Tag: 1928 Page 1 of 4
By Gregory Clark, September 22, 1928.
“This court,” states Magistrate Robert J. Browne, “stands adjourned for one hour for lunch. It will continue if necessary until midnight.
“We will have no quick-lunch justice here!”
Quick-lunch justice!
Everything about the old Toronto police court calls for quick-lunch justice. Justice slid along the greasy counter. Justice slapped down on the plate. The dingy old court room shouts for it. The dark and dismal corridor outside the door where distressed mankind waits for all the world like a Hogarth1 drawing of the Old Bailey – all shout for quick-lunch justice. For mercy’s sake, make it speedy.
Here is a court room that was built in 1899. In 1899, a buggy was the fastest thing on Toronto’s streets. In 1899 there were less than 200,000 people in Toronto. Booze provided only one or two problems – drunks, desertions. Now booze has become a complex thing, bootleggers, motorists, dives. In 1899 it was an honor and privilege to appear before Colonel Denison2 in the beautiful spacious new court room..
But age withers.
The windows of the police court to-day have shrunk to slits that let in a gray light. The curtains are drab and faded. The woodwork seems stained by countless sinful vapors.
The roar of a great city forbids that windows be opened. The tumult of the gears which turn the wheels of justice in this old room make it sometimes impossible for the court to proceed. On one day recently, Magistrate Browne sat from ten o’clock in the morning until four-fifteen in the afternoon before the “morning” court was ended.
Five different police courts exist in Toronto, and except for a small committee-room next door to the main court room, the old police court has somehow to accommodate them all. The “drunk” court, now shrunken to a little formality of twenty minutes. Then the main criminal police court, which in the heyday of Colonel Denison, used to run from ten to twelve o’clock and which now runs on and on, sometimes into the late afternoon; the women’s court in the little crowded committee-room, the traffic court in the afternoon wherever it can be accommodated, and on certain days, the health court, which sandwiches itself wherever it can find a high desk and a fragment of silence.
In this one year, there will be one hundred and twenty-five thousand cases pass through these courts!
The Police Court Midway
What is guarding Toronto, then, from quick-lunch justice? From slap-stick justice?
The corridor is like a midway. Toughs and gentle women witnesses; babies in arms, thundering policemen, sick people, broken-hearted people, grim accusers, sly, shifty ones – the human midway, the corridor of the Toronto police court.
Toronto’s court has no witness rooms, no counsel’s rooms, no privacy whatsoever. The law of the land is that the court room shall be public. Whoever gets there first gets a seat in the court room, and the rest are herded into the corridor, to listen and strain amidst the shadowy din to their names called. Lawyers must consult their clients in this public highway. Witnesses, tragic or cold, gentle or rough, must all sit together and take away a nightmare with them when they go.
Common human sympathy urges everybody to hurry, to get the thing over and done with.
But Toronto’s five magistrates live in fear. They live in fear of being influenced by physical conditions around them. They do not know from one hour to the next which court room they will be in. Nothing is ordered or orderly. They live in a kind of pandemonium, but they will not err in the direction of speed.
“There will be no quick-lunch justice here,” says Magistrate Browne.
“Lewis Harris,” cries the clerk of the court.
“Lewis Harris,” echoes the constable of the dock.
At the back, the public is wedged in tight in the benches. In all the standing room, constables and detectives, witnesses and officials are packed in. The dock is filled with a row of midway spectacles, who look like the men who sing, in a Balieff ballet3, the “Song of the Volga Boatmen.”4 One of them, Lewis Harris, rises and stands forth.
Between him and Magistrate Browne on his high bench, are the lawyers, privileged characters, who rise and sit, bend and scuffle, talk and wave documents, come and go. Over all this scene there quivers a tumult of sound and movement.
But away up against the high panelled wall, alone and aloof, in black coat and wing collar, sits the young magistrate. He is handsome in the Greek way. His eyes are intense blue and very wide and quiet. He has a broad, strong mouth, which turns down in a faint sardonic smile when the rumpus of his court reaches one of the panics of physical congestion.
He is at rest. None of the excitement seems to reach him. His head is framed against the high panels, and you think the gray hair on his temples is blonde hair, so peaceful is his face.
“Lewis Harris!” cries the clerk of the court. In triumph, as if proud to produce anybody at all amidst all this whirligig.
No Off-Hand Judgment
Harris is an old man, bowed, white-haired, with spectacles down on his nose like a collector of coins.
We are all sympathy at once for Lewis Harris. What crime can be juggled up against so quaint and helpless an old man as this?
Maybe, we thought, he has no home and has come to the end of the long, long tether.
“Pickpocket,” says a voice, amidst the countless whispering, murmuring voices.
It seems that at the Exhibition, two visitors caught Lewis Harris with his hand entering one of their pockets. They held him and a detective arrived.
What an absurdity! Pickpockets are young and nimble and foreign. This man is old and gentle and far from nimble.
A lawyer is standing up, leaning forward and stretching up his arms in gesticulation to Magistrate Browne.
“Sixty-eight years old,” exclaims the lawyer. “It is admitted he tried to pick the pocket. But he is so old, your worship. Deport him. Send him back to the States where he came from. Fell for a momentary temptation.”
But another lawyer is on his feet, a rugby player of a lawyer. He is the crown prosecutor and he holds in his hand a very large sheet of foolscap.
“A record, your worship.” he says in a man’s voice that cuts through the fog, “dating back to 1894. Philadelphia, 1894; Boston, 1896; Chicago, 1899; San Francisco, 1904; Portland, Oregon, 1906; San Antonio, Texas, 1907; Detroit, 1913: Toledo, 1916; Omaha, 1918; Atlanta, Georgia, 1922…”
Why Lewis Harris is no poor old man! He is an adventurer, a world traveller! A man who has seen the world.
“All,” says the prosecutor with the man’s voice, “for picking pockets.”
“Sixty-eight years old!” pleads the lawyer. “He is not long for this world. Deport him, your worship. Send him back to where he belongs.”
The magistrate’s wide blue eyes are staring at the old bent figure below him.
No quick-lunch justice here.
“We can only feel sympathy,” says the magistrate, “for this old man at the end of his life. But the interests of the community must be served. We cannot deport him. That would only create the impression amongst American crooks that they can come up here with impunity, take their chance, and if caught, all their punishment would amount to would be to be sent back home at no expense to themselves. Nine months in the reformatory, and to be deported at the conclusion of his term.”
Thinking Down His Sympathy
The next case is a boy.
He is young and clean and slim. There is a delicate look about him. If we felt sympathy for a sinful old man, we feel even more sympathy for this straight youth of nineteen. He has the face of a poet, and this is no company for poets.
A poor woman hobbles in and sits beside the lawyers at the witness bench.
The boy, it seems, is charged with criminal negligence. He drove a truck and struck down this woman. All the evidence comes out, a doctor concluding with detailed technical description of the injuries. The woman with three little children got off a street car under the Queen St. subway and along out of the gloom came this truck and hurled her to the ground.
The boy walks nervously to the witness box and stands up close to Magistrate Browne. They talk face to face.
“Have you a driver’s license?” asks the magistrate.
“No, sir. I am studying music….”
“He won,” says the boy’s lawyer, “the governor-general’s prize for violin two years ago.”
“I am on my holidays,” continues the boy. “And I was helping my brother. I thought I would help him, so I drove this truck from the repair shop to our home.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen. I got along all right, but coming through the Queen St. subway, it was dim, and I was following the street car. I did not know street cars stopped in the subway. Suddenly. I found myself rushing beside the street car. It was all a whirl. I had struck the woman before I knew anything. It was all over…”
What kind of justice will we get here?
Surely a young man with only a little gray at his temples will feel a great sympathy for this boy and his violin, who suddenly in the dimness found himself rushing past the street car and all his life tumbling about his head.
Do students of the violin go to jail?
“There is nothing in your favor,” says the magistrate, slowly. Let the court beg for hurry. Let anxious fists hammer at the gates. “Nothing in your favor. You are young. You have no license to drive. You are not accustomed to driving. Yet you take a death-dealing machine through the streets of this city. And only the mercy of God prevented you from, killing a woman and two of her three children. This is a dangerous age.”
An almost silence has come on the court and the lawyer stands with jaw fallen. The magistrate is staring with calm eyes at the boy, thinking down his sympathy, thinking it down.
“You will go to the reformatory for one year.”
The student of the violin does not seem to understand. He has not been used to paying. Others pay. He plays.
Will he take his violin to the prison, I wonder?
World is More Complex
Thieves, embezzlers. forgers, thugs, sneaks, they get their time and their share.
Five different men charged with reckless driving, or being drunk in charge of cars, go down to jail.
All one man did was crash into the rear of a truck. He went to jail for ten days. He had had “half a glass of beer” earlier in the day.
“I wish,” says Magistrate Browne, “the press would give greater prominence to the sentences imposed on reckless and negligent drivers. There is no mercy here for men who drive motors negligently and recklessly or when under the influence of liquor in the slightest degree.”
The hours drag on.
Already the traffic court cases for the afternoon are gathering out in the corridor and the confusion and rumpus seems to be on the increase.
Order! Order! Order! The magistrate demands it, sardonically. He has an inspector in the court room whose sole duty is to preserve order and decorum in the court. There are ten or a dozen constables and officials to back him up.
And because the magistrate was once a soldier he gets order, even out of what is clearly inevitable.
But what can you expect of an old and sin-blown court room that dates back to 99. when the fastest thing in Toronto’s streets was a buggy and the only problem booze gave us was drunkenness, to be dealt with in the quick-lunch way, with humorous jests from the bench and comic items in the daily press?
We’ve come a long way. The world is stranger, more complex than in 99.
“Yet,” says Magistrate Browne, “we’ll have no quick-lunch justice here!”
Editor’s Notes: (There was a section of this story that I deleted as it was racist to immigrants).
- William Hogarth was an 18th century English artist. ↩︎
- George Taylor Denison was a Canadian lawyer, military officer and writer. ↩︎
- Nikita F. Balieff was a Russian Armenian born vaudevillian, stage performer, and director. He is best known as the creator and master of ceremonies of La Chauve-Souris theater group. ↩︎
- The “Song of the Volga Boatmen” is a well-known traditional Russian song. ↩︎
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.
This image went with a story by Merrill Denison about his wife getting her driving licence.
$2 in 1928 would be $34.50 in 2023.
By Charles Vining, September 8, 1928.
“Let us,” Gregory said, “do something different now and then.”
“All right,” I said, cautiously.
“For example,” Gregory said, “if you’re going to interview somebody why can’t you have one about me for a change?”
“That’s too different,” I said. “We couldn’t go interviewing each other like that. It wouldn’t do.”
“Why not? What’s wrong with me?”
“Oh, you’re all right, Greg, and I like you, but you ought to be more of a public figure for an interview. You ought to be a financial magnate or a statesman or a railway president or something. You’re not even a golf champion or a visiting politician.”
“That’s just it,” Gregory said. “All our interviews are about the same kind of people. Rich or important. I’d be different.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’d be interesting.”
“That would be nice of you.”
“Do you know why?”
“No. But I suppose it’s something about fishing.”
“Not at all. I’d be interesting because I’m average. I’m like all the other people on the street. We’ve got the idea that people want freaks or heroes, but they don’t. They want people like themselves, that they can understand.”
“That’s bunk, Gregory. I suppose you think that’s why people like the colored comics.”
“Certainly. Exaggerations of themselves.”
“Well,” I said. “I’ve just had lunch with Fred and I don’t feel like arguing any more to-day. Anyway, we couldn’t have an interview about you, Greg. There wouldn’t be anything to ask you.”
“What do you usually ask people when you interview them?”
“Depends on the people. You have to ask them the things they know about.”
“You could ask me about the newspaper business, Charles.”
“All right. Mr. Clark. What do you regard, Mr. Clark, as the most serious problem of the newspaper business to-day?”
“That’s easy. The growing intelligence of the public.”
“And what is the solution, Mr. Clark?”
“I would make every editor pass his matriculation exams. Those who fall would be transferred to the business office.”
“Yes, that would look fine in an interview, Greg. You’d be getting your salary held back and then you’d blame me. Here’s a thing I’ve often wondered about you. Greg. Why are you in the newspaper business?”
“I May Be Minister of Fisheries”
“I’m not sure. But I think I went into it because everybody told me that the newspaper business leads to so many other things.”
“Where do you think it’s leading you?”
“Well, I’ve become Fishing Editor. I may be minister of game and fisheries some day.”
“For heaven’s sake, let’s keep off fishing. That’s one reason we could never have an interview about you, Greg. It would be sure to end up in a lot of tripe about trout. Why don’t you try to think about something else?”
“I do. Fishing is only my hobby.”
“If I were to ask you what is the most interesting thing in life, what would you say?”
“Not fishing. My wife and children.”
“Oh, you’ve been reading what Mr. Taschereau and Arthur Meighen said. That’s what they said.”
“I didn’t know that, Charles, honestly I didn’t. What should I say?”
“Yourself. That’s the most interesting thing in life to you. Your wife and children are interesting because they affect you. What’s your great object in life, Greg?”
“Object. Do I have to have an object?”
“Well, if you’re going to be successful you do. If you don’t know what you want how are you going to get it? Edison says the object of life should be to be happy. Are you happy?”
“Sure. I’m happy. But I want everybody to be happy.”
“Pollyanna. Awfully nice stuff for an interview.”
“No. If everybody’s happy they won’t be making trouble for me. That’s why I try to make everybody happy, Charles. When you see me, strutting round here and making a fool of myself that’s what I’m trying to do.”
“How do you mean?”
“Why, I’m letting people feel superior. They look at me and say to themselves they’re glad they’re not a queer nut like me and that makes them feel happy. I often let people feel superior so they’ll be happy. Then they don’t bother me.”
“That’s a fine philosophy for a young man. Haven’t you any ambition, Greg? I thought you told me a long time ago that you were going to write a book.”
“So I am. When I’m forty.”
“What’s it going to be about?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m going to do it when I’m forty.”
“How old are you now?”
“Thirty-six. I wouldn’t tell you that in an interview, though.”
“It’s high time you were doing something. Do you work hard at your writing?”
Gregory looked around the room.
“Yes,” he said, lowering his voice. “But I don’t want anybody to know it. It would spoil everything. I make them think I can’t work.”
Has His Funeral All Planned
“How do you work? I never see you work.”
“I work all the time. I work walking along the street and sitting in Child’s. I’m always thinking about people and imagining about them and trying to understand them. On the street car I look at the man opposite me and think all about him. I’m never idle.”
“Oh, that,” I said. “But I mean work.”
“That’s work,” Gregory said. “Work means working at your job, doesn’t it? Well, my job is to understand about people so I’ll know what they like. The easiest part for me is sitting at the typewriter. But I wouldn’t want anybody to know about that, Charles.”
“Say, Greg. Do you mind telling me how you ever got to be a major in the army?”
“By not getting killed. I spent two years in an infantry battalion and kept from getting killed. They couldn’t help making me a major because there wasn’t anybody else left.”
“Were you a dug-out king, or what?”
“Well, I was pretty good in the dug-out. Adjutant for six months.”
“Oh. Adjutant. They probably had to promote you to get you out of the job.”
“Sure. They’ll find out anybody in six months, but I did pretty well. And apart from that, Charles, I was a champion. I wasn’t particularly athletic before the war but out there I was the champion of our whole brigade. There was only one other serious contender. I could jump higher, duck quicker and lie flatter than anybody in the brigade, even our colonel. And another reason I didn’t get killed was because I never got on a horse unless I absolutely had to.”
“Do you ever think about dying now, Greg?”
“Yes. I’ve got my funeral all planned. I’m going to make my will conditional on being buried the way I want.”
“What do you want them to do?”
“I want to be dressed in my fishing clothes, waders and jacket. Then I want them to lay me out with a rod in my hand and all my other rods, and flies and reels spread out round me. Then I want them to cremate me and all my things and put the ashes in the centre of a great big concrete boulder. The boulder will be put on a truck and all my fishing friends will soberly follow the truck up to the Mad river. When they get there I want them to dump the concrete boulder into the Hawthorn pool. And that’s all.”
“An awfully nice idea, Greg. Will you have anything inscribed on the boulder?”
“No. It will be just under the water in that pool, and all the trout will get in the shadows of it.”
“But nobody will know it’s there.”
“Certainly they will. Every good fisherman knows where the big boulders are in the pool he’s fishing. And all my friends will fish in the pool and they’ll come along and say, ‘There’s, Greg out there; I think I’ll try a cast there.’ They’ll never forget me that way.”
Doesn’t Believe in Judgment
“Why do you pick the Hawthorn pool?”
“Well, that’s where I’ve had my best fishing in the Mad river. And the pool really needs a big boulder anyway.”
“Don’t you think you’re liable to have trouble digging yourself out of that boulder on Judgment Day?”
“I don’t believe in Judgment. I got away from the idea of Judgment in the war. I knew old Jim-, a wicked carousing devil with blue eyes and an orange moustache, but brave and true and gay. How could he be Judged? How could the other men I know be Judged? And if they can’t be Judged, how can you or I?”
“Do you believe there’s life after death, Greg?”
“I think so. I hope there is; I’ve got some friends I’d like you to meet, Charles. I hope everybody’ll be there together. Everybody happy.”
“Even your colonel?”
“Yep.”
“And the governor-general?”
“Yep.”
“I thought you weren’t very keen about governor-generals.”
“Oh, they’re all right.”
“Didn’t I hear you saying the other day wo ought to do away with the governor-general in Canada?”
“Well, I was probably talking to some colonial. I wouldn’t make a fuss about doing away with the governor-general. He does no harm.”
“Would you like to see Canada get out of the Empire, Greg?”
“No, why leave the Empire? It does no harm to be in the Empire. I don’t think we need to leave the Empire any more than England or Scotland does. We’re all right. Canada is free. Canada has her own flag. Some people can’t see it and, I don’t know what it looks like myself, but I know it’s flying, right at the top of every mast.”
“Do you think Canada is ever likely to be annexed by the United States, Greg?”
“I’ll tell you what I do think. I think that within fifty years the United States will be annexed by Canada. I think the United States is heading toward the worst social disaster in human history through the breakdown of law and Justice. They’ll come to Canada to get our law and justice to save them.”
“Well, prophecy is safe, Greg. By the time it happens you’ll be up there in your boulder with the trout.”
“That would be pretty hot stuff for the interview though, Charles. What do you say?”
“Oh, we’d better forget that interview idea, Greg. If people were to read some of the things you’ve said they’d think we’re both nutty.”
“No they wouldn’t. I’ve given you some pretty good answers. You ought to write it.”
“That Sort of Thing’s Libelous”
“Well you know, Greg, an interview isn’t just a bunch of questions and answers. There’d have to be a description of you. Do you think you’d like that?”
“That’s all right. I’d help you with it.”
“No you wouldn’t. If I were going to interview you I’d interview you and it would be accurate and truthful.”
“What would you say, Charles?”
“I’d just tell what you look like. Five feet two inches tall, tously hair, large head, small face, green shirt, red tie, baggy clothes, shoes need shining, pockets always bulging with old letters which are never answered, hat over one ear, small glittery blue eyes behind a screen of long straight eyelashes, humorous terrier brows, acquisitive nose, hard mouth if you’d take off that straggly moustache, loud voice, big stride, glad hand, fine telephone manner, ready promises but-“
“Say,” Gregory said, “that sort of thing’s libelous. You’d get the paper into trouble. That’s my character, not my appearance. And it’s not right anyway.”
“Certainly it’s right. And I’d have to give an estimate of your character if the interview were going to be any good at all.”
“You don’t know my character. I’d have to tell you that.”
“You never ask a man his character when yon interview him. You have to estimate it. But I know yours already.”
“I’ll bet you don’t.”
“I know it better than you do, Greg. You never know your own character. You only know what you like to think it is.”
“Oh, is that so?” Gregory said.
He said it noisily, but I detected a furtive alarm.
“Yes,” I said.
“Well?” Gregory said.
“There’d have to be something about your habit of procrastination. And your fixed rule of never keeping an engagement on time, no matter how important it is. And your methods of wangling things. And the way you mismanage money. And your artfulness in bluffing things you don’t know anything about. And-“
“Look here, Charles. I thought you were my friend.”
“So I am, Greg. I’m just proving it. I know you, and still I like you. I’ll tell you, Greg. If you really want this interview I’m willing to do it.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize it would mean so much trouble for you, Charles.”
“I don’t mind that, Greg. In fact, I believe I’d like to do it for you.”
“No. Charles,” Gregory said. “I wouldn’t think of bothering you with it. Let’s go over to Child’s and have a talk.”
Editor’s Notes: I make an exception on this site and include another author’s writing in the event it is about Greg or Jim. Charles Vining was one of their colleagues on the Star Weekly.
Arthur Meighen was a former Prime Minister of Canada. Louis-Alexandre Taschereau was premier of Quebec from 1920 to 1936.
This illustration accompanied a story by Frederick Griffin on a railway that was discontinued.