Ads, articles, and filler from old Toronto newspapers
The August 26 1926 edition of the Toronto Daily Star contained this ad for a live performance:
Louise Glaum (1888-1970) appeared in over 110 movies between 1912 and 1925. After this, she returned to the stage, where she started. She toured the Loew’s Theatre chain with The Sins of Julia Boyd and with The Web, which she wrote herself.
The Sins of Julia Boyd was written by Paul Gerard Smith, who also wrote for the Ziegfeld Follies and for Buster Keaton.
The July 22 1926 edition of the Toronto Daily Star contained a photograph of (supposedly) the first woman ever to compete against men in an auto race.
I couldn’t find anything about Mme. Hitier in any searches (it doesn’t help that her name is very similar to “Hitler”). And this list of female Spanish drivers doesn’t include her. Either this photograph got her name wrong, or she is lost to history.
The July 22 1926 edition of the Toronto Daily Star had photographs of the corner of Montgomery Avenue and Yonge Street, just north of Eglinton, in 1907 and 1926:
Streeter provides details on what has happened since. The post office shown in the lower photo was demolished in 1936 and replaced by an Art Deco-inspired two-story post office. This building is now being remodelled into a condominium; Google Street View shows what it looks like now.
The July 9 1926 edition of the Toronto Daily Star contained this photograph of a man who was simultaneously a British baronet and a member of a theatre company playing on Broadway:
Wikipedia has an entry for Sir William Dunn, who was the 1st Baronet of Clitheroe and a former Lord Mayor of London. The page mentions that his son, Sir John Henry, had been located working in a coal mine near Barnsley. I don’t know whether this was before or after he was in the Revue Company.
Searches for John Henry Dunn didn’t turn up anything else, as there was at least one other, more notable, person with that name.
On July 8 1926, the entire staff of the township of Scarborough and their families had their annual picnic at Silver Fern Park. The July 9 1926 edition of the Toronto Daily Star captured the event in photographs.
I could find no reference to Silver Fern Park anywhere. The town of Agincourt has long since been swallowed up by what is now the city of Scarborough; it is bounded by Kennedy Road on the west, McNicoll Avenue on the north, various streets from McCowan to Markham on the east, and Highway 401 on the south. Presumably, the park was turned into housing developments long ago.
One of the common features of the business section of a newspaper is photos of people who have just been promoted to an important position. This has been going on for some time – for example, here’s one from the July 9 1926 edition of the Toronto Star.
Just for fun, and because Mr. Prittie has a distinctive name, I decided to trace him in the Toronto city directories. (What do you do for fun, dear reader?) I didn’t go year by year, so I might have missed some things. Here’s what I found, in chronological order:
24 Hazelton Avenue still stands, though it has been remodelled some; it is now the Ingram Gallery. The gallery has a website, which lists its location as a “historic brownstone”. Sadly, they don’t mention the Pritties, since presumably they don’t know about them.
The May 18 1926 edition of the Toronto Daily Star contained a photograph of Bucky Harris, player-manager for the Washington Senators at the age of 29, and his bride-to-be:
Bucky Harris (1896-1977) was traded from the Senators to the Detroit Tigers after the 1928 season, and became mostly a full-time manager for them until 1933. He then went on to manage the Boston Red Sox, the Washington Senators (again), the Philadelphia Phillies, the New York Yankees, the Washington Senators (yet again), and the Detroit Tigers (also again). He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame as a manager in 1975.
Harris and the former Miss Elizabeth Sutherland were divorced in 1951. She passed away in 1978; her obituary appeared in the Washington Post.
Harris apparently married again, but I can’t find any other information. The Society for American Baseball Research has an article on Harris, which goes into more detail on his baseball career.
The December 2 1926 edition of the Toronto Globe contained two articles that indicated that the weather was significantly different in various parts of the country.
The first article indicated that winter was about to arrive early in Ontario:
Crookston, Minnesota, had it rather tough. If you’re curious, here is the Wikipedia page for Crookston. Test pilot Milt Thompson would have been just shy of seven months old when this cold snap hit.
Compare this to the residents of Newfoundland, who were enjoying an unusually warm late fall:
I couldn’t find climate data for St. John’s from 1926 on the Environment Canada website, for the simple reason that Newfoundland was not yet part of Canada then. But I did look up Sydney, Nova Scotia, which isn’t all that far away, and it turned out that it was having an unseasonably warm spell in late November, 1926. Between November 15 and 30, there were eight days where the temperature was 10 degrees Celsius or higher, and two days where it peaked at 14.4C. (The average high temperature for Sydney in November is 7.3C, and that’s for the whole month; for the second half, it would be lower.)
December 1 was also unusually warm, with a high of 11.1C, but it rained buckets – 41.1 mm of rain fell there. After that, normal service resumed: there was 5.1 cm of snow on December 3, 12.7 cm of snow on December 4, and a whopping 22.9 cm of snow on December 6. There was also snow on the 9th, rain/snow on the 11th, and 38.1 mm of rain on the 12th, so early December 1926 was miserable in Sydney, and was probably miserable in Newfoundland as well.
As for Ontario in December 1926: the Toronto data shows a three-day cold spell from the 4th to the 6th, with 15 cm of snow on the 5th. Ottawa’s cold spell was longer, but with less snow.
The December 2 1926 edition of the Toronto Globe contained this ad for an optician:
A search of the Toronto city directories indicates that William C. Knox (himself) set up shop at the 262 1/2 Yonge Street location sometime between 1915 and 1920. He was still there in 1930, but by 1933 other family members had joined him to form W. C. Knox Ltd. at that location. By 1935, this location became Proctor Optical, discussed elsewhere in this blog.
Here’s an ad from the December 2 1926 edition of the Toronto Globe that I was not able to completely figure out:
I have no idea what a Mosher dance is, and a Google search turned up nothing. My best guess is that it was related to the Mosher School of Dancing, which existed near Bay and Bloor in the late 1920s.
A Google search for The Auditorium and 212 Cowan Avenue also both turned up empty. The 1926 city directory lists the Pavlowa Dancing Academy at 210 Cowan Avenue; this is probably what this was. This dancing academy appears in the 1928 directory, but not the 1929 one.
I also have no idea who or what Audimo was. Google searches for “Audimo” redirect to searches for “Audio”, as they can’t find anything on Audimo.
The area around 210 Cowan Avenue now appears to be a park that serves the nearby high-rises on Dunn Avenue.
Toronto Old News 