Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into Canada Read online

  The current Banff Springs Hotel is not the original structure. In 1926 a fire destroyed a large portion of the hotel, and there were reportedly some odd architectural finds. Supposedly, when the original hotel burned down, people discovered a previously unknown room that had no doors or windows. Plus, there’s room 873, which has no visible door. It was covered to blend in with the rest of the hallway. The story goes that a family was murdered in the room and their little girl’s fingerprints were smudged on a mirror. The fingerprints couldn’t be washed off, so the room was closed for good. This family still roams the hotel, along with myriad specters, including a bride who either tumbled down a staircase or had her dress catch fire, and Sam Macauley, a bellhop who died in 1978. People claim to have seen the bride floating down the stairs or dancing in her flaming gown in the hotel’s ballroom. Macauley helps out guests, carrying bags, unlocking doors, and turning on lights when other hotel employees are around.

  Despite these reports, the ghosts at the Banff Springs Hotel might not all be entirely supernatural. According to one local historian, there is no evidence that a bride died from burns or that a family was murdered on the grounds. He did find out that an elderly bellhop named Sam McCauley (with a slightly different spelling) once worked at the hotel. But the historian also uncovered accounts of a former public-relations director who thought ghost stories would be good for business, and a hotel manager who rigged a fishing line to make it look like empty bags were being carried across the lobby by a ghostly presence.

  What: A ghost train…we think

  Where: Former railway between Prince Albert and St. Louis, Saskatchewan.

  This train’s legacy is one of the most consistent examples of paranormal activity in Canada, although no one has ever seen an actual train. A light from an unknown source has often been reported following a dirt path that was once the location of railroad tracks between the cities of Prince Albert and St. Louis. Hundreds of people have claimed to see that light, but no one can give a clear explanation for it. Skeptics credit the glare to headlights from a nearby highway. Advocates suggest it may be the ghost of a conductor or brakeman. One story tells of a drunken railway worker who was decapitated while working on his locomotive. Maybe he now wanders the path in search of his lost head. But why a man without a head would need a light and why the head isn’t looking for the body, instead of vice versa, remain unexplained mysteries.

  Who: Captain Colin Swayze

  Where: The Olde Angel Inn, Ontario.

  This tavern in Niagara-on-the-Lake is home to the ghost of British captain Colin Swayze, murdered in the Harmonious Couch House cellars while searching for rum during the War of 1812—or was it while making a brave last stand against detestable American soldiers seeking to steal the rum? Regardless, he died. The coach house burned down, and the Olde Angel was built on the same spot. Swayze’s ghost wanders the halls and causes a ruckus now and then. Guests hear fifes, drums, bagpipes, and partying in the halls, and sometimes things fall or are moved. But apparently he is a friendly ghost—as long as a British flag hangs in front of the inn.

  St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia boasts two famous ghosts.

  Who: The Blue Nun (and a priest of indeterminate color)

  Where: St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia.

  This university has its share of ghost stories but none so famous as that of the Blue Nun, who leaped to her death from the fourth-floor balcony of the school’s Gilmora residence hall. Every year, freshmen report seeing a ghost in a blue habit drifting through their dorms, and hearing stifled giggles in the hallways. Then there’s the disgraced priest who haunts the stairwells, said to be responsible for the nun’s death. (A forbidden love affair?) So he follows her around, hoping to save her soul from the hellfire torment of living eternally among college freshmen.

  The ghost of keeper John Paul Radelmüller supposedly haunts the Point Lighthouse in Gibraltar, Ontario.

  Who: John Paul Radelmüller

  Where: Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, Ontario.

  The Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, on Lake Ontario in the Toronto Islands, is said to be haunted by its first lighthouse keeper, John Paul Radelmüller. The story goes that he brewed his own beer, and on January 2, 1815, he refused to give beer to three drunken soldiers from Fort York in western Toronto. So they lured him to the lighthouse’s cellar, killed him, and then hacked his body into pieces. They buried the pieces around the lighthouse, and his ghost has been reportedly wandering the islands ever since—probably trying to find his pieces and pull himself together. Strange mists, unidentified lights, and the sounds of a body being dragged up the lighthouse stairs are included in visitors’ accounts, which are documented on a plaque at the popular tourist attraction.

  Circus of the Sun

  “We’re happiness merchants—giving people the opportunity to dream like children.”

  —Guy Laliberté, founder of Cirque du Soleil

  Performers in the big-top production Ovo. Cirque du Soleil’s iconic blue-and yellow tents are open for business in Montreal.

  Let the Sun Shine in

  We’ve all heard about it: that dazzling spectacle that combines drama and comedy with pretzel-shaped acrobats. Cirque du Soleil (French for “Circus of the Sun”) is the world’s fastest-growing circus, but this huge entertainment powerhouse had surprisingly humble beginnings—it was the brainchild of a young street performer in the village of Baie-Saint-Paul, Quebec.

  In the early 1980s, Guy Laliberté, a Quebecois college dropout who ran off to Europe to join the circus, found a new job; he hooked up with Les Echassiers de Baie-Saint-Paul, a band of street performers in Quebec. They toured the province, amazing crowds with their ability to juggle, dance, play music, and eat fire—all while walking on stilts. That job wasn’t very lucrative; Laliberté and his colleagues scraped by on whatever tips they got on the street.

  A Cirque du Soleil performer soars to new heights.

  A New Kind of Circus

  In 1984 they finally got a big break. Quebec City was celebrating the 450th anniversary of Jacques Cartier’s discovery of Canada, and Laliberté proposed creating a new type of circus for the celebration. Cirque du Soleil had no animals or variety acts; instead, it featured a combination of dramatic theater, thrilling acrobatics, and music.

  Things didn’t go smoothly at first—the big top even fell down on the first day. Still, the performances were crowd-pleasers, so when the Cartier celebration ended, Laliberté partnered with a fellow performer, Daniel Gauthier, and they took their circus show across Canada.

  Canadians loved the show, but the partners wondered if their venture could earn evern more money. So in 1987, they decided to risk all their savings and bring their blue-and-yellow Cirque du Soleil tents to California. There, the show found stunning financial success. Today, Cirque du Soleil has 20 shows running concurrently all over the world.

  Performers of the Cirque du Soleil production Mystère pose during their Las Vegas show.

  The Artists’ Nature

  Around the beginning of the 20th century, a group of Canadians shook up the art world and created Canada’s first national art movement.

  In 1916 Tom Thomson painted this colorful Canadian forest that he called Autumn’s Garland.

  European Wannabes

  It’s hard to imagine landscape painting as controversial. What could be more traditional than painting the world around you? So it’s strange to discover that an upstart band of landscape painters known as the “Group of Seven” started a movement in the early 1900s that brought international recognition to Canadian art for the first time. Adding to their mystique was the sudden and mysterious death—accident, suicide, murder?—of Tom Thomson, one of their most promising young associates.

  In order to understand the significance of Thomson and the Group of Seven, it’s important to understand mainstream Canadian art in the early 20th century. The national galleries were full of Canadian-themed art that tried very hard to pretend it
had not been painted in Canada. Most of the early painters eagerly packed up their brushes and easels and headed for European academies to learn to paint like the French or English. At the time, European landscape painters were focused mostly on pastoralism, an artistic genre that emphasized idealism instead of realism (and included a lot of shepherds and pastures, hence the name). But there were no verdant pastures and moors in Canada; there were angry cliffs, rugged mountains, vast prairies, and freezing tundras. Yet rather than embrace those natural features, many Canadian painters stuck to the pastures. In some cases, they even went so far as to declare Canada’s dramatic landscapes unsuitable for painting.

  There were exceptions, of course. Paul Kane (1810–71) was as much a mountain man as an artist, tramping across the wilds of Upper Canada, sketching and painting the forests he saw and the First Nations people he met. His work influenced Lucius Richard O’Brien and others. But even these men based much of their success on idealized landscapes painted in the European tradition.

  “Teaching the polly-ticians what to say” is a cartoon by J. W. Bengough.

  Portraits of the Artist as Young Man

  Ontario native Tom Thomson spent his young adulthood in the late 19th century bouncing around with little ambition. Eventually, he managed to find work as an engraver in Seattle, dabbling in fine art on the side. He might have stayed there for good, engraving and dabbling, if not for an overreaction to a woman he loved. Alice Elinor Lambert was an American high school senior who became famous as a writer of romance novels; however, she clearly wasn’t very familiar with romance in 1904 when Thomson got down on a bended knee, declared his love, and presented her with an engagement ring. He expected a loving response. Instead, she giggled. Ever the sensitive artistic type, Thomson not only fled the room, he left Seattle entirely, never to return.

  But what was mortally embarrassing for Thomson turned out to be great for Canadian art. Once he’d relocated to Toronto, he joined the design firm of Grip, Ltd., a company founded in 1873 by J. W. Bengough, one of Canada’s finest cartoonists. The company designed and published Bengough’s weekly humor magazine, Grip, and designed a limited number of books, pamphlets, and advertising on the side. Eventually, Grip, Ltd. came into its own as an important design firm, providing artwork for advertising and other commercial uses. It was in this atmosphere that Thomson began his association with most of the artists who became the Group of Seven: J. E. H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, A. J. Casson, Frederick Varley, Frank Johnston, and Franklin Carmichael. Challenged by Grip’s art director to try landscape painting as a way of improving their skills, it wasn’t long before the artists were heading off for the unspoiled natural beauty of Algonquin Park, paints and canvases in hand…and their expenses covered by an heir to the Massey-Harris farm-equipment fortune.

  F. H. Varley’s Gas Chamber at Seaford depicts a World War I military training exercise in Seaford, England. Soon after, Varley would become a founding member of the Group of Seven.

  The Canadian Spirit

  From his first trip in 1912, Thomson started spending as much time as possible in Algonquin, eventually taking a position as a park ranger, and living in a lakeside shack.

  Joanne Kates of the New York Times later wrote, “His early work was dull and timid, but after Thomson went on his first canoe trip north of Toronto, his eyes were opened and his palette exploded with color.”

  As his artistic skill blossomed, Thomson traded tips and inspiration with his friends, pushing them to create their own exciting new visions of Canada’s wilderness.

  Over five years, Thomson himself produced hundreds of sketches and dozens of paintings, including masterpieces such as The Jack Pine and The West Wind, described by fellow artist Arthur Lismer as “the spirit of Canada made manifest in a picture.” Many of those paintings went on display at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and Thomson was considered one of the country’s most promising painters. But his career came to an abrupt end on July 8, 1917. As he had done many times before, Thomson took his boat onto Canoe Lake. That afternoon, the boat was spotted floating overturned. Eight days later, Thomson’s body turned up, a fishing wire wrapped 17 times around one leg and a large bruise on his temple. Despite that, the local coroner ruled it a case of accidental death due to drowning. Thomson was buried within 48 hours.

  What exactly happened that day on Canoe Lake has stumped art historians and armchair detectives ever since. Theories involving murder or suicide have been most popular—there were rumors that Thomson owed money to a local lodge owner who killed him during a fight to get it back. Supposedly his girlfriend (she never copped to the relationship) was pregnant and he’d borrowed the money to marry her…or killed himself because he couldn’t. Even his burial site came under scrutiny: originally, he was interred in his beloved Algonquin Park, but two days later his brother had the body exhumed and moved to a family plot.

  The Group of Seven

  Red Maple, by A.Y. Jackson, one of the Group of Seven artists

  Artistic Agitators

  What we do know is that Thomson’s paintings greatly influenced the other men he’d worked with at Grip. Those paintings owed little to pastoralism and traditional European landscapes. Their style was rooted instead in design concepts taken from the Art Nouveau and Postimpressionist movements, which emphasized color, flowing curves, and simple authenticity. In taking a new approach to traditional landscapes—and by putting Canadian landscapes unmistakably before their audience—the Group of Seven (as the painters eventually came to be called) intended to use their art as a declaration of national pride.

  By 1919 the remaining artists had added to their numbers A. Y. Jackson and Lawren Harris (a Massey-Harris heir and artist in his own right), and they had begun a campaign of artistic confrontation, provoking public battles with prominent art critics who wanted nothing to do with this new style of painting.

  The publicity attracted important supporters like noted art critic Barker Fairley and Eric Brown, director of the National Gallery of Canada. Brown took the group’s paintings to exhibitions in Europe, where they were met with approval, providing vindication that at last Canadian art was worth serious attention.

  The Refus Global manifesto ushered in a new era of painting.

  By the late 1930s, the once-revolutionary Group of Seven had split up, and their landscapes had in turn come to be seen as the old guard, inspiring the next generation of artists who painted in opposition to their work. “Les Automatistes,” based out of Montreal, rose up in a new revolution with their 1948 manifesto Refus Global (“Total Refusal”) and ushered in an era of abstract and surrealist art. But the Group of Seven remained a historical landmark in the art world, the first who could really stand up and say (proudly), “We are Canadian artists!”

  Group of Seven artist Arthur Lismer painted “Olympic” with Returned Soldiers in 1919.

  Baryshnikov Bails

  On June 29, 1974, a 26-year-old Soviet ballet dancer named Mikhail Baryshnikov bolted out of the O’Keefe Centre in Toronto. It was the last night of the Kirov Ballet’s Canada tour, and he was the company’s star. The show ended with him dancing a spectacular pas de deux, and while his Soviet “escort” (a KGB agent assigned to make sure the dancer didn’t do exactly what he did) waited for him to sign some autographs, Baryshnikov slipped out a side door and into a waiting sedan and disappeared into the night. Baryshnikov became one of the most famous defectors of the Cold War. He later said he chose to seek asylum in Canada (and later moved to the United States), not to reject his homeland but to take advantage of dance opportunities in the West.

  In the years after his defection, he went on to work with famed choreographers like George Balanchine and Twyla Tharp and danced with the American Ballet Theater and New York City Ballet. He also served as the artistic director of the American Ballet Theater and eventually began his own company.

  Mikhail Baryshnikov rehearses for a performance.

  Million Dollar Names, Part II

 
; Here are some more eponymous Canadian families..

  Buckley’s Mixture

  “It Tastes Awful. And It Works.” It’s hard to believe that would be a winning advertising slogan, but W. K. Buckley made it work, because he wasn’t lying…it did taste awful. Buckley was a young pharmacist from Wallace, Nova Scotia, when the worldwide flu epidemic struck Canada in 1918. He mixed up an anti-cough concoction in a butter churn, tossing in ammonium carbonate, potassium bicarbonate, camphor, menthol, Canada balsam extract, pine needle oil, hot chili pepper juice, and a type of red sea algae commonly called Irish moss. It tasted, in Buckley’s own assessment, “brisk.” Still, it seemed to work. Buckley’s Mixture sold for 75¢ per bottle. Long after his death and the sale of the company to a Swiss conglomerate, Buckley’s awful concoction—now with a decongestant added—still sells a reported 6 million bottles a year worldwide.

  Moores men’s clothing store

  Moores Clothing for Men

  In 1980 Toronto-based entrepreneur Martin Prosserman was putting together a discount men’s clothing chain and looking for investors. Dave Moore had been in the men’s clothing business for 15 years and thought a discount chain was a good idea. He had a modest amount of money to invest, so he became a minor stockholder in Prosserman’s company.

  As plans moved forward, Prosserman called the investors together to decide a number of things, including what to call the chain. He wanted to give it a “shorter, sharper name,” like Sears or Eaton’s, which disqualified several possibilities—including “Prosserman’s.” Finally, going down the list of investors, someone saw Dave Moore’s name and threw it out for consideration. Moore’s response: “Sure.” Little did he know that, in just 14 years, his namesake chain would open 100 stores, allowing Prosserman to negotiate a $125 million sale. Perhaps if Moore had had an inkling, he would’ve held onto the investment longer and gotten rich; instead, he cashed out after two years and became a clothing wholesaler, selling to retailers including the one that bore his name.