Working the Dead Beat (34 page)

Others had public profiles in sharp contrast with their humble beginnings. Who knew that Simon Reisman — the tough-talking, cigar-chomping market capitalist chosen by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to negotiate a free trade deal with the Americans in the mid-1980s — had flirted with communism as a student at McGill University?

“Honest Ed” Mirvish made a fortune as a bargain-basement retailer by claiming to be the cheapest guy around. But he was a big-hearted benefactor of the arts and his community. Giving away free turkeys at Christmas was only one of his many generosities. Broadcaster Peter Jennings, the eloquent voice and cultured face of
ABC
News, was in fact a high school dropout who had educated himself by reading voraciously and roaming the world as an international correspondent.

Dorothy Joudrie wanted nothing more than to be a housewife and a mother, but she became infamous as “Six-Shot Dot” when she emptied a gun into her husband, corporate titan Earl Joudrie, after he tried to terminate their tempestuous marriage. Ted Rogers, a relentless entrepreneur, was actually driven to build his communications empire to avenge and honour his father, who had died when he was a boy. The senior Rogers had been an inventor who developed a radio that could operate without batteries and had founded the Toronto radio station
CFRB
. He died suddenly in 1939, when he was thirty-eight and his only son was six. His devastated widow was pressured into selling the radio station. For the rest of his life, Ted Rogers, in a roller-coaster career that culminated in his being one of the richest men in Canada, was propelled by and thwarted in his drive to regain control of his father's radio station.

Jane Rule was an American writer who fled her country in the repressive McCarthy era and found a refuge in Canada, where she was instrumental in the development of two movements: the blossoming of cultural nationalism, and gay literature. Finally, Doris Anderson, the child of an unwed mother, was a pioneer feminist who bludgeoned male opposition in order to become the first female editor of
Chatelaine
and turned the magazine into a vocal vehicle for women's rights.

Everybody has a private life. What unites these people is the impact they made on the public agenda.

 

 

Ralph Lung Kee Lee

Chinese Head-Tax Survivor

March 10, 1900 – March 15, 2007

C
ANADIANS CONFRONTED AN
ugly part of our collective past in June 2006, when Prime Minister Stephen Harper rose in the House of Commons to offer a formal apology to the remaining payers of the Chinese head tax and their families. His contrition and the symbolic $20,000 payment for “racist actions” had been such a long time coming that there were only six survivors, including Ralph Lung Kee Lee, who were well enough to sit in the visitors' gallery that day to hear Harper speak.

“We acknowledge the high cost of the head tax meant that many family members were left behind in China, never to be reunited, or that families lived apart and in some cases in extreme poverty for years,” he said. “We also recognize that our failure to truly acknowledge these historical injustices has prevented many in the community from seeing themselves as fully Canadian.”

At 106, Lee was the eldest of the fewer than two dozen surviving payers of the infamous tax. His story mirrors the hardship and prejudice that so many Chinese endured when they came here as foreign workers. We tend to assume that the Chinese arrived with the building of the railroad, but they have actually been here since 1788. That's when Captain John Meares sailed from China with a crew that included some fifty Cantonese and landed in Nootka Sound, in present-day British Columbia. He bought some land from a First Nations chief and, with the help of his Chinese carpenters, built a trading post and a ship — the
Northwest America
, the first European vessel launched in B.C. Some of the Chinese jumped ship and “intermingled” with aboriginal women, according to historian Anthony Chan, author of
Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World.

The second wave of Cantonese Chinese was prospectors. They moved north from California in 1858 during the gold rush in the Fraser River Valley. Because they were seeking gold and because B.C. was mountainous, they began referring to what is now Canada as Gum Shan, or Gold Mountain. There were soon about five thousand Chinese living in B.C., some of them taking over abandoned mines and forming their own companies, and others providing food and laundry services in mining towns.

After Confederation there was a great push to link the West Coast to the rest of Canada by completing the Canadian Pacific Railway, and that meant that cheap Chinese labour was in demand. Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald put it bluntly: “The choice is only between Chinese labourers or no railway; there is no alternative.” More than fifteen thousand Chinese immigrants worked laying track and at other jobs to build the
CPR
. More than a thousand of them died during construction. When the railway was finally completed in 1885, the prime minister acknowledged their contribution in the House of Commons by saying, “Without the great effort of Chinese labourers, the
CPR
could not have been finished on schedule, and the resources of Western Canada could not also be explored.”

The public mood about the Chinese turned sour after the railway was finished and manual and service jobs dried up. Many laid-off Chinese sojourners became destitute and faced social and racial discrimination. Unable to return to China, some moved east into the Prairies and Ontario. To curb immigration, the government passed the infamous Head Tax Act in 1885, which levied a fifty-dollar entrance fee on all Chinese immigrants coming into Canada. The tax increased to $100 in 1900 and was raised again, to $500 (the equivalent of about $10,000 today), in 1903. Newfoundland began charging a similar tax in 1906, which was repealed only after the province entered Confederation in 1949. About 81,000 Chinese immigrants paid a total of $23 million in head tax to enter Canada.

And yet, despite the costs and the prejudice, Chinese people like Ralph Lung Kee Lee continued to come to Gold Mountain. He was born on March 10, 1900, in Toisan, Guangdong province, the middle of three children. Because he was “number two,” his parents decided to send him to Canada, hoping he would prosper and send money back home.

He was only twelve when, with two younger cousins aged nine and five, he boarded a ship in Hong Kong for the long voyage to British Columbia. All three boys had identification tags hanging around their necks. An uncle met the ship in Vancouver, claimed the three tagged boys, and took them to Fort William (now Thunder Bay).

Lee was indentured for five years, washing dishes (standing on an apple box to reach the sink), peeling potatoes, and doing whatever else was asked of him, until he had paid back the debt his uncle had incurred for his head tax. Then he began working maintenance on the railroad tracks — hard physical labour from morning to night.

Lee finally got a break when a white engineer offered him a job working in the train kitchen, helping the cook prepare meals for passengers and crew. For the first time in his life he was making enough money to set some aside. When he was twenty-two, a decade after he had landed in Vancouver with a tag around his neck, he sailed back to China. His parents had found him a bride, Kem Lun Lee. They married in 1922 and had a son, Ming, a year later. By then Lee was running out of time: if he remained out of Canada for more than two years, he would forfeit his immigration status.

Once again he made the long voyage, leaving his family behind in China. By now, though, he had marketable skills. He found a job in a restaurant in Windsor, Ontario, and began saving money to bring over his wife and child. Politics again intervened. The onerous head tax was repealed, but the Liberal government of William Lyon Mackenzie King replaced it with something even more draconian: the Exclusion Act of July 1, 1923.

The law curtailed immigration from China and prohibited family reunification. Between 1923 and 1947, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed, fewer than fifty Chinese were allowed to enter Canada. As a result, many Chinese Canadians called Dominion Day (now Canada Day) “Humiliation Day” and refused to celebrate.

By the mid-1930s Lee had saved his passage back to China. By then his son, Ming, was a teenager, older than Lee had been when his parents had sent him to Canada in 1912. Lee stayed for two years, the maximum time he was allowed to be out of the country without losing his status. His wife gave birth to a daughter, Faye, in 1937 and became pregnant with a second daughter, Linda, before Lee had to return to Canada.

In China, Lee's elderly parents found the money to send Ming to school in Hong Kong. There the boy fell ill, and with no family to organize medical care, he died in 1939, when he was seventeen. Lee, who had known his son for only two brief periods in his short life, never discovered where Ming was buried, a trauma that haunted him for the rest of his life.

The Exclusion Act was lifted in 1947, two years after the Second World War ended. Lee applied in 1949 to have his wife and two daughters join him in Canada, but they weren't granted permission until 1952 — three decades after Lee and his wife had married.

His younger daughter, Linda, saw her father for the first time when he met their boat in Vancouver. She was an adolescent, about the same age as Lee had been when he arrived in Canada for the first time with his two younger cousins. The adjustment was hard — neither the children nor their mother spoke English — and they had to learn each other's ways. They settled in a small town near Windsor, where Lee ran a restaurant and later operated a small import-export business in Chinese herbs and dry goods.

In the late 1970s, his daughters grown and independent, Lee and his wife moved to Mississauga, a city to the west of Toronto. She died in 1981 at the age of seventy-nine, but he continued to live on his own until 1991, when he moved in with his daughter Linda. When she and her husband relocated to Vancouver in the mid-1990s, he moved into a nursing home close to one of his granddaughters. He continued to drive his car until he was ninety-five and, a robust walker, agreed to use a wheelchair only when he was past a hundred.

All this while the political movement to lobby for compensation for those who had suffered under the head tax was gaining momentum in the Chinese community. Beginning in the mid-1980s, more than four thousand head-tax payers and their families, including Lee, registered with the Chinese Canadian National Council, seeking redress. Compensation was one thing — it was only money, after all — but a formal apology was one concession too far for many politicians, who feared it would set a precedent for other groups seeking public remediation of historical wrongs.

The debate ramped up when Stephen Harper, leader of the Conservative Party, made redress and an apology part of his platform in the 2006 election campaign. Negotiations began in earnest after the Conservatives won the January election and formed a minority government. Six months later the stage was set for the Ottawa ceremony.

A train dubbed the “Redress Express” left Vancouver, stopping en route to pick up several of the fewer than two dozen survivors, the roughly two hundred widowed spouses of head-tax payers, and other family members at stops along the way. Passengers settled into complimentary seats provided by Via Rail.

Lee, accompanied by his daughter Linda and a grandson, climbed aboard at Union Station in Toronto. As the eldest of the surviving head-tax payers, he was asked to carry a ceremonial last spike. After Harper's statement in the Commons, Lee asked the prime minister to hang the spike on the wall of the Railway Committee Room, the very room where the decision had been made to build the national railway more than 150 years earlier. No Chinese had been invited to the ceremony at Craigellachie in 1885, when railway baron Donald Smith had pounded in the last spike linking the eastern and western tracks of the transcontinental railroad.

Lee had a very special celebration on his 107th birthday the following year, when his local MP presented him with his $20,000 redress cheque. Later his daughter Linda offered to use some of the money to take her father back to China to look for her brother's grave, but he declined, saying he was too old to make the journey. Although nobody realized it at the time, he had suffered a small stroke, and he went into hospital the next day. He died on March 15, 2007, five days after turning 107.

 

 

Mabel Grosvenor

Pediatrician

July 28, 1905 – October 30, 2006

T
HE LAST SURVIVING
granddaughter of Alexander Graham Bell and one of the first women to graduate from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Mabel Grosvenor began working as a pediatrician in Washington, D.C., in the 1930s, an era when the likely outcome of most childhood illnesses was death. More than sixty years later, when she was asked to name the greatest medical advance during her career, she promptly replied: “Antibiotics.” Although she lived most of her life in the United States, she began and ended her life at her grandparents' estate in Baddeck, in the rugged highlands of Cape Breton overlooking Bras d'Or Lake in Nova Scotia.

Why she decided to become a pediatrician is lost. She never married and had no children of her own, which may have been a factor. Then, too, she probably absorbed the idea of nurturing and caring for other people's children from her own grandparents. Grosvenor's grandmother, Mabel Hubbard Bell, after whom she was named, was deaf. She had lost her hearing as a child, as a complication of scarlet fever in the days before antiobiotics made it a serious but not deadly disease. Her grandfather, Alexander Graham Bell, began his working life as an elocution teacher specializing in deaf students. That's how he met both his wife, Mabel, and Helen Keller, the blind, deaf, and mute child who, largely thanks to his interventions, graduated cum laude from Radcliffe. In 1913, when Grosvenor was eight, her grandparents, who were dedicated to children and teaching, hosted a huge reception for Maria Montessori, the Italian early childhood education advocate and pioneering female doctor, and founded an American branch of her movement in their Washington home. If her grandparents were not the models for her, she was a keeper of their legacy.

As the last person to have a close relationship with the inventor of the telephone, Grosvenor was a precious conduit to the past for journalists wanting to know more about her grandfather's work and personality. “People were always bringing children to Grampie,” she told her nephew Edwin S. Grosvenor for his 1997 biography,
Alexander Graham Bell: The Life and Times of the Inventor of the Telephone
. “If they called on him or wrote that they had a deaf child, whom they wanted him to see, he would always make time to see them.”

She also described doing experiments with her grandfather, including demonstrations of how sound carried better underwater than through the air. “When we were swimming at the shore, he would go away from us and have us duck our heads under water,” she told her nephew. “He would then clap stones under water and we could hear it. Then we would raise our heads out of the water and he'd clap stones in the air and you couldn't hear it.”

Grosvenor depicted Bell as “a very theatrical person,” in a 1994 interview with Baddeck journalist Jocelyn Bethune, remembering that when he told a story, “you were on the edge to hear it.” She described him as “six feet — which was tall in those days. He had sparkling hazel eyes and great expressions. His hair stood up — but it was flat when he was not feeling well.”

While researching
Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell
, biographer Charlotte Gray went to visit Grosvenor in 2003 at her retirement home in Washington. By then ninety-eight, Grosvenor was nearly blind and quite deaf and “had terrific mobility problems,” but “she had
all
her marbles.” Happy to talk about her grandparents, she told Gray that she was ten years old before she realized that her grandmother was deaf. “We all knew that we had to look her in the face when we spoke to her, and we could never call to her from another room, but we thought this was just good manners.”

As for her Edinburgh-born grandfather, she described him as speaking an educated English without a Scottish or regional accent. This was a key detail, because there is no known recording of Alexander Graham Bell speaking. “His father Melville was a speech teacher, and he would never allow his sons to speak with an Edinburgh brogue,” Grosvenor said. “The only times I heard him use a Scottish accent were when he was reciting ‘A man's a man for a' that' by Robbie Burns, or when we visited Edinburgh together in 1920.”

In a long life stretching the length of the past bloody century and well into this one, Grosvenor embraced electricity, the telephone, cars, airplanes, female suffrage, television, men on the moon — everything but the computer, which she resolutely resisted. Self-effacing, private, and forward-looking, Grosvenor was cherished by several generations of nieces and nephews in the extended Bell-Grosvenor family, as a confidante, a mentor, and the embodiment of love and caring.

MABEL HARLAKENDEN GROSVENOR
was born on July 28, 1905, at The Lodge, Beinn Bhreagh (which is Gaelic for “beautiful mountain”), in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, her grandparents' summer home. The property included not only “The Lodge” — the thirty-seven-room mansion built by her grandparents in the 1890s — but several other houses and buildings dating from the same era. She was the third of seven children of Elsie (neé Bell) and Gilbert Grosvenor, the man who transformed
National Geographic
from a dry journal into a glossy, heavily illustrated monthly magazine.

She grew up in Washington, D.C., in the family home near Dupont Circle, but she spent extended periods of time, including most summers, in Baddeck because her parents travelled extensively as what we now call photojournalists. “He was the centre of her life, but she was the centre of ours,” she said about her grandparents to biographer Charlotte Gray.

By all accounts the Bells doted on their ten grandchildren. In
Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude
, Robert V. Bruce described the inventor as having “the majesty of Moses and the benevolence of Santa Claus.” Grosvenor's older brother Melville told Bruce that his earliest memory was “sitting on his grandfather's lap and, on instructions, tweaking the nose of Alexander Graham Bell to produce a dog's bark, pulling his hair for a sheep's bleat, and by way of climax, tugging his Santa Claus beard for the deliciously fierce growl of a bear.”

Grosvenor was in Baddeck when her grandfather's red silk kite,
Cygnet
, soared 150 feet above Bras d'Or Lake with a young man named Tom Selfridge clinging to its structure. The apparatus hovered for a breathtaking seven minutes and then sank gently into the water after the wind dropped. Bell, who was obsessed with the idea of manned flight, later wrote about this experiment: “I almost forgot to mention the witness who will probably live the longest after this event (and remember least about it) — my little granddaughter Miss Mabel Grosvenor — two years of age.”

He was right about that. She didn't remember the
Cygnet
's brief flight in 1907, and she was not even there — being at home in Washington — when the
Silver Dart
achieved the first controlled powered flight in Canada, on February 23, 1909. Even so, in a 1994 interview with journalist Jocelyn Bethune, she said: “I swear I remember being there with Grandma — being very cold, being frozen, but everyone was excited. I didn't see why everyone should be so excited — if Douglas [pilot J.A. D. McCurdy] wanted to fly, why shouldn't he? Being brought up on wonders, they seemed commonplace.”

Four years later, on March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, Grosvenor, then eight years old, rode in an open carriage up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol building in Washington with her mother, grandmother, aunt Daisy Fairchild (neé Bell), and two of her own four sisters. They were part of a suffragist march at least five thousand strong, demonstrating in favour of giving women the vote. The march drew an estimated half-million onlookers; many of them were violently opposed to the female franchise and hurled abuse and lit cigar butts at the marchers while the police looked away. According to Grosvenor, her grandfather was the original suffragist in the family. “He persuaded my grandmother. I think he felt that women had just as much right [to vote] as men.”

She described her early school days to journalist Jim Morrow in an interview for the Baddeck
Victoria Standard
in 2005. “We got out of school at lunchtime. And then in the afternoon two days a week we had horseback riding and one day a week we had dancing class,” and all of this in addition to art classes on Saturday. All the great adventurers of the day probably passed through the Grosvenor home, but the only one she could remember was the Canadian Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, because he stayed with them and “he put sugar on everything.”

An intelligent, studious girl, Mabel at the age of fourteen served as an unofficial secretary to her grandfather, taking dictation from him on a variety of subjects ranging from genetics to genealogy to the mechanics of hydrofoil boats. She'd had a bad bout of whooping cough in the spring of 1919. Her parents, wanting to “toughen her up” because the deadly influenza epidemic (which had spread through returning soldiers of the Great War to civilian populations around the world), was still raging, agreed to let her extend her usual summer sojourn at Beinn Bhreagh. She was in residence on September 9, 1919, when her grandfather's hydrofoil boat the
HD-4
set a world marine speed record of 114 kilometres per hour, a record that stood for a decade. “As I remember, the speed of the
HD-4
was measured on land,” she told Morrow. “There was a mark on the shore and when the
HD-4
reached another mark further up the shore, they measured the time it took to get there.”

At Beinn Bhreagh she slept in a sleeping porch off one of the balconies, a habit that persisted until her last five years. “I slept out there all winter. We had a child's play broom and we'd brush the snow to get to the floor. And I had a cold bath every morning to strengthen me,” she told Morrow. That winter she took up skiing, ice skating, and snowshoeing, but mostly she was being “tutored” by her grandfather in his new hobby, genealogy.

The following year she accompanied her grandparents on a sentimental trip back to Bell's native Scotland, partly in search of his roots. “He didn't really get interested in genealogy until his father died,” she remembered decades later. “We went to parish offices to look through records and visited cemeteries. He found several cousins he didn't know existed.”

While they were in the U.K., Bell, who had never flown in any form of aircraft himself despite his fascination with manned flight, arranged for his granddaughter and his wife to fly from London to Paris, but, as she told journalist Allen Abel in 2003, “at the last moment, he chickened out and wouldn't let us go. He said it was too dangerous.”

Back in the U.S., Grosvenor enrolled in Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, a liberal arts college for women and the eldest of the academically elite “Seven Sisters.” After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1927, she entered the medical school of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, choosing that institution over Harvard because of its smaller classes.

Grosvenor was one of only seven female medical students (one dropped out after contracting tuberculosis) in her graduating class in 1931. After doing an internship at the New York Hospital in New York City, she moved back to Washington, where she worked as a pediatrician in private practice and in clinics for disadvantaged children at the Children's Hospital.

After practising medicine for thirty-five years, Grosvenor retired early, in the mid-1960s, to care for her own parents, who were both frail and in poor health by then. As well, she took over stewardship of the Beinn Bhreagh estate. She loved to sail on the lake in her dinghy, the
Carola
, or on the yawl
Elsie
. A well-known figure in Baddeck, she spent her time driving her silver convertible, gardening, presiding as honorary president over meetings of the Alexander Bell Club — one of the longest continuing women's clubs in Canada — and taking care of others.

She was an ongoing source of awe for family and local residents for her ability to recall names, events, and people. As she grew older, she was granted the first conservation easement in Nova Scotia to help ensure that the property and its gardens would continue as a heritage site.

As she had done almost every year for more than a century, she travelled from Washington to Baddeck in June 2006. As the days grew shorter and cooler she stayed on because her health problems, including congestive heart failure, were accelerating and she thought she would receive better medical care there than in Washington, according to her great-nephew Grosvenor Blair. “That's what she said, but I think she also loved Baddeck and the people, and she was very much at home here,” he said. Grosvenor died quietly of respiratory failure on October 30, 2006, in the place where she had been born more than a century earlier. She was 101.