybody else. “I run the old mill (two slow steps forward) Over to Reubensville (two slow steps back) My name’s Joshua Ebenezer Spry” (three brief waltz steps).

Then the three little running steps, hand in hand, the three steps back, then the gents making their two slow sideways steps from their partner and three quick steps forward to their new partner.

Anybody who can whistle that simple old tune can do these steps, and that’s all there is to the old-fashioned barn dance, except that when a roomful of happy, solemn people are doing it, there is a lilt, a grace and a swing to it that has the mysterious effect on your eye that a marching regiment has, as if once upon a time long ago, man had rhythm in him and had lost it. But finds it, for a little while in the old country dances.

George Wade says that the square dances were bound to come back again when musicians became numerous enough to overflow the city markets and overrun into the country music market. In the city, people see so much of each other that when they dance, they want to dance alone, in isolated couples, as if they were apart from all the world. But in the country, they are glad to be together and they want to dance in company.

As soon as orchestras began to visit the country, the folks were livened up and they danced. But not the lonely dances. The company dances.

The logical procedure, as for these musicians, is to bring back to the city some of the spirit and excitement of these social dances. All the older people, all the people whose youth was spent in the country who had not learned the modern dances, were pining for their fun. And it came. It’s here. Hundreds of people are doing it.

And it is whoopee unconfined.

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Editor’s Notes:

1. These were popular dance halls in Toronto. Most have been demolished, but the Palais Royale still exists. ↩︎
2. This is just a made-up word to mean some country you have never heard of. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, February 11, 1922.

The flim-flammer is the hardest kind of crook to catch, for he neither breaks in nor leaves traces. His victim usually sees him but a moment. He operates like the hawk – out of the blue and back again.

A humble little man in his shirt sleeves and bare head came into a Yonge street drug store. In his hand he carried an envelope stamped and addressed, but not sealed.

To the clerk he said:

“Could you give me a ten-dollar bill for ten ones? I want to mall the money in this letter, but the ones are too bulky.”

“Sure,” said the clerk.

The small man removed a bunch of one dollar bills from the letter and handed them to the clerk. The clerk handed him a ten spot.

Then the clerk counted the bills and found only nine.

“Hold on,” he said. “You’re one short here,”

“Oh,” exclaimed the stranger, taking the ones and counting them. “That’s funny. Too bad.”

And he stuffed the one dollar bills back in the envelope in full view of the clerk. Then he said:

“Here, hold this till I run back and get another dollar.”

And handing the clerk the letter, but keeping the clerk’s ten in his hand, the little man in the bare head and shirt sleeves, left the store – never to return.

But it was not just one dollar he got away with. For when the clerk, after ten minutes had elapsed, examined the letter, he found nothing in it but paper. The flim-flammer had switched envelopes. In some neighboring hotel or shop, he had left his hat and coat. This man worked his game on six stores in three Yonge street blocks in twenty minutes.

Another form of flim-flam recently worked successfully on several stores on Roncesvalles and Queen street is the $20 bill stunt. The crook picks a store where there is a girl in charge. He buys some small ten cent article and hands a $20 bill. After he has got his change, he says:

“Oh. never mind that $20! I’ve got the right change. Just give me back my $20”

The girl hands him the $20, he pays down the ten cents, and before the girl grasps the fact that there is $19.90 coming back to her, the crook is out the door and gone.

It is astonishing how this swindle works. There is a confusion in most people’s minds in money-changing that provides the cover for this particular flim-flam.

Foreigners are particular victims of flim-flammers of their own race. An Italian, who was carrying $3,000 trust funds on him, made the acquaintance of an elderly man who had a remarkable lockable purse. The elder man offered to buy his young friend a similar purse for the safe keeping of his $3.000. He did so. And in St. James Park he presented the purse and locked the $3,000 in it for him.

“Now,” said the elder man, “this is my key. I’ve left yours at the hotel. Meet me at the hotel for lunch, and I’ll give you your key.”

The young Italian, his new purse containing the $3,000 safe in his pocket, was on hand for lunch. But his friend failed to turn up. Growing suspicious, he tore open the locked purse and found some clipped newspapers. The crook had switched purses.

Strangely enough, this young Italian, returning heart-broken to Italy, met his crooked friend on board ship and had him arrested in England. But the Canadian government would not go to the trouble of extraditing him.

One of the oddest swindles, not much removed from the flim-flam yet based on a system by which respected citizens of Toronto have made themselves wealthy, was recently pulled off in New York, with a few Toronto people involved.

Two respectable and well-known financial men went up to Petrolea¹, Ont., and bought a tract of land.

Then they went to men with money in New York and put up a novel scheme.

“Give us your money,” they said, “to invest in this oil property. We will dig only one well, and if we don’t strike oil within one year we will give every cent of your money back to you. To safe guard you, we will bank our money in care of a well-known trust company.”

This unusual plan at once attracted money, and the two operators sold in all three million dollars of stock.

This three million they deposited with the trust company.

They then spent ten thousand dollars on sinking a well near Petrolea. And at the end of the year, no oil was struck. So the two financiers returned to New York, drew their three million out of the trust company, and returned every cent to their investors, with the remark that it was a gamble and nothing lost.

But the trust company paid 4 per cent. on that $3,000,000 deposit. which amounted in one year to $120,000!

This the two financiers took for themselves, no mention having been made in the promise to the investors of interest!

A tale is going around about a well-dressed man buying a $500 diamond at a big Toronto Jewelry store, for which he offered his check. The Jewelers asked for references, and the stranger gave the name of the manager of the big hotel at which he was staying. Calling him up, the jewelers were informed that the man was undoubtedly good for the $500.

The stranger then crossed Yonge street to a small jeweler and offered the diamond for $100. This jeweler, sensing something crooked, slipped out his back door on pretence of testing the stone and went across to the big jewelers. When they heard of the offer, they immediately called the police. When the detectives arrested the stranger he protested that the ring was his, and he could do what he pleased with it. But he was taken to headquarters.

Then by telegram the jewelers made enquiry of the stranger’s bank in an American city, and found to their dismay that there was plenty of money to cover the check.

They went up to withdraw their charge and apologize, and the stranger said:

“Gentlemen, this episode will just cost you $1,000.”

The story goes that they paid it.

But the unfortunate part of it is that there appears to be no truth in the story.

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Editor’s Note:

1. Petrolia is a town in Ontario. A little searching around seems to indicate that it was once called Petrolea but the railway companies misspelled it as Petrolia later, and that stuck.. ↩︎

To the Bewildered Ordinary Citizen It Is Merely a Cacophony of Sounds.

Like a Big Bass Fiddle, the Mayor’s Voice Croons Steadily On Through It All.

By Gregory Clark, January 31, 1920.

Toronto’s brand new City Council is assembled functioning. It had its first business meeting and all went merry as a marriage bell. But it is so like all its predecessors that hanged if City Clerk Littlejohn, who has seen forty-six City Councils come and go, can tell, for a minute, whether this is the year 1920 or 1895. You might say, nothing changes in Toronto’s City Council but the names of its members and the fashion in clothes. And as for the latter, they change but slowly – in Toronto’s City Council.

The one thing that marks this year’s Council, the one bright incident that brings a faint ray of relief to the dreary round of City Clerk Littlejohn, in the ennui bred of nigh half a century of the company of City Fathers, is the presence of Alderwoman Mrs. L. A. Hamilton, the first City Mother¹.

In the assembled Council, Mrs. Hamilton sits at the toe of the big horseshoe of benches, directly facing the Mayor’s throne. Should any alderman so far forget himself as to us open up one of those pre-1920 barrages of vituperation, the vain cry of “order, order!” is now reinforced with the presence of a lady. And some of our most irate civic parents have thus had their best teeth pulled.

But City Clerk Littlejohn, whenever the day grows drear and the Council meeting unduly tangled, scrambled and undone, raises his melancholy gaze to the toe of the horseshoe, refreshes his spirit with a glance at the lady member, and returns to his task of keeping the Mayor on the tracks, as one who breathes – “Ah, well! There are signs in the sky! A new day may dawn!”

After the manner of college magazines, we might categorize the new Council as follows:

This year’s Handsomest Man: Either Controller Alf. Maguire or Alderman Brook Sykes. It all depends how your taste runs. Controller Maguire is of the rich, autumnal type of manly beauty; somewhat on the stout side of what is called a man’s prime. His election photos temper justice with mercy. Brook Sykes is the youngest-looking member of the Council; blond, quiet, is alert. One could easily imagine him a movie star of the Doug Fairbanks or Tom Moore type; the manly kind, easy to look at. At any rate, he looks like one apart in that circle of Fathers. He looks like a Civic Son.

Homeliest Man: (Censored).

Youngest Man: Alderman Josephus Singer (who, not being Irish, and therefore not superstitious, occupies Seat No. 13).

Heaviest Man: Alderman Birdsall.

Lightest Man: Alderman Miskelly.

Noisiest Man: His Worship the Mayor.

Most Silent Man: This is a race, of apparently, between Aldermen Winnett and F. W. Johnston, with Alderman Cowan running up. Alderman Cowan’s ordinary speech consists of an ejaculation. A sentence is good going. Two sentences is his limit.

This Year’s Prophet: Mrs. Hamilton. The male members are regarding her as a sort of Mrs. Elijah. They are waiting for her to wave her mantle and hurl the challenge magnificent.

Most Serious Man: Alderman Plewman. He engages not in argument or vain clamor. When he sees his chance he points his order paper confoundingly at the assemblage, and says his say.

This Year’s Poet: Alderman Donald MacGregor.

The Most Aggressive Man: Controller Cameron, who in spite of his recent illness. still dominates the meeting, whenever he feels like it, with his Celtic fire.

Now, the plain citizen might regard with some awe and not a little sneaking veneration the assembling of the City Fathers. One would expect of them, dignity, precision, ease.

Let us attend a Council meeting and see.

The meeting is called for two-thirty, o’clock in the afternoon.

At 2.20, we peek into the Members’ Room: a nice, comfortable room furnished with leather chairs and cigar-fumes.

The City Fathers are already gathering. A dozen of them are draped in easy attitudes over the leather chairs and benches. All are smoking either cigars or pipes.

“Hello, Bill!” yells one City Father to another across the room. “Did ye get yer house yet?”

“Sure,” replies the other in the same prevailing tone, “bet yer hide I did.”

“Well, well!” cries another, “if it ain’t my old friend Henry!”

“Yep. Large as life and twice ‘s natural!”

I quote thus to show the easy air of friendly banter, airy badinage, that relieves the lighter moments of the City Father’s life.

The members continue to arrive. The air becomes thick with cigar smoke. Alderman Mrs. Hamilton enters, gently pressing her kerchief to her nose.

Just before 2.30, in stalks the spectacled and solemn Mr. Littlejohn, City Clerk. Several of the older aldermen attempt pleasantries with him. He seems, however, to be thinking of other things.

He sizes up the assemblage, never relaxing his dignified aloofness. Then he disappears for a moment. He has gone to see if his Worship the Mayor is ready. He is.

A loud bell rings in the Members’ Room. City Clerk Littlejohn takes the up his position at the door and stands looking in upon the members with an air of menace.

The members file blithely into the Council Chamber.

Let’s also go there.

The Council Chamber is high, but none too large for the twenty-eight members of the Council. The horseshoe row of little desks is drawn up facing the Mayor’s throne. There is an empty throne on each side of the Mayor’s. These are for visiting potentates. The Mayor’s dais is guarded by the banners of the 180th Sportsmen’s Battalion, one of the unfortunately broken-up.

The members take their seats behind their little desks. Eighteen citizens and two policemen in the steep little gallery lean eagerly forward to see.

“Order gentlemen!” booms a solemn voice from the door beside the throne. It is City Clerk Littlejohn again.

Then, with long strides, cutaway coat-tails flapping, in flies his Worship, the Mayor. The members rise to their feet. It’s a sort of “Parade, ‘Shun!” affair.

Now comes the startling part of our adventure.

Our eyes have scarce left the flying figure of the Mayor to note the rising members, the members are just in the act of sitting down, when a sudden, droning, nasal and unintelligible voice begins-

“Controller Maguire the minutes of last meeting be taken as read, seconded, carried!”

In the rustle and confusion of all the roomful getting seated, we fail at first, to locate the sound. Just as the last syllable is sung, we trace it to his Worship, the Mayor.

Yes, sir! He started his incantation as his foot touched the dais; and just as his coat tails brushed throne, he had got through the first item on the program.

Thereafter that strange, droning monotone was the motif of the whole piece.

For there is only one way to describe a City Council meeting: it is a symphony in jazz.

To be sure, the various members, officials, clerks, etc., seem to enter everything that is being said or done. But to the bewildered, ordinary citizen, it is merely a cacophony of sounds, a human jazz symphony of the cubist school.

The aldermen talk to each other. Four aldermen make at once. The City Clerk and the Mayor’s amanuensis, Mr. James Somers are both explaining something to the Mayor, while the Mayor, in his low cello-jazz voice, is reading a bill and Controller Alf. Maguire, as the chairman of the Council, is on his feet, twiddling his watch-chain and serenely explaining to the Council the meaning of the bill the Mayor is reading.

It’s a sort of mild pandemonium.

Now and then, as in all good jazz music, there is a pause, and somebody with a voice like a piccolo or a melancholy saxophone (one of the aldermen), picks up a new theme, plays it lucidly, daintily, musically, and then with a crash, fortissimo down come fiddle and drums, trombone, cymbals and bazoo; and they jazz that theme to ribbons and run. And like the oom-oom of the bass fiddles, the Mayor’s voice croons steadily on through it all.

And when it’s all over and you buy a copy of the sporting extra, you are astounded to see, all set out, the items of business done.

It’s a miracle, that’s all! A spectacle de jazz.

One thing we did catch, however, Alderman MacGregor (whose mythical voice corresponded to the fiddle in that mad symphony), rose a couple of times to a point of order and found he was just a couple of jumps ahead of the party on the order paper. His musical protestations were rudely stilled by several members.

One alderman, levelling a withering glance at Alderman MacGregor muttered:

“Fer heaven’s sake, sing!”

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Editor’s Notes:

1. Mrs. Hamilton was the first-ever female city councillor elected in Ontario. ↩︎