This comic accompanied a story by Caesar Smith about acquiring a new car. In the 1920s, it was not uncommon for someone’s purchase to be scrutinized by the neighborhood. This resulted in the humourous story about a new car being like the arrival of a new baby.
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:
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.
This is an illustration that accompanied a story by Caesar Smith.
These images appeared with a story by Ralph Brewster about odd inventions.
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:
By Gregory Clark, August 4, 1923.
Hundreds of Abandoned Homesteads Throughout the Lakes Region of the Great Summer Resort Bear Witness to a Past of Hardship and Despair.
To the world Muskoka means gaiety, ease and joy.
It is a bit of the earth, it seems, set aside at the creation for the delights of summer.
But in back of those bright shores that are studded with hotels and cottages are evidences of an epic struggle in former days.
Muskoka and winter, Muskoka and grim hardship, Muskoka and dark despair seem absurd contradictions in terms.
But back over those splendid hills of light green and dark green, on little side roads where lovers stroll, throughout that beautiful region now largely given over to the summer resort, you will come across hundreds of ruined and abandoned homesteads, the mute records of at least one defeat Ontario dealt her pioneers.
The lake region of Muskoka is peculiar in this respect, there is no average farmstead. As you motor through the district you pass some small areas that appear to be excellent farm lands. But when you leave the highways and the neighborhood of the larger towns you strike the great contrast. For miles you will traverse hills and dales of wilderness, with infrequent clearings where a pitiful, tumbledown little shanty, new or old, scrabbles a meagre existence from a small patch of ground. Then you will emerge all of a sudden on a wide and beautiful clearing of hundreds of acres, and in its midst a modern red brick house, large barns and out-buildings, in perfect repair, every evidence of being a very successful farm.
There is no average. Either they are very well fixed or very poor.
And to add a sinister touch to the poor ones, the wilds are filled with hundreds of these ruined and abandoned homesteads, most of them the log houses and rough barns of the pioneer, the picturesque, hand-made homesteads of the builders of the province.
The reason is simple enough. That part of Muskoka consists largely of sand and rocks. It is fine soil for pines and hollyhocks, but poor for potatoes and other fruitful crops. Scattered all over the district are deposits of better soil, valleys where great forests have stood for ages, flats where swamps have been easily or naturally drained away.
When the pioneers came thrusting into Muskoka from the south they knew not which was good soil and which was stones. The forest hid that vital fact. The shrewdest were rewarded with a hundred or two hundred acres of loam over and in the sand. The less shrewd came wearily into some gorgeous valley filled with the sunset which Muskoka alone can devise and proudly and gladly they made a camp and, unladed their ox-cars and cried to the dark hills:
“Home!”
And when with gigantic toil which this older part of the province has forgotten, even when it looks at its endless fields, the forest was torn down and laid in piles and burned, these less shrewd pioneers found under the strong and sturdy forest only hummocks of sand and countless boulders, and here and there outcroppings of the fundamental rock which lies shallow under the whole of that northern country.
If you look at some of these abandoned homesteads with a recreative eye, you will be able to reconstruct the whole tragedy. For the clearings about the log shanties are not regular and ordered, spreading out squarely, but are in patches, a couple of acres cleared here, and over a ridge in a neighboring gulley, a couple of acres more, and so on, as the pioneer, finding rocks and sand in this dark valley where he so gladly cried “Home!” searched each autumn, with fire and axe, for that stretch of hidden earth which would be black and smooth and soft to the plow.
You don’t have to travel far in from your cottage or hotel to find one of these tragedies clearly written in logs and boulders and brushy meadows already falling victim to the enfolding forest. Fate has played a pretty trick with Muskoka. For fifty years it was the scene of a thousand failures made more bitter by the few successes. To-day, it is a nation’s playground, full of ease and music and brightness. Its million dollar breezes dimpling lakes and driving light sails and cooling ten thousand screened verandahs, have touched far different scenes.
The opening up of the west and its prairies and the arrival of the summer resort saved Muskoka from being a tragedy for those who had pioneered into it. Hundreds who had struggled faithfully to find the black acres under the forest gave up and went to the west, from which, twenty-five to forty years ago, fabulous reports were coming into the east. Far away were boundless acres of black soil covered not with forests, but with grass. To select your homestead you had not to cruise a wilderness and trust to luck for what the clearing would show, but merely walk over your hundred and sixty acres and feel it with your feet. No clearing but to drive the plow through the sod and burn a little swale of willows.
And by the hundred from Muskoka, as from all other parts of the province where disappointment had sought out the pioneer, they packed up and set forth for the west.
Those who remained, either from doubt or from poverty, were persuaded to remain by the arrival of the summer resorters. The exploitation of Muskoka as a summer resort is thirty years old, and yet it has only begun.
When the first cottagers came they brought relief to the poorest settlers. Garden crops could be sold at the best of prices. Milk, butter and meat were in demand. The labor of the man was needed for clearing, building and well-digging about the summer cottages.
Other settlers took in a few summer boarders and so were put on the first step towards the summer hotel. The majority and many of the best of the Muskoka hotels are run by the descendants of pioneers. From keeping a few visitors in the homestead to the erection of a small hotel and from the small hotel to the modern Muskoka hotel were logical steps.
There are golf links in Muskoka on pastures that were regarded as hopeless by the pioneer who cleared them. There are farms in Muskoka found to be more profitable as pleasure grounds for two months of the year than as farms for twelve months.
One old lady in her eighties told me the story of her pioneering in Muskoka. She came as a girl of eighteen by ox-cart into the country now the heart of the gayest resorts. A party of fifteen entered the district. They cleared their acres and found sand and stones. But they added to their income by cutting lumber for the markets at Bracebridge and Gravenhurst. Winter was desperately hard. They were cooped up for five months, while wolves possessed the forests.
They lived poorly and lonely, and the men went off in the winter to the lumber camps and in the summer added small patches to their clearings and tended sparse crops of hay and wheat and a limited garden.
When the west boomed her brothers and brothers-in-law and other men of the community promptly abandoned their clearings and went west. Everyone of them proved successful farmers in the west, died, well off, and deeded over their little Muskoka clearings to their sister, who owns hundreds of acres of bush and scrub.
Yet she still dwells in a small and poor farmhouse amid about forty acres of cultivated soil, growing corn and vegetables for the summer resorts, and pasturing a herd of cows for milk for the same market. She is poor, but quite happy. Her grandchildren own and operate several tourist hotels throughout the lakes.
Not far out of Bracebridge I talked to a settler in his seventies. His two chums, after five years pioneering beside him in Muskoka, gave up and went to the legendary west. They sold him their clearings for three hundred dollars each, no cash down, to be paid in instalments as the remaining man found convenient,
Both the wayfarers settled out of Winnipeg and became very wealthy wheat farmers and cattle-raisers. Both are dead now. But for many years the two of them made trips every other year to Muskoka for fishing and hunting. They came and stayed with their old chum who stuck to Muskoka. In this way, be paid off the three hundred dollars each for the clearings, the westerners paying part cash for their accommodation and part the old debt until it was wiped out.
You would think they would have given him the clearings. That they would have persuaded him to give up his miserable stone acres and come out west with them.
“This is good land,” said the old man to me, “I have been very happy on it. I have more fun than those chums of mine. They died before me. They had to come back here for their fun. Ther coaxed me to come out west, but they knew I wouldn’t budge-“
Those two well-off westerners wouldn’t have insulted their chum by offering him their abandoned land for nothing.
“Still you have had to struggle hard for what you’ve got here?” I asked, waving at the little unpainted home, the rock bound pasture, the undefeated forest all about the clearing.
“No harder than anybody else. I had a strong time. My sons are doing well, some in the towns, some at the resorts.
“Nobody can dig a well like me. I have doctors and lawyers and millionaires coming to me for advice and help all the time. They would be no good without me. There was a bank president just drove up here to this clearing an hour ago to get me to tell him where to build his new boat house. Big blue car. I am going with him to-morrow to show him where-“
So it wasn’t a tragedy altogether. They had a strong time. The desolate homesteads you will find everywhere in the lake region of Muskoka were the original settlings of men who went west or moved out to the lake shores to meet the cottagers and the tourists.
Still, for all the joy and the fame and gaiety that have made Muskoka a beautiful, byword there has been a grim contrast of bitter struggle and disillusionment which somehow hallows the district and justifies the compensation of these days of dancing and idling and making merry.
By Gregory Clark, July 30, 1921.
The corn-on-the-cob season is here; and, as usual, the souls of countless thousands of hungry but proper people are filled with perplexity.
It is a terrible thing to go into a restaurant and see great platters of beautiful golden corn and at the same time be afraid to order it for fear of your neighbors’ eyes.
It is too much to have to sit in a cafe and see some brave, courageous person across the aisle ecstatically sliding his face along the cob of corn, his eyes rolling dreamily, and melted butter dribbling down his chin; while you, over-civilized, hyper-socialized, are afraid to make a similar spectacle of yourself.
Thousands of people in Toronto alone, it is estimated, are either bringing their lunch downtown in a package or are lunching at home solely because this is the corn season. Their stomachs crave the corn, but their moral courage is not equal to eating it in public.
Cannot the medical officer of health or some other authority on eating issue a public announcement standardizing the eating of corn-on-the-cob, and thereby sanction it even for the most finicky?
A neat poster could be got out, in colors, showing with diagrams the proper way to hold the cob, whether one or two or three rows should be bitten at once, how far along the row the eater should go before coming up for air, and so on.
It seems as if corn was created to set at naught our most sacred table manners. A few years ago, some hostess, endeavoring to admit corn into the most conservative menus and at the same time to preserve the table manners, set a fashion of cutting the corn off the cob with the knife, to be then eaten with the fork, like peas. But treated this way corn loses all its charm, its savor.
To mock us, Nature has made corn-on-the-cob the most delicious and at the same time the awkwardest of foods. It is taboo to rest the elbow on the table. But on the best authority, it is stated that if you don’t rest both – both elbows on the table while eating corn, you get butter all over your necktie.
Then the cob is round. Two, or at most three rows are all that can be reached at one bite, yet one bite is not a fair mouthful. There fore, the eater must take two or three bites sideways. This manoeuvre constitutes one of the most absurd exercises ever required of the human face. When the mouth is opened, the eyes open with it, the eyebrows are raised, and the same muses which elevate the eyebrows cause the ears to move.
Nature has undoubtedly provided corn to prevent us taking ourselves too seriously.
Timid and proper people, of course, resign themselves to suffer when tempted by corn in public. Then they hasten home and have a private gorge on corn. At this season of the year, if you go to your back windows towards bed-time and look across the yards at the kitchen windows opposite, you will probably see half-a-dozen proper citizens indulging in an extra corn feed before bed, by way of reprisal for the day’s self-denial.
No new methods need be sought. There is only one way to eat corn, and someone high in the public esteem ought to do a great public service by going about to all the different restaurants and giving frank and lusty exhibitions of corn eating to set at rest the minds of the pure and proper.
An Englishman just arrived in Canada was horrified at the first corn-eating exhibition he saw. It appeared a heathen sort of practice. After observing for a moment, he decided to demonstrate an improvement.
He ordered corn, and ostentatiously commenced eating from – the end, as one eats asparagus.
History tells that he made slow work of it, cob and all. But with true British doggedness, he stuck to the end.
His case is a warning to corn reformers. He is buried in Halifax.
This illustration went with a story by Robert Reade on the opening of herring season. The picture shows the possibility of a school of herring swamping a boat .
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