1951 - The Roving I by Eric Nicol

Click here for Eric Nicol Trivia - Maybe a Billion Laughs

“As a teen in 1960s Ontario, I fantasized that some heavenly intervention might allow me to pass high school French so I could go off to Paris and hang out with someone who might be named Collette, Michèle, or something like that. Ernest Hemingway’s death, image, and aftermath loomed large in pop culture and in young male minds at that time.

            He told us, ‘If you’re lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you,’ adding that celebrated comment: ‘for Paris is a moveable feast’…”

Except from: What’s So Funny?
Lessons from Canada’s Leacock Medal for Humour Writing

In my book on the Leacock Medal, I opened the review of the 1951 winner with a personal reference to the somewhat obvious links between Hemingway and Paris and young male imaginings. I couldn’t help it.  

            Eric Nicol’s book The Roving I, the first of three to win the Leacock Medal for him,

tells of ordinary things: a visit to the library, a ride on a train, and a walk through city streets. There’s not much interaction with other people. Yet the book holds your interest because those streets run through Paris, and the train takes you across the French countryside. Nicol wrote the book during his time as a graduate student at the Sorbonne in the late 1940s. He assembled The Roving I as a travel narrative aimed at a Canadian audience, drawing it from the columns that helped pay his expenses abroad. Eric Nicol’s later books also repackaged newspaper columns, but those collections often lacked any unifying theme. The Roving I had the story-like framework of his year in Paris, and this makes it an easier read.

            The tone of the book and many of its observations may seem quaint in an Internet world. Yet some passages could have been written yesterday, and pretty much all of it remains funny. This is because Nicol describes the walks through the streets of the everyday with weird words and silly detail--as he did on his day at the bibliothèque: “A little man saved from midgetdom only by his bowler. With hands resting on his behind, he fluffs out the wings of his swallowtail coat (circa 1885), like a nervous blowfly.”

The book, like all of Nicol’s work, is fun and funny, but I found this one intriguing because it was clear that as much as he liked Parisian life, the City of Light was not destined to be his Moveable Feast. 

For him, it was and would always be Vancouver. 

The book gives readers a chance to reflect on their own touchstone, early life experiences and how they have framed all that has followed.

For More: What’s So Funny?
Lessons from Canada’s Leacock Medal for Humour Writing

Eric Nicol Trivia - Maybe a Billion Laughs

Nicol and His Brush with Me

1947 - Ojibway Melody by Harry Symons-b

Click for Harry Symons Trivia

"The two-story, nineteenth-century manor sits in a leafy, established part of Peterborough. I’m glad that I didn’t know about the house before I entered it.

 Learning within its walls convinced me that I was on to something. “He used to live here; in fact, I bought the house from him,” my host said in reference to a famous former inhabitant.”

Except from: What’s So Funny? 
 Lessons from Canada’s Leacock Medal for Humour Writing

I started this chapter of my book, a review of the first Leacock Medal winner, by describing my March 2013 visit to a very special place and a meeting with a very special person that convinced me that I was on to something with me Leacock Medal student project. 

It was this encounter, in fact, that made me think, for the first time, that my research and reviews might be fodder for a book.

 

The place is an old manor house in Peterborough, Ontario and home to Professor Tom Symons and his wife Christine.  My wife and I visited them in March 2013 to talk about Tom’s father Harry Lutz Symons, the author of Ojibway Melody: Stories of Georgian Bay. Little has been published about Harry, and I wanted access to the family archives at Trent University. 

Harry Symons was that he loved his cottage near Pointe-au-Baril on Georgian Bay and saw it as his sanctuary. With Ojibway Melody, he tried to share it, guiding us around the islands, pointing out the good fishing spots, and describing the locals.  Given Stephen Leacock’s association with Ontario cottage country, the 1947 medal judges probably felt that this book made a fitting first winner of the award established in Leacock’s honour.  

Yet, as I describe in my book, it struck me, initially, as a puzzle. The writing often seems like a  stream of consciousness, nothing like the one-liners, jokes, or comic stories that we consume as humour today. Harry praised simple pleasures: “First we swing our feet out of bed, and dangle them over the side, and keep our toes off the floor just in case it is cold. Then we yawn a good deal and grumble, and flex our arms, and wish we were back in bed . . . And quite often we just do give up and crawl back in again .”  To understand why this would have seemed funny to readers back in the 1940s, you need to recall that Canadians were struggling with the strains of a changing society, and they wanted to forget about the war. Harry Symons was a WWI frontline soldier and pilot and had no desire to dwell on thoughts of war.     



My Fading Harry Autograph

He and Dorothy, the nurse he met recuperating in a British hospital, had eight children including my host Tom, a man who served as the founding President of Trent University and Chair of the national Commission on Canadian Studies and in other roles that helped shape modern Canada. 

His home, the one I visited in the spring of 2013, carries formal designation as "Marchbanks House," a historic site and former home of novelist Robertson Davies. Davies wrote his Leacock Medal-winning novel in this house in Peterborough. Over the years, the home has also welcomed other Leacock Medalists including W.O. Mitchell who taught for a while at Trent.



For my research, Tom Symons described how his father’s Leacock Medal book influenced his life and his perspective leading him to establish Canada’s first department of aboriginal studies at Trent and to define the field of Canadian Studies as we know it.

So, this is why I framed my review of the first Leacock Medal book with the story of my visit to this particular home in Peterborough.

DBD - January 2015

Interview - Harry's Son - Tom Symons

Click for Ojibway Melody - Trivia

1969 Leacock Medal Winner

Trueman Trivia

Stuart Trueman, a reporter and editor, worked for the daily newspapers in his native city of Saint John, New Brunswick (the Telegraph Journal and Evening Times Globe) for over 60 years if you count his post-retirement freelance work for the papers.  He retired in 1971 and passed away in 1995 at the age of 84.

• Initially a cartoonist, Trueman began working at the Telegraph Journal at the age of 18 right out of high school.  He illustrated his 1969 Leacock Medal winning book, You’re Only as Old as You Act, and others with his own drawings.
• Despite other interests and roles, newspaper work in his home town would be his career anchor for the rest of his life. Trueman soon added reporting to his cartooning duties at the paper and eventually became editor-and-chief of the paper.
• One of the men credited with the “discovery” of Magnetic Hill, the visual phenomenon that became a major tourist attraction, Trueman was an extremely energetic promoter of New Brunswick natural phenomena and historical sites.
• He served in many official capacities including, for close to thirty years, as an alternate member of the Commission overseeing the Roosevelt Campobello International Park.  
• Trueman was often referred to as “Mr. New Brunswick” because of his knowledge and promotion of the history of his province and of its scenic and cultural attractions.
• As a 21-year-old reporter, on 19 May 1932, he interviewed Amelia Earhart at the Saint John Airport as she was preparing for her historic flight across the Atlantic.
• In addition to You’re Only as Old as You Act, Trueman wrote thirteen other books and published more than three hundred humorous articles in publications like Weekend, Maclean’s, and Saturday Evening Post.
• He wrote two of the books after the age of 70. They were cookbooks based on New Brunswick heritage recipes co-written with his wife, Mildred.

You're Only as Old as You Act Review

1969- You're Only as Old as You Act - Stuart Trueman

No covered bridges, no swirling tidal waters, and no lobster-eating Acadians in the 1969 Leacock Medal winner.  This disappoints me and my Bourgeois side because the author Stuart Trueman was normally an energetic promoter of New Brunswick.[i] 

Nicknamed “Mr. New Brunswick,” Trueman worked his entire career and lived his 84 years around his native Saint John.[ii] Yet, when reading his Leacock Medal book, you might not recognize any stories as being associated with the place he cared about and called home. 

The book, You’re Only as Old as You Act, bundled up a collection of stories about family, friendships, and other absorptions not tied to geography or local culture. Trueman had published most of them earlier in magazines intended for national audiences and may have written them purposely for a generic Canadian sense of humour. 

Trueman did not consider himself a humorist at all or even a particularly funny writer, but rather a reporter who could write in a light-style when required, and, in this book, his technical reporter skill stands out.  His writing is crisp and efficient.

But these pieces also follow a recipe of sorts.  They often tell of a well-meaning hoser whose plans go wrong and have the opposite effect of what might be expected.

In the story of “The Considerate Shopper,” Trueman advises readers to speak pleasantly

to “sales girls” so that they know you appreciate the “tiring hours they put in” and because the act will encourage “faster service.” He then counts out the dominoes that tumble after his compliment is taken as an accusation, attempts to explain are seen as an awkward joke, and then his apology is viewed as an inappropriate advance.  Similar luck befalls the salesman who thinks his success in fishing will make him popular at the well heeled White Birches Lake Fishing Club. 

One Christmas season, Trueman’s friend Roly Haskins has his head turned by four speeches on keeping up “the goodwill of Yuletide ... all the year.”  When Roly decides to leave his Christmas tree and decorations up, he is branded a tightwad by neighbours who think he is “trying to make one tree last two Christmases.”  His persistent good will wishing causes friends to assume he has something to sell and then “the rumour flew around the Roly was going into politics and shouldn’t be trusted.”

Although Trueman follows a pattern, it’s not enough by itself. His quirky, yet authentic descriptions made it all work. 

My No-New Brunswick misgivings aside, it’s all pretty funny, and that mix of a well meaning hoser, unintentional consequences, and writing skill probably makes a pretty good and still valid recipe for Canadian humour.[iii] 

Trueman Trivia

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[i] One of the men credited with the “discovery” of Magnetic Hill, Trueman  served in many official tourism roles including, for close to thirty years, as an alternate member of the Commission overseeing the Roosevelt Campobello International Park.

[ii] Stuart Trueman worked for two Saint John, New Brunswick papers, the Telegraph Journal and Evening Times Globe, for over 60 years if you count his post-retirement freelance work for the papers.  He retired in 1971 and passed away in 1995 at the age of 84.  Initially a cartoonist, Trueman began at the Telegraph Journal at the age of 18 right out of high school.  He illustrated his 1969 Leacock Medal winning book, You’re Only as Old as You Act, and others with his own drawings.  As a 21-year-old reporter, on 19 May 1932, he interviewed Amelia Earhart as she was preparing for her flight across the Atlantic.

[iii] Trueman wrote thirteen other books and had more than three hundred humorous articles in publications like Weekend, Maclean’s, and Saturday Evening Post.  He wrote two of the books after the age of 70. They were cookbooks based on New Brunswick heritage recipes co-written with his wife, Mildred. (http://w3.stu.ca/stu/sites/nble/t/trueman_stuart.html New Brunswick Literary Encyclodpedia online Nov. 2, 2013)

 

 

1963-Three Cheers for Me by Donald Jack

As a WW II ambulance driver at Camp Borden, my mother attended an average of six to eight fatal air crashes per month. She learned what a body looks like after it passes through a propeller and what it smells like while still smoldering.[i]  Dramatic stuff.  But whenever asked about her role in the War, she talked about her time as chauffeur to a famous pilot.

“I drove Billy Bishop to drink” was her one-line response.[ii]

By the time Donald Jack wrote his war story, the 1963 Leacock Medal winner Three Cheers for Me, an upbeat mood was starting to displace the pain of World War II, and veterans like Mom were more and more prone to focus on funny memories.

The British born Jack had served in the RAF, moved to Canada, and established himself in a less demanding situation as a playwright and author.[iii]  He could laugh about war more often, but, as a writer, he also knew that a good story is more than a one-line joke. Three Cheers for Me never shies away from the trenches, muddy battles, and hairy dog fights.

The Bandy books, three of which would win the Leacock Medal, are first person accounts of the life of Bartholomew Wolfe Bandy, a sometimes smart, but luckless, Canadian medical school dropout who headed to the frontlines in 1916 and later fought from the cockpit of a Sopwith Camel. The realism of the stories convinced early readers and reviewers that they were non-fiction memoirs.  

I found the battles amusing not because of what happens in them, but because of Donald Jack’s set up outside.  When Bandy was preparing to leave for Europe, his father, a self-righteous minister in the Ottawa Valley still shaken by the fifty-year-old Origin of Species, described the Great War as a battle “not just against the barbaric legions of the heathen Hun, but against all revolutionaries, theorists, anarchists, and Charles Darwin !”   He and others saw the greatest dangers in the temptations of alcohol and dismissed bleak stories of battle wounds and trench foot. “Plain carelessness,” one church elder tells Bandy. “No excuse at all. It may be a little damp at the front, but to let your feet get that way is inexcusable ... (I hear) the generals are thinking of punishing anyone who so abuses his extremities.”

As he watches the passing bodies, sits in the mud, and listens to the shells fall, Bandy reads letters from his mother who hopes that he’s keeping up his piano lessons while abroad, adding that her son must be having “an interesting time over there, seeing Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London.”  The correspondence from Canada reaches a crescendo when Bandy starts receiving letters of condolence: “My Dear Bartholomew ... we sympathize with you in your misfortune ... despite everything we are still your friends” with no explanation.  Eventually, an aunt tells Bandy that his father was caught in an indiscretion in the cornfield.

Another force that keeps the story light is the intertwining of a love story based on narrowed eyes.  Bandy has fallen for the young English woman Katherine Lewis, whose face was characterized by a squint.  At first, Bandy says simply that “she had a slight squint” and later a squint to be “self-conscious about.”  Then, he notices that “Her squint ... suits her” and eventually confesses that “That faint squint of hers affected me strongly.”  Bandy later thinks there is “something almost erotic about (her squint).”[iv]

Through these techniques, Jack manages the mix of humour and horror pretty well, but it’s not easy. Even though Three Cheers for Me ends with a cliff-hanger inference of more to come[v] and even though Jack would eventually write many more Bandy books,[vi] a second one did not appear for over a decade.[vii]  Despite his abilities and those inclinations to think of chauffeuring celebrities instead of corpses, it still took a bit of work to find humour in war.

Donald Jack Trivia

Billy Bureaucrat - Parody

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[i] You could stop a thousand people on any street in this country today and not find one person who was aware that over 2,000  military men died on Canadian soil during World War II.  These were the pilots, crew, and others killed in air crashes and ground accidents around training bases.  (“The Great Canadian Air Battle”, Dr. Jean Martin, Canadian Military Journal, Spring 2002).

[ii] Bishop, a flying ace in WWI, was a senior air force officer who promoted recruitment during WWII.

[iii] Jack was not yet a Canadian citizen when he wrote this book. He only came to Canada in 1951 and worked on survey crews in Alberta and as a bank teller in Toronto before turning to theatre and writing, which led to a job with Academy Award-winning Crawley Films in Ottawa. Two years later Crawley fired him.  In 1957 Donald Jack’s Breakthrough was the first Canadian TV play to be simultaneously telecast to the United States. His third play, The Canvas Barricade, produced in 1961, was the first original Canadian play performed on the main stage of the Stratford Festival.

[iv]  Jack’s relationship with his own wife Nancy likely affected his stories.  In 1986, when she fell ill, Jack returned to his native England with her.  He stopped writing for many years after her death in 1991.  Born on Dec. 6, 1924, Donald Lamont Jack died in 2003, working on another volume of The Bandy Papers. (National Post and Globe and Mail Obits in  June 2003).

[v]  The book ended suggesting that the future was to bring an “awful new significance ... to the expression War is Hell.”

[vi] Jack wrote with military discipline, saying his dedication came from "reminding myself of how lucky I am to be able to be the only thing I ever really wanted to be -- a writer."  Jack wrote 40 TV plays, several radio plays, four stage plays, and 35  film scripts.  Leacock medals came for three of the nine volumes of The Bandy Papers : Three Cheers for Me  in 1963, That's Me in the Middle  in 1974 and Me Bandy, You Cissie in 1980.  One of his two non-fiction books was about the history of medicine, Rogues, Rebels and Geniuses.  The other was the history of the Toronto radio station CFRB, Sinc, Betty and the Morning Man.

 

 

 

 

1971 Leacock Medal - Children, Wives, and Other Wildlife

Some Stuff by Robert Thomas Allen

“Sorry, we don’t hire women here.”  I cringe remembering how many times that phrase slid across my lips. In the 1970s, I helped manage a forestry company that worked out of remote camps with crews sharing tents for weeks on end.  We didn’t think and used working conditions to justify our policy.

The same cringing sensation gripped by neck this year when I pulled the 1971 Leacock Medal book down from the shelf and looked at the cover. Children, Wives, and Other Wildlife by Robert Thomas Allen seemingly bundles adult women with things childlike and untamed.  Allen produced the book in an era when the law still permitted gender discrimination in the workplace.[i]  People like me merrily abided by it.

 Allen, however, sat on the other side of the fence, and his book may actually have been mocking sexism with its title.   While capable of playing with gender stereotypes, Allen had no patience with male chauvinism.

“The next time I see a guy sitting behind a wheel honking at a woman driver, then shaking his head slowly and looking over at me with a long-suffering smile as if we belong to some secret club,” he says. “I’m going to go over and start letting the air out of his tires, just so that he won’t get the idea that I agree with him.”

His essays on “wives” are satirical and sometimes silly, but also a celebration of women who support, care, and struggle without abundant appreciation. 

Like most essay collections, Children tries to categorize the pieces but is really a mixture.  His subjects include schools and learning, the lot of women, the humane treatment of wild animals, the natural environment, encroachments on cottage country, and a curmudgeon grab bag of “All Kinds of Complaints” illustrated by Toronto Star cartoonist Duncan MacPherson. 

Still, all of them are thoughtful and progressive for the times.

Allen was my age, 60, and liable to the toxins of bias and nostalgia when this second Leacock book was published. But he keeps an open mind, lives more outside of his era than within it, and finds funniness in the arduous task of clear thinking. 

He sounds a lot more thoughtful than he did in his first Leacock Medal book, the Grass is Never Greener.  Fourteen years had passed, and Allen spent that time as a freelance writer, outside the office world, and working hard as a professional observer of life.

Like a sociologist doing field work, he studies everyone, including his daughters, with a scientific and analytical eye.  He sits in a classroom for a methodical examination of humour.  Little children know intuitively that it’s funny when someone breaks wind, when adults fall down (“Dear Aunt Florence: Last night Daddy fell over a duck,” Allen’s daughter writes in her first work of written humour), or when friends act silly (one boy induces hysteria whenever he does “a little pivot” and announces “I’m a strawberry pie”).

But Allen learns that children have a rougher time with jokes that require the context of prior knowledge, society, and cultural associations, and they, unnervingly, base their judgments on a parent’s reactions. 

His daughter reads to her family at dinner from a book of riddles. 

“When is a door not a door?” she asks.   Allen invites her to share the answer, she says “When it’s upstairs.”  Other family members scratch their heads trying to understand why a door can’t be a door when it’s upstairs. Then the novice humorist says, “Oh. That was for another joke. It’s -When it’s ajar.” At this point, the adults get it, and the little girl smiles with contentment.  A few minutes pass, then she asks “What does ajar mean?”

Thinking about these exchanges cause Allen to recall his own school days, his own biases, and what he thinks is funny, concluding that “the humor in a joke doesn’t come from the joke itself, but from a lot of mental pictures, ideas, feelings, and associations that the joke suggests” and that people have their own peculiar associations aligned to gender, age, culture, and their times.  He thought as much as he wrote.

If I was propelled back to the 1970s, I would (after advising the twenty-something me to think harder and figure out how to accommodate women forestry technicians) tell Allen’s publishers to drop the Wives and Wildlife title and use an unbiased, more enduring one: something like “A Bunch of Thoughtful Stuff by Robert Thomas Allen.”

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[i]  The book was published in the same year the Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada was released (December 1970).  The Report initiated changes in these laws.

.

 

1973 Saturday Night at the Bagel Factory by Donald Bell

Saturday Night in the Oil Patch

April 2013 – Bobbing derricks, truck traffic, and puffs of dust surround me on my drive to Northern Alberta. But the images that fill my mind are of tall buildings and human traffic in a city back east.  Montreal.  I’ve been reading the 1973 Leacock Medal book Saturday Night at the Bagel Factory by Donald Bell. 

My son, Jonathon, lives in Lloydminster and works on a rig in the heavy oil fields.  For six years, his greatest ambition has been to move back to the familiarity and friends of Ottawa.

Donald Bell[i] would have struggled too if he had had to move to Alberta for a job.  He loved his home town too much.  More precisely, he loved the people of Montreal.  The “painters, idlers, hermits, and various city freaks” who populate the pages of Bagel Factory. [ii]  

The all-night diner and bagel bakery on Saint Viateur gave Bell a great venue for the study of urban humanity in action.  But he also found material at rock concerts, wrestling matches, and other gatherings of “Hieronymous Bosch figures in modern dress.”

Bell seemed, however, most engaged when telling me about individuals like Jacob Kaminsky, “the Balloon Man,” who inflated and sold the little balls of latex on the street until weather drove him into Place Bonaventure where he was arrested for selling without a mall permit.   Bell covered the court case telling the story of a man who brought colour to the city streets and to the air floating above them.

I think of my time as a PR guy and my days as a balloon man, stretching, inflating, tying, and tearing my fingers to decorate Legion Halls, backyards, and community centres.  My kinship with the Balloon Man causes me to think that Donald Bell’s Bagel Factory characters likely exist everywhere, and I wonder whether oil patch Alberta had any Balloon Men.

Standing in the senior-filled Tim Horton’s in Red Deer, I think about Jockey Fleming and Kid Oblay, two Montreal street characters that some label beggars.  Bell deemed them “old-time moochers” who “work” the intersection of Peel and St. Catherine.   He drew their jagged biographies by transcribing what they said about each other and Montreal.  The drama in the stories came in images teased out of their words.  Jockey pleaded for burial “in the Irishman’s cemetery” because “That’s the last place the devil will look for a Jew.”

Bell’s went beyond this Jewish sub-culture. The lacrosse game told the story of urban aboriginals, and the theatrical booking agent Don D’Amico, bohemian artist Luigi Scarpini, and the Carmen Espresso Restaurant touched on the city’s Italian community.   The Flea Market in Le Vieux Montreal story revolved around Polish entrepreneur Stash Pruszynski.  And the Delphi Pool Room with its annual Fluke tournament gave Bell an excuse to celebrate the mind of Nick, the proprietor, and the city’s Greek neighbourhoods.

They must have a pool room or two in Lloydminster.  Although I email and phone my son fairly often, we have things to discuss, and I’m thinking that sitting confrontation style in a restaurant booth might not be the best way to break the ice.  That night, he meets me at the Holiday Inn, and we walk a block to shoot pool at The Sticks on 44^th and talk for two hours. A Montreal hockey game is playing on big screen TVs, there’s a fight, the camera pans the crowd, and I think of wrestling at the Paul Sauvé arena and Hieronous Bosch.  I go back to the hotel room and read more Bagel Factory.

Without rolling hills, transport trucks, and edgy odometers, I focus on the text and think less about Bell’s stories and more about his technique.  He seems to be stepping back from the journalist’s role with the story of the stories - and how he does his work: studying and writing about other people’s lives.[iii]  Bell tells how he meets and engages with his subjects. He doesn’t bother writing about people he doesn’t like.  He gets involved. He lends them money, they call him when in trouble, and he partners with them in business.  He gets sued by the Balloon Man, and he gets another “friend” out of jail.  He gets more deeply involved.  Donald Bell’s sees the people in the bars and on the streets of Montreal, not as characters or caricatures, but as humans because he cares about them. 

Caring about my son makes me think about the people I meet in Lloydminster and around the oil rigs outside.  Like multicultural Montreal, they come from many regions and countries, but are all Canadians and interesting to me as people who surround my son.  I start to think that someone might be able to write Bagel Factory-style essays about the people in this part of Canada too.  Maybe this is why a Leacock winning book seemingly about a particular city, particular people, and a particular point in time was really about people everywhere. 

A month later, my work will take me to Montreal and to the Bagel Factory on Rue Saint Viateur.  In front of the bagels and ovens, I will think of the people in the heavy oil fields of northwestern Alberta.[iv]

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[i] Donald Herbert Bell was born November 17, 1936 in Brooklyn, N.Y. In 1941 his family moved to Montreal. His family name at the time was Belitzky. He died in Montreal March 6, 2003, age 66.

[ii] In the 1960s, Bell worked for CBC International Services, the Montreal Herald, the Calgary Herald, and the Montreal Gazette. From 1967 on, he was a freelance writer.  For years, he researched the life and death of magician Harry Houdini.  Bell’s  manuscript was published posthumously in 2004 as The Man Who Killed Houdini.

[iii] In the 1980s, Bell travelled extensively looking for books for his second-hand bookstore in Sutton, Quebec : La Librairie Founde Bookes.  He wrote a column in Books in Canada magazine and a book, Bookspeak, on these experiences.

[iv] For more, check Concordia University Archives  Don Bell fonds. http://archives.concordia.ca/P235 , accessed Nov. 5, 2013