Bloody Sunday, 75 years later

Police beat men as they left the post office in downtown Vancouver.

June 19, 2013

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the police riot remembered in Vancouver as Bloody Sunday. On the occasion, we look back at the life of Steve Brodie, who led the unemployed men in their strike. This obituary was originally published in the Globe and Mail on Jan. 23, 1998.

ROBERT (STEVE) BRODIE

LIVES LIVED

Friday, January 23, 1998

Hero of Bloody Sunday, labourer, seaman, organizer. Born on June 8, 1910, in Falkirk, Scotland; died of cancer in Victoria on Dec. 6, 1997, aged 87.

A MAN can pack a lot of living into 87 years, and Steve Brodie didn't waste any of them. Yet for all that he did and all that he saw in his time, he was remembered for what happened one dawn nearly six decades ago, when four Mounties with billy clubs and a Vancouver city detective armed with a rubber hose beat the living bejeezus out of him. It was June 19, 1938 -- Bloody Sunday -- and much of the blood was Mr. Brodie's.

A month earlier, he had led a contingent of unemployed men into the Vancouver Post Office on a sitdown strike. How he conducted himself in those days made him the most admired -- and feared -- man in the city.

As a boy in Scotland, Robert Brodie lost both parents to the influenza epidemic of 1919. Five years later, the Salvation Army shipped him and other orphans to Canada, where he found work at 14 as a farm labourer.

Mr. Brodie was a Bible-toting man like his blacksmith father, a lay preacher, but at one farm in the Sand Hills of Saskatchewan he came upon a former journalist with a library of radical books. "He told me, 'You are a member of the working class and you have no option but to help them rise,' " Mr. Brodie remembered. "I used to read the Bible to the Indian girl who lived with him, but I was beginning to doubt."

Police thug beats Steve Brodie.

In the early 1930s, his livelihood evaporated with the moisture of the Prairie soil. He took to the rails like so many other hungry men. One bitter winter's night, he was hauled aboard a slow-moving freight. An older man dragged him across the dark boxcar and flicked his lighter. At Mr. Brodie's feet, as recounted in Pierre Berton's The Great Depression, were three teen-aged boys, frozen to death.

It was in the relief camps that he was nicknamed Steve, for the Irishman who was said to have jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge on a bet. In 1935, Steve Brodie hopped a freight in Vancouver with hundreds of others in an audacious protest. The On-to-Ottawa Trek ended when police attacked a crowd on Dominion Day in an event remembered as the Regina Riot.

Mr. Brodie came to believe that capitalism made miserable the many for the benefit of a few. (Nothing he saw later caused him to change his opinion.) He joined the Communist Party, which, with its top-down discipline, would prove an uneasy, and short-lived, fit for the firebrand battler.

On May 20, 1938, some two thousand bedraggled men marched in columns through downtown Vancouver. Mr. Brodie led one group into the Post Office, others took over the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Georgia Hotel. The men settled in at the Post Office, sleeping on the cold stone floor. They called it the Hotel Federal. Thousands visited with gifts of food. The pocket-sized Sitdowner Gazette was sold to raise money. Meanwhile, the mails kept moving.

Early one morning, the clip-clop of horses' hooves was heard. The police ordered the building vacated; the men, led by Mr. Brodie, said they would submit to arrest. The police refused, firing a tear-gas canister. "Up until that moment, we had lived for 30 days in that building without five cents worth of damage to property," Mr. Brodie later wrote. "Now as the lobby filled with gas, arrangements were made to purify the air by eliminating some three thousand dollars worth of plate glass. . . ."

The sitdowners ran a gantlet of police. The 5-foot-8, 138-pound Steve Brodie was the last man out, his orange sweater a bull's-eye for the waiting cops. He was beaten senseless and left in the gutter. Police refused to call an ambulance. A passerby drove him to St. Paul's Hospital. He had head injuries, nearly lost an eye, and was left toothless.

The eye injury prevented him from serving in the regular forces during the Second World War, which he spent in the merchant marine. He later worked in the Esquimalt shipyards, retiring in 1968. Never married, he was a devoted surrogate grandfather and great-grandfather. In recent years, he would meet cronies at a Victoria cafeteria, where they bet on the ponies and Mr. Brodie touted his system for winning at craps with his trademark dry cockiness. He long ago abandoned any faith in political parties, although he remained as angry at injustice as ever.

The Post Office he occupied 60 years ago is now home to upscale boutiques, the doorways once again temporary refuge for the homeless. Unlike in his day, they are unorganized and without hope.

Tom Hawthorn is a reporter with the Victoria Times Colonist.

The occupation of the post office had been peaceable until police ran amok.

Debut no picnic for Wakamatsu

Don Wakamatsu throws batting practice for Toronto. He now scouts for the New York Yankees.

Former Blue Jays coach Don Wakamatsu made his major-league debut as the catcher for Charlie Hough and his unpredictable knuckleball. Wakamatsu was called up from the Vancouver Canadians in 1991.

By Tom Hawthorn, The Province, May 24, 1991

Don Wakamatsu's dream job proved to be every catcher's worst nightmare.

The 28-year-old backstop ended a six-year apprenticeship Wednesday by playing his first major league baseball game. His unenviable assignment was to track a knuckleballer's unguided missiles.

"It's a nightmare to get called up and have to catch Charlie Hough," Wakamatsu said yesterday, the day after his debut. "It's nerve-racking."

Wakamatsu was plucked from baseball anonymity earlier this week, as the Chicago White Sox bought his contract from the Vancouver Canadians.

It was just another among dozens of midseason roster moves, a bit of baseball paperwork noted only by Rotisserie devotees and a patient catcher's delighted family.

For Wakamatsu, who was toting a humbling .127 batting average here, the unlikely promotion has temporarily put aside thoughts of retirement.

"You play in the minor leagues for so long, you wonder if you're ever going to move up," Wakamatsu said before last night's game in Oakland.

"Everything I touched this year went bad. You can't ever give up. Statistic-wise, when I'm playing my worst, I get called up. It's a strange game."

Wakamatsu was promoted by the parent club after backup catcher Ron Karkovice tore a ligament in his left thumb.

On his arrival, manager Jeff Torborg, a former catcher, tossed the rookie a glove as big as a ham hock with the warning he was to handle the notorious knuckleballer.

Early in his debut, two elusive pitches corkscrewed away from him, one costing a run.

Wakamatsu lined a single to right field in four at-bats in a White Sox victory over the California Angels at Anaheim. The ball was waiting in his locker after the game.

Meanwhile, Wakamatsu hopes to learn more about his trade from first-string catcher Carlton Fisk, a future Hall-of-Famer.

"He's been in the game forever, longer than any other catcher," Wakamatsu says. "He's got an aura around him. I try to pick his brain whenever I can."

After a minor-league whistle-stop tour that included stops in Iowa, Florida, Montana, Alabama and Tennessee,Wakamatsu is enjoying the fruits of the major league minimum salary of $100,000 US.

As well, Wakamatsu has finally read his name in a big league boxscore, even if it was shrunk to "Wkmts".

His temporary job has won him a permanent citation in the venerable Baseball Encyclopedia.

"Now, I can be remembered," he said with a laugh. "They say there's only one place to play, and it's the bigs, that's for sure."

Didn't you used to be … Doug Ault?

Doug Ault's Opening Day home runs led the Blue Jays to victory in the franchise's first game in 1977.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
April 1, 1988

It was a chilly April afternoon 11 years ago when a tall, blond Texan became the toast of Toronto.

Snow was falling, and a wicked wind was blowing in from Lake Ontario. Baseball , the summer game, was making its major-league debut in Toronto.

The hometown Blue Jays were an expansion team staffed by rejects and retreads scavenged from the other ball clubs. Among the cast of castoffs was an unheralded first baseman.

Doug Ault had all of nine games' experience when he walloped two home runs to lead Toronto to a 9-5 victory over Chicago on the club's first opening day.

"It was like winning the World Series," Mr. Ault said recently. "I tell you, if it had been snowing all year, I might have hit 50 home runs."

He hit only nine more homers that season, and was destined to return shortly to the shadows of obscurity.

He was demoted to the minors, retired as a player to become a manager, and last fall was demoted to an even lower level of the minors.

When the Jays leave spring training in Florida to play this season's opening game on Monday in Kansas City, Mr. Ault will stay behind to manage the club's Class A farm team in Dunedin.

"It's a lot more challenging down here," he said. "Down here in A ball, you have to stress the basics. You repeat yourself a lot. But it's more rewarding, too, when you see a teen-ager you managed making the big leagues in two or three years."

Mr. Ault made the major leagues as a 27-year-old rookie after years of travelling the minor-league circuit. He might have been condemned to a life in the minors had the Jays not taken him as their sixteenth of 30 picks.

(Catcher Ernie Whitt, who will likely be behind the plate for Toronto on Monday, was taken next. Pitcher Jim Clancy, the team's third pick, is the only other original Jay still with the team.)

The Blue Jays were hatched on April 7, 1977, on an Exhibition Stadium field carpeted with snow. Before the game started, Chicago infielder Jack Brohamer used a pair of catcher's shin guards as skis and two bats as poles, and glided in the snow from first base to second.

The Jays sold 44,649 tickets to the game, but that many people were never in the stands at the same time. A monumental traffic jam caused many to miss the first pitch (a called strike thrown by Toronto's Bill Singer), while frostbitten thousands fled early.

Anne Murray sang the national anthem, fans baptized the stadium by sipping from mickeys, and Mr. Ault jumped on an inside slider in the bottom of the first inning. The ball finally came to a stop in a $2 seat in the sixth row of the left-field bleachers.

Mr. Ault so liked the pitches thrown by Chicago's Ken Brett that he swung at an outside fastball in the third inning, this time sending it over the right-field fence.

"I remember the fans were waiting on something to happen," Mr. Ault said. "I hit that first one and it just kind of got them going. All of a sudden it was like it wasn't cold at all, like we were in Florida and it was 80 degrees out and we were going to win our first baseball game."

Mr. Ault was not the only hero in the messy barn-burner of a game. Right-handed pitcher Jerry Johnson was credited with the win in relief of Mr. Singer, who when he left the field was cheered despite surrendering a generous supply of hits (11) and runs (4) to the visitors.

Fortunately for the home side, Chicago was just as solicitous. They stranded 19 of their own baserunners and allowed the Jays 16 hits, including two singles by Vancouver-born third baseman Dave McKay and a pinch-hit homer by Al Woods in his first major league at bat.

When the snow had cleared, Toronto was victorious. The fans who had opened the game chanting "We want beer!" ended it with the cry, "We're No. 1!" For one day, they were. But the Jays lost 107 games that season to go with only 54 wins.

"The other 161 games were anti-climactic," former team president Peter Bavasi (now president of a sports-news information service in New York) says today. "The first one was definitely something special."

Making the big leagues is never easy, and Mr. Ault's journey was more arduous than most.

Despite hitting a spectacular .473 to lead all college players in 1972, he was ignored by scouts. He was a contact-hitter satisfied with singles playing a position where scouts expected homers. He hit right-handed and threw left-handed, another oddity.

"I was a weirdo, no doubt about it," he says. "Certainly didn't make things easier for myself."

He ended up playing for the Glacier Pilots of Anchorage, Alaska (where he once saw the sun set and rise during a lengthy double-header), and later took the field for teams in Gastonia, N.C.; Pittsfield, Mass.; Spokane, Wash.; and Mexico City. In the off-season he worked as an itinerant roughneck on oil wells in the North Sea and in Louisiana.

Eleven years after his heroics, Mr. Ault is still asked by fans about what he acknowledges was the greatest day of his career. Of course it was not such a great day for the pitcher he made a patsy of, Ken Brett.

"I don't think he was too happy with me," Mr. Ault said. "I remember playing first base that day, and I could hear him yelling at me from the bench: 'You got lucky!' It was opening day and I guess he wanted to win. But he gave me his best stuff and I hit it."

Years later, the hapless hurler was still bothered by the homers.

"I made a hero out of him," Mr. Brett once said. "For one day at least, I made him the toast of Toronto."

Doug Ault died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on Dec. 22, 2004.

Secluded troubadour scouts for new talent in rustic beer parlors

Stompin’ Tom Connors (1936-2013)

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 26, 1988


Somewhere in Ontario, Stompin' Tom Connors is nursing a grudge.

It has been 10 years since the minstrel from the Maritimes put away his guitar, returned his many music awards and announced he would stomp for us no more.

The down-to-earth troubadour from Prince Edward Island, who only a few years earlier had won a national audience with such folksy tunes as Bud the Spud and Sudbury Saturday Night, retired in protest against a music industry he believed was ignoring Canadian talent.

He has been on a one-man crusade against the business ever since.

The latest salvo in his quixotic quest is Stompin' Tom Fiddle and Song, the 51-year-old singer's first album in 12 years. He released the record this month to raise money for his latest brainstorm, an album featuring unknown Canadian country artists.

Mr. Connors, who won his reputation travelling the hoser highway from hamlet to village to town, is once again haunting the beer parlors of forgotten hotels.

This time, he is searching for undiscovered performers on whom he is willing to stake his modest fortune.

But, despite frequent pleas for his return to the stage from such fans as actor Dan Aykroyd, singer K.D. Lang, and broadcaster Peter Gzowski, he insists on remaining in seclusion.

"He really hasn't changed his stand on entertaining as yet," says Cliff Evans, a Mississauga, Ont., fire fighter who is his business partner.

Mr. Connors has rarely been heard from since he angrily denounced the recording industry at a press conference in April, 1978.

He pledged at the time not to perform for a year, but his only public performance since then was last year at a protest rally calling for the continuation of Canadian content regulations for radio stations. He sang one of his own songs, We Have No Canadian Dream.

The long absence has given rise to many rumors.

"I've heard all kinds," Mr. Evans said. "People have wondered about sickness, and, obviously, being an entertainer, the first thing most people think about is a drinking problem. I could go on and on and on, but none of these are true. Tom retired because he's fed up with the Canadian music industry.

"Surprisingly, I've even had lots of comments in the few years that I've been around Tom that people have thought he had separated from Lena."

Mr. Connors and his wife met 18 years ago when she was working as a go- go dancer in a bar. Three years later, they were married in a ceremony seen coast to coast on Elwood Glover's noon-hour television broadcast from a Toronto hotel. New Brunswick premier Richard Hatfield and Toronto mayor David Crombie were among the guests.

Far from having separated, Mr. Connors has coaxed his wife into singing a duet with him in French on the new album.

"She doesn't claim to be an Anne Murray or anything like that," Mr. Evans said. "It shows the family side of Tom."

The importance of family is a frequent theme in Mr. Connors' music. He was born to an unwed teen-ager, and his earliest memories are of hitchhiking with his mother across Nova Scotia. Later, he was seized from her by the Children's Aid Society and placed in an orphanage, where he was adopted by foster parents from the hamlet of Skinner's Pond, PEI.

He ran away at age 13, took a job on the docks in Saint John and later worked on coal boats. He bought his first guitar for $19 while thumbing from town to town. He sometimes spent a night in jail as a vagrant; other times he would work in construction, pick tobacco or dig graves.

When he found himself a nickel short of the price of a glass of beer at the Maple Leaf Hotel in Timmins, Ont., Mr. Connors took to the stage to make up the price.

He wrote songs about everyday life, using crude rhymes and knee- slapping imagery to tell the tale of characters such as the potato- hauling, truckdriving friend, Bud Roberts, whom he immortalized as Bud the Spud.

He soon learned that he could pack any hall if he sang about the town in which he was performing. Thus was born Sudbury Saturday Night, about a night's carousing, and Tillsonburg, about the misery of migrant workers in the tobacco fields.

The nationalist sentiment in his lyrics and his heartfelt appreciation of the rigors of the working man's life won him acclaim.

Mr. Connors and his stomping board - a piece of plywood on which he kept time with his foot after a hotel owner complained about the wear on his carpet - eventually found their way to Toronto. He signed a contract, recorded several albums and later starred in his own television variety show, Stompin' Tom's Canada.

But he always harbored the suspicion that the city sophisticates looked at him as a hillbilly, a rube in a black hat with simple songs. He resented promoters' signing of big-name U.S. acts to star at places such as the Canadian National Exhibition.

He made his break with the industry in grand fashion, returning his Juno awards to the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences because it was honoring too many "border jumpers" who left Canada to find fame south of the border.

He is less harsh in his judgment these days. He is so enamored of country crooner K.D. Lang, who has enjoyed great success in Nashville, that he has penned a tribute to her in his new album. The song, Lady K.D. Lang, includes such lyrics as, "Her main claim to fame was how she sang with a twang" and jumped around like a 'rang-ee-tang."

Today, Mr. Connors lives as a virtual recluse with his wife and 12- year-old son, Tommy, near a village in Southwestern Ontario. Mr. Evans says his partner often plays the guitar for friends.

The townspeople are protective of his privacy.

"They come here looking for him all the time," says the woman who runs the general store. "Fans or reporters, I don't know who they are. The man wants his privacy and I respect that, so I shoo them away. This is a neighborly town, and Tom is just a neighbor."

On weekends, Mr. Connors and Mr. Evans travel the highways of Southwestern Ontario looking for beer parlors featuring country music.

Their record company A.C.T. - Assist Canadian Talent - released an album two years ago that featured four Stompin' Tom tunes and two songs each from unknown singers such as Kent Brockwell, a blind singer from Peterborough, Ont., and Bruce Caves, a firefighter from Norval, Ont.

The record sold poorly, in part because Mr. Connors refused to grant interviews about his project.

Meanwhile, his fans remain hopeful that he will change his mind about remaining a hermit.

"You can't get his songs out of your head," says Mr. Gzowski, who has made several appeals on CBC Radio's Morningside for Mr. Connors to appear on the show. "He's definitely an original, and he's ours."

A modest election proposal

By Tom Hawthorn

Boulevard Magazine
November, 2012

A cocky America invaded Canada 200 years ago. Conquering our land would be “a mere matter of marching,” insisted Thomas Jefferson in one of his less Jeffersonian moments.

American troops occupied Laura Secord’s house, ordering her to serve them food and drink. She plied them with booze, overheard their battle plans, then rushed to warn the local British commander. The red coats and Iroquois allies repulsed the invaders. A chain of chocolate emporiums was then named in the heroine’s honour by a grateful nation. (I may have fudged some of the details here.) Unfortunately, it has proved difficult to build a national mythology around the Battle of Beaver Dams, which sounds like an episode of Hinterland Who’s Who. Only about 30 combatants died, which is what police in Detroit now consider a slow night.

The war continued. They burned down Muddy York. We burned down the White House for the win.

What did the United States get out of the War of 1812? Two songs — Francis Scott Key’s Star-Bangled Banner and Johnny Horton’s Battle of New Orleans. Only one of those became a Billboard No. 1 hit and it is the one not sung before baseball games.

Two centuries later, our noisy neighbours in the basement claim to be the greatest democracy on the planet. Heck, I’m not convinced our American cousins have the greatest democracy on the continent. As those jokesters from the Canada Party argue, our frozen wasteland is “America, but Better.” They have suggested Canada take over the downstairs neighbour. “Not an invasion,” they insist, “an intervention.”

Invasion or intervention, you can expect push back from a nation with a constitutional right to the “pursuit of happiness,” which means they don’t much cotton to being told what to do by no well-meaning, socialist-medicine-taking northern varmints.

We Canadians should continue our policy of stealth infiltration. In the 1950s, Americans were convinced Communists were everywhere — acting in the movies, teaching in their schools, putting fluoride in their water, even hiding under their beds. While distracted by Red witch-hunts, those patriots entirely missed the maple invasion as Canadians slowly poured across the border before quietly insinuating into all facets of American life. Why, you’d hardly know we were there. Play spot the Canuck.

Kiddie crooner Justin Bieber? Canadian.

Michael Bublé? Canadian.

The Band? Neil Young? David Letterman’s musical sidekick? Canadian.

Celine, Avril, Joni, Alanis, Shania? Canadian.

Big-eared electronic dance deejay deadmau5? Canadian.

Titanic director James Cameron? Canadian.

Cutie patootie actor Michael Cera? Canadian.

Cutie patootie actress Ellen Page? Canadian.

Ironsides, from the old television show? Canadian.

Let’s Make a Deal host Monty Hall? Jeopardy! quizmaster Alex Trebek? Capt. Kirk and Scotty from Star Trek? Canadian.

John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, Jim Carrey, Dave Foley, Mike Myers, Leslie Nielsen, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short? Canadian.

Curly-haired silent-film ingenue Mary Pickford, known as “America’s Sweetheart”? As Canadian as a maple donut at Tim Hortons inside a hockey rink.

Jennifer Granholm, the firebrand former Democratic governor of Michigan who made a keynote address at the Democratic convention? Canadian.

Conservative political pundits David Brooks (born in Toronto) and Charles Krauthammer (raised in Montreal) and David Frum (son of Barbara) all have a Canuck connection.

With so many of us having successfully infiltrated, we have lulled our southern allies into thinking we’re pretty much similar. With Americans going to the polls this month, we should quickly launch the final volley in our two-century-old plan — to finally end the War of 1812 by allowing ourselves to be absorbed into the United States.

Canada agrees to become the 51st state in exchange for adding a maple leaf to the 50 stars on the flag. Our population is about the same as California’s, so we’d get about 55 votes in the Electoral College. Barack Obama outpolls Mitt Romney by 68-10 in Canada (and by 50-19 even in Alberta, aka Texas North). A close contest becomes a landslide. Americans get health care and, overnight, become a world curling power. Meanwhile, we Canadians get our hands on the mightiest military machine history has ever seen. Today, America. Tomorrow, the world.