by Brian Vallee
Shortly after Eleanor’s death, the quarantine sign came down and an Irish immigrant woman was sent by the church to help with the children. Her name was Minerva – nicknamed Minnie – and eventually she and Glover Boyd would marry.
Ed turned sixteen less than a month after his mother’s death. He had shown no interest in school for some time, and now he was free to quit. He was repeating his final year, and had spent so little time there that his official school record shows no marks for any subjects after seventh grade. He was, however, interested in continuing his education at a technical school where he could pick up a useful trade. His father agreed it was a good idea and promised to send him to one.
Despite his poor grades in most subjects, Ed was strong in spelling, earning marks of 89, 73, and 77 in the last three years for which there is a record. His next-best subject was reading, and in his last year and a half at Earl Beatty he probably spent more time in the local library than he did in the classroom. “Most of what I learned was from my own reading and experience.”
Ed doesn’t remember his parents ever reading to him or encouraging him to read. But he discovered the public library and would spend hours reading fairy tales. “And when I got too old for that, I started reading cowboy stories.” Then it was action and adventure tales. One of his early favourite fictional characters was Jack Harkaway, the hero of several illustrated English stories that were popular with young readers back then. In his later travels, Ed would sometimes use Harkaway’s name as an alias.
Minnie had a male friend, also from Ireland, who was an expert at karate and judo, which he taught to Ed with Glover Boyd’s encouragement. “He was pretty good, and I learned a lot from him, especially judo.”
Ed believes that the relationship between Minnie and her Irish friend was more than platonic. “I think she wanted to marry him, but my old man got in there and that was it.” With romance budding between Glover and Minnie, Ed says they didn’t want him around, and his father soon forgot his promise to send him to a technical school. Instead, he arranged for Ed to work on a farm north of Toronto, near Thornton. “I would have had a trade, but he got wound up with this damned woman that took my mother’s place, and that was it.”
When Earl Beatty School was informed that Ed was going off to work, he was recorded as having passed eighth grade and was officially graduated. The date was June 26, 1930.
Ed’s resentment over having to miss technical school and leave home was tempered by the excitement of doing something new and different. It was an adventure. The 120-acre farm was owned and operated by a twenty-two-year-old nephew of one of Glover Boyd’s cousins. “His name was Milt, and he was a real go-getter who knew what he was doing. He had a lot of cows and chickens and a half-dozen horses. I did some of the work, but I didn’t get paid anything. He let me live there to learn how everything operated.”
Milt had a brother who also worked on the farm, and two sisters who lived with their parents two farms over. The sisters, Bertha, seventeen, and Irene, in her twenties, worked hard on the family farm, but often found time to come over and cook for their brothers and Ed. The newcomer was the nearest male around, and both sisters found him attractive.
At the time, Ed’s sexual experience was limited to the groping he’d done with his cousin and her friend under the back porch of the Chisholm Avenue house. But that was soon to change. It began the day Ed and Bertha were alone in the house and she began tickling him.
“You know what you’re going to get if you keep tickling me?”
“Yes, I know.”
It was in the cold of winter and Bertha was wearing long-johns under her dress. “By the time I got through the underwear, I almost lost my desire to go any further. Anyway, I got her half-naked but we heard somebody outside, and that was as far as we got. We didn’t get another chance.”
But he did get a chance with the older sister in a furtive encounter at the main house. “I kind of talked her into taking her pants off, and we had intercourse, but I didn’t know much about what I was supposed to do, and right away I went off and spoiled the whole thing. I just didn’t have the experience.”
After almost two years on the farm, Ed was bored and decided to move back to Toronto. He hitchhiked home, but after a month decided Glover and Minnie didn’t really want him around. “You feel that you’re not part of the family anymore, so you leave.” Ed might have felt unwanted but he was also bored, because he had nothing to do.
It was the summer of 1932. The country was in the grip of the Great Depression, with 30 percent of the labour force – more than one million people – out of work, and one in five Canadians dependent on government relief for survival.
Eighteen-year-old Ed decided to join the vast army of rootless men riding out the Depression on trains. He went down to the Don Valley and caught a freight train heading north. “And when I got on the boxcar, it was full of men from other countries. A lot of them were smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, which were horrible to smell. And you could smell garlic everywhere. That was my first time away on my own.”
4
An Armful of Boxcar
Edwin Alonzo Boyd’s first train ride took him as far as North Bay, Ontario. Shortly after he arrived at the railway yards, a policeman grabbed him.
“You’re pretty young,” said the officer. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m going out west.”
“What’s your name.”
“Ed Boyd.”
“I seem to know you.”
“Well, my father’s a policeman in Toronto.”
“He is, eh? Don’t you think you should go home and be a good son instead of riding the rods?”
Ed shrugged.
“If you want, I’ll put you on a passenger train and you can go back to Toronto and get a fresh start.”
Ed was quickly swayed and was headed back to Toronto on the next train. He stayed for a few weeks, but knew it wasn’t working out. He went back to the marshalling yards in the Don Valley and jumped another freight train. “Only this time when I got to North Bay, I didn’t stop – I just kept right on going.”
He got as far as Port Arthur before police pulled him and four others off the train and took them to jail. They weren’t charged, but they spent forty-eight hours in the cells. They were fed watery porridge for breakfast, watery soup for lunch, and in the evening a small portion of meat with a piece of hard, stale bread. At night they were given blankets, but had to sleep on the floor, which they were used to from boxcar living. “It was kind of a novel experience, and I didn’t mind it at all, except for the food.”
As soon as they were released, Ed jumped another freight train and continued west. In his chosen boxcar he met freckle-faced Jake Dunn,5 about his own age. Jake was a heavy smoker, and soon they were sharing cigarettes. They had no money, but Jake was an experienced panhandler and taught Ed how to go door to door for handouts. Nervously he knocked on his first house. A woman answered.
“I’m sorry to trouble you, but I’m looking for enough to get a bed for the night,” he said. “I haven’t got any money and I need food. Could you give me twenty-five cents to help out?”
To his amazement, the women dug a quarter from her purse and handed it to him. “I just kept going from house to house, up one side of a street and down the other, and after about an hour I had seven dollars. At that time you could get a bed for twenty-five cents a night at the YMCA.”
Ed had no moral qualms about bumming from house to house. He’d heard enough about the Bible at church and at home, and the only religion he was exposed to now was at the Salvation Army, where he and Jake went for free meals. “I just laughed at the religious part, I thought it was a lot of baloney then, but it came in handy, because there were so many women involved in religion that you could get a free meal by just shining up to them.”
Bumming came easy to Ed, and he and Jake kept it up in town after town all the way to Winnipeg. “If the train stopped in a small town at night and we saw a lot
of lights, we would get off and go bum a few houses. I would ask for food, but they would usually give me money instead. And I thought, gee, this is better than working.” To this day he finds it remarkable that so many people took pity on him and gave him money.
When they arrived in Winnipeg, it was not exactly a hospitable environment. The Depression had hit the four western provinces the hardest. Their export-driven economies had collapsed, there were crop failures, and the price of wheat was at its lowest in recorded history. In Saskatchewan, 66 percent of the rural population had been forced onto relief, and the other western provinces were technically bankrupt after 1932.
Ed and Jake spent some time in Winnipeg before moving on to Edmonton, where their panhandling didn’t go over as well. They each took one side of a street, but a man at the second or third house Ed went to turned him away and threatened to call the police. They switched to another street, but their luck wasn’t any better. “The police starting scouting up and down the streets until they saw me coming down from a veranda and they grabbed me.”
“What are you up to?” asked one of the officers.
“I’m just knocking on people’s doors to see if they can help me get a bed for the night.”
“So you’re panhandling, eh?”
“Not really, I just need a place to stay.”
“I’m going to let you go this time, but if you knock on any more doors, we’re going to have to put you in jail.”
Luck ran out for Ed and Jake in November 1933, when they were arrested and charged with vagrancy. Each was fined $20 and costs. Neither could pay, and they were sentenced to six weeks in jail. But Edwin Alonzo Boyd was not the name on the RCMP books: he had no wallet or identification on him and said his name was John Wilson Harkaway, after his fictional hero Jack Harkaway. “You could only use that name every so often, because a lot of people recognized it from the books.”
Ed and Jake were sent to the Fort Saskatchewan provincial jail about eighteen miles northeast of Edmonton on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River. They were released on Christmas Eve along with two war veterans, who took them down to the local Legion Hall and filled them with beer. Ed had never drunk beer and he ended up vomiting all over the sidewalk outside. “I went to the drugstore where the guy gave me some stuff to make me vomit more, and I got rid of it all.” He vowed never to drink again.
They returned to Edmonton and found rooms for a dollar each per week. They paid for two weeks in advance, but as soon as they started panhandling again, the police chased them. “This time we weren’t going to hang around. We grabbed an armful of boxcar and kept going until we got to Calgary.” To find shelter and keep out of the clutches of the police, they decided in January 1934 to go to a government relief camp west of Calgary.
Unemployment relief camps had been set up by the federal government in 1932 to provide work and shelter for single, homeless men. They were operated by the Department of Defence but staffed by civilians. The camps were voluntary, although “sometimes the Mounties shoved you into the camps to get you off the railroads.” Homeless men were provided a bunkhouse bed, three meals a day, work clothes, and medical care. They worked forty-four hours a week clearing bush, building roads, planting trees, or constructing public buildings. The pay was twenty cents a day. The camps were sprinkled across the country, and about 170,000 men had gone through them by the time they closed in June 1936.
Ed and Jake worked on the Trans-Canada Highway, which was being pushed through to British Columbia. But after only a few weeks, there was a communist-inspired strike and they ended up back in Calgary. They arrived in town too late to check into the Salvation Army, but Ed was pleasantly surprised when a chinook wind brought in summer weather. “I’d never seen anything like that. I just slept there right on the sidewalk, and I did that every night the chinook was on.”
Soon after, Ed became ill and was looked after for three weeks by the Salvation Army. He thinks it may have been an especially severe case of flu. He spent the whole time on a cot in a cubbyhole. Jake proved to be a loyal friend and waited for him to get well.
For a while they hung around Calgary, where Ed spent a lot of time reading in the library. Then they decided to hop a freight train for Toronto, and perhaps continue to the east coast. As it turned out, Jake lined up a job at a mill in Kitchener and Ed decided to stay home in Toronto for a while. Glover Boyd told his son that there was always room for him, but Ed didn’t feel comfortable. “He put up with me, and he never criticized me or anything I did. I don’t know what it was.”
After a short stay, Ed was ready to move again. This time he headed northwest to a relief camp near Nipigon, Ontario, where again he found himself working on the Trans-Canada Highway. It was still winter and working outside in the cold was tough, but Ed found it bracing.
It was at the Nipigon camp that he met Duke O’Kane, an Englishman of Irish ancestry with a very proper public-school accent. Duke was in his late thirties, a thin, sharp-featured man about Ed’s height. He was a loner, a “remittance man” who was sent a monthly stipend by his family on the condition that he stay away from England. It wasn’t a lot of money, but enough to live on. He never told Ed why his family had shipped him over to Canada.
Duke walked with a swagger and was known for his large penis in whorehouses in Northern Ontario and the West. Ed describes it as “a real weapon.” One of Duke’s favourite haunts was Old Mag’s in Port Arthur (now part of Thunder Bay). Mag was a large, husky woman with a booming voice. Everybody knew her, and purportedly she ran most of Northern Ontario’s prostitution and the bootlegging that went with it. “When you met somebody and told them you’d been through Port Arthur, they’d always ask you, ‘How’s Old Mag doin’?’ ”
Ed and Duke decided to leave the camp in early May 1934, a month after Ed’s twentieth birthday. They hopped a freight and leisurely made their way west to Kelvington, Saskatchewan, arriving at night in late August. They went to sleep in a barn at the end of the main street. When they awoke in the morning they were covered in lice. They were desperate to boil their clothes and kill the lice, and the local barber came to their aid. He invited them to build a fire in the field behind his house and provided a large washtub, in which they boiled their clothes and had a bath. Duke and Ed were grateful to the barber and asked if there was any work they could do for him as payment.
“I don’t have anything,” he said, “but if you fellahs want to stay around and look for work you can sleep in my car.” He pointed to an old Dodge near the house. They accepted his offer, but the weather was mild and they slept outdoors, using the car only when it rained. The barber had a lovely wife and a beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter. “The daughter looked like a movie star,” recalls Ed. “I think Duke wanted to get into her pants, but her mother had warned her about people like him.”
Ed and Duke found work as stookers with local wheat farmers. Horse-drawn binders cut and tied the wheat into sheaves, which were dropped to the ground in batches of six or eight. Stookers gathered the bundles and arranged them in tight formations with the grain kernels facing up. It was heavy work that paid three or four dollars a day.
Duke wasn’t fond of such strenuous exertion. “He would stook for a couple of days, and then he would quit and hang around in town.” The workers were paid at the end of each day, and when Ed arrived in town with his earnings, Duke would borrow much of it to play snooker. He always promised to pay it back, but he never did.
They stayed in Kelvington, sleeping in the barber’s car, for three or four weeks before heading to Winnipeg. Even with Duke tapping his resources, Ed had been able to save thirty dollars. “It kept me going for two or three months. Things were so cheap in those days, you could get a meal for twenty-five cents, including coffee, ham and eggs, potatoes, and dessert.”
They were especially fond of Chinese restaurants, which usually had generous portions of bread or crackers in bowls on the table. “When we were hungry and didn’t have a lot of money, we’d go in
, order a cup of coffee, and eat half the bread, or order soup and fill it with crackers until we were full.”
With so many single men riding the rails, especially in the West, prostitution flourished. In most towns and cities the police didn’t interfere as long as certain unwritten rules were followed. The prostitutes had to stay in designated areas, usually on out-of-the-way streets or on the edge of an industrial district. In smaller towns there would be a single whorehouse; in the larger cities and towns there were “lines” – rows of houses from which the women offered their services. The other requirement was the weekly checkup by a doctor, usually on a Monday. If there was any sign of venereal disease, the prostitute was ordered to leave town until she was healthy again. If she refused, the police persuaded her to leave, or arrested her.
Duke knew the location of all the brothels in Winnipeg, and when they arrived there he headed straight for the one with his favourite hooker, whom he saw on a regular basis. Ed sometimes went along, but didn’t participate. His only other experience with whorehouses was the time he happened upon a short street in Lethbridge, Alberta. There were lines on both sides of the street with prostitutes of all sizes and colours sitting on verandas, some of them with their crotches exposed.
“Hey, white boy,” shouted a black woman. “Come on over here and I’ll show you how to do it.” Ed turned and fled.
Ed and Duke left Winnipeg, bumming in all the little towns along the way, and parted company when they reached Calgary. “That was the last time I saw him,” says Ed. “He was more or less a loner and he went his own way.”
One of the more bizarre characters Ed met while riding the rods was Red the Barber, a former wrestler. It was an appropriate moniker, since he was also a real barber and had red hair and a red beard. He carried the tools of his trade with him, and fellow hobos could get their hair cut for a nickel. Red was a loud, burly man who engaged in sexual teasing with the younger hobos.
