Then, for the ladies, it was Al Plunkett. Long before Rudy Vallee titillated the girlies with his falsetto crooning, even longer before Sinatra had the girls screaming, slight, dapper Al Plunkett was winking at them slyly and singing “No wonder the waves are wild, It makes mother ocean blue – The bathing suits they get disappear when they get wet.…” Sophistication. There it was, boy, right in front of us. Suave, smooth, cool. That was Al Plunkett. What a hit he’d have been on television!
But what we really came to see were the skits, featuring Fred Emney, Charlie Jeeves, Red Newman, Pat Rafferty, and anybody else from the cast that might be needed. These were in the best English music-hall tradition. Fred Emney was, I swear, the funniest Englishman I’ve ever seen. He walked funny, talked funny, made funny faces, and he did it all with a marvellous economy of words and movement. A shrug, a raised eyebrow, a grunt (in an English accent) could bring forth a spontaneous roar from the audience.
Newman and Rafferty were more obvious, more frantic, louder and wilder. They worked hard for their laughs, fell down a lot, smashed things, shouted, fought–but they, too, were marvellously funny. Rafferty played the poor little put-upon tramp, a sort of Stan Laurel to Newman’s Oliver Hardy. He dressed in baggy, tattered clothing, and used a dead-white make-up. When being bawled out by Newman, he could shiver and shake until you’d swear he was going to fly apart.
Ross Hamilton always came out in a beautiful gown and big hat, and sang soprano. Imagine it. A real female impersonator. But they were very big in the Twenties, and people took them seriously. The house rocked with applause after his sentimental song, Danny Boy or some similar tune, not so much for the quality of the singing as for the fact that he was doing it. “Imagine that, eh? You’d never know he was really a man.” Thinking back on it now, I can’t for the life of me figure what was so all-fired wonderful about a man pretending to be a woman, but such are the vagaries of taste in entertainment.
Glen Allen, a small, lithe man in a blond wig and appropriate padding, did an adagio dance with a male partner. He was very good, too, and we all applauded mightily.
Those were the more innocent–or perhaps the more short-sighted days. Words like “homosexual” and “transvestite” weren’t kicked around as freely as they are now. Dressing up like a woman, and singing and dancing like one, was looked upon as a damned clever trick–something like sawing a female in half, or making a rabbit disappear–nothing more.
At the beginning of the second act, the scene was familiar to us all, and standard with the Dumbells. The stage was fitted out like a drawing-room, with comfortable chairs and a grand piano. Most of the cast were on stage, immaculate in evening dress, as though to reassure us that although they clowned around a lot, they were really sophisticates at heart.
We loved this. Most of us had never seen anybody in a tuxedo before. Then Captain Plunkett would get up and make a little speech about how nice it was to be back in Saskatoon, and introduce his fellow cast-members. Then he’d say something like, “Now, Harry, if I accompany you, will you sing one of those lovely Irish ballads?” And Harry Binns would nod, butt out his cigarette and saunter over to the piano, where the Captain was already seated, drop one hand lightly on the lid and sing Mother Machree. He had a high Irish tenor, such as you rarely hear any more, and the Empire Theatre rang with the golden tones of it.
Then it would be Cameron Geddes’ turn, and he’d sing Asleep in the Deep, and we’d all marvel at how he could hit those real low notes the way he did. Talk about Paul Robeson!–those of us who saw the Dumbells in the late Twenties know perfectly well that Cameron Geddes was the finest basso in the world. There he was in the flesh, not on record or on a screen, but there, straining and perspiring to do his very best. And every one of us pulling for him every note of the way. Ah, Cameron Geddes, how many sore throats you’ve given me as I, myself, strained and puffed to get my voice down that low. You were the greatest!
After the final reprise with the entire cast, and after the curtain had come down for the final time, we’d find our way out of the theatre in a daze. Out into the frosty briskness of Twentieth Street, to walk up Third Avenue and across the bridge, talking, talking, talking about the show. Laughing again at the antics of Rafferty and Newman, marvelling anew at the skill of Emney, saying the lines over and over, and still laughing ourselves silly. We’d indulge in this same re-hashing as the long winter wore on, and the greatness of the show would grow with the repeating.
We’d do more. Some of us, as I have said, were stage-struck. Dennis Hamer and I would steal the material from the Dumbells, add a few local touches and maybe even originate a joke or two, to make skits of our own which were put on at the high school “lits”. Just about anything went at the lit: singing, reciting, and acting. Often, the kids from the Ukrainian Institute dressed up in their national costumes and performed their native dances. The lits were a great outlet for local talent.
Since neither Dennis nor I wanted to always be the straight man and let the other have all the jokes, we would alternate. In one skit he’d be the comic and I the straight man. In the next, we would reverse the order. Dennis, who was English, looked very funny in plus-fours and a monocle, and could read a comic line. He was, however, inclined to become over-enthusiastic and frantic when we weren’t getting the laughs we expected. On one such occasion, during the barber-shop skit (one of our best) when we ended up eating the shaving cream (whipped cream, really), the audience sat stoney-faced and silent instead of rolling in the aisles. Dennis completely lost his cool. His antics with that whipped cream became crazier and crazier, until finally he dumped the whole dish of it over my head. The white sheet I had on covered only my shoulders, so that most of my only good suit was covered with the sweet, sticky mess. There was nothing in the family budget to provide for dry-cleaning.
I don’t know where the members of the Dumbells an today. Many of them have passed on to that greater stage in the sky, while others, I’m sure, live in peaceful retirement dreaming of those days when they made Canada laugh. Everybody, I suppose, has his nomination for the most important man who ever lived. To me the best of the lot was that bouncy, shrewd, resourceful Captain Merton Plunkett, who got the Dumbells together and gave a generation of prairie-bound sodbusters a notion of what show business was all about. He doesn’t even rate a listing in the Encyclopedia Canadiana, but to me he is still the greatest.
In later years, after I’d left the dry, wide prairies and become a journalist of sorts, I wrote an article for Maclean’s magazine called “The Rise and Fall of the Dumbells”. My research took me to Collingwood, and to the home of Captain Plunkett. I was as nervous and excited as I’d have been meeting the Queen herself. Me, actually talking to Captain Plunkett! I had, indeed, arrived.
15 To Increase in Wisdom and Stature
Boys’ Parliament, that national organization which gave to those qualified an early insight into the political ways of grown men, was an important part of many a teen-ager’s life. In my own case, I never would have made it if a kid hadn’t got hit on the side of the head with a hockey puck.
My family had always gone to Grace United Church, which was on Tenth Street, two blocks away from Westminster Church, which was on Twelfth Street, and I had gone to Sunday School there, too, until the year I went into Nutana Collegiate.
As I have already said, I, like most prairie kids, had a passion for hockey. And one evening I was down at the open-air rink on Broadway, playing sub for the Grace Church Midgets, or Sprouts, or whatever the little kids were called. I wasn’t getting much ice-time because, as I’ve pointed out, I was neither very quick nor very aggressive, two extremely necessary attributes in a hockey player. Well, our goalie got hit in the face with a puck and quit. One of the other players looked at me and said, “Hey, why don’t you go in goal? You’ll get more ice-time than anybody.” So I did.
I buckled on the big heavy leg pads and the belly pad and took the goal stick and went and stood in goal. And now a funny thin
g happened. If you’ve ever watched kids play hockey, you’ll notice that when the forwards get a chance to shoot at the goal they invariably shoot at the goalie. If he can’t move fast enough to get out of the way, the puck hits him and he makes a save.
Well, since I couldn’t move fast, the first puck that was shot at me hit me on the leg pad and bounced away. Everybody shouted, “Good save!” This went on and on. Once a forward got right through the defence on what is known as a “breakaway”. It was just the two of us then. As he came towards me, I coasted towards him and sprawled all over the ice–another thing that I did rather well. The puck hit me somewhere and bounced away and everybody once again yelled, “Great save!” I was the goalkeeper.
Then I discovered another thing. Nobody really wants to be goalkeeper. For one thing, there is always the danger of being hit in the face or some other unprotected part of your anatomy. Also, you have to stand still and, since all of our games were played on open-air rinks and the temperature was often 30 below zero, you get mighty cold. And you also have to carry these big pads to and from the game, instead of the lighter equipment of the other players.
So, in our next game I was once more stuck with being in goal. And I once more made some great saves. I even caught one puck. I was pretty good at baseball (catcher, naturally) and when I saw this high puck coming my way I dropped my goal stick and caught it with both hands. A little unorthodox, but effective. Once again everybody yelled, “Great save!” It was heady stuff and I was hooked.
At this point I must introduce Peggy O’Neil. His real name was James O’Neil, but with that last name the nickname of “Peggy” was inevitable. He was a smallish, tough Irish kid and the best hockey player I’ve ever known. Long after I knew him, he went on to star for the Saskatoon Junior team, and then to play with the Boston Bruins in the National Hockey League.
Back in 1926, he really couldn’t skate very well, but he could stick-handle like a fiend. He was always where the puck was. After any scramble he usually came up with it, and he was able to move his stick with such quickness and dexterity that it was almost impossible to get it away from him. To be sure, he’d rarely pass the puck to a team-mate, any more than he’d relinquish it to an opponent, but in those days of no forward pass or blue lines, the ability to keep the puck was far more important than good combination. And Peggy sure could keep that puck.
When Peggy wasn’t playing, he hung around the rink watching other games. So he witnessed my début as a goalkeeper. Right there and then he began to work on me, and he was just as cunning and persistent off the ice as on it.
“Why don’t you come to Westminster Church Sunday School?” he asked.
“Why should I?”
“Well, we’ve got a great class. Meet Sunday morning instead of in the afternoon with the rest of the Sunday School. Do just about what we like. And Napoleon Yake is our teacher.”
Mr. Yake was one of our English teachers at Nutana, and I liked him.
“He lets us do anything we want,” Peggy went on. “We don’t have any of that religious stuff. Talk hockey most of the time, and we’re going to have the best midget team in the city. We need a goalkeeper.”
“But I’m no good,” I countered modestly, hoping he would protest.
“That doesn’t matter. Hell, we’ll see to it nobody ever gets a decent shot at you. Besides …” a belated afterthought, “I’ve seen you make some saves.”
And so it was that I switched Sunday Schools. Mother put up a token protest but, after all, I was going to Sunday School voluntarily, and that was more than any of her other boys had ever done. Every Sunday morning we met in a small room in the basement of Westminster Church, about eight of us, and talked hockey. Mr. Yake was a small, compact, courtly man with no children of his own. He loved hockey, and I’m sure he loved every one of us, especially Peggy O’Neil.
We played hockey and won the championship of the city for our division that year, and the next year, and the next year and the next. From standing in goal and having pucks peppered at me, I gradually learned a little bit about how to stop them and, although I got hit in the head a few times, miraculously I had no teeth knocked out. Which is more than could be said for the others. My recollections of those years were twofold–freezing my feet and watching players spit bloody teeth out onto the ice, and, just as often as not, keep right on playing.
Boys’ Parliament? Oh yes. The officials of the Sunday School decided that since the boys of Mr. Yake’s class actually liked to go to Sunday School, maybe the same idea would work for all the boys of the church. So they organized the Westminster Boys’ Club, which met at ten in the mornings and was run along more or less democratic lines. We had a president and all the other officers, elected by the boys themselves.
In 1929, the Tuxis Boys’ Program, originated in 1914 by E. Taylor Statten, was going strong, and great rivalry developed between the different boys’ clubs in Saskatoon as to who would represent them at the Boys’ Parliament to be held in Regina. Two parties were organized, since you can’t have a decent election without developing some rivalry and competition and mud-slinging. They were called the “Four-Square Party” (“square” hadn’t yet acquired its opprobrious connotation) and the “All-Round Party”. I was somehow selected as a candidate for the All-Rounders and, in company with others, I went about on Sunday mornings visiting other Sunday School classes to make speeches and gain votes.
And then a strange thing happened. Although I was a conscientious enough boys’-clubber, I was also a writer of, and actor in, skits, and I simply couldn’t take this thing of the election seriously. So while my opponents gave talks that were terribly earnest and sincere and dull, using a lot of phrases about “healthy minds in healthy bodies”, and “youth of today is on the march”, and “the future of our country is in our hands”, I just couldn’t do it. I’d try. I’d think of some great phrases to spout, but on the way from my brain to my mouth something would happen to them, and they’d come out funny. The more serious and profound I attempted to be, the more that little devil would get in there and knock it just enough off balance to be ridiculous.
The first time this happened I was as surprised as the audience. I was the fourth boy to speak, and the strain of trying to be serious and sincere was visibly telling on our listeners. Their faces were strained and pinched with purposefulness. I stood up, also trying to look purposeful but succeeding only in looking silly, and started off to say: “Fellow Tuxis Boys, I’ve come here to show you that I am serious about my intentions.…” Unfortunately, the little demon got in there and it came out: “Fellow Tuxis Boys, I’ve come here to snow you .…” The aptness of this slip so appealed to me that I couldn’t help but follow it up. And what an audience! The release was so great that they howled at every remark I made. The same thing happened at every other meeting. I got elected easily.
Certain things stick in my memory about that week at Boys’ Parliament. Eating grapefruit for the first time; the Regina tornado; hearing Jimmy Gardiner speak, and the unbelievable pomposity of it all.
It is customary to talk today about the superiority of the youth of the Twenties to the hippies, teen-agers, and flower children of the Sixties. Bull feathers! The big difference was that then we respected the Establishment, believed in it, swallowed all its platitudes and, most of all, planned and schemed and plotted to get into it. Today’s young people are hep. They don’t swallow all they are told. They see there are some terrible inconsistencies and hypocrisies and injustices in the Establishment and they want to basically improve things. We took what we got; they reject it. Certainly theirs is the healthier, more exciting, more meaningful attitude.
The principal debate at the Parliament was–what else? –whether boys should smoke or not. And in the midst of it all one silly ass got up and pronounced obsequiously that “if the Creator had meant us to smoke, he’d have put chimneys in our heads.” That was the first time I’d ever heard that pooferish, completely irrelevant remark, but not the last.
I’m sure that in every year, right up to and including this one, I’ve been the innocent witness of somebody getting to his feet, pursing his lips, and saying exactly the same words in exactly the same asinine way. So much for the campaign against smoking.
Each member of the Boys’ Parliament was billeted with a Regina family. I was lucky enough to draw an elderly doctor, who had a beautiful home and a gracious wife. It was a completely new experience for me. A room of my own, a bed of my own–the first time I’d ever slept without at least one other body in bed with me–and grapefruit for breakfast!
Dr. Holmes had been living in Regina on that awful June day in 1912, when the tornado roared through the city, sweeping most of the water out of Wascana Lake, demolishing the Methodist Church and the Baptist Church, lifting houses off their foundations as though they were toys, killing twenty-eight people, and injuring hundreds more.
“The worst of it was,” Dr. Holmes explained, “that there was a lot of construction going on then, and the wind picked up the sand and blew it into the cuts of the wounded. We had an awful time cleaning up those wounds.”
We also went to a huge banquet in the Saskatchewan Hotel, the first time I’d ever been in a big hotel, and it was great. Five courses. Waiters and waitresses sliding around, looking after you as though you were the King of Siam. Everybody saying nice things. And then the Honourable James G. Gardiner, premier of the province, speaking to us. What a speaker! He just opened his mouth and let it pour forth, scarcely ever pausing for breath. He beat you down with words. I sat there in awe. How could it be that a man could do so much just with his voice? Many times after that I heard Jimmy Gardiner speak and he always had the same effect on me.
Never Sleep Three in a Bed Page 17
