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Looking From the Engineer’s Cab Every Level Crossing is a Hair-Raising Hazard – The Engineer Cannot Slow Up His Train Every Mile or So – All He Can Do is to Watch, Watch, and Hope Those Motorists Ahead Will Have Sense Enough to Play Safe – Nervous Strain Terrible

By Gregory Clark, November 28, 1925.

Fifty-eight miles, fifty-nine, SIXTY miles an hour!

The gigantic engine leaps and sways like a racing automobile multiplied a thousandfold.

It feels as if it were hurling itself. The din is soundless, an ear-blocking din. Heat whirls in the grey steel-filled cab. Past narrow windows, the world streams dizzily past.

His gauntleted left arm resting shakenly on the huge throttle, his squinted eyes glued to the narrow ribbon of steel-shod way ahead, the engineer drives International Limited thundering through.

Sixty miles, SIXTY-ONE miles an hour!

Through narrowed eyes, he strains his sight ahead on that swift-rushing path ahead of him, swift-rushing towards him, like a river, a rapids, a furious torrent of road.

For he is coming to a level crossing that is a provincial highway. Soon he will see it. He reaches up, never moving his eyes from the path, and hauls heavily on a cord. Faintly in the din he hears his fierce whistle blow, long, long, short-short.

Then he sees far ahead the highway. Little black objects are scuttering across. Motors.

His giant Six Thousand leaps on. Oh, how the flickering dimly-seen, roadbed is swept up! The little black objects ahead seem to swell larger, larger. The engineer again reaches up, hauls the cord and the fierce whistle hoots.

Of course the highway crossing is protected. There are bells and wig-wags¹ on it. It is broad daylight. It is a still afternoon, and his wild whistle can be heard miles. Yet…

The crossing is clear. The International is two swift train-lengths away from it. A low-hung touring car, grey, speeding, appears back on the highway racing for the crossing. Two hundred yards back!

The engineer crouches. The gauntleted arm clamps against the huge throttle. A wild thrill of horror seizes him, enfolds him. He snatches the whistle cord and hauls hard.

SIXTY-ONE!

He watches with half-closed eyes the point he will pass like a thunderbolt in three-two-ONE second.

The speeding motor car comes to a sudden stop twenty feet from the crossing. The man at the steering wheel is looking up with a grin and waves to the engineer. It was a little joke he was having… His passengers, women, are huddled terrified in the back seat.

The engineer, clammy from head to foot, wipes his gauntlet over his forehead and turns his eyes again on the wheeling road before him, his road. For a mile and a quarter ahead is another level crossing.

He is alone. This leaping, thrusting three-hundred-ton monster of black steel and white fire is his to make go and his to stop. Behind him, attached to him, in his care, are ten eighty-foot cars carrying three hundred and fifty men, women and little children. They are sitting unconcernedly, watching the country flying by, reading, playing, chatting as in a drawing room.

Speed Demanded by Public

The engineer is alone and all this is in his keeping. His mate, the fireman, sits across the cab, watching out the other window, his hand on the levers that control the automatic coal feed to the ravenous engine. But the two lone men in, the front of this mile-a-minute train are separated by an impenetrable, invisible wall of tumult.

You and I, in a hundred and fifty miles of motor travel, will cross perhaps four, five level crossings. We come to them as each of us sees fit, some of us cheerfully and recklessly, some of us cautiously. Four or five of them in a day’s long travel.

This engineer, traveling at tremendous speed, a speed demanded by the public as a whole, you and me included, a modern, twentieth century rate of speed, with neither the power nor the right to stop at crossings, this engineer has to cross not four or five but one hundred and forty level crossings in a hundred and forty miles of headlong, hurtling race.

One crossing to a mile is the average in the older settled portions of the province. Many of them are highways, protected by bells, automatic wig-wag signals or gates. But most of them are just open crossings with only the white cross sign. To you and me they are incidental risks of the day’s run. To the engineer in the cab of your train they are the ever-recurring, permanent, hair-raising hazards and terrors of a life of service.

Duncan Campbell of Mimico is one of the engineers who drive the International Limited, that great train run by the National Railways across Quebec and Ontario into the United States. As you know, engineers do not run a train the whole of its great run. They take it over in “divisions.” At every hundred and forty miles or thereabouts is a “division point” on the line, where a new crew come aboard, to drive the mighty creature its next hundred and forty mile run. Engineer Duncan Campbell’s share in the run of the International Limited is from Toronto to Sarnia and then, after a rest, from Sarnia to Toronto again. This division is one hundred and seventy-four miles through the most thickly-populated district of Ontario and of Canada, and his steel path is crossed by no fewer than one hundred and seventy-nine roads. More than one to every mile of his run. And in that run he hits sixty miles an hour -when he may.

“Each and every one of those crossings,” says Engineer Campbell, “is in itself a danger and a terror. Many of them are just little Country dirt roads. But in this day and age, with the motor car risen to such a place as it has in our lives, there is no road that has not its menace. Of course, an engineer, after many years back and forward on his division, every day of his life, comes to know each stick and stone of it, as a man knows his path home.

“Our orders are to keep our eye on the road all the time. Care as we must for our engines, we must keep our eye on the track ahead. We know every crossing as we come to it, we learn to sound our whistle without really seeing the whistle-post. Some crossings we learn to distrust more than others. All crossings, despite the fact that we pass them several times a week, fill us with secret fear.

“For you must understand, we run on a schedule of time and of speed. The public demand it. But I can stop my train with the emergency brakes, in about twice its length.

“If my train is ten cars, my train is about eight hundred feet long. Therefore, I can stop in 1,600 feet.

One Bad Fright Every Trip

The emergencies that arise at level crossings arise at far less than 1,600 feet; they arise at five hundred feet, four hundred feet. It is the man who suddenly decides he can make it after all, the man who has slowed up and then puts on speed to cross over, the man who is one hundred or two hundred feet from the crossing, who breaks the hearts of engineers.

“Engineers are trained to be experts in judging the interrelation of distance and speed. That is our business, our skill. As I sit at my window watching the crossing ahead and suddenly see a man start up to try and beat me to the crossing I know better than he that I am going to be at that crossing before he possibly can be.

“You would be surprised to know how many motorists strike trains in the second and even the third coach back in these attempts to beat us. If we had tried to stop, we might have just succeeded in slowing enough so that our pilot would have struck and destroyed them instead of them striking us. You have only to recall the sudden way a train appears to rush into the station platform to know how deceiving a train’s speed is. Yet coming into the station the train is actually slowing up, not speeding up.

“There is no trip that we do not have at least one fright. We do not know that the car running to the crossing really going to slow up. We do not know the intentions of the driver. We do not even know if he has seen us. It happens all in a few seconds. To us it sometimes seems an eternity. Yet we never become accustomed to it. Sometimes the cars will skip across so close in front of us that I am in doubt whether we have hit them or not. But no: they got across and waved jokingly to my mate at the other window,

“We are helpless. Once we have set the engine in motion and at a speed demanded by official schedule, we cannot stop save in emergency. If we slowed up for every crossing, not only would it make travel impossible, with a slow-up every mile, but would only make the motoring public confident instead of otherwise with regard to crossings.”

A C.P.R. engineer who cannot be quoted by name has the same experiences to tell.

“It is a regular thing in our trade for engineers to wear out under the strain and have to be laid off or transferred to lighter runs,” he said. “One bad accident puts a nerve strain on engineers throughout the country that is sometimes very hard to bear.

“A few days ago I sat at my cab window and counted eleven cars that crossed on a certain eastern Ontario highway after I was within one train length of the crossing, a matter of seconds, for I was hitting nearly fifty miles an hour. What if one of them had got rattled? What if two of them had met and locked? I could not stop in time. I pulled the whistle cord and held my breath. This was only a few days after a big smash near Toronto when half a dozen were killed.

“That night I dreamed some pretty tough dreams, I can tell you.”

What is to blame for the accidents? If the people of Canada paid out millions in taxes for gates at all crossings, as they are in England, would it help?

“The vast majority of our accidents and our scares,” says Engineer Alexander Bond, who for thirty years has driven on the Toronto-Sarnia run and now is one of the crack drivers of the International, “occur not at night but in the daytime. Our great electric headlight seems to be sufficient warning at night. In the daytime nothing but caution will do. For it is the opinion of engineers generally that seventy-five per cent. of the people hit are fully aware of the approach of the train and are struck as the result of misjudgment or carelessness or recklessness in the face of danger. Perhaps not even twenty-five per cent. were struck not knowing the train was upon them.

Foolish “Jokes” of Motorists

“I recall one day an open car coming at a fair speed towards the crossing. I had blown my whistle, but because it appeared to be a carload of girls I blew it again, for safety. Instead of slowing, the car put on speed. It was already too late for me to brake. We were hitting our top speed. All this happens, you must remember, in a flashing second or two. I was sick with the shock of it. I could scarcely look for fear. But as we rushed past my frozen gaze beheld two or three young girls laughing below me and waving, having pulled their car up suddenly, as they had intended from the start, not fifteen feet from the train.

“We get the shock, whether we hit or not.”

It is safe to say there is not an engineer of really long standing who has not hit something on a level crossing. He has excellent reason to fear them.

One engineer told of his worst accident. A car came to a stop at the crossing, the engineer watching, relieved of heart. The train bored on. Suddenly, to the horror of the engineer, he saw the car jerk into motion and start to cross after all, in low gear, apparently. Whether it was misjudgment of speed or whether the driver, flustered, had put his engine into gear; at any rate, the engineer and his mate felt the little bump which means that the 300-ton engine has struck the one-ton car. When they got stopped they found, on the pilot, a little boy of about five years dead. The father and mother were in fields to right and left.

“There was only one man who could possibly, under heaven, have averted that accident,” said the engineer, a pathetic look on his face, in remembrance of that horror. “And it was not I.”

Thundering through, the great engine cannot dodge. Either it must travel at its modern speed or railways must give up. And no matter whether the speed is sixty or twenty, the relative danger is still there.

What is the answer? In Ontario alone, in 1924, 63 persons were killed and 132 non-fatally injured in level crossing collisions. Ontario alone. The figures for the present year, to date, are 43 killed and 132 injured, in Ontario alone.² The National Railways supplies the Safety League with statistics as to all cars that crash through gates after they have been lowered. This year the number has been 70. So gates, in a sense, are an actual menace, since a car that crashes gates stalls on the tracks, naturally.

Several of the United States have adopted the “stop law” at all level crossings. That is, motor cars and other vehicles must come to an absolute stop at level crossings at all times, whether there is a train coming or not. This necessitates the car changing gear and crossing in low or second. It permits warning signals to be seen or heard.

What inconvenience, what injustice would the stop law do the motoring public? In a hundred miles of travel a man would have to stop at level crossings an average of half a dozen times. In the course of a day a motorist does stop and change gears half a dozen times merely from the ordinary hazards and chances of the road, either a hole in the pavement, a detour obstruction, a traffic jam. Would the stop-law be so great an inconvenience?

Over a hundred dead in the past two years seem to testify in Ontario alone that the stop- law is due.

Thundering through they must thunder through, those great trains. A whole transportation system depends on the exactness of arrivals and departures.

On what depends the speed and the care of a motorist on the highway?

Just lives, human lives.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. Wigwags is a nickname for a type of railroad grade crossing signal once common in North America, referring to its pendulum-like motion that signaled a train’s approach. They seem to have been use from the 1920s to the late 1940s where they began to be phased out in favour of flashing lights. ↩︎
2. Current information on deaths and injuries can be found on the Operation Lifesaver website, which also has good information on railway safety. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, October 21, 1922.

If it is neighbors you want, go north.

If you are sick of the soft, fickle hand of city brotherhood, head for some place beyond North Bay.

If you are seeking the Land of the Golden Rule, you will find it, chances are, in a blackened and forsaken and dismal country lying between Cobalt and Englehart…

—

An old man comes limping up the hill to the relief car at Charlton. He must be all of seventy. His overcoat is six sizes too large for him. A boy’s cap perches on top of his old grey head. His broken shoes are sodden with slush. He seeks each spot he sets his foot. He winces with each step.

As he approaches the little group huddled about the door of the lone express car, a woman sitting on a box rises to give the old man her place.

“Sit down, woman,” says the old man. “A fine day, everybody?”

It isn’t. But they all agree it is.

He rests against the car. Presently his turn comes to stand before the opulent open door.

“Now, dad, what?” says the constable dishing out supplies.

“Somethin’ warm for an old woman and an old man,” says the old fellow.

“Well, you’ve got a coat,” begins the constable.

“Oh, ’tain’t for me,” says the old man. “It’s for an old couple, neighbors of mine. They are too old to come, so I come for them. They…”

“Were you burned out?” queries the constable.

“Me and them and the whole concession,” says the old man. “We are all starting over again in W—‘s barn. Now, the old woman, she needs a cloak…”

“How far have you come?”

“Oh, three, four mile.”

Out come priceless things from the express car – coats, sweaters, stockings, heavy wool underclothes.

The old man’s arms heap up. A boy steps over and says —

“I’ll help you carry them, mister.”

“You go help your own father,” says the old man, sternly.

And down the hill he goes limping, under a large bundle tied in a sheet.

A neighbor.

—

A big, mustached man is standing at a crossroads, his back to the driving rain.

Every party that comes trudging up the road has women and children in it. The big fellow halts them all.

“Where are you heading?”

“Englehart,” they answer.

“It’ll be dark in an hour. Never make it to-night. My place is half a mile up the side road here. Something to eat and room for the woman and kids in the house if you’ll share the barn with me.”

“Thanks, mister.”

The heavy-hearted little parties turn off the lonely road up the muddy side road.

And the neighbor stands with his big back to the spinning rain, watching up the desolate highroad.

—

A middle-aged man sits in the shelter of a bit of ruined brick wall. In his arms is cuddled a baby in a piece of soiled white blanket.

“A pretty baby,” I say to him. “Is it your only child?”

He blushes with the violence of the northerner.

“This ain’t mine,” he says. “Mine is all growed up. This one belongs to a young woman that took sick and they took her out to New Liskeard in a buggy. I’m carrying her baby in.”

“Why, it’s miles!” I exclaim.

“Well, I’ve come miles. But I’ll meet a car pretty soon, I figure. Anyway, it don’t matter – he’s nice and warm.”

—

Amid the ruins of what once was a house, a barn and a cow stable, a broad young man is toiling with an axe and some long nails and blackened remnants of timber.

Both his hands are swathed in dirty bandages. Above the bandages his wrists show scarlet and raw. He handles his axe gingerly, clumsily.

He proudly surveys the pitiful little lean-to he has made out of brittle charred boards.

“What’s this you’re making?” I ask.

“Well,” says he, resting gratefully. “It’s a sort of a cow shed. If my hands weren’t burned I could cut some logs out of that bit of swale over yonder that escaped the burn. But this’ll do fine, for a while.”

“Was this your homestead?”

“No, it belonged to a fellow I worked for, summer before last. He got all messed up saving his own kids and his neighbors, so I says to him I’ll fix up a shelter for his cows.”

—

If you don’t believe these legends, go and see for yourself.

---

Editor’s Note: Greg was sent to cover the Great Haileybury Fire that ravaged the Timiskaming District from October 4 to 5, 1922. It has been called one of the ten worst natural disasters in Canadian history.

By Gregory Clark, October 4, 1924.

Pranks, Politics and Scraps Made Up Boyhood of Ontario’s First Son – Whenever He Can He Goes Home to His Folks at Morrisburg – Aims at Restoring Responsibility in Province’s Schools – Forswore Big Salary and Life of Ease Because He Is a Fighter

G. Howard Ferguson¹ sat in the wood shed.

His father and mother sat in earnest talk in the office of the big stone house.

“He is going from bad to worse,” said Mrs., Ferguson. “You are away at the sessions of parliament a great deal, and you don’t know what is going on.”

“Hmph!” said Dr. Ferguson. “Don’t I!”

“This time,” continued Mrs. Ferguson, “the principal of the high school says he does not see he is going to take Howard back. It was serious offense against the discipline of the school. He put gunpowder into the stove, which blew off the lid and a kettle for distilling moisture into the class room air…”

Dr. Ferguson, M.P., stood up.

“There is one thing we mustn’t forget. It takes brains to think up mischief. It takes spirit to carry it through. I prefer a young rascal to a mollycoddle. If we can only control him until the serious affairs of life begin to interest him, I am certain Howard will be a success, for he is filled with vigor and ardor. Why, he may some day be premier!”

And with a chuckle the doctor walked out wards the wood shed. For his sly reference to Howard and the premiership would settle Mrs. Ferguson. She was born of a political family, and here she was the wife of a politician, and doing her best to raise a family of politicians.

G. Howard Ferguson continued to sit in the wood shed, his chin sunk in his hands, gloomily pondering the mysteries of existence, until his grave parent entered, and read him a stern and final ultimatum with respect to his future conduct.

All this was forty years ago. It would have by now been forgotten if a little girl, devoted worshiper of the wicked Howard, had not lain cuddled in her crib in the next room, listening intently to the ominous conversation of her parents.

What Does Kemptville Say?

I went down to Kemptville, near Ottawa, to try and obtain a “line” on the premier of Ontario. In The Star library, where files are put on all public men, there is a fat file labeled Furguson. But in those papers and photographs there is not one picture of the premier except in the political aspect, and not one printed line but is political.

Since his announcement of the temperance plebiscite the whole province is sharply curious as to the human aspect of the Hon. G. Howard Ferguson. Politics reveals most men. Politics has clothed the premier in a voluminous garment. What is he like, with the toga off? What’s his sport, his hobby, his life?

Kemptville holds the answer, entire.

Because Kemptville knows so much about Premier Ferguson, the rest of Ontario knows little.

By a boiling process, I could reduce my adventures down to a few paragraphs in estimate of the man.

But we won’t boil. Come on with me.

I landed into Kemptville before seven o’clock of a bright and frosty morning. A gentleman in whiskers, representing a large implement firm, was the only other passenger besides myself to be deposited at Allen’s Hotel.

A boy of fourteen was sweeping the sidewalk in front of a neighboring store.

“Where does the premier live?” I asked him.

“Just up the street there. But he ain’t here now. He’s in Toronto.”

“I just came up to get some information about him.”

“Oh? Well, you came to the right place.”

“What sort of a man is he?” I asked.

The boy studied me curiously.

“Say, he’s the best… Say, do you know, he gives orders to the schools to issue out ice cream tickets to us, every fair time, and this year I got three. Howard’s the best man in the world. He never walked past me in his life. You ask anybody.”

A sound within the store set the boy vigorously sweeping again. So I went into the hotel. Mr. Allen greeted me. I told him my business.

“Anybody,” said Mr. Allen, “can tell you something about Howard. But you must be sure to see Mrs. Dr. Storey – that’s his sister – and you must pay a visit to the ‘board of trade.'”

He smiled and showed me through the window a little grey shop across the road from the hotel.

Sitting There for 25 Years

“That’s Bill Hyland’s shoe repairing shop. But it is better known hereabouts as the ‘board of trade.’ That’s where the boys sit. You will find some of them there at any hour of the day. When Howard is home, he sits in there, too. They know Howard. He’s been sitting in there for twenty-five years.”

Already I began to have an inkling of the situation – and an inkling of the Hon. G. Howard Ferguson. So, to see how far this thing was going to go, I resolved to ask everybody about the premier. I got Alf. Little to drive me around in his ancient Ford. Alf. is older than the premier, but went to school with him.

“What kind of a man is he? What was he like when he was a kid?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you,” said Alf. “He was only so high. But he could lick you to a standstill. Next minute, he would lick anybody that touched you. As far as I can remember, he didn’t do anything but fight. But he was the most popular kid in the town. He’s never changed. Still fighting, all the time, still licking bullies, still befriending everybody, still the most popular kid in town.”

When the sun came up and shone fair down into the main street of Kemptville, there began to be signs of life. Merchants opened up their doors and let down the awnings. Boys swept off the pavement. And then appeared a few elderly gentlemen who marched leisurely, from different directions, halting for brief chats with all who were out, but converging definitely upon Bill Hyland’s cobbler shop.

So I went in, too. Bill Hyland is one of those lean, gentle, genial men who beam behind spectacles. His shop is the typical cobbler’s shop, littered with old boots and leather, the walls covered with cards and papers, the air reeking with the pungent, friendly smell of leather. Grouped about the little den, on chairs without backs, sat three members of the board of trade.

“The premier comes in here, when he’s in, town?” I asked.

“When he’s home,” corrected Bill Hyland. “He sits right there, on that box by the window, with his legs crossed, smoking and leaning his head back.”

“What does he talk about?”

“Whatever there is to talk about. He’s been sitting there for years. I don’t know how many. He’s one of the bunch. The only difference his being premier has made is to keep him away from home.”

“He’s closed his law office,” I said.

“Yes, but not his home. His farm is still going strong. He comes home whenever he can, and sets to work on his farm and comes in here to talk with the boys, the same as ever.”

“I guess he is pretty popular in Kemptville.”

“Why shouldn’t he be? He’s lived here all his life. We’ve known him since he was a kid. He’s a friend to everybody. And he has made good. And he still lives in Kemptville.”

He is a Small-Town Man

In this quiet town, Howard Ferguson was born and raised. Back to it he came, after seven years’ exposure to the charms of the big city during his university and law courses. From it he came to Toronto as member of the legislature and cabinet minister and premier. But back to it he still comes whenever the increasing responsibilities of Toronto permit.

And here we have the reason he is not known, as other public men come to be known, to the big city. Because he is a small-town man. Unlike Whitney and Hearst², he has not transferred his interests and his home to Toronto when big politics called. It is a character hunt we are on, and hero we have the first clue: when he can, he goes home to his folks.

The board of trade was a little bit stand-offish with me, for there is dynamite in politics, and who knew but that I might be an enemy within the lines?

“They tell me Howard was a live wire, as a young fellow,” I suggested to the meeting, by way of setting loose the anecdotes. The boys exchanged smiling glances.

“You see Mrs. Dr. Storey,” said Bill Hyland, tapping at his last. “She will have it right.”

So at last I came to the big stone house where, the premier’s sister lives. She was the same little girl who lay curled in her crib listening to the fateful words of her parents the night G. Howard Ferguson sat alone in the wood shed.

“The premier’s success in politics,” I said to her, “comes, as such things come, from character and not from chance. Are we right in regarding him as a fighter, a man of high spirit and energy, to whom politics is second nature, whose hobby is politics, whose fun is politics, whose life is politics?”

Raised in Political Atmosphere

“It would have been a great wonder,” replied Mrs. Storey, “if Howard had not gone into politics and made a success of politics. For he was born and raised in an atmosphere thick with politics.

“When he was three years old, his father, Dr. Ferguson, entered the Federal house for the first time, and remained a member of parliament for twenty-five years. So, for the formative years of his life, Howard lived in the thick of it, when politics was a greater game than it is to-day.

“This house had three spare bedrooms, always kept in readiness for the political guest. There were guests to dinner nearly every night, and politics was the talk at table.

“Howard’s mother was even more interested in politics than his father, for it may fairly be said that she did a great deal to organize and plan the doctor’s campaigns, and she had much to do with the success of his career.

“So you may see Howard should be pretty well grounded in the current history of politics. What a boy listens to at the table, every day of his life, is likely to influence him.

“Then, the practical side of politics, the manual labor of the game, has been familiar to him from childhood. By the time he was ten years of age, he was out driving through the country distributing campaign literature, posting up notices, and accompanying his father on canvassing trips, learning the art of political discussion and of soliciting a vote. These things were not chores to him. They were manly stuff, and he took the most ardent interest in the whole game. I recall him coming home to dinner with the latest political gossip he had picked up sitting around the stores with the men of the town. And I remember his goings and comings on winter nights near election time, when he was driving through the country in a cutter, going messages for his father, delivering literature or arranging the practical details of meetings.

“Of course, character was being formed during these adventures, but the practical lessons in politics which he learned in boyhood seem to have been invaluable to him, and to have had some influence in directing his steps.”

Was Forever into Mischief

I turned Mrs. Storey’s memory towards his character as a boy. Was he a fighter?

She laughed.

“I regret to say, he was forever into mischief. He was so eager a disposition, so full of energy and vitality. I imagine he could not be content with the ordinary outlets offered to boys. It must be confessed that he was frequently suspended and expelled from school, because of his mischief. Fred Napp, of roller boat fame³, wore two gold teeth in front, as the result of a shinny argument with Howard. I remember him coming home with black eyes, and other wounds, which only endeared him to me the more.

“He used to go with other boys back to the gipsy camp and play cards with the gipsies. When he was attending high school, one of his favorite games was to attend auction sales in the town and when any well-known town, skinflint began to bid for something. Howard would bid too, running bids up to much more than the other had hoped to pay, and when Howard felt he had gone as far as was safe, he would drop out.

“Only one time, if I remember, did he get caught. He bid against a certain character in town for a lot of old railroad lamps, an old gun and a broken carpet sweeper. And the other dropped out, leaving Howard the winner of the contest at $8.35. This was one of the two times that Howard got a switching from his father. For father had to pay the money for the junk.

“It was after the escapade of the powder in the stove at school that his father sent Howard down to the shanties for a week to work at hauling out railway ties.

“He was not a success at school, because of his mischief. He had his ups and his downs. But his father was not alarmed, for he said that if this energy, and invention could be turned to the serious affairs of life in due time, the boy would be a success. And that has proved true.”

The Fights in Harding’s Mill

Not Mrs. Storey, but Jim Hagen and a couple of the other old schoolmates of the premier told of the fights in Harding’s flour mill. Old man Harding would put up coppers for the boys to fight for. On the big bare mill floor the boys would gather after school and, paired off, would fight till “nuff” was called, the winner taking the one cent stakes.

Howard was the top boy in his class in this fighting. Jim Hagen remembers him fighting ten fights in succession, and taking boys a good deal bigger than himself in order to compete in the copper stakes.

“He became a mighty skilful scrapper,” said Jim Hagen, “but mind you, it was only for sport.”

Howard got into trouble once, though. The system of initiation into the high school war known as “blocking.” It is nowadays known as the “royal bumps.” The novices are taken by head and feet and bumped against a brick wall.

Howard was one of the four lads who undertook to give the bumps to a big lad named Brown. It was a rule that each new boy had to step up himself and take the bumps, for if he backed down, heaven help him. Brown had to be seized by force to take his initiation. And in giving him the bumps, he was injured. The father had the case up before the magistrate. and Howard was fined $8.

“He announced, at that time,” said one of the chums who also was fined, “that he was going to enter the profession of law. And he did.”

G. Howard Ferguson sat in a little bedroom in the house at 191 McCaul street, Toronto. On the floor lay his carpet bag, unopened.

Here he was, in the midst of the great city the world before him. The principal of the school had finally and irrevocably decided that he could no longer countenance Howard’s mischief and infraction of the discipline of the school.

And here was Howard, not a matriculant, sent up to Toronto by his father, to try to matriculate in the university at the Toronto examinations.

He was lonely and alone. He had reported at the Y. M. C. A. and at the registrar’s office. Not a soul had spoken to him. He had registered. And there on the floor of this strange room, so far from merry Kemptville, lay his carpet bag unopened.

Would He Head for the West?

Would he stick it? Or would he grab his bag and disappear – go out west where all the youth and adventure of that day were heading?

At that moment, there came a rap on the door, and a big fellow by the name of Jack Ferguson walked in.

He was a third year student at the university.

“I happened to notice your name on the roll,” said the stranger, “and my name being Ferguson, I thought we Fergusons should stand together.”

The older fellow took young Howard in tow, introduced him into the life of the university, got him into the football club, and Howard gave up all dreams of going west, and sailed into his matriculation with his usual vigor.

He settled down to seven years of college in Toronto, to his degree in law.

Character: a distinctly independent nature, with the ingenuity to devise mischief and the spirit to see it through, even to the extent of being, finally, sent up alone to face matriculation in the big strange city. He was no compromiser.

The comic coincidence of the thing is that the very day I was learning all these mischievous exploits of the boy the man was giving to the press of the province the details of the great educational reform which he, as minister of education, as well as prime minister, has devised.

When I got home from Kemptville, I got an appointment with the premier and told him I had been down to the old town and had dug up some great tales of his boyhood.

“Go ahead,” said he. “Our sins will find us out.”

“But,” said I, “isn’t it odd that these things should be told just at the moment you announce your educational reforms?”

“I have in mind,” said the premier, “some of the things that happened to me as a boy, when I make the changes I have suggested. Responsibility is the thing! It was want of responsibility that made me a mischief. So I advised responsibility of my own.

“Don’t imagine for a minute that my schoolmasters did not leave impressions on me that have lasted all my life. A man to whom I owe as much as to anybody in the world was a schoolmaster whom I met after I had left school, but who taught me this philosophy: Never worry and never lose your temper.

“But responsibility is a good philosophy, of which we have almost lost sight of in recent times, so religiously have we sought, with infinite organization and regulation, to take all responsibility off teachers and children and mankind as a whole. My desire, in the reforms I have outlined, is to restore responsibility to teachers and children. I want to bring back the old personal contact between teacher and pupil which you will find amongst the best memories of the older men. The legendary schoolmaster who left the imprint of his character on his pupils.

“I have cut the book of official regulations which bind and tie the teachers and pupils of this province from two and a half inches thick to one inch. I hope to do more. Set them free. A boy isn’t a pail in which to pour facts. He is a material to inspire with life, to galvanize into glorious life. If you hold him, he will wriggle — Thank heaven!

“Go ahead with your stories if you want to. They will be no different to the stories that could be told of every schoolboy in the country.”

Tied Knots in the Bell Rope

Aye. Howard, of the time you tied the knots in the bell rope so that the lame teacher couldn’t reach it (and went and visited and ministered unto him when he was ill,) and of upsetting the bell so that it wouldn’t ring (and only one boy bold enough to climb the roof and set it right,) of unscrewing all the seats and desks from the floor the day the inspector called, and the vast hullaballoo and confusion when the pupils came in and sat down with a crashing and smashing under the grave inspector’s outraged eye, (and you suspended, no questions asked, but just the teacher saying weakly: “Howard! Leave the room!”) and so on and so on.

When he came back from College, and set up his shingle as a barrister and solicitor, his well remembered talent for raising heck did not work against him, for he at once obtained a good practice in the law which involves the interests of a small town: suits, mortgages, property law. What energy he had to spare from the establishing of a law practise he put into the town council, being a town councillor, reeve and a member of the school board. (His mind turns to education.) Then in 1902 he went up before the Conservative convention for nomination to the provincial house, but failed to get in. In 1905 he again went before the convention and went in when the Whitney government came to power.

This, of course, brought him into his stride. When he was invited into the cabinet he wired his mother, who was already on her death bed, of the realization of her dreams, this gifted lady who had been into politics all her days, and it was a great triumph for her.

Stuck to Home Folks

But he never abandoned the home folks. When he came into Bill Hyland’s place, as a cabinet minister, he took the same seat as ever, and they still called him Howard.

When he went back as prime minister, it was the same.

Kemptville has a beautiful big agricultural college and experimental farm now (since Howard’s accession to the cabinet) and a fine armories, (of, recent date). Why not? The big house he lives in he has had twenty years, with the farm. He was a success before he was a political success.

His farm makes him money. It has an orchard of five hundred trees, and he fattens hogs and steers. and grows corn and vegetables. He could live off his farm. Last season, he got the best price in the township for his hogs.

In 1920, when the Hearst government went down to defeat. Hon. Howard Ferguson announced to his colleagues and friends that he was through with politics. It was generally known that a very big industrial corporation were after him, and had offered him a salary of some thirty thousand dollars to look after their foreign interests.

It was a beautiful prospect, to spend his richest years – he was now fifty – with money and travel all over the world, with his wife for he has no children. It was the sort of goal a man dreams of. An end to all the responsibilities and burdens for polities is a master that lets a man not many paces from the door. An end to struggle and care – just to travel and deal in big, accustomed matters, from Norway to Japan, Paris, London, the world!

Howard Ferguson, the small-town man, had never traveled. Here, in 1920, before the vigorous, active man was a dream vista, ahead, down the years.

He Simply Couldn’t Quit

He was through. He told his colleagues, his constituents, his friends. His colleagues pleaded. His party begged. Big Tories came down from Ottawa to argue with him, to beg him. But he was going.

Then came the timber enquiry.

“You can’t go now!” his colleagues cried. “It would look as though you were running away.”

“Let them talk. It won’t hurt me. I have nothing to hide.”

“But It will damage the party if you quit,” they argued. “Even if you feel no hurt, it will hurt the party. Fight, Howard, fight!”

As the twig is bent…

He had his plans made. His affairs were more than half put in shape. He had accepted the big corporation’s offer. His wife and he had planned trips, voyages. They had spent nights and nights planning, reveling, scheming.

And then character began to function.

The fights in Harding’s mill, for Old Man Harding’s coppers, the politics around the table, the Party, the trips in the winter night stacking up dodgers on country cross-roads, the meetings, the argument, Bill Hyland’s “board of trade,” the home folks, fight, fight.

So the Isles of Greece where burning Sappho love and sung. Also, the capitals of Europe, calling, calling, ease, wealth, independence, an end to fighting, fighting-Howard stayed.

He walked the floor all one night. His wife had said: “We will stay!”

The next morning he came out with his famous, “nail-their-hides-to-the-fence.”

And he is premier.

When he announced to a contentious province the holding of a temperance vote, the province asks, sharply curious: “What manner of man is he, himself, apart from politics? What is his life? What does he play?”

Well, there you are!

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. Howard Ferguson was the 9th Premier of Ontario from 1923-1930. ↩︎
2. James Whitney was the 6th Premier of Ontario from 1905-1914. William Howard Hearst was the 7th Premier of Ontario from 1914-1919. ↩︎
3. The Knapp Roller Boat was a weird attempt to increase speed and reduce sea sickness. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, September 22, 1928.

“This court,” states Magistrate Robert J. Browne, “stands adjourned for one hour for lunch. It will continue if necessary until midnight.

“We will have no quick-lunch justice here!”

Quick-lunch justice!

Everything about the old Toronto police court calls for quick-lunch justice. Justice slid along the greasy counter. Justice slapped down on the plate. The dingy old court room shouts for it. The dark and dismal corridor outside the door where distressed mankind waits for all the world like a Hogarth¹ drawing of the Old Bailey – all shout for quick-lunch justice. For mercy’s sake, make it speedy.

Here is a court room that was built in 1899. In 1899, a buggy was the fastest thing on Toronto’s streets. In 1899 there were less than 200,000 people in Toronto. Booze provided only one or two problems – drunks, desertions. Now booze has become a complex thing, bootleggers, motorists, dives. In 1899 it was an honor and privilege to appear before Colonel Denison² in the beautiful spacious new court room..

But age withers.

The windows of the police court to-day have shrunk to slits that let in a gray light. The curtains are drab and faded. The woodwork seems stained by countless sinful vapors.

The roar of a great city forbids that windows be opened. The tumult of the gears which turn the wheels of justice in this old room make it sometimes impossible for the court to proceed. On one day recently, Magistrate Browne sat from ten o’clock in the morning until four-fifteen in the afternoon before the “morning” court was ended.

Five different police courts exist in Toronto, and except for a small committee-room next door to the main court room, the old police court has somehow to accommodate them all. The “drunk” court, now shrunken to a little formality of twenty minutes. Then the main criminal police court, which in the heyday of Colonel Denison, used to run from ten to twelve o’clock and which now runs on and on, sometimes into the late afternoon; the women’s court in the little crowded committee-room, the traffic court in the afternoon wherever it can be accommodated, and on certain days, the health court, which sandwiches itself wherever it can find a high desk and a fragment of silence.

In this one year, there will be one hundred and twenty-five thousand cases pass through these courts!

The Police Court Midway

What is guarding Toronto, then, from quick-lunch justice? From slap-stick justice?

The corridor is like a midway. Toughs and gentle women witnesses; babies in arms, thundering policemen, sick people, broken-hearted people, grim accusers, sly, shifty ones – the human midway, the corridor of the Toronto police court.

Toronto’s court has no witness rooms, no counsel’s rooms, no privacy whatsoever. The law of the land is that the court room shall be public. Whoever gets there first gets a seat in the court room, and the rest are herded into the corridor, to listen and strain amidst the shadowy din to their names called. Lawyers must consult their clients in this public highway. Witnesses, tragic or cold, gentle or rough, must all sit together and take away a nightmare with them when they go.

Common human sympathy urges everybody to hurry, to get the thing over and done with.

But Toronto’s five magistrates live in fear. They live in fear of being influenced by physical conditions around them. They do not know from one hour to the next which court room they will be in. Nothing is ordered or orderly. They live in a kind of pandemonium, but they will not err in the direction of speed.

“There will be no quick-lunch justice here,” says Magistrate Browne.

“Lewis Harris,” cries the clerk of the court.

“Lewis Harris,” echoes the constable of the dock.

At the back, the public is wedged in tight in the benches. In all the standing room, constables and detectives, witnesses and officials are packed in. The dock is filled with a row of midway spectacles, who look like the men who sing, in a Balieff ballet³, the “Song of the Volga Boatmen.”⁴ One of them, Lewis Harris, rises and stands forth.

Between him and Magistrate Browne on his high bench, are the lawyers, privileged characters, who rise and sit, bend and scuffle, talk and wave documents, come and go. Over all this scene there quivers a tumult of sound and movement.

But away up against the high panelled wall, alone and aloof, in black coat and wing collar, sits the young magistrate. He is handsome in the Greek way. His eyes are intense blue and very wide and quiet. He has a broad, strong mouth, which turns down in a faint sardonic smile when the rumpus of his court reaches one of the panics of physical congestion.

He is at rest. None of the excitement seems to reach him. His head is framed against the high panels, and you think the gray hair on his temples is blonde hair, so peaceful is his face.

“Lewis Harris!” cries the clerk of the court. In triumph, as if proud to produce anybody at all amidst all this whirligig.

No Off-Hand Judgment

Harris is an old man, bowed, white-haired, with spectacles down on his nose like a collector of coins.

We are all sympathy at once for Lewis Harris. What crime can be juggled up against so quaint and helpless an old man as this?

Maybe, we thought, he has no home and has come to the end of the long, long tether.

“Pickpocket,” says a voice, amidst the countless whispering, murmuring voices.

It seems that at the Exhibition, two visitors caught Lewis Harris with his hand entering one of their pockets. They held him and a detective arrived.

What an absurdity! Pickpockets are young and nimble and foreign. This man is old and gentle and far from nimble.

A lawyer is standing up, leaning forward and stretching up his arms in gesticulation to Magistrate Browne.

“Sixty-eight years old,” exclaims the lawyer. “It is admitted he tried to pick the pocket. But he is so old, your worship. Deport him. Send him back to the States where he came from. Fell for a momentary temptation.”

But another lawyer is on his feet, a rugby player of a lawyer. He is the crown prosecutor and he holds in his hand a very large sheet of foolscap.

“A record, your worship.” he says in a man’s voice that cuts through the fog, “dating back to 1894. Philadelphia, 1894; Boston, 1896; Chicago, 1899; San Francisco, 1904; Portland, Oregon, 1906; San Antonio, Texas, 1907; Detroit, 1913: Toledo, 1916; Omaha, 1918; Atlanta, Georgia, 1922…”

Why Lewis Harris is no poor old man! He is an adventurer, a world traveller! A man who has seen the world.

“All,” says the prosecutor with the man’s voice, “for picking pockets.”

“Sixty-eight years old!” pleads the lawyer. “He is not long for this world. Deport him, your worship. Send him back to where he belongs.”

The magistrate’s wide blue eyes are staring at the old bent figure below him.

No quick-lunch justice here.

“We can only feel sympathy,” says the magistrate, “for this old man at the end of his life. But the interests of the community must be served. We cannot deport him. That would only create the impression amongst American crooks that they can come up here with impunity, take their chance, and if caught, all their punishment would amount to would be to be sent back home at no expense to themselves. Nine months in the reformatory, and to be deported at the conclusion of his term.”

Thinking Down His Sympathy

The next case is a boy.

He is young and clean and slim. There is a delicate look about him. If we felt sympathy for a sinful old man, we feel even more sympathy for this straight youth of nineteen. He has the face of a poet, and this is no company for poets.

A poor woman hobbles in and sits beside the lawyers at the witness bench.

The boy, it seems, is charged with criminal negligence. He drove a truck and struck down this woman. All the evidence comes out, a doctor concluding with detailed technical description of the injuries. The woman with three little children got off a street car under the Queen St. subway and along out of the gloom came this truck and hurled her to the ground.

The boy walks nervously to the witness box and stands up close to Magistrate Browne. They talk face to face.

“Have you a driver’s license?” asks the magistrate.

“No, sir. I am studying music….”

“He won,” says the boy’s lawyer, “the governor-general’s prize for violin two years ago.”

“I am on my holidays,” continues the boy. “And I was helping my brother. I thought I would help him, so I drove this truck from the repair shop to our home.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen. I got along all right, but coming through the Queen St. subway, it was dim, and I was following the street car. I did not know street cars stopped in the subway. Suddenly. I found myself rushing beside the street car. It was all a whirl. I had struck the woman before I knew anything. It was all over…”

What kind of justice will we get here?

Surely a young man with only a little gray at his temples will feel a great sympathy for this boy and his violin, who suddenly in the dimness found himself rushing past the street car and all his life tumbling about his head.

Do students of the violin go to jail?

“There is nothing in your favor,” says the magistrate, slowly. Let the court beg for hurry. Let anxious fists hammer at the gates. “Nothing in your favor. You are young. You have no license to drive. You are not accustomed to driving. Yet you take a death-dealing machine through the streets of this city. And only the mercy of God prevented you from, killing a woman and two of her three children. This is a dangerous age.”

An almost silence has come on the court and the lawyer stands with jaw fallen. The magistrate is staring with calm eyes at the boy, thinking down his sympathy, thinking it down.

“You will go to the reformatory for one year.”

The student of the violin does not seem to understand. He has not been used to paying. Others pay. He plays.

Will he take his violin to the prison, I wonder?

World is More Complex

Thieves, embezzlers. forgers, thugs, sneaks, they get their time and their share.

Five different men charged with reckless driving, or being drunk in charge of cars, go down to jail.

All one man did was crash into the rear of a truck. He went to jail for ten days. He had had “half a glass of beer” earlier in the day.

“I wish,” says Magistrate Browne, “the press would give greater prominence to the sentences imposed on reckless and negligent drivers. There is no mercy here for men who drive motors negligently and recklessly or when under the influence of liquor in the slightest degree.”

The hours drag on.

Already the traffic court cases for the afternoon are gathering out in the corridor and the confusion and rumpus seems to be on the increase.

Order! Order! Order! The magistrate demands it, sardonically. He has an inspector in the court room whose sole duty is to preserve order and decorum in the court. There are ten or a dozen constables and officials to back him up.

And because the magistrate was once a soldier he gets order, even out of what is clearly inevitable.

But what can you expect of an old and sin-blown court room that dates back to 99. when the fastest thing in Toronto’s streets was a buggy and the only problem booze gave us was drunkenness, to be dealt with in the quick-lunch way, with humorous jests from the bench and comic items in the daily press?

We’ve come a long way. The world is stranger, more complex than in 99.

“Yet,” says Magistrate Browne, “we’ll have no quick-lunch justice here!”

---

Editor’s Notes: (There was a section of this story that I deleted as it was racist to immigrants).

1. William Hogarth was an 18th century English artist. ↩︎
2. George Taylor Denison was a Canadian lawyer, military officer and writer. ↩︎
3. Nikita F. Balieff was a Russian Armenian born vaudevillian, stage performer, and director. He is best known as the creator and master of ceremonies of La Chauve-Souris theater group. ↩︎
4. The “Song of the Volga Boatmen” is a well-known traditional Russian song. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, September 8, 1923.

Roaring Bunch of Men Go From East Every Summer Seeking Adventure, Find None, and, Without Price of Return Ticket, Stay West and Make Good.

Harvesters going west are like troops going to war in more respects than one.

There is the same noise and abandon. The primitive colonist sleeper cars bear the same crowded and forbidding look. And both harvesters and soldiers are full to the brim with the expectation of high adventure.

And adventure doesn’t come.

Just as the soldier landed with a chilling flop into the drab and unfruitful and uneventful round of spit and polish and drill and the stupid eternity of the trenches, so the harvester, ready for big doings in the wide romantic west, finds a hay fork in his hand, or about twenty square miles of new-cut wheat to be stooked before dark, or a thousand bushels of grain to be heaved by brute force into the separator, amidst a smother of dust and chaff, before the boss calls it a day and lets the cook sound his whistle.

A harvesters’ excursion is spoken of in the east here as something picturesque and outward bound. So it is. Eight hundred men all in a roaring bunch constitute a picture.

But when a harvesters’ excursion hits the west and is smashed by the impact into countless little squads and sections and troops of four or ten or seventeen men, dumped all forlorn off the train at some little packing box way station in middle of a limitless prairie, the romance goes out of it.

Eighty per cent. of the men who leave the east on a harvesters’ excursion hope never to return. They have visions of the Big Chance which life so far has denied them.

And eighty per cent. of that eighty per cent. are broke when they leave the east.

And what are the rewards of a harvester?

In Manitoba, this year, the wage per day ran round $3.50. Out further west it ran to $4 and In seme places as high, as $4.50¹. The harvester paid strictly by the day. If it rains and there no cutting or stooking or threshing, there is no pay. If it blows up rain about noon there is half a day’s pay, and no more. Sundays, no pay. At four dollars a day, working at most twenty-four days in the one month’s work the harvester must put in before he can use the return stub of his cheap fare, he can earn $96.

He has had to pay $15 plus half a cent a mile beyond Winnipeg to come out west. It will cost him half a cent a mile to Winnipeg and twenty dollars from there heme. If he smokes cigarets and has any other expensive habits the likelihood is he will return to the hard and undemonstrative east as broke as he left it. In fact, many of them are so broke they can’t pay their fare home and have to stay west.

In Brandon I talked with one old chap in the livery business who said that that was how he came to settle in the west – came out harvesting and couldn’t pay his way home. And blamed if he didn’t think the west was largely populated with people in the same predicament.

Thousands of the harvesters don’t get regular jobs helping a farmer for a steady month or six weeks. Only a few lucky ones get taken on with “outfits” – which are threshing gangs that travel from farm to farm. Most of them get a few days’ work at stooking, and then get tired and move over a few miles to some I place they’ve heard about where there are better jobs going begging.

“The trouble with harvesters is this,” said a Manitoba wheat rancher, “the tough ones that can do the hard manual labor of harvesting are a restless crew, either finding fault with the grub or getting into fights or moving on for the sheer love of moving on. The quiet, conscientious fellows are usually those not accustomed to hard manual labor. They will stay on the job, but they can’t handle the work.”

So this army of fifty thousand men dumped into the west every August spreads thin or thick over the map, restless, hard-worked, disillusioned, most of them making just barely enough money to pay their passage back to the east at the end of four to six weeks.

But like old soldiers, who will keep on going to wars no matter how sour the last one turned, there are old harvesters who keep on going west every autumn, moved by the expectation of adventure which is so elusive a jade in this workaday world.

The harvesters’ special from the east, with a three to four day weary jam of passengers, usually pulls into Winnipeg at night. I don’t know whether Winnipeg has arranged that or not. But at any rate the great majority of harvesters never see Winnipeg at all.

Their train pulls in in the dead of night.

As they break, gasping with relief, out of the train that has imprisoned them for four days, into the Winnipeg freight yards, they find themselves being lined up before a small wicketed office under arc lights, where representatives of the Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta government employment bureaus are waiting to inform them where harvesters are required.

The expeditionary nature of the excursion goes out of the harvesters’ special right there in Winnipeg.

“Have you any place in mind?” asks the agent.

“No,” replies the harvester.

“How about Lethbridge?” says the agent. “Twenty-five men wanted there at once by farmers not ten miles out.”

“Done.”

“Have you the fare?”

Then the harvester walks over to the ticket booths and gets his half cent a mile fare to Lethbridge.

“A train for Lethbridge leaves from here in two hours,” says the ticket man.

It is three o’clock in the morning. Winnipeg lies cold and asleep without. The harvester goes out to see Winnipeg, walks a deserted block, rambles back to the station to sit till his train is ready in the dawn. Gets aboard, pounds westward another few hundred miles in a colonist sleeper, and wakes up to be debarked in Lethbridge.

Farmers are waiting at the employment bureaus in the station. The harvester is hailed by the farmer.

“How much a day?”

“Four dollars, sleep in the house, home cooking.”

The great majority go to no such town as Lethbridge for the jumping off place. They find themselves unloaded, amid the cheerful hoots of fellow passengers, at a little packing case station, without a human habitation in sight for all the miles and miles of bronzed fields on every side. Half a dozen farmers are waiting, with motor cars and flat wagons, to snaffle such men as are getting off at that point.

Thefts of good men occur. When the train stops at one of these little jerkwater stations, and ten men debark for fifteen farmers waiting, the farmers will jump aboard the train, swiftly scan the cars, and make take-it-or-leave-it offers to the best looking men in the car. That is, men booked through to further points.

Or they will run along the open windows of the car, calling:

“Any good men in there want four dollars a day and six weeks steady work?”

“I want five old hands.”

“Two men wanted – have you had any experience? Hop out. Four a day.”

Many of the farmers won’t take pot luck in the men sent. They prefer to board the train and pick out the men they want on appearance, offering them half a dollar a day extra for a bribe. In this way they get the men they want.

In nearly all the farms, which run from a half section of 320 acres to a section of 640 acres, the harvesters are taken right into the home of the farmer and eat at the family board. On the big wheat ranches of one and two or more sections, the farmer has a bunk house built within the tree enclosure in which his homestead stands and which is used for accommodating harvesters only. He hires a cook for the season. The food is always plentiful and plain.

But it is with an “outfit” that the harvester comes nearest adventure.

An outfit consists of a tractor, a threshing separator and a caboose. The tractor drags the threshing machine and the caboose from farm to farm and runs the separator at threshing. From eight to fifteen men constitute the crew of an outfit.

As soon as the grain is in the shock, the outfit sets forth on the rounds which it has planned during the summer. From ranch to ranch it goes, snorting and steaming. The caboose is cut off in a shady spot – if possible – and the thresher is set up in the middle of a field. The farmer, with rented and borrowed teams, totes the shocks of grain to the roaring maw of the separator. No bringing in the sheaves to the barn in the West. They just thresh right in the field. When they have cleaned up one square mile, they move the outfit to another part of the prairie and thresh all the wheat within range. The threshed grain is either stored in little granary sheds or is carted into the barns.

Great heaps of straw and chaff, as big as city houses, are thus left dotting the stubble fields, like slag heaps around Hill 70².

Passing from Winnipeg. I saw three huge columns of smoke ascending in the air to the north.

“Forest fires, eh?” I remarked to the passenger beside me. He chuckled.

“Ain’t no forests in these parts, mister. Them’s straw stacks burning.”

“How would that happen?” I asked, from the east where straw is so much per so much.

“Well, a farmer jest throwed a match into it, I guess.”

They burn their mountains of straw in the West.

No greenhorn can get aboard one of these “outfits.” They are prize workers. The owner of the outfit gets so many cents a bushel for the threshing, and it is in his interests so get the job done in record time. He hires men with some pride in their shoulders. They work like demons. They work all hours, from dawn to dark. They take joy in beating the last day’s record, the record of former crews. They go to their caboose at the end of the day dead beat, hardly able to sit up and sing after their huge if unornamental meal.

But it is the nearest thing to adventure there is in harvesting.

The ordinary harvester bends his back at stooking, at teaming sheaves to the threshers, at bucketing grain into the granaries, at all the simple, ancient acts of agriculture which have changed little in ten thousand years. It is uneventful, healthy, heartbreaking work, the kind of work a man can easily pass up when the spirt moves him.

The railroad officials figure that 20 per cent. of the return ticket stubs they issue are not used each year. Twenty per cent. of fifty thousand men is ten thousand. That is draining the east and populating the west at a pretty good rate.

But the west is a large and roomy and hospitable place, for all its cold and its bleak wastes of prairie (how an Englishman from the green rolling hills of ‘ome must pine!) and somehow the thousands who stay either stranded or by choice in the west as the result of their harvest excursion, shake down.

That cheery, hail spirit of the adventurous trainload of irresponsibles somehow sticks to the westerner. If you whoop on the main street of an eastern city, a policeman will run you in or a space will be left about you in the traffic. Whoop at the main crossings in a western city and nobody pays the slightest attention, unless you look lonesome, and then a crowd will form around you in the traffic and take you home to supper.

In Winnipeg, I asked a man the time, and he took me home to dinner. In Brandon, I enquired the location of the railroad station, and my informant turned out to be a cousin. In Dauphin, I picked up a man’s hat the wind blew off and he introduced me to a member of parliament, a judge, the local chairman of the newly formed license commission, and the leading Presbyterian divine, right there and then on the street.

And by special interrogation, I found that each and every one of these cheery informants was originally a harvester who came west, went broke, settled and made good.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. $4 in 1923 would be $70 in 2024. ↩︎
2. The Battle of Hill 70 was a World War One battle. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, September 2, 1922.

On the Midway, everybody is a moron.

A moron, according to the psychologists, is “a high grade imbecile, with the mental age of a child of eleven years.”

Aside from the fact that this is a dirty crack at boys and girls of eleven, it is a pretty good description of the Midway.

Mind you, we are not asseverating (quaint Victorian word) that everyone who goes into the Midway is a moron. Our point is that as soon as he enters the Midway he becomes a moron – a high grade imbecile with a mental age of eleven.

Is it the bright paint, the gaudy canvas, the barking barkers, the primitive music that throws a spell over us and reduces us to morons? Or is it the psychic effect of a mob, whose massed personality overwhelms the individual personality, and reduces all for the moment to a common level of intelligence?

There is something decidedly spooky about the Midway.

Observe what happens to this large, thick, masterful looking man. He is the president and general manager of a flourishing manufacturing business. He is an officer of the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association. His golf handicap is four. His poker handicap is nil. He has a hundred and thirty cases in his cellar and is practically a teetotaller. In a word, he is a successful man.

Yet, look at him.

He is the bear cat of a party of four – his wife, another thick gentleman and wife. No young ‘uns in the party.

His collar is wilted. He has just consumed. a hot dog in three bites, and is hollering “C’mon, c’mon!” to the others, and is pointing to the Ferris wheel.

His face is red. There is a dab of mustard on his coat. His shoes are dusty, his clothes awry. Little would you think that to-morrow morning, with a flirt of his pen, he can close a factory employing four hundred men, or raise the price of washing machines. He acts like a boy of eleven. He looks like a high grade imbecile. He is, temporarily, a moron.

Or this lady, here, with the attractive white hair and the eyes the color of polished mahogany. Would you think she was one of the eight intellectual women of Toronto? Would you suspect that she has raised a family of three already prominent lawyers and is the vice-president of nineteen women’s organizations?

Her specialty to-day is freaks. She has been into every side show from the glass blowers to the wild west show. But her passion is freaks. She has had her fortune told by means of a paper out of a glass tube, but she has been in to see the gen-oo-wine Siamese twins three times. She goes in no spirit of mockery, but with the idea of getting an eye-full in those hot brown eyes, as thrilled as any girl of eleven. As a matter of fact, she is eleven. She is a moron.

Here is a boy scout in mufti who has wheedled his dad to the shooting gallery. The boy has fired two full rounds – fifty cents. Then a peculiar expression overspreads dad’s face, as he picks up the rifle.

I’ll shoot a few,” he says.

Dong, clatter, pink, go the targets as dad unlimbers.

“Give me another dozen,” says dad.

And another, and another.

“Hey, dad, what about me?” cries the boy scout in mufti, forgetting for the moment the creed of the scout.

Dad looks at his son as if he had never seen him before. Then a look of puzzled recognition comes into his face. He pays for another dozen each.

“I’ll shoot the top row, you take the bottom,” says dad to his son. “Bet I can beat you.”

Boy against man? Not at all. They are evenly matched, Dad has become a moron. He is only eleven.

But enough of individual cases.

Look at the swarm. They are all morons – we are all morons. Our mouths are slightly open. Our eyes shine. We move about erratically, irresolutely, aimlessly. We are children of eleven. Morons.

But no! Alone, aloof, there in the crush go a few superior bodies, ill as ease, marking us with amazement, a mild contempt.

Poor creatures, they are fixed forever at the age of forty or fifty, or whatever their age is.

Of your charity, pity them that cannot become morons for a day!

By Gregory Clark, August 26, 1933.

The editor of The Star Weekly was hurrying up Yonge St. at noon to keep a luncheon engagement. The hot, dusty downtown was crowded with the armies of noon.

Tired people. Hot people. Undefeated but without hope of victory. Past the same stores and the same windows. Going the same path, at the same time.

The editor walks quickly. He sees the colors of yellow dresses, of dark shine in windows, the blur of a bright blue car passing, but suddenly his heart stands still and he stops in his tracks to pretend to look in a window.

Coming down Yonge St. is a young telegraph messenger boy, his cap tilted. Beside the boy walks a slim bit of a girl, brown hair blowing about her face, pink frock, some parcels in her hands. And high by his shoulder, as if to ride above all the multitude, the messenger boy is carrying a baby.

A tiny baby.

If you should suddenly see a garden of flowers marching down Yonge St., you could not be more arrested. Here in the midst of the incomprehensible city walked Joy!

All unaware of the world around them, this telegraph messenger, this girl, this baby, moved with a strange nimbus around them, a cloud, a bright sheen of happiness. The newspaper editor for no reason felt tears coming into his eyes as he stood to watch them pass. He saw others start and turn. He saw men halt and look back at these three children walking with joy. Men who, after gazing, seemed to wake.

The editor went on to luncheon. But he could not get the picture of that messenger boy, the girl and the baby out of his eyes.

He came back to the office. He sent for his art editor and his writing men. He described the scene to them.

“We’ve got to find them,” said he. “Are they married? Is that their baby? The tiniest baby I ever saw downtown. How do they get along? He’s a messenger boy, and she was so young! Why do they look so happy? Happiness isn’t so plentiful nowadays. Yet here are two children, already launched on the adventures of life, in a stormy time like this, and if ever I saw joy, I saw it on Yonge St. at noon to-day.”

So we went out and found them.

We visited them in their little apartment. surrounded by everything they have bought themselves.

Boy and girl.

“In these days,” we explained to them, “tens of thousands of people are afraid to get married, wondering how they would get along, until you find any number of people near thirty who still can’t make up their mind, work up their courage. Tell us about you, won’t you? It would interest all young people. And old people.”

“All right,” they laughed, sitting on their chesterfield, side by side, a little bewildered at having an old weasel of a newspaperman, without coat or vest, sitting under their bridge lamp on the low chair, drinking their lemonade in the hot summer night.

Harry Watson lost his job at the metal stamping works, so he decided to go with a chum up to Bathurst and Bloor and take in a movie.

That is the way youth meets Fate.

Not having any money to spare, he left his chum outside on Bloor and he stepped into an ice cream parlor for a cold drink.

He sat at the marble counter. Facing him was a large mirror in which youth could see the cubicles along the other side, in which girls preferred to sit.

Clara Callicott was in one of the cubicles treating her young cousin to ice cream. Clara could afford to treat young cousins because she was a business girl. She wrapped parcels in one of the big department stores.

“Clara,” said the young cousin, “there’s a fellow looking at you in the mirror. He’s staring.”

“Tell me when he looks away,” said Clara. “He is looking away now,” said the cousin. But at the moment Clara looked, so did Harry.

And Harry couldn’t help but smile. And before she knew it, so did Clara.

Harry Watson sat there, eking out his drink as long as possible. But a drink is only so long. And before he could get another smile in, he had to go.

“There goes your boy friend,” said the young cousin.

But when Clara came out, there was the boy friend standing very casually on the sidewalk.

Clara walked up Bathurst.

“Let’s lead him a chase,” said Clara. They walked as fast as they could, laughing, up Bathurst St., in the night.

But Harry kept up with them, and when they slowed down, Harry walked past, and then had to stop and kneel down and tie his shoe lace. And this old scheme, as old as shoe laces anyway, worked.

“Hello,” said Harry.

I suppose it is something about a man kneeling that stirs a girl’s heart.

“Hello,” said Clara.

As Harry lived in Parkdale, and Clara lived on Davenport, it was only Sundays that they could see each other. And as Clara had a Sunday School class, it was after four.

But they used to walk up to Cedarvale, and then, after a reasonable period of being out of work, Harry Watson got his job as telegraph messenger. In the downtown district.

You get 3 cents a message. In a sense, you are on commission when you are a telegraph messenger. The snappier you are, the more you make. If you get down early, and get into your uniform without undue delay and so on, you can get a bunch of night letters to deliver. That brings up your average.

Harry liked his job. And worked at it. He had an idea.

He had known Clara for quite a time and was satisfied in his mind that she was the only girl in the world. He saw her a great deal oftener than on Sunday afternoon for a walk in Cedarvale. He could see her in her noon hour.

“Here comes Romeo,” the other girls used to say in Clara’s department in the big store when the familiar figure of Harry in his jaunty cap and gray shirt and army breeches appeared at noon.

So one Sunday in Cedarvale, Harry asked Clara to marry him.

“Are you crazy?” asked Clara.

Harry assured Clara he was not crazy.

“We have been going together now for some time,” he said. (Now you know what young people are saying in Cedarvale on June Sunday afternoons.) “We are sure we like each other. I’ve got a good steady job. Two can live cheaper than one.”

Clara still thought Harry was crazy. But it was nice walking home from Cedarvale in the evening and knowing that the boy beside you was a man who had asked you to be his wife.

She said she would think about it. And sure enough next week, Clara had thought about it long enough to say yes. Clara lived at home with her father and grandmother. She does not ever remember her own mother. She had been working two years and at sixteen was more independent in her spirit than most girls.

“All right,” she said to Harry.

And they proceeded to plan to get married.

“How much money did you have?” I asked Harry.

“Next week’s pay, when I got it,” laughed Harry.

“Why didn’t you save first and then get married?” I asked.

“No,” said Clara, “that’s what everybody else does, and they take so long saving up that they never do seem to get married. So we decided to get married first and then we would have to save. And we were right.”

The wedding supper consisted of ice cream soda in a handsome Yonge St. fountain. All around them in the bright evening moved the workaday world through with work. All the people afraid of romance, all the people walking cautiously around the rims of life. And here sat the bride and the bridegroom, with the last step taken first, and the unheard, invisible theme song of the moment being “So what?”

“By the way,” I asked, “how much money did you save by this time?”

“Still next week’s pay,” said Harry. “You see, a fellow feels kind of proud of getting things for his wife. The first couple of pay days after we were married, I bought things for Clara. Not presents, you see. But dresses and things she was entitled to.”

“So the saving?” I suggested.

“Yes, that’s how the saving went.”

For a month the young couple considered the next step in their adventure.

“A honeymoon!” exclaimed Harry. “We’ve got to have a honeymoon.”

He had friends in Detroit, a young married couple in their middle twenties. Harry wrote them. In early October, Harry and Clara, with their marriage certificate with them in case of questions at the border, went to a movie and then to the Union Station and got the 1 a.m. train for Detroit.

They had four days in Detroit, and if the average middle-aged honeymooner, who stalks with dignity in and out of vast hotel dining rooms, and waddles solemnly around Detroit or New York department stores showing his bride a big time, would like to know about less pompous honeymoons, Harry and Clara will tell him that they went to movies, they ran laughing up strange dark residential streets in Detroit, they got on any old street car going anywhere, and for a car fare, journeyed a thousand miles on the road of mystery and happiness. Their friends treated them wonderfully. Drove them all over in their car. Left them alone. Jollied them.

“We sat up all night in the day coach from Toronto to Detroit,” said Clara. “And when we got to Detroit, to our friend’s apartment, I was a sight. But the way they took us to their hearts, you would think we were angels. Oh, we had a wonderful honeymoon.” And so home.

Their Home of Joy

They got in early in the morning. They both went to work as usual (Clara hadn’t told her employers she was married) and got there on time. They were living in furnished rooms on Howland Ave., near Dupont, with an elderly couple who were rejoiced to have two such young people for their tenants. Bed-sitting room, kitchenette and sunroom, $20 a month¹.

“The first meal I cooked,” said Clara, “well, first of all, I had on an apron. I cooked sausages, creamed mashed potatoes, cake and coffee.”

The first piece of furniture they possessed was the walnut smoker’s stand Clara gave Harry for his birthday.

The second piece of furniture was one of those blue enamelled kitchen receptacles you open with your foot on a pedal which was given by one of Clara’s girl friends.

In one of the banks where he delivered telegrams Harry saw a small booklet on budgeting. He took one home and Clara and he devised a budget. They have stayed on it ever since.

The evening I visited them I found them in a pretty apartment, consisting of four rooms. The living room has a beautiful chesterfield suite, attractive curtains made and hung by Clara herself. Pictures and ornaments few and tasteful, chosen with all the reserve of people of thirty or forty. A fine radio softly playing.

“You hadn’t much experience of housekeeping?” I suggested.

“No, but it comes very naturally to girls,” said Clara. Her kitchen is enamelled white, and everything is spotless. Over the kitchen cabinet hangs a small white framed picture – you know the kind – showing a bouncing baby lying on its back, with its bare toes in the air, and it smiling out at you.

“When I knew I was going to have a baby,” said Clara, “Harry bought me that picture.”

All the autumn and winter the two young ones sailed along and then in March Clara knew the blessed event was to occur next fall. That meant, of course, the end of the business-girl part of her life.

“One of the girls in the baby’s wear department was away and I managed to get her job for a few weeks,” said Clara. “I had a wonderful time then. There I was in the loveliest department of the store. And every parcel I did up I imagined it was for me!”

Don’t imagine, Mrs. Reader, that I, the poor recorder of this story, made up that last sentence.

It was in April that Clara decided to give up her work. So she, with a whimsical appreciation of womanhood, brought down her marriage license and displayed it individually and collectively to the girls in the department.

“I suspected it all along,” the girls said. “We have been whispering for months, because one of the girls in another department saw a telegraph messenger buying a ring.”

But that was another telegraph messenger. Because they had been married months before.

Sunshine Goes With Them

“So one source of income was stopped?” I said.

“Yes, and don’t imagine it has all been plain sailing,” said Clara, “as far as money was concerned. We have had some pretty close figuring to do. But when you must, you can do remarkable things. We budget everything.”

The baby boy was born in the Women’s College Hospital. Clara stayed twelve days there and then came home, and the great test of bathing the baby she passed with flying colors.

“Were you frightened of your responsibility those first few weeks?” I asked.

“I think when people are happy, their babies are happy,” said Clara. “My baby has been wonderful from the beginning. He weighed eight pounds. He never cries. He is just bubbling with joy all the time.”

“Do you ever wish you were a girl in the big store again, with no cares, no responsibilities.”

Clara gave me a funny look, and getting up suddenly, she walked into the other room where the baby boy, in the humid evening, was still talking to himself and you could hear his little fists thumping a tune on the little iron cot.

Back she came with her boy. He was in his nappy and a flimsy shirt. His little. sturdy body gleamed in the soft light of the stand lamp. He put his head on one side and smiled at me. The girl mother walked once around the quiet, sweet room with its blue curtains, low-toned furniture. Just once around that room, with her boy husband sitting watching them with a sort of stillness on him, and then, with a look at me that was all the answer in the world to my question, she walked out of the room and put the baby back in his little bed.

There are some questions, it seems, you do not need to answer with words.

What fun do they have? They go to a movie once a week. Daddy Callicott comes and minds the baby boy. They have their radio. It is all the entertainment they need to divert the joy of being at home together, with their plans, their budgets, their little boy.

On fine days, Clara takes the baby as far as Sunnyside. On the street car, she can see people nudging each other and debating whether she is the mother or the big sister or the nurse girl.

At Sunnyside, elderly ladies come and sit beside the two of them and get into conversation, and come roundabout and twisty to the question, is Clara the mother or the sister of the little boy in the sunsuit?

Oh, it’s great fun.

Perhaps only two in a million could dare the risk of doing what these two have done. They have never had a quarrel. They have the same sweet, honest attitude toward life. They are happy. Hard working. Devoted. But it is not for children we have told their story. It is for the older folk. The ones who come at life so practically and methodically, as if life were a cold pool, and they were prowling timidly or cautiously about its edge.

He is a telegraph messenger.

She is still a girl.

And they are on September 3rd two years hand in hand along the main road of life.

And where they walk, the sun shines.

---

Editor’s Notes: This story is also considered a classic of Greg’s writing during the Great Depression.

1. $20 in 1933 would be $455 in 2024. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, August 6, 1927.

The test of civilization, is whether you can get from your house to your berth in the Montreal flyer¹ without getting wet.

At Birdseye Centre, Hamilton, Orillia, Waubashene, if it is raining, you get wet.

You know at once that you are not in a metropolis. For you have to stand out on the station platform and let her rain.

One thing that could be said about the Old Union Station² is that it was metropolitan. From your side drive to your berth in the sleeper you enjoyed the full fruits of civilization. You kept dry.

The tragical announcement that we are now working up to is that for the next couple of years Toronto is not going to be a metropolis. Waubashene, Myrtle, Petrolia can all give Toronto the merry laugh of sisterhood.

For with the final switch-over from the Old to the New Union Station Toronto is going to find itself standing out on the platform in the good old-fashioned way.

Raincoats, fur coats, umbrellas and mufflers will now be the essential tools for catching a train. There are winter nights ahead when Toronto will sigh for the good Old Union Station with its roof.

This is bad news for Toronto, we know. After all the years of waiting, after all the official openings of the New Station by Mr. Church and Mayor Foster and everybody that wanted their names inscribed in enduring stone, it will be a shame to discover that the New Union Station. for quite a while at any rate, will be just a magnificent waiting-room. For all practical purposes, such as catching trains, you will go in one door out of the wet and out the other door into the wet.

Those of us who still think that we are going to have a station a la New York or London or Chicago, where you find the trains pulled up and waiting practically in the drawing-room, are going to be disappointed.

We’ll Be Out in the Open

The Old Union Station is not being torn down because we are about to move into the New Union Station. It is being destroyed because the viaduct is going to crash through it. We are going into the New Union Station only because we are losing the old one.

In other words, our move into the famous New Union Station is in the nature of a temporary expedient.

The viaduct is a vast elevated road of solid concrete about as wide as a ball park. On it, some day, the train tracks will be laid so that you and I may motor under it rather than constantly dispute the way with the trains. They have completed the viaduct back of the new station. But there are no tracks on it. It has been completed in this short block so that we won’t have to go back to the Old Union Station later when they wish to build the viaduct behind the New Union Station.

So for a couple of years, nobody knows how long, we will emerge from the back door of the New Union Station, walk across the wide cement viaduct, descend temporary steps to the same old ground level we are using to-day, and get on our trains from a temporary plank pavement, and from beneath narrow high roofs, also temporary, that are laid, like long arbors, between each set of tracks.

If you look eastward the next time you are out in the open at what used to be the Old Union Station, but is now a strange and unfamiliar pile of tattered old buildings, you will see the steps and stairways being built where we will walk out over the viaduct and down to the trains. Unquestionably, they will be covered steps. Unquestionably the plank platform amongst the tracks will be sheltered as best it can be with narrow temporary roofs. But it would only be quibbling with Coboconk³ and Port Hope to say that we will not be out in the open.

Furthermore, it will be a long haul for hand-baggage. There Bowmanville will have it on us. Because at Bowmanville you just drive up to the platform and there you are.

But the red caps will probably make a great killing during the years Toronto has to walk over its viaduct. From Front street, where you have to get out of your taxicab, to the far edge of the viaduct, where you commence the steps down to the train tracks, it will be twice as far as it is now, under the tunnel.

In the New Union Station – Toronto’s magnificent new waiting-room – you can get any number of things. You can get an eyefull. You can breathe. You can get lunch, have your hair cut, get a beauty treatment, buy books, a soda, drugs. In the dining-room you can dance. But you can’t get a train.

If It Rains We’ll Get Wet

They are nibbling the old station away.

The next time you go down to the station you won’t know the old place. And if it is raining, as it most likely will be, you will get wet..

Never more will you take the Montreal flyer from Track 3. Track 3 is only a parking place for coaches now.

The old roof – the one we bade good-by for the first time many a year ago, is gone. Suddenly, at last, it is gone. And several hundred outraged pigeons flutter about the ancient towers we never saw before, wondering what the dickens men keep putting things up for only to pull them down.

The towers that are revealed now – and soon they will be nibbled away – are surprisingly stately. We had no idea they were there. If we had known what a cathedral style the Old Union Station really had, perhaps we wouldn’t have. spoken so rudely of it, the last couple of generations. But the great canopies over the tracks hid the towers. Hid the station. It was the canopies we did not like, after all.

The viaduct is ready to be shoved through the old station. It is now right up against the east end of the doomed pile. When it starts to move it will smash right into the towers, right across Track 3 and crush to flinders that old staircase we used to wind down in a great hurry; and the old dim restaurant with its glass covered sandwiches.

So out beyond, far beyond old Track 6 which was the uttermost limits we had to go even when bound for North Bay, they have spread huge pavements of planks, and all over the place are signs directing you to Track 7, Track 8 and even Track 9!

These plank pavements run away to the eastward, in back of the New Union Station. You can see staircases being built up into space. You can see dinky little narrow shelters being erected all along the tracks, We know what it means.

The switch-over from the Old to the New is going to take place soon – before, they hope, the crush of homing holidayers and Exhibition visitors. They are working up to that peak now. The viaduct having marched right up to the eastern edge of the old station, three tracks, the first three, have had to be closed, and are now used for parking only. They have therefore taken some of the freight tracks from beyond the outermost of the old passenger tracks. When your train is on Track 9 you begin to think Toronto is getting to be a big girl now. Some of the older folks don’t like it, however.

“Track 9!” exclaimed an old lady with several bundles. “Good gracious, how far is that!”

“Just through the archway, lady, and across that platform.”

“Why on earth don’t they leave things alone? Always changing things, until a body hardly knows where to turn!” growled she.

A Theatre of Real Drama

When you tamper way so delicate an organization as a railway-terminal, there are bound to be consequences, like repairing a clock, and having a couple of wheels left over. But they are getting on very nicely. Perhaps the trains are not made up quite so early as they used to be. The result is, it is not the passengers but the mail, express and baggage lads who do the most worrying. Each of these departments has half a dozen truck loads of bags and boxes and trunks to rush aboard when the train pulls in. Maneuvering the trucks against each other and in the narrow lanes between the tracks – for borrowed freight tracks have not the space between them that regular passenger tracks have – it’s quite a job. All postmen think the mails are more important than express, and what the baggage men think about the urgency of baggage would warm the heart of a passenger. When your train is made up and you have a few minutes to spare stroll up forward and listen to the boys trying to adhere to that regulation of the railroads which reads that profane language on the part of employes will not be tolerated. Has his majesty’s mail right of way over the personal baggage of his majesty, the traveling citizen? And if express costs so much more than the carriage of either mail or baggage, should not express get priority, and so give its money’s worth?

The switch-over itself will take place without ostentation. The last train will be made up in the old station. The last passenger will hurry, staggering under his bags, down the dim underneath tunnel. The last “All aboard” will ring out mournfully in the upstairs waiting-room with its high reverberating ceiling. And from then on the taxis and the private cars will call at the handsome pillared main doorway of the New Union Station. All is being got in readiness. The ticket sellers will be in cages like bank tellers. The information girls and boys will be in their circle out in the middle of the vast floor of the new waiting-room. The telegraph desks, the lunch counters, all will be manned as if by magic. For the people who have the parts to play have been studying their parts and the scenery has been set for six years.

Everybody who wants to say good-by to the Old Union Station should do so without delay. There should be some ceremony of farewell. For all its shabbiness, the Old Station had tremendous sentimental significance. It was the first glimpse of home, the last glimpse of home. It is hallowed by a million farewells, a billion kisses of parting and of restoration. It has been the theatre of countless dramas, tragic and comic. In this tattered old theatre the boys said good-by for the South African war. Its walls rang with “Johnny Canuck” and the city thrilled as the train bearing two, three, four hundred heroes pulled slowly out. That was drama. But it was the same old theatre that heard no songs at all when hundreds and hundreds, thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, in endless trains, in trains running on priority orders, went steaming unromantically eastward again, and leaden footed girls and women and elderly men walked slowly out of the old station to go home and wait interminably for yellow telegrams which started “His Majesty regrets to inform you…”

The little boys who have carried their toy pails and sand shovels through the old station are grown to men who have carried their bags and despatch cases through the same old gate.

Young people who passed through it on the springing feet of youth have come back through it with failing steps or in boxes.

A theatre of the true drama of life, more than any other single building in the city, it has taken part in the happiest moments of the people. The setting forth to adventure, the coming home.

And one day, within the next few weeks, suddenly, in accordance with a notice fastened to its front, it will be left flat.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. The Montreal Flyer (also known as the Green Mountain Flyer), was regular train service between Montreal and the Northeast United States, with sections to New York City and Boston. It started in 1892, and was discontinued in 1953. ↩︎
2. This article is about the transition in the building of the third Union Station in Toronto. On the date of the article, although the station was incomplete, its building was complete and the station was opened by Prince Edward, Prince of Wales. Four days later, the track network was shifted from the second Union Station, while the new viaduct, concourse and train shed were under construction. Demolition of the second Union Station began almost immediately and was completed in 1928. The third Union Station project was not fully completed until 1930. ↩︎
3. Coboconk is a village in the Kawartha Lakes. ↩︎