Sidewalk mosaics: the next step to art

Liz Calvin and Bruce Walther are lead artists for the Mosaic Art Tile Project, which has embedded 18 colourful mosaics into the sidewalks of downtown Vancouver. The pair later learned they had an important connection. BELOW: Bruce Walther's design for a mosaic honouring Doug Hepburn, the World's Strongest Man.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
March 10, 2010

VANCOUVER

In the crush of a crowd on a downtown Vancouver street, I noted with horror the position of my right foot.

I was standing on Dal Richard’s head.

Not that the nonagenarian band leader was complaining.

A tile mosaic embedded in the sidewalk on Georgia Street features the bandleader. It is near the front entrance of the Hotel Vancouver, where he was longtime bandleader in the rooftop Panorama Room.

“The Swing of Things” is one of 18 street mosaics commissioned by the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association. These can be found scattered around the commercial district, like colourful manhole covers.

Sidewalk mosaics: Taking art to the next step. Or, taking the next step to art.

The spectacular pieces are the work of Liz Calvin and Bruce Walther, lead artists for the Mosaic Art Tile Project.

During the Olympics, they could be found in a Granville Street storefront at work on new mosaics.


Mr. Walther had a knife in his hands and a stock of colourful bits of tile at his feet. The mosaic on which he was working was in its earliest stages, the outline drawn but only a few bits of tiles in place.

“It’s kind of meditative,” he said yesterday. “It’s like making a puzzle. One little piece at a time. The hours go by.”

The artist turned 52 last month. He is a soft-spoken man whose grinning countenance and stubbly appearance hint at some inside joke, all of which makes him resemble the British comic Alexi Sayle.

Though formally trained at Langara College and what is now known as the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Mr. Walther credits an art teacher at John Oliver Secondary for showing him the possibilities of art as a life.

The subject of the mosaic on which he is currently working was inspired by a visit to a barber shop near Victory Square some two decades ago. Mr. Walther noticed on the wall a photograph autographed by someone described as the World’s Strongest Man. The accompanying yellowed clippings indicated the fellow was from Vancouver.

“I’d never heard of the guy,” he said, “and I was born and raised here.”

He kept Doug Hepburn’s name and story in his mind.

He learned more about the strongman from Jon Thor, the former bodybuilder who won titles as Mr. Canada and Mr. USA before becoming a heavy-metal thunder god. Mr. Hepburn mentored Mr. Thor early in his weightlifting career. (It should be noted Mr. Hepburn also performed on stage as a nightclub crooner, even releasing an album of Christmas songs.)

Hepburn was born with crossed eyes and a club foot. A botched childhood operation left him with a limp. He took up weightlifting in response to schoolyard bullying. Still unknown even in his hometown, he became a laughingstock when he tried to raise funds to attend the world weightlifting championships in Sweden in 1953. To the surprise of his detractors, he returned as champ at age 26. He was so broke he spent his first night home in a $3-per-night skidrow flophouse.

The following year he won the heavyweight gold medal before an appreciative home audience at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games.

He never received the accolades and support he felt he had earned.

Mr. Hepburn — poet, inventor, dietitian, cabaret singer, reluctant professional wrestler — spent his final years as a self-described recluse, entertaining those few who sought him out with a rambling philosophy. He died in 2000, aged 74.

Mr. Walther’s mosaic depicts the strongman lifting with his back six hockey players in skates standing on a platform. He is also shown flexing his beefy right bicep, which is as thick as a the waist of any of us mere mortals.

After completion, a sidewalk site will be selected and the mosaic will be imbedded.

Like Mr. Hepburn, the artist, too, is an eastside kid. He was born to immigrants from war-torn Germany who met in Canada as young adults. His introduction to mosaics came courtesy of his carpenter father, who brought home from construction sites leftover boxes of tiles, some of which he used in the top of a homemade coffeetable. The boy also accompanied his mother on visits to the Blue Boy Motor Hotel at the foot of Fraser Street, which boasted a bowling alley. The hotel’s exterior included a tile rendition of the figure from the Gainsborough painting from which the lodge took its name.

“The mosaic has a long history,” he said. “Every year they’re digging up another mosaic that’s been buried for a thousand years. They’re always finding Roman mosaics in Britain and other places.”

When the business group launched its public art project four years ago, Mr. Walther and Ms. Calvin were commissioned to design, produce and supervise the installation of the mosaics. While they were talking, Mr. Walther realized it was her late father who had been his high school art teacher.

Bruce Walther's mosaic titled "Walk of Champions," which honours Vancouver's victorious sporting teams.

At 95, trailblazer Bernice Levitz Packford wants the right to end her life

Bernice Levitz Packford has taken as her final cause a lobbying effort for the right to die with dignity. Globe and Mail photograph.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
March 8, 2010

VICTORIA

The door of the white clapboard house in Fairfield opens to reveal a diminutive figure clutching a walker.

Dressed in purple corduroys, a green sweater and a sleeveless red fleece pullover, Bernice Levitz Packford invites a visitor into a dining room that now serves as a parlor.

“I’ll put in my hearing aid,” she says, wheeling into her adjacent bedroom.

A recent copy of Tikkun, the progressive Jewish magazine, rests atop a New York Times Book Review on a table.

A few greetings cards stand open.

“Thank you for continuing to be a trailblazer,” read the neat handwritten script.

“Bernice, you continue to be a champion, giving voice to the concerns of the most vulnerable people.”

She turned 95 yesterday (Sunday), a landmark birthday in a life of activism. Soon after arriving in Victoria in 1953, she could be found on a downtown street wearing a sandwich-board sign seeking foster parents for needy children. She became more sophisticated in her protests over the years, but has never wavered from a desire to improve the world, little bit by little bit.

She has championed clean water, old-age pensions, and the importance of voting. She demanded a CBC Radio station in Victoria, which finally arrived a decade ago. In 1983, the taxman seized $549.21 from the pensioner’s chequing account because she had diverted payments in opposition to military spending.

She protests Canadian participation in the war in Afghanistan.

A local politician once greeted her in public with a hearty, “Bernice, my rabble-rousing friend!”

She recently announced her final issue, her last cause, by writing a letter to the editor of the local daily newspaper. In it, she made a shocking confession.

“I am tired,” she wrote to the Times Colonist, “and I am ready to die now.”

Ms. Packford wishes not only to die, but to kill herself.

Or, more accurately, to have herself killed.

She settles into a chair at the table, brushes a hand against her magnificent white hair.

“I want to go, I want to die, when I’m able. I want to go on my choosing,” she told me.

“My greatest fear is to have a stroke and remain conscious and be aware that I’m helpless.”

It is not a crime to commit suicide, but it is a crime to counsel, or to aid and abet, suicide. Hence Ms. Packford’s dilemma and sad plea.

“It’s simple to do,” she acknowledges, as though speaking of an ordinary chore. “I haven’t got the means to do it. There’s lots of potions. But I don’t know them and I haven’t got access to them.”

She spent months perfecting the 331-word letter calling on Parliament to give her the right to an assisted suicide.

Her fear is not unique, nor is her dilemma.

Born in Toronto, she was raised by her mother, Hinda, a seamstress and garment worker from Russia. Her father, a partner in a men’s clothing store, was a soft touch when it came to credit. With the outbreak of war in 1914, many young men enlisted in a spirit of jingoism and patriotism, stiffing Sam Levitz. The store closed. Her father died when she was aged six.

A sickly girl, who struggled with breathing problems, she found solace in reading. Once, she was so engrossed by “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” she rode the streetcar past her home to the end of the line and back again before realizing she had skipped her stop.

She learned about social democracy in magazines, joining the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation at age 20, soon after sharing a car ride with party leader J.S. Woodsworth, whom she found inspiring.

With men away to war yet again, she found work which financed her studies in social work. She came to British Columbia in 1945 to avoid winter, earning a bachelor’s degree. Still seeking to avoid cold weather, she rejected a transfer to Pouce Coupe and ended up on Vancouver Island.

For 40 years, she was an outspoken advocate for foster care. She befriended the parents (“wonderful people”) of current provincial NDP leader Carole James, as they raised many troubled children.

“I won’t say I love helping people,” she says. “That isn’t it. I satisfy myself. I fulfill myself by being active and by assisting people. I always want to improve things.”

She knows she is fortunate in having enough money to live in her own home, to hire helpers who cook and clean. She trundles with her walker to the Cook Street Village for shopping, lunches with lady friends at some favourite restaurants, is a regular at Saturday services at the Congregation Emanu-El synagogue, founded when Vancouver Island was still a colony and which she proudly describes as the oldest continuously operating synagogue in the land.

She follows with admiration the lives and careers of her daughter and three grandchildren.

Other than suffering from heart congestion, she is in good health, though her hearing is failing and she finds herself fading in ability. “My energy is limited,” she acknowledges. It is the possibility of an incapacitating stroke she most fears.

On the day we met, the health department in Washington released a report on the first 10 months after the passing of the state's Death with Dignity Act. Doctors can prescribe lethal medication for terminally ill adult patients. In the first 10 months, at least 36 people did so.

Of course, Ms. Packford is not terminally ill. She is not even ill. I tell her I am in no hurry to see her depart. She has the most wonderful, infectious, impish laugh.

Her argument, as always, is compelling.

If the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation, it also has no place in the deathbeds.

Diamonds are forever

Dorothy Jane Mills holds a bat and her own Seymour medal at her home in Naples, Fla. New York Times photo.

On Sunday, the New York Times published a fine article by the baseball writer Alan Schwartz in which baseball historian Dorothy Jane Mills (formerly Seymour) is credited for her work on three important books. Back in 1996, when she lived in British Columbia, I profiled her for the Province newspaper, an early acknowledgement of her important contributions to our understanding of baseball history. The article was reprinted by the Edmonton Journal, the Winnipeg Free Press, and the Kingston (Ont.) Whig-Standard.


By Tom Hawthorn
The (Vancouver, B.C.) Province
June 18, 1996

SIDNEY, B.C.

Dorothy Mills, who has never played an inning of baseball in her life, probably belongs in the Hall of Fame.

She has spent much of her life in windowless rooms reading yellowed newspaper clippings, sifting the ashes of baseball's forgotten history, seeking larger truths in the minutiae of the summer game.

Her late husband, Harold Seymour, was the author of three noted volumes of baseball history, a trilogy that is to baseball historians what the Dead Sea Scrolls are to Bible scholars.

Only now, four years after Seymour's death, is she willing to take credit for her contribution, which includes most of the research and much of the writing.

"After he passed away, that was my opportunity to point out that I was deeply involved," she says today.

That is not a minor confession. Their trailblazing work made the study of baseball a respectable one, inspiring untold college courses and uncountable volumes of baseball history.

Their pioneering efforts also made possible the filming of Baseball, the 18 1/2-hour documentary by Ken Burns for which Mills was a consultant.

Last weekend, the inaugural Seymour Medal, honoring her and her late husband, was presented in Kansas City to author David Zang for his biography of Moses Fleetwood Walker, a 19th-century black player.

Yet she admits she'd "probably drop the ball if anyone ever threw one at me," and confesses she has no favorite team, no hero of the diamond. Truth be told, she does not much care for the game.

"I am not a ball fan," she says. "I'm not a games person. No games excite me, really."

These days, she winters in Naples, Fla., and summers in Sidney at a tidy trailer park favored by seniors, a development sandwiched between the Victoria airport and the ferry traffic on Highway 17. Her contributions to baseball research are now limited to an online chat group, although she is quick to respond with a letter when she spots an error in a newspaper or magazine.

As Cleveland State sophomore, back when the Indians won the World Series in 1948, she fell in love with a dour professor who maintained an uncharacteristically boyish enthusiasm for baseball. They married and she left the school to embark on a self-directed study of baseball, economics and America. She haunted archives and libraries in New York, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis and Cooperstown, N.Y., mining a rich lode of documents.

"I began to think of it as a treasure hunt," she says. "Each time I found something interesting it was a clue to something else."

While baseball was a new-found interest for her, to her husband it was a lifelong obsession.

Seymour was born in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, an area so tough his mother refused to let him play outside. The family moved to the Flatbush section of Brooklyn when Harold was six and he grew up within earshot of fabled Ebbets Field, home of the Dodgers.

He found work at the park as a turnstile boy, scoreboard operator and, to his everlasting delight, as a bat boy, all the while dreaming of a major league career for himself. The closest he got was forming a semi-professional team at age 17.

"He was a very strict manager," Mills said. "They called him McGraw," after the tyrannical John McGraw, manager of the New York Giants.

The closest Seymour got to the majors was by bird-dogging as an unofficial scout for two clubs.

While his pro ball career was left in the on-deck circle, he began to put up some good numbers in academia.

Still, in the 1940s, his inaugural proposal to teach a course on baseball history was unanimously rejected by faculty.

"At the time, it was not a respected field for serious research," said Tom Heitz, the former librarian of the Baseball Hall of Fame. "People laughed at him and belittled him for what he was doing."

Some years later, Seymour was studying at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., when he submitted a Ph.D. dissertation on the same topic.

His thesis was accepted and, in 1957, he won national publicity for earning so high a degree for so low a subject.

The couple recast the thesis into two volumes for Oxford University Press, the first of which -- Baseball: The Early Years -- was published in 1960. The second volume was called Baseball: The Golden Years. Both received standing ovations from critics and are still in print.

Sports Illustrated magazine, comparing the author to a famous chronicler of the Roman Empire, called Seymour the "Edward Gibbon of baseball history."

While Seymour had a well earned reputation as an imperious and taciturn man, his whimsy found expression in the naming of two New England homes in which he wrote his histories. The first was called Bush League Farm, the second Big League Camp. A third volume, Baseball: The People's Game, an account of the sport as played by amateurs, was published in 1990, most of it written by his wife as his conditioned degenerated. Seymour died of Alzheimer's disease at age 82 in 1992.

A year ago this month, his widow made a pilgrimage to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. She brought with her to the baseball shrine a box containing her husband's remains.

On an unseasonably cool summer's evening, a handful of historians gathered in the grandstand above the red brick wall that is the backstop at Doubleday Field ("where Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball," Mills notes pointedly).

A eulogy was read. Then, one historian stepped on to the dirt surrounding first base, shaking free a dusty ribbon of ash at the position where Harold had played as a boy.

Dr. Alvin Hall, a professor from a nearby university, told the assembly that the scene reminded him of a classical dialogue not so much Platonic as vaudevillian.

He said, "I'll never again be able to hear the famous Abbott and Costello baseball routine 'Who's on first?' without thinking, `I know who's on first."

Howard Kessler, reporter (1914-2010)

Howard Kessler in 1954. BELOW: A page from the family scrapbook.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
March 6, 2010

VICTORIA

A week after his marriage to a pretty co-ed, Howard Kessler conjured an idea that placed his name in newspapers throughout the continent.

The young Alberta-born student was studying journalism at the University of Oregon in 1936, a year in which Depression hardships gave rise to faddish pastimes and eccentric movements.

Mr. Kessler and his bride, the former Edith Davis, a home economics student known as Edie, formed a campus organization called the “Two-Can-Live-As-Cheaply-As-One Association.” The idea was for married students to test the age-old adage by making bulk purchases and sharing the rent of large apartments.

Everyone scrimped in those days, so the eager young couple’s experiment with thrift gained wide publicity. Their tongue-in-cheek use of a pared-down acronym — T.C.L.A.C.A. — amused reporters who included the unwieldy shorthand in their copy.

The initial reports garnered hundreds of letters from other students eager to follow their example.

The president of the university, the aptly named C. Valentine Boyer, encouraged the success of the campus association, as married students scored on average a 20-per-cent higher grade than other undergraduates.

The fledgling group even invited the abdicated monarch, the Duke of Windsor, and Mrs. Wallis Simpson to become honourary members.

“I see a national organization with affiliated branches in many universities and having headquarters from which the organization will be directed,” Mr. Kessler told the Lethbridge Herald seven weeks after his marriage.

The grand dream never happened. A final newspaper nod to their adventure came with the birth of their daughter, Stephanie, in 1938, which received coverage even in Click, a magazine with a wide circulation. The Oregonian in Portland published a photo of the parents and their baby beneath a headline reading: “Two-can-live-as-cheaply plan complicated.”

Howard Eugene Kessler was the son of Lulu Bell and Anson Kessler, who settled on a 960-acre farm in Alberta just north of the border with Montana. The Kesslers hailed from a family of barrel manufacturers from Dayton, Ohio, arriving on the Canadian Prairies in 1909. He soon had a steam plow and six four-horse teams working his spread, most of which was planted with winter wheat. In time, the elder Kessler became an insurance agent.

From a young age, the boy made known his desire to be a journalist. At age 16, while attending Lethbridge Collegiate Institute, he wrote for the school newsletter, called the Ballyhoo.

He left Alberta to study journalism in Eugene, Ore., where he met his future wife, a student from North Dakota. He took a break after his first year to travel through Europe, a journey during which he wrote several long reports for his hometown newspaper.

His first dispatch in 1934 described the arrival in London of Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark for her pending marriage to the Duke of Kent. After culling 13 daily newspapers in the capital, the tyro reporter bemoans the overwhelming interest in the hat worn by the princess, a concern that bumped coverage of constitutional reforms in India to inside pages.

He visited France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Morocco, sometimes passing days without eating. He spent a month touring southern England by bike, train and on foot, finding a land struggling with the ravages of the Depression.

“The tin mines of Cornwall, great gashes in the earth, are nearly all deserted and the machinery shipped to South Africa for use,” he wrote. “The fisheries, which especially along the east coast, are the principle sustenance of English seagirt towns, are poor and ailing, hard hit by the most disastrous fishing season in history.”

A recreational tennis player himself, Mr. Kessler interviewed the great Bill Tilden while dining on roast beef at the Savoy Hotel. “I came away impressed by the vitality, the versatility and the good common sense of this champion who stands undisputed, the monarch of all champions of the tennis Valhalla,” he wrote.

Mr. Kessler also spent time in a Spanish cabaret with Charles Zimmy, a man whose feats he first marveled at in a Ripley’s “Believe It Or Not” item. A sideshow attraction billed as The Human Fish and The Legless Wonder, Mr. Zimmy lost both limbs as a boy after falling beneath a Chicago streetcar. He became an world-renowned marathon swimmer, setting marks for distance and for hours immersed in the sea.

Mr. Kessler wrote that he found his time with the swimmer so engrossing that he barely noticed as the cabaret’s dancing girls swayed nearby. (The Herald displayed the article under the tasteless headline, “No pulling his leg.”) Two years later, Mr. Zimmy, his torso coated in grease as protection against numbing cold, broke his own records by swimming from Albany to New York over several days without ever leaving the Hudson River.

Mr. Kessler returned home by ocean liner to New York, after which he hitchhiked to Washington, DC, before continuing to Kansas and north to Lethbridge.

On his return, he warned the Herald that Huey Long was the most dangerous man in American politics, so great was his popularity among the disenfranchised. The Louisiana senator was assassinated three months later. Mr. Kessler also reported that the administration of Franklin Roosevelt was losing support. “Too much going up blind alleys and then backing up,” Mr. Kessler said, though his prediction proved wildly wrong, as the president won overwhelming re-election a year later.

In 1938, he wrote a humorous article for Movie Mirror magazine in which he described meeting Hollywood stars on luxury liners about to depart for vacations in Hawaii. He poses a question to one pint-sized star, only to have Shirley Temple complain, “But Mamma, I thought this was a holiday!” He also posed beside Robert Taylor, the handsome leading man of “Magnificent Obsession,” and interviewed Groucho Marx, who lifted a pant leg as a bit of burlesque for photographers.

After graduating with a science degree specializing in journalism, Mr. Kessler packed his young family into a motor trailer and began a cross-continental journey in 1939. They drove through the Appalachian states before heading south to Florida and west through the Gulf states into Texas. It had been his idea to write a book about the journey, but the travel proved to be too taxing and the trek was aborted.

He launched a newspaper called the Mill City Log in an unincorporated lumber town on the North Santiam River about 90 kilometres south of Portland. It did not last long.

Mr. Kessler worked as a reporter for newspapers in Portland and Bend, Ore., as well as in Petaluma and Sacramento, Calif. He spent many years with the California Farm Bureau.

In 1965, he moved to Victoria, where he opened Poor Richard’s Books, stocking the shelves with his sizable personal library. His wife opened her own storefront operation in the suburbs in which she specialized in inexpensive paperbacks. The bookstore was sold in 1976 and the couple retired the following year, returning to the wandering that marked so much of their life. They counted 50 different addresses in a half-century of peripatetic curiosity.

Mr Kessler was a thrifty, energetic and optimistic character, always eager to try out a scheme, even if so many proved to be pipe dreams.

He maintained a series of notebooks in which he chronicled his adventures. He kept every letter he received and every missive he sent dating back to 1934.

Howard Eugene Kessler was born on Nov. 10, 1914, at New Dayton, Alta. He died on Jan. 8 at Surrey, B.C. He was 95. He leaves a daughter, Stephanie Belanger, of Ferndale, Wash.; a grandson; a granddaughter; and, a great-grandson. He was predeceased by his wife of 72 years, the former Edith Davis, known as Edie, who died in White Rock, B.C., on Aug. 9, 2009.

Bob Chakales, baseball player (1927-2010)

Bob Chakales appears in a 1955 baseball card with the Chicago White Sox. BELOW: Chakales with the Cleveland Indians, as shown on his 1952 Topps card.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
March 5, 2010

The baseball career of Bob Chakales, so full of promise, seemed jinxed.

After six seasons of toil in the minor leagues, he got called up by the Cleveland Indians, only to find himself as the extra man in a renowned rotation. He wound up exiled to the bullpen.

When he at last got a chance to be a regular starter, he had the great misfortune of being plagued by nagging injuries.

He hurt his arm, developed aches in his elbow, winced from a sore back.

By the time he arrived in Toronto in 1959, reporters knew about his history. “Through adversity may come a star,” reported the Globe. The pitcher is “an antidote for frustration,” pronounced the Star.

Mr. Chakales — his name was pronounced “shackles,” appropriate considering his hard-luck background — pitched for baseball’s Toronto Maple Leafs for three seasons. He had a supporting role in the team’s spectacular 1960 championship season.

Mr. Chakales looked every bit a ballplayer. Tall, handsome and blond-haired, with a crooked nose hinting at an accident in his past, he stood 6-foot-1, weighed 185 pounds. He was known as Chick and, for his fair colouring and ethnic heritage, The Golden Greek.

Born in North Carolina, he was a star athlete at Benedictine High in Richmond, Va. He was named All-State in baseball, basketball, and football.

The Philadelphia Phillies signed him as an amateur free agent at age 17 in 1945, assigning him to the Class B Wilmington (Del.) Blue Rocks. His signing bonus was $12,500, a generous sum he thought until the Brooklyn Dodgers offered him twice as much too late the following day.

He was drafted and missed a season fulfilling his military obligations with the U.S. Army.
It was during spring training in 1948 that he hurt his arm.

A few years later, Baseball Digest would describe the circumstances, presenting his words in an approximation of his Southern accent.

“Ah was tryin’ to snap a cu’ve an’ Ah snapped mah arm,” he said. “Mah arm was rilly soah. I tol’ em ‘bout it an’ they said, ‘Keep throwin’, it’ll work out.’ Instead it got soah and soah. I culd hahdly lift the ball.”

The pitching prospect fell into some bad habits, indulgences made possible by the dwindling supply of bonus money.

“Ah became a playboy. Ah learned how in the Army. Ah got out of shape.”

The Cleveland Indians selected him in the minor-league draft three years later. He finally got promoted to the parent club in 1951. He recorded three wins and four losses in his rookie campaign, cementing two of those victories with his own timely hitting.

Though delighted with the opportunity, it was his misfortune to join a veteran pitching staff including Bob Feller (22 victories in 1951), Early Wynn (20), Mike Garcia (20) and Bob Lemon (17). The stellar quartet of right-handers forced Mr. Chakales to the bullpen as a relief pitcher, a role which he felt did not allow for a full demonstration of his pitching repertoire. He possessed a decent fastball, an ordinary changeup and a wicked curve. He worked on but never mastered a knuckleball he described as a slip-pitch.

The pitcher was beginning his fourth season with the Indians when traded to the Baltimore Orioles for first baseman Vic Wertz. His old club went on to win the American League pennant with 111 victories. His new club lost 100 games.

Mr. Chakales also pitched for the Washington Senators, Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox over parts of seven seasons, compiling a 15-25 record with a 4.54 earned-run average.

He was a welcome presence in the clubhouse and as an easy-going player likely to offer a reporter on deadline a good quotation.

It is said he once promoted himself with the tongue-in-cheek statement, “First came Hercules, then came Socrates, then came Chakales, the greatest Greek of all.”

His career was in decline by the time the Maple Leafs added him to the roster. He undoubtedly was happy to wear the uniform, as Toronto had been responsible for four of his six defeats the previous season.

His first act with his new employer was to hold out and refuse to sign a contract, as he was one of the International League players leading a campaign to improve pension provisions in contract language. “No sign for ’59” was the slogan. As it turned out, Mr. Chakales made holding out for better pay an annual rite of spring training.

In 1960, the Leafs won 100 games thanks to a robust pitching staff fronted by Riverboat Smith and Al Cicotte, who led the league in wins, strikeouts and ERA. Mr. Chakales went 9-3 working as both a starter and a reliever.

A sore shoulder limited his action early in the 1961 season. He came off the disabled list in spectacular fashion in May, defeating the Richmond Virginians, his hometown team, 3-0, while also managing to knock in what would be the winning run.

He was traded to Hawaii the following month, a destination the dream of many ball players. Yet, for Mr. Chakales, the assignment meant he would be even farther from his family. So desperate was his new team for pitching that he was ordered to grab a charter flight in San Francisco on which the owner was also flying to the islands a troupe of hula dancers. The hurried departure meant the Leafs did not have an opportunity to hold a night honouring the likable player. He was 20-14 in three seasons with the Maple Leafs.

After 16 professional seasons of baseball, Mr. Chakales worked in insurance before becoming a builder and designer of more than 200 golf courses, many of them in Virginia. He also worked on the famed Sawgrass course at Ponte Vedra, Fla.

Though reporters liked to write about his unlucky progress, the pitcher did not care to indulge the notion he had been an underachiever.

“I don’t believe in complaining about the good things that didn’t happen to me,” he told the Toronto Star’s Milt Dunnell in 1959. “I’m grateful for the things that did come my way. If I ever start getting sorry for myself, I think of my father. He brought up a family of five on $16 a week.”

Robert Edward (Chick) Chakales was born on Aug. 10, 1927, at Asheville, N.C. He died on Feb. 18 at Richmond, Va. His was 82. He leaves his wife, Anne; two sons; three daughters; 10 grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and, a brother. He was predeceased by three brothers.

Youth of tomorrow get taste of Vancouver Island's past

Tara Saracuse displays the cover of "Island Kids" on a computer screen. Photograph by The Martlet. BELOW: Emma Stark as a girl.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
March 4, 2010

VICTORIA

Tara Saracuse remembers history being taught as a dry list of dates and events. Kings and things in seventeen-seventy-something.

Or maybe that was eighteen-eighty-something.

Only in the final years of high school did a couple of exceptional teachers help her realize history told the stories of real people.

“It was hard for me to digest all those names and places and dates,” she said. “All those events were abstractions in my mind.”

Ms. Saracuse, 22, will complete a degree in creative writing at the University of Victorian next month. She is a rare undergraduate to have published her first book before earning a sheepskin.

Written for ages 8 and up, “Island Kids” is history of the most memorable kind — stories about Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands told through the eyes and words of the real-life children who experienced those times.

The book includes 22 narratives, from a Haida creation story to Luna the Whale swimming in the waters at Gold River.

The young writer does not shy from unhappy events, including stories about residential schools and the internment of the Japanese-Canadians during the Second World.

Some of the other events described include the Ladysmith Chocolate Strike of 1947 and the tsunami that washed through the streets of Port Alberni in 1964.

One of the more remarkable tales told is of little Emma Stark, the daughter of former American slaves who moved to Salt Spring Island to avoid the bounty hunters in California. She attended classes in a log schoolhouse where her teacher was John Craven Jones, a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio.

The schoolmaster offered his charges instruction in Latin, philosophy and human rights, a rich education that would have been the envy of even some of the wealthiest white citizens in nearby Victoria.

Two black men were later murdered on the Stark farm, mysteries unsolved to this day, so the family fled to a more remote locale.

“The story tries to imagine what it would have been like for her to be in so wild a place, so untamed,” Ms. Saracuse said.

The girl eventually moved to Vancouver Island with her father, Louis, in about 1875, becoming a teacher herself at Cedar, south of Nanaimo. She died in 1890, aged 33.

The Stark’s family tale can be told because her mother, Sylvia, left reminiscences rich in detail about family life.

While the children’s history book is described as creative non-fiction, the author has composed a fictitious conversation among the Stark children. The end of each story includes a section titled “What do we know for sure?” in which the fictive is separated from the historical.

Ms. Saracuse would like readers to imagine themselves as bystanders as the events take place, from watching a young Emily Carr avoid being trampled by cattle to a boy delivering groceries on a bicycle.

“I want them to connect with Vancouver Island as a place. I think we live on an amazing island. Amazing for its culture and its sheer natural beauty.

“What was once a wild, untamed land is now a wonderful dichotomy of civilization and nature. We are so lucky.”

The book assignment came in a most fortuitous manner. Working on a term paper for a university writing class, Ms. Saracuse interviewed the author Linda Goyette and the publisher Ruth Linka. The pair, as it turned out, were looking for a writer for the third in a series of books. The undergraduate was invited to join the project, resulting in the release last month of “Island Kids.” The book got written, but the paper never got finished.

The author describes her good fortune in connecting with the publisher as “planned happenstance.” After graduating, Ms. Saracuse will begin a new job as an assistant to Ms. Linka at Brindle & Glass, a Victoria-based publishing house.

A self-described “seeker of information,” Ms. Saracuse traveled north to Courtenay to interview Norman Leung, through whose eyes the amazing story of Cumberland’s Chinatown is told. Mr. Leung offered a tour of his garden and introduced her to his wife, before offering a spellbinding accounting of life in a Chinatown of which little remains today though it was once said to have rivaled San Francisco’s in size.

Mr. Leung’s father had come to Cumberland to be a miner, though low wages and deplorable safety standards led him to instead take up the long hours of being a green grocer. The family’s vegetables were peddled from a truck with twice-a-week deliveries.

“He told me wild stories about the fan-tan houses and the Chinese medicine stores, the sounds and the smells,” she said.

His tales were not without melancholy. She asked him about playing. He could not remember doing so, as his days were filled with work. Riding a bicycle to run errands was as close as he came to a carefree pastime.

Mr. Leung eventually opened a grocery in nearby Courtenay, complete with a lunch counter with stools. The family store became a well-known landmark until the patriarch retired about three years ago.

The ancient grocer, old enough to be Ms. Saracuse’s great-grandfather, brought history to life.

Tara Saracuse will be reading from “Island Kids” (Brindle & Glass) at 1:15 p.m. on Thursday at the Esquimalt Library.

A playground for dead-tree products

The spectacular interior of Munro's Books in Victoria.

By Tom Hawthorn
Boulevard Magazine
March/April, 2010

Skip up the steps from the west sidewalk of Government Street, place a hand on the brass handle, pull open the doors to heaven.

Inside is a shrine of commerce of the most edifying kind.

A bookcase holding the latest trade paperbacks appears straight ahead, the brilliant covers miniature masterpieces of the graphic designer’s art. The case is one among dozens that line all walls and create aisles throughout the store.

Some books are presented spine only, a demure presentation made necessary by the sheer number of volumes at hand.

Every title carries the possibility of a transcendent experience. (OK, a copy of "Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Puzzle Book #3" might challenge so high-falutin’ a concept.) Change your life, have a laugh, time travel, build a shelf, plant a garden. No wonder books are a delight.

My all-time favourite bookstore — and I have visited many over the years — is Munro’s Books, a playground for any who love the printed word on dead-tree products such as this.

A measure of a city is the quality of its retail merchants. Some places become known for certain goods — Milan for high fashion, or Taxco, in Mexico, for silver. Our city still carries a reputation as a far corner of Olde England with tattered Union Jacks, a tiger skin over the fireplace at the Bengal Lounge, cosies over the pots at the tea rooms. That’s all fine, if a little hokey. A better reflection of who we are is that the people of this city support a variety of excellent independent bookstores.

Munro’s downtown is joined by Bolen Books at Hillside Mall and such smaller neighbourhood stores as Tanner’s Books in Sidney, Ivy’s Book Shop on Oak Bay Avenue and the Cadboro Bay Book Campany, not to mention a selection of shops specializing in children’s literature and crime books.

We’re readers and these stores provide our sustenance.

Just stepping into Munro’s makes me feel like one of the faithful on a pilgrimage. Pillars rise almost eight metres to hold up a coffered ceiling designed to resemble that found in the ruins of the Roman library at Ephesus.

Not familiar with ancient architecture? They’ve got books about that.

My route into the store always follows the same path — go to the right of the front desk, past the new releases, to the mid-rear of the store, where magazines were added some years ago. Sitting at my computer, I can map the store as easily as my own home. The children’s section is in a nook in the far corner. Bought my daughter some Harry Potter volumes there. The classics section rests just before the entrance. Humour is against a rear wall (should you need a bathroom reader), as is fantasy.

Literature is along the south wall, though the substantial poetry section has its own place on the north wall, not far from the history section. Music is hidden away near the foyer.

In the centre are tables upon which rest stacks of publishers’ rejects, orphans of a fickle trade. One local political columnist describes this part of the store as the “free book table,” so inexpensive are the volumes whose remaindered status is dictated less by their literary quality than by the cost of warehouse space.

A bookstore is no more than bricks and books without a staff. You never know when the clerk chasing down the latest Dan Brown exercise in typing is a published author of greater talent, if not necessarily popularity and certainly not riches. At Munro’s, Deborah Willis is the author of Vanishing and Other Stories, a first collection that was nominated last year for a Governor General’s award. At Bolen’s, Robert Wiersema, who, as the store’s events coordinator handles author readings and signings, is also the author of the best-selling novel, Before I Wake, as well as The World More Full of Weeping, a novella published last fall.

Harder to find a more erudite crew outside a campus than bookstore workers. My visits to Munro’s have included conversations about music, sports and politics. And when I’m tweaked about the sad state of the newspaper industry, I counter with accounts of the perils of the book trade.

The independent stores have survived the rise of the Internet, the arrival of big-box rivals and the rising Canadian dollar, which made a mockery of the prices printed months earlier on dust jackets. The latest challenge is the advent of portable readers with their Age of the Jetsons’ promise of eliminating physical books.

Munro’s has been in business for 46 years, a longevity owing much to the vision of the eponymous founder. Jim Munro, who is 80, left a steady job at a department store to open a paperback bookstore with his wife, the former Alice Laidlaw. The business has lasted longer than their marriage, though they remain on good terms. Why, you can find more than 20 Alice Munro titles among the stock, including editions in French and German.

The proprietor’s best decision came in 1984 when he bought the neo-classical bank building that is now the store’s home. He has thus avoided the fluctuations of retail rents and the whims of a landlord.

I do not believe I have ever left the store empty-handed, often indulging my weakness for doorstopper-sized works of history. The intent is to be rewarded with a good read and a glass of red wine after a hard day's keyboard labours, though often enough the books wind up in stacks on the floor of the home office. Over time, these teetering stalagmites mock me for my intentions. Oh, “Shock Doctrine,” you were once top of the list, but now you seem so last year. “Stalin's War,” you've been in the pile longer than the siege of Stalingrad. I promise to get to you, “Best American Magazine Writing of the Year, 2009,” as soon as I find out the date of the apocalypse from “Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans are Looking Forward to the End of the World.”