Whistling in the Face of Robbers: The Life and Times of Dahn A. Batchelor

By Dahn A. Batchelor

Dahn A. Batchelor could have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but instead he was born into poverty, living the first year of his existence in a two room shack with no running water or electricity. In this first volume of his memoirs, author Dahn A. Batchelor shares the details of his lifefrom his birth in Toronto in 1933 to his eleventh year in 1944. This book is the first of six volumes of his memoirs. In this volume, he narrates the story of his childhood, which aside from being one of extreme poverty; he suffered from loneliness and several failures in school. But more than that, he has written about the events in history that encompassed his life along with the lives of his contemporaries. He describes what it was really like to live through the years of the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War. As Batchelor recalls his life from 1933 through to June 1944, you will get the feeling that you were there with him. Unbeknown to him during his childhood years, he would later play a role in society that had a profound effect on the lives of millions of people around the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781462028160

Dahn A. Batchelor

Since the writing of his memoirs and reading them was and is a huge undertaking, Dahn Batchelor decided that he would write them in six volumes—two of them in each of three series. His life experiences’ representing his childhood years is in the series, Whistling in the Face of Robbers. The second series which represented his life as a young man is titled, Patience: The snail will reach the ark, and the third series representing his life as an older man is titled Rising from the Ashes.

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Contents

Introduction

Preface

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Introduction

I have known Dahn for many years and I am always impressed anew with the tireless manner in which he grasps his talents and stretches them as far as they will go, wasting none. Most of us let our gifts slip through our fingers in self-indulgent pursuits but Dahn has always seemed to recognize his ability, and therefore responsibility, to fully develop his own varied and considerable talents and then use them to help others. His life has indeed been interesting, because he made it so. His autobiography is a generous sharing of his experience, rather than any sort of conceit. It is simply part of his philosophy that no part of a life should go to waste, not even the telling of the tale. And in the end, you will find that Dahn has chosen to present to us in his autobiography, not simply his own story, but the story of the centuries in which he lived. His life has been well lived and his story well told.

Jack Hope barrister & solicitor

Preface

It was the Roman satirist, Juvenal (c.60—c.140) who said that ‘if you are poor, you will whistle in the face of robbers.’ All through my childhood years, I was so poor, I was always whistling. It’s ironic when one thinks about it. My great maternal grandfather was one of the richest men in Canada and I could have been born with a golden spoon in my mouth, but because my mother was date raped (resulting in me being conceived at that time) and subsequently ran away from home, and because she was too proud to return to the security of her family, my life as a child began in a two-room shack in a field with no water or electricity, with my crib being the bottom drawer of an old beat-up dresser. It was from these humble beginnings, that I eventually had to make my own way into the world. The only thing I had going for me from my humble beginnings was the gradual development of a creative mind.

A creative life is a meaningful one. However, Bob Sharpe, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Wales, has stated: Actions within a life have meaning—life does not. Most human lives are meaningless in that they have no overriding purpose. It does not follow that they have no value or significance. Indeed, they may achieve more and do less harm than those who are devoted to some grand plan. unquote. The vast majority of human beings have no grand plan other than reaching their goals of acquiring their basic needs of warmth, shelter, clothing, food, sex, love and of course, happiness and seeking to acquire those needs in themselves is not wrong.

Life without purpose can be meaningless, of that there is no doubt. The late Princess Leila Pahlavi, formerly of Iran, said it rather well when she said and I quote; The most important thing is to find yourself, to find a reason for existing, to find a direction in life, a goal. unquote. Unfortunately, despite her great wealth and education, she found no purpose in life and sank into bouts of depression and eating disorders and died an early death on June 17, 2001 at the age of 31. Adrienne Clarkson, the Governor General of Canada when appearing before the graduates of the University of Toronto on June 19, 2001 said in her address: Mediocrity is safe, very easy and therefore, to be avoided at all costs. The purpose of life, it seems to me, is to leave no one and nothing indifferent. It means taking risks, going down paths that are not approved. It means the possibility of loneliness and isolation. It means, in sum, all that is opposite to mediocrity. She later said; ….if the moral stance you take is that you can change things, that you can effect things, that you do not have to accept the immediate and expedient way, (then) only with this stance can you even vaguely hope to make a difference. unquote.

I will paraphrase Rick Warren from his book, The Purpose Driven Life in which he said in part; Our unspoken life metaphor influences our lives more than we realize. It determines our expectations, our values, our relationships, our goals and our priorities. For instance, if we think life is a party, our primary value in life will be having fun. If we see it as a race, we will value speed and we will probably be in a hurry all of the time. If we view life as a marathon, we will value endurance. If we see it as a battle or a game, winning will be very important to us. unquote

As I grew older, I gradually realized that if life is simply being an on-going party, then it isn’t as much fun as living one’s life as one grand scavenger hunt.

As I see it, all our lives are influenced by these aspects of life, some more than others. It’s simply a human trait in all of us. But with some, it goes to the extreme.

Although the majority of the world’s population is satisfied in acquiring basic needs and settling for these needs alone, many of us at some time or another, have had desires of one sort or another to achieve some grand purpose in life beyond acquiring our basic needs. Many of us are or have been devoted to some ‘grand plan’ and for this reason, we sometimes wish to bring about a change for the better in the status quo that will have a beneficial effect on the lives of others and in the process of doing this, we make a name for ourselves. As fate would have it, many of us have been fortunate enough to have left our works and our names behind us to play a role in and be part of history and in that sense, have a desirable effect on the future of our fellow human beings.

But as the years went by and I grew older, I realized that having an IQ of 122 was no guarantee of success. There are many Phi Beta Kappas who wear the key and that is the only real thing they ever accomplished. Social scientists have established that having a high IQ coupled with a good upbringing and going to the right schools and choosing a lucrative career matters little. There are however five aspects in our lives that brings our goals to the fore. They are fate, competence on-the-job, ambition, hard work and sacrifice.

A great many persons aspiring to leave their mark have had wretched childhoods and often lived mundane lives until some incident in their lives changed their own directions in life. There is no doubt in my mind that fate plays an enormous role in our lives although it would appear that some people seem to have all the luck. But having a lot of luck is not a sign that one should rely upon. During the American Civil War, General George Armstrong Custer had almost a dozen horses shot from under him and he emerged from the war with hardly a scratch. Then along came the battle of the Little Big Horn.

Fate being as fickle as it is, my life could have been mundane and insignificant to anyone other than my immediate family, friends and co-workers but when I saw the opportunities that fate was giving me, I ran along side of fate like a person wanting to hitch a ride on a passing train and I let it take me wherever it was going. I grabbed that proverbial brass ring on that train and it has taken me around the world and into the lives of many millions of my fellow human beings and possibly indirectly, even yours too.

Many people choose to make their mark, beginning in their childhoods and despite their hardships and sometimes handicaps in life; they somehow manage to do just that. My own existence comprises of a wretched childhood, hardship, hard work and sacrifice and admittedly, sometimes laziness to boot and on occasion, outright stupidity on my part but thanks to fate and the other attributes I spoke of, I have been able to etch my mark on the tablets of history.

My story is that of an ordinary human being and like everyone else, I have my own failings, idiosyncrasies, talents, desires and aspirations. But as fate would have it, I just happen to be on some occasions, given the opportunity to do something special at the right places and at the right times and that’s what has made my existence have some significance on the lives of so many of my fellow human beings.

If by reading my story, it inspires you to grab that brass ring as the train of fate moves along side of you so that you too can serve your fellow human beings, then my having been here will definitely have an effect on your life also as well as those to whom you would serve and inspire.

There is something I want to add in my preface that I feel should not be left out. I have done something in this book that very few of my fellow autobiographers have done, if any—that is to write about our times. I think it is important that those of us who have written our memoirs, to take on the responsibility of telling our readers what it was really like to live in our era and what occurred when we were alive. If we don’t do this, then the writing of history will be left to those who were born long after the events we write about took place and long after those of us who were there during those events, have passed on. There is a responsibility on us to correct any errors being promulgated.

For example, there are some who maintain that the slaughter of almost six million Jews by the Germans is fiction when in reality, it is a fact and the Japanese for many years refused to put in their school text books anything relating to the atrocities committed by the Japanese from 1937 to 1945. Often statements of leaders of nations bring about these errors also.

In September 2001, Tony Blair, the prime minister of Great Britain while visiting President George W. Bush in the White House said to the president; My father’s generation went through the experience of the Second World War when Britain was under attack through the days of the Blitz. There was one nation and one people that stood side by side with us at that time, and that nation was America and that people was the American people, who stand side by side with us now. unquote.

The prime minister was historically wrong. In my September 21, 2001 letter to him, I wrote in part; Anthony Eden, the newly appointed Dominions Secretary wrote the Canadian government on September 6th, 1939; ‘It is hoped that Canada would exert her full national effort as in the last war, even to the extent of the eventual dispatch of an expeditionary force.’ On the following day, Prime Minister King told the House of Commons; ‘We stand for the defence of Canada. We stand for the co-operation of this country at the side of Great Britain and if this house will not support us in that policy, it will have to find some other government to assume the responsibilities of the present.’ On the 10th of September 1939, Canada cabled a text of a declaration of war against Germany to Vincent Massey, the Canadian High Commissioner in London. It was Canada that stood side by side with Great Britain during the Blitz. Ninety-seven Canadian airmen flew along side the airmen of the Royal Air Force when fighting the oncoming German bombers and forty-seven of them died in the air battles. The German bombing of England ended in June of 1941. The United States didn’t enter the war until five months later when Germany declared war against the United States in December 1941. unquote

Without appearing to being too facetious, I am compelled to add that a study in 2002 showed that only three percent of the people in the U.K. could name three continents and only 15 percent could name all seven. If Blair got the same education these people did, then I can readily forgive him for his gaffe. George W. Bush made a similar gaffe while visiting Tokyo on February 18, 2002. He said to the Japanese officials; My trip to Asia begins here in Japan for an important reason. It begins here because for a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times. From that alliance has come an era of peace in the Pacific. unquote

Obviously this man forgot about America’s war with Japan between December 1941 and August 1945. There was no era of peace in the Pacific during those years and certainly no great and enduring alliance between the United States and Japan during those war years.

In all likelihood, both Prime Minister Blair and President Bush knew the real truth of their gaffes and were simply stroking, so to speak, their hosts.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California who was born in Austria made a terrible blunder when he addressed the Republican convention in New York in September 2004. He said that he remembered seeing Soviet tanks in the streets in the province of Styria in Austria after the Second World War.

That was not possible because he was born in 1947 and by that time, the Soviets were gone and the British occupied that province. He probably made that statement to forward the old communist threat for Bush’s election campaign on the latter’s fight against terrorism.

The danger of leaders in various nations making false statements publicly is that many people will believe what these people of power are saying and it is these kinds of mistaken beliefs where the errors in history are formulated.

Another example of a historical error came about on December 10, 2001. An article was published in the Law Times in which one of its writers wrote, ….it strikes me that before the two world wars, they interned Japanese people and they interned the German people. unquote.

In actual fact, neither the Japanese nor the Germans were interned before either of the two great wars in the Twentieth Century had begun. Germans were interned after the First World War began and it was only after the Second World War had begun that the internment of the Germans and Japanese took place.

Here is another example of a historical error. On December 27, 2001, the narrator of a television history program describing the attack on Pearl Harbour, said, The war with Japan ended with one plane and one bomb. unquote.

During that moment in his broadcast, he was speaking of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima from the American bomber, Anola Gay. In actual fact, the war with Japan ended after a second plane dropped a second atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki three days after the first bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. It was because of the dropping of the second bomb, that the emperor of Japan, Hirohito was able to convince the diehards in the Japanese military to surrender.

Sometimes, a caption under a picture in a newspaper can be misleading. As an example, in November 2010, the Toronto Sun printed a picture of a wooden bench that was used to seat some of the major Nazi war criminals that were tried by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. In the caption under the picture it stated in part; The dock where Nazis including Herman Goering and Martin Bormann stood to answer charges of crimes against humanity 65 years ago goes on display for the first time today in a special exhibition. unquote

Martin Bormann was the private secretary to Hitler and as such, he had considerable influence over Hitler in many ways. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg tried Bormann in absentia in October 1946 and sentenced him to death. He actually died on a street in Berlin by ingesting cyanide on May 1st, 1945 while trying to flee Soviet soldiers in Berlin. That being the case, he couldn’t have stood in the dock to face his accusers. Anyone reading that caption would believe that he was actually alive in October 1946 and present during the Nuremberg trials—eighteen months after he died.

Atlas Editions, a Quebec firm that prints very detailed atlases that are put in binders with commentaries on the back side of each atlas stated in the atlas titled, The Great Lakes of Africa the following erroneous statement with respect to events taking place after colonial days had passed. Some of these events were widely published as was the massacre of Hutis by Tutsis in 1994. That statement was a terrible blunder and did an injustice to the Tutsis. In actual fact, the assassination of president Habyarimana in April 1994 set off a violent reaction, resulting in the Hutus’ conducting mass killings of Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus. Primarily responsible were two Hutu militias associated with political parties: the Interahamwe and the Impuzamugambi. The Hutu Power group known as the Akazu directed the genocide. As many as 800,000 Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus were murdered enmasse by the Hutus. The publishers of Atlas Edition later acknowledged to me that they had made a mistake.

It’s scandalous indeed to think that so many Canadians know so little about the Twentieth Century. For example, a study in 2002 showed that only 31 percent of Canadians knew anything about the Dieppe Landing in the shores of Northern France during the Second World War in which over 1000 Canadians needlessly died in the battle. And worse yet, when the late Pierre Trudeau, a long-time prime minister of Canada (1968 - 1976 and 1980 - 1984) died in September 2000, many of the high school students didn’t even know who he was and yet most knew who General Armstrong Custer of the Battle of the Big Horn was.

Lord William Rees-Mogg in his book The Great Reckoning said in part about what was taught in the United States with respect to history. Surveys of students suggest that they have little or no grasp of the past. They cannot say in what half century the Civil War was fought much less recognize more subtle patterns in history. What Madonna (female singer) said about her latest boyfriend or girlfriend is much more known than what Winston Churchill (prime minister of Great Britain) said about Hitler during World War II. Madonna has had far more press than Churchill, who is a largely unknown figure for those who came of age in the last two decades of the Twentieth Century. (1980-2000) When world historic figures are forgotten a generation after their death, it is a clear hint that popular culture has discounted history almost to the vanishing point. unquote

These examples explain why I feel that we as autobiographers should include in our memoirs, not only the particulars of our own lives, but also the particulars of the local, national and world events that encompassed us and became part of our lives. If we don’t do this, then those who come after us after we are all gone; will not have the advantage of having been here when we were here while those authors in the future are writing the history of our times.

Writing one’s memoirs is an adventure even though it is an enormous task. At first, it is enjoyable and entertaining to nostalgically go back into one’s own past; then the book becomes one’s mistress, and later, one’s master. But finally, it becomes a tyrant with demands that seem impossible to meet.

It has taken me many years to search for the historical facts in books and on the Internet that I have included in my memoirs but I have done this because I want my readers to fully understand what it was really like to be alive during the years of the Great Depression and the wars that followed it and to learn of the discoveries and new appearances and life in general in the remaining two thirds of the Twentieth Century and partway into the Twenty-first Century in which I was still alive at the time of this writing. This book is not only a book of my memoirs but also a history book that explains in some considerable detail what was really going on around the world during my lifetime. From my observations, very few if any autobiographers have chosen to write about their times in their memoirs.

In order to be accurate, I have found much of the historical information I needed for the creation of this book from various books and internet sources. I strongly urge you to obtain a good atlas so that you can have some idea as to where all the places I have described in this book can be located. It will make it easier for you to see where the events I will be describing to you really took place in the world.

Writing my memoirs that covers the last two-thirds of the Twentieth Century and part of the Twenty-first Century and which includes the historical events encompassing my life is much too vast to include in one book so I have divided my memoirs into three series; my childhood years, my early adulthood and my later years. The first series is titled, Whistling in the Face of Robbers, the second series is titled, Patience: The snail will reach the ark and the third series is titled, Rising from the Ashes. This first volume of the first series covers a time frame beginning in January 1933 and finishing in June 1944.

I hope you enjoy reading this first volume of my first series of my memoirs. Think of it as a trip back in time as you not only promenade with me through my own life but also in the collective lives of millions of others whose lives were equally affected in one way or another by the events of history that encompassed us all.

Dahn Alexander Batchelor

Chapter One

It was during the early morning hours on one of the last few days of August 1951 that my heart stopped. I was naked and had been strung up by my heels and later by my wrists. I had been tortured for ten hours non-stop and suffered from excruciating pain every moment. All the time I was being tortured and screaming in agony, I was alternately begging God to let me die and cursing him for letting me be born. At the end of the tenth hour, my heart finally stopped. My torturers cut me down from the beam in the ceiling, resuscitated me, dressed me and then after driving me through a deep forest, they dumped my unconscious body into a small creek to die and then drove away. As fate would have it, cursing God for letting me be born was pointless because I was born anyway and as you have fathomed by now, I didn’t die in the creek.

The year 1933 was the year of my birth. It was not the best of times and it certainly wasn’t the worst of times but those people who were still alive at the arrival of the century that was to follow and remembered what life was like in 1933, would have attested that 1933 was to them like Queen Elizabeth II pronounced the year 1992 for herself; as being; Annus Horribilis. I suppose everyone has some year in their lives that was particularly bad for them but in 1933, that year was particularly bad for everyone, unless of course they were very wealthy; of which the vast majority of us were not.

Like every year, great events occurred, some bad, some good but for the majority of the people in Canada and the United States in 1933, life for every one of us was just one difficult struggle after another to survive without losing everything we had in the process.

It was in January 1933, the month I was conceived, that the worst thing that could have occurred that year, did occur. It was an event that would have a direct effect on millions upon millions of people in Europe and North Africa in the near future. Adolf Hitler, one of history’s most infamous and cruel dictators, came into power in Germany that year. As a result, over 50 million people died in the conflagration in Europe that was to ensue.

On January 30th, Hitler was appointed the Chancellor of Germany by President Hindenberg. The aging president had knuckled under the pressure he was subjected to by Hitler and his cronies. Several days after the November 1932 elections, the Reichstag (parliament) rejected the program of the incumbent Chancellor, Franz von Papen, for a ‘government of national concentration.’ In response, von Papen resigned. Hitler then asked President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint him chancellor, but the president refused, knowing that Hitler would use the office to obtain dictatorial power for himself. In early December, he appointed the Minister of Defense, Kurt von Schleicher, to the premiership, but he too resigned less than two months later. Hindenburg had no other choice but to choose Hitler who had been the recommendation of the Conservatives, who themselves thought they could manipulate him for their own purposes. I think he was a bit afraid of Hitler since it appeared that Hitler had an enormous power base.

It was during one evening while Hindenburg was standing at the window of the Chancellery, the ‘brown shirts’ (Hitler’s followers) marched in front of Hindenburg’s window by the thousands carrying torches and flags. There weren’t that many actually in the parade. Hitler had cleverly arranged to have them walk around several blocks and keep returning to the street which the Chancellery was located. After watching the parade for more than an hour, the chancellor must have felt very intimidated in not tired from standing up so long at one time.

The new era in Germany started out modestly since only three of the 11 ministers in Hitler’s government were Nazis; Hitler, William Frick, minister of the interior and Goering, minister for Prussia. Hitler swiftly took over all mechanisms of governance and functions of state, making Nazi Germany a totalitarian dictatorship.

In February of 1933, the month after I was conceived, Mayor Cermak of Chicago traveled to Miami, Florida to meet with President-elect Franklin Roosevelt. They arrived together on Wednesday, February 15th and sat together in one of the cars in the parade. The parade car moved slowly down the street as Roosevelt and Cermak smiled and waved at the people lining the streets. The car stopped and Roosevelt gave a speech while sitting at the back of the car. A man named Guiseppe Zangara pushed through the crowd. He fired five shots at the President-elect. The bullets hit four people and Mayor Cermak. The mayor fell out of the car and called out The President, get him away! But Roosevelt ordered his car to stop and further ordered that Mayor Cermak was to be put in the car with him. Roosevelt held Cermak all the way to the hospital. Mayor Anton J. Cermak died three weeks later, on Wednesday, on March 8th, 1933. His body was taken back to Chicago and buried in the Bohemian National Cemetery.

Guiseppe Zangara was tried, convicted, sentenced and executed in the electric chair on Tuesday, March 21st, 1933 only 35 days after Mayor Cermak was fatally shot. That was probably the shortest period in the United States between the murder of a victim and the legal execution of his assailant. Nowadays, the waiting period can go on for many decades.

At midnight on January 16th, 1920, one of the personal habits and customs of most Americans suddenly came to a halt in the United States. The Eighteenth Amendment was put into effect and all importing, exporting, transporting, selling, and manufacturing of intoxicating liquor was put to an end. Shortly following the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment, the National Prohibition Act, or the Volstead Act, as it was called because of its author, Andrew J. Volstead, was put into effect. This determined intoxicating liquor as anything having an alcoholic content of anything more than 0.5 percent; omitting alcohol used for medicinal and sacramental purposes. This act also set up guidelines for enforcement. Prohibition was meant to reduce the consumption of alcohol, seen by some as the devil’s advocate, and thereby reduce crime, poverty, death rates, and improve the economy and the quality of life. National prohibition of alcohol—the ‘noble experiment’ was undertaken for the purpose of reducing crime and corruption, solve social problems, reduce the tax burden created by prisons and poorhouses, and improve health and hygiene in America. This was of course to no avail. The inclusion of the Prohibition amendment of the 1920s was ineffective because it was unenforceable, it caused the explosive growth of crime, and it increased the amount of alcohol consumption in the United States and Canada. Much of the alcohol was illegally shipped into the USA from Canada and much of it was made by moon shiners in the forests of most of the states. However, in February 1933, prohibition in the USA came to an end.

On March 11th, 1918 the Canadian federal government called for Prohibition making the production, importation and sale and consumption illegal. Prohibition in Canada was a part of the War Measures Act because with so many young Canadian men dying in the war over-seas, the members of parliament didn’t think it was ethical that people in Canada should continue partying and enjoying life back home. In addition, the country needed a unified home front with social discipline and industrial alcohol was needed for the war effort and grain was needed more for food production than for alcoholic beverages. Canada’s distilleries turned to producing industrial alcohol. After the war was over, most of the members of Parliament wanted Prohibition to continue however the Canadian Senate had a sober second thought (now there is a play on words) about it but their thoughts didn’t actually change anything.

Prohibition however continued on the provincial level (except for Quebec) and many taverns and stores remained closed. It really was a farce. All the loopholes were exploited again and again. People could still get liquor via mail from other provinces like Quebec or Saskatchewan.

Samuel and Harry Bronfman formed the Canada Pure Drug Company to market their ‘medicinal alcohol’ that was considered legal at that time. The drug store became a popular place. So popular in fact that in Ontario during 1923 and 1924, as many as 810,000 prescriptions for the ‘medicinal alcohol’ were written which in effect gives you an idea of the medical profession’s complicity in all of this. Moonshine production increased in the rural areas which found its way into the mouths of their friends and neighbours. In 1919 a federal report revealed that in the first ten months of that year, 85 stills were seized across Canada whereas only 24 had been seized during the previous year. Incidentally, the term ‘moonshine’ was derived from the fact that much of the work creating the illegal liquor was done at night when the moonshiners did their work only by the light of the moon.

In the 1920s the creation of liquor control boards brought a slow but gradual end to Prohibition. It was obvious that if the politicians wanted to get elected, they had to move in the direction of their constituents who wanted an end to any form of prohibition, so they readily went along with the idea of having liquor control boards having direct control over the sale of liquor to the public.

In Ontario during 1927, the province opened the first liquor store in Toronto and thus, it ended the 11th year of prohibition in that province. Ontario did successfully withhold the withdrawal of Prohibition within several municipalities in the Toronto area for many years but national Prohibition was over in a heartbeat. With this new control in place, temperance advocates moved on to other social problems facing the country such as women’s suffrage (their right to vote).

On February 10th, 1933, the New York City based Postal Telegraph Company introduced the first singing telegram. I never witnessed a singing telegram until sometime in 1970 when a woman brought such a telegram into a police station in Toronto and began singing the message to the police officer the telegram was directed to. On the 17th, Newsweek came into being. On February 25th, the Americans launched their first custom-made aircraft carrier, USS Ranger.

On Monday, the 27th of February, the Reichstag (Germany’s parliament building in Berlin) was empty as it had been in recess since December 1931. At around 8:30 in the evening, one of the caretakers patrolled the building and found nothing unusual. At 8:50 a postman was passing the entrance to the session chamber and he too noticed nothing unusual. But at 9:05 a student saw a man carrying a burning torch on the first floor. By 9:14 the fire alarm was received by the local fire station and the firemen were in the building by 9:24 but by then, fires were breaking out everywhere. At 9:27 there was a huge explosion and the great chamber was enveloped by flames. In the rear of the building a half naked Dutchman, Marinus van der Lubbe was discovered and arrested. He claimed to have set fire to the building as some form of protest. Hitler and Goering (head of the Gestapo) arrived on the scene. Goering at once accused the communists. The next day the ageing President under duress by Hitler, signed a decree which allowed the Nazis to suspend the freedom of speech which they use to ban virtually the entire opposition press. Communists were arrested wholesale.

The German authorities retained the services of Harry Sodermann, the chief of the Stockholm Criminal Investigation Department to investigate the cause of the fire. In his report, he put the blame entirely on Goering. Sodermann was immediately hustled out of Germany. Soon after the Second World War, evidence surfaced that Goering and his henchmen may have been responsible for setting fire to the Reichstag. The motive was clear enough; blame the communists. Some people however now generally believed that the Communists and Goering’s henchmen had nothing to do with the burning of the Reichstag and that it was solely the action of the Dutchman. Who was Lubbe the naked Dutchman found on the scene and what happened to him after he was caught? Lubbe had decided he wanted to live in the Soviet Union rather than in Holland (The Netherlands) but was unable to raise enough money for his train fare. However, in 1933 he moved to Germany where he immediately began protesting against the new government headed by Adolf Hitler. Obviously the man was a bit demented, considering the danger of publicly protesting against Hitler while living in Nazi Germany, an act that was extremely risky at best.

When they police arrived at the Reichstag fire and found Lubbe on the premises, they arrested him and the Gestapo (secret police) began torturing him. As said earlier, he confessed to starting the Reichstag fire however he denied that he was part of a Communist conspiracy. Herman Goering refused to believe him and he ordered the arrest of several leaders of the German Communist Party. As well as Lubbe, the German police charged four communists with setting fire to the Reichstag. This included Ernst Torgler, the chairman of the Communist Party and Georgi Dimitrov of the Soviet Comintern. They were completely innocent but that matter little to Goering as he was all for getting rid of the Communists in any way he could.

Marinus van der Lubbe was tried and found guilty of setting the Reichstag Fire and was executed on the 10th of January 1934 by decapitation with a guillotine. He wasn’t the first or the last to be guillotined by the Nazis. Over 20,000 people would eventually be executed in this manner by the Nazis. Other accused persons however were found not guilty which angered Hitler to no end. At this stage of his career, he didn’t have complete control of the courts so there was nothing he could really do about the verdicts. In the year 2000, my wife and I visited the Reichstag. It is a very beautiful building inside.

On Saturday, March 4th, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated as the president of the United States. It was during his inaugural speech that he made that famous comment, The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself. He made that statement in context with his address in which he outlined an aggressive policy to deal with the economic emergency. As soon as he became president, he appointed Frances Perkins as the Secretary of Labour. She was the first woman in the USA to be appointed to a cabinet post. Richard Bennett, a Conservative and who by 1933 was still indecisive and ineffectual, was the Prime Minister of Canada. His great deeds would come about two years later.

In the years preceding World War II and the Hollocaust, (the extermination of millions of Jews) a Nazi concentration camp was built in the city of Dachau. Construction of the camp was completed by March 20th, 1933. Although many Jews and prisoners of war later died there nonetheless from the horrible living conditions, it was a concentration camp and not an extermination camp such as Auschwitz and several others which were to be built later. Herman Goering was the man who conceived the idea of concentration camps in Germany although Great Britain created them during the Boer War in South Africa although I think the conditions in the ones in South Africa weren’t as bad as the ones in Germany.

On March 23rd, Hitler was given total control of German legislation. He was by now, almost an absolute dictator whose future actions would have an effect on the lives of everyone in Europe, many in Africa and everyone in the Western Hemisphere to some degree, no matter how remote.

Everyone has a community they call home and a great many people consider their home the place where they were born. I was born in the City of Toronto, the capital of the province of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. This city and environs have been my home for most of my life.

The western and centre parts of the city gradually slope upwards from Lake Ontario to the northern part of the city whereas the eastern part of the city begins at the top of the 350-foot (100-metre) bluffs overlooking the lake. Over the years, Toronto developed an incredible network of recreational and park facilities. Walkers, joggers, cyclists and hikers can follow over 56 miles (90 km) of paved trails and many more hundreds of miles of unpaved trails. There are many locations in many of the parks for family picnics and group events. Anyone who has flown over the city or gone up to the Observation Deck near the top of the CN Tower, the deck being as high as 1,465 feet (447 metres) from the street when looking over the city, will think that they are looking over a vast forest. Every street except those downtown for the most part is tree-lined with shade trees.

The city is on the north shore of Lake Ontario, a lake that is one of the largest lakes in the world. It has 712 miles (1,146 km) of shoreline. It is 193 miles (311 kilometres) in length and its breadth is 53 miles (85 kilometres). The southeastern shores of the lake are in the State of New York.

Toronto is blessed with a series of beautiful islands in its harbour. The Toronto Islands were not originally islands but actually a series of continuously moving sand-bars, or littoral (shore) drift deposits, originating from the Scarborough Bluffs and carried westward by Lake Ontario currents. By the early 1800s, the longest of these bars extended nearly 5.6 miles (9 km) south-west from Woodbine Avenue, through Ashbridge’s Bay and the marshes of the lower Don River, forming a natural harbour between the lake and the mainland. The island’s sandy beaches and the island’s paved pathways that meander through expansive lawns bordered by flowers and thousands of trees makes the island park a haven for 1,225,000 visitors each year who visit this 230 hectare (568 acre) park after alighting from the ferry after a 10-minute ferry trip from downtown Toronto. All of the islands are connected with one another by arched foot bridges.

Truly one of the most beautiful sights to be seen is the sun setting over western Toronto from the islands in the harbour. The distant buildings silhouetted in black against the golden sun and the gold sparkling waters shimmering between the island and the mainland with the trees of the island silhouetted in black truly is a feast for the eyes.

By the turn of the Twenty-first century, Toronto was and still is a cosmopolitan city and has developed into one of the world’s most multicultural and diverse cities in the world with it being home to more than 80 ethnic communities from Africa, Asia, the islands of the South Pacific, South America and Europe. Toronto by the turn of the Twentieth First century had become the home of four professional sports teams and the third largest English-speaking theatre district in the world, behind New York and London. It boasts of a world renowned concert hall (which I once performed in as a solo pianist) and a highly respected symphony orchestra. Toronto is also the business centre of Canada with skyscrapers exceeding 70 floors.

The city cares for its own citizens and everyone for the most part are conscious of the rights of others. All its citizens (including those that are landed immigrants) have free medical and hospital coverage, the people are concerned for the homeless and care for them when possible and for the most part, no one in the city needs to go to bed hungry. In the winter months, many citizens roam the streets looking for homeless people and providing them with sleeping bags, warm clothing and food. Those who visit the city and even those who live in it praise it for its many attributes.

In the year I was born however, the city was vastly different then than it was by the end of the Twentieth Century. Most of the people were terribly poor, jobs were difficult to get and anyone who wasn’t a white Anglo-Saxon protestant suffered terrible abuses heaped upon them that are no longer acceptable in any decent community. Thousands upon thousands of unemployed, including children, were homeless and roaming the streets looking for handouts. The police tortured their suspects, the courts were a farce, the jails were archaic and strapping the butts of unruly inmates was the norm. There were no such things as human rights and simply put, the well-to-do for the most part, didn’t give a damn about the vast majority of those less fortunate. Both the air and the water in the city of Toronto were often polluted and even living in the surrounding towns, Scarborough, East York, North York, York, Etobicoke, New Toronto, Port Credit and Streetsville (later all incorporated into the city of Toronto) didn’t make breathing its air and drinking its water brought in from the lake, acceptable by any standards.

The widespread prosperity of the 1920s ended abruptly with the stock market crash in October 1929 that brought about the great economic depression that followed. The depression threatened people’s jobs, savings, and even their homes and farms. At the depths of the depression, over one-quarter of the American and Canadian workforce was out of work. For many in the United States and Canada, these were hard times. The economic troubles of the 1930s were worldwide. Economic instability led to political instability in many parts of the world. Political chaos, in turn, gave rise to dictatorial regimes such as that of Adolf Hitler in Germany and the militarists in Japan. (Totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union and Italy predated the depression) These regimes pushed the world ever-closer to war in the 1930s. It was the longest and most severe economic depression ever experienced by the Western world. It began in the U.S. with the New York Stock Market Crash of 1929 and lasted until 1939 when I was six years of age. By late 1932 stock values had dropped to about 20% of their previous value. Between the years of 1929 and 1939, the world saw one of the most devastating periods of hardship, poverty, and governmental instability in modern world history. With the start of the Great Depression, governments from around the world were thrown into almost ten years of turmoil. The depression did not come to an end for most of these nations until World War II began in 1939.

It was unfortunate indeed that in order for the depression to come to an end, a world war had to begin. That makes sense when you consider that once the war began, employment was on the rise because so many factories were building war machines etc. They needed manpower to function fully to meet the demands of war.

By 1933, as many as 11,000 of the U.S.’s 25,000 banks had failed. Millions of depositors lost their savings because of the bank failures. In those days, governments didn’t insure the bank accounts of its depositors. This led to much-reduced levels of demand and hence of production, resulting in high unemployment (by 1932, 25-30% compared with 9.1 % in the US in 2011). Since the U.S. was the major creditor and financier of postwar Europe, the U.S. financial collapse led to collapses of other economies, especially those of Germany, France and Britain. Nations sought to protect domestic production by imposing tariffs and quotas, reducing the value of international trade by more than half by 1932.

The Great Depression had grown worse and had spread a pall of fear and desperation around the world. Soup kitchens flourished all over North America where millions in the United States and Canada lined up to get their daily meal. Those who had some money would go to a cafe where a cup of soup was reduced to pouring ketchup into a cup of hot water for those who couldn’t afford soup with their meal. Millions of unemployed and dispossessed crossed Canada and the USA in box cars like lemmings, all looking for work. It was common to see the homeless begging at the doorsteps of farmers for an hour’s work so that they could have something to eat.

The farmers and their families weren’t that better off and many of them abandoned their farms to seek employment somewhere else. The farmers, whose farms they were forced to abandon, congregated in the cities in the hopes of finding employment there. In 1931, over a quarter of a million farmers, homeowners and small businessmen lost their farms, homes and businesses in North America. Others, from small towns and villages, singly, in pairs and in groups of a dozen or more, crossed the country in box cars in faint hopes that the next large town or city offered more hope than the last one did. Thousands upon thousands of homeless people could be seen hitchhiking across the country with their suitcases with no hope other than getting something to eat in exchange for pushing a wheelbarrow or digging a ditch for a few hours. Millions of men and women and also boys and girls who were left to fend for themselves, drifted in and out of cities in search of a job or a home in the faint hope that another family would care for them.

Near every freight yard, there were hobo jungles where weary vagrants congregated to exchange intelligence about travel conditions, such as which trains to avoid because of the ‘bulls’, (railroad cops) where they could scrounge a free bed or in which town they could get a free meal or a few day’s work. The railroads gradually became tolerant towards these railroad hobos because there really wasn’t much that they could do to stem the millions of free riders as the numbers far exceeded the ‘bulls’ who patrolled the yards with axe handles and beat vagrants out of the boxcars.

The average family had no more that $20 on hand at any one time but that money was a lot of money then. It was equivalent to $256.31 American and $334.48 Canadian in 1999. It would pay the rent for a small flat over a store for one month, or pay for a dinette set or pay the wages for a live-in maid for a month; if anyone but the rich could afford a maid. For most employable men, the wage was one dollar a day. That comes to $12.82 American and $16.73 Canadian in 1999. Interns in the hospitals weren’t paid anything accept their room and board. In 1933, nine out of ten farmers didn’t even have electricity. I remember living on a farm during the summer of 1941 and there was no electricity on that farm then either. Breakfast was 25 cents. (That is equivalent to $3.20 American and $4.18 Canadian in 1999. Lunch was 40 cents and that is equivalent to $6.41 American and $8.36 Canadian. A four course dinner cost 50 cents. That is $7.69 in American money and $10.03 in Canadian money in 1999. Oddly enough, these were almost the same prices in Winnipeg in the mid 1950s. Airfares from Chicago to Los Angeles return on the other hand were $207 American. If you wanted to take an ‘around-the-world-cruise’ visiting 14 countries for 85 days, it would cost you $749.00 American which in 1999 money would be equivalent to $9,598.72 American and $12,526.33 Canadian. In 1999, I got to spend an all inclusive week (airfare included) in a large hotel in Cuba for the same price of $749 Canadian.) If you wanted to purchase a Kodak Brownie camera for your trip, it would cost you $2.50 American which in 1999 would be $32.04 American and $41.81 Canadian.

Housewives saved near-microscopic and sometimes inedible portions of leftovers to mix in the next meal. They patched clothes, mended socks, relined winter coats with old blankets and steamed off unused one-cent stamps from their incoming mail for their outgoing mail.

Many families in the rural areas of North America were so poor, they lacked indoor privies and even used newspapers and sometimes leaves and twigs (hence the phrase—the dirty end of the stick) for use as toilet paper when they had to go into the outhouses to relieve themselves. Alas, the pages of department store catalogues didn’t do the trick, as they were too stiff and hard. Use of the Sears catalog for this purpose declined in the 1930’s due to the fact that they started printing on glossy, clay-coated paper. Many people complained to Sears about this glossy paper. Can you imagine writing a letter to Sears: Dear Sir, I want to register a complaint about your new glossy catalog paper. It is no longer soft and absorbent and as such, it is difficult to use as toilet paper.

Wage earners had to support their families of six to eight on ten dollars a month. Many of them had lived their entire lives without electricity and few of them had wandered more than ten miles from their homes, a great many never having seen a small town, let alone seen a large city.

Anyone who lived through the thirties, could easily understand why that decade was called the ‘Dirty Thirties’ but of course, I was too young to remember the consequences of being poor; such as sleeping in the bottom drawer of a cheap dresser in a two-roomed shack with no electricity or water of which I did during the years 1933 and 1934.

The people in the United States think they had it bad in May of 2011 with their unemployment figures being 9.1 %. The year 1933 was the worst year of the depression with unemployment being so bad, it resulted in one out of every four (25%) adults being unemployed. The physical signs of distress were everywhere. Clusters of men and women, some with their small children in hand, were begging on the streets for handouts or waiting endlessly at the food relief stations for a small amount of food that would last them through the day. A proud family breadwinner, who had never begged for a thing in his life, would find himself standing in a long line to get the ‘Pogey’. (a term which was used in parts of Canada during the Great Depression to mean government relief––similar to welfare.) Soup kitchens flourished all over Toronto for the single unemployed who had no money at all in their pockets. Factories were closed along with many stores because of forced bankruptcies or because the landlords evicted them. Many a proud father, brother or son was seen with stooped shoulders, standing on street corners with hands outstretched, begging for a dime or even a five-cent piece that would get them a cup of coffee. Bing Crosby’s hit, Brother, can you spare a dime? from the musical, Americana was not only the song of the times; it was also the sign of the times. The St. Lawrence Hall on King Street East in Toronto, once the local focal point for wealth and splendor, where famous artists like Jenny Lind once sang, had been transformed into a large dormitory for the homeless. Even the smallest of houses were crammed with the evicted and unemployed who moved in with relatives. Relatives from out of town who found a place to sleep in a home slept on living-room couches, sometimes three or four to a bed or on mattresses placed in the kitchens. In some communities, as many as 15 percent of the homes were sheltering ‘extra’ family members.

The problems of the Great Depression affected virtually every group of Americans and Canadians. No group was harder hit than African Americans however. As the economy struggled through the 1930s, jobs grew even scarcer. Competition between whites and blacks brought added hostility. By 1933, approximately half of black Americans were out of work in the United States. In some Northern cities, whites called for blacks to be fired from any jobs as long as there were whites out of work. Racial violence again became more common, especially in the Southern states.

Lynching is the extrajudicial execution carried out by a mob, often by hanging, but also by burning at the stake and shooting, in order to punish an alleged transgressor, or to intimidate, control, or otherwise manipulate a population of people, however large or small. It is related to other means of social control that arise in communities, such as, riding the rail, (tied to a pole and carried out of town) and tarring and feathering. Lynchings were more frequent in times of social and economic tension, and often were means by the politically dominant population to oppress social challengers.

Mobs of unruly citizens thought of lynching as a form of punishment for presumed criminal offenses, performed by self-appointed commissions, mobs, or vigilantes who without due process of law, took the law into their own hands. This occurred in the United States before the American Civil War and afterwards, from southern states to western frontier settlements.

Violence in the United States against African Americans, especially in the South, rose in the aftermath of the American Civil War, after slavery had been abolished and when recently freed black men were given the right to vote. Violence rose even more at the end of the century, after southern white Democrats regained political power in the South in the 1870s. Nearly 5,000 African Americans were lynched in the United States between 1860 and 1890. Despite the foregoing, not all lynchings in the United States were targeted against African Americans. Between 1882 and 1968, the Tuskegee Institute recorded 1,297 lynchings of whites as well as the 3446 lynchings of African Americans during that period of time. There were 28 lynchings in 1933 in the United States in which two whites and 24 blacks were lynched by mobs.

For many African Americans growing up in the South in the 19th and 20th centuries, the threat of lynching was commonplace. In the South, an estimated two or three blacks were lynched each week in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The number of lynchings of blacks by white mobs increased from eight in 1932 to 28 in 1933, 15 in 1934, and 20 in 1935. The number of lynchings finally dropped to two in 1939 as economic conditions improved for whites.

Homicides totaling 1,937 were the reasons that people were lynched, followed by 255 for felonious assault. There were also 912 lynchings for rape, 288 for attempted rape, 232 for robbery and theft, and (get this one) 85 blacks were lynched for supposedly insulting a white person.

Lynch mobs enforced the racist social order through beatings, cutting off fingers and/or genitals, burning down houses, and/or destroying the crops of African/Americans. Murder was a common form of lynch mob justice. Most lynchings terminated with a hanging but prior to the final act, victims were sometimes tortured prior to being killed by such methods as beating, burning, stabbing, sexual mutilation and eye-gouging. Photographs of these events frequently show the perpetrators laughing and smiling. Next to hanging, the most common methods of killing were burning alive, shooting, and beating the victims to death.

Often victims were lynched by a small group of white vigilantes late at night. Sometimes however, lynchings became mass spectacles with a circus atmosphere. Children often attended these public lynchings, which anti-lynching advocates saw as a form of indoctrination. A large lynching might be announced beforehand in the newspaper, and there were cases in which a lynching was started early so that a newspaper reporter could make his deadline. It was common for postcards to be sold depicting lynchings, typically allowing a newspaper photographer to make some extra money. These postcards became popular enough to be a real embarrassment to the government, and the postmaster officially banned them in 1908. However, the lynching postcards continued to exist through the 1930’s.

Many lynchings were carried out with full participation by law enforcement and government officials. Police would on occasion arrest and detain a lynching victim and then release him into a location where a lynch mob could easily, and quietly, complete their deed. Fewer