by Brian Vallee
Ed helped Dorreen with the dishes at home and with her outside cleaning work. On Wednesday nights they would wash and wax the floor of the ballet studio, using a heavy electrical polisher. Dorreen also did laundry, which Ed picked up and delivered, for several people in the upscale Forest Hill neighbourhood. “It was hard work,” she remembers. “I just had my one washing machine and my iron. It was word-of-mouth business.”
Ed would mind the children when Dorreen’s cleaning work took her out of the house, and she would mind them while he was at work. For times when they both worked the cleaning jobs, the children had a baby-sitter.
The TTC job was steady and paid well, and Ed didn’t mind the unpredictable hours (he was normally on call). With Dorreen also working and looking after six-year-old Anthony and the twins, they had little time for a social life. “If I wasn’t washing and ironing, I was doing something else,” she says. “And Friday was my day to clean our house. For all the laundry, mine and others’, all I had was a Bendix wringer-washer. There was no dryer or anything. Ed put up a clothesline, and that’s where I dried everything – outdoors.”
When Minnie became quite ill, Dorreen went back to Glover’s for two weeks to help nurse her and look after the house. Ed, with the help of baby-sitters, looked after the children while Dorreen was away. It was only two weeks, but Ed missed her, and wrote her this short note: “There must be something wrong with my brain to let you go away. Coming home is like walking into a morgue. I went to a movie, even if you did keep intruding on my thoughts. We love you very much.”11
When Dorreen returned home she was surprised at how neat and tidy the house was – until she looked in the closets. “Everything was in there,” she laughs, “and I thought, oh brother.”
Ed cared deeply about Dorreen, but believes, in retrospect, that the feeling wasn’t mutual. He says she was constantly nagging at him to push the TTC for a regular route. But he knew such demands weren’t feasible until he had more seniority. “She had a habit of putting me down because I wasn’t getting ahead as quickly as some others.” They often quarrelled bitterly, and a prison counsellor would report years later: “His wife would, on occasion, scream out that the twins were not his, and she named their father. Boyd had occasion to meet the alleged father and was disappointed to see how much the twins looked like him.”
Boyd alleviated his growing frustration by working out at the same judo school that he had frequented before the war. There he became friends with Frank Lamb, another nonsmoking, nondrinking judo enthusiast. Lamb’s wife, Flo, and Dorreen would remain friends for fifty years. Underwood sometimes enlisted Boyd and Lamb to train others. Once again, Boyd was paid in promises. For him, the workout was more important than the money.
Boyd usually kept his emotions to himself, but was in constant turmoil over Dorreen harping at him. “One thing I couldn’t stand was people telling me what to do. I’d had enough of that in the penitentiary and in the army. I enjoyed working at the TTC and I could have had a good career there, but I got tired of listening to Dorreen. She wanted to run my life – so I quit.”
When he informed his superiors, he was summoned to the TTC head office and was told that although he had a good military record, if he left he could not be rehired because of his criminal record. His mind was made up, he replied. He left in March 1946, after eight months on the job.
Dorreen denies badgering Ed about getting ahead at the TTC and says she couldn’t understand it when he quit – but didn’t complain. “It was a good job,” she says. “And I was always working. We had the house and we were doing all right. I don’t know why he quit.”
Both Norm and Gord also quit the TTC. Norm decided to go back to school, and Gord bought a piece of land near Lindsay, Ontario, under the Veterans Land Act. Norm studied engineering and business in university, but dropped out after two years because of financial difficulties. He got a good job and never did go back.
After leaving the TTC, Ed Boyd worked for several months at a bakery and pastry shop a few blocks west of their home on Eglinton. He left the bakery and worked at a series of odd jobs, including one as a night watchman and janitor at a plumbing supply store. While reading a magazine one night he read a slogan that appealed to him, and he copied it onto the wall of the storage room at the back of the store. “I don’t remember what it was now, but the boss saw it and told me to find another job.”
His next job was at a grocery store three blocks north of Eglinton on Yonge Street. The owner had recently purchased the store but lacked practical business experience. “He was always asking me what he should do next,” says Boyd. “It got so I was doing the deliveries and looking after the store while he’d be out cruising around looking for girls.”
Boyd delivered groceries in an old panel truck. Sometimes he had to fill orders off the shelves from a list and then make the delivery. He loaded the orders into the truck and made three or four delivery runs a day. When he noticed that no one checked the boxes after they were put into the truck, he saw a way to help feed his family. “Somebody would phone in an order with fifteen or twenty different things, and if they were items I liked, I would duplicate the whole thing – fill two boxes instead of one. I’d shove them in the truck, and when I got to my place, I’d deliver my order.” Boyd stayed at the grocery store for nearly a year.
By the fall of 1948, feeling desperate, Boyd began searching the want ads. He answered a job for a window-washer and was hired immediately. Boyd thought his employer had a good thing going, and in the spring decided to go into the business himself. He even purchased a vehicle, a maroon panel truck that looked like a modified hearse, with a rear door that swung out to the side. He built a rack for his ladders on top and had his name stencilled on the driver’s door in small print. He was bringing in over $100 a week, except in the winter months when business trailed off dramatically. He wanted to expand his business with a modest advertising campaign and perhaps even hire one or two employees. His reputation had been solid with his bank since the war, and he asked for a $1,500 loan, suggesting as collateral the business that was so secure in the summer. The bank turned him down. Boyd was angry and resentful. Unless he could expand his business, it would never be lucrative enough to support his family.
He decided to become a taxi driver. There was work available, but he needed to apply for a licence through the Toronto Police Department. His application was turned down because of his criminal record. Boyd became angry and despondent, and as summer waned in 1949 his frustration and inner turmoil grew. He was feeling inadequate – in his mind, letting down both himself and his family. He had turned thirty-five that April but had no real prospects. He was a loner who didn’t seem to fit in. He daydreamed about being an entertainer – a Hollywood actor – and had even gone to Lorne Greene’s acting academy to see about enrolling. The woman he talked to seemed uninterested and was heading off to lunch. He said he would return later, but didn’t bother.
If only he hadn’t been held back at every turn, he thought. If only his father had kept his promise and sent him to technical school, where he could have learned a trade. If only he had stayed with the TTC. If only.…
Then, in late summer, Boyd was reading the newspaper when an article caught his eye. A mentally handicapped teenager had walked into a bank at Church and Dundas streets, demanded money, and walked out with $69,000. He had sauntered up the street about three blocks before the police picked him up. The money was returned to the bank, and the youth was released soon after. Boyd couldn’t believe it. “He didn’t even show a gun. He just told the teller it was a holdup and they gave him the money. Right away, that sparks a thought in my mind – if it’s so easy to rob a bank, what the hell am I working for? Why slave for somebody for a pittance, once a week or once a month, when I could just walk into a bank and get $69,000?”
12
Success
Edwin Alonzo Boyd decided to rob banks not for the thrill – although that became a part of it – but because he believed
he was eminently qualified. It was something – finally – that he could succeed at. He thought that with his ability and training, and with proper planning, he wouldn’t get caught and it wouldn’t even be that dangerous. “What it came down to, was that they had the money and I wanted it.”
There was nothing spur of the moment about his first robbery. Two or three weeks of planning went into it, starting when he rented a garage (at $5 a month) well south of his target, which was the Armour Heights branch of the Bank of Montreal. He liked the interior layout of the bank and mapped out several escape routes in his head. He never once considered the Thompson sub-machine-gun hidden away in his duffle bag. “I wouldn’t think of having something that big. It would just get in the way.” He would never assemble the Thompson, and he eventually threw it out in bits and pieces, or simply “left it behind somewhere.” The Luger would be his weapon of choice.
When Dorreen was out working or shopping and the children were asleep, Ed practised using make-up in front of a mirror. He also started a moustache. And two days before the robbery, he tested his disguise. With the rouge, mascara, and cotton batting stuffed into his nostrils and cheeks and behind his lips, he intentionally met Dorreen as she was returning from shopping. “I came walking around the corner and I looked her straight in the face, and she looked at me and didn’t recognize me. And I thought, if she didn’t recognize me, nobody would.”
Boyd went into the bank two or three times to get a close look at how it operated. “I went in when there were line-ups. That gave me more time. I think I changed a ten-dollar bill or something.”
After reading about the mentally handicapped teenager and his haul of $69,000, Boyd was somewhat disappointed at his take on his first job. “I didn’t realize that you don’t always get sixty-nine thousand. Sometimes you only get a thousand, or two thousand.” Still, he had pulled it off, and knew he could do better if there was a next time.
His escape had been sheer luck, and as he drove home from the rented garage in his truck, he played the robbery over in his mind. Logistically, it had been a disaster, nothing like the precision military-style operation he had envisioned. He analysed his mistakes. Overshadowing all others was the whisky. That would never happen again. It had left him in a stupor and kept him in the bank long after his allotted time. It was plain stupid, he thought. The second major mistake was not having his own getaway car at the ready. “I figured the first car that came along, I would just jump in and drive away, but it didn’t work like that.” He couldn’t depend on grabbing a stranger’s car at gunpoint – it was too dangerous and unpredictable. But he already had a plan to remedy that.
That evening at home, as he was reading in the papers that the bank manager had emptied a pistol in his direction, Boyd added a third mistake to his list: he hadn’t known that tellers and managers had guns and were prepared to use them. What the newspapers didn’t tell him about was the secret downtown firing range in the basement of the old Bank of Toronto building where all the tellers and managers were sent for target shooting – a practice that would end in the late 1950s after a bank employee was killed by a manager’s ricocheting bullet meant for a robber.12
Boyd decided that if he did rob another bank, he would have to neutralize the threat of being shot by the tellers or the manager. Robbing banks had turned out to be a lot more dangerous than he expected. What if that manager had been a good shot? From now on he would think as if he were still in the army, and face the possibility that he could be shot. “You had to decide if it was feasible and worth taking a chance.”
When Boyd arrived home, he hid the money and didn’t tell Dorreen what he’d been up to. At least now, he thought, she couldn’t accuse him of not providing for the family, and the kids would have a good Christmas.
When he first looked at the newspapers early that evening he was dumbfounded. Both the Toronto Daily Star and the Telegram had huge, front-page headlines and photographs describing the robbery. And the next day even The Globe and Mail, the most staid of the three major dailies, ran a front-page story with a total of seven photos on the front and inside pages.
Boyd found it fascinating that he had created all this fuss. He – the loner – was the only one in the whole world who knew the person they were writing about. All those pictures and words had been inspired by his few minutes of action. He was anonymous, but even so, this was clear recognition of what he had accomplished – or what he had succeeded at.
Boyd knew nothing about the circulation war that had been ongoing between the Star and the Telegram for almost sixty years, since 1892 when the Star was founded by two dozen striking printers from the Telegram. The traditionally conservative Telegram considered the upstart Star and its owner, Joseph E. “Holy Joe” Atkinson, to be not only liberal but even Bolshevik.13
By the late 1940s the Star had a circulation of about 400,000, double that of the Telegram. The much despised Harry C. Hindmarsh, Atkinson’s son-in-law, was a powerful force at the Star. Hindmarsh, heavy-set, over six feet, with short-cropped hair, was brutal with his reporters, especially if they showed talent and independence. Ernest Hemingway, who was a reporter at the Star in the early 1920s when Hindmarsh was city editor, described his boss as “a son-of-a-bitch and a liar” and quit after less than four months.14 Fifty years later, another reporter on quitting the Star would tack up this note: “Ernest Hemingway once worked here. Later, he blew his head off with a shotgun.”
Gwyn “Jocko” Thomas, the Star’s legendary crime reporter, started at the paper as a copy boy six years after Hemingway quit. In his memoirs, From Police Headquarters, he recounts how Hindmarsh visited his wrath on reporters who missed a story. “If they were away from their posts or were otherwise careless and got scooped, they were fired.… This cloud was always with us, and together with natural combativeness it often drove us to almost comic-opera frenzies of effort to beat the Telegram.”
At the time Edwin Alonzo Boyd robbed his first bank, Atkinson was dead and Hindmarsh was president of the Star. His policies continued to prevail, tempered only by the Newspaper Guild, which had finally won a foothold and begun to improve conditions for reporters. In 1949 the war between the two papers was in something of a lull, but that was soon to change.
George McCullagh, wealthy owner of The Globe and Mail, entered the fray when he purchased the Telegram for slightly more than $3 million. McCullagh didn’t mince words about his intentions. Addressing Telegram employees the day after he bought the paper, he said, “The outstanding thing that brought me into the evening newspaper field was to knock off the Star. The Star has done enough to the profession of journalism that we ought to go in and teach it a lesson.… I’m going to knock that shit-rag right off its pedestal.”15
Jocko Thomas says Hindmarsh and McCullagh absolutely hated each other. McCullagh once told Time magazine, “That fellow Hindmarsh is so ugly that if he ever bit himself he’d get hydrophobia.”
McCullagh brought in his friend John Bassett to run the paper, which adopted Hindmarsh’s tactic of sending flying squads of reporters and photographers to blanket a crime scene or any other breaking news event. The Telegram’s new aggressiveness soon paid off, and in the first six months under McCullagh, circulation increased by sixty thousand. The war raged again, and would continue until the Telegram finally folded in October 1971.
The Star’s coverage of Ed Boyd’s first bank robbery included a banner headline across all eight columns, with four large photos directly beneath. The right-hand photo showed a policeman studying Cranfield’s car for fingerprints. Under it began the story, which continued onto page 2, where there were two more photos, including a four-column shot of the bank. The Telegram refused to be outdone: its headline, BANK BANDIT ESCAPES 6 SHOTS, GETS $2,000, also ran across the full eight columns of page 1. (The Telegram headline was slightly inaccurate – the bank’s Ivor Johnson pistol could only fire five shots.)
Thomas recalls that gunpoint bank robberies were unusual in Toronto until Boyd’s time, a
nd his use of a note was unheard of. “Prior to that, we didn’t have any note-jobs. They came in later when the banks filled their staffs with women and told them if they received a note, to hand over the money so they wouldn’t be hurt.”
Thomas says it was no surprise that both the Star and the Telegram led with the bank robbery story in their afternoon home editions. Both papers produced seven or eight editions a day, and in those days “they thought nothing of stopping the presses and re-plating the papers.”
Thomas worked out of the small press office at the old police headquarters at 149 College Street. When a call came in about a serious crime he would take a cab or his own car to the scene. The reporters and photographers would get there almost as quickly as the police, and in those days they enjoyed free rein to interview witnesses and take all the photos they wanted as soon as the police completed their inquiries. “You had to get the pictures and interview the bank staff. Interviewing them on the spot was the name of the game. Nowadays the cops close the doors and you don’t even get the names of the bank staff.”
Once the reporters had their facts they would call them into the newspapers. “The Star used to insist that you dictate the story from the scene. There was no rewrite desk, like they had later, where you just give the facts to some guy who puts it in shape. You had to dictate off the top of your head and you got used to that.”
Thomas says Boyd was smart, or lucky, in choosing the Armour Heights bank for his first robbery. “That section of North York didn’t get much patrolling in those days. It was right near the Toronto boundary and they would have quite a ways to go to get there. And some of those North York divisions were pretty stripped of men in the mornings when they had to go to court to testify in cases they were involved in.”
