When the hunt for Santa led two young boys to the Star newsroom
For more than a century, Star’s Santa Claus Fund has helped give families a little Christmas
“Say, Mister, can you tell me where I can find Santa Claus?”
The quote rings with antiquity, placing the reader in a winter long ago. A light snow is settling on the City of Toronto. The signing of the armistice has brought fresh joy. Soldiers returned to Halifax on the Aquitania are due this very evening at north Toronto station. The promise of longterm peace is delivering economic optimism (the price of wool has dropped as much as 30 per cent) and war brides are eagerly arriving, including Mrs. T. Miller, “a little Scotch woman from Stirling.” On Dec. 3, 1918, the sun will set at 4:43 p.m.
Two young boys make their way from humble homes in the city’s east end toward the King St. West premises of The Toronto Daily Star, the city’s largest newspaper. At the corner of Yonge and Adelaide, Holt Renfrew & Co. is advertising Christmas furs — ermine neckpieces for children, and barrel muffs for $100. At Simpson’s, a boy’s overcoat retails for $13.50. At 18 King St. West, the presses are running.
The boys find their way down a long corridor to the newsroom. A reporter’s account: “They were real boys, two fine, manly little chaps, even if their clothes were a little ragged and their faces not over clean, and their boots could have been more intimately acquainted with blacking.” Why, “not even the roar of the presses below could dim the brightness of their eyes or frighten away the alertness of their manner.”
The premises of the Star were not an illogical place of inquiry for two boys alert to the hunt for Santa Claus. The paper’s Santa Claus Fund was a consistent winter presence with its call for donations and its name-by-name recitation of those who had stepped forward to give. “A business woman” $1. “Six well wishers” $9. “Chas C. Turner” $25. “A little boy whose daddy lies in Flanders” $1.
The boys in the newspaper account would remain anonymous, and their story would play on the front page.
One boy told the newspaperman of losing his father to influenza and how his impoverished mother was trying to make do. The story echoed that of Star founder Joseph E. Atkinson, whose own widowed mother struggled to feed and clothe eight children, a background that shaped Atkinson’s attentiveness to the plight of the disenfranchised and the power of civic action. Under Atkinson, the Star founded the Santa Claus Fund in 1906.
A dozen years later, a surprised reporter was asked if he knew where Santa might be. The unnamed reporter pondered this: “When I was a kiddie, Santa Claus came looking for me.”
Poverty upended that relationship, as it does.
Assurances were given that Santa would indeed find this boy, who responded, “Mister, will you fix up my friend too?”
Neither boy would know of the gathering of volunteers working away in the basement of Massey Hall that winter of 1918, packing up parcels with biscuits, a toy, an item of clothing (donated by Eaton’s), candies and “a lovely navel orange.”
Seven thousand boxes. Seven thousand children.
“Kings may come and Kaisers may go, but Santa Claus must not be permitted to abdicate in the realm of childhood,” decreed the Star, sensibly.
It has been this paper’s mission ever since to continue with the Santa Claus Fund. Contributing to the fund, the Star said a century ago, “is a privilege open to everybody.” Peace did not hold. But poverty did. Today the goal for the Santa Claus Fund stands at $1.7 million.
Forty-five thousand boxes. Forty-five thousand children.
“The Star has been a beacon, a light over time in consistently understanding this issue, consistently trying to help,” says John Boynton, chief executive officer of Torstar Corp. That task falls to all of us. To our repeat mayor with his eye on his own legacy. To corporate leaders. To you and me.
“Hopefully we can motivate other CEOs and other companies to join us in doing whatever they can do to help,” Boynton says. “I just worry that everyone’s moved off that file a little bit.”
That “file,” as Boynton refers to it, is the day to day, the here and now, immediate needs. “I think there are a lot of good causes out there, but I think at the high end of the list, the top of the list should be those who have been marginalized, those who just struggle day to day. … If I could say anything to other CEOs it would be, ‘Don’t lose the fact that there’s still the most basic need out there.’”
What he has observed is the tendency to gravitate toward the long term. “But how do we help them tomorrow?” he asks of those in need. “Somehow that’s become less appealing or less of a focus or less attractive for politicians and corporations. I think we have to get back to some basics.”
Boynton mentions opulence and inequality and how at no point is the disparity more magnified than during the holiday season.
A century ago, two boys ferried their worries across town to a newsroom that cared.
What would happen on that day, they fretted?
What would happen on that one day? The Star helped. So can you.