A prescription for living
ARLENE CHAN At his storefront on Dundas St., Tom Lock filled prescriptions and stocked his shelves with pharmaceuticals, personal care items, gift packages and birthday cards. The enticing aroma of roasting peanuts by the cashier made them hard to resist. Folks lingered, waiting for medications, wandering the aisles and chatting with Tom. In the 1950s and 1960s, his pharmacy was a Chinatown landmark.
Among the many household objects found in the nearby Armoury Street Dig, the archeological team retrieved dozens of the day-to-day objects that would have been sold by druggists: medications, toothbrushes, syringes. While the excavated artifacts would have predated Lock’s business, they illustrate that residents of this working-class, immigrant neighbourhood were consumers of the same products that would have been found in any household.
As Toronto’s first pharmacist of Chinese descent, George Thomas (Tom) Lock must have had a prescription for an extraordinary life. Perhaps he was destined to be one of a kind with the auspicious arrival of his mother to Toronto in 1909, seven years before his birth. At 20 years old, she appeared on the Toronto Daily Star’s front page with the headline “Chinese Woman Comes to Toronto” — one of the first to settle in the city.
This was the era of the bachelor society, when the majority of the 1,099 Chinese in Toronto were men, many of them married but separated from their wives and children. The impacts of Canada’s head taxes (18851923) and exclusionary legislation (1923-47) were severe, deliberately deterring, then halting, Chinese immigration and preventing family life. The Locks were one of only 13 Chinese families in the Chinatown area.
The youngest of four children, Lock had a unique childhood: hanging out at the YMCA on College St., playing badminton at the Bay Street Mission on Elm St., shooting hoops at the Chinese Young Men’s Christian Institute on University Ave., and joining the all-Chinese 128th Boy Scout Troop. These pastimes cemented his friendships with the other boys in Chinatown.
Having Jewish friends who, like him, were often bullied and pushed around as outsiders expanded his horizons. He learned Yiddish, carried out his friends’ household duties during their Sabbath and gained street smarts. At Ogden Public School, where there were but a handful of Chinese students, he could hold his own.
The Lock children had their share of responsibilities, especially after the untimely death of their father during the Depression years. Working at the family laundry honed Lock’s expertise in sewing, cleaning, ironing, and mending cuffs and collars. Cooking was another chore, and his mother regularly sent him to Elizabeth St. to buy a live chicken. There were two Jewish poultry stores, owned by the competing Wasserman brothers. Lock was often caught in the middle for a sale, a brother yanking on each arm. These were not the only times he was pulled in two directions.
When Canada joined Britain and France in the war against Germany, the Chinese across Canada were strongly divided. Should they volunteer to fight for a country that treated them so poorly? On the other hand, the war opened a door for them to prove their patriotism and ultimately gain the right to vote. To this end, enthusiasts lined up to enlist. Lock’s older brother Earl and his cousin and kung fu master Jimmy Lore were among the many to be turned away by recruiters who deemed them unsuitable because of their ethnicity. Lock’s recruiter had a different opinion, and he enlisted without incident.
A turning point for the Chinese in Canada was the bombing of Pearl Harbor and Canada’s declaration of war against Japan. Canada and China were now allies against a common enemy. In 1944, conscription was expanded to include Chinese Canadians, who became regarded as assets in the Pacific war arena, where they could easily blend in behind enemy lines.
Lock went above and beyond the call of duty. Once again he volunteered, this time for a covert mission to sabotage, infiltrate and spy behind enemy lines. Operation Oblivion was the code name, with a casualty rate projected at 80 per cent. Toughened on the streets during his youth, he was well-positioned for this elite guerrilla unit of Chinese Canadians. Intensive training, with a suicide capsule among the supplies, included jungle survival, demolition with explosives, parachute landing and medic assistance.
Lock returned home safely after the war to the welcoming arms of his family at Union Station; however, he had one more battle to win. During his commando training in Australia, Lock had met and married Joan Lim On. They were now a stateless couple. Lock couldn’t settle in Australia because of its White Australia policy, and his wife was not allowed into Canada due to the Chinese Immigration Act. A special Order in Council eventually granted her entry as a war bride, one of a handful of Chinese immigrants who entered Canada during the 24 years of exclusion.
Armed with impressive credentials and reference letters from two Nobel laureates, Dr. Frank Macfarlane Burnet and Toronto’s Dr. Charles Best, a co-discoverer of insulin, she was immediately hired as a microbiologist at the Hospital for Sick Children. With financial aid from the Veterans Rehabilitation Act, Lock enrolled at the University of Toronto, where he and his friend Sam Chin were the first Chinese graduates from the School of Pharmacy.
The life-and-death precision of his wartime training had laid the groundwork for his chosen profession. Tom Lock Drug Store opened in 1954 at 136 Dundas St. W. in the heart of Chinatown. Lock became Toronto’s first pharmacist of Chinese descent, and proprietor of the first Chinese-owned pharmacy in Canada east of the Rockies.
He was even able to somewhat realize his prewar aspirations of becoming an interior decorator or fashion designer with the store’s startling colours of yellow, coral and turquoise, rather than the typical black-and-white interiors. What also distinguished Lock’s drugstore was signage in English and Chinese, the small inventory of Chinese goods such as abacuses, tea and herbal remedies, and services surpassing those of other pharmacies. Bachelor-society men, aging and still alone, relied on his bilingual fluency for filling out government forms, translating letters and doctors’ instructions, and getting advice for aches and pains. Lock was the kind of person to lend a hand and serve his community.
Photo developing was a popular service, one that Lock particularly enjoyed providing inhouse — he had a keen interest in photography. The customers were themselves a snapshot of the neighbourhood in the 1950s and 1960s: oldtimers and new immigrants, travellers arriving at the Bay St. bus terminal, lesbians and gays who frequented the nearby Continental and Ford hotels, and prostitutes.
Across the street at the Kwang Tung Hotel, rooms were rented by the hour, and Lock kept an ample supply of condoms and aphrodisiacs to meet demand. His long workdays, from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m., had their slower moments. Lock would step outside and chat with passersby in English and Chinese, all the while keeping an eye on what was transpiring in the neighbourhood. His vantage point was ideal for watching the hotel, timing the sex-trade workers with their clientele, and noting, “That didn’t take long.” He was known for his observant quips about life in Chinatown; he called them his “CDRs,” his complete detailed reports of the neighbourhood.
Another topic of Lock’s CDRs was gambling, a prevalent pastime of the bachelor-society men in many establishments along Dundas and Elizabeth Sts. Lock witnessed frequent police raids, one resulting in furniture being tossed onto the sidewalk and smashed with axes. In the basement of his store, a steel door led to a gambling house in the adjacent building. The distinctive clatter of mah-jong tiles broke the silence whenever Lock made the trek downstairs to retrieve pop bottles from storage.
Fondly remembered as an outgoing personality with his own brand of humour and “Lock-talk” expressions, he served his community at the drugstore for 22 years. Lock lived life to the fullest for 88 years until his passing in 2003, leaving the legacy of a lasting impact on others. His first-hand experience, especially with the aging Chinese men living on the streets and in rundown rooming houses, strengthened his resolve to do more.
He was a founding member and long-serving board director of the Mon Sheong Foundation, the first Chinese charitable organization in Canada. In 1975, the Mon Sheong Home for the Aged opened near Chinatown with 65 beds as the first residential facility in Ontario for Chinese senior citizens. This association coexisted with other institutions, such as the Chinese Canadian Institute and the Chinese United Church, located down the street from Lock’s pharmacy.
Lock’s contribution lives on at the Mon Sheong Foundation, which has expanded its facilities to 457 beds in the Greater Toronto Area. And Chinese Canadians such as Lock, who enlisted in the armed forces during the Second World War, played a pivotal role in bringing about fundamental changes for the Chinese in Canada: gaining the right to vote, obtaining full citizenship and seeing the repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act.
Lock’s prescription for life served him well to the benefit of his fellow Canadians.
As Toronto’s first pharmacist of Chinese descent, George Thomas (Tom) Lock must have had a prescription for an extraordinary life.