Marathon Man ran and ran until he could run no more

Al Howie completed his run across Canada 20 years ago this week. He averaged more than 100-kilometres per day, greater than running two marathons. The run raised $500,000 for charity.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 31, 2011

VICTORIA

Al Howie ran.

He ran the length of Vancouver Island.

He ran around a paved mile-long loop for 20 hours per day for seven days.

He ran from Winnipeg to Ottawa to compete in a 24-hour endurance race. He won.

He ran across America.

For him, a marathon was a short jog in the park. He was the ultra-marathon man, an unstoppable runner whose distances were so great as to seem fantastic, even comical.

Most famously, he ran across Canada, from St. John’s to Victoria, six times zones and 10 provinces, plunging into the waters of Juan de Fuca Strait just 72 days and 10 hours after dipping into the Atlantic Ocean.

At Mile Zero, a plaque honours Mr. Howie for his epic journey, which concluded 20 years ago this week.

Mr. Howie has had little recognition for his spectacular feats. He has not been enshrined in sports halls of fame. It is as if he ran into the record books and then into obscurity. He seems to have been forgotten by all, except for a small band of dedicated supporters.

These days, Mr. Howie’s home is a small room at an assisted-living facility in Duncan. A man once afraid of needles now gets four daily insulin injections to treat Type I diabetes.

“I’m not so healthy as I was,” Mr. Howie, 65, said by telephone earlier this week, the burr of his native Scotland still on his tongue.

To stay in shape, he swims, preferring the breaststroke. “Like getting a massage while you’re working out,” he said.

These days, he is capable of running only three miles at a time.

Al Howie's bronzed shoes

“It would be nice to get back out on the road,” he admits.

In his day, the runner styled himself as the Tartan Spartan. He wore running shorts emblazoned with the Union Jack. His long, wild hair fell past his shoulders and he grew a fierce beard on his chin, making him a feral figure. He raced along streets and highways like a mad Rob Roy without a horse.

The sport of distance running offered little in the way of prize money, so Mr. Howie spent many years in near-penury. He depended on modest sponsorships and the charity of friends.

“I run on resentment, angrily pounding the blacktop,” he once wrote. “Why must I run on empty? Why do I get no support from my hometown? Mostly, I plod on because I have committed myself to this asphalt insanity and I simply don’t know how to quit.”

Born in Saltcoats, a village on the Scottish coast, southwest of Glasgow, he came to Canada in 1973 after marrying a Canadian woman, a union that would not last. He took up running to cope with cravings while try to quit cigarettes, replacing one addiction with another.

He has been a stonemason, a foundry worker, and a treeplanter. He once operated a crusher at a copper mill mine near Port Hardy, running 20-kilometres each way to work.

A diagnosis of a malignant brian tumour in 1985 failed to end his running career, which won notice not only for his victories but for his preference to run between cities to race. One year, he completed the Edmonton marathon before running the 1,500 kilometres to Vancouver Island to compete at the Royal Victoria Marathon.

“I have to admit,” he once told the New York Times, “there are days when I wish I was good at something a little easier, like darts or pool.”

Sometimes, he drank a beer before a race, a hedonistic stunt all the more frustrating for rivals when he nevertheless ended the day atop the podium.

“Helped put me in the mood,” he says of his pre-race regimen.

The cross-Canada trek, called Tomorrow Run ’91, raised $527,400 for a charity for children with special needs. Mr. Howie ran the equivalent of 2 1/2 Boston Marathons. Every Day. For two months.

It is not known if Mr. Howie’s health will permit him to come to Victoria for a ceremony on Thursday, the 20th anniversary of the day he dove into the water without removing clothes or running shoes. A plaque and a city proclamation declaring “Tomorrow Run ’91 Day” in Victoria might instead be delivered to him at his home in the facility.

Once upon a time, Mr. Howie would have run from Duncan to Victoria to receive the honours.

A restaurant unlike any other seeks a new home

The restaurateur Corey Judd seeks a new home for Cabin 12, a welcoming gathering place for patrons and staff alike. Chad Hipolito photograph for The Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 29, 2011

VICTORIA

On a chill February morning, Corey Judd opened the doors to his restaurant, ready for another ordinary day of slinging hash.

“All of a sudden two black limousines pulled up outside,” he recalled. “Large men with sunglasses and earpieces walked in.”

Soon, he was preparing eggs benedict and hash browns for a party of six, including David Jacobson, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, who was in the province to attend the Winter Olympics.

The ambassador’s unexpected appearance came about because the restaurant faced a shortage of coffee mugs. The owners — Mr. Judd and partners Dan and Heather Del Villano — came up with the idea of sending letters to every nation participating in the Olympics asking for a souvenir cup.

They got mugs from Chile and Greece. The ambassador, in Victoria to speak to a $30-a-plate business luncheon at the swanky Union Club, delivered a mug in person.

In that moment, Mr. Judd can be forgiven if he allowed himself a moment to imagine success for his restaurant. It opened 30 months ago on a small fund raised through social media. He had no access to credit, nor did he have a home address, spending the early months living in a back room. The doors stayed open thanks to the benevolence of a landlord who preferred late payment to none at all.

It was a business launched on a shoestring potato. The economic downturn hurt. The introduction of the HST hurt. Even a modest expense not in the budget, such as replacing a front window broken overnight by a drunk, threatened the restaurant. Happily, patrons and downtown businesses to contribute to the repairs.

Now, the joint faces its toughest challenge yet. The building has been sold and will be gentrified. The restaurant now needs to find a new home.

Mr. Judd’s first thought: “Here we go again. It’s been one thing after another after another after another. Starting with nothing and no credit. Then the broken window. Then the summer from hell. Then the HST. Then the Olympics.

“It hasn’t been easy to open a restaurant in the past two-and-a-half years in Victoria.”

The irrepressibly optimistic restaurateur is scouting other downtown sites.

His restaurant, with the puzzling but not uninviting name Cabin 12, can be found tucked into the shady north side of the Plaza Hotel, a building best known as home to Monty’s, a strip club. Cabin 12 is a welcoming respite from the sometimes unfriendly scene on the street outside, where drug dealing and other unpalatable activities take place.

Eating at Cabin 12 is like breakfast at your mom’s place — if your mother was a cross between Grandma Moses and Patti Smith.

A turntable greets diners and music is chosen to suit the mood of the room from a generous collection of vinyl. The works of local artists cover the walls, the works for sale without commission. Canadian Tire money is accepted at par and the staff has accumulated about $150 worth of Sandy McTire scrip.

“I’m trying to create a space where people feel they are in their grandma’s house 20 years ago lying on the carpet playing gin rummy,” he said.

The Frommer’s travel guide notes “rambling, artsy charm” and food that is “down-to-earth scrumptious.”

The menu includes an item saucily billed as the HST (hash browns, sausage, toast) with the admonition: “It’s good for you! You’ll learn to like it! Trust us.” A breakfast sandwich is named after popular local columnist Jack Knox, who has championed the restaurant. The menu item is, as the columnist acknowledged, “scrambled and cheesy.” (Mr. Knox fancies himself an award-losing journalist, though having a sandwich named after oneself is the second-highest accolade known to the journalism profession. The highest? Having an alcoholic drink named after you.)

Mr. Judd named Cabin 12 after a favourite cabin at a camp at which he once worked.

The restaurant opened after a rough patch in his personal life, during which a struggle with alcohol and then marijuana dependency left him close to “falling off the edge.”

These days, he hires people — the staff now numbers 16 — who have similarly overcome difficult circumstances.

“We’re looking at a business model which takes people off the streets. Not for any philanthropic reason. Like me, if you’ve lived on the edge for a long time, you’re very resourceful.”

Cabin 12 is not just a restaurant, but a cause, and a change of address is just another temporary roadblock to be overcome on the road to redemption.

PNE prize homes have always been about dreams

Fairgoers in their finery line up to tour the prize home at the Pacific National Exhibition in the 1950s. The modest homes have given way to monsters designed for use as rustic retreats.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 25, 2011

Maxine Dalfo lives in a house of dreams, a modest bungalow that once seemed as grand as a mansion.

In the dark Depression year of 1934, Vancouver fairgoers by the thousands gambled a thin dime on a chance to own the house.

It had cedar-lapped siding painted a dark brown with cream trim.

Inside, to the left of the doorway, French doors swung open to a living room with a fireplace. The main floor also offered a full kitchen (with that remarkable innovation, the electric stove), a dinette, two bedrooms, and a bathroom with a claw-foot tub and jade green fixtures.

The unfinished second floor offered the promise of two additional bedrooms as well as a sewing room with a window in the gable dormer overlooking the front steps.

A team of horses hauled the bungalow along fir skids to its current location at 2812 Dundas St., a half-block from the exhibition grounds. The Dalfos — Victor and the former Maxine Sokowich — bought the home from a widower hardware-store owner 30 years later.

“It was still on stilts,” she said.

For almost a half-century, this has been Mrs. Dalfo’s home, a place where she raised a daughter and buried a husband. Victor Dalfo worked as a longshoreman. Maxine also found a job on the waterfront at a cannery, where she drove jeep, kept tally, and otherwise helped freeze and smoke salmon.

Each summer, she visited the nearby Pacific National Exhibition. “There wasn’t a ride we didn’t go on,” she said, “there wasn’t anything we didn’t try.” She played bingo and placed $2 bets at the horse races. She always made sure to buy tickets for the annual prize home.

BBQ on patio of 1968 prize home.

Fairgoers hear a six-word mantra: “Win a house! Win a car!” The phrase is repeated endlessly by ticket hawkers.

These days it takes a lot of dimes to buy a ticket. The price is $25 for five tickets, or $50 for 15. When the gates open each morning, eager patrons race walk to the entryway of the fully-furnished, 3,100-square-foot Craftsman-style house that is this year’s top prize.

The three-bedroom, three-bathroom home comes with a theatre room, a wine cellar, and a garage loaded with tools. Mrs. Dalfo’s home would fit comfortably inside the main floor. After the winner is announced at the close of the fair on Labour Day, the home will be moved to a lot in Kelowna with a lake view.

The annual prize-home package reveals a lot about our consumerist desires.

In the first blush of post-war prosperity, the fair’s prize homes were prefabricated houses showing off the latest innovations from British Columbia’s wood products industry. Most were simple rectangles in early ranch style. In 1953, the first television set was included with a house.

One of the prize homes wound up on the University of British Columbia campus, where it was used as a dormitory for the athlete scholars Father David Bauer recruited for the 1964 Olympic hockey team.

An academic paper written in 2005 by Elizabeth MacKenzie, a UBC post-graduate architectural student, tracked down many of the early prize homes. These can still be found as far afield as the Capilano Heights subdivision in North Vancouver and along the Lougheed Highway in Burnaby.

In the 1960s, the homes became larger, though the fair’s managers and builders avoided becoming architectural trendsetters. The prize home remained a middle-class dream designed to “suit the tastes of the average person.”

A two-year flirtation with selling tickets for a $50,000 gold bar instead of a house resulted in lower ticket sales. The prize home program was re-introduced in 1969.

Following the energy crisis, a solar-powered home was offered as a prize, but these more modest designs soon gave way to ever larger footprints. Now, the prize home is a mansion designed for a resort.

For a taste of the prize-home high life, one can rent Eagles Nest at Daniel Point, a 5,000-square-foot waterfront mansion on a peninsula overlooking Pender Harbour. The house boasts four bedrooms, a media room with pool table, and three west-facing decks. A week-long summer rental costs $2,600.

The 23-metre-long mansion was the PNE prize home in 2000. It was trucked from east-side Vancouver to a prime waterfront location on the Sunshine Coast by Nickel Bros., an industrial mover that has hauled the prize home for the past 25 years.

It must be odd to stay in a grand holiday rental that may have traveled farther than you have.

Mrs. Dalfo plans on buying prize-home tickets this year. Even if she wins, a one in 1.545 million chance, she will not move from her home, which once offered the dream of a better life in a harsh time.

The 1974 prize home was a rare model to show modernist lines.

The 2011 prize home will be trucked to a lakeview location in Kelowna.

Creating public art not for the faint-hearted

The artist Tyler Hodgins dangles from his latest public sculpture, "Glass Half Full," a whimsical piece that brings art to the playground. Or does it bring the playground to art? His sons Emmett (left) and Dexter take the art for a spin. Globe and Mail photograph by Chad Hipolito.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 22, 2011

VICTORIA

Two sculptures stand side by side, a pair of outsized stainless-steel representations of glasses of water. One glass is tall, the other stout. A blue straw extends from one, a red straw from the other.

Both glasses are half full.

Or half empty, depending on your perspective.

The sculptures can be spun, chimes inside ringing as they rotate.

A playful piece of public art was unveiled on the Dallas Road waterfront on Friday. A posse of children sat quietly through the reading of a poem by the city laureate and brief speeches by the mayor and the sculptor before being unleashed on the artwork.

They spun the glasses until they were dizzy, one boy straddling the red straw like a pirate seeking booty.

The sight delighted Tyler Hodgins, who remembers being fascinated as a boy by the illusion created when viewing a straw in a glass of water.

“As children we learn from looking,” he said at the unveiling, “that what you see isn’t always what is there.”

The 43-year-old Victoria sculptor is himself as tall and lean as a straw. His latest piece, titled “Glass Half Full,” is a large-scale interactive work likely to generate a lot of interest from locals and tourists alike. The lure of turning either of the glasses is irresistible, while each turn alters the view of the sculpture. At the same time, if you’re riding the piece, your view alters with the movement.

"Rings" by Tyler Hodgins

The sculpture is in Holland Point Park, at the foot of Government Street, next to the Harrison Yacht Pond, home to model boatbuilders, their miniature ships contrasted by the larger-than-life sculpture.

Creating public art in Victoria is not for the faint-hearted.

Many residents remain resistant to change to the streetscape of any kind. As well, one person’s art is another person’s travesty. The six-year-old aluminum, granite and stainless steel piece outside the hockey arena, titled “Pavilion, Rock and Shell,” is widely criticized (“monstrosity” is one of the kinder descriptions), while the year-old “Homecoming” on the Inner Harbour is seen by some as cloying and sentimental (“bland” is the kinder of the criticisms).

“You don’t want to try to please everyone,” Mr. Hodgins said. “You want to engage as many as possible.”

The sculptor has won two other public competitions in the capital district. Another stainless-steel piece, titled “Rings,” can be found at the intersection of two trails in Saanich, while his “Topography” sculpture can be found at the entrance to a local community centre. For that one, volunteers stepped into foam for the artist to later make concrete casts of their footprint.

Mr. Hodgins was incorporating into his art his day-to-day working life. While establishing himself as an artist two decades ago, he found work with his hands as a maker of orthotics. It is physical, repetitive work, but it pays the bills as he raised a family of three children. Eight years ago, he had an installation at The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. “The Work Project” incorporated a video, photographs and the discarded wooden casts of feet that passed through the orthotics laboratory. These were placed on the gallery floor, causing visitors to walk across an uneven surface to better see the photographic images. You could say the piece was good for the art and sole.

He had a good model for balancing the financial demands of family with those of creating art. One of his childhood memories involves wrestling with his father, a Nanaimo high-school teacher, who was stretched out prone on the floor while trying to edit a typescript. The work was published as The Invention of the World, a magic-realist novel that helped launch the writing career of Jack Hodgins.

Hours after the sculpture was unveiled, the artist returned to the site to watch the public react to his work. He discovered the children had played so vigorously on the installation that some of the chimes were dislodged. It is an easy fix. He could not have been happier.

60 years since Eddie Gaedel took a walk

Eddie Gaedel stepped to the plate as a pinch-hitter 60 years ago on Aug. 19, 1951. Detroit catcher Bob Swift kneels to catch the high pitch from Tigers' left-hander Bob (Sugar) Cain. Umpire Ed Hurley squints to locate the batter's strike zone.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Detroit Free Press
August 14, 2001

Eddie Gaedel was a chubby-cheeked vaudevillian who worked burlesque houses in the Midwest. He weighed just 65 pounds and stood no taller than an asterisk.

Fifty years ago, on Aug. 19, 1951, Gaedel stepped to the plate in a game against the Tigers. He drew a base on balls and walked into baseball lore.

"I thought it was a big joke," said George Kell, a future Hall of Famer who played third base for the Tigers that day. "The fans sure got a kick out of it."

St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck had signed the 3-foot-7 Gaedel to a contract the day before. He sent him to the plate at Sportsman's Park wearing a child's baseball uniform with the fraction 1/8 on the back.

One of the most famous moments in baseball history -- and certainly the zaniest -- will be re-enacted this weekend at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. Mike Veeck, a baseball consultant known for his own wacky promotions, will portray his father, while his 8-year-old daughter, Rebecca, will take Gaedel's place.

The strangest incident in Tigers history never will be forgotten by Kell, who saw his share of oddities in six decades as a player and broadcaster.

"I'm glad to have been a part of it," said Kell, who will turn 79 on Aug. 23. "We Tigers laughed it off, because we figured we were going to win."

Timing was right for Browns



The sad-sack Browns trailed the New York Yankees by 36 games with a month left in the season. A doubleheader against the Tigers, struggling unsuccessfully to stay at .500, promised to be a box-office dud.

Eddie Gaedel tips his cap.

Veeck was a baseball Barnum. He signed African-American players such as Satchel Paige when other owners refused to do so. Veeck invented the exploding scoreboard. He planted ivy along the outfield wall at Wrigley Field. And, for one day in the summer of 1951, he hired a player not much taller than a bat.

Veeck decided to mark the 50th anniversary of the American League, and coincidentally that of Falstaff Brewery, his club's radio sponsor, between games of the doubleheader.

The promise of a party lured 18,369 fans to Sportsman's Park, the largest Browns home crowd in four seasons. Fans were given a free can of beer, a slice of birthday cake and a box of ice cream. They were also handed salt-and-pepper shakers in the shape of miniature beer cans, an inside joke because only a handful of people knew what Veeck's fertile imagination had brewed.

The Tigers won the first game. Then the festivities began. A juggling act was at third base, trampolinists at second base, an acrobat at first base. Paige led a quartet of Browns at home plate, Ol' Satch banging the drums while pitcher Al Widmar plucked at a stand-up bass.

"I spent 60 years in baseball. Never saw anything like it," said Widmar, who recently retired to Tulsa, Okla., after a long service with the Toronto Blue Jays.

While the crowd roared its approval, an actor of Falstaffian girth dressed in an Elizabethan costume wheeled onto the grass a three-tier, seven-foot papier-mache cake.

"Ladies and gentlemen," announcer Bernie Ebert said, "as a special birthday present to manager Zack Taylor, the management is presenting him with a brand-new Brownie."

And out popped Gaedel in his uniform, wearing curly-toed brownie slippers.

Manager Rolfe protested

He pranced a bit before taking a seat in the dugout. He quietly changed into baseball shoes as the second game began.

The Tigers were surprised to see rookie Frank Saucier in centerfield. He had just undergone an operation for bursitis in his shoulder and couldn't throw from the mound to the plate, never mind from the outfield.

The Tigers were retired and Saucier was listed to lead off the home half of the first. But Gaedel popped out of the dugout waving three toy bats. "For the Browns," Ebert announced, "number one-eighth, Eddie Gaedel, batting for Saucier."

Red Rolfe bolted from the Tigers' dugout. The manager objected that the Browns were making a farce of the game. But Taylor showed umpire Ed Hurley a valid player's contract for Gaedel, which Veeck had fortuitously mailed to the league office the day before, when the office was closed.

Hurley examined the paper and signaled for Gaedel to step to the plate.

Veeck was worried that his newest player would get it into his head to swing for glory. He told Gaedel that he had taken out a million-dollar life insurance policy on him and had placed a sniper on the roof to shoot him if he swung.

Tigers starter Bob (Sugar) Cain, a fine left-hander, called catcher Bob Swift to the mound for a conference.

"I didn't know whether to throw the ball underhanded or overhanded to Gaedel," Cain later told writer Danny Peary. "I just wanted to be careful not to hit him. Dizzy Trout told me later that if he'd been the pitcher, he'd have thrown the ball right between his eyes."

Gaedel, batting right-handed, stood deep in the batter's box, taking a wide stance and crouching so low that his strike zone appeared no more than a few inches deep.

Swift wanted to rest flat on his belly for the pitch, but that was too much for umpire Hurley, who ordered Swift to his knees.

At third base, Kell came halfway down the line in case of a bunt.

"I played in real close," Kell said from his hometown of Swifton, Ark. "I would have tried to throw him out. I was not going to make a farce out of it."

Cain's first pitch was a perfect fastball about four feet above the plate. A strike to every major-leaguer but one. Ball one.

The second pitch was just as good. Ball two.

Cain was laughing now. He lobbed one in. Ball three.

Later, he would say he would've given his right arm to throw just one strike. He lobbed another one toward the plate. Ball four.

Gaedel's bat never left his shoulder.

"They were trying to throw strikes," Kell recalled. "Of course, there wasn't any way he could throw strikes to a fellow that small."

Gaedel trotted down to first base, tipping his cap to the fans along the way.

"He did a good job," Widmar said of his temporary teammate. "He didn't swing."

Jim Delsing was sent out as a pinch-runner. Gaedel slapped his replacement hard on the rump, and milked applause as he crossed the infield grass to the dugout behind third base. He opened his arms wide and bowed. The sad-eyed Gaedel was a professional showman, and this was the largest audience he'd ever see.

"For a minute," Gaedel said after the game, "I felt like Babe Ruth."

Despite Veeck's legerdemain, Delsing got only as far as third base and the Tigers won, 6-2.

Delsing, a journeyman outfielder who posted a solid .255 batting average over 10 major league seasons, has spent the past half-century as the answer to a trivia question.

"It doesn't upset me," he said from his home in Chesterfield, Mo., a St. Louis suburb. "Some of the things you accomplished on the ball field are forgotten, but you wouldn't be calling me about my fielding average."

Delsing will be in Cooperstown this weekend for the re-enactment. He will play himself.

No hard feelings

The butt of the prank was Saucier, who became the only player ever to be pinch-hit for by a little person. "This is the only part of the gag I ever felt bad about," Veeck noted in his 1962 memoir, Veeck —As in Wreck.

Saucier, who is 75 and owns a financial services business in Amarillo, Texas, says he has long been incorrectly portrayed as being miffed. He ended his career with only 14 at-bats, but he carries no grudge.

"Three thoughts went through my mind that day," he said. "One, this is more like a carnival or a circus than a professional baseball game. Two, this is the greatest bit of showmanship I've ever seen. Three, this is the easiest money I'll ever make."

American League president Will Harridge, infuriated by a stunt he thought held the game up to ridicule, banned Gaedel from baseball two days later. Harridge also tried to expunge Gaedel's name from the record book, but Veeck successfully argued that if Gaedel was a phantom, so was the walk issued by Cain, the benching of Saucier and the pinch-running by Delsing.

The president's ruling ended Gaedel's playing days, making his career as short as he was.

Gaedel died at age 36 of a heart attack after being mugged in his hometown of Chicago in 1961. Cain attended his funeral.

Cain died four years ago, while batterymate Swift, a fellow Kansan, died in 1966.

Gaedel was paid $100 for his plate appearance. He also earned a small slice of baseball immortality in the record book. He recorded a perfect 1.000 on-base percentage. You could look it up.


Hard to believe 10 years has passed since I wrote about the 50th anniversary of my favourite moment in baseball history. Some of the principals in the drama were already gone and we have lost several more in the decade since. Al Widmar died in 2005; Jim Delsing died in 2006; and, George Kell died in 2009. Frank Saucier, the butt of the stunt, still lives in Amarillo, Texas. He turned 85 in May.

A rare postcard of Eddie Gaedel was placed for auction earlier this year. He was billed as "Little Eddie the Mercury Man." Five years later, he walked into baseball lore.

Versions of this article also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and the National Post of Toronto.

If only the 300-pound propeller that went missing could talk

A converted rum-runner did service along the rugged Vancouver Island coast as a motor launch in the modest fleet maintained by the British Columbia Provincial Police. Photograph courtesy B.C. Archives.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 18, 2011

At dawn, Joseph Spears trundled downstairs to the home office, casting a glance into the front courtyard.

Something was amiss.

“That’s kind of strange,” he thought to himself. “There’s no propeller.”

Eleven years earlier, four burly loggers lugged a brass propeller into the yard on the waterfront in Horseshoe Bay, where it had rested ever since. Flowerpots were placed between the blades to brighten its appearance.

Joseph Spears

Mr. Spears, a lawyer, knew not to contaminate a crime scene, yet curiosity compelled him to take a closer look. The flowerpots had been moved and concrete pavers showed telltale scratch marks. The 136-kilogram (300-pound) propeller was gone.

Later in the day, the West Vancouver police issued a press release. “At 0822 hrs,” the department was “advised of a theft complaint.” Missing was a brass propeller. Estimated worth — $5,000.

So far, so ho-hum. Brass and copper items are purloined every day to be sold as scrap.

The police had one other detail.

The propeller came from a vessel “once owned by infamous Al Capone in the days of rum running back east.”

In the dog days of summer, the notion of a Capone connection generated plenty of local media coverage. The hunt was on for an artifact of Prohibition-era shoot-’em-ups.

The propellor had been scavenged from the Texada, a 28.3-metre (93-foot), wooden-hulled vessel that ran aground in August, 2000. The ship, owned by a forest services company, struck a rock in Dolomite Narrows on the south side of Burnaby Island in the Queen Charlottes (now Haida Gwaii).

As the tide went out, the vessel listed sharply to port. The accident site was part of a protected marine conservation area in the middle of Gwaii Haanas national park. The crew joined park wardens and contracted private operators to pump diesel fuel off the stricken vessel. After three weeks, a towing company hauled the Texada to Vancouver, where it was scrapped. Mr. Spears, who had represented a company involved in the salvage, wound up with the propeller.

The schooner was built in 1930 in the renowned shipyards of Shelburne, N.S., where it was outfitted with a modest, six-cylinder engine, standard for fishing vessels. The owner soon after registered it in Newfoundland, a British colony, at which time it was powered by a pair of 12-cylinder motors.

Flower pots decorated the propeller before the theft.

The refitting allowed Margaret S II to outrun police, or rival gangs, as it ferried a cargo of booze, not fish. Even after Prohibition ended in the United States, the rum-runner cruised from St. John’s to Bermuda. One researcher has found evidence the schooner transported 3,300 cases of liquor in a single month in 1934. The criminal gangs that profited from challenging the booze ban later sought to avoid taxes.

After being seized by the Dominion Government, the vessel was loaned to anglers and members of the New York Zoological Society (reminding one “unpleasantly of various Baltic Sea cargo boats”) before winding up on the West Coast in 1938. The rum-runner became the pride of the modest fleet of the British Columbia Provincial Police. In a Victoria shipyard, according to the historian R.G. Patterson, the hold was transformed into sleeping quarters for the crew with cells for five prisoners. An aft fuel tank was removed to make way for a sea-going courtroom billed as the world’s smallest (“a virtual broom closet,” according to one account).

Police Motor Launch No. 14 patrolled the rough waters surrounding Vancouver Island, pulling into isolated outports and reserves. After four years, the patrol vessel joined the Fishermen’s Reserve (the Gumboot Navy) of the Royal Canadian Navy under yet another name, HMCS Ripple. It spent the last three years of the war with an eye out for Japanese submarines.

In 1945, the government sold the boat to B.C. Packers Limited, which gave it yet another refit, this time to aid in fish packing. The company also gave the vessel the name it would carry to the scrap yard decades later.

It was the propeller of the ex-Margaret S II, the ex-P.M.L. #14, the ex-HMCS Ripple, and the ex-Texada that wound up in the yard of 6438 Bay St. in West Vancouver. Next door is the Troller Pub, a fitting neighbour for a rum-runner’s prop.

Yet, the evidence of a Capone connection is slim. In an insurance dispute involving the Texada, John Hargrave, a prothonotary of the Federal Court of Canada, issued an order in which he described having been shown the boat many years earlier. A marine engineer “showed me a cabin with a diagonal row of holes in the lining,” telling him that “they were machine gun bullet holes and that he knew for certain she had been a rum runner, owned by Al Capone.”

The Chicago mobster went to prison on tax evasion charges in 1931, the same year in which the vessel would likely have been first used in a criminal enterprise.

The West Vancouver police quickly recovered the prop, thanks in part to media coverage fueled by the association with a notorious gangster.

A "broom closet" courtroom was placed in the aft of Police Motor Launch No. 14, commanded by the British Columbia Provincial Police. The converted rum-runner is believed to have once been owned by the notorious gangster Al Capone. 

The Texada rests on a rock after running aground in a national park in what is now Haida Gwaii.

The professor who cracks the secrets of the spies

The historian David Stafford has retired to Victoria. He has written extensively on special operations in wartime. Photograph by Chad Hipolito for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 15, 2011

VICTORIA

Spies have their secrets and they take them to the grave.

It is David Stafford’s mission to uncover those mysteries, to shine light on the shadowy world of wartime intelligence operations.

He pursues his quarry not by cloak-and-dagger means, but through diligent work while sitting at reading tables in dusty archives. Documents tell a story, but only part of one, and not always truthfully. It takes a lifetime of research and an insider’s knowledge of bureaucracy to ferret out truths hidden by those trained in stealth.

The world of Churchill and Hitler, of spy craft and secret agents, of mysterious places known as Camp X where operatives were trained in The Silent Game, as he titled one of his books, seems all the more wild and adventurous considering Mr. Stafford’s own daily routines.

At 69, he can be found puttering in a garden in Victoria’s tony Rockland neighbourhood, a white-haired, avuncular figure whose native Geordie accent has been softened after many years in Canada.

His latest book was released earlier this year with the satisfying title Mission Accomplished. In some ways, that is the case for Mr. Stafford, too, who is now taking a well-earned sabbatical.

The British Cabinet Office commissioned the work, an official history of actions by Special Operations Executive in Italy from 1943 to the end of the Second World War. SOE was the force established for espionage, sabotage and subversion in lands of German occupation. As Churchill memorably ordered, their job was to “set Europe ablaze.”

Written to be enjoyed by a general audience, Mr. Stafford also took as his responsibility to provide for scholars “a first sketch” of the secret war on the peninsula, seeding the ground of his research with footnotes to encourage further exploration. “I’ve given them al the signposts,” he said.

One of the more fascinating details in the book regards the loyalties of Italian military intelligence following the overthrow of Mussolini. They opposed the German occupation of the north of the country.

“They worked closely with the Allies,” Mr. Stafford said. “They had networks behind the lines. They had a lot of wireless operators who were then trained by SOE as wireless operators for SOE.”

David Stafford

Their presence added a conservative, Royalist force to an Italian resistance popularly regarded as being dominated by left-wing anti-fascists.

Mr. Stafford prefers to be known as an historian of war rather than a military historian. In his other recent books, Ten Days to D-Day and Endgame, 1945, both popular histories with rigorous scholarship that earned favourable reviews, he tells grand narratives through the experiences of individual soldiers and civilians.

More than six decades after the end of the Second World War, the appetite for histories of that conflagration remains unsatisfied. The groaning shelf of books on Churchill, to which Mr. Stafford has contributed two titles, remains a genre of its own.

Why has the interest persisted?

“Naziism was an unequivocal evil, not much doubt about that,” Mr. Stafford said. “It has a black-and-white simplicity about it. We live in rather grey and uncertain and confused times now. I think there’s a yearning for certainty. We can look at that war and not have qualms at being involved.

“We can agree that while the costs were dreadful, they were on the whole worthwhile.”

The ranks of surviving veterans dwindles daily, as time exacts its toll. With each death, a historian mourns the loss of a fragment of the story of the war.

“I regret so many of their stories will not survive,” he said. “A lot of the histories will die with them.”

Born at Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1942, Mr. Stafford gained his doctorate while working for the British Foreign Office. He abandoned a career in diplomacy for one in academia, taking a position at the University of Victoria in 1970, where he would remain for 14 years. While here, he interviewed nine veterans about their role in clandestine operations, a fanciful description for old-fashioned spying. The professor donated his tapes to the university library and the interviews can now be heard online.

While finishing an earlier book on SOE, his father, a university mathematics lecturer, whom he knew had served as a meteorologist with the Royal Air Force, admitted to a minor role in special operations while posted in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Norman Stafford was responsible for preparing weather forecasts for flights in which agents were to be parachuted behind Japanese lines.

His father kept his secret until shortly before his own death. Now a son seeks to revive another lost tale from the archives.