Sometime in the dark and mist-shrouded vistas of time past — 1946 rings a distant bell — my parents moved into a fine old house on the 1400 block of Cameron Street. It was a good working class neighborhood at the time, maybe even with respectable middle class pretenses.
With the horrors of the Great Depression and then World War ll behind them, they must have had a lot of hope and big dreams, if not a lot of money, at that time. If they had a little extra money left over at the end of the month, they might walk down the half block to Dewdney Avenue to the Utopia Cafe. At that time, it was a good family restaurant run by a Greek chap named George. I think my dad told me once that at that time they could both dine there for about a quarter but I may be making that up.
But then things got a little weird. George sold the place to a rather eccentric chap named Roger Ing, originally from Canton. At first, that was all we knew about him. He ran the place — featuring the above menu — throughout the ’70s and beyond. In the early days, most of his clientele were people from the neighborhood, like me. If Scott Collegiate, located a few blocks north and a few blocks west, had an official clubhouse, it was the Utopia, or U-Ball as it was sometimes referred to. There was a corner table at the front of the place that you could only sit at if you belonged. I was allowed to sit there, in certain circumstances. It was one of those unspoken things.
Roger’s English was never all that great, although it was rumoured he understood more than he let on. He wandered around the place in his own little world delivering cheeseburgers and orders of chips and gravy and topping up cups of coffee. Nothing out of the ordinary, I suppose, but for one day when I stopped in for a coffee en route to my piano lesson. I had my music books with me. Roger sat down at my table, transfixed by a Beethoven sonata I was working on. He opened the cover and looked at the music carefully. Then he took out a ball point pen and drew a perfect caricature of a bust of Beethoven on the cover. Under it he drew a staff of music and “Ludwig van Beethoven, 1770-1827.”
Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. What on earth did Roger know about Beethoven? How did he know how to draw like that? I’d known him for years but never suspected he knew anything about art or music. After that little episode, Roger treated me a little differently, I thought. If I had books with me, which I usually did, he would sit with me for a minute and leaf through them muttering to himself. If I bothered to ask him about his interest in these books, or his knowledge of Beethoven, I don’t remember now. Or if I did, maybe he didn’t answer me. As I say, his grasp of English was never all that strong.
Enter Art McKay — literally. Art was an artist of great renown in Regina and beyond, a member of the “Regina Five,” on faculty at the University of Regina’s Fine Art Department. As I was told the story, he just happened to wander into the Utopia early one evening for a cup of coffee. He immediately recognized Roger as a former student, a foreign student from Canton who had come to Regina to study art at the college (University of Saskatchewan, Regina Campus at that time) in the 1950s. Roger obviously recognized his former professor. Soon enough a sketch pad materialized and they began trading drawings, just the two of them in the dim lights of the Utopia with the door locked to the outside world.
From that point on, things began to change rapidly at the Utopia. Roger transformed the unused banquet room (from the days of George) at the back of the place into his studio. Paintings began to emerge from the studio — strange, wild, crazy, intelligent, ironic, weird and wonderful paintings that were grouped around a number of motifs, including UFOs, flying hamburgers, tigers, as in William Blake’s tygers, the Mona Lisa, the rodeo and bulls, delicate little birds on a branch and of special interest to me, portraits of Beethoven and Shakespeare and other artists of note from days gone by.
Roger scoured the second hand stores for paintings and prints and painted over top of these, spilling onto the frame, retaining and revealing some of the original work underneath. (Also, his friends and fellow artists brought him prints and paint-by-numbers they found at garage sales, frames and all.) His output was astonishing. The quality of the work was insanely uneven. So many experiments, some that worked, some that didn’t. It didn’t seem to matter to him. The paintings kept streaming out from the banquet room at a prodigious rate. (We regulars would peak in when we were at the back feeding our dimes into the pinball machines, The Queen of Hearts and Buckaroo!)
For all of this, Roger certainly had his time in the sun, his late in life more than fifteen minutes of fame, and deservedly so. There is a wealth of information about him and his art and the Utopia on the internet, including a very good documentary by Regina author and artist Judith Silverthorne, titled Roger Ing’s Utopia, among others.
My story ends on a personal note. I returned to Regina for a few years in the early 1990s after Roger had begun his ascent to fame and adulation. (From Regina, I moved to Calgary where my playwriting career took flight.) One day before I left, I went into the Utopia in the late morning and sat at the old corner table. It was a quiet morning and Roger brought me a coffee and sat down with me, just as he had twenty years earlier when he drew his little portrait of Beethoven on the cover of my sonata.
I explained to him that I was moving to Calgary, that it was a good opportunity at a good theatre. After a moment he looked at me and said, “You show them. Show them what the boys at the corner table can do.”
Thanks for reading!
eugene stickland 