Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into Canada Read online

  Harvey’s co-founders, George Sukornyk (left) and Rick Mauran, visit Cairo, Egypt, in 1962.

  Harvey’s

  The Harvey’s fast-food chain is named for an unsuccessful Toronto auto dealer. In 1959 restaurateur Rick Mauran wanted a simple name for his new operation. He considered “Humphrey’s,” but then ran across the name “Harvey’s” in an advertisement for John Harvey’s auto dealership.

  Mauran liked the name, especially when he discovered that the dealership was going out of business and that Harvey was willing to sell his “Harvey’s” sign for cheap. Mauran bought it and put that sign outside his first restaurant on Yonge Street in Toronto.

  Grand & Toy

  At age 25, James Grand (1857–1922) started a stationery “store” in Toronto—he took orders and sorted out the products on his mother’s kitchen table, and then delivered supplies door-to-door from a wagon. In 1883 he teamed up with his brother-in-law, Samuel Toy, and started a real store with 12 employees, including his son Percy.

  In 1904, when much of the city’s downtown burned during the Great Toronto Fire, Percy Grand saved the business by standing on the store’s roof and dousing flaming debris with water, leaving Grand & Toy as the only office supplier still standing in the city’s core. (Percy is also credited with, in 1927, being the first to round the sharp corners on hexagonal pencils, making them more comfortable while still retaining their non-roll feature.) Grand & Toy now has 90 locations across Canada.

  Tim Hortons Donuts

  What does hockey have to do with doughnuts? In most ways, not much, except that Tim Horton, a Hockey Hall of Famer from Cochrane, Ontario, helped start the now-famous doughnut chain. Tim Horton was a defenseman who played for the Toronto Maple Leafs from 1952 to 1970. After 18 seasons, Horton was traded to the New York Rangers, then to the Pittsburgh Penguins, and finally to the Buffalo Sabres. Throughout his career, Horton tried a number of business ventures to capitalize on his fame, including an auto dealership and an unsuccessful chicken-and-burger chain. It wasn’t until he and a partner opened Tim Hortons Donuts in 1964 that he achieved business success. It didn’t last long, though. In 1974, during his second season with the Sabres, Horton flipped his Italian sports car after a game and died in the crash. He was 44.

  LePage used colorful advertisements like these to interest buyers in its glue.

  Le Page Glues

  You could say that Prince Edward Island’s William Nelson Le Page (1849–1919) had a great deal of stick-to-itiveness. He put his mind to creating something that didn’t exist yet: glue that didn’t have to be heated. Rather than boiling discarded cow parts (the standard way to make glue in the late 1800s), he tried using something he could get cheaply—fish skins. He ended up with an industrial-strength glue that had a good shelf life and worked at room temperature. Expanding into the home market with Le Page’s Liquid Fish Glue, he sold 50 million bottles between 1880 and 1887. Le Page left the company in the 1890s and sold his shares, but maintained rights to his name. His partners ignored those rights and added insult to injury by altering the spelling of Le Page to LePage, omitting the space in the official company name. After a lengthy court battle, the LePage Company won, and William Nelson Le Page—lacking the commercial use of his name and a good part of his fortune—retired to Vancouver.

  April Fools’, Newfie!

  Newfoundland—the last holdout to confederation—was scheduled to join Canada on April 1, 1949. As the date approached, somebody realized that April 1 was April Fools’ Day. Since many citizens of the province-to-be were unhappy about losing their independence, the “joke’s on us” symbolism of joining on April Fools’ seemed like a bad idea. Supposedly, that’s why the signing was moved to take place at the very end of the day on March 31, 1949.

  The Arctic Thermometer

  What do you do when your normal thermometer routinely freezes solid? Here’s a handy homemade invention created by “Yukon Jack” McQuesten. All you need are four bottles…

  A sign marks the site of McQuesten’s abandoned trading post at Fort Reliance, Yukon.

  Br-r-r-r!

  For centuries, people in most climates found that mercury thermometers worked well enough to keep track of the temperature outside… But what about the times when the weather is so cold that even mercury freezes? Such was the challenge in the Yukon during the early days of European settlement. It wasn’t just a matter of idle curiosity, either—the weather often got cold enough that a person outside could quickly die of hypothermia. So it was important to know what you were up against before you left your cabin.

  Enter “Yukon Jack” McQuesten. Born Leroy Napoleon McQuesten in Maine, he had gone west for the California gold rush, and when that didn’t pan out, he headed north. Eventually, he ended up about 10 kilometers (six miles) south of present-day Dawson City where, in 1874, he established a trading post called Fort Reliance. It was there he invented a thermometer that saved the lives of many people. He called it the “Sourdough Thermometer,” after the local nickname for prospectors who ate a lot of sourdough bread. It was surprisingly simple, yet brilliant.

  Advertisements extol the virtues of Perry Davis’ Painkiller.

  Little of This, Little of That

  The thermometer consisted of four small bottles. The first contained mercury; the second, coal oil; the third, 150-proof Jamaica ginger; and the fourth, Perry Davis’ Painkiller, a well-known and much-used elixir at the time, made of ethyl alcohol, opiates, and other unknown herbal ingredients.

  How did it work? By paying attention to the freezing points of each liquid. The bottles were set outside in a row where they could be seen from a window. When the mercury froze, the temperature outside had reached –40°C (–40°F). If the coal oil also froze, it was –45°C (–49°F). The Jamaica ginger froze at–51°C (–60°F), but it was the painkiller that you needed to watch for the really cold temperatures: it turned white at –51°C (–60°F), crystallized at –57°C (–70°F), and froze solid at –60°C (–76°F). If the mercury hadn’t frozen, everyone knew it was safe to go outside wearing normal arctic furs. (If the mercury did freeze, most people went outside as little as possible.) But if the Perry Davis’ Painkiller froze, it was unsafe to be outside unless you were within range of a roaring fire.

  Jack McQuesten

  Yukon Jack Canadian Liqueur, made from Canadian whiskey and honey

  Fame and Fortune

  This lifesaving invention made Yukon Jack a legend. Prospector and author Jack London considered it an honor to call him a friend. Years later, London wrote characters based on Jack and his wife Kate—an Athabascan native—in his Yukon stories, The Wife of a King. Another honor of sorts came in the 1970s when American alcohol producer Heublein Spirits named a whiskey “Yukon Jack” and put a picture of McQuesten on the bottle. Jack and Kate did okay, too. They operated trading posts up and down the Yukon River for 20 years, amassing a $2 million fortune before retiring in 1894 to a Victorian mansion in Berkeley, California.

  Canada’s McQuesten River was named for Yukon Jack.

  Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

  An ice shelf is a thick, floating platform of ice created where a glacier flows into the ocean. The largest one in the Northern Hemisphere is the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf on the northern coast of Ellesmere Island, Nunavut. It formed about 3,000 years ago and encompasses 400 square kilometers (155 square miles).

  In 2002 scientists began noticing that Ward Hunt and others in the area were breaking apart. Today, Canada’s arctic has five large ice shelves left, and they cover just 10 percent of the area they did 100 years ago, leading scientists to worry that global warming may make the shelves disappear completely in the next few years.

  The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, Ellesmere Island

  Don’t Forget the Barrel, Part I

  Just after the dawn of the 20th century, the first person went over Niagara Falls and lived. Since then, other thrill seekers and fools have attempted similar feats—some successfully, some not. And they’ve chosen some w
acky ways to do it.

  The Falls

  Canada claims Horseshoe Falls, the only part of Niagara Falls that gives at least a slight chance of surviving an “over-the-falls” attempt since it dumps directly into deep water instead of onto rocks below. Every attempt, successful or not, has taken place on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, although it took a while before Canadians decided to get into the act. Here are a few of the brave (crazy) souls who’ve tried.

  Annie Edison Taylor poses with her barrel after going over Niagara Falls.

  Annie Edison Taylor: The Original

  Date: October 24, 1901

  Method: Wooden and iron barrel

  Result: Survived

  You wouldn’t suspect that Annie Edison Taylor would be one to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. In 1901 she was a Civil War widow and an aging music teacher from Bay City, Michigan. But this was also during a time before Social Security, and Taylor had no savings, no pension, and no children to take her in. As her 63rd birthday approached, she came up with an audacious idea—go over Niagara Falls with the hope that the stunt would earn her enough money to live out her days comfortably. (However, her unspoken thought may have been that death might be the second-best alternative to her dismal financial prospects. One historian reported rumors that before she came up with her Niagara scheme, she considered throwing herself into the Saginaw River.)

  On her 63rd birthday, Taylor crawled over the side of a row-boat and strapped herself into a cramped barrel. It had been made back in Michigan by the West Bay City Cooperage Company from oak, iron, and a mattress, and was weighted at one end with a 90.7-kilogram (200-pound) anvil in the hope that it would keep the barrel upright at least some of the time. On the shore, her newly hired manager talked to a small group of reporters and onlookers, most of whom believed they were watching the prelude to a suicide. In fact, the manager himself had reason to be concerned beyond his financial interests—authorities on both sides of the river threatened him with manslaughter charges if she died.

  A friend screwed down the lid, wished her good luck, and cast her adrift. For 18 long minutes, Taylor floated in the dark…her heart pounding, the barrel spinning and toppling her in all directions amid the ever-growing turbulence of the rapids. Suddenly, stomach-turning weightlessness and her own disembodied scream were followed by a hard and sudden blow that bruised her body, gashed her head, and briefly knocked her out.

  Dazed and disoriented, Taylor floated, came to, and breathed deeply, wondering if she’d be saved before she ran out of oxygen. Finally, she heard knocking and muffled voices. Then came a welcome stream of light and the face of a man squinting down at her. He shouted, “My God, she’s alive!” Spectators along the shore cheered and applauded. Taylor said, “Nobody ought ever to do that again.”

  But of course they would. Taylor’s successful stunt inspired many others over the coming years. And what of her dreams of wealth? Alas, they didn’t come true. Her manager disappeared with her barrel (he wanted to use it to find fame himself), and she spent most of her existing savings trying to track him down and get it back. She made some money posing for photos and selling souvenirs to tourists at a small stand near the falls. She also tried to write a book and considered taking a second plunge but died in poverty in 1921, aged 82.

  Bobby Leach

  Date: July 25, 1911

  Method: Steel barrel

  Result: Survived

  New York restaurateur Bobby Leach had been a performer with the Barnum and Bailey Circus, so he figured he knew enough about stunts and bragged for nearly a decade, “I can do anything Annie can!” On July 25, 1911, he finally tempted fate in a custom-made steel capsule. Leach survived the trip, but not without fractures and contusions that kept him in a hospital for six months.

  Unlike Annie Taylor, Leach made a pretty good living for a while after his barrel ride, recounting the experience and letting spectators inspect his barrel. But fifteen years after his stunt, he died in a freak accident while touring New Zealand—he slipped on a discarded orange peel and broke his leg. The man who survived a tumble over Niagara Falls ultimately died of…gangrene.

  Jean Lussier

  Date: July 4, 1928

  Method: Inflated rubber ball

  Result: Survived

  “Smiling Jean” Lussier was a machinist born in New Hampshire to French-Canadian parents. After a childhood in Quebec he moved to Massachusetts and, although he was capable of making a barrel out of metal or wood, he decided to take a radically different approach: a 1.8-meter (6-foot) rubber ball reinforced with steel bands. Inside, he also reinforced the bottom edge with 68 kilograms (150 pounds) of solid rubber padding and ballast, then lined the inside floor, walls, and ceiling with more than 30 inflated inner tubes, leaving a little space in the center for himself. Lussier survived the fall and moved to Niagara Falls, New York, to sell photos and souvenirs—including “genuine pieces” of his rubber ball, which went for 50¢ each (about $7 in today’s money). Local residents wryly noted he continued selling the pieces long after the original ball was gone.

  The mighty Niagara Falls sends mist high into the sky.

  A 1906 cartoon created by J. S. Pughe shows tourist attractions at a waterless Niagara Falls.

  Sonny the turtle

  George Stathakis and Sonny the Turtle

  Date: July 5, 1930

  Method: Steel and wood

  Result: George died. Sonny lived.

  George Stathakis wasn’t just a chef; the 46-year-old was also a great believer in metaphysical experiences, and he wanted to publish books on the subject. But where would he get the money? Like those before him, he thought he’d make a fortune by going over Horseshoe Falls. He enlisted the help of friends in Buffalo, New York, to help him build a sturdy barrel, and they responded with enthusiasm—too much, in retrospect. The barrel was massive—3 meters (9.8 feet) long, 1.5 meters (5 feet) wide, and weighing nearly 900 kilograms (1,980 pounds). Niagara River expert Red Hill Sr. warned Stathakis against using it, but he didn’t listen. On July 5, 1930, he packed himself—and his 100-year-old pet turtle, Sonny—into the massive barrel and prepared for the ride of his life.

  Stathakis actually survived the fall. He probably felt the initial anticipatory anxiety, the terror of being banged around and suddenly launched downward, and the pain of impact. Afterward, he probably also experienced a profound relief and sense of peace when he realized that both he and Sonny had made it. But then he waited…and waited…and waited. The problem was that the heaviness of his barrel made it fall faster and sink through the waterfall, ending up stuck behind it. Sometime in the night, 14 to 20 hours after the initial descent, the barrel escaped from its watery captivity. Rescuers found it after sunrise, but Stathakis had suffocated long before. His death, however, left enough oxygen for a slow-metabolizing turtle. Sonny emerged from the barrel to continue to live on this side of the misty unknown.

  William “Nathan Boya” Fitzgerald

  Date: July 15, 1961

  Method: Rubber ball

  Result: Survived

  As far as Canadian authorities were concerned, the death of daredevil William “Red” Hill Jr. in 1946 was the last straw. They made it illegal to go over Horseshoe Falls without a permit, and made it clear that permits were not going to be easy to come by. For 10 years, nobody tested that law, but then came 30-year-old William Fitzgerald. He’d learned the lesson of Jean Lussier’s light rubber ball—in fact, he’d consulted with Lussier when designing his own rubber-ball craft. On July 15, 1961, at about 11 a.m., Fitzgerald loaded himself into his rubber ball and headed down the river. By lunchtime, he was fished out of the water below the falls by employees of the Maid of the Mist boat tour company…and was promptly arrested. When asked why he’d done it, Fitzgerald answered, “I had to do it, I wanted to do it, and I am glad I did it.” After paying a fine of $100 (plus $13 for court costs), he headed home to New York City. Fitzgerald’s feat was especially unusual in that he was the first African American to
make the trip, and he hadn’t done it for fortune and fame. In fact, it wasn’t until much later that people even discovered that William Fitzgerald was a maintenance man for IBM and an aspiring novelist with the pen name of “Nathan Boya.” Fitzgerald went on to become a doctor of sociology.

  The partially frozen cascade of Niagara Falls formed a breathtaking spectacle in January 2014.

  Karel Soucek

  Date: July 2, 1984

  Method: Metal and fiberglass barrel

  Result: Survived

  The first Canadian to make the plunge, Karel Soucek was a professional stuntman from Hamilton, Ontario. He ended up trapped in rough waters for 45 minutes afterward, so he was probably grateful that he’d equipped his barrel with two tiny windows and a snorkel for breathing. He was eventually fished out, his cuts, bruises, and chipped tooth were put right, and he was fined $500. Six months later, he was hired to appear at the Houston Astrodome and re-create his Niagara fall. Being dropped in a wooden barrel from the same height into a 10-foot-pool of water should’ve been safer than going over Horseshoe Falls…except the barrel missed the center of the pool and slammed hard against the edge. Soucek was severely injured and died shortly after.