Dateline- Toronto

by Ernest Hemingway

  “No, Bill. We didn’t get nothing permanent good out of the war except the lieutenant’s mustaches. Plenty of them about.”

  “And from the look of the big stores on Saturday, the women are mighty well applying it that Canadians are storm troops,” countered Bill.

  “They ain’t the only ones as knows that, either. Why, I remember once at Vimy—” It was Bill’s turn to choke Jack off.

  “Here’s our car. Say Jack—” They clung to the arms and legs of the crowd on the rear platform. “They got these out of the war all right enough. Remember 40 hommes ou 8 chevaux?”

  “I rather well do. Why once on leave train we was—” Bill interrupted quickly, shouting above the roar of the tram.

  “Ran into a not half bad one the other night, Jack. Out to my sister’s there was a young fellow. Returned boy he was; had kind of a sentimental turn. He looked kind of familiar but I couldn’t quite place him. I was in the other room readin’ the paper and he was talkin’ with my sister’s friend. ‘Betty,’ says he mournful like, ‘this is the way I feel,’ and he recited that thing by this Kipling bloke. ‘Me that has been what I’ve been. Me that ‘as seen what I’ve seen—’ you know how it goes. Well, when he come to the place where it goes ‘Me that stuck out to the last—’ I recognized him. Know who he was?”

  “No. Who was he?” Jack shouted back.

  “Used to be batman to the R.T.O. at Boulogne,” grunted Bill, as a milling passenger stepped on his pet corn.

  Fashion Graveyards

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  April 24, 1920

  Big department stores cannot obtain insurance against changes of styles. If they did not devise some scheme to protect themselves against shifts in the public taste, merchandisers would be constantly in danger of being crowded with unsalable “Hyline” coats, “Pinchback” suits or other passing favorites.

  Anyone who has tried to purchase a particular model of coat which happened to be suitable but at present is out of style, knows that it is impossible to do so in the big city stores. Do the departmentals and men’s furnishing houses sell all the goods they buy? What becomes of the old styles and the unsuccessful styles? Those are the questions the would-be purchaser asks.

  The answer is that all good styles when they die go to the country. Because they cannot get insurance against changing fancy of the city public, every large furnishing house has an outlet established in some smaller city in the mining district, bush or country.

  In some towns like Sudbury a furnishing house advertises that all their goods are direct from Toronto. They are, too, but the Sudburian or Cobaltese who imagines he is buying the latest Toronto models is really purchasing all the unsalable clothes of one of our furnishing houses.

  In towns as near as Sudbury clothes would be only a little way out of style. Far back in the wilds is where the real old-timers will be vended.

  There you will see a little false-front store advertising a New York, Toronto or Chicago connection, whose very latest creations will be “Mack Machinaw’s, the Kind They Are Wearing on Broadway,” or “Be in Style, Wear Peg Top Trousers.”

  Those little stores on the edge of things are the real graveyard of dead styles.

  Trout-Fishing Hints

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  April 24, 1920

  Sporting magazines have fostered a popular fiction to the effect that no gentleman would catch a trout in any manner but on a fly on a nine-foot tapered leader attached to a double-tapered fly line cast from a forty-five-dollar four-and-a-half-ounce rod.

  There is reason for this putting of trout fishing into the class of a rich man’s diversions. Outdoor magazines are supported by their advertising. The advertisers are putting out expensive goods suited to the under-stocked, over-fished streams of the Eastern United States where only fly fishing is allowed. So the sporting writers pound their typewriters in praise of the fine and far-off fishing of streams like the Beaverskill and Esopus, whose fame is built on the catches of twenty years ago and take every opportunity to stigmatize the bait fisherman.

  The old-timer, firmly implanted in the seat of the scornful, reads the twaddle of the American trout-fishing critics and smiles. He knows the comparative value of bait and fly. He knows that at certain seasons the fly is a far more killing lure than any natural bait. And he knows that on some streams the fly will catch only small trout. He also knows that bait fishing for trout with light tackle and a leader is as sportsmanlike as fly fishing, that it is the only practical method on thousands of streams and that day in and day out through the season it will catch infinitely larger trout in exactly as sportsmanlike a way as fly fishing.

  Worms, grubs, beetles, crickets and grasshoppers are some of the best trout baits. But worms and hoppers are those most widely used.

  There are three kinds of earthworms. Two of them are good for trout fishing and the third is absolutely useless. The big night crawlers come out of their holes in the grass in the night, and enough for a good canful can be easily picked up after dark with the aid of a flashlight. They are really too large and thick for trout bait and are much better for bass, but are far better than nothing.

  Common angleworms are easy to get in the spring but are sometimes impossible to find in a long dry spell in the summer. They can be dug after a rain and kept alive in a big box full of earth until they are needed. A large quantity of worms can be transported a long way by keeping them in a small tin pail full of moist coffee grounds. Coffee grounds stay moist and keep the worms much better than earth, which dries and does not absorb the water evenly. Too much water will kill the garden hackles as quickly as not enough. Worms kept in coffee grounds will be clean and fresh for fishing.

  Pale yellowish worms which are found under manure piles look like angleworms, but are really a distinct species. They have an offensive odor and taste and trout do not like them.

  The novice at trout fishing with worms needs to know a few general rules, but in the main he must work out his own destiny as every stream differs. The following rules are applicable everywhere, however.

  Always approach a hole cautiously so as not to frighten the trout.

  Never let your shadow fall over a hole.

  Use plenty of bait and keep the point and shank of your hook covered.

  Remember that the most difficult places to get your bait into are the most likely to contain big trout. Other people will have fished the easy holes.

  Watch the line at the tip of your pole. As soon as it straightens the least bit, strike with your wrist. Don’t wait for a jerk before striking.

  Always drop your bait a little before the head of a hole and then lower the tip of your rod so that the current will roll your bait naturally into the hole.

  Little wrinkles like those make the difference between getting a small and foolish trout who will strike at anything out of a hole and fooling some big old-timer that will only strike at a bait that is absolutely natural.

  Worms are best used on the small, brushy creeks, full of logs and deep holes that must be fished from the banks. They are superior to grasshoppers on streams that must be fished from the bank because if there are hoppers in the grass along the stream they are stirred up by the fisherman and a number usually land in the stream. The trout will take a free hopper swirling down the current every time in preference to one attached to a leader.

  On streams that can be waded grasshoppers are the premier bait. They are cast exactly as a fly, except that you try and minimize the snap to avoid whipping off the bait.

  Trout rise to a hopper far more readily than they do to a fly, and they are bigger trout. If you want to insure catching big trout, put three good-sized hoppers on the hook. Put the hook in under the chin of the grasshopper and carry it back through the thorax. A triple hopper bait is too large for the smaller trout to hit, and tempts the old whangle berries.

  The big difficulty about fishing the grasshoppers has always been the difficulty of catching them. The classic way is to
get up early in the morning before the sun has dried the dew, and catch the hoppers while they are still stiff and cold and unable to hop more than a feeble foot or two. They are found under the side of logs in a clearing and along the grass stems.

  Any fisherman who has chased a lively grasshopper in the heat of the day will appreciate the method of catching them invented by Jacques Pentecost, an old-time north shore trout fisher.

  In a clearing or around an old lumber camp where hoppers usually abound, they can be obtained in plentiful quantities by the Pentecost method. Let two men each hold the end of a ten-yard strip of mosquito netting and run into the wind with it. The netting bellies out like a seine, and the grasshoppers flying downwind are soon swarming in the net seine, which is held only a few inches above the ground. Then you flop the netting together and pick the hoppers out and put them in your hopper bottles. This method takes all the labor out of hopper catching.

  Grubs, beetles of all kinds, hornet grubs, trout fins, chunks of liver from a partridge or duck are all emergency baits that will catch trout when you are in the bush and cannot get worms or hoppers.

  Muddlers, or miller’s thumbs, little flat-headed minnows that look like miniature catfish, are very killing baits for big trout. They live under rocks in fast water, and are very difficult to catch.

  The usual method is to go after them with a small dip net or a fork fastened to a stick, and try to spear them or scoop them up as they shoot out when you turn the rocks over.

  An unfortunate experience wherein I speared my big toe, mistaking it for a muddler in the rapids of the Black River, has prejudiced me against them.

  All those baits will catch trout. If you are fishing with a light rod and a leader, the trout has exactly the same chance as though you were fly fishing. In addition you are at least giving the trout something for his money—if he gets away he has a good meal instead of just a memory of tinsel and feathers. And when you are fishing with grasshoppers you will find that unless you have a wrist that is two shades quicker than an otter trap, you will present the trout with a lot of free meals this summer.

  Buying Commission Would Cut Out Waste

  The Toronto Daily Star

  April 26, 1920

  The present government system of purchasing supplies is comparable to having every engineer on the C.P.R. negotiate for the coal, water and oil for his own engine, said Ralph Connable today.

  Mr. Connable, who heads the Woolworth Company in Canada, at the request of the War Purchasing Commission, made a thorough investigation of the system of buying supplies for the twenty or more departments of the Dominion Government with instructions to apply business methods and put the department on an efficient basis.

  According to Mr. Connable, each department is now buying supplies in utter ignorance of what the others are doing. The Post Office Department, Customs Office Department, Departments of Justice and Militia all buy their own equipment without any knowledge of what the other is purchasing. This is as wasteful of money as though each section boss of a railway negotiated for his own rails and ties and each station agent bought his own oil, soap and brooms, printed his own timetables and built the particular type of station he most admired.

  One of the disadvantages of the present system is that the departments generally do not get the benefit of the technical knowledge and experience acquired in each department. This and a number of other faults that aid in the operation of the patronage system, but that cost the public hundreds of thousands of dollars, would be done away with by centralization of the purchasing.

  For example, the quantities of goods demanded by some of the departments are not sufficient to enable them to purchase at the lowest wholesale price. Centralizing would make all the goods be bought together and combining the purchases of the departments in one would make a sufficient quantity to get the rock-bottom wholesale price.

  Now there is no uniform standard as to sizes and qualities for the different departments. Thus each may demand a certain size envelope or certain quality of form. Adoption of standard sizes alone would save enormously.

  Departments bidding against each other for supplies have raised prices materially. Lack of standardized inspection has been another difficulty.

  Mr. Connable advocates forming a Central Purchasing Staff such as that headed by Sir Hormidas Laporte, the late W.P. Gundy and Galt, of Winnipeg, during the war. This staff would handle all the purchasing stock from budgets made up by each department the first of the year. Thus they would be able to take advantage of market conditions as all big commercial houses do.

  Each department should have a requisition clerk to look after the interests of the department, to handle emergency orders, and to act as a medium of quick communication between the department and the commission. Having him an employee of the commission would be a quick red-tape cutter.

  Even if the men in charge of the purchasing commission were paid $10,000 to $25,000 a year salaries there would be a net gain of millions to the government by stopping the present wasteful system of uncontrolled buying. It is necessary to pay good salaries to get men above the influence of political pull and patronage.

  An advisory board of such men as Harry McGee, R.Y. Eaton, H.J. Daly and J. Allen Ross should be appointed to serve without pay and give the new commission the benefit of their experience during the first two or three years of its life. Management of this kind would turn the purchasing department from the haphazard, muddling, wasteful squanderer of public money that it is today into a compact business organization that will get the public the best value for every dollar it spends.

  Car Prestige

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  May 1, 1920

  This deals with the Other Half. The Other Half, you know, is that stratum of society from which any of us have just now emerged. We have magazine articles on How the Other Half Lives, How the Other Half Eats. And so on. All the doings of the Half are chronicled by faithful observers. Anything the Half does is interesting.

  Of course, most of us would never admit having emerged from anything. We all cherish a fond delusion that we have sunk to this present level.

  Look at our grandfather! Or if by chance he should be living, look at our great-grandfather. There was a man for you. All great-grandfathers are enveloped in a mantle of romantic gentility.

  If our great-grandfather isn’t a great man, it is our own fault. We can go as far as we like with him. Nobody can prove us wrong.

  Almost the first thing a newly minted millionaire acquires is a genealogy. This is expensive but it is bound in leather and titled “History of the Kale Family.” No one ever reads it, of course, but it goes backward through a series of begats to some suitable and defenseless ancestor selected for the millionaire by the genealogist.

  This is a fine thing for the millionaire, for it gives him the feeling common to all of us that he had a great-great-great-great-grandfather who was a greater man than he was. Thus the millionaire, whose father may have run a soap boiler, enjoys that feeling of having come down in the world and always thinks of himself as a decayed gentleman.

  To the millionaire, we are all the Other Half. There are just two classes of people, he and others. To the rest of us, humanity is divided into a greater number of classes.

  The present social scale seems to be dictated by the motorcar. All of Toronto is divided into those with and those without. To those with, those without are the Other Half. They have been much spoken of in various Other Half books.

  First in the scale of the new feudal system comes the Fordowner. The Fordowner has just got under the wire in the race for social supremacy. Every Fordowner has one ambition, to cease to be a Fordowner. This is not because he is dissatisfied with his car but because all Fordowners are looked upon as the Other Half by those who possess cars with a different type of gear shift.

  Of course there is the case-hardened type of Fordowner who declares that the little car is good enough for him. She’ll pull through anything and it doesn
’t bankrupt a man to buy a new casing once in a while. No big cars for him. But steal a glance at the look in his eye when a McSwizzle Light Four goes by.

  As soon as a man leaves the Fordowner class he is lost. From then on it is a mad race until he achieves a Rice-Rolls or the grave. The most cautious bookmaker would lay thirty to one on the grave. But the ex-Fordowner is not daunted. He smashes into the race.

  His easiest time is during his service in the medium-priced car class. There are a number of cars of about the same price and the man and his wife who own a Choochoolay feel themselves on terms of equality with the possessors of Overseas Darts and other cars of about the same voltage.

  This time is one of comparative comfort. The Choochoolay owner refers affectionately to his car as “a good little wagon.” He contemplates trading it in next year for another of the same make. He has a comfortable disdain for Fordowners and We Who Walk. Then the blow falls.

  Jones across the street, who is not earning a cent more than he is, has a McSwizzle Light Six. Mrs. Jones tells his wife about it. All unsuspecting, he arrives home from the office in the good old Choochoolay only to be confronted by the fact that it is doomed. Jones has started the race. Perhaps it was Mrs. Jones who put him up to it, but at any rate no one in the Choochoolay set can be comfortable any longer. Jones has a McSwizzle.

  Once out of the Choochoolay class there is no more peace before the achievement of a Rice-Rolls or Rose Hill. Buying a McSwizzle Light is like stepping into the rapids above Niagara. Once in, you must go the pace.

  Of course he has moments of triumph, as when he first owns a Delusion-Demountable. But the Delusion-Demountable is three hundred dollars cheaper than a Complex Collapsible, and the Browns have just purchased a Complex. The Complex is a good car and it is a far cry to the first motor. He is a changed man, for a man changes with his cars. He is making much more money, too. He has to or face bankruptcy. In fact he is so successful that one night after dinner the Mrs. broaches the subject of a Pierced-Sparrow.