On the menu as a souvenir? The menu
It was local and classy. Real classy.
The official Grey Cup Dinner on Dec. 1, 1972, was held two nights before the Grey Cup was to be played in Hamilton for the first time in 28 years and dinner chair, Joe Kostyk, and Grey Cup festival chair, Jack MacDonald, the future mayor, wanted to do it up right.
The dinner was open to the public and popular enough, even at $25 per ($153 in today’s dollars), that it had to be held in two ballrooms simultaneously, at the Sheraton Connaught Hotel and at the downtown Holiday Inn.
Besides “Pride of the Nation” roast beef, the menu included “Consommee with Winona Sher“r City y,” “Roast Potatoes, Steel Style,” “Baby Niagara Carrots,” “Grimsby Cherries Flambé with Brandy” and “AstroTurf Tossed Greens,” the latter a play on the new artificial playing surface at refurbished Ivor Wynne Stadium.
But, the most elegant part of the menu was the physical menu itself. All the guests received them and they were so well-crafted that a half-century later they don’t look a day older than a day old.
It looks like high-end brass but, in reality, the menu was made at American Can Company, a major Hamilton employer at the time, which created millions of “tin cans” a year for products like Campbell’s Soup and Vernor’s Ginger Ale.
Jack Callowhill, who was part of the famous Canadian-American Devil’s Brigade Second World War special forces unit, worked at American Can for 35 years. Retiring in 1985, he spent most of his career in the “procuring” (purchasing) department at American’s plants at Emerald and Shaw streets and later on Wellington Street.
Callowhill, who died Nov. 17 at the age of 98, took a few of the menus when he retired, threw them in a drawer at home and didn’t think anything about them until he moved into the Amica seniors residence in Stoney Creek. He eventually gave a couple of the menus to neighbours, Pat and Lynda Lynch, who, in turn, have donated them to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame. The hall will include them in their Grey Cup exhibits.
Just a few days before he died, Callowhill spoke to The Spectator about the menus.
“What they are is actually a piece of tin plate, like the company would make into a can,” Callowhill said.
“We bought the material from Stelco. It would all come in a certain size and it was put through a slitter to recut it down so that it could be put on a printing press.
“It was not engraved, it was printed like a newspaper would be. It’s like a type of gold varnish on it, like you see inside many food tins.”
Callowhill didn’t go to the 1972 dinner, nor the game between the Tiger-Cats and Saskatchewan Roughriders.
He had planned to watch this year’s Grey Cup on TV, as he usually does and he followed the Ticats almost every game.
He only went to one Grey Cup, in Toronto during the 1980s and said his only connection to the iconic championship was that he had helped buy the materials that eventually created the durable 1972 dinner menus.
“Quite a few of guys who worked there got them that year,” he told The Spectator. “I said to myself, ‘This will make quite a nice souvenir.’ ”