Memoirs of a Worldly Guy
All in all, I'd say my Dad did O.K. for a kid orphaned as a child and with a Grade Four education. But he had attributes; he was a good athlete and he had no fear of heights.
He had the poise and balance required to work at great height without safety harness and worked as a result on the grain elevators at the Lakehead and some of the skyscrapers of Detroit. He also had a lifetime souvenir of his steelworking up in the clouds. When we questioned him about the shortened middle finger on his left hand he explained that it was common for riveters to test the rivets for snugness after they had cooled. One method was to press and wiggle a finger on them to see if they were secure, the other was to move rapidly along a line of rivets with a cold chisel and a hammer, tapping each rivet in turn. A riveter could tell from the sound given off if it were snug. Since it was the end of the shift everyone was in a hurry; such a hurry, in fact, that Dad and his cohort, approaching from opposite directions, arrived at the same rivet a split second apart. Dad had just placed his finger on it when the cold chisel man placed his chisel on top of Dad's finger and gave it a whack. Dad said the end of the finger was not cut off cleanly but was smashed to the extent the doctor decided to amputate at the knuckle and sew the wound up cleanly. There is a studio photo of Dad and some of his cronies and the finger is still intact.
When I was down east in the late 1940's I went over to Walkerville and visited with my Uncle Dan's widow, Rose.
'One of Eddie's boys has just turned up, you'd better come over!' Soon the house was full of cousins and nieces and nephews all full of questions about Dad and the rest of the family. That's when I learned a bit more about his childhood. Rose told me that his father, a butcher and an alcoholic, had left him in the care of a Walkerville family. Dad's older brother Dan went by to see how he was doing. There was no one at home and Dan found Dad tied to a wooden kitchen chair in the back yard. Obviously Social Services hadn't progressed very far in those days. Dan was furious of course and untied Dad and took him home with him, permanently.
Dad must have started playing baseball at an early age because he was sufficiently skilful to have moved west as far as Swift Current by his midtwenties. They were playing AA and AAA baseball in the west in those days and he claimed to have caught warmup for Ty Cobb when he was still in the east.
My mother was the youngest of four girls in the Hope family and was working for 'the Massey-Harris' in Swift Current at the time. Dad and a teammate rented a run-down house in the town and a courtship began with the predictable conclusion. I never saw Dad drink liquor except at New Year's but, according to what Mom told me, beer was a popular beverage for Dad and his room mate during their free time in their halcyon baseball youth. Apparently they would lie in their beds and throw the 'dead soldiers' up through the trap door opening in the ceiling. But even the camel of legend could stand only so many straws. They were fortunate to escape serious injury when the overloaded ceiling finally gave up the ghost and collapsed under the accumulated weight of a two-year supply of empty bottles.
Professional baseball salaries in those days were far from the mind-boggling figures paid today. They ranged from virtually non-existent to miserly. As a result, Dad, as a married man with newly-acquired responsibilities, had to consider getting a real job. He took over the management of a hotel in Morse, Saskatchewan. Or was it Morris, Manitoba? There should be a law against naming towns that sound alike when they are both at the south end of provinces next to each other. Somebody should get on that!
When Mom and Dad came to Calgary around 1917 they brought their newborn son Robert Thomas with them and took a flat in Hatfield Court, an apartment building just west of the Stampede Grounds near where the Elbow Valley Inn and Casino are now located. My first memories are of the row housing on 14th Avenue next to the Holy Roller's church. Dad was running a pool hall (Mom insisted that we refer to it as a billiard parlor!) in the basement of the Grain Exchange building on the west side of First Street West just north of Ninth Avenue.
There was a slate staircase leading down to the 'billiard' room but we preferred to descend in the antique elevator which was encased in gilt-painted scrolled metal work and went down at a leisurely pace. This was Dad's second pool room and had about eight tables; the first place, rented above the old Picardy's store near Second Street West on the south side of Eighth Avenue, burned down.
Dad would occasionally go down to the business on a Sunday to write a few cheques and just monitor the general condition of the place. Lloyd and I looked forward to these weekend sorties. I can still smell in my memory the sweetish petroleum odour of the oil which had been rubbed into the wooden floors and remember how I was enthralled by the mysterious dark shadows at the far ends of the room. There were usually three or four pool cues stacked in a corner behind the counter which had been re-tipped by one of the night men and left for trimming. We watched with fascination as Dad knocked off the metal clamp, turned the cue up onto its tip, then shaved and sanded the tip back to shape. The leather tips came in little boxes and had to be glued and shaped to the end of the cue.
Dad never said anything and neither did we but we all knew that Lloyd and I were agonizing over whether Dad would remember the 'piece de resistance' of the visit. Finally he would pause and say 'Dang! I almost forgot!' then he would slide back one of the glass panels at the back of the counter and reach into the aromatic interior where the cigars and cigarettes and candies were stored and remove two small boxes. Cube-shaped and printed with colorful cherry designs they were just about the right size to contain a golf ball. They were CHERRY BLOSSOMS!, the 'ne plus ultra' of chocolate candies. A cone of hard dark chocolate impregnated with tiny chunks of walnut enclosed an interior that contained a plump maraschino cherry suspended in a filling of sweet, runny sugar syrup. The accepted method of devouring the delicacy was to first nip off the top of the chocolate dome and gradually suck out the sweet filling, nibbling the edges down to keep pace. Eventually, some ten or fifteen minutes of Epicurean indulgence later, the level would have been reduced to the point where a decision would have to be made about the plump cherry resting in its chocolate nest. Lloyd and I paced ourselves with frequent glances back and forth so that neither of us was far ahead of or behind the other.
This was the moment of truth! Did you suck the entire plump cherry into your mouth in a single intake, or bite off one side of the 'nest' and suck up the syrup as it dribbled over the edge? Decisions, decisions!
'Go in and brush your teeth!' Mom said when we got home.
About this time Dad had become active in several of the sporting activities in Calgary. He was involved in some way with the old Altomah Football Club and was instrumental in organizing the Pucksters, a baseball team made up of professional hockey players who wanted something to do during the summer months. Both Paul and Cecil 'Tiny' Thompson played. Paul was playing hockey for the Chicago Black Hawks and 'Tiny' for the Boston Bruins. I can't remember if 'Sweeney' Schriner ever played for them, but other names that come to mind are Sam Timmins, Archie McTeer and Gordon MacFarlane. Dad arranged for visits from some internationally recognized baseball teams. Our favorite was 'The House of David' and Lloyd and I looked forward to the 'pepper ball' session for which they were noted. Four of their players would stand halfway between the pitcher's mound and home plate and perform a series of marvellously deceptive moves and exchanges with a baseball. They were all wearing full-grown beards as an added barnstorming attraction, probably needed to draw in a few more viewers in those 'tight money' days. Even more impressive was a visit of 'Connie' Mack and his Philadelphia Athletics. The framed and autographed photos of Dad and 'Connie' and some of the ballplayers hung for years in the billiard parlour but ended up stored in the metal shack at the side of our house. They were a constant nuisance in my wife's mind and she finally managed to dispose of them in one of her garage sales. I had the feeling that there was little if any sentimentality involved. 'Chacune a son gout!' as the French say.
'Sweeney' Schriner used to like to tell me the story about his financial prowess.
'When I came home after my first year in the big leagues (Dad had scouted him) I had five thousand dollars in my pocket.' (That was a hell of a lot of money in those early days of the depression, circa 1932.)
"I'll tell you what you do,' your Dad told me. 'Go out along the Macleod Trail, I mean away out, even as far as where the railway tracks cross the highway, I think they call it Turner Siding. Then buy all the land you can get ahold of for your money; sit on it and you'll be a rich man some day.' So I says to him, 'What'sa matter with you, Pop? You nuts or somemethin? So I did the smart thing; I bought a couple of race horses!'
'Jaysus!' I said,'did they ever make any money?'
'Are you kidding?' Sweeney said wryly, 'I'm still waiting for the dogs to finish!'
Meanwhile, Lorne Carr, who had come home the same year with about the same amount of money, went even further out in 'the boonies' to what is now Anderson Road, bought a piece of property at Anderson Road and Macleod Trail and set up a motor home court which prospered from the first day. I think he sold it a few years ago for well over a million dollars. So much for good advice!
Because of Dad's high profile in the sports fraternity and his easy availability downtown he was frequently aware of new opportunities which came up from time to time. He had a good friend in Ernie LeNeveau of the Northern Trust and was one of the first to learn of the availability of the pool hall below the Hudson's Bay company at Eighth Avenue and First Street West. Apparently it had been a joint venture between two brothers who couldn't see eye to eye on just about everything.
So Dad ended up owning the biggest billiard parlour in Western Canada with twenty-one tables and named it 'Helmer's, Your Downtown Club.' At that time the Bay had not utilized all of the space they owned between First Street West and the CN Express Telegraph office. There were a number of shops intervening along the north side of the avenue including Tom Campbell's Hat Shop, D'Allaird's Ladies Wear, Woolworth's and Kresge's. I remember Tom Campbell's because Dad used to buy his fedora hats there and was friendly with Tom and all of the sales personnel. A man called 'Mooch' was one of the employees and I dated his lovely red-headed daughter for a while. I remember D'Allairds because I used to date the manager's lovely daughter. Ho hum! Such a busy little boy I was! There was little to choose between Woolworth's and Kresge's except for the magnificent hamburgers they used to serve at Kresge's lunch counter. They would carry them into the lunch counter in a huge stainless steel warming dish which I reckon was about two feet long, one foot wide and eight inches deep. The hamburgers, slightly less than the size of a saucer, were floating in a sea of rich gravy and served between big buns, God, they tasted wonderful! Or maybe it was the mustard we slathered on top of them. The milkshakes we ordered were a bit thin but we were more interested in food than in drink. The hamburgers and milkshakes cost five cents each! Since we'd blown ten cents at the movie we had five cents left over to fritter away on anything we chose. There was usually a temptation to cross the street again and spend the nickel on five cents worth of Karmel Corn at the little Greek shop next to the Palace Theatre.
Kitty-corner from Eaton's, on the southwest corner of Eighth Avenue and Fourth Street West was an old railroad dining car which had been converted into a lunch room, painted white, and sat diagonally across the corner lot. It was great fun to go in there, sliding the glass doors to one side to enter and sitting up on one of the round black leather stools. I think it was run by the White Spot organization but it disappeared too, like many of our old favourite places, when I was out of town once again. Pity!
The first shop to the west of Dad's entrance to 'Helmer's' (as it was popularly known) was the World News shop. If you took a sharp right instead of going into the World News you passed through a glass door onto the top landing of a flight of stairs leading down to the pool hall. There was a shoe shine stand in an alcove to the left at the bottom of the stairs where a Mr. Proctor held court. A second glass door led into the room where the tables were in action.
One of Dad's stock sayings was : 'Never make a pool player walk upstairs to play; they'll grumble all the way! On the other hand, they think nothing of trudging up the same set of stairs when they've finished their game.' There was another advantage he had; when all the streetcar conductors changed shift they did it at the 'Bay' corner. It was only natural that they would repair to Helmer's for a quick game or two before heading home. There was another little ploy of Dad's that was not generally known. The pockets on a standard snooker table are quite narrow, as a result many of the less skilled players had trouble finishing a game if their time was limited. Dad had the pockets enlarged by about an eighth of an inch without announcing the change. Almost without exception the players preferred to play at Helmer's because for some reason they never understood, they played a better, faster game.
Just in case someone has the impression that there wasn't a depression in those days, let me tell you about the phone calls. Before coming home each day Dad would phone to see what Mum wanted in the way of bread. He would put a nickel in the public telephone and dial W-4994. After two rings he would hang up and retrieve his nickel. and I would ask my mother what we required. I would then dial 95-226 and he would answer.
'Mom says two loaves of Graham and one white!' I would say.
'Thanks! See you later!'' Dad would reply, then hang up. On the way home he would stop at the National Bakery and pick up the bread.
-o-
There were three rows of snooker tables, six to a row and the big pillars between each row had room for scoreboards and long cues and rests to be stored. Off to the right of the rows of snooker tables was the main counter with its thick glass top and a display of cigars, cigarettes, chocolate bars and gum.
Further on there was a regular snooker table which was in almost day-long play by the 'old-timers' playing 'golf'. With eight or ten players in the game it could easily run to five or six hours before someone won the game. There were long, padded benches between the pillars surrounding most of the tables in the room and the ones at either side of the 'golf' tables were usually filled with retired types who were quite happy to sit all day smoking, socializing and watching the slow progress of the game. Dad usually checked all the benches at night and I can remember on two or three occasions he told us the next day that he had found another old timer who had just nodded off permanently while sitting on one of the benches. I thought it was not a bad way to go!
Further on again was another snooker table and the table that I found most fascinating and addictive; the small four foot by eight foot American billiard table. It had no pockets! We played what was called 'three-cushion billiards'. There were onIy three balls in play on the table, two white and one red. One of the white balls was assigned to each shooter and one had a small black insert to identify it. In order to score a point it was necesary to hit both of the other balls and three cushions in any order. Simple, eh? I have seen fellows give up the game without ever scoring a point, and they had played for half an hour! Johnny Weiss and I would often play for an hour and a half and finish with a score of 4-3!
There was a big ice locker filled with bottles of ice-cold Coca-Cola against the wall at the back of the sales area and Jimmie Bruce, a little Scot with a game leg, visited it eight or ten times a day for refreshment. He was addicted. Jimmie had a massage table in the back room next to Dad's office and he frequently had athletes from every sport with sprains or strains he was treating with his heat lamp and the psychological effects of strong wintergreen fumes. Jimmie had grown up as a kid in Scotland and still had a Glaswegian accent you could cut with a knife.
Dad had been trainer for the Calgary Tigers who played in the old Western Canada Professional Hockey League which was sold intact to Eastern interests to form the National Hockey League in about 1928. Dad stayed in Calgary and formed the Calgary Bronks Hockey Team which played in the Western Hockey League and included Olds, Edmonton, Drumheller, Lethbridge and Coleman. The big prize in those days was the Allan Cup which signified 'amateur' supremacy among the regions who had enough industry to form teams and a league. It was depression time of course and it was significant that most of the participating teams were from towns or cities that had enough industry to provide paying jobs for the hockey players. There were the Kimberley Dynamiters (zinc and gold mining), Drumheller Miners (coal mining), Trail Smoke Eaters (lead and zinc refining), Luscar Indians (coal mining) and so on. Hockey players would play for a pittance if they could only have A JOB!
When Dad took over as owner and coach of the Calgary Bronks Jimmie Bruce became the trainer. His youth in Glasgow had imbued him with a slightly different set of values from those we were expected to follow in Calgary. As a result I was undoubtedly the best equipped young hockey player in Calgary. I had a variety of excellent hockey sticks, professional tan leather hockey gloves, first class shin pads, two or three jockstraps complete with metal cups and was perhaps the first and only juvenile defense man to wear a helmet.
The helmet came in handy one night when we travelled to Canmore for a Juvenile League game in the early forties. Harold Brandreth was our manager; Mel Friend was our coach. To say the Canmore fans took the game seriously would be a mild understatement. If we went too close to the boards they would grab our sticks and we would have to engage in a tug-of-war to retrieve them. At least they never threw lumps of coal at us like the Drumheller fans did. Our team was called the Grill Argos and at one point in the game we scored three goals in quick succession. The local referee responded by penalizing three of our players in quick succession for what were questionable infractions. 'Friendy' went absolutely wild and had to be restrained from going over the boards; I had never seen a man frothing at the mouth before. I had already endeared myself to the rabid locals when I grabbed a loose puck and started up the ice when Canmore had only one defenseman, a lad called Stasiuk, defending the blue line. He laid a perfect hip check on me and I flew into the air and landed face down several feet behind him. A great roar went up from the crowd, cheering, I assumed, the lovely hip check from Stasiuk. Wrong! As I flew through the air the back end of one of my skates had caught him sharply under the jaw.
What I thought had been a roar of applause for his hip check was in fact a roar of anger from the crowd for what I had done to their hero; he was lying face down, cold-cocked, motionless on the ice. The mood did not improve from that point on, with the result that instead of leaving the dressing room in calm, gentlemanly fashion at the end of the game we stepped directly from the dressing room into the bus. As we drove away angry Canmore fans yelled insults and banged on the windows to express their geniality and good sportsmanship.
I never knew whether Jimmie Bruce paid rent for his space in the backroom at Dad's but I'm fairly sure that he never paid for his 'Cokes'. I think Dad just thought that Jimmie added to the 'macho' ambience of the place. He also had a reputation among the 'jocks' for being the best man around to cure a 'charley horse". The dictionary defines a 'charley horse' as---'a cramping pain in the muscle of an arm or leg, usually caused by overexertion in athletics.' I always thought Jimmie's method for treating a 'charley horse' was crude and traumatic at best, but, as I said, the 'wise boys' swore by it.
Jimmie would have his 'victim' lie down on his rubdown table and lower the heat lamp down to heat the affected muscle area for a short while; then he massaged the troubled area for several minutes. His 'grand finale' was about to arrive.
'What does that spot on the ceiling remind you of?' he would say. Then when the patient concentrated on the chosen target, Jimmie would reach for a hidden empty coke bottle and deliver a solid smack to the affected area. My conversations with massage therapists in subsequent years indicate that the coke bottle scenario was purely for effect. Most of them concur that the muscle spasm would first have been massaged until Jimmie could no longer feel the spasm ('knot') then he would give the impression that the blow from the coke bottle (not hard enough to cause damage) was the secret cure.
Dad had a series of strokes starting in 1942 that gradually impaired his abilities. When I transferred from Trail to the Nitrogen Plant in Calgary I took Dad to a baseball game down by the Bow River. It was his last outing. From that time on he deteriorated more with each stroke until he was continually bedridden, incapable of speech and incontinent. Mom had nursing help the last couple of years but continued to wash his bedclothes a couple of times a day in her ancient Maytag washing machine.
'Would you mind bringing in the sheets from the clothesline, Ronald?' Mom was accustomed to saying to me when I came home from work. 'You may as well do it before you take your coat off.' I sometimes wonder if she would have used an automatic dryer even if we'd had one; she reckoned that the sheets were fresher if they were aired out. They were certainly fresher in the winter when it was often twenty degrees or more below zero Fahrenheit. I would take the wicker clothes basket out with me and start removing the sheets from the line. They were frozen and as stiff as boards but I would fold them double then double again and pile them into the basket. I would return to the house with the basket piled high with what looked like huge white undercooked pancakes. I would have been amused but I realized that someone had hung them out there when they were still wet. No fun!
Dad finally died early on Christmas Day 1951. I had been lying beside him with one arm around his shoulders while the rest of the exhausted family had gone to the kitchen for a cup of tea. When they returned to the bedroom we had both drifted off to sleep; Dad never to wake again. I gained some small comfort from the fact that all of his family were there and hoped he was aware of it.
Dad had sold a half interest in the billiard parlour not long after his first series of strokes but there was a period of time before Lorne Carr took over as manager; as a result the operations were not as closely supervised as they might otherwise have been. Through the years, as far back as the Grain Exchange, I had been friendly with the counter men Dad had hired. The first I remember was 'Brownie', who worked at the Grain Exchange along with Eddie. Eddie was a wrestling fan and was always showing me a new hold whenever I went down to the hall. Ty was a good-looking man from somewhere in Central Europe. He had helped his brother to immigrate from Europe sometime in the mid-thirties and Dad had put Eli on the payroll even though he didn't need him right away. So he sent him up to our house and I remember this thin young man standing at the back door one day telling Mom he would do any chores she wanted done. I think he washed the windows.
I'm sure you all know what spittoons look like; the dictionary has a succinct definition--"A container for spit." Fortunately for the tobacco chewers (which presumably initiated the use of spittoons) Calgary was not governed like the Singapore of today where any type of spitting is subject to fines and imprisonment. The brass spittoon was commonplace in billiard parlours, barber shops, hotel lobbies--any place that catered particularly to men. The more tony establishments referred to them as "cuspidors", not my idea of a more euphonious term! Regrettably, men were also in the habit of throwing their cigar and cigarette butts into them where they would gradually sink to the bottom. This made the disgusting job of cleaning them even more so. Dad minimized this problem by having screens cut to fit down into the neck of the spittoon, trapping the ugly missiles and able to be hooked out with a special wire. I'm not sure Eli had this in mind when he said he was 'prepared to do anything'!
During the first year or two of Dad's illness and before he had made a deal with Lorne Carr he had handed over the management of the hall to Ty and his brother Eli. About the same time there was another individual who had managed to become a part of the management team. Lloyd (who was more familiar in those days with the pool room activities than I) told me later that Joe had managed to ingratiate himself with the brothers to the point that he had taken over the late night closing-up shift on a permanent basis. Ty and Eli thought he was doing them a favour. What he was really doing was running a high stakes poker game in the back room after midnight. Dad would have had a fit, of course. He prided himself on running a clean operation. He knew guys were playing some games for money but the cash was not allowed to be visible on the tables. Whatever irregular practices were under way during that hiatus were soon put straight when the Lorne Carr deal was concluded.
Few if any of the players racked their own balls at 'Helmer's'. Dad always had a floorman who did it for them. Whenever the players finished a game they thumped the butt end of their cues against the floor and Joe Hill would come hustling over to rack the balls. Joe was really too old to be working but I guess they felt sorry for him and gave him enough of an income to live. These days he would probably be living in a cardboard box in some alleyway.
I had a job also, although I'm sure Dad didn't feel sorry for me and wasn't afraid I was going to starve to death. I think he just figured it wouldn't hurt me to have some of my own pocket money but that I should be doing something to earn it. So in his last couple of active years at the hall he gave me the responsibility of walking around to all the tables where games were in progress and gathering up all the red balls that had been sunk. These all went into the wicker basket and were placed on the floor under the end of the table. It wasn't really 'make-work' because it sped up the re-racking process at the end of each game. Even in those days everyone seemed to be in a hurry. I can't remember exactly but I expect I was paid twenty-five or thirty cents an hour; big bucks in those days. The pockets of the tables were made of stout twine so that after nearly two years of dipping my hands into them for an hour or two a day I had knuckles that would have been the envy of a seasoned Kung Fu expert.
I always relished the walk from the billiard parlour to where Dad parked his car over by the CP rail tracks. Every ten or fifteen feet someone would say 'How ya doin' Rosie?'
'Who was that, Dad?'
'I dunno, some guy.'
I was beginning to get the impression that just about everybody in Calgary knew Dad but he knew just about nobody. Maybe he was just a little absent-minded.
— The End —