Halloween, Church Street, Toronto, 1998 and 1999

from 1998

from 1999

Nips taken out!

(Dancer at club elsewhere in Toronto)

 

 

Go-go dancer, Plastique Lounge, 128 Peter Street, Toronto, Hallowe'en, 1999

I often went to Church Street for Hallowe'en in Toronto - the costumes were great. Afterwards I drove around and found this Gogo Dancer with angel wings in a club window near Spadina who vogued for me.

To do list

 THINGS TO DO TODAY

Save World from nuclear destruction
Call Porky Schneider

Actual entry for Oct 6, 1999

COUPLE FINISHES CROSS-COUNTRY TREK STARTED IN 1967 IN 1923 CAR

Lou and Betty Phelps in 1923 Star Car

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Fun assignment - Lou drove me around in the Star and the Model T, which had a lot of brass fittings and was sort of like a kettle on wheels - it had a six volt battery that Lou wanted me to touch both terminals of - he said the voltage was too weak to be felt, but I passed. He also told me he'd broken his arm trying to hand crank a car when the crank handle flew around because it was still engaged to the engine. He'd broken both bones in his forearm and his doctor told him he read old medical books that called this a 'chauffer's fracture' and up until then the doctor had always wondered why. I also learned why some Americans called license plates 'tags' - on one car there was a large leather tag with the numbers put on in metal numbers, I think by the owner, instead of a plate - I assume the states and provinces didn't make plates until later.

copyright 1999 Mark Bellis WOODSTOCK, SEPT 30, 1999 - It took more than 32 years, but a Woodstock couple has completed a cross-Canada tour in a car built three-quarters of a century ago in Toronto.
"We were proud - there was a real feeling of accomplishment" said Betty and Lou Phelps, speaking pretty much in chorus on their rambling spread near Woodstock that has two stables filled with car parts, tools, road signs, a 1909 model T, an antique fire engine, and a 1923 Star that was the Phelps first classic car which they drove back from Newfoundland this summer to finish a trip started in 1967.
The Star was part of a convoy of vintage cars that started off from Victoria in 1967 to celebrate Canada's centennial. Betty, Lou and their three girls could only take 6 weeks off for the trip in 1967 and had to interrupt the trip in Montreal at the Expo 67 world fair.
Lou Phelps bought the car in the early 60s from a St. Thomas man whose wife told him to sell it after it cost him $ 500 to get the fenders repaired, a process which involved delicate soldering with lead and tin. Lou paid $ 700 for the whole car, which coincidently was the suggested retail price of a new Star in 1923.
Rebuilding the Star took a few years, but Lou said it was not hard finding parts, as the four cylinder Continental motor in the Star was used in many other agricultural and industrial applications and some are still in service today, as are the bearings and other parts. The clincher tires, resembling fat bicycle tires, are also still sold commercially. Lou and Betty had to make a new fabric roof, do some body work, and replace the original cast iron pistons with steel ones.
The Star was a "working man's car", Betty says. It was a bit more comfortable and expensive than the model T Ford that it was built to compete against, and had room for a farmer or mechanic, his wife in the front and a few kids in the back, which is exactly how Lou and Betty travelled part-way across Canada in 1967, with their three daughters as part of a convoy that started.
Lou, however, calls the Star a "Courtin' car", since the front passenger was wedged against the stick shift on a narrow bank seat. "You couldn't help touching the girl's leg!".
No sooner had the convoy started off with three dozen other vintage car enthusiasts in Victoria than a passer-by offered the Phelps' steel disk wheels from an old Star to replace the wooden spoked ones they feared might break in the Rockies.
The Star completed both legs of the journey across Canada without any major mechanical failure apart from a brush having to be replaced on the generator.
The Star could only make 12 mph going through the Rockies because it relied on a vacuum tank that forced the gas from the main tank to the engine and would start to lose the vacuum going up a slope at high altitudes. On flat terrain, cruising speed was 30 mph, but the Phelps' prefer to run during the daytime and be off the road by 4 pm to avoid sharing the road with fast drivers.
The Phelps' family camped with the other classic car drivers during the 1967 trip and their three daughters, ages 2, 6 and 11 made life-long friends with the other drivers children.
During the 1999 trip, the Phelps' stayed at bed and breakfasts and participated in classic car shows.
"We were proud - it was a real feeling of accomplishment after 32 year to be able to look back and say we did it.".
Betty and Lou and their children still drive the Star and their other antiques in rallies and car shows. Their son David, who was conceived on the 1967 trip ("Another centennial project!" Betty jokes) collects antique fire engines and their daughter Patricia is a curator at Annadale, a 19th century mansion now a historical site in Tillsonburg.
The Star was built in Leaside, now part of Toronto, by Durant Motors, a company started by Billy Durant, a flamboyant Michigan entrepreneur who had founded General Motors at the start of this century, but lost control of it for the second time and was trying to recoup his fortune.
Durant went broke again, and finished his days running a bowling alley and diner in Flint, Michigan, the town that General Motors pretty much built. But so many Stars were sold that the Canadian branch plant was able to survive and became independent of Durant as the Dominion Motors Company. Run with a patriotic bent, It began building the Frontenac, a more luxurious car named after Count Frontenac, Governor-General of New France. The Frontenac was rolled out, literally to fanfare, at the 1931 CNE. The roll-out featured actors dressed as the Count and 17th Century French courtiers. But the Frontenac did not sell well during the depression and the company ceased production in the early Thirties.
There were about 500 Frontenacs built - Gord Curl of Guelph owns a 6-70 which still runs and is interested in speaking to anyone who has information or memoribilia about the Leaside Plant and the cars that were built there. His phone is 519-823-5837. Curl is the Eastern Canada representative of the Durant Motors Automobile Club, which includes owners of Durants, De Vauxs, Rugbys, Flints as well as the Stars and Frontenacs. The club is headed by:
Lance Haynes ,
4672 Mount Gaywas Drive
San Diego, CA 92117-3927
LanceDurant@aol.com
References:
Durant Motors Automobile Club http://www.durantmotors.com

Plutonium on way to Canada

Plutonium-238 pellet of a sort that was used to power the NASA Perserverance rover on Mars,   : Jaimee Janiga/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy

copyright 1999 Mark Bellis
CORNWALL, SEPT 29 - Neither the Mohawk reserve of Akwesasne or the City of Cornwall want a shipment of plutonium from Russian nuclear weapons scheduled to arrive in their community before the end of the year.
"Why does it have to be here?" asked Mike Mitchell, Grand Chief of the Canadian side of the Mohawk reserve which is across from Cornwall at a conference hosted by the federal government to address community concerns in Cornwall Wednesday.
132 grams of plutonium will arrive by ship from St. Petersburg, Russia sometime in the near future, said Brian Moore, director of the Nuclear Energy Division of Natural Resources Canada. The plutonium, mixed with uranium, will be taken by road from Cornwall to the nuclear research centre at Chalk River, north of Ottawa and used in test in a nuclear reactor along with plutonium from American nuclear weapons which will arrived from Los Alamos via road through Sault Ste-Marie at about the same time.
Moore said the plutonium cannot produce a nuclear explosion and is shipped in a special disaster resistant container with a locator beacon that will allow it to be recovered if lost underwater.
Mitchell said the shipments would further degrade the image of Akwesasne, which has suffered for years from violence associated with smuggling and illegal gambling and would frustrate their attempts to attract legitimate business investments. Cornwall Mayor Brian Sylvester said he and Cornwall city council feared that the experimental shipments, three in all, from Russia, would lead to Cornwall becoming the port of entry for Russian Plutonium if Canada started a commercial program to use plutonium from weapons in nuclear reactors. The Interational Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Mayors' Conference, which represents communities near the shipment routes and the council of the Mohawk reserve at Kahnawake on the Seaway near Montreal by which the shipment from Russia will come have both passed resolutions opposing the shipments.
Russia and the United Started have declared they have a surplus of 50 tonnes each of plutonium from weapons they have destroyed under the START I nuclear arms reduction program signed in 1991, and Sylvester worried more of the 50 tonnes would pass through Cornwall.
But Moore said that Canada has no commercial reactor licensed to use the plutonium fuel being tested at Chalk River.



David Cox, of Atomic Energy Canada Limited, which has the contract to run the tests at Chalk River, says that reducing Russia's surplus plutonium is a big concern of the United States, since he says security is light at the facility in Moscow where the surplus plutonium is stored and it is feared that material or know-how could fall into the hands of other countries.(By "light", Cox said that when his group visited the nuclear stockpile in Moscow, they just had to pass one guy in jeans reading a paperback to get into the plutonium storage area, in contrast to the American facility in New Mexico, which was basically a fort, with tank traps and razor wire fences guarded by military personnel.)

Stuffed Duck taken into custody

 copyright 1999 Mark Bellis

GUELPH JULY 29 - "Why a duck?" is the question that a Guelph curio dealer is asking himself after being served with a summons for putting a stuffed mallard up for sale in his shop window.

"They're environmentally friendly, once you get over the fact that someone's slaughtered them." says Ray Mitchell, 37, about the other animals in his shop, which he says are legal. Mitchell runs an antique shop on the main street of Guelph. The shop features a line of stuffed animals and birds that has included a boar's head, a cougar, muskrats, deer heads, bears, alligators, several frogs, including one riding a unicycle, two skeletal human feet and one elephant's foot, which he does not display. "It's kind of gross - they just took the foot and threw away the rest". But it was the mallard that he put in the window that got him into trouble July 11, when he was served with a summons which charged that he did "expose for sale a migratory Game Bird - to wit: one mallard duck ".

Rick Pratt, Manager of Wildlife Conservation for Environment Canada, says that one of his officers saw the duck on display for sale in the window and charged Mitchell under the Migratory Birds Convention Act, which he says covers most migratory birds, even the common mallard and robin, and prohibits their ownership or sale, even if they are stuffed. "Charges for selling are not common" for stuffed birds, says Pratt, but do happen, and even sales of feathers of migratory birds attached to hats may be illegal.

Mitchell could face a fine of up to 50,000 or five years in jail.

Mitchell says his other animals, which he has posed in a protest group in his window under a "Free Huey" poster, are legal, except for another mallard. "Huey", the mallard that caused the problem in thefirst place, remains in custody, pending the trial.

Mitchell says his collection are like his friends. "He's like one of the family" he says, refering to a black bear cub posed next to a log. "He watches TV with us, he likes everything we put on (the TV)" and says his wife and four kids don't "actually mind" the taxidermified wildlife, which includes a monkey's paw that he says his grandfather got in the Amazon in 1910. "I never have made a wish on it - you could make a wish for publicity and get charged with having a mallard duck!" he quips.

Mitchell says he has sold around 50 stuffed mallards during his 20 years as an antique dealer.