Christmas was saved despite strike woes
Worker action involving dad at Royal York Hotel almost made the holidays tight
Joe Groia’s memories growing up near Bloor and Lansdowne in the early 1960s include:
The straight-out-of-TV moment when a steer escaped the cattle car on its way to the abattoir at the end of the street where the Groias lived, the steer taking a bullet from a member of the local constabulary.
The job he took on at the age of 9 or so at the behest of the Union Station redcap who lived in a nearby rooming house. “He hired me to do his laundry once a week and he paid me in pop bottles. He had a closet full of empty ginger ale and Coca-Cola bottles.” So Groia would do the wash-dry-and-fold at the laundromat then take the payoff pop bottles to a shop on Lansdowne, cashing them in and buying penny candy. “The shop was run by a very nice Polish couple,” he remembers. “I didn’t know at the time why they had numbers tattooed on their arms.”
The early morning hours when his father, Sam, would till and weed the back garden with Mrs. Di Florio next door, tending the raspberries and tomatoes. “It was probably one of the most densely cultivated plots of land in the world,” he says, noting that Mrs. Di Florio’s daughter lives there still, and the garden still produces.
And Christmas morning, 1961, when there, under the Christmas tree, sat a
box with a label on one end addressed to Joe Groia from, who else, Santa Claus, and another box for Joe’s older brother, David.
It had been a tough year in the Groia household. Sam worked as a bellman at the Royal York Hotel and Groia’s mother, Eleanor, worked in reservations at the same hotel. In April of 1961, Local 299 of the Hotel and Club Employees Union went on strike, affecting 1,150 employees. A picture of Sam with the family’s cocker spaniel, Goldie, ran in that other paper. Both Sam and Goldie were walking the picket line, Sam bearing his picket sign on his front, as you would expect; Goldie with hers tied to her back. It was reported that it took Goldie two days to get used to the idea.
The Groias had a mortgage to pay. Union leaders expected the strike to last a couple of weeks. Strike pay was initially $20 a week for men; $15 for women, a sum that was raised to $25 for men, $18 for women.
April turned to May, to June, to July. The garden turned from raspberries to tomatoes to pumpkins. This was a big story, and the Toronto Daily Star was on it. The company had offered workers an hourly increase of 2 1⁄ cents. The workers wanted 2 five. As soon as the workers walked out, the CPR, which owned the hotel, ran recruitment ads. Hundreds applied.
A primary point of contention: the company wanted to turn back a hard-won concession that granted workers seven days notice in the event of a layoff. The company wanted to return to its prior practise of 48 hours notice.
This was a story with endless reporting angles. Guests arriving at Union Station, heading for the tunnel that connected to the hotel, struggled with their luggage, for the redcaps at the rail station refused to cross the picket line. The singer Juliette wouldn’t cross. The Lord Mayor of Bristol refused to cross. Premier Leslie Frost and Mrs. Frost, who resided in a suite at the hotel, switched to the Westbury. Mayor Nathan Phillips thought differently, crossing the lines with his wife in order to address the Canadian Congress on Corrections. “I’m taking a fearless stand and I’m not afraid,” the mayor said. The King Eddy picked up loads of conventions transferring from the railway hotel. With unionized musicians supporting their striking brothers, the Royal York promised that guests would be able to dance to “gramophone music.”
Pierre Berton took up the strikers’ cause. “An old-fashioned strike for old-fashioned principles,” he called it. “The union is still fighting for the kind of working conditions that most labour bodies achieved years ago.” He noted the company’s strategy of keeping workers on as “extras” for years and years and years, thereby denying them benefits and job security. One employee in five, Berton wrote, was an “extra.”
In July, the company issued demand letters to the striking workers: return to work or be fired. An unknown labour lawyer named David Lewis announced the union’s intention to prosecute the CPR under the Ontario Labour Relations Act. “They are trying to fire these people because they are on strike,” Lewis said. “That’s illegal.”
In August, Sam Groia picked up a bit of extra money by working as a carny at the CNE, manning one of those wheel-spinning attractions. Two hundred strikers returned to work, a number the company bolstered by hiring 900 new employees.
September came and went. And October. And November. “Even as a 7-year-old, the worry was palpable,” Joe Groia says. “You could feel the tension, the financial crunch.”
And then it was Christmas. The union always hosted a Christmas party, but the Christmas of 1961 was a bleak gathering in a bingo hall. Christmas morning there might have been one or two other items under the tree, but the main gift was the Star box, with a picture of Santa, should there be any confusion.
“It was full. I don’t remember everything that was in it, but I do remember there were Christmas candies and socks.”
At least half a dozen kids in the neighbourhood received boxes too. “Other kids would be wearing the same mittens,” Groia notes.
For years and years, the Groias kept the two boxes in the attic of the little house on St. Helens Ave., used as storage containers for fragile Christmas ornaments, an annual reminder of the Star’s Santa Claus Fund.
Joe became a lawyer, which is a story worthy of a book. David Lewis fought the CPR all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, winning on the grounds that the hotel had violated the Labour Relations Act when it fired 700 employees, a victory that coincided with the launch of an impressive political career.
The strike itself? It lasted for11 long months. In the end, the union retained its seven-day layoff notice provision for the majority of the workforce. The wage increases were negligible.
Sam Groia paid off the house. A bellman’s tips were pretty good.
A couple of weeks ago, Joe Groia noticed a story in the Star about the Santa Claus Fund, which brought back that memory of that singular Christmas morning. And then he did what any of us would do: he made a donation. If you have been touched by the Santa Claus Fund or have a story to tell, please email santaclausfund@thestar.ca.