Eavesdroppings - Bob Green

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his own family concert troupe. His wife, Louise, was a cornet virtuoso; was accomplished on the piano, marimbaphone, and clarinet; and was a spellbinder with her dramatic readings. Dramatic readings in those days were the mark of a superior band concert.

      So how on earth did they get to Waterloo?

      When the United States entered the war against Germany in l917, anti-German hysteria left Thiele and his family unemployed, even though both he and his wife had been born in America. Broke and desperate, Thiele answered an advertisement in the magazine Billboard for a bandmaster in a place called Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and came up for an interview. As he boarded a train in New York City, he told his wife to buy a French dictionary in case he got the job. “Everybody up there speaks French,” he said. A week later, when he returned jubilant with the job, he said, “Throw out that French dictionary, Louise. Believe it or not, up there they all speak German.”

      So they moved to Waterloo and turned it into the brass band Mecca of North America. The professor organized tattoos that attracted as many as seventy bands and 50,000 spectators to Waterloo Park at a time when the town’s population was pushing 5,000. He founded Waterloo Music Company, which manufactured band instruments, many of which he gave to bandsmen who couldn’t afford them. Thiele gave free music lessons, too, hence the title “Professor.” He also bought land on which he built a summer camp for fledgling musicians, calling it Bandburg. Later Thiele was acclaimed as the father of Canadian brass band music.

      Thirty years and countless accomplishments later, the Professor was awarded a day in his honour and paraded in an open convertible behind his band to Waterloo Park where thousands gathered to cheer. The driver of the convertible, Charlie Schneider, a close friend of Thiele’s, told me about the event many years later.

      “The Professor,” Charlie said, “was sitting on top of the rear seat, waving to the crowd as we followed the band into Waterloo Park. When the band began to countermarch on the grass, I swung the car around them and headed towards the throng lining the field. I drove under some spruce trees without a thought as to how high the Professor was sitting. The crowd suddenly went quiet. I turned to see what the Professor might be doing and … he wasn’t there. A spruce bough had swept him off. Right away a voice beside me hollered, ‘Charlie, let me in!’ It was the Professor, running beside the car. He was holding his hat in his hand. The back of his jacket was covered with grass stains. I stopped and opened the door, and in no time he was back on top of the rear seat, waving. The crowd went crazy. He always surprised them.”

      Unfortunately, today’s role models in professional baseball sustain their energy at manic levels by ingesting steroids, cocaine, Sudafed, and even Alka-Seltzer. These are called “performance-enhancing drugs.” George Brown finds this disgusting and quite unnecessary.

      “I knew some great athletes on the old Galt Terriers baseball club in the 1930s,” George says, “and the only performance-enhancing drug they ingested was called ‘beer,’ and they never ingested it before or during a game, only after, usually on the bus.” This might explain why some of their post-game performances exceeded anything they did on the playing field.

      George Brown recounts the time that Dave Johnson, who claimed to be a pitcher, humiliated the team by bombing out in Hamilton. Johnson, who pitched the ball the way he did the dice, ran an illegal gambling den under a grocery store on Dickson Street right across the road from the Galt Police Station. He was so bad in Hamilton that when the Terriers returned to Galt they stopped the bus at Soper Park so that four of the players could throw him into the creek above the dam. They then drove off and left him to soak.

      One time in St. Thomas the Terriers’ coach, “Bush” McWhirter, who never used or needed performance-enhancing drugs at any time, got into such a row with the umpire that he was ordered off the field. He kept shouting from the stands, however, until two policemen carried him out of the park. The team, which had lost, picked him up at the courthouse on the way home.

      On the bus McWhirter reviewed the game at the top of his lungs, ticking off all the umpire’s bad calls and stolen-base tag-outs. The players, fired up by McWhirter and a case of beer, began to boast about how fast they could run. Before the bus reached Paris they were running the bases in the aisle. At the south end of the Paris main street, by the cenotaph, McWhirter ordered the bus to stop. He declared there would be a race to see who was the fastest man on the team. It was 8:00 p.m. on a hot Saturday, and the street was crowded with pedestrians. Because of the heat the players had stripped down to their shorts. Young George Brown, who was the Terriers’ bat boy, was in constant fear that the whole team was about to be arrested, so he hid in the back of the bus.

      “Eight or nine guys piled out,” George said, “and when McWhirter hollered, ‘Go,’ they streaked through the traffic a full block to the Arlington Hotel with the bus in pursuit.” As he recalls, George Heggie won the race. Boyd Shewan was a close second.

      I can’t imagine Boyd Shewan running up the Paris main street in his underwear, especially since he became my morally rematrixed drill sergeant principal at Central School in Galt and would lecture the boys against peeing behind the trees in the playground.

      Before he married Marjorie Dykeman, George Brown settled down to run a cycle shop and developed into a tempestuous athlete on the ball field and ice rink. His goaltending on the ice might have landed him in the National Hockey League today. George says he brought his temper under control by learning to play the violin. His brother, Dave, a Galt firefighter, was musical, too, and sang so that he caused people to cry. George gave up the violin one night when he smashed it over a friend’s head while watching a Toronto Maple Leafs–Boston Bruins hockey game on television. No telling when he’ll give up beer.

      Back in those golden days no one ever got arrested for running down main street in their underwear. Now you can get arrested for carrying a cream pie within l00 yards of the prime minister.

      When George Brown’s violin was in for repair, he found peace and diversion at Scott’s Opera House. The flaking brown playbills of Scott’s Opera House in the archives at Galt City Hall reveal there was indeed entertainment before television. Dated from 1903 to 1918, the playbills are loaded with famous stage names that make one swoon with nostalgia. Who can forget Mortimer Ellingham, Adelaide Eaton Colton, and Lonnie Lorrimer Deanne? And how about Mack Sennett, Bessie Smith, Billie Burke, and Sophie Tucker? Mack Sennett played a minor role in the musical comedy Wang, but later became Hollywood’s king of slapstick and creator of the Keystone Kops.

      George says he went to the movies whenever he wasn’t playing hockey. He saw his first movie at Scott’s. It was called Wings, not quite silent because a man behind the screen reproduced the sound of airplanes with a vacuum cleaner. George played goal in a tough intercounty league and once punched out Howie Meeker, which was directly responsible for Meeker’s lifelong crusade against violence on the ice. But that’s another story.

      Maude Adams, the leading lady in American theatre, played Scott’s in the role she immortalized in Peter Pan, flying over the audience suspended in a harness hooked to an intricate network of wires. Special effects rivalled anything you might see onstage today. After the performance of Queen Zephra in 1903, the stage was showered with 40,000 yards of serpentine confetti of every colour.

      And there was suspense. A note in heavy type on the playbill of That Imprudent Young Couple warns: “Owing to the very unusual and unconventional ending of the third act, it is desirous that the audience remain seated until the descent of the curtain.” Management didn’t want a riot. The titles of many of the productions, not yet controversial in 1903, would surely cause homophobes to picket with bullhorns today: The Gay Mr. Goldstein, The Gay Musician, The Fairies of Ireland, When Women Love, and Mutt and Jeff’s Wedding. Scott’s was way ahead of its time.

      Playbill advertisements

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