Dateline- Toronto Read online

  It were wise, of course, for the returning munitioneer to come back to a different town than the one he left. Citizens of his own city might have misunderstood his motives in exposing himself to the dangers of the munition works.

  The first difficulty to be surmounted will be the C.E.F. [Canadian Expeditionary Force] overseas badge. This is easily handled, however. If anyone asks you why you do not wear your button, reply haughtily: “I do not care to advertise my military service!”

  This reply will make the man who was out since Mons and is brazenly wearing his button feel very cheap.

  When you are asked by a sweet young thing at a dance if you ever met Lieut. Smithers, of the R.A.F., in France or if you happened to run into Maj. MacSwear, of the C.M.R.’s, merely say “No,” in a distant tone. That will put her in her place, and, besides, it is all that any of us can say.

  A good plan is to go to one of the stores handling secondhand army goods and purchase yourself a trench coat. A trench coat worn in winter-time is a better advertisement of military service than an M.C. [Military Cross]. If you cannot get a trench coat buy a pair of army shoes. They will convince everyone you meet on a streetcar that you have seen service.

  The trench coat and the army issue shoes will admit you at once into that camaraderie of returned men which is the main result we obtained from the war. Your far-seeing judgment in going to the States is now vindicated, you have all the benefits of going to war and none of its drawbacks.

  A very good plan would be to learn the tunes of “Mademoiselle from Armentières” and “Madelon.” Whistle these religious ballads as you stand in the back platform of the streetcar and you will be recognized by all as a returned man. Unless you are of hardy temperament do not attempt to learn the words of either of those two old hymns.

  Buy or borrow a good history of the war. Study it carefully and you will be able to talk intelligently on any part of the front. In fact, you will more than once be able to prove the average returned veteran a pinnacle of inaccuracy if not unveracity. The average solider has a very abominable memory for names and dates. Take advantage of this. With a little conscientious study you should be able to prove to the man who was at first and second Ypres that he was not there at all. You, of course, are aided in this by the similarity of one day to another in the army. This has been nobly and fittingly expressed by the recruiting sergeant in these words: “Every day in the army is like Sunday on the farm.”

  Now that you have firmly established by suggestion your status as an ex-army man and possible hero the rest is easy. Be modest and unassuming and you will have no trouble. If anyone at the office addresses you as “major” wave your hand, smile deprecatingly and say, “No; not quite major.”

  After that you will be known to the office as captain.

  Now you have service at the front, proven patriotism and a commission firmly established, there is only one thing left to do. Go to your room alone some night. Take your bankbook out of your desk and read it through. Put it back in your desk.

  Stand in front of your mirror and look yourself in the eye and remember that there are fifty-six thousand Canadians dead in France and Flanders. Then turn out the light and go to bed.

  Store Thieves’ Tricks

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  April 3, 1920

  If you enter a department store carrying a bag of candy, an umbrella or wheeling a baby carriage you may become an object of suspicion. After you have entered if a clerk or floorwalker calls out “Two-Ten” you may know that the suspicion has crystallized and that you are regarded as a potential shoplifter.

  Shoplifting or unorganized stealing by amateur thieves is one of the big problems of the merchandiser, according to the head of one of the biggest department stores in Toronto. Department stores lose three percent of their sales through thieving from the counters, this merchant states.

  The candy bag, umbrella and baby carriage tricks are some of the standard schemes of the shoplifter. The facility with which they can be worked makes anyone possessing the properties for the trick a suspicious character to the department store clerk.

  In the operation of the candy bag for obtaining merchandise, a woman stands along the counter displaying rings and cheap jewelry as though she were waiting for someone and dips into her candy bag. Her hand goes from the candy bag to her mouth. But on the downward trip something from the counter goes into the bag. The movement is so simple and unsuspicious that it is almost impossible of detection. Hence the lynx-eyed manner in which the candy-bag toter is scanned.

  There is nothing subtle about the umbrella method. It merely consists in entering the store with an empty umbrella and leaving with a full one.

  Two women, a baby and a baby carriage are requisites for the success of the baby-carriage trick.

  One woman wheels the baby carriage and does a bit of shopping. The other removes articles from the counter, telling the clerk she wishes to show them to another woman who is with her. Whatever is taken is placed in the baby cab under the baby, who is an unconscious accessory both before and after the fact.

  The woman returns to the counter while the clerk’s attention is distracted and says that she has replaced the article. Flat bolts of lace are the things most often taken in this way. With a pile of them on the counter the clerk cannot tell if they have been replaced. With baby seated happily on the loot, it is calmly rolled out of the store.

  “Two-Ten,” which sounds to the uninitiated like the call for a cash girl, clerk or floorwalker, is the signal given by anyone in the store when they see a suspicious-looking person enter. It means “Keep your eyes on her ten fingers.”

  In addition to amateur merchandise stealers, the big stores are confronted with the problem of organized gangs of thieves who work department stores throughout the States and the Dominion. Four is the usual number for a shoplifting team.

  They arrive in a town and wait until clerks are advertised for by some big store. Two of the quartet take positions as clerks and the rest is easy. It is simply a matter of how much of the contents of the store they can deliver to the outsiders who play the role of customers.

  These professionals have such a variety of artifices that they are very successful. The great success of their scheme, however, lies in its essential simplicity.

  Floorwalkers and store managers have one almost infallible way of detecting theft among the clerks. It is an application of the old platitude, “A guilty conscience needeth no accuser.” If a clerk follows the floorwalker with her eyes it almost invariably develops that she is stealing. She must watch the floorwalker to prevent his surprising her in some irregularity—and if she does watch him she is gone.

  Although women make up the majority of offenders at amateur shoplifting, boys also do quite a bit of thieving. Pocket knives and perfumes are the most common articles taken by the younger generation. They are readily vendable.

  It is interesting to note, too, that the head of the Toronto Juvenile Court recently asked one of the Toronto stores to take Ford ignition keys off their counters. Boys were buying them and then unlocking parked Ford cars and taking them for joyrides.

  “There are no such people as kleptomaniacs,” said a department store head. “At least, we have never run into a genuine klep. All of the people who steal from us have stolen the stuff because they wanted it or the money it would bring.

  “The thieving is divided into two classes, amateur and professional. The amateurs are usually given another chance and released. We try to send the professionals to prison. But never in all my experience with thousands of shoplifters have I encountered a kleptomaniac.”

  Trout Fishing

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  April 10, 1920

  Spring is only spring to the majority of the city dwellers.

  There are no more coal bills, but the little car needs a couple of new casings. We won’t trade it in after all this year. There is an Easter hat and a spring suit for the wife and the old kelly [hat] will h
ave to do another season.

  The kids are playing marbles and jumprope in the street, and in the evening when the office toiler walks home from the car line he has a wordless feeling that things aren’t right. He feels that he wasn’t meant for this, and that somehow if things had gone differently he wouldn’t be doing just this. But that doesn’t last long, for shortly he is home.

  To those that are beloved of the Red Gods, spring is more than that. It is the opening of the trout-fishing season.

  If you are a common or garden variety of angler you have a vision of a deep, dark hole where the waters of the creek disappear in a black swirl under the bole of an overhanging tree. Someone is crouching out of sight on the bank and looping worms onto a hook. That is you. Then you gently swing the gob of worms out onto the water and lowering the tip of your rod let the bait sink into that swirl under the cedar. The line straightens with a jerk. You strike and swing the steel rod back over your head, then there is a struggle and the trout is flopping on the bank behind you.

  For that kind of fishing you need an outfit that costs about nine dollars and a half. A good steel rod nine and a half feet long will set you back about five dollars. A half-dozen three-foot gut leaders will be a dollar. Twenty-five yards of excellent bait line can be purchased for another dollar. Any reel will do around two dollars as you don’t need to do any casting with it. A box of number four Carlisle hooks, one hundred in a box, won’t be more than a quarter.

  With that outfit you are equipped for bait fishing on any type of stream that you have to “horse” the trout out of. Horsing is a technical term for that free arm motion that causes the trout to suddenly desert the stream he has been born and raised in and go for a flying trip through the air. It is the only method of landing trout in streams that are so brushy and clogged with snags that it is impossible to play them.

  Worms are the bait for the early part of the season. Use plenty of them and keep your bait fresh.

  Some bait fishermen will say that a leader is an affectation and tie the hook directly to the line. But a leader will mean bigger fish. A leader is invisible in the water and the old sockdologers that will barely sniff at a bait on the end of a line will hit a seemingly unattached gob of worms like a flash.

  At this time of year the trout are in the holes in the smaller streams. The drains through culverts on the nearby streams often harbor the very largest trout. In the evening and in the early morning trout will be feeding in the shallows—but the deep pools and hollows under the banks are the very best bets in the daytime.

  The bait fisherman’s best time is the early spring. The fly fisherman comes into his own in the later spring and summer.

  Just now he is contributing to the prevailing unrest of labor owing to a vision of a certain stream that obsesses him.

  It is clear and wide with a pebbly bottom and the water is the color of champagne. It makes a bend and narrows a bit and the water rushes like a millrace. Sticking up in the middle of the stream is a big boulder and the water makes a swirl at its base.

  A man in hip boots with a landing net hanging under his left shoulder by an elastic cord is standing in the rushing current and studying what appears to be a big red morocco pocketbook.

  The man is the fly fisherman, and what he is looking at while his fairy light wand of a rod rests straight up in the top of his hip boot is his fly book. A snipe lights on the boulder and looks inquiringly at the fly fisherman and then flies jerkily up the stream. But the fly fisherman does not see him for he is engaged in the most important thing in the world. Deciding on his cast for the first day on the stream.

  Finally he bends on two flies. One on the end of the leader and one about three feet up. I’d tell you what flies they were, but every fly fisherman in Toronto would dispute the choice. With me though they are going to be a Royal Coachman and a McGinty.

  The fairy rod waves back and forth and then shoots out and the flies drop at the head of the swirl by the big boulder. There is a twelve-inch flash of flame out of water, the flyfisher strikes with a wrist like a steel trap, the rod bends, and the first trout of the season is hooked.

  Those are the two kinds of trout fishing. Ontario affords the very best of both kinds. I would go on and write some more. But there are too many trout fishermen in Toronto. The city would be paralyzed. Imagine the havoc in offices and families if they all left the city tomorrow.

  Everything would be tied up, from the streetcars to the Parliament House.

  Besides, I can’t write any more just now. I’m going trout fishing.

  Tooth Pulling No Cure-All

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  April 10, 1920

  To the mind of the man in the street the practice of medicine is swayed by a series of fads. A few years ago we all had appendicitis. More recently we all were the unwilling victims of tonsils and adenoids. Still more recently it seemed to the layman that blood pressure controlled all things. At present it seems that all the ills that flesh is heir to can be traced to our teeth.

  But that does not mean that to achieve health we must become an appendixless, tonsilless and toothless race. Removal of any of those centers of infection is the very last thing to do. We ran through the appendix and tonsil period and now to the layman it seems that we are in the midst of an era of X-rays and tooth pulling.

  It is a fact that there is in the United States an organization of dentists known as the One Hundred Percent Club, who extract every tooth where the root is infected. On the other extreme are the dentists who try and save every infected tooth.

  The middle course of saving all the teeth that are possible to keep, and only extracting when it is the only possible plan, is the sane one, according to a leading Toronto dentist.

  “All movements swing like a pendulum,” he said. “They go to one extreme and then return to the other. The only safe plan is to use common sense and sanity.”

  According to the Mayo brothers, world-famous surgeons of Rochester, Minnesota, ninety percent of all infections of the body are located above the collar. In the Mayos’ hospital all teeth with infected roots are extracted simply to eliminate the possibility of infection.

  Infection starts on the outside of a tooth in a little gelatinous globule. This may not be removed by the toothbrush, which would merely pass through the clot of germs and separate them but not remove them.

  The waste products which this colony of active germs produce form lactic acid which, with the germs, dissolves the tissue and eats its way up the tooth. The germs finally enter the roots where a pocket is formed which the dentists call a rarefied area.

  It is these pockets at the root of the teeth which contain millions of disease-breeding germs which the dentists locate through the X-ray.

  The X-ray is not infallible, according to the dentists. Too many dentists accept the X-ray picture as final and order the tooth pulled. The X-ray should only be one step in the diagnosis. It may show almost anything, depending upon the angle from which it is taken and the skill of the dentist who is reading it.

  As soon as a pocket is discovered at the root of the tooth, the hundred percenter orders the tooth pulled. He does this because it has been discovered that in these pockets are germs which enter the circulation and go to every part of the body. They are called selective germs. That is, each one has some particular part of the body which it affects.

  The pus pocket at the root of the tooth may send germs out into the blood which will attack the kidneys, heart or spleen. The pus which forms in the pocket burrows back into the tissue, providing a better opportunity for the germs to circulate and eventually reaches the gum, where it forms what is known to the layman as a gum boil.

  To one dentist, as soon as the X-ray reveals an infected area, the only course to follow is to have the tooth out. The careful dentist, however, ascertains whether the root of the tooth is dead or not. If the root is alive he does not have the tooth pulled, but by a system of drainage and irrigation clears up the infection at the root, syringe
s out the pocket and saves the tooth.

  The greatest weapon in combating infection is general good health. There was an era of germicides. Many mouthwashes were manufactured to be used to kill the germs in the mouth. We were supposed to rinse our mouths with some well-advertised wash and leave it like a battlefield after the assault with dead germs lying in heaps.

  It is an absolute fallacy to suppose that we can kill the germs in our mouths with germicides, according to the dentist. There is nothing that we can put into our mouths strong enough to kill germs that will stand ten minutes’ boiling. The germ will always be with us.

  Living a healthy life, keeping up our resistance, keeps the germs under control. They are like seed which is planted in different kinds of soil. If the soil is rocky and arid they cannot take hold. But if it is soft and favorable they flourish. Living a healthy life is the way to combat all disease.

  Lieutenants’ Mustaches

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  April 10, 1920

  Two returned men stood gazing up in infinite disgust at a gang of workmen tearing down a building on King Street.

  “They’ve been pecking at that for two weeks,” observed the first, who wore a maple leaf with the First Division insignia in his lapel as he spat into the street.

  “War ain’t taught them nothin’, Jack,” said the other veteran, looking up at the workmen knocking the bricks out one by one. “Stokes gun would do up that job in no time.”

  “Or they could mount a six-inch how at the corner and it sure wouldn’t take two weeks to finish the job,” Jack suggested.

  “We ain’t efficient ourselves, Jack. None of them we’ve named are the real house wreckers. It ought to be bombed. Have a couple of eggs dropped on it at night when the streets are clear. They’d flatten her. I seen Jerry come over—” Bill was getting reminiscent, so Jack changed the subject.