This illustration accompanied an article by Gil O’Mourne about the number of sandwiches Torontonians eat.
Tag: 1927 Page 1 of 4
By Gregory Clark, October 22, 1927.
We were betting each other how long we could hold our breath.
“I bet you a thousand dollar bill…” began Charles.
“There’s no such thing as a thousand dollar bill,” I said.
“Yes, there is.”
“No, there isn’t.”
“There is, too.”
“I bet you a thousand dollar bill there isn’t,” I said.
And in this way was born the singular notion to make a story out of a thousand dollar bill1.
For there are such things as $1,000 bills. Charles phoned one of his bankers, and I lost the bet.
“Pay now,” said Charles, “and I want the $1,000 in one bill.”
However, after some discussion, Charles agreed not to collect right away if I would get a $1,000 bill and take it out on to Yonge street and buy him a dollar neck-tie with it.
“I would just like to see you,” he said, “trying to buy something with a $1,000 bill.”
“Where would I get a $1,000 bill?” I demanded. “Who would trust me with it?”
The editor, standing nearby, said he would – out of the business office.
So we had the business office get us a $1,000 bill from the bank.
It was the plainest, ordinary little bill, about the size of a one dollar bill, perhaps a trifle longer and a trifle narrower, green on the face and orange on the back2. It had a picture of the queen on it3, and on either side of her majesty, the neat figures 1000. Arched overhead were the words, One Thousand Dollars.
“There are not many of them,” said the bank manager. “And few of them are ever in circulation. They are used mostly between banks There are also thousand and five thousand dollar ‘legals’, which look like a Bank of England note, and are used only between banks. But this little fellow here is negotiable, just like a dollar bill.”
I wrapped it in a dollar I happened to have in my pants pocket, and grasping it firmly with my left hand in my pocket I called for Charles and we went forth to try and spend it.
“The idea,” said the editor, as we departed, “is not entirely humorous. This will test Toronto’s urbanity. If a thousand dollars knocks them dizzy, it will show that Toronto is not as big as she looks. On the other hand, if it creates no stir along Yonge street, why, Toronto is growing up.”
Charles and I agreed that we would not risk the bill in a big jewelry store, because in all probability they would change it for us right off.
“You buy me a tie, that’s all I want. And it must be a dollar tie or a ninety-five cent tie.”
“Right-o,” says I, my hand perspiring with the clench I had on that flimsy bill in my pocket, for we were now in the midst of Yonge street traffic, and I was turning over in my mind the idea of calling one of the big policemen off traffic duty to follow us.
“We’ll Just Charge It”
Furthermore, as we turned north on Yonge street, I suddenly noticed what an awful criminal looking population Toronto has got. I never noticed it before. But all at once, every face I looked at had a grim, sinister expression on it, and each face was staring peculiarly at me!
I glanced at Charles, and, by George, there was a funny look even on his familiar face.
“Ahem!” said Charles. “What do you say, Greg, if we just jump a train for New York and have a celebration on that $1,000?”
“How long would it last?” I demanded.
“That’s a fact,” said Charles. “Let’s not do that. Well, here’s Dunfield’s. I like their ties.”
We walked in and stood beside the dollar tie rack. We had to wait a few minutes. Apparently the clerks thought by our looks that we didn’t have much money. Little did they know!
Finally a salesman walked over.
“We want a tie – a dollar tie – or have you any around ninety-five cents?” asked Charles.
So we selected a tie; a jolly dollar tie.
As the salesman slipped it into the envelope, I tossed the $1,000 bill on to the showcase.
The salesman glanced at it, halted in his tracks, examined it closer, without picking it up.
“Is this the smallest you’ve got?” he asked, never turning a hair.
“Yes, it is,” I said, feeling about in different pockets to see if by chance I might have a five hundred or a couple of hundred in my match pockets or small change pocket.
“I’m afraid,” said the salesman, “that as it is after banking hours…”
“Have you anything smaller, Charles?” I asked.
Charles patted his wallet pocket thoughtfully.
“No.” said he, “I’ve nothing smaller, I’m afraid.”
We looked at the salesman. He said: “Just a moment.”
He walked back to the cashier’s desk and talked quietly with another salesman. They both returned and handed us the bill, and the tie.
“We’ll just charge it to you,” he said, “and you can drop in and pay for it another time!”
Done! Stumped! Bluff called! Anybody that presents thousand dollar bills around Dunfield’s can have tick4. They can easily have a dollar tie on credit. In fact, take the whole store, and you’re welcome!
Charles and I didn’t know just what to do in the face of this friendly offer. But I, lying like the deuce, as a matter of fact, said:
“No thanks, old man. I don’t like to do that. I like to pay cash for everything.”
And, somewhat crestfallen, we went out into Yonge street.
The Gaze of Suspicion
Imrie’s were the next victims.
We selected a very nice tie, smart club stripe. It was slipped into its envelope. I laid the thousand dollar bill on the show case. The salesman picked it up calmly, turned to the cash register and said:
“One from a hundred.”
“One from a thousand!” I corrected, in an alarmed voice.
The salesman stopped, looked at the bill.
“By Jove,” he said, “I slipped one of those noughts, didn’t I? Well, I’m sorry. It’s after banking hours; I can’t change this. But here-“
He slapped a check book down on the show case.
“I’ll take your cheque.”
Stumped again!
It began to look as if a thousand dollar bill did not cut much ice after all amongst the merchants of Yonge street.
I said I had no bank account – that I carried my wealth about with me – I got out of Imrie’s with as much dignity as I could, and we made for Brass’s.
There we chose a black and white tie, at ninety-five cents.
The salesman took the bill in his hand. He turned red.
“Where’d you get this?” he asked.
“It’s perfectly good,” I retorted.
“It looks all right,” said the salesman, turning it over and over and feeling it carefully.
“Feels all right. But I’m sorry; I can’t change it.”
He hung the tie back on the rack, and we I could feel upon our backs, as we walked out, the psychic impress of a gaze that was both suspicious and envious.
“Where now, Charles?”
“I think,” said Charles, “you should buy me a pot of tea.”
“Right-o.”
We went to a small but busy little tea shop and sat down and solemnly consumed a double pot of tea and three orders of cinnamon toast.
I signaled the girl. “Pay my check, please.”
And I handed her the thousand dollar bill. She never even looked at it. She picked it up casually with the slip and walked off to the cashier.
In a moment, the manager came back, all smiles:
“I’m frightfully sorry,” he said, beaming, “but you’ve caught me without… as a matter of fact, I’m most sorry, but I’ve not ten minutes ago returned from the bank. I can’t change this!”
He held the thousand dollar bill triumphantly in his hand, waved it, but maintained the air of a gentleman who was most frightfully embarrassed, socially, at being caught without any money.
“But we’ve drunk the tea and eaten the toast,” said Charles.
“Have you nothing smaller than this?”
I asked Charles if he had.
“No. I’ve not,” he retorted, “and, anyway, you invited me to tea.”
“Well, now, I’ll tell you, gentlemen,” said the manager, “it’s quite all right. You just pay this chit the next time you’re n!”
He was all for having us regular customers.
But in the end, Charles dug up the eighty cents and paid the bill, with loud protests that I had invited him to tea and might at least carry some decent sized money about with me.
Just Chicken Feed
As we left the tea room the girl who had waited on us passed us in the corridor with a pale and very much impressed little smile.
“Now where?”
“Eaton’s,” said Charles. “I feel we will meet our fate at Eaton’s.”
And as we walked north to Eaton’s, we looked at the crowd walking by. Somehow, the sinister criminal look about them that I had noticed at first had all gone. I noticed, instead, a sort of patient, harried look about them all. They seemed weary, tired. I felt a thousand dollars would do each one of them so much good.
And the humorous feel of that flimsy note in my pants pocket lost something.
“A lot of these girls,” I said to Charles, “work hard for a whole year for a thousand dollars.”
“And what,” said Charles, “would they do with it if you handed one of them that $1,000 in your pocket? Buy a fur coat.”
“Or maybe they wouldn’t believe it. Let’s try to give it away to someone!”
“If you try,” said Charles, “crippled as I am, I will bean you. You should realize by now that that $1,000 is real, and that it is mere chicken feed on Yonge street. Grab tight on it. Here’s Queen and Yonge.”
In Eaton’s we decided that it must be a girl we buy the tie from. So we hunted around, finding nothing but men clerks in the tie departments. But at last we came to the boys’ tie department, with girls behind the counter. And there, suspended on a rack was a gorgeous tie of scarlet and black stripes, the most gorgeous tie you would ever want to see, and it was marked boldly above it, “75 cents.”
“There’s the tie!” cried Charles. “And there’s the girl to sell it to us.”
She was amiable.
“That is a beautiful tie,” she agreed, passing it over to us. “You would be surprised who I sold a tie just like that to, last week!”
“Who was that?”
“Mr. Tommy Church5,” said the girl.
“Sold,” said Charles. “I must have this tie, even if I only use it to tie up love-letters and things in lavender.”
I laid the $1,000 bill softly on the counter.
The girl went ahead making the bill out, and then glanced at the note to see what denomination she would take the seventy-five cents out of.
“Oh!” said she.
She picked it up and studied it for a minute.
“I wouldn’t like to send that up,” she said. “Just wait a moment.”
And, taking the thousand dollar bill carelessly in her fingers so that it fluttered, she walked off, out of the circle, into the crowded aisle.
“Your Change! Thank You!”
Charles and I had the pleasure of seeing the salesgirl walking briskly off, we knew not whither, with that thousand dollar bill waving carelessly by her side as if it had been a dollar.
“Gone to see about it,” said Charles.
“I think maybe we should have gone with her,” said I.
“What,” said Charles, in a friendly way, “would the office do if you lost that bill? Would they take it out of you?”
“Hang it, Charles,” I expostulated, “don’t talk like that! I wonder where she’s gone?”
“She might lose it,” said Charles. “She might have it snatched out of her hand by some of these pickpockets.”
I went clammy all over.
And then, to my joy, appeared the young lady, coming briskly back. The time she was gone was less time than it would have taken for the tube to go up and come back with our change6.
She appeared smartly before us at the counter.
“Your change,” she said.
And she counted off nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars and twenty-five cents.
Handed us the tie.
“Thank you!” said the girl in the boys’ neckwear department.
No hesitation. No doubt. What happened was that she had simply carried the bill to the cashier’s office, one floor up, handed it in, asked for change, got it, and took her seventy-five cents out of it.
So there was the end of our thousand dollar bill. All I had left of it was nine one hundred dollar bills, four twenties, a ten, a five and two twos. And a quarter.
Funny how unromantic that roll looked. Just so much spondoolicks7.
“Well,” said Charles.
“It looks,” said I, “as if Toronto is growing up. It is nothing to them that plain ordinary fellows haul out thousand dollar bills.”
“The races are on,” said Charles. “And the stock market is booming as never before. Maybe the good times they talk about are really here8. And besides, we may look a little like gamblers.”
“There’s something flattering about the reception we got all along the line. It must be the ties I wear,” said I.
“Here,” said Charles, “you take this one. I’ll never use it. It’s more your style.”
“No, Charles,” I replied. “You keep it as s souvenir of this adventure. I’ll charge it up to expenses anyway.”
Editor’s Notes: This is one of the original “stunt” stories that was done in the late 1920s and early 1930s. If you think it is odd, just consider that this would not be out of place today as a Youtube video.
- $1000 in 1927 would be $17,915 in 2025. ↩︎
- Here is an image of it (this would be before the creation of the Bank of Canada in 1935). ↩︎
- That would be Queen Mary, wife of George V. ↩︎
- In this context, “tick” is slang for “an account” or “credit”. ↩︎
- Thomas Church was mayor of Toronto from 1915-1921, and then a Member of Parliament for a Toronto riding from 1921-1930, 1934-1950. ↩︎
- I love the idea that they would be using pneumatic tubes for this. ↩︎
- “Spondoolicks” is slang for money or cash. Greg sure can bring out the 19th century slang. ↩︎
- Uh, oh. ↩︎
Sharp-eyed readers will notice that this comic is called “Birdseye Corners” and not “Birdseye Center”. There was still a transition time between 1925 and 1927 where the name switched between “Life’s Little Comedies” and “Birdseye Center”. It was mostly “Birdseye Center” in 1927, except for this brief period in March and April 1927 where is was “Birdseye Corners”.
By Gregory Clark, February 19, 1927.
It is not courage that wins wars nowadays. Courage, was no doubt the chief virtue of a soldier in the days when they fought battles hand to hand. But it was a sort of dogged dumbness that made the German a good soldier long after he was licked. When the Canadians were nearly insane with mud and racket and lice, you could go out on patrol in No man’s Land and hear the German posts singing. Stolid dumbness is a great quality in modern armies. Far greater than courage. The only virtue that approaches it in general serviceability is craft.
Craft won Sergeant Fatty Boarding both his stripes and his decoration. Yet he had no courage and only a little dumbness. He was nervous as a little boy going down cellar1. He started at the slightest sound. It was a treat to see him start violently. Early in his career, he showed he had no courage by being caught jammed head first into a funk hole2 so tightly the captain had to get a working party to dig him loose. And the first week, he made a name for himself by suddenly, in the midst of the evening strafe, giving a wild yell and starting to run. He ran down the communication trench until he got lost in the dark. The file detailed to go after him heard him yodeling pitifully in the midst of a field of weeds half a mile back of the reserve trenches, and he was pathetically glad to be put under arrest. But they took him back up the line.
His appearance before the c.o. became regimental history.
“Well, sir,” said Fatty, “I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have enlisted. This is all just a bad mistake. Send me back home.”
“My man, you’re in the army now,” said the colonel.
“But do you mean to say,” said Fatty, pop-eyed, “that if a man doesn’t want to stay here he’s go to stay here and run the risk of getting killed?”
“Good heavens!” exclaimed the colonel.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered,” said Fatty.
His punishment, in view of his obvious innocence, was fourteen days and the charge was altered to absence without leave. And it was in the fourteen days at Fatty spent cleaning pails and paving paths around the officers’ huts that he worked out the theory that won him more than most men got out of the war.
Probably his close confinement in the clink3 with that famous old soldier, Provost Sergeant Harkins, showed him some of the fundamentals of soldiering. Harkins never tired of relating his numerous adventures in ‘is Majesty’s service In Hindia, Hafrica, Hafganistan and wot not. And fourteen nights of these yarns was a good general education for Fatty.
Fatty came from a small settlement – you couldn’t call it a village, exactly – in Northern Ontario. He had spent his life mostly sitting around. He was an intense thinker. His favorite amusement was sitting with the upper part of his back and the back of his neck propped against a wall, the rest of him laid out on the ground, while he screwed his face up into an expression of deep concentration. As soon as he was released from the clink, he found a good wall with a southerly exposure and laid himself out to think.
Fatty a Graceful Volunteer
When cook house sounded at five o’clock in the afternoon, Fatty fell in, not somewhere in the first flight, which was his usual position, but at the very end of the line with the batmen4, who, haying eaten most of the officers’ supper, only turned out to cook house for appearance’s sake.
“What’s a matter, Fatty,” called the company wits. “Lost your energy layin’ flagstone pavements?”
When Fatty at last came up to the kitchen, he said in a kindly way to the cook:
“If you need any help cleanin’ up, call on me.”
“Buckshee?5” sneered the cook, who, like all cooks, was a suspicious man.
“No, no! I been workin’ lately and it’s good for me. Just call on me.”
And Abbs, the cook, did. Fatty cheerfully spent the evening as a volunteer, scrubbing up dixies6, carrying water from the distant well. There were half a dozen aspirants amongst the older members of the company who felt they were in line for the job of cook’s helper. But Fatty was so graceful a volunteer, during the rest of the stay in billets, that when Abbs asked, as usual, to be excused duty cooking in the line on the ground of queer pains he had in his stomach, sides, chest, legs and back, the captain, learning that Fatty was the man Abbs wanted to send in his place, agreed.
“That fat fellow is cut out for a cook’s helper,” said the captain.
Thus smoothly did Fatty slip into the job of company cook in the line, a job that kept him strictly on duty in a deep dugout twenty-four hours of the day.
The only thing Fatty had to worry about now was the trips up to the line and the trips back to the rest areas. But he managed to soften these somewhat. Ordinarily, a working party which is detailed to carry in the rations from the dump where the wagons leave them also carries in the four dixies which the company requires in the line. But Fatty showed himself a gallant worker. When he reached the dump, he picked up all four dixies himself. He put one over his head, hung two in front of him and one behind.
In the dusk, you would see him slowly plodding forward, on his own, far in rear of the company, like an unhorsed knight of old.
“My dear man, those dixies are heavy!” cried the Padre7, one night, meeting Fatty.
“Yeh,” said Fatty. “And thick!”
And he carefully and noisily clanked down into the trench.
It was on a trip in on the Mericourt front that Fatty won his first stripes. In addition to his four empty dixies, he was carrying the sergeants’ primus stove8 which he had cheerfully offered to transport into the line because it just covered the lower part of his abdomen which the dixies that hung in front of him did not quite reach. That night, the Bosch9 had learned of the relief and decided, quite rightly, that it was a good time to raid. The trenches would be full, the old and the relieving troops encumbered with baggage, all unready for a surprise attack. Fatty, nearing the forward trenches, met outcoming troops in the narrow communication, and as he could not pass them, laden as he was with dixies, he studied the night carefully and finding it quite still, decided to risk climbing up into the open and walking along the trench to the front line. As he prowled along, he saw that the communication took a wide bend, and to make the short cut, he angled out into the open meadow. At that moment, the Bosch barrage came down like a thousand of brick.
Wild Yell of “Flammerwerfer!10“
Fatty, leaping for the trench, let the dixie on his head fall forward so that it completely obstructed his vision. In order to keep his mind intent on covering as much of his delicate anatomy as possible with the dixies and the primus stove, he could not concentrate on the direction he must take. He made a couple of frantic circles, shells and splinters whooping and zinging around him, and then, in a complete and directionless panic, the heavy dixie over his head, he decided to run straight on until he should fall into a trench. The raiders had got to the front trench and were flinging bombs and cutting furiously to get through the wire.
Fatty had the smoldering stub of a cigaret in the hand that held the primus stove. A shell splinter, just as Fatty reached the front line trench, made a hole in the brass stove. The escaping gasoline took fire from the cigaret and there was a wild streak of hissing flame. Fatty, with a shriek, hurled the thing from him. With the dixie fallen over his head, he did not know where he flung it. He certainly did not know he had pitched it fair forward into the thickest of the raiders.
“Flammenwerfer!” went a wild yell from out in No Man’s Land. Someone in charge fired a red rocket and the raiders withdrew in haste just as their first men were about to pitch into the trench.
The Fatty they picked up from the bottom of the trench and disentangled from all his dixies, was speechless with fright. One of the lieutenants who had been within a few feet of the spot came and wrung his hand, shouting:
“Good man! Good man! What in hell was…”
By the time they had got him down into his dugout with a nip of rum in him and surrounded by a group of admiring comrades, Fatty was sufficiently recovered to remember that he was an old soldier.
“I seen my duty,” he remarked casually, “and I done it.”
An hour later, the captain had told Fatty that he was promoted to lance corporal and would be attached to one of the platoons just as soon as somebody could be got to take his place as cook.
Two lieutenants and one sergeant had already given Fatty a drink. The captain offered Fatty his water bottle when he made this announcement. With the resultant courage, Fatty looked his captain in the eye and solemnly saluted.
“Say la gerry!” he remarked.
A few weeks later, at the battle of Passchendaele, in which Fatty was deprived of the honor of participating by an untimely attack of violent cramps in his stomach, the company lost most of its n.c.o.’s and Fatty was promoted to corporal. And it was Corporal Fatty Boarding who brought up the rear of his platoon, gladly carrying the haversacks, the heavily stuffed haversacks, shovels, and other impediments of his weaker comrades, when they marched back into the old Loos sector.
“I don’t see how you can walk with all that stuff hung about you,” said the lieutenant.
“Oh, I don’t mind a few small compact things, sir,” said Fatty. “The heavier they are, the better cover they are, after all.”
“True,” said the lieutenant.
It was Corporal Fatty who was on trench duty at the top of Horse Alley, much to the amusement of his subordinates, when the company commander came through the trench and said in a hoarse voice:
“The enemy are not thirty yards from you here. I guess the safest place in the world, right along here, is No Man’s Land.”
“Boys, I Seen a Rabbit!”
And Fatty climbed up on the firestep11 and took a gingerly look out into that eerie darkness.
“I seen a rabbit,” said he, dropping down into the trench. “Boys, I seen a rabbit!”
“A rat, you mean.”
“No, a rabbit. A big fat rabbit, hoppin’ along not eight feet from my nose. Oh, boy, I could almost smell him cookin’.”
All that night, on duty and off, in the trench and in the dugout, Corporal Fatty Boarding could talk of nothing but rabbits.
“I didn’t do nothing but snare rabbits, back home. I have snore thousands of rabbits. Not these issue rabbits, mind, from Australia, but soft, chickeny, white meat rabbits. Fried rabbits, and boiled rabbits, and rabbit stew…”
“Shut up!” roared the dugout.
And in that one night, Fatty took at least a dozen good long looks over the parapet.
“They’s a woods just back there a bit,” he said, after one of his peeps towards morning. “I bet that place is just swarming with rabbits. Now a rabbit cooked in bacon fat, deep…”
The following day, Corporal Fatty was seen working in his concentrated way with pieces of signal wire, making nooses. He collected several yards of old wire. He borrowed a trench periscope and studied No Man’s Land for the better part of the afternoon. When the lieutenant came along and found him staring over, he asked what he saw.
“I see an old bit of a battered-in trench,” said Fatty, “that looks like a-looks just exactly like a sort of a rabbit runway!”
It must truthfully be told that, before taking any steps himself, Corporal Fatty asked several of his men if they would care to go out into No Man’s Land and set a few rabbit snares for him. But in view of the profane answers, he had to spend the night staring, with his eyes barely clear of the parapet, into the night towards the enemy lines.
“Seen any more rabbits?” asked some of the boys.
“Yes. I think I seen a thousand,” said Fatty.
The third night, he could bear it no longer. The company commander himself had said that No Man’s Land was the safest place around there. So about midnight, through a narrow oblique gap cut in the wire to permit patrols to go out, Fatty crawled forth and set three wire snares in the shallow abandoned trench, which ran from the Canadian to the German side.
He returned all of a lather. He had to alt a long time on the fire step before he gained his voice.
“I guess I didn’t do a very good job. I had to set ’em bigger than at home, because these here Belgian rabbits is big. Maybe I won’t get any the first try.”
However, he posted himself to wait and listen for the squeaks and struggles that would tell of a capture.
Nothing happened for an hour.
Then came a sudden loud squeak. A thrashing around, not twenty feet out.
“Gosh!” said Corporal Fatty, Belgian rabbits seemed as big as horses.
But he leaped forth and wriggled into No Man’s Land. There was a shot. A loud yell. A strangled cry. And just as the officer and duty sergeant reached the bay, in rolled Corporal Fatty Boarding holding by his ears a German trooper with a copper wire strangling him around the neck.
Bombs flew. Corporal Boarding seemed so unaware of help being at hand that he struggled furiously with his captive on the bath mats12, though it was curious that he seemed to want to keep his victim not underneath but on top of him.
“Good man! Good man!” gasped the lieutenant, hurrying the corporal towards the company commander’s dugout, the prisoner staggering ahead at the point of Fatty’s bayonet.
“You find out,” said Corporal Fatty, holding the tin mug up gallantly, as he told his story to the company commander. “You find out where the Germans is crawlin’, then you set snares just as if – well, just as if you was snaring rabbits.”
“Great lad!” breathed the company commander, earnestly.
They made Fatty a sergeant forthwith and six weeks later his ribbon came through.
Editor’s Notes: There is a lot of World War One slang in this one…
- When something is “down cellar” is means it is in the basement. My grandmother used this phrase all the time! ↩︎
- A “funk hole” is a small dugout usually for a single man dug in to the side of an existing trench, with just enough space to sometimes lay down. The term comes from a slang term for cowering in fear. ↩︎
- A “clink” is a prison. ↩︎
- A batman in WW1 is a soldier assigned to an officer as a personal servant. This was based on tradition in the British Army where an officer was a “gentleman”. ↩︎
- “Buckshee” means “free of charge”. ↩︎
- A dixie is a large pot used for cooking or distributing food to the men in the trenches. ↩︎
- A padre in the military is a military chaplain, usually a priest, minister, or rabbi. ↩︎
- A primus stove was the first pressurized-burner kerosene stove. ↩︎
- The Bosch was a derogatory term for the Germans. ↩︎
- A flammenwerfer is a German flamethrower that was used in World War I and World War II. ↩︎
- A firestep is a step or ledge on which soldiers in a trench stand to fire. ↩︎
- A bath mat is slang for wooden floors used to line trenches to help with controlling mud. They are also referred to as duckboards. ↩︎
This is an illustration to accompany a story by Fred Griffin about preparing animals for a fair.
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:
- 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. ↩︎
- 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. ↩︎
- Coboconk is a village in the Kawartha Lakes. ↩︎
By Gregory Clark, June 18, 1927.
Mr. Bodkin, who works in our office, carries a handbag.
He has carried it for years, and with his handbag, umbrella and his rubbers on, he is so serious and dignified a personage, none of us has ever ventured to jolly him about the bag.
As far as we know, he never carries anything in it. It just seems to be a habit of long standing, and he would as soon go out with no collar and tie on and come to business without his faithful old handbag.
Now it so happens that he parks his car three blocks away from the office, half a block from one of the new liquor stores.1
And that handbag has taken on a new and horrible significance.
The first day liquor was on sale, Mr. Bodkin came down Church street and saw the line-up. And being an old newspaperman, the instinct to stop, look and ask naturally halted him.
He is a shy sort of man, however, who depends on his powers of observation rather than his tongue, and he stood about for all of five minutes before he spoke to one of his neighbors in the crowd, to ask what the line-up was for and where everybody was going, because everybody was carrying a bag of some description.
“Booze,” replied the neighbor. “This is the opening day.”
You can imagine Mr. Bodkin’s horror. He has been a prohibitionist since birth, a tremendous worker for the dries, the author of many a strong article and influential pamphlet on the liquor traffic.
And here he had been standing, bag in hand, in the liquor store line-up for five long minutes while curious crowds of onlookers stared.
He got out of there so fast, he was limp when he reached the office.
We helped him out of his coat, and he flung the old handbag to the floor.
“If it hadn’t been for that!” he cried, with a mortified air.
We gathered around him.
And he told us of the tragedy.
“Five long minutes I stood there!” he wailed. “Goodness knows who saw me. Hundreds and hundreds passed by and paused to look. Amongst them must have, been scores of acquaintances, and probably the telephones wires are at this moment being burned up with the scandal that Bodkin, the great prohibition worker, was amongst the first to line up for his liquor!”
We soothed him.
“Boys,” said Bodkin, “do me a favor. Help me out of this mess, will you? Pass the word around amongst your friends that I was standing there in all innocence, as a newspaper man. That’s good fellows!”
“But,” said Jimmie, “that handbag. It will be hard to explain away that handbag.”
“Oh, dear!” sighed Mr. Bodkin.
For two days, he came to work without the handbag, but he was like a lost soul. He wandered around like a man who has forgotten his pipe. The rest of us could do no work, with him wandering around. He would sit and stare moodily at the place beside his desk where he used to park the handbag.
“I don’t enjoy the walk anymore.” he confided to me. “I have carried that bag for twenty years, and I think it has become part of me. Little did I dream the liquor business would ever strike me in a vulnerable spot. Its ramifications are so insidious, reaching into a man’s most sacred life. Curse the liquor traffic, I say!”
Jimmie had the inspiration.
“Look here,” said he to Bodkin, “just have the words ‘MSS Only’2 inscribed in gold letters on the bag, good and big.”
So Bodkin has his bag again and all is well. He has the words “MSS Only” in letters two inches freshly gilded on the faithful old bag. And he comes down Yonge instead of Church street now.
“It’s a much finer way to come anyway,” he says.
There must be hundreds and hundreds of people who have been made self-conscious since the liquor stores opened, lawyers, doctors, salesmen, who have to carry bags in the daily vocation.
But they can all follow Mr. Bodkin’s lead. Doctors can quite excusably work in a little free advertising for themselves by inscribing their name and title on their bags in large characters. Lawyers can put “Legal Documents Only.” Travelers can have the name of their firm or commodity emblazoned.
Or, to put another interpretation on the idea, although this is hardly fair to Bodkin, now that he has employed the idea in self-defence, could not those who do line up at the liquor stores camouflage their bag’s contents by all sorts of disarming inscriptions such as “MSS Only.” “Dr. Smith. horse doctor,” “Use Squkm Gramophone Needles,” “Hokem and Pokem, Barristers, Etc.”
The clever concealment of the true function of a handbag that is solely employed for the purpose of carrying two crocks from the liquor store will now be one of those things that will tax the ingenuity of a necessarily ingenious section of the public.
Editor’s Notes:
- The Liquor Control Act overturned prohibition as legislated in the Ontario Temperance Act and established the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), through which the province managed liquor distribution with government-run stores taking effect on June 1 1927. ↩︎
- MSS is an abbreviation for manuscripts. ↩︎
