A Drink With The Toronto Star

Well, as the headline suggests, a few weeks back, I had a drink with Eric Veillette from the Toronto Star. It was for his "A Drink With" column, which is pretty neat: he's recently featured everyone from Councillor Josh Matlow to TTC CEO Andy Byford to Spacing co-founder Matthew Blackett. And as the man behind the Silent Toronto blog — all about our city's silent film history — he's got a particular interest in Toronto's past. So he's had lots of drinks with heritage and history folks, too, like Karen L. Black, (manager of Toronto's Museum Services), Black Creek Pioneer Village's Wendy Rowney, David Wencer (who writes some of Torontoist's Historicist columns, and is also the archivist for Sick Kids) and Colin Brunton (the director of The Last Pogo Jumps Again, the Toronto punk doc I wrote about a few weeks ago).

We headed to the County General on Quest West West for some whisky. You can check it out online here.

Christmas on University Avenue in 1963

The Toronto Star has a Facebook page for their archives, full of neat old photos and stuff. For the holiday season, they've made this beautiful image their cover photo. It's from 1963 and we seem to be looking down University Avenue from the steps of Queen's Park. You can check out the rest of their stuff on Facebook here.

The Star's Star Editor

Here's Joseph E. Atkinson, the old editor of the Star. He took it over in 1899, a few years after it had been founded by striking printers, and helped it grow into the most popular newspaper in Toronto — despite being a liberal voice in a very conservative city. In fact, it was so liberal that Wikipedia claims it was the first newspaper to be banned in Germany when the Nazis came to power.

The Star has an article all about the paper's early years here.

Toronto's Oldest Tree

The oldest tree in Toronto (and a tiny person on a roof)

When John Graves Simcoe, the Lieutenant-Governor who founded Toronto, first sailed into our bay in 1793, what he found, of course, was an untamed wilderness. An ancient forest covered almost all of the area, right up to the shore of the lake in places, with enormous oaks and pines towering hundreds of feet into the air, lush canopies of maple and ash, streams and brooks and rivers filled with salmon and trout, plus deer and bears, wolves and foxes, bald eagles and flocks of passenger pigeons so thick that they blocked out the sun.

Simcoe picked out a spot on the shore for Fort York, laid out ten blocks of a new town, and ordered his men to begin the arduous task of clearing the trees and building a city in their place. The clear-cutting would continue decade after decade as vast stretches of open land were carved out of the wilderness. (The scale of it was enough to shock some people even in those days—nearly 150 years before the birth of environmentalism. After her arrival in Toronto in 1836, the outdoorsy wife of the Attorney-General complained, "A Canadian settler hates a tree, regards it as his natural enemy, as something to be destroyed, eradicated, annihilated by all and any means.") But that, of course, was just the beginning. Despite our "city within a park" slogan, Toronto's total canopy coverage today sits at just 17%. That, depressingly, is about the same as Los Angeles'—less than half of the 40% boasted by other unlikely American cities like Washington, Atlanta and Houston.

Still, amazingly, a few of those same ancient trees that stood in the lush forest of Simcoe's day have survived more than 200 years of Toronto. The oldest of them all is a giant Bur Oak. It stands in the backyard of a house in the Annex, more than 35 meters high with a trunk almost 6 meters around. It's somewhere between 350-400 years old, which means it had already been there for 150 years when Simcoe first arrived, and must have started growing right around the same time that Étienne Brûlé is said to have become the very first European to visit these parts alllllll the way back in 1615.

And that, my friends, is nothing. The oldest tree in Ontario—a White Cedar on the Niagara Escarpment—germinated in 688 AD. That makes it 1322 years old—only about 50 years younger than Islam.

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Back in November, the Toronto Star published a profile of that Bur Oak, which I borrowed the photo from and you can read here. And back in 1923, they published an article by Ernest Hemingway, worrying about the effect car exhaust was having on Toronto's oaks in general. It's over here. Long before that, Simcoe's wife Elizabeth painted watercolours of the ancient forest, some of which you can find here and here and here. And, in a happy coincidence, NOW published an article about Toronto's trees today, including the city's current efforts to get the canopy coverage up to 30-40% by planting more than 100,000 trees a year. It's here.

This post is related to dream 01 Metropolitan York John Graves Simcoe, 1793

Punching Ernest Hemingway Right In The Face

Ernest Hemingway in 1923

I sort of get the impression that a lot of people who met him probably wanted to punch Ernest Hemingway in the face at one point or another, but Torontonian author Morley Callaghan was one of the lucky few who actually got to do it.

Apparently, the story goes something like this: The two writers became friends in Toronto in the '20s, while Hemingway was living on Bathurst Street and they were both working for what was then called The Toronto Daily Star. It was as a foreign correspondent for the Star that Hemingway had first lived in Paris and since, drunken lout that he was, he hated the then-still-more-than-a-little-bit-uptight Toronto, it wouldn't be long before he headed back to France

Callaghan was now living there, too, and one night the pair of reporters was hanging out with F. Scott Fitzgerald, having an argument about boxing. Hemingway and Fitzgerald thought Hemingway was good enough to be a professional. Callaghan had his doubts. To settle the argument, Fitzgerald convinced the two to spar while he served as audience and timekeeper.

As it turns out, Hemingway could not have been a professional boxer. Callaghan, though smaller and an amateur himself, was better. Not only did he get to punch Ernest Hemingway right in the face, he knocked him down to the mat.

A moment later the legendary friendship between Hemingway and Fitzgerald was over. Fitzgerald, who had gotten caught up in the action and lost track of the time, exclaimed, "Oh, my God! I let the round go four minutes."

“All right, Scott,” Hemingway shot back. “If you want to see me getting the shit knocked out of me, just say so. Only don’t say you made a mistake.”

And that was it; he never forgave Fitzgerald. He was still bitching about it in the last letter he wrote before he killed himself, nearly 40 years later.

Callaghan wrote about it too, in his memoir, That Summer In Paris. And, as if this story hadn't already filled its quota of asshole writers, that memoir was then reviewed in The New York Review of Books by Norman Mailer. The review was called "Punching Papa" and you can read it online right over here.

This post is related to dream 07 The Lake Sturgeon Ernest Hemingway, 1923