When the city said ‘pardon my lunch bucket’
What’s so wrong with molten steel, steaming slag heaps and, yes, lunch buckets
BACK IN 1971, Hamilton gave itself a birthday present to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the city’s founding. It was a beautifully designed coffee-table book with the cheeky title “Pardon My Lunch Bucket.”
“Pardon My Lunch Bucket” was an unrepentant love song to the city of Hamilton, filled with vintage photographs and illustrations from the past, as well as contemporary cityscapes focusing on the massive urban renewal project taking place downtown that would soon open as Jackson Square.
The city had 5,000 hard cover copies of the book printed up for sale at $9.95 each, with another 10,000 soft covers for $4.95. It sold well at the start, although by 1975 the city still had 3,200 copies on hand.
Mayor Victor K. Copps wrote an enthusiastic forward for the book, which was commissioned by the city at a cost of $67,000.
“With its industrial base and its ever-expanding residential areas, Hamilton has a brilliant future ahead of it as a place to live, to work, to grow up in, to expand your personal horizons as the city expands hers.
“Only one thing worries me now. If the lunchbucket tag becomes passé, what are Hamilton’s critics going to come up with to replace it?”
Much like the more recent “City of Waterfalls” campaign, the book was designed to counter Hamilton’s reputation as a city of grime and crime, while taking pride in its lunch-bucket work ethic.
“Pardon My Lunch Bucket” also featured some remarkable predictions about Hamilton’s future.
By the year 2000, the book estimated that the city would boast a population of 800,000, living a life of leisure on a three-day workweek. A 15minute hovercraft shuttle would connect us with Toronto, while a “skybus” system brings us to our cottage country resorts and a monorail moves people up and down the mountain.
“Downtown as the citizens of the ’70s knew it is hardly recognizable now,” the book muses in a chapter supposedly written 30 years into the future. “People move along on travelling sidewalks on second-level streets, well insulated from the noise and fumes of traffic below.”
And everyone lives in highrise, ultra-hightech condos.
“Now it is possible to put your home on a truck and have it lifted by crane to be plugged into a service tower that provides heat, water, air conditioning, electricity and waste disposal.
“If you don’t like the view from the 87th floor, ring for the crane operator and tell him to plug your unit into the 117th.”
ALL THIS WAS WRITTEN while I was finishing up Grade 11 at Barton Secondary School on the east Mountain. I was already planning to leave our “lunch-bucket town” for greener pastures. In a couple of years, I would attend university in Toronto, then find a job in journalism and settle down in Vancouver where I lived for 17 years.
Deserved or not, Hamilton had a horrible reputation. The city was synonymous for industrial pollution, a place to avoid. We knew we were scorned by the rest of the country and we got rather defensive about it, developed a king-size chip on our shoulder. For good reason.
In 1967, the National Film Board delivered Hamilton a centennial gift in the guise of an hour-long documentary called “Steeltown.” It aired on CBC Sunday, April 30 at 10 p.m. and was billed as a travelogue. Hardly. It was more an art house critique of the industrial age.
“Steeltown” gave fuel to all of the Ambitious City’s insecurities. The film focused on molten steel, steaming slag heaps, blast furnaces and, yes, lunch buckets.
“The inhabitants carry curious little caskets made of metal with foodstuffs in them,” narrator Patrick Watson says in the opening scene which pictures workers plodding into one of the city’s steel mills.
At one point in the film, Hamilton factory employees — punching in and punching out — are compared to lab rats pressing a lever to obtain food.
The NFB crew also interviewed an amateur astrologist/clockmaker, a socialist security guard, students at the Hamilton Judo and Karate club, and a steelworker with a stamp collection of naked women.
It visited a Tiger Cat beauty pageant (where contestants were grilled with incisive questions like “Do you go steady?), the Dofasco Christmas party (scenes of Santa, sad clowns and dancing majorettes), Civic Stadium (the Cats beating the Bombers), a local cemetery, the Black Forest Inn (an oom-pah-pah band is playing at midnight), the Hamilton Deliverance Centre (“JESUS SAVES” in neon), a drunken New Year’s Eve bash (people were still twisting in 1966) and a Serbian Orthodox church.
Our civic leaders didn’t buy into the subtle social commentary. They were outraged. Hamilton had been slimed on national television by a federally funded agency.
The Board of Control sent off a protest to Secretary of State Judy LaMarsh. Alderman Joe
Kostyk demanded that the film be destroyed “before it’s shown all over the world.” Angry letters to the editor poured in to The Spec.
“It was a portrayal of the lowest instincts of man, enslaved in a gruesome environment,” wrote John Merz.
Federal cabinet minister John Munro, one of the few locals who admitted to liking the film, brought “Steeltown” directors Wolf Koenig and Rex Tasker to town to explain themselves before civic leaders. Nobody listened.
The biggest insult, however, came from Ottawa Citizen columnist Charles King.
“Poor, poor Hamilton,” King wrote. “Ontario’s ugly duckling community has been offended again … It must be galling to be ugly and to feel duty-bound to pretend that you’re beautiful.”
Slimed again.
I RETURNED TO HAMILTON with my family in 2000, the year, according to “Pardon My Lunch Bucket,” Hamiltonians were supposed to be living in mobile condo units in 117storey buildings.
That’s the problem with predictions. Some guy like me comes along 45 years later and points out how wrong they were. If you’re going to make predictions, you should probably make them for a couple of centuries into the future. By then they’ll be long forgotten. Nobody will call you out on them.
My Vancouver friends thought I was crazy, leaving La La Land for … lunch-bucket land. But we were returning home for family reasons, not for the scenery.
Truth is, the year 2000 was the pits in Hamilton, perhaps even the low point. One by one, the factories had closed and our great urban renewal project, designed to revitalize the downtown, seemed to have the opposite effect. People now did their shopping at suburban malls with parking. Downtown department stores like Robinsons, The Right House, Eatons and Eames were shuttered. We even lost the Chicken Roost.
The core was rotting. Local comedian B.A. Johnston wrote a song that captured its essence. It was called “Dirt Mall,” his nickname for Jackson Square, the place that was supposed to launch Hamilton into a bold new era.
Joe Urban, who designed the “Pardon My Lunch Bucket” project with Spectator writer David Proulx, has no regrets about the wildly optimistic predictions made in the book for the year 2000. It was a sign of the times. In 1971, Hamilton was booming. Anything seemed possible.
“It was an exciting time for Hamilton,” says Urban. “The city was a really hopping town.”
After completing “Pardon My Lunch Bucket,” Urban formed his own advertising firm on Main Street West. There was plenty of business in the ’70s and into the ’80s. He estimates 80 per cent of his clients were based in Hamilton.
By 2000, that figure had reversed. Only five per cent of his business came from Hamilton. The vast majority of his business came from Toronto, London and Kitchener. Hamilton had bottomed out.
Urban, now retired, spends winters in Florida and summers on his two-acre property in west Hamilton. In recent years, he has watched the city’s image change for the good as galleries, eateries and music venues have repopulated James Street North and King William.
“I’m really happy to see it,” says Urban. “It’s slow but it’s evolving”
Urban still hears a lot of negativity about Ham- ilton, but it comes from the suburbs, longtime residents who may be skeptical of the transformation now going on in the city core.
“There’s still a lot of pessimism, but things are changing,” he says. “I have friends who moved to Toronto, now some of them are coming back into the Hamilton area.
“People in Toronto are realizing how central Hamilton is. In less than an hour you can be in wine country, you can go north, or to Mennonite country, or Stratford, it’s all there. In Toronto, you can take forever just getting out of the city.”
I CAME ACROSS THE MOVIE “Steeltown” courtesy of Stacey Case, an avid fan of 16 mm films who runs a monthly set of movie screenings at the Doors Pub (Taco Joint and Metal Bar) at Hess and Main. He calls these film nights, set to the whirl of an old reel-to-reel projector, the Trash Palace.
In March, the Trash Palace feature was “Steeltown,” a collectible he values as if it was a Pete Rose rookie card. He found the film in the hands of a Toronto collector who gave it away for the paltry price of $10.
“The guy didn’t know what he had,” Case beams as he explains how the little NFB gem came into his possession. (Case has scheduled two more screenings of the film at the AGH Annex, 123 King St. E., on July 8, at 7 and 9 p.m.).
He loves it because it’s odd … and because it’s about Hamilton. Case is one of the many émigrés who have been moving with increasing regularity from Toronto to Hamilton.
The migration started because of housing affordability, but somewhere along the line, Hamilton became hip. Rock bands like the Arkells and Monster Truck now tour the world, proudly wearing their Hamilton heritage on their sleeves.
Our literary community boasts internationally recognized authors like Lawrence Hill, Gary Barwin and Marnie Woodrow, while monthly art crawls fill downtown streets with people eager to make the scene. Supercrawl is recognized as one of the top urban festivals in the country. It’s now cool to be Hamilton. Case is a silkscreen printer by day and a punk rocker by night, former drummer for the Toronto band The Tijuana Bibles currently banging away with Hamilton’s Noble Savages.
Besides his cherished hoard of 16 mm movies, Case also collects movie posters and Mexican wrestling masks. He ran weekly Trash Palace screenings in Toronto until he moved to Hamilton a couple of years ago.
Case, like many other recent Toronto transplants including Max Kerman of the Arkells, has become an inveterate promoter of all things Hamilton.
“Hamilton combines the best of what I like in a city,” Case explains. “An earthy grittiness tempered with caring citizens. A thriving arts scene with a grounded, blue-collar, get-it-done vibe.
“Pockets of the city seem frozen in time, and don’t seem to be rushing toward gentrification. Outsiders have no idea of the natural beauty to be found here, they just see the steel plant from the highway and write off our city.
“The best decision I ever made was to leave Toronto for Hamilton.”