by Brian Vallee
By now, Harold had a job as a milkman, delivering milk door to door with a horse-drawn wagon. Harold had mastered the harmonica and he taught Ed how to play. Ed was soon considered the best player at Earl Beatty, where one of the teachers encouraged him to join the school’s mouth organ band. Later he would be picked to join a YMCA band, which won honours at the CNE and often performed in school auditoriums and church basements in and around Toronto. “We had about forty guys,” Ed recalls, “dressed in light blue capes, with red silk lining, white trousers and shirts, and blue tams pulled down on one side.”
The YMCA band had one member who did all the singing, and who began each performance with the band’s trademark introductory tune. Edwin Boyd, in his eighties, can still belt out a lusty rendition:
“We’re the Danforth ‘Y’ Boys / Rough and ready we / Happy go lucky as you wish to see / Here to entertain you / Chase the blues away / So it’s hip hooray for the Danforth boys / Of the Danforth Y–M–C–A.”
J.D. Walker, who co-ordinated the band’s appearances for the YMCA, didn’t know Ed could sing until the day they were in the same car on the way to a performance in the town of Streetsville. Walker and another adult were in front. Ed and three other boys were in back. When the boys started singing old favourites, Ed joined in and Walker took notice. He was impressed.
One day soon after, the regular singer was late for a performance. Walker approached Ed and told him he would have to sing the opening number. This was the break he’d been waiting for. “But I’d never sung in front of a big audience like that before. I got about two or three words out and I lost my voice – I messed it all up. J.D. Walker wouldn’t talk to me after that. He thought I did it deliberately.”
Ed got into trouble at school, but he wasn’t a serious troublemaker. He had a vibrant imagination. And he didn’t like other people’s rules, and would skirt them or break them whenever he thought he could get away with it. Because he was such a fast runner, he often created situations for which fleet footwork turned out to be necessary.
But he wasn’t quite fast enough to escape the boot of a Roman Catholic priest from St. Brigid’s Church, which was just up the street from the Boyd house on Glebemount. The priest always wore a long black robe, and Ed thought he was a bit odd. The boy called him names and taunted him. The priest suffered the insults in silence until one day he decided he’d had enough, and was close enough to surprise Ed. “He chased after me, and managed to give me a good kick in the ass.”
Ed also learned not to insult the girl who lived in the corner house down the street. She was taller and heavier than he was, but because she was a girl, he didn’t think it was a problem. Like the priest, she was usually silent when he called her names. But one day was different.
“Look, I’ve had enough from you,” she said. “I’m going to beat your head in.”
Ed decided not to test her. “I thought, ‘Jeez, maybe she’s good at this stuff,’ so I decided to run. She started to run after me. She couldn’t catch me, but I didn’t call her any more names.”
Because Ed’s father was a Toronto policeman, any kind of rebellious act he engaged in impressed his friends, and was probably somewhat magnified in their minds.
Like the Harris Avenue house, the house on Glebemount had a back porch with an enclosed cubbyhole beneath, except there was no tiny door providing access to Ed. He solved the problem by digging a tunnel large enough for him to squirm under the wall. He liked it under there because he could listen to conversations in the house without being detected. And sometimes he and his friends smoked in the hide-out. “We used to go down to Danforth and pick up cigarette butts where the guys had thrown them before they got on the streetcars.”
By the time he was thirteen, with an indulgent mother busy with three young children, and a father on shift work, Ed was spending most of his spare time playing school sports or roaming downtown Toronto. There were also his outings with the YMCA band, and the violin lessons (short-lived) that his parents signed him up for. He wanted to take guitar lessons instead, so that he could sing while he played, but they insisted on the violin. “The reason they did that was because dad had always wanted to play the fiddle, so he thought it would be good for me. He never thought in terms of whether I would like it.”
Despite his reluctance, Ed was doing well with the violin, so well that he won prizes and was moved to an advanced level – a level he wasn’t ready for. The music was too complicated for him to read. “I don’t know why they did that. I should have asked for some answers.” The lessons were taught above a shop at Woodbine and Danforth, and when he realized he couldn’t keep up with the others, he simply stopped going. He didn’t tell his parents he had quit the lessons. He would hide the violin and go downtown and roam around Eaton’s or Simpson’s, spending the dollar that it cost for the lessons on jelly beans or peanuts.
A.G. Walter, one of Ed’s teachers at Earl Beatty, had competed internationally for Canada as a runner. “He didn’t like me at all because I was fast and limber, and he thought I should go into training to become a competitive runner or gymnast. But I wasn’t interested in that.” Walter thought Ed was squandering his natural athletic talents.
But young Ed didn’t think so. He used his talents to show off at every opportunity. For a time he found a Saturday job delivering meat for a butcher on Danforth. It wasn’t uncommon for other merchants to see him walking past their stores on his hands or doing forward or backward flips. He did the same on his way to and from Earl Beatty school. “I used to go everywhere on my hands. Sometimes I’d do flips for a whole block. Many of them didn’t know my name, but they were acquainted with the silly things I did to get attention.”
That kind of athletic vanity wasn’t what Walter had in mind, and Ed believes the teacher was out to get him. One day Walter called for quiet in his class just as Ed was closing his inkwell, which slipped and made a slight noise. The teacher raced down the aisle, grabbed Ed by the collar, and hauled him out to the hallway, where another teacher held him while he gave Ed a brutal strapping.
Ed was hurt that the other teacher, one of his favourites, would participate in such severe and unwarranted punishment. “It really broke my heart. I was the best player in his mouth organ band and he holds my hands out while Walter really lays it on me with the strap. They were black and blue for a couple of weeks.”
Despite the problems, Ed was satisfied — his athletic ability, his antics, and his membership in the school and YMCA mouth organ bands were bringing him some of the attention he craved. He was also the goalkeeper for the school’s successful soccer team, and a good skater, although too small to play on the hockey team. His definition of success may have been considered questionable by others, but at least he was being noticed, and that was important to him.
One of those who noticed him was the attractive Jean Phillips, who lived a block east of Ed. She introduced herself to him one night at the school’s outdoor skating rink. After a short conversation she announced, “You’re my boyfriend now.”
“I am?”
“Yes you are.”
Ed liked Jean, and they began spending a lot of time together, but the relationship didn’t last. One day he took some money from his mother’s purse and was proud of himself for getting away with it. When he boasted of it to Jean, she wasn’t at all impressed. “She wouldn’t have anything to do with me after that.” It was only then that Ed realized stealing money might be morally wrong. Jean’s reaction reminded him of how his mother had slapped him years before, when he stuck his hand under her dress.
Ed always liked the movies, and when he didn’t have the money he would sneak in the back door of the neighbourhood theatre, usually by himself but sometimes with one or two of his friends. Policemen often came into the theatre for a few minutes when they were on foot patrol.
Ed was sitting in a row near the front after sneaking in one day when a policeman came in and stood just to the side in front of him. “I didn’t look at him, but a
few minutes later the light from the screen got brighter and I realized it was my old man. He was on the beat, just filling in a little time. He didn’t see me, and I didn’t dare say anything.”
Young Ed loved the summers during his school years in Toronto. Two or three times he attended YMCA camps, where he always won the running races. “When I went up there I always shaved my hair right off – so I was ‘Baldy.’ And when he was in the city there was always the Toronto Transit Commission’s “swimming car,” which took youngsters to the Don Valley. “The streetcar would take us to Broadview Avenue and we’d walk down the hill to a little bridge below and swim down there for a couple of hours, then the streetcar would come along again and take us home.”
During the summer of 1928, fourteen-year-old Edwin Alonzo Boyd decided to join the Foreign Legion. He had read about it in the library and he thought it would be the life for him – high adventure and travel to exotic places. He reasoned that if his parents had their say, he wouldn’t be going anywhere. To pull it off, they would have to think he was dead.
He made careful plans, and one day, at first light, he rode an old bicycle down to the beach at the foot of Woodbine Avenue on Lake Ontario. He carried with him an old pair of trousers, an old shirt, and a pair of worn-out running shoes. His name was on a slip of paper in the pocket of the shirt. At the beach he put the bicycle down, placed the old clothes and shoes on top, and walked back to Danforth and then east to Kingston Road, which becomes Highway 2.
His plan was to make it as far as Oshawa on the first day. By dusk he had covered about twenty miles and was in Whitby, just west of his destination. But he was tired, hungry, and homesick. Thoughts of a hot meal and a comfortable bed buried his dreams of the Foreign Legion as quickly as a Sahara sandstorm can fill in a foxhole. “I turned around and started walking home along the railroad tracks. There was no moon and it got black dark, so I went back down to the highway.”
Ed was wondering if he would ever make it home when two raucous couples pulled up in a car. They were headed for Toronto and offered him a ride. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. “It was a Tin Lizzy with curtains on the windows. It didn’t go very fast and it made a lot of noise, but they drove me all the way home. When they found out I was hungry, they got me a hot dog and a Coke. They said anything else you want, just ask for it, so I got some jelly beans and some popcorn.”
It was near midnight when they dropped Ed off on Danforth at the foot of his street. Afraid to go into the house, he crawled into his hideout under the rear sunroom and fell fast asleep. In the morning he was ravenous and thought he might sneak into the house for some food. Just then he heard his mother crying and the front door slamming. Looking out the crawl hole, he saw his family getting into the minister’s car. “I thought, well that leaves the coast clear, I’ll go in and cut a hunk of bread or something.”
The door was unlocked, and Ed entered quietly and went to the kitchen. There on the table was a large layer cake with white icing.
He cut off a large slab and was about to devour it when he heard movement above in Harold’s room, and then footsteps on the stairs. The boy ran to the basement and hid behind the coal furnace with its maze of large pipes. But Harold followed him.
“Anybody there?” asked Harold in a loud voice, peering into the dim basement.
Ed didn’t answer. He was busy stuffing cake into his mouth.
Squinting and feeling his way, Harold came closer, until he was within a foot or two of the boy.
“Is there anybody there?” he repeated.
Suddenly, Ed stepped out, his face covered in white icing. Harold shrieked, fainted, and fell to the floor. Ed didn’t know what to do, but Harold quickly revived.
“Ed! What are you doing here? You’re supposed to have drowned. They’re dragging the lake for you down at the foot of Woodbine.”
The boy related his failed plan to join the Foreign Legion. Harold ran upstairs to phone the police or the lifeguard office at the beach. Ed’s relieved parents rushed home, and after his mother calmed down she warned him not to go to the beach anytime soon.
“Why not?” he asked.
“The lifeguards said if they ever catch you down there, they’ll throw you in the water and sit on you.”
The story was all over Earl Beatty when Ed returned to school in the fall. He was lectured by some of the teachers and was even called before the stern principal. “He gave me proper hell. All the teachers would look at me and shake their heads.” Almost seventy years later he still relishes the story and feels no regret. Once again, Ed Boyd had been noticed.
He remembers that after the incident his father was very angry. “He was going to beat the hell out of me, but mother talked him out of it. She said, Don’t hit him, he’s had enough trouble for one day.”
Ed considered his father a strict disciplinarian, though he probably enjoyed more freedom to go his own way than most boys of his age. And Glover no doubt was proud of his son’s athletic and musical abilities. When friends or neighbours visited, he often encouraged Ed to entertain them with the mouth organ or violin. “He showed me off, you see. He would get a certain amount of approval from the people because I was talented.”
Because he was the oldest of the four children, Ed was expected to set a good example for the others, and when he didn’t, he was disciplined. He says there was no psychological intimidation, such as “grounding” or “go to your room.” “He used violence to resolve things. He was religious, and as far as he was concerned the Bible said give your kids a good going over so they wouldn’t end up as bad people.
“He had a temper, and whenever he got mad he would take me down the basement and pick up a hockey stick or a broom handle, whatever was handy, and give me a few good swats. I used to put on a big act that it hurt more than it really did, because it would bother him and he would stop.”
Ed’s view of his father is disputed by his brother Norm, who says Glover Boyd was no different from most fathers of that era. “All they were trying to do is to keep their kids on the straight and narrow, and I don’t think he was any worse than anybody else. I think in a lot of cases, Gord’s opinion and my opinion are quite different from Ed’s opinion.”
The relationship between Ed and his father would make an interesting psychological case study, given Glover Boyd’s early absence during the war, and the child’s resentment when he was banished from the warmth and security of his mother’s bed.
Ed remains adamant that his father bullied him and treated him unfairly. “I don’t know how he was with the other kids, because right after my mother died, I was kicked out to a farm.”
Of sixteen possible health problems listed on Ed’s elementary school record, only one was checked off. It was No. 8 – defective teeth – an incongruous finding given the Hollywood smile that would be flashed across the front pages of Canada’s newspapers thirty years later.
The problem with his teeth was related to nutrition, which Ed says his mother knew nothing about. “She was always thin and didn’t eat properly. Often when I came home from school at noon all I had was a couple of pieces of toast with tea. I don’t remember drinking much milk.” He does remember drinking a lot of Coke and eating junk food, including his beloved jelly beans. He also ate a lot of peanuts, often passing them around at school, which earned him the nickname “Peanuts.”
Whatever his feelings for his father, Ed looked forward to Sunday dinners, when Glover usually did the cooking. “He liked to eat, and whenever he was off he would make a big dinner with potatoes and roast or steak.”
Poor nutrition and dental problems aside, Ed’s health was always excellent. The exceptions were the usual childhood diseases, including chicken pox and mumps. He remembers his grandfather, Lon, coming down from Muskoka to sit with him when he was restricted to his bedroom with German measles. The blinds were always drawn to keep the room darkened, and his grandfather sat with him for hours, telling him stories of the Muskoka woods and his early days in the lum
ber camps.
In early 1930 Gord and Norm contracted scarlet fever, a more deadly disease. As was the practice in those days, the house was quarantined, and a sign to that effect was hung on the front door. Ed didn’t catch the disease, but he was confined to the house. Eleanor Boyd was looking after the boys when she became sick herself. Ed believes she was susceptible to illness because she was frail and didn’t eat properly.
In March of the same year Ed heard his mother calling to him in a distressed voice. He went to her and she asked him to help her get to the bathroom upstairs. “She needed help to get on the toilet. I’d never done anything like that, so it was kind of a shock to me.”
Just then, Glover Boyd came home. “He kicked me out of there. He took mother to the hospital and that was the last we saw of her.” Eleanor Boyd, in her late forties, was dead.
Her coffin had a sealed glass top because of the scarlet fever, and Ed and the other children weren’t allowed to go to the funeral. “Dad said she looked all right in the coffin.” Glover went to the mortuary with Eleanor’s sisters and Harold, who was unaware that it was his mother and not his sister who had died.
Norm Boyd was just eight and a half when his mother died. “It was quite a shock,” Norm says now, “but it probably had more of an effect on Ed because he was older and he knew her longer than we did.”
Glover Boyd told friends that Eleanor’s death had a devastating effect on his oldest son: “And he got so you couldn’t talk to him. He wouldn’t let anyone into his confidence. He may have been emotionally confused with it all.”4