1883 - June - 1

        “Diurnal Epitome : What Goeth On In and About  the City”
          Hamilton Spectator. June 8, 1883

-      An Indian is trying to get on the police force.”

-      Geo. Midwinter now runs the Rock Bay park, and has renamed it Bay View park. It is a pretty spot. The Clara Louise will run from Bastien’s wharf to Bay View park weekdays and Sundays.

“Materialized Spooks : A Haunted House in the Rue de Macnab”

Hamilton Spectator. June 9, 1883.

“At the corner of Macnab and Murray streets stands an old stone house, surrounded by a small plot of ground, full of weeds, and a pine board fence. This house bears the reputation of being haunted. It looks as if it was. The window panes are all broken, the shutters are rotten, the stones dirty, and all the woodwork in a fast decaying state. Inside there is nothing peculiarly startling in the appearance of the place. It is much the same as houses that have gone to rack and ruin and left for a long time unoccupied usually are. Of late, however, strange beings from the spirit world have made fires in the grates, and, on more than one occasion, neighbors have been attracted by the smoke issuing from the windows in the morning, and have forced an entrance and found the floor on fire. But the ghostly inhabitants did not stop there. Mr. W. H. McDonald lives next door, and one night the spirits sallied forth and broke one of the windows of his house. Mr. McDonald got out of bed, appeared on the back yard scene, but, by the time he got there, the ghosts had made their escape. One night soon afterwards he heard noises in his yard, and on going down, found one of the spirits there. There was a fight, and though the spook struggled hard, he got the worst of it, and it is said that the visitor from an unknown world appeared upon the streets next day with a black eye, a damaged nose and a dilapidated jaw. Mr. McDonald placed the matter in the hands of the police. Nothing was done. Chief Stewart asked him to swear out a warrant against the spirit tramps, but Mr. McDonald, not being a perambulatory directory of trampdom, could not do it, and the matter, as far at least as the police were concerned, ended. Mr. McDonald spoke to the police commissioners about it. It made no difference. The ghosts were allowed to hold high revel in the house night after night and make the hours of darkness hideous by their unearthly clatter without any check.

“Soon after Mr. McDonald had given the ghost the thrashing, he got an anonymous letter from the gang, stating that they knew what time he came home at nights, that he was watched and that they were going to ‘fix’ him for interfering with them. This was followed by another letter in the same vein. Both letters were unstamped, and went to the dead letter office at Ottawa before reaching him. The racket in the house was kept up. It is kept up still. It has grown to be such a nuisance that he has been forced to give notice to his landlord of his intention to leave the premises at the end of the month.”

The life of a Spectator reporter, a dude of Hamilton in June 1883, as described by a … reporter “

“Say, my girl’s got back on me,” said the new reporter with the sad moustache and the Oscar Wilde hair, coming into the editorial rooms and interrupting the managing editor in an editorial on the grand display of dudology – which, by the way, is currently supposed to be the missing link so long sought after by Charles Darwin – at the band concert the other evening, “ gone clean back on me and gone off with another fellow. “My heart is broke.”

“That’s all right,” responded the managing editor, “but that does not explain your absence from this office for the last few weeks. Where have you been ? I want you to understand that this thing must cease, cease right now, or we shall be compelled to substitute some other mighty intellect for yours. You’re kind of smart, you know; you have a pretty wit, you’re brilliant in epigram, your humour is immense, your satire keen, and your sarcasm as withering as an autumn leaf; but you don’t attend to your work right, and unless you brace up we shall be compelled in the classic language of the Evening Times to give you the grand bounce.

“This will not occur again,” said the aspirant for journalistic honours, “ but I’ve been feeling so bad over my girl’s cruel desertion of me that it’s made me quite sick. Have you ever known what it is to love, and to love unrequitably; to waste all the tender attractions of a young and yearning heart upon an object that cared naught for its joy or its sorrow?”

“Yes, I’ve been there,” said the managing editor feelingly, as thoughts of a recent breach of promise case in which he had played one of the principal parts, flashed across his mind, “ I have been there and I can sympathise with you. Excuse this tear. But how did it happen? Give me a pointer on the row.”

“Don’t you give me away and I’ll tell you all about it. You see I’ve been going with that girl for a long while and I’m pretty badly mashed upon her – stuck for all I’m worth, as you might say. Soon after we first commenced, keeping steady company, I taught her how to smoke cigarettes. And I you it was fine. We’d stroll up and down some of the fine avenues smoking and she’d call me ‘old man’ and ‘old fellow’ and say I was a ‘fine old card’, just like one fellow ‘ud say to another.

“Well, just before we had this row, she sent me a note saying: “ My dear Jim – she always calls me Jim because it ain’t my name – “when night begins to throw her sable mantle over the earth and pin it with a star, meet me sure. Something very, very important. Mind ten o’clock. Till then farewell.” I went to see her of course, and as I had no cigarettes I gave her a cigar that some fellow had brought me down town through the day. Well, sir, the darn thing had powder in it and it went off with a bang, an’ you’d a gone right off and died if you’d a gone right off and died if you’d seen the circus that girl went through. She turned a summersault and fell over the sidewalk an’ I helped her up and she blamed me for it, and said I’d put up the job on her an’ now she wont speak to me. She’s going with a blooming red-headed dude now with little sprouts of red hair on his face that look like the electric light – a horseshoe over the mouth and half a one on each cheek. Say, I’m agoin’ to get square on that fellow if it takes me a year. Have you got room for a conundrum?”

“Yes, spit it out. Conundrums are awfully discouraging, and I noticed since you commenced giving them to me that the number of deaths in Hamilton has increased wonderfully. But I guess we can stand another.”

“What is the remarkable dead-head pass on record.

“ I give up. Better ask Spackman, he’s a –“

“ Oh never mind him. Thermopylae.”

“ That’s not so bad. Keep ‘em up to that standard and you’ll have a brilliant future before you yet,” and the managing editor settled down to his editorial while the new reporter with the sad moustache and the Oscar Wilde hair went gaily out to hunt for news.”¹

^{1 “}My Girl Gets Back on Him”

Hamilton Spectator June 11, 1883

On Monday, June 11, 1883, the Spectator carried a follow up report on the conduct of visitors to the Hamilton Cemetery on Sunday afternoons. There had recently been an article describing how unruly visitors had been acting. So the reporter visited the cemetery again on the following Sunday afternoon and noticed a fewer number of disreputables around:

“Part of this might possibly be attributed to the fact that it was not a nice day, but the Spectator’s stand in the matter had certainly a great deal to do with  it, for in Coote’s Paradise, across the way, the reporter noticed many of the faces that had grown familiar through his Sunday visits to the burial ground.”²

² “More of the Cemetery” Hamilton Spectator. June 11, 1883.

“ ‘Here’s the way they saddle the city with children to keep,’ said his Worship to a reporter Saturday, waving his hand toward a colored lady who occupied an easy chair in his office in city hall. The lady smiled at the reporter, nestled the infant in her arms a little closer to her ample bosom and heaved a tremendous sigh.”³

³ “Charlie the Waif : Another Mother Deserts Her Offspring” Hamilton Spectator. June 11, 1883.

A Spectator reporter was summoned to the mayor’s office on Saturday, June 9, 1883 so that he could witness and report about what the mayor and city officials had to face all too often – yet another baby was abandoned to the care of the city’s relief rolls.

The back woman sitting in the mayor’s office with a baby in her arms was asked by the reporter about the circumstances by which she was left with the child :

“ ‘What was the woman like?’ queried the reporter.

“ ‘Well, sir,’ returned the colored lady, ‘I don’t rightly know. She came to my place in a cab.’

“ ‘Dis she look like a servant?’

“ ‘Well, all I knows is she said she’d lived with the mayor,’ replied the woman with a chuckle

“Wherat the scribe was guilty of cacchination, and the mayor smiled benignly.

“ ‘What she means,’ said his worship, ‘is that the girl was a domestic.’

“The mayor gave the woman order for a small sum, called in a policeman and instructed him to find the mother of the child, who, he said, must be in the city, and the woman, baby and policeman left the office altogether.

“The woman tells this story : ‘My name is Anna , and I live on Catharine street north, near Cannon. Over two months ago, the woman came to my place with a six-weeks-old baby. She came in a cab and said her name was Margaret. She called the baby Charlie. She didn’t say where she came from, nor what her right name was. She said she’d give me $6 a month to keep the baby for her, and gave me $6.25 right there to start on. I’ve never seen her since and I’ve got no business keeping the baby. Margaret is a young woman of fair complexion. With brown hair, and she was nicely dressed when she left her boy with Mts. Johnson.”³

On June 12, 1883, the Spectator account of the previous evening’s city council meeting began with the following paragraph which shows the esteem aldermen of the day had for the general public :

“When all the Hamilton aldermen get together around the council board and sit solemnly debating on what to do for the furtherance of the best interests of the Ambitious city, they present a mighty, imposing appearance, and are calculated to strike terror to the hearts of boys, if by chance, society’s juvenile members could be induced to favor the council with their presence.⁴

⁴ “Hamilton’s Aldermen : Meet and Tell of Their Past Fortnight”

Hamilton Spectator. June 12, 1883.

As Monday, June 11, 1883 was the anniversary of the feast of Pentecost and of the giving of the Ten Commandments, the members of the Hebrew congregation in the city held a special service in the synagogue located at the corner of Hughson and Augusta streets:

“It was a most interesting ceremony, including a reading of the scrolls of the holy law and the confirming of seven applicants. The scrolls were produced from the shrine and placed on the table, where they were examined , and on the confirmants coming forward and occupying the front seats of the church, the scrolls were carried in front of them, after which one of them read a portion of the law, and invoked divine blessing, then they formed in procession and walked to the shrine where they deposited bouquets of flowers as a token of their first service to God.”⁵

⁵ “Feast of Pentecost : Interesting Ceremony and Confirmation in the Jewish Synagogue” Hamilton Spectator June 12, 1883.

Dr. H. B. Birkenthal preached an eloquent sermon on the topic of the Ten Commandments :

“It is becoming and proper for us to celebrate this day once a year, as it has been done for upward of 3,000 years, being the anniversary of the giving of the law to Moses on Mount Sinai. Since that time, that law has ruled all nations, and whenever there is a prosperous nation, it is the result of the observance of the law.”⁵

The rabbi urged all present to be honest, and, especially, he urged the children to be true to their parents and to become good and honorable citizens.

The confirmants were then called upon to take part in public worship and read portion of scripture:

“Then, as a token of faith, they all kissed the scrolls and were declared to be initiated into the congregation of Israel, and received the blessing from the rabbi and their parents.