The Leader’s Drill Shed Story.
Just east of the Parliament Buildings was the huge wooden drill shed built during the Trent excitement when every town in Canada was running to drill sheds instead of to good roads or prohibition. One night this far from elegant structure collapsed under the weight of a fall of snow. The old Leader, of which more anon, made a front page sensation of the accident. Multifarious headlines, nearly a column in length, told the harrowing story, and a single sentence stating that the roof of the shed had fallen in formed the body of the report. Jimuel Briggs was then writing the comic Police Court for the Telegraph, a rival paper. He arraigned a supposititious tramp before the “Beak” on the charge of drunkenness and vagrancy.
“What was the last piece of work you did?” asked the magistrate.
“The Leader’s report on the drill shed,” the prisoner replied.
“Six months with hard labor,” was the penalty promptly imposed. This was the first rebuke I know of to the headline as a newspaper artifice.
King and Yonge were the business and promenade streets. All the big retail stores were on King, and those of prominence were better known by the trade name given to them than by the names of their proprietors. Thus the Golden Lion, the Golden Griffin, the Mammoth, Flags of all Nations, and China Hall were the popular bargain centres. Yonge Street was just beginning to pick up the retail trade. This street was named after an early British secretary of war who never saw it. Up Yonge and just around the corner on Queen next to Knox Church, on the site now covered by Simpson’s, was a fashionable undertaking establishment conducted by Luke Sharp, whose name, displayed in huge letters over an assortment of attractive caskets, seemed to suggest “Safety First” to the passers by. Robert Barr, the famous humorist, who kept Detroit laughing for years, thought so well of the name that he adopted it as his nom de plume. Thus Luke literally leaped from grave to gay.
A more notable example of the coming together of the serious and the not-so-serious was furnished at King and Simcoe Streets where St. Andrew’s Church, Government House, Upper Canada College, and an attractive tavern occupied the four corners. It used to be said that salvation, legislation, education and damnation met at this point. Salvation is all that remains of the big four, and the survival is no doubt attributable to the fact that Toronto is Toronto the Good. Nor is this the only evidence of the Goodness of the City. Joe Clark, of the Toronto Star, whose orchard would have seriously affected the fruit market if he had had more than three trees, once told me that his precious heir-apparent some years ago came home from Sunday School triumphantly bearing a Bible—the big prize for the most industrious pupil. The next year he brought home another Bible, but with diminished enthusiasm. The following year he appeared with a third copy of the Holy Scriptures which he meekly laid on the table, and enquiringly remarked:
“Say, Dad, how many more Bibles have I got to win before I get anything else?”
Thus was the foundation of Toronto’s goodness firmly and permanently laid.