Dateline- Toronto

by Ernest Hemingway

  Since winning the title Dempsey has appeared in only one fight. This was with one of his closest friends, who had been an invalid for over a year, all the time under a physician’s care.

  Billy Miske was regarded as a jest and could not have lasted ten rounds against any good fighter, but he was an old friend of Dempsey’s and had been promised the first crack at the title and the accompanying $25,000. He looked ridiculous against Dempsey as he would have against any good fighter. But Dempsey took no chances with him. After he had knocked Miske down and had him dazed and blind he stood behind him, and as he got to his feet, before he had his hands up, smashed him on the jaw for the finish.

  So because he beat an old whiskey-rotted set-up and knocked out a sick acquaintance Jack Dempsey is hailed as the greatest fighter of all time by the critics.

  On the other hand the critics have dubbed Carpentier a flash in the pan, a grandstander, a false alarm, a morning glory, a night-blooming cereus, and a number of other things. Critics agree that Carpentier would have no chance with Dempsey.

  Here is the cold dope:

  Carpentier will weigh 176 pounds against Dempsey’s 185, but Carpentier has beaten men that would have chased Dempsey out of the ring.

  Let those critics of Carpentier who say that he will not last against Dempsey remember that Georges fought twenty rounds with Joe Jeannette when that great Negro fighter was at the top of his form. Carpentier, when he was 19 years old, fought Frank Klaus, who beat Stanley Ketchell, the man who knocked down Jack Johnson.

  Carpentier has twice knocked out Bombardier Wells, who was one of the cleverest boxers and fastest punchers that ever lived.

  In 1914 Gunboat Smith beat Jess Willard in twenty rounds out in California. Beat him so decisively that Willard was crying from the punishment he was taking.

  Gunboat Smith then came over to London and was matched with Carpentier at the National Sporting Club. The Gunner at that time was one of the hardest hitters and most dangerous fighters in the game, and had just beaten the enormous Willard and most of the other white hopes. Carpentier knocked him down three or four times and had him in such bad shape that Smith, rather than be knocked out, fouled the Frenchman and lost the fight.

  Carpentier then served through the war with honor and in his first big postwar fight, knocked out Joe Beckett, the champion of England, in a single round.

  Recently he came to the States and fought a formerly good American heavyweight named Battling Levinsky. In the first round Carpentier was covered up and cautious. He felt out Levinsky and discovered that he had nothing to fear. Then he sailed in and, recognizing that he was up against a comparative tyro, he threw aside all thought of defense and punished Levinsky at will.

  A layman would think that performance would satisfy his critics that he was a fighter as well as a matchless boxer.

  But the cry of the critics is: He has no defense. He is just a swinger. Dempsey will murder him.

  Wild West: Chicago

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  November 6, 1920

  Canada never had a Wild West. Largely, perhaps, because as soon as anyone came over from across the border and started to Wild West around, the North-West Mounted Police very quietly and firmly put him away where he wouldn’t harm any one.

  Now the States had a Wild West. It was as good as the movies portray. It had faro, dice, wide-open towns, bad Injuns, red eye, gamblers in frock coats, Bill Hart bad men, discriminate and indiscriminate killings, and all the jolly features.

  In place of the Redskins biting the dust it is now the commercial traveler that bites the dust.

  Where the elk once roamed, the Elk now roams, but with him are the Mason and Odd Fellow. Thus, to coin a phrase, the old order passeth, giving way to the new.

  But the Wild West hasn’t disappeared. It has only moved. Just at present it is located at the southwestern end of Lake Michigan, and the range that the bad men ride is that enormous smoky jungle of buildings they call Chicago.

  Every year some Congressman or Senator rises in the U.S. Congress and reports that during the past year thirty-two or twenty-seven American citizens have been killed in Mexico. All the Congressmen shudder as one Congressman. Mexico is obviously a bad place. “Something must be done about it. It can’t go on any longer. Steps must be taken.”

  Yet in the city of Chicago during the present year from January to November there have been one hundred and fifty killings. One hundred and fifty murders in ten months means a murder every forty-eight hours.

  Of course that record may not look so good against the score of some of the early Nevada mining towns where they boasted to kill a man for breakfast every morning. Some of the Nevada breakfasts, though, must have been furnished by sheriffs and marshals ushering out bad men.

  In the Chicago figures, however, no count has been made of the killings by police. By including the police bag, it would be pretty safe to say they kill somebody every day in Chicago.

  Chicago is supposed to be a dry town. But anybody willing to pay twenty dollars a quart for whiskey can get all they want. In the first days of the dry law enforcement much of this contraband whiskey was Canadian. The dealers feared to move the enormous stores of whiskey there are in the South.

  Now most of the whiskey you buy has a Kentucky label. Canadian whiskey costs too much and there is too much American liquor on hand.

  Gambling is flourishing again after a temporary retirement. Of course in every city there will always be certain types of gambling that can go on in spite of all the police can do. Those are the games that require no apparatus, but can be conducted anywhere. When the police raid a crap game, for instance, all that the gamblers must do is have the doors hold long enough for them to sweep the money into the buckskin bag that lies flat open on the billiard table, throw the dice out of the window, and the evidence is missing.

  Roulette wheels in operation mean only one thing, police protection. For you can’t hide a roulette wheel and you can’t throw it out of the window. It is expensive, bulky and heavy. Before a gambling joint decides to put a wheel into operation they must know that they will not be raided without a proper warning to give them time to stow away their equipment.

  At present it is common talk that there is in Chicago on the West Side a gambling house where roulette is played for as big stakes as obtain in Monte Carlo. So there is murder, drink and gambling in the new Wild West just as in the old.

  Now the reason that Chicago is crime-ridden and Toronto is not lies in the police forces of the two cities. Toronto has a force that for organization, effectiveness and esprit de corps is excelled nowhere in the world. Crooks steer clear of Toronto because they know the reputation of that force. It has established the same reputation for a city that the North-West Mounted Police did for a Dominion.

  Chicago’s crime record is the best description of her police force. Even if you escape all the various brands of criminal homicide that Chicago offers, the nightgowny person with the scythe has another sickle up his wide-flowing sleeve. There have been to date four hundred and twenty people killed this year in Chicago by motor cars.

  Newspapermen’s Pockets

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  November 6, 1920

  A manufacturer recently made a canvass of his employees and found that the average amount of currency that each carried in his pocket was $28.50. In commenting on this, an editorial writer asked us to realize that ten million men, each with only $20 in his pocket, will hold out of use $200,000,000 in currency, which could well be set to work.

  Let the editorial writer stop worrying. Although the factory employees may have had $28.50 apiece in their pockets consider the rest of us. For basis of comparison a series of composite photographs of the contents of the pockets of a number of persons of the same occupation have been obtained at great labor and expense.

  There are, for example, newspapermen. In the pocket of the average newspaperman (unmarried and hardened) there are the following articles:

/>   One handsome leather wallet (a gift).

  Three pencils.

  Two complimentary tickets to any poor show.

  A number of unredeemable mutuel tickets.

  Three letters from his best girls (who are soon to marry somebody with enough money to support them).

  A number of streetcar tickets.

  $2.85 in cash.

  Newspaper reporter (married):

  A varying number of Please Remits.

  A single mutuel ticket. He played a rank outsider who would have paid thirty to one for $5 on the chance of staving off the coal shortage. It was a poor chance.

  A picture of the wife.

  Lunch money.

  A cub reporter’s pockets contain:

  One large collection of clippings. These are stories written by the reporter himself which have actually appeared in a real newspaper. They show his splendid ability to handle such vital stories as an unidentified Negro being struck by a motortruck while crossing Dundas Street. There is usually some short feature story by the reporter describing how the wind blows up and down King Street. This was inserted in the paper by the city editor one Monday when copy was short and because he was once a cub reporter himself.

  When the police find a dead body with a pocket full of clippings they know it is either a cub reporter or an actor. As reporters never die, it is always an actor.

  In addition to the clippings cub reporters’ pockets contain a number of other things.

  A collection of letters from his best girl who hasn’t yet realized that she is going to marry somebody else.

  A street directory.

  A number of postage stamps, purchased in a moment of affluence and now stuck together.

  A receipt from his tailor for ten dollars’ payment on account.

  A handsome cigarette case. The cub reporter thought this was silver once, but a pawnbroker disillusioned him.

  An expense voucher which he plans to cash for supper.

  The editorial writer shouldn’t worry. As long as there are newspapermen, bond salesmen, automobile salesmen, bank employees and similar occupations, there will be a great enough lack of pocket money to balance the excess of the factory employees.

  Indoor Fishing

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  November 20, 1920

  Now when the old fly rod is hanging by its tip in the garret, and the flies that remain of the bright legion that opened the season are tattered feathered veterans and the patched waders are put away in the closet and the new net is lost, it looks as though the fishing season is over.

  But it isn’t. It is just under way. No, this doesn’t mean that they are fishing for trout in New Zealand, or the Andes or Lago di Garda. This yarn deals with the opening of the great indoor fishing season.

  More fish are caught in clubs at this time of year than ever were taken from the Nipigon. Bigger trout are taken around the tables in King Street cafeterias than win the prizes offered by the sporting magazines. And more fish get away within the confines of Toronto than are lost in all the trout streams of Christendom.

  That’s where indoor fishing has it on outdoor fishing. It is cheaper and the fish run bigger.

  It’s a peculiar thing that no man likes to hear another man talk about his golf game. Of course, most men spend the majority of their working hours talking about their golf game to other men. But do the other men enjoy it? They do not. They loathe it. They are merely listening in the hope that that blithering idiot will stop and give them a chance to talk about their own game.

  For a man’s golf game is self-contained within him. Outside influences haven’t much to do with it. He is really just talking about himself.

  Fishing is different. One fisherman loves to hear another fisherman tell about his fishing. For the fishing is something altogether outside of the fisherman. And while the one fisherman is listening he is mentally taking notes. Where did all this happen? How far is it from Toronto? Could he find the place? Are there any more as big up there? And so on.

  We were fishing for the rainbow trout where a little river comes into a lake and cuts a channel alongside the bank. Into the mouth of this river and the bay it empties into, big schools of rainbow trout come out of the big lake. They chase the shiners and young herring and you can see their back fins coming out of the water like porpoises with a shower of minnows shooting up into the air. Every once in a while a big trout will jump clear of the water with a noise like somebody throwing a bathtub into the lake.

  These monster trout won’t touch a fly and we fish for them by casting out from the bank with minnows and letting them lie on the bottom of the channel. We use an Aberdeen number four hook, a six-foot leader and sixty-five yards of twenty-pound test line, a quadruple multiplying reel and a fly rod.

  You cast your minnow out into the channel and let it sink to the bottom and there it waits until the trout grabs it. In the meantime you set the click on the reel and put a slab under the rod butt.

  None of these lake rainbows run under four pounds and when one hits the minnow the reel buzzes, the rod tip jerks down and you grab the rod and strike and the fight is on. The point of this is that we have caught trout in this way over nine pounds in weight. We have never had one run out all the line and, while we have lost many leaders, we had never had a fish big enough to break the line.

  One day in September I had just cast out the minnow into the channel, the rod was pointing up into the air and the click was set on the reel. I was about twenty-five yards down the shore getting some driftwood for the fire when the reel gave a shriek that mounted to about high C. Not the familiar bzzzzzzzzz but a steady shriek. The rod jerked down so hard that it was flattened straight out on the water.

  I raced for the rod the instant I heard the reel start. Just as I reached it, the shriek of the reel stopped. There was a big wallowing explosion out in the lake, the line broke at the reel and the rod—the butt had been under a log and resting on another—shot up into the air. I jumped into the water but the line had vanished into the lake.

  Don’t ask me how big he was. But he was big enough to take out over forty yards of line in the time it takes me to cover sixty feet and he was big enough to break a brand-new twenty-three pound test line without an instant’s strain. As soon as his weight hit the direct pull of the line it snapped.

  The other one I didn’t see. But one night Jock Pentecost came into camp wet to the skin, his rod broken at the second joint, his net gone and a story that made our eyes bug out.

  It seems that he was fishing a particularly deep and difficult stretch of river when he hooked a trout that he claimed was as long as his arm. He went downriver with him through a pretty sizable rapids where he lost his net. Sometimes the fish would sulk at the foot of a big boulder and Jock would have to throw pebbles at him to start him moving. He was afraid to pump him too much with his rod for fear of parting the leader.

  At other times the fish would rush and jump until Jock’s heart would be somewhere in his gullet with each jump. Jock said that when the trout jumped he made a noise like a beaver diving into the river.

  Of course it was a hopeless battle without a net and no other fishermen within two or three miles. Jock might have had a chance of beaching him if there had been any shallow places or patches of shingle. But the river runs waist deep and as fast as a millrace.

  Jock claims that he fought the trout for an hour and a half and then the big fellow started downstream and something had to smash.

  The enormous size of the fish and the length of time of the fight seemed unbelievable to us as it does to you. But Jock had the look of truth in his eyes.

  Two weeks after, the fish commission men netted some trout out beyond a dam on the river and put them upstream. They were too big to use the fish ladder. One of them was a rainbow trout weighing twenty-one pounds.

  And what is more, no one has caught him and he’s still in the river.

  Plain and Fancy Killings, $400 Up

  The Toronto
Star Weekly

  December 11, 1920

  CHICAGO.—Gunmen from the United States are being imported to do killings in Ireland. That is an established fact from Associated Press dispatches.

  According to underworld gossip in New York and Chicago, every ship that leaves for England carries its one or two of these weasels of death bound for where the hunting is good. The underworld says that the gunmen are first shipped to England where they lose themselves in the waterfronts of cities like Liverpool and then slip over to Ireland.

  In the Red Island they do their job of killing, collect their contract price and slip back to England. It is said that the price for a simple killing, such as a marked policeman or member of the “Black and Tans,” is four hundred dollars. It may seem exorbitant when you remember that the old pre-war price in New York was one hundred dollars, but the gunman is a specialist and his prices, like those demanded by prizefighters, have advanced.

  For killing a well-guarded magistrate or other official, as much as one thousand dollars is demanded. Such a price for even a fancy killing is ridiculous, according to an ex-gunman I talked with in Chicago.

  “Some of those birds are sure grabbing off the soft dough in Ireland. It’s mush to pull a job in that country but trust the boys to get theirs. One job means a trip to Paris.”

  It is a fact that there have been more American underworld characters in Paris this summer and fall than ever before. They say that if you throw a stone into a crowd in front of one of the mutuel booths at the famous Longchamps racecourse outside of Paris, you would hit an American gunman, pickpocket or strong-arm artist.

  Most of the blood money from Ireland went to back some pony or other. For the gunman believes in taking a chance. He believes that if he can make enough of a stake he can settle down and quit the business. But it is hard for him to quit, for there are very few professions outside of prizefighting that pay so well.