had a voice like a foghorn.
Up the street from Rouse’s you might pause at Struthers and Church Feeds to watch children ride the little hopper cars on rails delivering bags of feed to the curb. Next was Joan’s Lunch reeking of french fries, and Percy Cline’s Men’s Wear Shop. For working men. Percy preached against extravagance and high fashion from behind the cash register, his riveting gaze aimed either over his spectacles riding the tip of his nose or under them riding on his forehead. I can’t recall ever seeing him look through them. His advertisements in the Galt Reporter became collector’s items. One ad said: “Percy Cline’s Pants Are Down. Come and See His Underwear.”
The no man’s land between the Iroquois and Royal hotels offered the most exciting albeit hazardous entertainment. Here fights in both hotels spilled into the street and intermingled so that combatants wound up fighting strangers. A policeman watching the fights from a safe distance would be called back to headquarters in the old City Hall on Dickson Street by one dong of the clock tower bell. “Constable Steele,” the desk sergeant would say, “we have a report of a fight at the corner of Wellington and Main … again.”
“Yes, sir!” And Steele would slow-walk back to where he had come from in time to see the fight broken up by girlfriends of the combatants.
Both hotels ventilated their beverage rooms with large Bessemer fans that blasted beer fumes, cigarette smoke, bowel gas, and cockroaches at head level into the street with a roar that made children cry. My father told me with apparent belief that these fans had power enough to lower the barometric pressure in the beverage rooms and contributed to violence by giving the alcohol a high-altitude effect.
While the fights raged a man wearing buckskins and a ten-gallon hat hawked snake oil beside the Royal Hotel at the corner of Wellington. His white goatee made him all the more distinguished. He called himself the Colonel and resembled the colonel who today sells Kentucky Fried Chicken. His snake liniment, registered in Ottawa under the Patent Medicine Act, was formulated by Ben Sossin at his pharmacy a block away on the corner of Wellington and Dickson.
George Schaller, Ben’s assistant, did the mixing and bottling. The base ingredient, George said, was turpentine. To this he added a measure of oil of mustard for that burning sensation essential to healing, camphor for cooling and, most important, a dash of oil tar that created little black specks that sank to the bottom of the bottle and became the mark of authenticity.
The Colonel cautioned people never to buy snake oil if it didn’t have those little black specks. The real stuff would cure arthritis, gout, gallstones, and most ladies’ ailments too sensitive to mention. It wasn’t supposed to be ingested internally, he said, as it might terminate all of your problems.
Ladies making purchases from the Colonel didn’t notice the four-foot live blue racer snake he had draped around his neck until it looked them in the eye. Their screams attracted more customers. The Colonel lived rent-free with several pet snakes right across the street from his outlet in a cozy little one-room packing crate nestled between Wilson’s Discount Oil Depot, the Canadian National Railways tracks, and a Chinese laundry that later became Kirkham’s Appliance Store.
When the Colonel died of undisclosed causes, he left his secret formula to Ben Sossin, who arranged the funeral and bought the headstone. Orders for Blue Racer Liniment increased, however, and George Schaller mixed it by the gallon. Ben cut the price from $1 a bottle to 50 cents and sold it by the case.
The names of the four principal streets enclosing downtown Galt’s business section were dictated by ego and political hierarchy. Main Street, of course, was hands-off to avoid expensive and tedious litigation between the village’s founding fathers as to who was number one. Water Street, aptly named because it ran beside the Grand River, caused no dispute because no one wanted his name on a street that flooded every year. William Dickson, who arrived in 1816 with Absalom Shade, laid claim to Dickson Street because it flooded only halfway and ran up past the municipal offices. Shade, a carpenter by trade, built every important building and so had the village, Shade’s Mills, named after him. However, John Galt, better connected politically, had the village renamed after him in 1825, and poor Shade had to settle for Shade Street, which ran from the top of Main Street to a cow pasture later to become Soper Park.
The whole region, including Galt, Preston, and Hespeler, was later inexplicably renamed after a British Austin automobile called the Cambridge.
Ainslie Street, flooded only now and then, cut from north to south through the heart of the village and was named after a transient lawyer who happened to be delivering mail. Adam Ainslie was returning to Hamilton from Waterloo where he had gone to deliver some mail to friends who had accompanied him on a ship from Gibraltar. He had walked to Waterloo from Hamilton through Beverly Swamp where travellers had been known to disappear.
At the junction of two muddy paths called Hunter’s Corner, now the savage and virtually impassable intersection of Water Street, Dundas Street, Hespeler Road, and Coronation Boulevard, Ainslie refuelled at Hunter’s Tavern. He asked Hunter where he might buy a pair of dry socks and was directed down a narrow mucky path from where at a point now covered with Galt Collegiate Institute students’ cigarette butts, he caught his first glimpse of the Grand River shimmering in the moonlight.
Ainslie slogged down the path until he reached the intersection of Main and Water streets. At the northeast end of the bridge he entered Absalom Shade’s White Store (cash only) and bought from a clerk named Harris, after whom Harris Street would be named, the dry socks. Harris advised Ainslie that he might change his socks in the lounge of the Galt Hotel, run by a fellow named Barlow, predecessor of a cartage company and a future member of the provincial legislature. At the hotel Ainslie changed his socks before a roaring fire and chatted with a pleasant man named Thomas Rich, after whom Rich Avenue would someday be named.
Adam Ainslie was so taken by the hospitality of the village that he decided to stay and have a street named after himself. It helped that he became head of the local militia.
4 Fun and Fear Before Television
In the 1930s and 1940s small-town streets were illuminated mainly by 250-watt bulbs every 100 feet or so on hydro poles. The bare bulbs were screwed under corrugated metal reflectors that were painted white on the underside and resembled straw hats. The flickering twenty-five-cycle current allowed wan circles of light under the bulbs and dark shadowy spaces in between where a person might stand unseen.
Children loved to play games in these checkered spaces of light and dark: hide-and-seek, kick the can, et cetera. And because the streets were as safe as the unlocked churches, parents trying to listen to their radios over the noise of children wrestling in the living room would say, “It’s dark now. Why don’t you kids run outside and play until it’s time for bed?”
The long nights of autumn when the sun set before seven allowed the boys on Lowrey Avenue and Chalmers Street to prowl the town before bedtime. Sometimes we stuck close to home and goaded selected fleet-footed men into chasing us. We did this simply by tapping on their front doors.
Art Snutch was always good for a wild chase. He terrified us and we loved it. Art lived in a tiny red brick house across from Dykeman’s Variety Store on the corner of Lowrey and Pollock. One tap on his door and he was on top of us, legs scissoring in the air, hollering, “I’ll tan your hides!” He was tall, thin, and bandy-legged and could run like a deer. Ivan McQueen, who lived half a block away beside Lincoln Avenue Church, occasionally joined Snutch in the chase. Ivan, a bit paunchy and not as fleet as Art, had an ominous bass voice
