Canada Unity Rally

 Montreal, Oct 27 -

Traffic was really heavy so I stopped in the West Island and took the train in - Clifford Lincoln, a local member of parliament, was on the same train.

MP  Clifford Lincoln, who was born in Maritius.

At Canada Place, downtown Montreal

JUMBO - BACK FROM THE DEAD!!

From 1995 - The story with the very best lead sentence I ever wrote, and it was never run by the Star.

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Statue of Jumbo St. Thomas, Ontario, photo by Einar Einarsson, Creative Commons

copyright 1999 Mark Bellis
ST THOMAS, SEPT 23, 1995 - 110 years ago they had him for supper. Now they want the leftovers.
The people of St. Thomas want a New York museum to loan them the bones of Jumbo, the elephant whose name became a synonym for 'gigantic',who died tragically in their town Sept 15, 1885.
Jumbo is "a tremendous drawing card" said St. Thomas mayor Steve Peters, standing near the life-size thirty-eight ton concrete statue of the 11 foot 6 inch elephant, which is an all-but-unignorable landmark in St. Thomas, a city of 28,000 south of London.
Peters explains that St. Thomas, an important railway centre for traffic between Detroit and Buffalo in the 19th century, was hosting the Barnum and Bailey Circus on that faithful evening in September when Jumbo and a dwarf elephant named Tom Thumb were being led back to their railway car, when an "unscheduled train came down the tracks, hit the small elephant" and knocked him down the embankment, and then smashed into Jumbo, who died on the spot of his injuries, but not before he reached up with his trunk to embrace his keeper one last time.
Circus impresario P.T. Barnum quickly spun the story for big publicity, saying that Jumbo had died after he deliberately tossed Tom Thumb to safety and charged the train to protect his keeper.
Barnum brought Professor Ward, a famous Rochester taxidermist he had under contract, to St Thomas so quickly that some people thought that Barnum had arranged the accident to get rid of the 24 year old elephant, who was beginning to show his age, to grab headlines.
Jumbo was cut up on the spot by local butchers. Mayor Peters admits "some people did" grab the once-in-a-lifetime chance to try elephant steak. Barnum had the stuffed elephant and his skeleton tour with his circus until the bones were donated to the American Museum of Natural History. The stuffed elephant went to Tufts University in Boston where he served as mascot for the school's football team, the Tufts Jumbos, until a fire in 1975 which consumed all but an 18 inch sectionof his tail and parts of his tusks.
Mayor Peters travelled to Tufts recently and was allowed to take some fragments of blackened ivory back to St. Thomas. He presented the relics to Elgin County Pioneer Museum in St. Thomas this Friday. Deborah Herkimer, curator of the museum, has other Jumbo memorabilia on display, even items recovered from the pachyderm's stomach, including a small nickel-plated pig and a human tooth. The museum also has a photo of the train that killed Jumbo, which afterwards sported a statue of an elephant on the front as a memento.
"Barnum sued Grand Trunk" said Herkimer, who noted the jokes made about 'Grand Trunk', the name of the railroad which killed Jumbo, and elephants' trunks. Barnum won a year's free travel on the railway for his circus, but Herkimer said "Grand Trunk got him back" because they later charged him the equivalent to a year's travel for a detour trip he had to make, giving credence to the idea of some collusion between Barnum and the railroad.
Peters has written to the Museum of Natural History asking them to loan the bones of Jumbo for a local exhibition, but William J. Moynihan, the museum's director, said in a letter "Unfortunately, Jumbo is also a type specimen" still used for scientific study, and it is the museum's policy not to lend him out. Peters, undaunted, said he will continue to campaign for the return of Jumbo's remains.

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I took some photos of Jumbo's statue a few years earlier. It was in the middle of the night around 3 or 4 am and I was just driving around and saw it. I used some flashbulbs on a stand to illuminate it.

Bad Breath Clinic Opens

 GUELPH SEPT 11, 1995 - A Guelph Ontario dentist is leading the battle against bad breath by opening a clinic for halitosis sufferers.

"There are some people you want to talk to from a block away" says Dr Don Cohen, who has started a "Better Breath" clinic in Guelph.

Cohen said he is one of very few dentists in Canada offering specialized therapy for those suffering from offensive breath. Bad breath "can be devastating, both socially and on a business level" said Cohen, who first checks patients for diseases and infections that can cause bad breath, and measures the level of smelliness of their breath with a "halimeter" which takes a breath sample and analyzes it for sulfur compounds. Cohen explains "most bad breath comes from volatile sulfur compounds that comes from cell breakdown" from decaying food and bacteria trapped in the mouth. Most people score between 60 to 100 on the halimeter, but Cohen says that the "keep-a-block-away" types can score up to 700.

Cohen says that changing diet does little to offset mouth odours that occur between meals "The body is a closed system - most odors come from the mouth" and that some people have "a lot of bacteria dying , a lot of food rotting in their mouth" which causes the bad breath.

After sending patients back to their regular dentists for any necessary dental work, Cohen teaches patients how to clean their teeth and the rest of their mouth, including the tongue which he says "is like a shag rug" which can trap food and bacteria. He uses a special mouthwash and toothpaste containing stabilized chlorine dioxide which he says reduces sulfur emissions.

Can the treatment leave halitosis suffers "kissing sweet"? "Most people, yes" says Cohen, who says the treatment can cut sulfur emissions by half initially and gradually reduce them to normal levels.

Hillside Festival 1995

 These are some photos I took, I think for the Toronto Star, at the Hillside Festival near Guelph in 1995. I gave some to the Festival as film, but I don't know if I did with these.

Someone doing cartwheels

Smoking Popes at Lee's Palace, 1994 or 1995

 The Goo Goo Dolls opened for them and they weren't that well known so I didn't take any pictures of them! This is sometime in 1994 or 1995, Lee's Palace, Toronto, Ontario.

Christmas with the Cappucinos

Maxville, Dec 26 -  A 26 pound turkey slides out of an oven in a country kitchen in Eastern Ontario. "Most of us are ethical vegetarians" says the mother, as she stirs a frying pan the size of a manhole cover full of tofu. Even so, less than thirty minutes after the bird hits the table, nothing is left of it but a drumstick being gnawed on by a two year old grandchild that everyone has nick-named "G'Day".
    It may be the largest family Christmas dinner in Canada. "We've got fifteen or so of our own kids  here so far, and their families - I could be wrong - more are coming in." says the father, Fred Cappuccino, 67, as a throng of about thirty children and adults of all races mill around the two rooms in the log cabin. It could be a cook-out at the UN. Hands of every colour pass plates rapidly to and fro, carrying Indian hot curries and Korean pickled eggplant along with the stuffing and cranberry sauce. A young woman from Hong Kong asks her brother from southern India to put on more coffee. Vera, a Viennese-born friend of the Cappuccinos hands out latkes, potato pancakes, and cuts up a heart-shaped cake as the kettle comes to a boil on one of the three stoves, two of them wood-burning, in the house. "We cut our own wood - we've got a 50 acre wood-lot" says Shan Cappuccino, 25, who drove in from Ottawa. Only two children still live at home. Bonnie Cappuccino, 57, stir fries vegetables on the stove. Born in Illinois, she is wearing a Sari, large brass bangles on each arm that clang like gongs as she stir fries the vegetables, and 20 or so Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and African amulets and medals. The left side of her mouth is supported by a brace. "I had a brain tumor - it just left this side paralyzed - it was on the facial nerve - it wasn't  cancer." she says in a tone that says it was no big deal to her. It was removed a little over a year ago. Did it slow her down? "It took a while to recuperate. After about six months I was resuming my trips over to India."
    The Cappuccinos have set up three homes for children in India and one in Nepal. "She felt unfulfilled as a mother after raising 21 kids." jokes her husband Fred, who, along with all of their kids, share an oddball sense of humor.    Fred and Bonnie's unorthodox family started after the birth of their first son, which they named Robin Hood. Both of them were inspired by the ideas of Gandhi. "We believed in zero population growth," says Fred, who still works part-time as a Unitarian minister in Beaconsfield, Quebec and in Ottawa. "I wrote to Japan, where I worked after the war as a missionary to asked for a mixed-race orphan - I felt that a lot of the children that were fathered by American GIs, particularly when they were black, would have a hard time integrating into Japanese society." By the time the Cappuccinos had left Chicago to become pastor at a church in Pointe-Claire, a suburb of Montreal, in 1967, they had given birth to another child and adopted five more from across the world.
    Did Robin mind sharing a home with all these children? "I think it was much more fun - it was much more people to be with." he says.    The Cappuccinos inspired other people. "Sandra Simpson lived around the corner from us in Pointe-Claire - when she heard that we were adopting more kids she wanted to get in on it." The Simpsons went on to become known to millions as 'the largest family in Canada' from their TV commercials for a pain reliever and operate a restaurant near Toronto. Another neighbour who wanted to get in on the act was Naomi Bronstein, who now runs relief missions in Cambodia, Viet Nam and Guatemala. She recently brought two babies that were found abandoned in a trash can in Pnohm Penh back to Canada for medical treatment. All of the families now run their own separate charitable organizations. The Cappuccinos call theirs 'Child Haven International' and run it from an office in their Maxville home. The office was built thanks to a donation from one of Fred's missionary friend's in Japan, who sent him a donation. "He said 'the money was for you, not for Child Haven'," says Fred, "So we used the money to get the office out of Bonnie's kitchen."
    The homes in India and Nepal have about 200 children. Bonnie was in India this year to introduce new technology to make a form of milk from soya beans. The small-scale projects are directed at women to help them start their own businesses.  "It's a more palatable form of soy milk." Bonnie says they run the homes because "We enjoy it, I guess. We enjoy the countries, the people, and its a nice feeling to know you're doing a little good." The purpose of the homes for children is "Basically to raise them from whenever they come in, till they're self-sufficient."
    Bonnie is Buddhist, and Fred describes himself as "about 38.54 percent" Buddhist. Bonnie says " I believe that people are sacred, rather than believing in an external force, and I think people can help other people,"