Tag: 1922 Page 1 of 3
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.
This illustration accompanied an article by Douglas Eppes about horse racing.
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, February 4, 1922.
Three generations in the city, and the wine of life becomes water.
The third generation born and bred in the city has lost its spring, its sparkle, its flavor. It does one of two things. It seeks artificial and erotic stimulation, and so becomes that type of sophisticated and effete waster common enough in cities. Or it succumbs to the enfeeblement it feels within its veins, and joins the lower ranks of those drab, mechanical tollers who are the chief inhabitants of cities, the fourth or tenth or fiftieth generation of dwellers in cities.
For there appears to be an energy in the soil that man must absorb. The city man goes away in summer for a two-week holiday close to the soil, and sucks enough of this mysterious energy out of the earth to revive him for a year. But presently there comes to town a young man born and raised close to the earth and abounding in this primitive energy. And he drives the city man to the wall; outlasts him, out-moves him, skins him, picks his bones.
But this new man’s grandson is in turn the victim of a newcomer, fresh from the soil. All about us are examples of the third urbane generation putting up its unconscious struggle against a soily Fate. In some of the wealthier families, so filled were the first generations with energy, as the wealth they accumulated bears witness, that the fourth generation is sometimes left still in the ring.
But we have made the pursuits of the soil so hard, unpleasant and unprofitable that the enfeebled generation finds it easier to slip back into the permanent category of the city’s damned than to return boldly to the soil to recuperate in a few generations the supply of vital energy.
There is a way out, nevertheless.
And J. Hubert Waterberry found it.
Hubert was the third generation in Toronto. His grandfather, son of an immigrant who fought with Mackenzie’s rebels in 1837, came to town and built up a great contracting and building business. Scores of houses still standing south of Carlton street were built by Hubert’s grandfather.
Hubert’s father, however, was sent to school and became a lawyer. A good lawyer, too. He had offices in Victoria street and developed a big practice. But he found professional life to be merely the service of business life, and he determined that his son Hubert should be a business man.
Hubert was twenty-one in the year 1900. He was a sophisticated, elegant young man, fresh from college. His father got him into a prosperous firm of insurance brokers.
When Hubert was thirty, he was a bachelor. He had been hectically in love with several girls, but all had rejected him, in an indifferent way, as if they had sensed a want of energy in him. At thirty, he was feeling that want of stamina. On his father’s death, he used up every atom of his energy in breaking away from the big insurance firm with another young member of it, and starting a business of their own with the old man’s money.
But after five years, Hubert’s partner became restless for some reason and left the partnership.
At forty, Hubert was not so much a bachelor as an old maid. His office was a dim, dusty mausoleum in that remote district behind the King Edward Hotel. His business was reduced to those old accounts which had not yet been won away from him by live competitors. Hubert lived in the same select boarding house on Sherbourne street which he had taken on his father’s death.
Hubert’s only employe was elderly Miss Murdagh, who had been middle-aged when Hubert brought her with him from the old company.
In the dim office, with its maps, calendars and directories, these two sat from nine a.m. to five p.m., writing letters, issuing renewals of policies, but rarely going out for new business.
He had no clubs, no recreations. He read his newspaper at night, sometimes he went to a theatre or a lecture. His only hobby was his health, which, finding its self an object of interest, became steadily more complex.
His hair grew thin and grey. At forty he looked fifty.
Then one day old Miss Murdagh failed to turn up at the office. Hubert phoned her boarding house and learned that she had died during the night, quite unexpectedly.
Hubert was badly upset. He could handle the work all right, but it meant hustling. And Hubert had not hustled in fifteen years. three weeks after Miss Murdagh’s funeral at which Hubert was the chief mourner, he struggled alone in his dusty office, but found a wave of untidiness, disorder and tangled business engulfing him. Several faithful old accounts phoned him impatiently. Each night he went home later and more distressed.
He decided he would have to get help. After writing and re-writing half a hundred ads., he went down at noon one day to the newspaper offices with this:
“Wanted a mature woman acquainted with insurance business and office work. Telephone Mr. Waterberry, Main –”
At three o’clock that afternoon, girls began phoning him and calling at his office. They had looked up his address in the phone book. Hubert got into a panic. Suppose he picked the wrong girl? He couldn’t tell what they, were like over the phone. All who called at the office were young, flippant girls with powdered faces–
At three forty-five, with the telephone ringing. Hubert breathlessly seized hat and coat, locked up his office and fled home.
As he sat in his room waiting till dinner time, Hubert was filled with alarm. What would he do? Doubtless, when he went down to his office in the morning, there would be a queue of girls a mile long. He’d have to pick one. And Hubert didn’t want to have to pick one. He had lost his nerve. He would perhaps pick some horrible, hustling, cocksure creature.
Hubert decided he would be ill, in bed tomorrow, and maybe the ad. would blow over.
Just before supper-time, there was a knock on his door, and the housemaid said:
“You’re wanted on the phone, sir!”
Hubert went down.
“Mr. Waterberry?” asked a pleasant feminine voice.
“Yes,” His heart sank.
“I am answering your ad. in the paper today,” said the voice. “I hunted you up in the directory, finding your office, closed. Am I too late?”
Hubert was reassured by the softness of the voice. He could picture another Miss Murdagh.
“No,” he said.
“Then, I’ve had experience in insurance office work, not in Toronto, but in a small town in western Ontario,” said the woman. “I am very anxious to get any work, so whatever you regard as a fair salary I am willing to take.”
“Yes. All right,” said Hubert.
“Shall I call at nine or earlier?”
Hubert had an inspiration.
“Yes. And – and would you mind – I’m not very well – perhaps if you would take charge of the office for the morning and deal with the other applicants?”
“Why, yes!” said the woman. “The key?”
“Could you call here at my boarding house to-night? I’ll leave it with the housekeeper,” said Hubert.
“Very well.”
And Hubert, leaving the office key in an envelope, fled out and had dinner at a restaurant and spent a most enjoyable evening at Shea’s1.
The following morning Hubert went down town before lunch. He couldn’t help walking past his office, just to see–. There was no line-up of painted girls. He entered the building and paused outside his office door to listen.
There was a strenuous sound as of someone house-cleaning.
Hubert could scarcely eat his lunch, he was so excited. What if this woman he had engaged turned out to be one of those energetic, aggressive, chirpy women? What if she were young and bouncy? And Hubert spent a few minutes in prayerful remembrance of quiet, stodgy old Miss Murdagh.
Bracing himself, at two o’clock Hubert shoved himself down the back streets to his office. With leaden feet he climbed the old wooden stairs. He rapped nervously on his own office door and entered.
At the typewriter sat a big, splendid, brown-haired girl in a blue skirt and white waist.
She rose quietly and came over to Hubert, who had removed his hat and was looking at her dumbly. She smiled at him.
“Yes?” she said.
“I-I-ah!” said Hubert.
He looked expectantly at her. “Are – are you-?” he began.
“I’m in charge of the office. Mr. Waterberry is not in yet? Is there anything I can do?” said the pleasant young lady.
“Well,” said Hubert, immensely confused, and laying his hat down on a desk with an attempt at the proprietorial air. “I’m – ah – that is to say you see, I am –!”
“Ah, you’d care to wait?” said the girl, pulling out a chair.
And nodding pleasantly to him, she returned to the typewriter.
Hubert sat down weakly. He gazed around the office, noting its tidiness and order. “I – ah” he began.
The girl swung on her chair.
“You see,” said Hubert, “I’m Mr. Waterberry!”
What happened afterwards was a golden memory all his life to Hubert. The girl leaped up and helped him out of his coat. She escorted him over to his swivel chair. She was blushing furiously.
“Why – when you knocked,” she was saying, “you see, I was expecting Mr. Waterberry – but when you knocked, I thought you were a client. And then, when you stood there, with your hat in your hand –“
Her eyes were glimmering with laughter. Hubert looked sheepishly up at her and smiled. Then out came the laughter, boiling and bubbling. And Hubert suddenly joined in. He leaned back and laughed till he wept. They looked at each other and laughed again. It was years since Hubert had laughed with anybody. Years and years. It was a wonderful sensation. He hated to stop laughing. So he confessed about his fear, and how he ran away from the office yesterday -and – and –
So they chuckled and laughed. They exchanged confidences. Hubert how he detested these modern office girls. The girl, how she had come to move to Toronto. The minutes passed. Then an hour. Still they were talking. Hubert was zestfully explaining to her her work, the various accounts.
It was a long time since Hubert had been intimate with anyone.
When dusk caught them in the dim office. Hubert regretfully closed the discussion. He bade her a most cheery good night and went home feeling better than he ever remembered feeling in his life.
It was a new world for Hubert. It was a pleasure to go to the office. He felt infinitely younger, boundlessly young. The girl talked before a week was out, quite boldly about the need of new business. She discovered openings for it in old accounts. Hubert went and got it.
At the end of a year, the business and Hubert were so changed that Miss Pigeon – that was her name -found it necessary to hire another girl, and a little later, a young man.
She won Hubert over to joining a golf club. On business grounds.
Hubert and she still kept sacred their regular daily laugh and exchange of confidences. It was found necessary, after a while, to go to lunch together in order to complete these conversations. And finally, it came to theatres and movies.
Naturally, the whole thing had but one end. Hubert felt himself drawing the very breath of life through this vigorous, splendid girl. He depended on her more and more, in countless little ways, and in big ways.
Finally, she helped him select a new overcoat and hat.
He looked in the mirror of the hat store and beheld a mere lad of forty – a swagger, upstanding fellow–
And when they closed up the office that evening, the juniors having gone, Hubert helped Miss Pigeon with her ulster2. As he did so, something that had been smoldering in him all afternoon, broke loose. He felt as if an electric current were flowing from her to him, a magnetic, swirling current. And he released his hold on the collar of her ulster only to seize her shoulders, turn her around to face him and stare breathlessly and foolishly at her, and then enfold her in a vast, stupid hug.
Romance: thou art as sly of foot in Wellington street as in the castled fastnesses of Rosedale.
They were married in no time. They live in a bungalow out beyond High Park, in an atmosphere of the most absurd happiness, forty-four and twenty-five.
“You’ve made a new man of me,” says Hubert, at least once every twenty-four hours.
But while Hubert is aware of it, he doesn’t give proper value to the fact that his pigeon was born and raised on the farm.
Editor’s Notes:
- Shea’s Hippodrome opened in 1914, and was the largest movie palace in Canada, and one of the largest vaudeville theatres in the world. It was demolished in 1957 to make way for Toronto’s new City Hall. ↩︎
- An Ulster coat is a Victorian style working daytime overcoat, with a cape and sleeves. ↩︎
The Big Coal Strike of 1922 was a general strike of miners in the US and Canada that lasted 163 days.
By Gregory Clark, August 12, 1922.
Hotels, golf, motor cars are the death of summer resorts – these three, and the greatest of these is hotels.
No hotel ever founded a summer resort.
Years after a few plucky pioneers had gone out into the wilderness and located a place of beauty and had developed a good transportation system by rail and boat, along comes a hotel and squats down in the midst of the cottagers. And revelry departs.
The hotel starts a golf course. It jollies the natives into making good motor roads. Presently these monsters of the city invade the sacred calm of the summer resort, endangering the lives of the children of the cottagers, kicking up dust that never had been raised before.
A crowd of gaudy strangers, with no stake in the community other than a sixty dollar hotel bill for their two weeks at the summer hotel, come and swarm all over the place, make the still water echo with their yells at evening, go strutting past the cottages with their golf bags, thus enticing the men of the cottages away from the pleasant and proper idleness of the veranday, spooning in the ‘cottagers’ private groves, dancing to all hours to the raucous music of a four-piece orchestra, which fills the night that hitherto had been filled only by the mellow note of the whippoorwill and the cricket.
Do these two-week strangers acknowledge any indebtedness to the cottagers for having come and pioneered this beautiful place and made it possible for a hotel to accommodate them? Not they. With their sixty dollar investment in a hotel bill, they swank on all their giddiest garments, sneer at the cottager, who tries to maintain the ancient summer resort traditions of “old clothes and comfort.”
Most of these two weekers, by the look of them, spend the rest of their year saving up fancy clothes to flash on the summer hotel. It is possibly their principal reason for coming to the summer hotel. For they certainly do not otherwise enjoy the realities of a summer holiday.
And why should men who play golf all the year round bring golf up to their summer holiday? It is pure swank. I think most of these people who play golf at summer hotels don’t belong to a club at home, and play golf only at the summer hotel. I have watched some of them playing, and I think I have the right dope.
As a matter of fact, I think most of them borrow the clubs they bring up, because I saw one man solemnly trying to play right-handed with a set of left hand clubs.
And as they stroll elegantly from place to place over this beautiful land saved from the wilderness by the pioneering cottagers, these two-weekers cast haughty glances at the cottager, who, in a pre-war pair of trousers and pre-hotel pair of running shoes a little split around the toes, dares to enter the hotel to patronize it to the extent of a plug of tobacco (which they keep for the hired help).
They look on the cottager, with his investment of thousands in his cottage and his hundreds in annual operating expenses, as a hick.
There is only one escape. To go on and on, into some remoter wilderness, there to enjoy the peace and beauty of nature, until you have so improved the train and boat service that a hotel can come and usurp your paradise.
There is no law against hotels and motors and golf. They mean nothing to your true pioneer of summer resorts. They are the perquisites of the two weeker.
This is from a story by Fred Griffin on the opening of the Woodbine Track for the new season.
By Gregory Clark, March 18, 1922.
The death of popes, the marriage of princesses, the fate of jazz-party legislators are, after all, minor events in comparison with a baby’s first tooth.
The first tooth is a sort of coming-of-age. A toothless baby is merely an infant. When the first tooth emerges, the baby becomes a child. It is no longer a harmless creature. It can bite its papa’s finger. It can make papa yell. It is a creature of consequence.
A young couple of my acquaintance were blessed six months ago with a male infant. The father works in the same office with me. For six months, I have been subjected to an intensive course in babiculture. I know how much a baby should gain per week. I can tell the difference between a hungry cry and a temper cry. I know how to hold them in the bath. This friend of mine has spared me none of the intimate details of a baby’s daily routine.
It has been “baby” this, and “baby did that”; “baby nearly crawled to-day,” or “baby has learned to pull his daddy’s hair.”
Yesterday, however, my friend strode jauntily over to my desk and said:
“Well, what do you think! James bit an arrowroot biscuit last evening!”
I was puzzled.
“James?” I said. “James did what? Who the deuce is James?”
“James is my son,” said he, proudly.
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “Baby!”
“Baby nothing,” he retorted, exultantly. “He has cut his first tooth! James he is from now on!”
This shows how a tooth can go to the head.
The first tooth of a first baby, however, is a tolerably weighty event in a young household. That indispensable volume which arrives shortly before the baby in most menages, the “doctor book,” says:
“Teething: preceded by drooling, restlessness, biting of hands, loss of appetite for a few days.”
This friend of mine wasn’t just sure what that word “drooling” meant. He was of the opinion that it meant emitting a sort of wail. His wife disagreed with him, but would not admit what she thought it meant. They were both somewhat shocked, on phoning the doctor, to learn that it meant merely dribbling or slobbering at the mouth.
“Good gracious!” cried the young mother. “Baby’s been doing that ever since we got him!”
Baby was also restless. He was also biting his fists. He was also a little careless about eating, much to his mother’s alarm, for she thought the baby was losing affection for her.
So father went and scrubbed his hands, took baby on his knees, and inserted the point of his little finger into baby’s jaws to feel for a tooth.
“You!” he shouted, jerking his hand away, sending the baby into roars of fright, and causing mother to snatch him angrily from his papa.
“My dear,” said father in an awed voice, turning red and white – “James has a tooth!”
So they took a teaspoon and waggled it in James’ mouth, and were rewarded by a small, faint, tinkling sound. The rest of the evening was devoted to calling up James’ grandparents, uncles and aunts, and friends and acquaintances twice removed to impart the remarkable news.
The tooth can now be seen – if the light is good – and James keeps still. It is a tiny thing, a minute splinter of mother o’ pearl –
James’ school, college and university have now been selected by his male parent. He is going to have a gold watch if he doesn’t smoke till he’s twenty. His father has already commenced weeding out his library, destroying certain trashy books he wouldn’t care to have around –
“You know,” said the father this morning, “It’s a caution how time flies. He’ll be in long pants before you know it. It takes a thing like this first tooth to wake a parent up to his responsibilities!”