Category Archives: PEI History

Crucial Cyrus Ching

Cyrus Ching, a renowned labour mediator in the United States, was born in Prince Edward Island, but I hadn’t heard of him before reading about him in the October 26, 1949 edition of the Charlottetown Guardian.

I am familiar with his dry wit, though, and I wonder if it came from his early PEI childhood, which sounded quite challenging. I’ve known a few farmers possessed of a dry wit, usually accompanied by the calm and goodnatured mien necessary to persevere in an occupation where you are constantly at the mercy of weather and fortune. I have benefited from being on a couple of community boards with some intelligent, dry-witted farmers, and have learned a lot from them about curbing my chatterbox tendencies and making few, brief comments after all the other chatterboxes have exhausted themselves. It is a powerful technique, and people listen.

Here’s the entire article (including, unfortunately, a bit of the casual racism of the time):

Dry Native Humor Of Islander Is Noted In Refereeing Labor Spats

Washington D.C., Oct. 25 – One of the few reassuring sights in strike-tense Washington these days is a massive man with a shy grin and a huge pipe who lumbers in and out of the White House, the least mysterious participant to enter mysterious meetings.

If you were to point him out to a stranger and say, “That’s the man who is in the middle of one of the most crucial strikes in U.S. history,” the stranger wouldn’t believe you. Cyrus P. Ching, Director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, just doesn’t look like the “crucial” type.

Only clue to the tremendous responsibility which he has carried around for the last couple of years in the job, and which today is at peak-load, is a slight stooping of his huge frame and a minor hesitation in his step. Even stooped shoulders, however, don’t bring his six-foot, seven-inch frame down to the level of average men.

Few persons have the privilege of becoming legendary while they are still alive. Ching has that honor. There just seems to be a sort of legendary quality about the constant, semi-amused, yet quietly profound manner of the man.

Many Anecdotes

There’s almost no limit to the anecdotes involving his dry humor and the subtle devices he has used to get labor and management in a friendly mood. He calls these things “establishing better communications with people.”

Once he was having a particularly difficult time with a union man named Lee, during a tough negotiation. Lee was about to walk out when Ching said: “Maybe we’d better get out of this labor business altogether and start a little laundry.” After the moment it took for all present to catch the gag, there was a big guffaw which relaxed the tension and greased the way for a successful settlement. His favorite line to use on a negotiator who has his dander up is to ask him if he ever heard of “rule six” of the British Navy. That brings the question of what rule six is, and then Ching tells this story:

“During World War I U.S. Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels was visiting British Admiral Beatty. In their presence a captain started sounding off about how the war was being run. Beatty said to him in a sharp voice. ‘You are violating rule six of the British Navy.’ That shut him up and later Daniels asked Beatty what rule six was. Beatty replied, ‘Never take your self too damn seriously.'”

Nation’s Foremost Mediator

Ching is the nation’s No. 1 labor mediator for many more reasons than having a good collection of stories. He has had a key part in the most controversial piece of labor legislation in history, the Taft-Hartley Act, and after two years still has the confidence and friendship of both labor and management leaders.

Ching sums up his philosophy on labor relations in this way:

“Promoting proper labor relationships is nothing you can do overnight. It isn’t anything you can do by law. You can set up machinery to soften the blows of people not inclined to get along together. You can pad their gloves a little, and it may be necessary to have a referee to do that. But in the last analysis labor relations begin down in the bottom department of the plant between the foreman and employee.”

On his job as boss of the Conciliation Service he says:

“We cannot measure the efficiency of a conciliation service by the number of fires it extinguishes. We can measure it only by the machinery we build up to encourage people to settle their own disputes. In other words, the test of conciliation is how few disputes lead to strikes and how many disputes are settled directly by the parties, with whatever help we can supply. My job is to contribute to fire prevention.”

Born In P.E.I.

Ching knows the hard road of success. At 13 he took over management of the Prince Edward Island, Canada, farm on which he was born. After a stint of fur trading and commercial fishing following his farming, he went to a Canadian business school. Soon after graduation at 19, he took off for the big city of Boston. It has been written:

“All he had at the time, when he stepped off the train, was a gripsack, a copy of Bryce’s “The American Commonwealth,” which he had read at 14, and $31.”

First job was on the Boston Elevated Railway Co. Not too many years later he was assistant to the traction company’s president. He had studied law by that time and personnel matters were his specialty. Then labor relations became his sole endeavor and he wound up director of that activity for the U.S. Rubber, just before he came to Uncle Sam.

When people ask him about his Chinese-sounding name – which is Welsh – he replies: “I am three-quarters Scotch and one-quarter soda.”

The article notes that Cyrus had “a slight stooping of his huge frame and a minor hesitation in his step,” but the writer neglected to mention that Cyrus was 73 years old in 1949! According to his Wikpedia entry, he worked up until his death in 1967 at age 91. His Wikipedia entry links to a National Archives clip of Cyrus on an early US television program, and it’s worth a look to try to hear his Island roots in his speech.

Trifluvians

People from Trois–Rivières/Three Rivers, Quebec are known as Trifluviens/Trifluvians.

People from the recently-created municipality of Three Rivers, Prince Edward Island, are known as residents of Three Rivers.

I don’t think any of the three rivers (Cardigan, Brudenell and Montague) that make up Three Rivers count as fleuves rather than rivières, but it sure would be fun to add Trifluvians to our Island lingo. Let’s do it!

(I came to all this through a 1964 article about Quebec singer Pauline Julien declining an invitation to perform for Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to PEI in October 1964 to mark the centenary of the Charlottetown Conference. Julien’s Wikipedia entry notes she was born in Trois–Rivières and was “the companion of the poet and Québec provincial MLA Gérald Godin, another Trifluvian and sovereignist.” Julien and Godin were both arrested and held for eight days during the 1970 October Crisis, then released without charge. I don’t know if her refusal to sing for QEII had anything to do with her arrest under the War Measures Act, but I doubt it helped.)

*The Guardian, September 21, 1964, page 2*

Tremors

The Journal Pioneer is larger than The Guardian this morning, with a huge white border around each page. The Guardian is the same size as it was yesterday.

There have been a few drips of change here and there since Postmedia bought the Saltwire network in August. Yesterday the cartoons in The Guardian were in colour for the first time I can remember. The Saltwire branding has been almost completely removed from both papers.

Will Postmedia keep two papers on PEI? Only time will tell. I hope we didn’t witness the Journal supernova today.

Creel Flies to Paree

Creelman MacArthur built a vacation home in 1933, on the land where our house is located, when he was a member of the Canadian Senate. Before his time in Ottawa, he was a prominent Summerside businessman and a member of the provincial government.

In May of 1924, MLA MacArthur left on what seems to have been a business trip to Ottawa and then on to Europe.

Of note is the flight he took from London to Paris. Commercial passenger air service between London and Paris started in 1919, according to a couple of sources I found. I’m fairly certain that there was no commercial passenger aviation in our part of the world at that time, so could old Creel have been the first Prince Edward Islander to take a commercial passenger flight? I’ll claim that for him and look forward to being proven wrong.

The image of him puffing away in a pokey plane cabin listening to a tinny BBC radio broadcast while looking down as the Dover cliffs give way to the English Channel is clear in my imagination. What a trip!

—RETURNS HOME— Mr. Creelman MacArthur, M. L. A. returned home to Summerside last week from a visit to the Old Country and the Wembley Exhibition. During the trip he toured England. Scotland, France and other parts of Europe. In London he met quite a lot of Canadian friends, some visiting and others located there. He reports having had an enoyable time. Amongst one of his interesting experiences was a flight from London to Paris by the regular express air route which is not only a saving of time but a most comfortable mode of travel. Mr. MacArthur was allowed to smoke his cigar whilst travelling several thousand feet up in the air and to listen in at a radio concert picked up in transit.

Tourism Insert August 1949

I am in love with this busy map from a special tourism section in the August 13, 1949 edition of the Charlottetown Guardian. It reminds me of picture books I had as a child, lots of busy vignettes, new details emerging with every viewing. And Vikings speeding towards PEI!

I can’t read the signature at the lower right, but it could be the work of the Guardian’s cartoonist at that time, Vic Runtz, who did sign some of the lovely drawings included in the rest of the special section. Catherine Hennessey wrote a beautiful tribute to him upon his death in 2001. He was a very fine editorial cartoonist and I hope his work has been or will be exhibited on PEI.

*Vic Runtz editorial cartoon August 13, 1949 Charlottetown Guardian, including his signature cat wearing a bowtie, possibly to give some balance to the rah-rah tourism insert.*

*Vic Runtz editorial cartoon in the June 21,1949 Charlottetown Guardian reacting to promises being made in that year’s Canadian federal election, promises still being made (and broken) today.*

Gus Peters in Hollywood

The news from the western end of the province in the Charlottetown Guardian from this date 75 years ago had an enticing and sparkly dose of Hollywood magic sprinkled over it.

Charlottetown Guardian – July 21, 1949, page 11

Thanks to the Internet Archive, I found the July 1949 issue of Modern Screen magazine and the adorable photo of Gus and Miss Stanwyck. I love that Stanwyck looks to be genuinely laughing, and Gus, then in his early sixties, seemed to be quite amused as well.

I’ve snooped around a bit on Ancestry, the PEI Public Archives, and Libraries and Archives Canada to develop the following quick rough sketch of Gus Peters, friend to the stars:

Gus was born Augustus Morris Peters in Summerside sometime between 1886 and 1889, depending on the records. He signed up for service in the First World War on May 13, 1915 in Fredericton, NB, telling them that his birthday was May 28, 1887.

He was assigned to the 2nd Canadian Divisional Ammunition Column, regimental number 180, and was on the SS Caledonia on June 13, 1915 headed for England. Gus was knocked down by a horse in August 1915, broke his left wrist and spent 24 days in the hospital at Shorncliffe army camp.

He was sent to France on September 16, 1915, serving as part of the Second Division of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in England and France, and received his discharge in Halifax, NS on May 25, 1919.

When he signed up for service, he gave his trade as cowboy, and he also referred to himself as a rancher, not really a PEI kind of occupation to have. It seems he worked for a while in North Dakota, and his demob papers said he was headed to Hot Springs, Montana after the war.

At some point Gus moved to California and married Hattie Seligman, born in Missouri around 1886, on July 7, 1928 in Los Angeles, California.

According to the 1930 US Census records, Gus gave his birthplace as New York, for some reason, and reported that he was employed as a stage hand in moving picture. By the 1940 census, Hattie and Gus were living in a home they owned at 5431 Fulton Avenue, Van Nuys, a few minutes drive from the Paramount Studios lot where the photo with Stanwyck was likely taken.

In the 1950 census, he gave his age as 63 and said he was still working as a stage grip at a film studio. As could likely be expected in a company town like LA, also on his census sheet were silent movie actor George Burton and Citizen Kane art director Perry Ferguson.

Gus died October 16, 1957, possibly after being hit by a car, and was buried at San Fernando Mission Cemetery in LA, his obituary giving his age as 71.

I had a hunch, and Ancestry confirmed it, that Gus was the uncle of my cousin’s husband (because of course he was), and his relatives still live in the Summerside area.

“This is a recording”

We started getting early morning spam phone calls on our landlines a few years ago (our house has an apartment for my mother). Early as in 6:30 a.m. early. My mother was not usually out of bed or, if she was, she was getting dressed or in the bathroom, and she would rush to answer the phone. As her mobility decreased, I was afraid this would all end in a fall.

To prevent a possible tumble, I started taking her kitchen phone off the hook every morning when I got up. I’d hear a dial tone followed by a ring noise and then a voice telling me to hang up and try my call again (apparently known as an intercept message). After the message was repeated twice, a rapid busy signal would start and eventually would go dead after a long period.

My mother would replace the handset when she was in the kitchen and ready for her day, and if someone called to tell her that her Windows machine was acting up or she had won a cruise, she was awake and ready to hang up on them. This was an easy solution to an annoying problem.

We have two phone lines in our house. Our copper line was replaced in 2021 by a fibre optic cable that gives us internet, television and telephone. As my mother doesn’t use the internet, and we are able to wirelessly bounce a television signal from the Bell Home Hub modem to give her television, we decided at that time to leave her copper telephone line as it was.

Until Bell Aliant sent out letters earlier this year. The first informed us that if my mother’s copper line broke, they wouldn’t fix it and my mother would have to get a fibre line, which was fair enough, I suppose. That was followed a month later by another letter saying they would be cancelling her phone service by August if she didn’t switch to their fibre service. A classic Bell passive-aggressive move.

As we already had the fibre line and Home Hub in our house, it was an easy matter of some magic person left over from Island Tel days doing some programming at the Bell Aliant office in Charlottetown and rerouting my mother’s phone number to our modem (each of the Home Hubs has room for two phone lines). We lucked out again and had a tech come to our house (another Island Tel vet nearing retirement) who was able to make things work in our basement to easily route from our modem to my mother’s phone.

The morning following the switch, I picked up my mother’s handset expecting to hear the regular pattern. As I moved around her kitchen, I heard the dial tone followed by the signal to warn that the phone was off the hook, but no gentle, helpful voice.

I thought that was the end of the voice, but a couple of weeks later I was looking after a friend’s house while she was away and remembered she still had her copper line service, so I had one last visit with the Bell Aliant voice:

Anyone know who recorded this message? It certainly sounds like an Atlantic Canadian voice, maybe PEI but could be Newfoundland or Cape Breton, too. Recorded on tape? A copy of a copy of a copy? Let me know what you know, and please try your call again.

Canso

When I heard that a restored Canso airplane was going to be visiting the former air force base in Summerside, I switched a few things around so I could take my mother to see it.

My mother was a clerk in the Royal Canadian Air Force (Women’s Division) during the Second World War, serving from April 1943 to January 1945. She was posted to the RCAF base at Torbay, Newfoundland for 13 months and would have been there at this exact time 80 years ago.

Seeing a Canso, loaded with bombs and depth charges to hunt German U-boats, would have been an everyday thing for her then, nothing special, but today was certainly remarkable. She was interested to see one again, and thought it was smaller than she remembered. This Canso looked very different as it was painted as a water bomber, which was its last role as a working aircraft, and not as a military plane. She found it difficult to believe that 80 years had passed, thought a lot about all the friends she had made, now all gone.

It was windy with rain threatening as I pushed her wheelchair across the tarmac towards the plane. She learned to march on a similar runway in Ottawa, marching back and forth, back and forth. They issued the women shoes that were one size too big because all the marching would swell even the daintiest of WD feet.

It was to that very Summerside runway that she had been headed one day, probably also in 1944, when the plane she had hitched a ride from Torbay to visit her family on PEI spotted a U-boat surface in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. They scrambled to get out of the area and radio the submarine’s position so bombers could be dispatched. She had been sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, so hopped out pretty quickly and the plane returned to Torbay. She never heard, or has forgotten, if that U-boat was sunk.

The Canso we saw today is one of only 13 remaining of the 3,600 built. My mother, once one of 17,000 WDs, is probably one of only a few still alive. Possibly one of the last people who saw a U-boat. My mother is still very much who she has always been – independent, generous, jolly, disciplined – but she has also morphed into being a living historical artefact, still able to tell her story at nearly 102. Rare birds indeed.

Retail Humour 1964

My parents’ grocery store was part of the Lucky Dollar brand. They were independent owners but benefited by being able to purchase stock through the Lucky Dollar centralized system, giving them more favourable wholesale prices, and being included in the Lucky Dollar advertising, which was mostly limited to a large one or two page ad in the local papers that showed the weekly specials.

My mother or father would tear that ad out from the paper and it would hang over their cash register so they could refer to it as they rang up customer orders.

Here’s one they probably didn’t bother to put over the register, although they might well have stuck it up somewhere else in the store so people could get a chuckle. The regular Lucky Dollar ads were usually pretty dry, so this is zany stuff!

Margaret (Campbell) Kilbride, RN

When I wrote about discovering an audio recording of our neighbours Margaret and Kevin Kilbride, I said I was sorry I hadn’t spent more time with Margaret in her later years, wished I had asked her more questions about her nursing career and military service. I knew a little bit, but not much, and didn’t know a way to find out more.

So imagine my delight when I was contacted by a woman who grew up in Foxley River and had interviewed Margaret in 1985. Susan Bulger Maynard was a neighbour of the Kilbrides, and of ours, and her parents, Roger and Norma Bulger, were close friends and great supports to both Kevin and Margaret.

Susan’s interview with Margaret was for an assignment for one of her university courses, and thankfully she saved the paper, kindly sent a copy to me, and has generously allowed me to share it here on my website. It is an absolute treasure and helped to fill in so many blanks about Margaret’s life.

All I had previously known about Margaret’s Second World War service was that she had been a nurse in Europe and somehow lost a finger during that time, but Susan’s interview uncovered many more details, including that Margaret had been a lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps (Nursing Division) in charge of operating rooms in Belgium and France, and had been night supervisor of a 1,500 bed military hospital in England.

I can’t even begin to imagine what Margaret saw during her years with No. 10 Canadian General Hospital, and what she had to live with for the rest of her life. Her time as the head nurse of our little 13-bed Stewart Memorial Hospital in Tyne Valley would certainly have been a very different experience, and there probably wasn’t much that could rattle her.

Margaret would often drop in to our house on her way home from work for a quick visit, sometimes still in her white uniform, so I was surprised to learn from Susan’s paper that after Margaret married Kevin in 1954 and moved to Foxley River, she took a few years off from nursing and worked at home. I expect that after having nursed full time for 22 years, 5 of those her service in the RCAMC, those few years of home life were a very welcome and necessary break.

While I went to school with some of Susan’s younger siblings, she and I have not often crossed paths, but we both feel that Margaret had a hand in bringing us together; if anyone can make things happen from beyond, it would be Margaret!

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