All roads led to Kitchener at 1925 reunion
Ninety-three years ago this weekend, Kitchener was ready to party.
On tap was a week of non-stop entertainment: marching bands, airplane flights, baseball, firstrun movies, dignitaries, vaudeville, football, midway, eight parades, balloon ascensions, Decoration Day ceremony, lawn bowling, dance bands, carnival, Crown-the-Queen contest, historical pageants and much more. Who would want to miss a minute of the action from Aug. 1 to 8, 1925?
It was Kitchener’s Old Boys’ Reunion with the slogan: “Somethin’ Doin’ Every Minute.”
In the city’s history, 1925 wasn’t a special anniversary, so what was the occasion? Several smaller reasons combined nicely. St. Jerome’s College was 60 years old. Kitchener had just opened a new city hall, and home-towner Prime Minister Mackenzie King had agreed to attend a civic welcome. However, the social background to the era seems more relevant.
Since the end of the Great War, Kitchener’s population had increased by a third to 25,500 and showed no signs of slowing. Tensions among citizens which had been magnified by the war had eased — some German social clubs had even reopened. Business and commerce boomed during Kitchener’s first decade with its new name.
Nationally, the Roaring ’20s, a.k.a. the Jazz Age, was spilling over from the United States. Kitchener citizens, like many other Canadians, were becoming part of a newfangled consumer society in which advertising was setting goals that the average pre-war person had never dreamt of. Kitchenerites felt proud that national chains were locating here: famous-name department stores and five-and-dime stores brought renowned product lines to town. Hollywood movies and popular American entertainers kept locals up-to-date with the latest flapper fashions, sayings and attitudes. In short, life was pretty good for the majority of Kitchener’s residents. Any lingering thoughts of Olde Berlin — a “German town in Canada” — were lodged only in the minds of a few aging and quickly-being-left-behind residents. Kitchener was, more than at any other time in its history, a young, forwardlooking community.
What better way to celebrate the “new” city than to invite all those who had moved away in previous decades to return and see what this reborn city was all about? Sure, their memories of late 19th-century Berlin would be revived but those flashbacks would occur among the many new industries, buildings, parks, people, housing developments and ideas that formed the 20thcentury Kitchener.
Kitchener’s Queen Street auditorium was renamed the Hofbrau and opened early every day, serving as a restaurant for the huge crowds until 9 p.m., then it hosted jitney dances featuring international and local groups such as Detroit’s Tuller Hotel band, the Bon Jon Girls orchestra, the Bostonia Colored Orchestra, plus two hometown favourites: the Lyric Theatre Orchestra and Rudy Roth’s swing band.
One of the more popular destinations for hundreds of the visitors was Suddaby Public School on Frederick Street. For many, the memory cells had to work overtime: here in August 1925, the school had a different name and even the building was different. For most ex-pupils it had been Central School, built in the 1850s, but when popular principal Jeremiah Suddaby died in 1910, the school board renamed Central in his memory. In 1921, an entirely new modernistic building was constructed on the site.
Several visitors recalled tales of youthful derring-do at the old Central. One day in the 1870s, as he walked the long sidewalk from Frederick Street, principal Thomas Pearce noticed smoke drifting from the old wooden clock tower. In a panic, fearing his school was ablaze, he rushed to the school’s roof only to find a half-dozen early-arriving boys enjoying a pre-schoolday smoke in the tower. Their punishment is, alas, not recorded. Another aging student recalled history class at Central. Jeremiah Suddaby ensured his history lessons were full of battles. Often, he had the front of the classroom cluttered with boxes, brushes and books, each representing, for example, a Roman legion, Wolfe’s 78th Fraser Highlanders or Napoleon’s Imperial Guard. Forty years later, Suddaby’s battle re-creations were still coming alive for at least one old boy visitor.
Two-and-a-half years ago, a pair of essays in Flash from the Past went into much more detail about the 1925 Old Boys’ Reunion. If you did not save the hard copy, I do have scans you may request.