Eavesdroppings - Bob Green

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Helen Patterson of Preston rode in her father’s car as he drove Aunt Jessie from Clyde to Kitchener to catch a train for Port Huron, Michigan, where she worked as a nurse. The zeppelin, a mile to the south, caught their eyes. They didn’t know it was coming or even what it was. It was unworldly, and they had to stop to watch it pass. They forgot all about the train and missed it.

      Strangely, few people here today remember this great spectacle. Even my sister, Shirley, forgot it, and until her memory revived I began to wonder if I might have simply dreamt it. However, Jim Rintoul remembered it, too, and phoned me.

      The great zeppelin flew 590 flights, more than one million miles without a mishap, all the time captained by Dr. Hugo Ecker, then in his seventies. The airship was 776 feet long, 113 feet thick, and was held aloft by 3,945,720 cubic feet of hydrogen gas … more than that released by our House of Commons during a Depression-year debate. Five 530-horsepower diesel engines enabled the ship to cruise at seventy miles per hour in still air. In 1936 the Graf Zeppelin was dismantled and replaced by the Hindenburg, which exploded at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937.

      A second Graf Zeppelin was built in 1938 and dispatched on a goodwill tour around the coastline of Britain. It was loaded with electronic gear to check out Britain’s radar defence system. British spies learned of this and had the system turned off. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain hailed the goodwill tour as evidence of Adolf Hitler’s peaceful intentions.

      The Graf Zeppelin was my first vivid memory. Subsequent memories, though not as spectacular, are just as precious.

      On any Saturday night in downtown Galt back in the 1930s, automobiles bumper to bumper on Main Street between the unsynchronized traffic lights at Water and Ainslie chugged up such a din that jaywalkers had to shout to one another. And the sidewalks were so crowded that the fit and able walked on the pavement. Most people weren’t out to shop but just to walk and talk, a luxury of the Great Depression. Patrons of Gone with the Wind lined two abreast from the Capitol Theatre on Water Street to the Imperial Bank at Main and around the corner to jostle with people pushing in and out of Walker Stores.

      One Saturday afternoon near Christmas 1938, so many people jammed Walker’s that the elevators couldn’t handle them all and the stairs collapsed. Galt firemen mistook dust billowing from the windows to be smoke and turned on the hoses. Aside from a lot of shoppers soaked to the hide, the only serious casualty was a girl with a compound leg fracture.

      Moviegoers lined up to the corner of Main were harangued by a street preacher from Hamilton who drew apocryphal omens on the road with coloured chalk. He raged against sex and violence and assorted vulgarities on the silver screen until his eyes bugged out and flecks of foam gathered on his moustache. When jeered, he raged against jeering. He raged against the Salvation Army Band (heretics he called them) gently huffing hymns at the corner of Main and Mill streets beside Rouse’s Music Store, which sold radios, refrigerators, and washing machines.

      Danny Oliver cruised the street, taking everything in. A spindly man always sporting a black bowler hat and a carnation in his lapel, Danny nervously marked time with his toed-up dusty black shoes and twitched his nose like a rabbit. Every few minutes he bolted away, cursing at the top of his lungs, but soon sneaked back to mark time and twitch. Today we would say he had Tourette’s syndrome.

      Directly across from Walker Stores, Lee Bing’s second-floor restaurant enclosed its patrons in muted green upholstered enclaves affording such privacy and quiet that diners in each cubicle peered out a lot to see who might be in the next. Bing McCauley, whose Bing is not to be confused with Lee’s Bing, said that Lee once told him he had survived the sinking of the Titanic. He had been a steward but wouldn’t discuss how he got off with the women and children. Years after he departed and the book about the disaster, A Night to Remember, was published, Lee Bing appeared in the survivors’ list.

      You couldn’t properly hear the Salvation Army Band until you passed Tait and Kitchen Hardware at Main and Ainslie. The store still had horse collars hanging from hooks in the ceiling. Across the intersection in front of the magnificent sandstone Victorian Gore Insurance building, now appallingly demolished, my future brother-in-law, Roy Petty, hawked late-edition Toronto Stars, shouting his wares between numbers by the Salvation Army. The band, mellow and forgiving, attracted crowds of the faithful, including Vart Vartanian in the town’s first zoot suit.

      “How’s the suit fit, Vart?”

      “The pants are a bit snug under the armpits.”

      Between hymns while the pastor delivered admonishments, the bandsmen set their horns, bells down, on the pavement. One subzero night after a long admonishment a cornet player got his tongue frozen in his mouthpiece and had to make his way into Rouse’s Music Store, blurting chromatically through his horn for warm water.

      The pastor preached against gambling straight at Griffith’s Smoke Shop just 100 feet away on Mill Street across from the bus station. You couldn’t see into Griffith’s because of Sweet Caporal cigarette ads covering its show windows. Only if you sneaked a look when the front door opened could you see the gaming tables through the blue haze.

      On Saturday, Hockey Night in Canada, patrons of Griffith’s called in bets period by period from a pay phone just inside the front door. One night Reuben Brown, owner of a downtown ladies’ shop, was trying to place a bet when the Salvation Army Band struck up “Throw Out the Lifeline.” Reuben, enraged, charged into the street and shouted, “Shut up! I can’t hear a damn thing!” And ran back to the phone. He had a voice like a foghorn.

      Up the street from Rouse’s you might pause at Struthers and Church Feeds to watch children ride the little hopper cars on rails delivering bags of feed to the curb. Next was Joan’s Lunch reeking of french fries, and Percy Cline’s Men’s Wear Shop. For working men. Percy preached against extravagance and high fashion from behind the cash register, his riveting gaze aimed either over his spectacles riding the tip of his nose or under them riding on his forehead. I can’t recall ever seeing him look through them. His advertisements in the Galt Reporter became collector’s items. One ad said: “Percy Cline’s Pants Are Down. Come and See His Underwear.”

      The no man’s land between the Iroquois and Royal hotels offered the most exciting albeit hazardous entertainment. Here fights in both hotels spilled into the street and intermingled so that combatants wound up fighting strangers. A policeman watching the fights from a safe distance would be called back to headquarters in the old City Hall on Dickson Street by one dong of the clock tower bell. “Constable Steele,” the desk sergeant would say, “we have a report of a fight at the corner of Wellington and Main … again.”

      “Yes, sir!” And Steele would slow-walk back to where he had come from in time to see the fight broken up by girlfriends of the combatants.

      Both hotels ventilated their beverage rooms with large Bessemer fans that blasted beer fumes, cigarette smoke, bowel gas, and cockroaches at head level into the street with a roar that made children cry. My father told me with apparent belief that these fans had power enough to lower the barometric pressure in the beverage rooms and contributed to violence by giving the alcohol a high-altitude effect.

      While the fights raged a man wearing buckskins and a ten-gallon hat hawked snake oil beside the Royal Hotel at the corner of Wellington. His white goatee made him all the more distinguished. He called himself the Colonel and resembled the colonel who today sells Kentucky Fried Chicken. His snake liniment, registered in Ottawa under the Patent Medicine Act, was formulated by Ben Sossin at his pharmacy a block away on the corner of Wellington and Dickson.

      George Schaller, Ben’s assistant, did the mixing and bottling. The base ingredient, George said, was turpentine. To this he added a measure of oil of mustard for that burning sensation essential to healing, camphor for cooling and, most important, a dash of oil tar that created little black specks that sank to the bottom of the bottle and became the mark of authenticity.

      The Colonel cautioned people never

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