The Thirties

Written by Ray Eddy, for the Homecoming 1980 Yearbook

My last year at TH&VS (1933-34) was perhaps the most memorable year in my life; a very enjoyable climax of my years at the school. That year I was elected President of the Literary Society and managed the production of the Porcupine Quill.

Campaigning for the Presidency of the Lit Society created more furor than Timmins High had seen for many years. Bob Hogarth, Dave Sky and Jack Brovender were my campaign directors and if I had managed to keep them around for the rest of my life in that capacity, I probably would have gone further in the political field than I did. They were marvelous organizers. On Page 48 of the Porcupine Quill is a small mention stating “Eddy for President - was written on every blackboard”. Well, that is a little understated - the fact is that each morning and lunchtime when we returned to the classrooms, both boards in all form rooms were completely covered with the slogan. These three fellows must have had unlimited help and I suspect a bit of sanction from the teachers who were known to proceed very slowly to their classrooms where they knew the chalking was going on.

I always arranged to be about the last one in the room and you can imagine how disturbing it must have been to the teachers to put up with 40 odd students clapping and calling out “Speech – Speech” - not once a day - but a every change of classroom as we were on the rotary system.

I had several very worthy opponents and once I got over the embarrassment, I became very adept at making more and vaguer promises than any of them - and with the splendid artwork caricatures and cartoons that constantly showed up around the school, drawn by Harry Shephard and Arthur Pritchard, and the general feeling of tremendous enthusiasm, we won the election by a landslide.

We did many things that year, such as staging plays, debates, etc. and I can still remember the dark blue velvet curtains on the stage - which I was usually in front of, being master of ceremonies, and being somewhat inarticulate in those days as I have been all my  life since, my fellow students didn’t miss any opportunities to trip me up - either by repeating four or five words I just said over and over behind the curtain or holding the curtain closed when I had just finished my introduction or whatever and wanted to get off the stage.  I was even stuck by a hat pin one time, in the part of me that was leaning against the curtain.

An interesting thing about the Student Council or Literary Society in those days, was that we were completely self-supporting - not in any way subsidized by the school, so we ran money-making projects, many of which were dances. Two or three a year of three dances were important community events. I recall at one of these evenings Bill Drew was in charge of ticket sales and late in the evening he ran out of change, so he solved his ticket selling problem by the simple expedience of flipping the customers double or nothing to get in – so the $1.50 charge often became $3.00 per couple.

We always served lunches at these big dances and the domestic science students would make the sandwiches in the science kitchen - we would buy the groceries.

Mr. Bernardi at Timmins Dairy was persuaded to donate about half the whipping cream we put in the coffee. An incident that stands out in my mind is that one evening, a person who had never made 45 gallons of coffee before (we had three 15 gallon enamel pots) put the coffee in cheese cloth in the containers, then added the cream and sugar and proceeded to boil the whole mess. Rather than admit we were that stupid and have to do without coffee, we got a bolt of cheesecloth from the sewing room and strained all the curds out of the coffee. Needless to say, there were many compliments about the coffee and the Domestic Science room floor got a good mopping up - some of us lost a good two hours dance time because of the incident.

The Lit Society that year was such an enthusiastic body that we decided to publish a year book. Since we hadn’t done one for four or five years, there were very few precedents available to us and we were all completely without experience.

I had the invaluable experience of picking the right people to work together and get a very large undertaking completed and published against a deadline and made it a literary and financial success. Ernie Hogarth and I looked after the financing and it was our purpose to sell enough advertising that we would be able to give the magazine away and while we did very well, at the end we were obliged to charge the very small sum of twenty-five cents per copy.

The revival of the Quill was a team effort from the word “go”; everybody helped the others. It was during depression years and the school staff was very concerned that we would lose money on the effort. My responsibility was to sell advertising on Saturdays and after school. I sometimes skipped a few classes to keep appointments with merchants to persuade them to support the students - in fact during the last two weeks I think I attended five classes.

The Porcupine Advance did the printing and they got the contract chiefly because Joy Lake was the receptionist and Mr. Duff, composing room chief at the Advance, was very, very helpful. Mr. Lake, owner of the Advance was a little concerned at first, but when he saw that every time we had $100.00 in the bank we wrote  him a cheque in advance, he knew how hard we were trying and I am sure gave the school a very attractive price when the bill was completed.

I believe I am correct that Ginger Gilbert and Roland Godin from Commercial did most of the typing.

Miss Cunningham, the Latin teacher, would, when she became very angry with the class, give a little speech that went as follows: “I told you once - I told you twice - I told you three times - but when I get up in the numbers etc. etc!!” With Ginger Gilbert’s help we attempted to have this little diatribe slipped into some of the articles she was retyping - it was tried under various disguises in sports copy, in stories, in articles, and sometimes even in poems but it was always found and rejected by the teachers who were doing the proofing. The final straw came when those of us who were involved plus many innocent article writers were called to the office and told to stop. I think only one writer of an article seriously disapproved of our tampering with their handiwork - most of them rather enjoyed our attempts at humor.

Altogether the Quill that year was a huge success. And while a good many copies sold for a quarter, towards the end, the price on the black market was $1.50. When we were down to the last hundred, I sold them for 25 cents each to the ten students who had worked the hardest on the sales team and they were a happy to be about $13.50 to the good when they sold them at the going price.

I was not the only one who benefitted from the production of that magazine; the experience we got was of value I am sure in later years to Ernie Hogarth who attended RMC, joined the army and later went into business. Vic Copps who went into newspaper and magazine work and later became the Mayor of the City of Hamilton. Harry Shephard and Arthur Pritchard both became active in the Commercial Art field and later went into business. Eino Aho and Henry Ostrosser both later became businessmen. Connie Harris became one of the first businesswomen of her day and later married. I’ve lost track of Lew Seddon; Jack Marks became sports editor of the Globe and Mail and Publisher of Sports magazine; Bob Torrance went into business.

So you see, we have all led good, productive lives I’m sure in good part attributable to our association that year with producing and directing something worthwhile.