by Brian Vallee
“Come on, you know you want to sleep with me tonight,” he would say.
Ed never knew if Red was a homosexual or if it was all an act. “He never pulled that crap with me, but he would always say it to the younger ones who were just starting out.”
Wherever Red went, he was recognized, and there were always half a dozen to two dozen men travelling with him. “He was like a magnet because he knew the best way to move around, and you always ate well when you travelled with him.”
When it came to gathering and preparing food, Red was like the commandant of a small guerrilla band. He would set up operations under a railway bridge or in a gully, and his troops would fan out with orders to bring back specific food items. One man would be responsible for corn, another for potatoes, and so on. “And if there was a chicken or a small pig running around, he’d have us bring that back too.”
When all the ingredients were in hand and cleaned, Red would cook them over a bonfire. In his journeys back and forth across the West he had plotted the best places to stop for food. “He didn’t mind robbing farms and gardens, but I never saw him rob a house. He knew all about panhandling and the best places in the West to stop for food. Travelling with Red was a good way to learn the ropes.” As with Duke O’Kane, Ed last saw Red the Barber in Calgary.
Friendships for the hobos riding the freight trains were often fleeting, and the names and faces of many of the men Ed travelled with are as blurred as a video on fast-forward. It was one of those now faceless men who helped him steal a Model-T Ford in Medicine Hat. It was a crank-start, so they didn’t need keys. “I’d never driven a car before and I had to learn after we swiped it. We cranked it up, got it going, and took off.”
Around midnight, they pulled into a closed gas station and managed to fill the tank without being detected. There were no locks on the hoses in those days. They ditched the car in Calgary and immediately hopped a freight and kept going. “I didn’t bother with cars after that. The freight trains were always going in the direction you wanted to go.”
The possibility of jail was an accepted risk for those riding the freights, and in February 1935, fifteen months after his six-week stint in jail, Ed was again caught begging, this time in Saskatoon. He was fined $3, plus $1.75 in costs. Again he couldn’t pay, and was sentenced to two months in the Moosomin jail in southeast Saskatchewan, ten miles from the Manitoba border. And again he was incarcerated under a name other than his own. This time he said he was John Gerald Adams.
Ed’s stay at Moosomin wasn’t all that unpleasant. The jail included a farm, and he drove a team of horses with a sled and worked in the barn part of the time. It was there that he practised front and back somersaults from the loft into the hay. “I used to practise when nobody was watching me. I’d disappear for an hour or so and do back-flips off the beams into the hay. It helped me later in the banks when I could leap over the counters with no strain at all.” His body was so limber and flexible he was able to bend over backwards and touch his nose to the floor.
Ed was released in April. By the early summer of 1935 he was again back in Toronto, ready for another odyssey. Gord, the oldest of his two brothers, was out of high school for the summer. He didn’t have a job, and Ed invited him to join him on the road. Glover Boyd didn’t object, and Gord decided to go.
They travelled west to Saskatchewan and Alberta and on their way back east went to a government relief camp in the wilderness north of Sioux Lookout. It was a logging camp on Lac Seul, and men and equipment were brought in by scow. Ed was hired as a night watchman and Gord worked in the kitchen. “All we were doing was eating, sleeping, and working,” recalls Ed. “You could leave any time you wanted.”
At the camp there were often boxing matches in the evenings to help pass the time. One of the men had boxing training and was better than the others. He was always looking for someone to fight. One day Ed asked him if he would teach him to box. They put the gloves on and went behind the huts. “The way he taught me was to treat me as if I had been boxing for years. He broke my nose. He wasn’t playing around. He nearly knocked my head right off my shoulders, so after a couple of rounds I quit.”
Another man, a quiet, tough street fighter, saw what happened and didn’t like it. Later he challenged Ed’s antagonist. “Come on, show me what you can do,” he said. The centre of the dining room was cleared, and when the boxer threw a punch, Ed’s defender flattened him. “He must have hit him about a hundred times in two or three minutes. God he could hit hard.”
Ed was soon bored in the isolated bush camp and figured it was time to move on, but Gord decided to stay. While Ed was heading to Toronto, the police picked him up in Capreol just outside Sudbury. “They didn’t want people riding the freights so they put me on a passenger train and sent me home. That was fine with me.”
He arrived in Toronto just in time to get caught up in the On to Ottawa Trek – a movement that began in April 1935, when 1,500 men in British Columbia relief camps went on strike. The camps, contended critics, had been set up by the government in lieu of a proper program of work and wages.
The B.C. strikers went by train and truck to Vancouver, where there were sit-ins at the museum, the library, and the Hudson’s Bay store. These actions were followed by a march on Stanley Park by 20,000 strikers and their supporters.
When there was no response from government, the organizers decided to take their protest to Ottawa, and the On to Ottawa Trek was born. More than a thousand strikers commandeered freight trains and made it as far as Regina, where their numbers doubled. Eight of their leaders went to Ottawa to present their case to Prime Minister R.B. Bennett, while the others remained behind in the Regina Exhibition Grounds. When the talks broke down, the leaders returned to Regina. On July 1, the police moved in, provoking an all-day riot that left one policeman dead, scores of police and rioters injured, and 130 strikers arrested. That part of the drama was over, but in Ontario a much smaller group was continuing the trek.
“They were just walking through Toronto from Niagara Falls when I joined them,” recalls Ed. “They had about twenty women and a couple of hundred men and boys, and we walked all the way to Ottawa. I wore my shoes out.”
An advance party would inform residents in towns and villages along the route that the strikers were approaching, and bags and boxes of food would appear. The marchers made it to Ottawa and camped out in a municipal park, but the leaders were rebuffed in their attempts to meet with the prime minister and were ordered out of town. City police raided the park and ripped down the shacks and lean-tos the marchers had erected. Ed and the others were told to leave Ottawa immediately. “They told us they’d put us away for a long time if we ever returned.” He hitchhiked to Toronto and within days was back riding the rods. But this time it wasn’t the usual aimless journey: he had a plan.
Ed always loved the movies, and even in the darkest days of riding the rods, he escaped to the cinema whenever he could scrape together enough money. The old theatres were dark: cool in the summer, and cozy in the winter. They were magical places where his imagination could soar. He liked westerns and gangster movies, but musicals were his favourite. He never forgot the musical comedy The Golddiggers of 1933, a Depression period piece in which Ginger Rogers, in a costume of large coins, sings – in pig latin – the hit song “We’re in the Money.”6
Now, Ed decided, he would travel to Hollywood and try his luck as an actor. “I had feelings at one time that I’d like to be a James Cagney or somebody like that.”
He made it to Winnipeg and then took a freight south to a lightly travelled border crossing point. At two o’clock on a November morning, with the customs office locked and in darkness, he walked across the U.S. border into Minnesota. He marvelled at his good fortune – nobody there, and the highway stretched out before him.
Ed covered about ten miles before he saw the lights of a car. Now if he could get a ride, it would really be a special day. He waved the car down, and to his delight it pulled over and
stopped.
“Hi, do you want a lift?” said the male driver, who was alone.
“That would be great,” said Ed, jumping into the front.
“Where are you going?” asked the driver, pulling away.
“South.”
“Do you live around here?”
“Yeah, just over there, the second farm over.”
“Oh? What’s the family name?”
“Johnson.”
The driver, who was stocky and fit, glanced at Ed, studying his face. “I don’t think that’s the right name,” he said finally. “I think I’d better investigate you.” It was then that he told his passenger he was an off-duty border patrol officer. He drove Ed to Fergus Falls, Minnesota. The next morning, under the name Herbert John Hardley, Ed was found guilty of violating U.S. immigration laws. His sentence was twenty-four hours in custody, but he was ordered transferred to a deportation centre at St. Paul, Minnesota. It would be two months before the train carrying deportees would be ready to depart for Canada. Ed boarded with the others and was delivered to the border at Niagara Falls, where he was put on another train bound for Toronto.
Undeterred, he went right back to riding the rods. In the West he met up with his friend Jake Dunn, and they slipped effortlessly into their old pattern of bumming door to door. And if they didn’t get enough for food, they would simply order meals in a restaurant and afterwards admit they had no money to pay the bill. “We got away with that often in Calgary, Saskatoon, and other places. Most of them would say, ‘Oh well, turn them loose – just don’t do it again.’ ”
In a Calgary restaurant in August 1936, the trick might have worked again except that they pushed their luck, ordering extravagant desserts after a full meal. For Jake it was a banana split, for Ed a Rainbow Special loaded with scoops of ice cream and fancy toppings. The angry proprietor refused their offer to work off their debt and called the police. In court it was the desserts that riled the judge.
“I can understand – you’re hungry and you want something to eat,” he told the two accused. “Everybody needs to eat – but a banana split and a Rainbow Special? I have to do something about this.”
Ed and Jake didn’t know what to say. “So he gave us some time.” It was only three days in the Calgary jail, but it was a portent for what was to come: that conviction was the first ever under the name Edwin Alonzo Boyd.
5
Penned In
Less than three weeks after Jake and Ed were released from the Calgary jail, they jumped from a freight train a mile or two south of Saskatoon. They had decided to walk into town from that direction. It was after midnight, and as they walked along they noticed a gas station with no lights on and no houses nearby.
Approaching the building, they peered through the front windows, wondering if there might be money in the cash drawer inside. They walked around back and discovered a locked washroom window. Jake leaned against the wall, and Ed climbed his back, smashed the glass, unlocked the window, and crawled through.
Less than a minute later, a police car pulled up on routine patrol. Jake, standing watch at the back of the garage, saw the car in time and was able to duck out of sight. Ed saw the policeman through the front window and hid under a large desk.
The officer was carrying a flashlight and discovered the broken window in back. Ed could hear him grunting as he pulled himself through the window. “I should have broken out one of the front windows and got out of there.” He opted to stay under the desk, thinking the officer would take a cursory look around and leave.
Instead, the officer sat at the desk, opened one of the drawers, and removed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Ed watched him light the cigarette and slip the lighter, and other items from the desk, into his pocket. Then he picked up the telephone and called the owner or manager of the gas station.
“There’s been a break-in,” he said. “They came in through the back window. You better get over here, or send somebody, because I’ll be leaving pretty soon.”
Ed, meanwhile, was scrunched beneath the desk, a pair of rubber boots held against him for cover. “I put them over my hip and he put his foot on them. I guess he figured that’s what was under there.”
The officer had his flashlight in hand and flicked it on and off every few seconds. When he happened to play the beam under the desk, he saw two eyes staring up at him. The chair he was sitting on was a three-legged swivel type and Ed thought of grabbing his foot and flipping him over backwards, but decided against it. The officer jumped up.
“Get out from under there,” he ordered.
Much of what happened later remains somewhat of a blur for Ed. He was taken to jail and then transferred to Edmonton, where he appeared in court on September 3, 1936. He thought he was pleading guilty to the service station break-in because he had been caught red-handed. He didn’t think it was that serious until he heard the sentence – three-and-a-half years in the penitentiary. This was the second conviction registered under the name Edwin Alonzo Boyd.
Reading about himself in the newspapers years later, he realized the police had tacked on several other charges. “I didn’t have a lawyer, and I didn’t know what I was doing. They laid all these other charges against me that I didn’t know about. I guess they were clearing off their books.” Clearing off indeed. His rap sheet for that court appearance lists convictions for twenty separate offences, mostly break, enter, and theft.
Days before the gas station break-in, while passing through Edmonton, Ed and Jake had paid two weeks in advance for a room in a boarding house on 101st Street, near the Salvation Army. When no one showed up to claim the room, the proprietor contacted the police and gave them two names. One of them was Edwin Alonzo Boyd – and he was in custody. The police decided to put the room under surveillance. A day or two later they were waiting when Jake Dunn appeared. He had used a phony name with the proprietor and did the same with the police.
“Are you a buddy of Edwin Alonzo Boyd?”
“Nope, never heard of him.”
“You don’t sound very truthful. We’re going to take you in.”
Jake was eventually convicted in the gas station robbery and of several other offences similar to Ed’s.
After his conviction, Ed, in handcuffs and with an RCMP escort, boarded a train in Edmonton for the 175-mile ride to Saskatchewan Penitentiary at Prince Albert, on the south shore of the North Saskatchewan River in the centre of the province. He and the Mountie sat in facing seats. The Mountie seemed uninterested and settled in to read a newspaper. Ed, who had learned to pick the lock on his father’s handcuffs, always carried watch springs stuck in his pants behind the belt buckle. His system wouldn’t work if the cuffs were double-locked, but on this day there had been only one turn of the key, and he was able to open the lock without the Mountie noticing.
“You know these cuffs won’t stay on,” he said, as if discussing nothing more than the weather. The startled Mountie looked over and saw the open cuffs in Ed’s hand. He grabbed them and put them back on, this time double-locking them. Ed still regrets that he didn’t try to escape. “I was too stupid. Instead of trying to run away when the train stopped, I had to show off.”
At the train station in Prince Albert, Ed’s escort signed him over to the prison officials. He was loaded into a car, and as they neared the prison Ed could see the forbidding, fortresslike building looming before him. He wasn’t frightened, but felt a sense of unease and wondered what lay before him.
He was given the usual strip search and issued prison clothes – heavy denim jacket and pants, heavy wool socks and boots, and a peaked cap. His friend Jake, also convicted in the gas station robbery and several break-ins, showed up a couple of weeks later, but they were in different parts of the prison and didn’t see much of each other.
Of the Saskatchewan Penitentiary, Ed remembers the profound boredom more than anything else. For the most part, prisoners were assigned meaningless, repetitive tasks. He spent most of his first year shining cell bars
with a piece of emery cloth attached to two sticks. He held the sticks and moved the cloth back and forth to buff the bars. “You kept moving up until you had the bar completely shined, and then you moved to the next bar.”
The only relief from that job was when he was assigned to sweep or mop the long corridors in front of the cells.
Ed’s situation improved after nine months when he was transferred to the kitchen, where he was in charge of making tea in huge electric vats. He would fill the vats with water, add three pails of loose tea, and stir it with a large wooden paddle. “It was pretty lousy tea, but they put a lot of chicory into it.”
He worked in the kitchen through the summer and fall of 1937. It was considered a cushy job, and he was glad to be there when the first snow signalled the arrival of the cold western winter. But it wasn’t to last. A fellow inmate, self-appointed boss in the kitchen, accused Ed of not doing his job properly. “I got mad and smashed him one, and he ran to the guard.”
Ed was moved out of the kitchen and isolated in a cell at the end of an empty cell block. When no one was around, he would burst into song, his voice carrying well in that setting. More than once the chief keeper came to the door of his cell.
“You’re not supposed to sing,” he grumbled.
Ed would sit silently until the keeper walked away, then start singing again. After two or three weeks, he was transferred to a work detail outside the walls. It was a cold winter, with temperatures often dipping to thirty below zero. Keeping warm was impossible.
The work involved digging up stumps with grub hoes a half-mile or so beyond the prison walls. With the cold, the stumps were like cement.
The inmates had their own small shack with a wood stove, but against the severe cold it didn’t throw much heat, and they were forced to huddle together to keep warm. A bonfire kept the guards comfortable on the coldest of days. Warming their hands over the fire, they would sometimes taunt the inmates.