by Brian Vallee
While he was continuing south, police from North York, Toronto, and the Ontario Provincial Police were converging on the bank. When they arrived, Cranfield, Elwood and his staff, and other witnesses described to them what they had seen and heard. They would have to go through it all again for the reporters and photographers from the three Toronto newspapers, who were already rushing to the scene.
As police dusted Cranfield’s car for fingerprints, the owner proudly pointed out the bullet hole in the trunk and talked about the unexpected present he had found on the front seat – a $20 bill left behind by the bandit.
The consensus of the witnesses was that the robber was five foot seven or eight, forty to fifty years old, and slight of build, with a thin black moustache and a ruddy complexion. They agreed he was wearing a dark-brown fedora, blue suit, blue-striped shirt, and dark tie.
Scores of police officers fanned out from the bank on motorcycles, in patrol cars, and on foot, in a street-by-street search. Shortly before 1 p.m. a suspect was picked up on Felbrigg Avenue, but he was quickly released. Police also searched buses and streetcars and set up roadblocks to check all vehicles heading north out of Toronto. Within two hours of the robbery, a hitchhiker on Highway 11 had been questioned and released and five other suspects – one taken off a bus and one from a streetcar – had been picked up and paraded before Elwood and his staff for identification. They too were soon released. Police said later they believed the bandit escaped by boarding a bus and mingling with the passengers.
In fact, after scrambling through the neighbourhood around the bank, the robber had casually walked to the garage and his waiting truck. He considered himself lucky, because he was still feeling sluggish from the whisky. He slept for an hour.
He had brought along a damp cloth and a razor. After he had woken up and his head had cleared, he wiped off the rouge and mascara, shaved his moustache, and changed his shirt. Only then did he count the money – $2,256. It wasn’t as much as he had expected but, everything considered, it was a good day’s work. The more he thought about it, the better he felt: he could actually rob a bank and get away with it.
2
Early Years
East of Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay, two or three hours’ drive north of Toronto, is Muskoka, a rugged land of rivers, lakes, and forested islands on the southernmost edge of the Precambrian Shield. Before it became Ontario’s premier cottage country, it was a preserve of the wealthy, who stayed in the exclusive resort hotels that had sprung up after the railway was pushed through in 1875. One hundred years later there would be four hundred tourist hotels and resorts and more than twenty thousand cottages.
Until early in the twentieth century, there was also a thriving lumber industry, with sawmills in Muskoka’s three main towns – Gravenhurst, Huntsville, and Bracebridge. And there was some farming, but it was a struggle because arable land was scarce, with rock and thin soil predominating.
Edwin Alonzo Boyd’s roots were in Muskoka. His middle name came from his grandfather, Alonzo Boyd, an early pioneer who worked at logging and farming and who was known as Lon. Lon was short, sported a handlebar moustache, and chewed tobacco. He was married and had three sons, one of whom died in childhood. In his later years Lon worked in the lumber camps as a cook’s helper and handyman. He was well known as “a kind of a character” who could do just about anything.
Lon’s eldest son, Edwin Glover Boyd, was born in Kilworthy, near Gravenhurst, on July 1, 1892, and spent his early years there. The family lived in a farmhouse “sitting on a pile of rocks with just enough soil to grow a few vegetables,” as one relative described it.
Glover Boyd’s mother died young, and he followed his father to the lumber camps, where for a time he was a teamster, using horses to haul logs out of the woods. But he soon gave that up and moved to Toronto before the First World War. He was an accomplished electrician and was hired by Eaton’s department store. Family history has it that he installed the light over the statue of Timothy Eaton at the main Yonge Street entrance of the old Queen Street store.
It was at Eaton’s that Glover Boyd met Eleanor McCallum, a slim, dark-haired clerk several years his senior. They soon fell in love and made plans to marry. She told him she was raising her young brother, eight-year-old Harold, because her mother was a widow with health problems. And Harold would be coming to live with them. That wasn’t a problem, said Glover. He learned later that Harold was not Eleanor’s brother, but her son, born out of wedlock.
Edwin grew up thinking Harold was his uncle. “But he was really my half-brother. And I don’t think my dad knew until a month or two after they married. I don’t know if he would have married if he had known about it before.” Harold’s true identity would remain a secret to everyone else in the family for almost three decades.
Edwin Alonzo Boyd was born on April 2, 1914. He would be known simply as Ed to family and friends, but the name Alonzo had an appeal that years later the media would be unable to resist. It was always “Edwin Alonzo Boyd” or “Alonzo Boyd,” never Ed, which simply wasn’t flashy enough.
Four months after Ed was born, the British Empire, of which Canada was part, went to war with Germany. Glover Boyd joined the army in August 1915. Edwin was seventeen months old when his father went overseas. It would be almost four years before he returned.
In the war, Glover served in France with the Royal Field Artillery. For a time he was transferred – probably because of his skills as an electrician – to the Canadian Squadron of the Royal Air Force. He spent six weeks in two different hospitals with a severe elbow fracture and was once given a severe reprimand for driving a military vehicle without permission. He left the army with the rank of sergeant.
During the war, Ed lived with his mother and Harold in a walk-up apartment in a house on Marchmount Road near Davenport and Ossington. The second-floor apartment was small, and the family that owned the house lived downstairs. Harold had his own room, and Ed slept in his mother’s bed. During the day, Eleanor Boyd worked at an ammunition factory and Harold looked after Ed.
Those early years were largely uneventful and not unpleasant for young Ed. Eleanor was a doting mother and Harold was always helpful and treated him kindly. “I don’t remember having a lot of other children to play with. But Harold took me places and always found things to do. He was supposed to keep an eye on me when my mother was at work and he did a good job of it.”
Ed was short-changed when it came to grandparents. His paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather both died before he was born, and he had no memory of Lon Boyd until after the war. His maternal grandmother, a large woman with chronic health problems, visited from time to time. There were also visits from his three aunts, Eleanor’s sisters, who lived in Toronto, and from his Uncle Oswald, his father’s younger brother.
While Glover Boyd was fighting the war overseas, Eleanor was facing her own ordeal at the ammunition factory. She was burned on one side from her knee to above her hip when she was struck by a wayward artillery shell casing on the assembly line. The heavy, plant-issue coveralls she was wearing saved her from even more serious injury. She recovered, but for the rest of her life she kept the scar covered.
Young Ed had his own close call while playing in front of the house one day. While being chased by other children, he ran into the path of an oncoming car. The car was halfway over him when it stopped, and he crawled out from under it. He wasn’t hurt, but horrified onlookers rushed to his side. “They were all shook up and they picked me up and asked me if I was all right.” Ed liked all the attention and never forgot it.
Glover Boyd had joined the Salvation Army before he went overseas, and when he returned home they sent a uniformed band to give him a rousing welcome on the front lawn. Afterwards everyone crowded into the apartment for tea and cake. Eleanor had often showed her son a photo of his father holding him in his arms. But the boy had no memory of him, and when Glover walked through the door after the war there was no resemblance to the clean-shaven yo
ung man in the photo. The stranger was a tough, seasoned army sergeant with a walrus moustache. He had served three years and ten months overseas. Now he was home and he wanted to share his wife’s bed.
Five-year-old Ed saw his parents whispering in the kitchen, his father somewhat glum. It was near the boy’s bedtime when his mother came out and told him there would be new sleeping arrangements that night.
“Your father wants to sleep in my bed,” she said.
“But that’s where I sleep,” pleaded Ed.
“Well, tonight I want you to sleep on the trunk. I’ll make it nice and comfortable for you.”
More than seventy-five years later, Edwin Alonzo Boyd still remembers how he felt that night. “We had a big steamer trunk and I slept on that. She said it would be just for one night, but I was never in her bed again. That was my place, not his. And I didn’t know him – he was just a big stranger. I felt really rejected – mother didn’t want me anymore. I guess it kind of stuck in my subconscious.”
Now that Glover Boyd had returned the apartment was obviously too small, and they soon moved to a duplex on Bee Street2 in Todmorden, an area beyond the Don Valley, in East York.
To support his family, Glover Boyd decided to return to the Muskoka woods to work in logging and lumbering. For almost two years he travelled back and forth between his job and his family in Toronto. When Eleanor gave birth to another son, Gordon, in the spring of 1920, Glover intensified his search for work closer to home.
Eleanor was pregnant again when he answered a recruiting ad for the Toronto Police Department. He was a fraction under the height requirement, but that was overlooked because he was a veteran with overseas service. He was twenty-nine years old and five feet nine and three quarter inches, and his weight was one hundred sixty pounds. He said he was an electrician by trade. His application was accepted, and he would remain on the force as a constable for the next twenty-five years. Three months after he was hired, Eleanor presented him with a third son, Norman. Their last child, Irene, would soon follow.
Young Ed’s relationship with his father was tentative at best; but even with the expanding family, the love he felt for his mother endured. It was understandable: he knew her better, and she indulged him, while his father, who was deeply religious and had a military bearing, was the authoritarian figure. But even Eleanor had her limits. The few times she was truly angry with him, he knew he’d done something to justify it.
Such was the case at a family reunion in Kilworthy, with relatives from Muskoka and Toronto attending. Ed was crouched by the porch at the front door of the farmhouse, and whenever a woman or girl walked above him, “I would stick my hand under her dress. I thought it was lots of fun, but I wasn’t looking at who I was doing it to.”
The game ended when his hand went under his mother’s skirt. “She slapped me across the face. She was really mad. I was a little kid and I didn’t think they were making a big deal out of it, but they were.” The slap was warranted, he decided later.
3
School Days
Edwin Alonzo Boyd was on his own by the age of sixteen, his world view and his moral code already shaped. He did not get to go to high school or college, so his early experiences at home and church and in school had an inordinate influence on how he turned out as an adult. There would be no other structured authority in his life until he joined the army.
There was a lot of upheaval in those first years. His family moved four times and switched churches three times, and he went to four different elementary schools – one of them twice.
Ed didn’t start school until he was seven years old – a year later than most children. With a new baby in the house, and his father travelling back and forth to Muskoka, his parents had simply forgotten to enrol him in the fall of 1920. And two weeks after Ed turned seven, in April 1921, his father had begun his new job with the police department. In July, Norman was born, leaving Eleanor occupied with two small children.
Ed might well have missed the 1921–22 school year but for a conversation with his mother shortly after school started that September. She noticed him moping around the house.
“Why don’t you go out to play?” she suggested.
“There’s nobody to play with, mom.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re all back at school.”
“Well, don’t you want to go back to school?”
“I don’t know, I was never there yet.”
The next day she enrolled him in a school a couple of blocks from home. He had been at school only a few days when he was traumatized by an incident that caused him to miss several more weeks. One day he was desperate to go to the bathroom, but the teacher ignored him. “I put my hand up but she didn’t take any notice, so I shit my pants,” he recalls bitterly. With the other students making faces and complaining about the odour, the teacher took the boy into the hall and ordered him to the bathroom, and then home. “I couldn’t wash myself very well and I didn’t know what to do, so I went outside the school and finished what I started.”
A teacher from another class happened to glance out the window, and Ed was mortified when he looked up, trousers around his ankles, and saw her watching him. “That was the last time I went to school for a long time.”
For whatever reason, his absence wasn’t noticed for several weeks. Eventually his mother was notified and she alerted his father. It was just after a heavy rainfall, and Glover found his son playing in a large puddle.
“What’s the matter with you?” he demanded. “You haven’t been to school in weeks.”
“Is that right?” replied the boy, sheepishly. “Is that how long?”
As Glover flushed with anger, Ed ran off. Father chased son down the street. The boy was too fast, but inevitably had to face his father at home. “He marched me down the basement and gave me a damn good whack with a hockey stick.”
Before he finished his first year of school, the family moved again, this time to 1 Harris Avenue, a short walk to No. 10 Police Station – Glover Boyd’s first posting – at Main Street and Swanwick Avenue in Toronto’s east end. The house was a block north of Danforth Avenue, just around the corner from Gledhill Public School, which Ed transferred to with just a few weeks left in the school year.
What young Ed liked best about the Harris Avenue house was a hideaway under the back porch – a closed-in storage area with its own tiny hinged door. He called it his fort. And it was in his fort, when he was nine, that a female cousin and her older girlfriend introduced him to sex. “The older girl was the instigator. There was no intercourse, but we did a lot of other things. I didn’t like it much, but I went ahead and did it anyway.”
One of his younger brothers, about three or four at the time, was posted as a lookout. He heard everything that went on, including excessive use of the word “fuck.”
The next day, while attempting to describe to his mother what he had seen in the hideout, the boy blurted out: “Ed fucked Dorothy! Ed fucked Dorothy!” When Eleanor related the story to Glover, he was bemused rather than angry.
In September 1923, just over a week after Ed started third grade at Gledhill, Glover moved the family several blocks north to 160 Chisholm Avenue, and the boy transferred to nearby Secord Public School. Until then, his grades had been poor, and although his performance improved in several subjects, he was transferred back to Gledhill Public School for fourth grade in September 1924. He doesn’t remember why the switch was made.
Religion was important to Eleanor and Glover Boyd. The children had baths on Saturday night, and on Sunday they dressed up for church and Sunday School. Ed had a strong tenor voice and when he sang at church, people noticed. “They all knew about my singing, and that made me feel good.”
The Boyd family worshipped for a time at the Salvation Army centre3 on Cedarvale Avenue, where Ed joined the Boy Scouts. Later, they crossed the street and joined the Faith Tabernacle, an evangelical church focusing on scripture study, which suited Glover Boyd,
who wanted to be more proficient in Bible language. The church boasted its own resident faith healer, Oliver E. Crockford, who later became reeve of Scarborough.
Crockford’s skills were sought when young Ed smashed his wrist while walking a spiked steel fence. “I was stepping between the spikes showing off to some other kids, and I missed my footing.” His chest struck one of the spikes, but it wasn’t punctured because his wrist took the brunt of the fall. The wrist was never X-rayed, but Ed insists it was broken in three places. “You didn’t need an X-ray to tell it was broken, because it was twisted like an S.”
Crockford was summoned to pray over the boy, and within a day or two he could do handsprings and back-flips. Glover Boyd called it a miracle. “My mother and dad were real honoured to think the Lord had healed me.” The knuckle on Ed’s injured wrist retracted as a result of the accident. “It’s in there somewhere, but you can’t see it.”
The Boyds soon moved again, this time nine blocks west to 31 Glebemount Avenue. This small, two-storey brick house, a block north of Danforth, would be young Ed’s last permanent residence for many years. The move meant a transfer to yet another school. This time it was the new Earl Beatty Public School. It was at Earl Beatty that Edwin Alonzo Boyd came into his own. He would always be slight and wiry, but now he began to fill out a bit. With that came increased self-confidence. He disdained traditional school subjects but excelled at sports and music. “I was always looking for something that made me stand out, and I couldn’t get it by schooling because I didn’t give a damn about reading and writing and all the rest of it.”
The home front, meanwhile, had stabilized. Glover Boyd was into his fourth year on the police force, and with the birth of their daughter, Irene, he and Eleanor were now raising four children. Harold, now in his twenties, continued to live with the family, his presence causing no apparent tension between Eleanor and Glover. “They both knew the truth,” says Ed, “but my mother always talked about him as her brother and we didn’t know any different, nor did Harold – he thought he was my uncle.”
