Comic and Other Papers.
There were comic papers as well as serious ones in my early days. The Grumbler was one. It was owned by Erastus Wiman, who afterwards led in the unrestricted reciprocity movement, and the chief writer was Bill Rattray, who later on wrote the heavy religious articles, combating German agnosticism, in the Mail. Another was the Poker, conducted by Robert A. Harrison, who rose to the position of Chief Justice of Ontario. Then came Grip, published by my old school-fellow, Johnny Bengough; it succeeded splendidly, until Johnny’s two fads—single tax and prohibition, then ahead of the age—lost it the needed patronage. Johnny was a bright cartoonist and an able writer and is credited with the authorship of that celebrated poem, “On-tay-rio, On-tay-rio, the tyrant’s hand is on thy throat,” which raised a great ruction in Quebec, and which had been attributed to the late Hon. James D. Edgar.
The Mail first appeared in 1872 with T. C. Patteson, the father, along with Harry Good, of the sporting page in the Canadian newspaper. The Globe would not go in for horse racing, so the Mail made a specialty of this sport and ultimately the older paper had to come in. The Mail was to have been started on April 1; but the foreman printer drew attention to the danger involved in the selection of that date for the first number. So the paper came out a day earlier than was intended. Yet the Mail did not escape the sort of humor appropriate to the first of April. It had the city laughing soon after it was founded by reason of some curious typographical errors incident to the haste of production.
One of these arose out of a St. George’s Society service at St. James Cathedral. It appears that a boy in the composing room had been entertaining himself by setting up sections of a dime novel relating the adventures of “Cut Throat Dick, the Bold Roamer of the Western Plains,” or of some other celebrity of that type. When the report of the St. George’s sermon was being placed in the form preparatory to printing the paper, the “make-up” man used instead of the second half of the sermon a selection from the story of “Cut Throat Dick” with the result that the preacher, Rev. Alexander Williams, was represented as using language that was quite unsuited to the pulpit.
In the same paper somebody played a practical joke at the expense of Mr. M. Homer Dixon, the Consul-General for the Netherlands. Mr. Dixon always appeared at state functions wearing the diplomatic uniform of blue cloth and gold lace. A letter appeared in the Mail offering a vigorous defence of this practice and was signed apparently by Mr. Dixon himself. The missive, which was a forgery, set everybody laughing.
But there was a louder laugh at a practical joke played by my old friend, W. R. Callaway, general passenger agent of the Soo Line, and formerly of the C.P.R. at Toronto. Mr. Callaway is nothing if not a wag. The jobs he has put up are innumerable, and this is one of them. He issued “swell” invitations to the leading citizens of Toronto to visit his office on King street and see the first cycle used in the construction of the C.P.R. which had just been completed. The acceptances were many. Amongst those who came to see the wonderful and historic machine were Sir George Kirkpatrick, the mayor and aldermen of Toronto, and many society ladies and gentlemen. They were escorted to a rear room where they beheld a brand new wheel-barrow, especially borrowed for the occasion from Rice Lewis & Son. The crowd took the “sell” good naturedly, but Mr. Callaway was conveniently absent in London.
Returning to the newspapers—in a later day came the Sun, the World, edited by W. F. Maclean, M.P., the Empire, both afterwards absorbed by the Mail, and the Telegram, the last and highly successful venture of John Ross Robertson. John Ross in this enterprise made municipal politics his specialty, and woe to the man he opposed. One candidate for the mayoralty to whom he objected was Angus Morrison. Mr. Morrison was not a good or strictly coherent speaker. John Ross went after him by printing verbatim reports of his campaign speeches, and thus did him no end of harm.