This morning, one of the interns suggested our walks reflect an east-to-west bias and went on to describe us as "a total S.O.B." You can imagine we were willing to be open to the first part of this commentary but took umbrage at the latter. It turns out said intern meant no offence as the acronym refers to our geographical location, living, as we do, South of Bloor (Street).
After an appropriate waiting period we will post the intern a supply of orthopaedic turtlenecks. That and their excess of youth should help to aid their recovery. In the shorter term, we found assigning ourselves a corrective north-south flaneur just the thing to encounter new images in old places and be reminded of another episode in family history involving Grandfather.
Now, the casual or foreign viewer may be forgiven for thinking that the above photo was taken in the Communist party-sanctioned pleasure quarter of Piatigorsk in 1951. But no, this instead, dear reader, is a major intersection in contemporary Toronto, Canada's business capital and North America's fifth largest connurbation. One may be forgiven for thinking that the authorities are placing psychotropic or dissociative substances into the drinking water for the general citizenry to put up with an aesthetic environment even remotely like this.
Some of the history of this corner, from the early part of the last century, may help to explain its present day taintedness. That dull ochre building stands on what was once the location of an ornate art nouveau-styled library. A delightful and humane structure noted throughout the Empire for its spacious and sensible layout, for literally acres of inspiring stained glass depicting our clean young Dominion's most beautiful scenic landscapes and for modern electric lighting. No expense was spared, dear reader, on the Lansdowne Library.
Unfortunately that call to arms that so shocked the world in August of 1914 would be heard just weeks before the new library was to receive its many books, periodicals and musical recordings. The War Office began to spread its administrative tentacles and the Landsdowne Library was taken up as a record office. Pointless, prolonged slaughter being then, as now, quite administratively intense.
In any case, by November of 1920 Grandfather had made his last sudden explosive decompression with the Royal Canadian Navy's Diving Bell Squadron and found himself back in Parkdale. Thinking he might enjoy visiting what had been, on his departure six years earlier, billed as "the most beautiferous and important single cultural treasure within direct sight of a Great Lake" by Premier William H. Hearst Grandfather instead found himself looking in the dusty windows of a disused shell, devoid now even of the rows of meticulous War Office clerks. His disappointment was almost as great as that of Parkdale's other out-of-work war veterans.
At Christmas of 1920 Grandfather was the head of an unemployed veterans committee barricaded in the library. Their demand was "Jobs, Dignity and the Allotted Books or It's A Revolution Here As Well." A quotation from a committee leaflet illustrates the nature of the stand off.
"...if we are thrown out of our improvised home and the community soup kitchen closed we will surely march on city hall with these dozen Vickers guns for a petition. The authorities should remember that we are doing them a service in taking over this empty building. We are using it to distribute food which we collect from trades people on Saturdays and have now a scheme on hand to mend the kiddies' boots and send them dry-shod to school ...we in this way keep control over 17,000 unemployable men who might otherwise be driven to far more violent things than seizing an empty building ...ours is a sensible, direct sort of action, we don't want to break anything if that can be avoided."
As the New Year dragged on the authorities showed intermittant interest in negotiation whilst perparing a brutal make-an-example-of-them sort of ploy. Unfortunately, for them, they had not reckoned with Grandfather.
Police Master Sergeant David "The Bastard" McMurrin, a Belfast man, hammered on the library door with a hairy fist. Grandfather opened up and asked McMurrin what he wanted. The sergeant, looking like murder itself, uttered foul curses. McMurrin was a hard case and had been in charge of the security detachment in the shipyard that built none other than the RMS Titanic before coming to Canada and joining the Toronto Borough Police. During his Belfast tenure McMurrin instituted a morale-building sports program at the shipyard which increased its members skills in boxing, wrestling, rugger, football, checkers and hitting Catholics with a cement block.
Now, as I've mentioned Grandfather was a navy man, and not just of any deck-swabbing kind either. He'd learned to master diving bells. The most complex of craft, diving bells require constant trim adjustments to operate smoothly. These adjustments are accomplished with an iron tool the proportions of which can be gauged by its having been nicknamed an "elephant's pecker wrench" by the men who used it. An example of one had been Grandfather's sole souveneir of participation in the First World War.
The sound McMurrin's skull made when Grandfather's wrench crowned him King of the Pigs was said to have been heard on the steps of the Provincial Legislature. In either case the police backed down and at Grandfather's funeral in 1961 the largest of the floral arrangements was from Toronto's finest who also honoured him with a pipe band. It seems that McMurrin had become unpopular and a younger, more progressive generation of local police yearned to be free of him.
Sadly, a wave of arrests by the Provincial Police was directed at the network of women supporting the men barricaded in the library. The water and electricity was shut off. Also, an internal element favoured quitting the protest when a relief act promising three cents a week to all mothers with a minimum of eleven children was passed. Grandfather, democratic to the end, followed the wishes of the majority and led the march out of the library. He continued straight to the lounge in the Drake Hotel where he could be found for most of the next forty years.
At sunset the very day of the relief committee's victory parade a mysterious fire tore through the library. Each stained glass window snapped with a report like a sniper's rifle. Grandfather is said to have winced each time.
When we walked by Lansdowne and Bloor today, well, we knew how the old man felt.
editor's note: if even we can't work with these blue pumps, we just can't work with it at all
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