Tragedies marred news of Elvis’s Ottawa concert

To mark our 175th anniversary year, we feature a different front page each week from past Ottawa Citizens. Today: April 4, 1957

Two tragedies and an incident of giddy elation greeted readers of the Citizen’s front page of April 4, 1957.

The night before, Ottawa’s Auditorium had been “transformed into a gold-spangled juvenile paradise as 9,000 ecstatic teenagers squealed paeans of praise for their hairy hero, Elvis Presley.” Elvis, the Citizen reported, wore a $4,000 gold jacket and a black shirt with a “plunging neckline,” and performed “some sort of tribal dance resembling an African fertility rite.”

Earlier in the day, however, grave misfortune had befallen a local family whose 13-year-old daughter, returning home from school that afternoon to find the house locked and her parents and sister out, propped a wooden ladder underneath a bathroom window through which she intended to gain entry. The young girl choked to death when her neck was pinned by the window sash as she attempted to get inside.

Halfway around the world, meanwhile, Canada-U.S. relations were damaged by another incident, when Canada’s ambassador to Egypt, E. Herbert Norman, 47, leaped seven storeys to his death from atop the Swedish embassy in Cairo.

Half a dozen years earlier, at the height of McCarthyism in the United States, Norman had been named by the U.S. House of Representatives’ un-American activities committee as a former communist. Despite being exonerated by both U.S. and Canadian governments, the committee, just weeks before Norman’s death, again raised the spectre.

Canadian Embassy officials in Cairo, the Citizen noted, claimed that Norman’s death resulted from “recent unpleasant publicity and accusations.”

Winnipeg North MP Alistair Stewart was far more blunt in his assessment, saying that Norman had been “murdered by slander.” bdeachman@postmedia.com