A Good Day's Work Read online

  ALSO BY JOHN DEMONT

  Citizens Irving: K.C.Irving and His Legacy

  Coal Black Heart: The Story of Coal and Lives it Ruled

  The Last Best Place: Lost in the Heart of Nova Scotia

  Copyright © 2013 John DeMont

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  DeMont, John, 1956-, author

  A good day’s work : in pursuit of a disappearing Canada / John DeMont.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36802-7

  1. Labor—Canada—History. 2. Professions—Canada—History. I. Title.

  HD8104.D46 2013 331.0971 C2013-902639-8

  Cover design: Five Seventeen

  Cover image: History Collection, Nova Scotia Museum

  IMAGE CREDITS

  this Page courtesy of author

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  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  To Lisa Napier

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE Across This Land

  CHAPTER TWO Holy Sweet Mother

  CHAPTER THREE The Milkman Cometh

  CHAPTER FOUR Watering Hole for Dreamers

  CHAPTER FIVE Every Jeselly One of Them

  CHAPTER SIX Iron Man

  CHAPTER SEVEN Reading the Grass

  CHAPTER EIGHT Life of a Salesman

  CHAPTER NINE Showtime

  CHAPTER TEN A Trick of the Light

  Acknowledgements

  End notes

  PROLOGUE

  I LIVE in the city where I was born. This is, mostly, a happy state of affairs. I’ve moved around, but Halifax is a good place to be because of what it is—easy on the eye, a little crazy, naturally laid-back without being drearily tranquil—and what it was. A kind of personal archaeology is possible here. Those possessing a certain frame of mind can glimpse the ruins of the past amid the structures of the present. I’m not talking about the stuff that tourists, guidebooks in hand, seek: the mouldering buildings, the scenes of ancient bloodletting, the unassuming corners where this guy and that started before going on to great things. Halifax, by Canadian standards, is an old place. There’s a ton of that kind of history around for those who want it. It’s just not what I need.

  What I need when my forebrain bulges, and the dog knows enough to give me a wide berth, is to tread the landscape I walked when I was young. I realize I’m not alone in this. My research—well, I asked a few people—has shown me that the yen surely seems to grow as time passes. It’s not surprising. The day will come when the fog of dementia descends on your elders and people your age start to take their leave. Eventually university kids hold open doors and call you “sir.” And your hamstrings become so tight that only by laying turtled on your back can you pull put your socks on … at this point I think it’s perfectly natural to want to breathe the air you breathed when life was all out there, waiting for you.

  I’m lucky because I just have to walk out the door. Then I’m immediately on terrain where every house, street, building, patch of playground grass or chunk of schoolyard concrete, on the right day can summon up the pang of memory. From the ages of six to nine I lived in a small, slant-roofed, white wooden house with my parents and younger brother about three minutes east of where I now live. Sometime in 1965 we packed up and made the eight-block drive in a fin-backed Buick to where the street was a little wider and the lots a little bigger. For the rest of my school years that is where we lived: in another white wooden house in a neighbourhood where everything mind-blowing I remember about childhood happened.

  The house at 1681 Cambridge Street is a khaki colour now and, of course, smaller than it seemed at the time. When I stroll by alone, as I sometimes do, it’s like I’m some kind of ghost looking into the second-floor window where my bedroom used to be. In my mind I see my dad standing in the den, simultaneously watching The Wild Wild West on the black-and-white TV and continuing a lifelong quest to groove his golf swing. Out in the kitchen, past the living room where no one sat and the dining room where people seldom ate, I picture my mom, slim of figure, hair in a Donna Reed pageboy, putting away the supper dishes and taking the occasional pull on a Player’s Mild smouldering in an ashtray. Then my memory takes me out the back door to the then-unpaved lane that ran behind our house. I see a crewcut kid and my little brother, hear the smack of the horsehide baseball landing in the Rawlings leather gloves and smell the salty evening air.

  In my mind it is 1967, because that’s probably as good a reference point as any. Do you remember ’67? When, at a hundred, Canada seemed to be suspended midway between the old and the new? The year of Expo, Man and His World. A time when Canada’s economy was shooting on all cylinders and we as a country were as prosperous as we’d ever be. This place, even an eleven-year-old could see, was coming of age. We had our own flag. A hockey team in Toronto—back in the Precambrian days when only six NHL franchises existed—was on its way to winning its last Stanley Cup.

  I know, I know: revolution was in the air. The streets of America were aflame. Che was dead. Israeli tanks rumbled into Gaza Strip. In Canada, Quebecers were jazzed by the notion of independence and the young luxuriated in the pot-befogged coffee houses of Toronto’s Yorkville. But Pierre Berton labelled 1967 Canada’s “Last Good Year” for a reason. The truth was that in 1967, if it was great to be alive, then to be a young boy living in a comfortable house on a pleasant street in Halifax made you want to get up and do the Mashed Potato.

  SOMETIMES I take out a black-and-white picture of James Grant’s 1967 grade six class at Sir Charles Tupper School. We did not look like people about to set the world ablaze. With a few exceptions—a pair of Jewish brothers, two girls with French-speaking parents and one young woman with an English accent—we were startlingly uniform: the pasty-faced descendants of Celts and Brits, as befitting a province settled mainly by English, Irish and Scots. This is how hick a town we were: an Australian-born kid landed in our midst a year or so later. We nicknamed him “Skippy the Bush Kangaroo” after a show we watched on television.

  Looking at that school picture, I find it hard to imagine him really caring. We wore glasses with Coke-bottle lenses that magnified the eyes like Jerry Lewis’s in The Nutty Professor. This was before orthodontists owned islands in the South Pacific, so most of us, I’m guessing, had teeth like dragons. Some of the girls would later in life join wacko religious cults and pair up with bad men. Yet radical fervor did not seem to simmer among these wearers of pleated skirts, knee socks, penny loafers and regulation navy blue jumpers. Or for that matter among the boys, all of us yearning to be as flinty-eyed as Linc Hayes in The Mod Squad, as spectacularly as that ide
al contrasted with the sports jackets, ties and cardigans—the bowl cuts and wet-down-with-spit side parts—that live forever in that class photo.

  We were, largely, Sunday-school students. We Sang “O Canada” at the start of every school day and, in many cases, still said the Lord’s Prayer before we hit the hay at night. Somewhere nuclear missiles sat in silos ready to exterminate entire generations. But in these innocent times my buddies and I mostly wanted to debate the merits of Mary Ann on Gilligan’s Island versus those of the daughter with the go-go boots on Lost in Space.

  Bobby Orr and Napoleon Solo were our transcendent heroes. Since we had yet to discover Dad’s Playboy stash, the only printed material most of us came in contact with outside the classroom was the pile of Dr. Strange, The Ghost Rider and Rawhide Kid comics under our bed. Halifax, in those days, had a pair of television stations, three radio stations and morning and afternoon newspapers. We might as well have been ancient Mesopotamians scanning the skies in search of signs of enlightenment from the gods, because the sum total of what we knew was nothing.

  If any of the dads were hitting the Canadian Club or the wife, none of us knew it. If any of the moms got wrecked on tranqs and ran off with a hairdresser, well, that was news to us. Big sisters undoubtedly had abortions; older brothers were getting their first taste of blotter acid. All this would have come as revelation too.

  Where we lived I thought of as central Halifax or “Quinpool,” after the main drag; or “over by Dal,” a reference to Dalhousie University. But some people thought of it as the edge of “the South End,” where the city’s most comfortable burghers lived. Our parents were members of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire and the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks of Canada. They paid their taxes. They voted in Bob Stanfield, a stolid long-johns magnate, as premier for four straight terms. We were the offspring of small-business owners, bank managers, accountants, teachers and university professors. The daughter of the owner of both of the city’s newspapers was a classmate. So was a young woman whose dad would later become president of Dalhousie. A couple of classmates were, I guess, genuinely wealthy by the standards of a Maritime Canadian city in the sixties. But the only way we might have understood their privilege was when they got new hockey gear every Christmas or could afford a Mountain Dew to go with the popcorn in the box with the scary clown face for the Saturday matinee at the Oxford Theatre.

  Our city, with a population of just 93,000, was small. But we didn’t comprehend that either. Nor did we know that Halifax, a port town, was once considered the wickedest town in North America. During the war years, it was still a place of whorehouses and opium dens, a town that exploded in an orgy of drinking, looting and public fornication when peace was declared on VE day. In 1967 hookers strolled in front of the Lieutenant-Governor’s residence and Hells Angels were muscling into the drug trade. Of the 134 listings under restaurants and taverns in the 1967 city directory, only seventeen had lounge, bar or tavern in the name. But libations, I later learned, could be had at Billy Downey’s Arrow’s Club, where great soul and R and B bands performed, or at the Resolute Club, habituated by the city’s expat Newfoundlanders, or the Surf Club on Barrington Street, home to navy men. I never knew what exactly was served up at the Prize Fighter’s Club on Creighton Street. But a double rum and Coke was forever available at the Greco-Canadian Social Club, an establishment with which I would one day become well acquainted.

  That, though, came far later. For kids careening toward teen age in 1967, this place, where men still wore hats and every crossing guard was named Al, was a whole world of bygone glories in a few city blocks. All you needed was a bicycle with a banana seat, and a Sandy Koufax card clipped with a clothespin to the spokes of the rear wheel so that the bike sounded like it was motorized. Or just a pair of Adidas sneakers, the white ones with the blue stripes, You could pump up leafy Jubilee Road, past Murray’s, where moms sent their progeny for smokes, and Payne’s with the glass showcase manned by a real-life butcher in a white apron and hat. You might veer down Edward Street, past the little stone post office, then cut up Coburg Road, where for a dime and a used Fanta Orange bottle you could pull the latest Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos from a wire rack inside a drugstore that had relocated from the city’s downtown after the VE-day riots. You might take a detour through a cemetery where Confederate soldiers, Norwegian, Dutch and British sailors from the Second World War, a few Fathers of Confederation and an industrialist or two are buried. Then you might fly steeply downhill to the Horse Field, the playground on the edge of the railway cut, where in a year or so my compadres and I could be glimpsed sitting in the branches of a big tree, smoking wine-tipped cigarillos. If you went far enough, you could strip off T-shirt and shorts and dive into the waters of the Halifax Arm, back in the innocent days when people still did such things.

  Whichever way you went you passed places of worship because the spirit mattered in this small city, which at that point boasted ten Anglican churches, as well as seven for Baptists, three for members of the Salvation Army, two synagogues—both in my neighbourhood—and a smattering of worship homes for Christian Scientists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals and the Greek Orthodox. The city had eleven United churches, including St. Andrew’s, which the DeMonts regularly attended. Adherents of the Roman Catholic faith, in 1967, could choose from ten churches for Sunday mass. The closest was blocky, stone St. Thomas Aquinas, not a hundred yards from our house. But at that point, the Catholics in the area had their own nun-taught school system, which meant that other than the occasional bout of after-school sectarian violence, we didn’t mix much with the Catholic kids.

  All paths, sooner or later, seemed to lead to Quinpool Road, which carried traffic from the fishing villages and bedroom communities back and forth to the downtown. There we bought Black Cat bubble gum at the Candy Bowl and caps for our six-shooters at the 5¢ to $1 Store. At the Bluenose Hobby Shop we stared reverently at Aurora model kits of Godzilla and a Japanese Zero. Inside establishments with candy-striped barber poles at the entrance, we’d climb into chairs you could adjust up and down. Their owners, overjoyed to see that not everyone was letting their hair hang down, would unfurl white aprons, tie the ends around our chicken necks and ask our moms, “How short?” We usually went to Saturday matinees at the Oxford, one of Halifax’s eight movie theatres, and sometimes, for birthday parties, headed for the Hyland on the street’s westernmost end. In a couple of years, when we were old enough for paper routes, we would gather after delivering the Chronicle Herald on Saturday mornings for pancakes at the Ardmore Tea Room. But at age eleven a few of us already knew enough to make our way past the Blossom Shop, Leverman Credit Union, Reliable TV, Quinpool Shoe Repair and Dorothy Richards Corset Specialty Shop to the Maritime Campus Store in the hope of glimpsing an honest-to-goodness co-ed.

  Everything came together in the wondrous year of 1967. Jim Grant was definitely one of the best teachers I ever had. One of our crew—may the gods to this day still reward him—convinced the Miller sisters to play tackle football with us. We won our Little League baseball championship when the best athlete I had ever seen—a guy who would only live another six years before hanging himself in a vacant lot—drilled a ground ball toward third base at the same time as I put my glove in front of my face in self-defence.

  Sometimes I think about how little has changed since that glorious summer of ’67 when a guy named Irwin nearly left me in a vegetative state. Mostly, though, I think that forty-five years is a very long time. And I find myself increasingly driven to explain to everyone who will listen what Halifax used to be like.

  THIS did not happen overnight. There was no single moment when I ceased looking hopefully forward and began peering mournfully back. I did not stop mid-sentence one day and slap my forehead in the realization that I had become one of those old coots who believes that the past is the only place where anything monumental occurs. Nor do I see myself as one of those reactionary tools longing for the
good old days before same-sex marriage and turbans in the RCMP, when blacks, Jews, Indians and girls knew their place. I acknowledge that this neighbourhood where I live, this city—heck, the entire country—is getting better, every day, in so many ways. In the twenty-first century of this global world, change is a necessity along with a virtue. That doesn’t stop a person from thinking about how things used to be.

  I just have to look out the window, at the elementary school next door. Each noon hour a few dozen parents show up to escort their kids the few blocks home through the mean streets of residential Halifax, where, I guess, gangbangers and pedophiles roam. I went to the school that carried the same name nearly half a century ago: I can remember precisely one child whose parents showed up to walk her home: the dad wore a hat, suit, tie and overcoat in the hottest weather; the mom had the whiff of religious fundamentalism.

  The schoolyard where we used to throw the football, skate and play Red Rover until it got too dark to see is now vacant minutes after the bell rings. Halifax kids, you see, don’t wander free and mess around in schoolyards and vacant construction sites the way we used to. They’re in daycare now, on parent-organized play dates or enrolled in swanky after-school programs to learn Irish dance and tae kwon do.

  That’s a little sad. It is also what people today call a “First World problem.” Except sometimes I actually get out of my neighbourhood and drive through the close-knit towns my parents grew up in. To hear them tell it, home was a place where the smells of comfort food floated from open windows, lovable oddballs roamed the streets and everyone looked after everyone else. Now, with their mines and steel mills gone, those towns are harder places in which the young no longer stick around. All over this country, it seems, the dream of a sweet life in a small town is dying; rural areas are hollowing out. Most Canadians now huddle in cities along the Trans-Canada Highway, where they live in houses surrounded by hedges or gates in suburbs where farmland once rolled. Roots can be shallow in communities without sidewalks or central gathering places, where everyone must get behind the wheel of a car to take the kids to school or buy groceries. Neighbours don’t necessarily watch each other’s backs at a time and in a place when we’re more likely than ever before to let others fall by the wayside.