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.”
Beethoven, by Roger. I probably bought this along with a grilled cheese and coffee for ten bucks or so circa 1990.
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.”
Ken Danby’s great painting, Roughriders. Everything has changed, yet the feeling remains. Timeless.
More nonsense, this time about football, as we try to erase the memory of the World Series from our Canadian minds!
I grew up only a few short blocks away from the setting of this painting, which was old Taylor Field. If the Riders are going towards the south end zone, then you could almost see my house between the QB and the running back on the left.
Growing up so close to the action, it was impossible not to become a life-long fan, which at times is both a blessing and a curse. We’ll see what happens this year!
Thanks for reading more stream-of-consciousness whatever it is!
we had a pee wee football and some nights we would play catch on dewdney avenue on the sidewalk in front of dewdney drugs and the doctor’s office on the corner and paramount cleaners and johnny the barber and the utopia cafe and gondola pizza and the little co-op store on the corner but this was a long time ago and I may be forgetting something anyway if you got good at it you could throw those little balls a long way and with any luck catch one that had been thrown a long way which is a good feeling maybe you know it and maybe it’s not all that surprising that we played with a football because taylor field where the roughriders played was only a block south of us so naturally football was very important to us sometimes we would cross elphinstone and walk over to the exhibition grounds and run around on the infield in front of the grandstand where they practiced and they had a machine that was a bright yellow frame with black arms of stiff rubber protruding from the inside of the frame which you had to run through if you could make it i guess those black rubber arms emulated the arms of the defensive linemen and linebackers and what made it special and even magical in a way to run through that thing was knowing that george reed himself would have been running through it a few hours earlier a brush with greatness unlike any other and we probably had the pee wee with us when we went there or maybe even a real football
In front of the Utopia Cafe on Dewdney Avenue, circa 1990.
My post about Aydon Charlton the other day brought to mind the neighborhood we grew up in, the old north end of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Aydon and I shared the pedigree of being Albert-Scott men, Albert Elementary School and Scott Collegiate. Kids from the south end of town would look down on us I guess, but we were proud to have graduated from both of those schools.
Fun Fact. I once read that more students who started at Albert School went to jail than graduated from high school. Or maybe I just dreamed that. It’s not too big a stretch to imagine that it’s true. Interesting times, interesting place, for sure.
Nowadays they call it the core or North-Central. What had been a good working class neighborhood when I grew up there has fallen on a hard times. Macleans magazine called it the worst neighborhood in Canada, worse even than Vancouver’s infamous East Hastings area.
I knew the hood had fallen into hard times since I left back in the 1980s. (My parents stayed on in the house on Cameron Street until they, like most of their old neighbours, sold for what they could get and moved to the south end.) But I never thought it was that bad.
Last summer my wife Belina and I traveled back to my homeland. She came directly to Calgary from the Philippines and had never been to Saskatchewan. (Imagine!) We stayed at a hotel in the south end. (Where I ran into my high school art teacher, one of my favourite teachers of all time, still going strong!) We had tickets for the Rough Rider game, thanks to my friend Scooter. (Yes, I have a friend named Scooter.)
We planned to spend one morning touring around my old neighbourhood. I was afraid of what I’d find there, and I wasn’t sure how Belina would react if it was really as bad as Macleans made it out to be. We set out on a beautiful morning in June. We went into a Tim Hortons for some coffee and donuts. The woman working there was from the same province in the Philippines as Belina. Off to a good start.
We drove past my old house on Cameron Street. The front veranda was gone but otherwise the house and yard were in good shape. The lovely old elm trees arched high above the street, dappling the light of the early summer sun. The street seemed tranquil, hardly the ravaged war zone I had been expecting. All in all, the old neighbourhood looked pretty good that morning. I’m not sure I’d want to live there again. I’m not sure I’d be comfortable walking around there at night like I did as a kid. All in all, we had a nice day, seeing the sites of my younger years.
I thought it might be worthwhile to attempt some stream-of-consciousness sketches of the neighborhood I grew up in. Stream of what? Just my little way of making sure I’ll never make a million dollars from this blog of mine. (Sorry Belina!)
Here you go . . . .
these streets we walked along in broken down sneakers and jeans cuffs scraped down to hanging threads under the canopy of lofty branches verdant and dark and cool in summer, black and skeletal and sketched against a stark white sky and the crunching of footsteps on the snow (still in sneakers despite our mothers’ pleas to wear the boots they paid good money for) back and forth along the avenues past the library and David’s confectionery past the school we went where the recess battles were lost and won further along to the playground its pool empty and derelict in winter blue and shiny under the glow of distant street lights in summer when despite the tall chain-link fence we were drawn to climb over and go skinny dipping (only once for me thank you) although the water was cold and the prairie nights cool and it never lasted long enough to feel it was worth the effort unless of course there were girls involved but unlike the movies there were never girls involved and if we would cross the playground to the south side we would discover the foundation of the jail they kept Louis Riel in before they hanged him although we didn’t learn anything about that in school so what did we know anyway more likely we would turn north and walk the two blocks to our high school if we had any reason to be there, basketball in the winter, baseball in the summer and fall, bit just as likely we’d go back home and see what was on the two channels we got on tv back then
Where to begin, eh? Sometimes the simple things become utterly complex on account of the interrelated nature of events and memory and friendship and even where we came from.
Let me start by saying that my friend Aydon Charlton passed away last week. Aydon was a family friend, as we might say, and yet more than that. His parents and my parents were good friends back in the day, in the old north end of Regina,Saskatchewan. He was older than me by perhaps a decade or so, more of a friend to my older brother Tom than to me. Yet through our family connection and our church, St. Peter’s Anglican (since desanctified) we knew each other.
When I arrived at the University of Regina English Department, Aydon was very much present, completing his MA. I may not be remembering this correctly but I believe his thesis was on Wilkie Collins, which was unusual enough to be memorable even all these decades later. (You know doubt remember, dear reader, that Wilkie was Charles Dickens’ great companion, and the author of a very fine novel, The Woman in White.) (Among others.)
We were part of the same cohort, acolytes of an eccentric, charismatic prof, my namesake Eugene Dawson, as well as his colleague, Ray Mise. They were Americans, exotic to us Saskatchewan boys, I guess. They were hard drinkers and so we learned to be too along with learning a few things about literature and literary criticism. I think I can say that Gene had more influence on my development than any of my other teachers. Aydon probably would have said the same of Gene, but maybe including Ray as well. It was an interesting and profound introduction to the world of arts and letters, to say the least
You can say what you like about Facebook, and it would probably be true, but it brought Aydon and I together years later and we had some good conversations over the last few years. He was fond of sharing photos of his parents, and I would be sure to comment as I remembered them fondly.
In a few of those exchanges, Aydon told me the story of his father turning an unassisted triple play at the St. Peter’s annual church picnic. Remembering some of the congregation of the time, choristers and lay readers and the like, that didn’t seem like that big a deal to me, but in Aydon’s mind it was one of the great athletic feats of the Twentieth Century. It was obviously important to him, he told me that story at least three times. Who was I to argue?
This picture is of me in my Senators Little League uniform. It was a good team year in and year old, coached by the legendary Joe Resch whose son Glen played goalie for the New York Islanders and the Colorado Rockies. During one of my seasons with the team, I fell into a miserable hitting slump. There didn’t seem to be any hope to get out of it. I began dreading our games.
One evening, Aydon’s dad Phil came over to our house, not to visit with my dad, but to see me. He had with him a Sports Illustrated magazine with an article on hitting by the great Ted Williams. A little research tells me that it was likely the July 8, 1968 issue featuring “Ted Williams on the Science of Hitting” on the cover. Phil gave me the magazine, saying “I hear you’ve been in a bit of a slump. Maybe this will help.”
I read it. Did it help? I’ll say! I distinctly remember the next game coming to bat in one of the later innings when Joe Resch turned to the guys in the dugout and said, “Here comes Stickland again. He’s 5 for 5 tonight! Man oh man!” The power of the written word, friends.
When Aydon told me the story of Phil turning the triple play, I countered with the Ted Williams story. It was a funny kind of bonding, later in our lives. All the more poignant now that he’s gone. Aydon was a good man with a brilliant sense of humour. Requiescat in pace.
A tribute to the Blue Jays and their return to the World Series. And to remember and honour Aydon and his dad, Phil.
There is of course the physical voice created in the throat of the individual which may be pleasant or otherwise. There is also the authorial voice,that of the writer which although silent, through the words on the page insinuates itself in your mind. That’s what we’re going to talk about today.
The reason the man with the screechy voice (see yesterday’s post) and I were talking in the first place was on account of the Portugese author Jose Saramago, in particular this book, Skylight. Mr. S.V. and I share a love of Saramago and his work which is enough to override any concerns I might have with his vocal production.
It might shock you (maybe you should sit down!) that Saramago’s novel All The Names is my favourite novel, period. Don’t ask me why — it just is and that’s all there is to it.
Yet I don’t recommend you rush out and buy it. It’s not an easy book to read, in fact none of his books are, with sentences that run on for hundreds and hundreds of words and paragraphs that go on for pages and pages. It can be a little intimidating. Most of us prefer to see a lot of white space on the page and Saramago doesn’t give you very much of that. Still, for serious readers, All The Names is, in my humble opinion, well worth the effort.
I’ll say this for Mr. S.V. He’s a reader. He’s one of the few people I know who has read Saramago and can have a serious conversation about him. AND SO IT CAME TO PASS that the other day we ran into each other at the coffee shop and fell into talking about literature and JS from P and I asked him if he was aware of the book pictured above, Skylight. He was not familiar with it and so I gave him the down and dirty as I will do for you now, dear reader, to reward your patience for having read this post for the last three hours or however long it’s taken you to get this far.
Skylight is actually the first novel Saramago wrote. He was in his early 30s when he completed it. He sent it to a publisher in 1953. The publisher lost the manuscript. It was only found in 1989 when they changed offices. They said, “It would our great honour for us to publish this manuscript,” to which Saramago replied. “Thank you, no.” He was already famous by that time, although still a few years away from being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998.
According to Pilar del Rio in his introduction to the novel, “Being ignored by that publishing house had plunged him into a painful, indelible silence that lasted decades.”
During his lifetime, he never approved the publication of Skylight, but kept it on his desk for years and years. His explanation for this, from later in the introduction: “No one has an obligation to love anyone else, but we are all under an obligation to respect one another.”
It was finally brought into print in 2014, after he had passed away in 2010. In Saramago’s words, it was “the book lost and found in time.”
In my mind it’s a fascinating story of how one of the world’s great authors was silenced for so long by what may well have been a clerical error.
Mr. SV was intrigued by my description of the book’s history. I offered to lend it to him and even found it and carried it around for a few days before I saw him again. In the meanwhile, he had ordered it from somewhere and read it. As I mentioned, he’s a great reader.
At the height of my fame (notoriety?) I appeared on the Google Earth image of Caffe Beano in Southwest Calgary. You could say I was hanging out there quite a bit at the time.
I’m not sure if I’m alone in this, but I have always been very sensitive to the tonal qualities (or lack of) of the human voice. It is said that beauty is only skin deep, but in my experience, it has more to do with the quality of a person’s voice than the quality of their skin.
Someone wrote a critique of a piece by, I believe, Beethoven saying it sounded like a cat’s claws on a window pane. I can’t remember the exact reference. It’s probably in Diana Rigg’s great compendium No Turn Unstoned. (Great book if you can find it, a collection of incredibly negative reviews of great works of art, particularly theatre. Yes, the same Diana Rigg who starred in The Avengers.)
Well, that’s just a variation of the tired old “nails on a blackboard” saying which probably doesn’t resonate as much now that we have whiteboards and colourful markers instead of blackboards and not so colourful chalk.
A horrid, terrible, irritating voice. If I hear that I run the other way. It makes me wonder, are such people aware of how grating and offensive their voices are to others? Do they never think of doing something about it? Voice lessons, for example? It’s a problem that can be fixed. I know these things. I studied with the great voice coach David Smuckler at York University in Toronto. Many moons ago now, Johnny. (Or whomever.)
(Where are we going with this, Eugene? Focus, man, focus!)
This is all by of saying that I know a man whom I see at Caffe Beano from time to time with a high screechy voice. It’s so pronounced I was describing him to a fellow patron (trying, after years of knowing him) to learn his name. I mentioned the voice and the fellow patron (whose name I don’t know) knew right away the person I was talking about.
I was looking for him because I had a book for him. That book will be the subject of Vox Humana 2 so stay tuned!
Meanwhile, I had written in my journal a description of the voice that became so, shall we say, fluid that I believe it may qualify as a literary conceit, along with Mr. Eliot’s etherized patient. This description longed to be freed from the pages of my journal and was really the impulse for writing this post in the first place. So here it is —
He has a voice like a rusty gate swinging open in the late afternoon of a cloudy day in autumn with the wind and swirling leaves. Someone in a long black cloth coat has pushed the gate open. We can’t be sure if he’s coming or going. Presumably there is an old house beyond the gate but whether our friend in the long black coat is returning, say from work, or heading out, perhaps to the library, we will never know.
Remember to check for part two of this fascinating discussion of whatever it is.
Hello out there, wherever you are. Welcome once again to my all-but-moribund blog.
I see I wrote a post four years ago announcing my triumphant return to these cyber pages, and then nothing. Just an eerie silence. Four years! What the hell? I guess I wasn’t back after all. But this time, I mean business! This time I’m really back, no fooling around. At least I think so.
We shall see and time will tell.
In the meanwhile (ie, between now and the end of time), I share with you some kind of poetic ramblings from my daily journal for your consideration. It is my plan, ongoing, to share some things I am working on, for your consideration. And so without further ado:
(Hmmmm. What shall I title this? October 12, 2025? Sure. Let’s go with that.)
October 12, 2025
OK now son you’ve been here before you know the rules you know the ropes you know what to do you know the ins and the outs and the highs and the lows just keep your head down and your phone in your pocket and your eyes on the page and try and forget that fight you had for the hundredth time and that once again your bank account is as empty as a drunken promise and that tooth ache that is not going away and that summer that is gone with a cold winter looming and the winds have turning cold and try and forget the landlord raising the rent and the politicians who lie and the church that stands empty and your pencil lead that keeps breaking and your hip that is aching and your heart that is yearning and your lungs that are burning and your hands that are shaking and that the plans you are making will surely fall apart and nothing you say or do or think will make the slightest bit of difference in a world steeped in greed and lies and anger and hatred and anything else and everything else none of that matters all that matters is you here now this broken pencil the blank page patiently waiting take a deep breath and begin again —
End of whatever that was.
Thanks for reading! See you soon. I won’t let four years go by the time, promise.
eugene stickland 