Under the Electric Sky (2 page)

McNab's Island, 1890s

I
t was always by early evening, when the shades of summer sky started to contrast and clouds turned to little puffs of cotton candy, that any individual on McNab's Island realized the only relief for the pressing joy that welled up inside them was more dancing, more drinking, more food, more music, more anything that would keep this celebration going.

Exactly what the thousands of revellers were celebrating was never made clear, but if you were part of the party on McNab's in the late 1890s, you understood and need not worry about specifics. More became an attitude rather than a motto and why was a question nobody asked. There was something clean and exhilarating about being on the island at dusk on a beautiful late June day. It was like a sparkling swirl of cosmic energy strung everyone together for a short spell, there between the spruce trees on an island nestled at the mouth of Halifax Harbour that flirted with the ocean and beyond. It made you feel small in a wholly human way, but a meaningful component of something much larger and it was nice to be a part of that.

The orchestra would blare on from the grandstand, fiddlers and horn-blowers keeping up the momentum of their audience, the bodies of men and women on the hill accentuating ghost notes with their limbs as the smell of food mingled with night in the branches above. Children were giggling all around, engaged in innocent games of hide-and-seek and foot races. Young men were winding down a baseball game in the distance as the gentle summer air gave way to a mild breeze off the ocean, creating a night atmosphere for the island all its own. It hung in the darkening sky, low above the heads of the picnickers and dancers in the light from the lanterns, as if it could be poked by a curious finger, the still painted backdrop for the show that was now contained to this one lonely island.

It was difficult to determine at times the adults from the children in this cloud of excitement. On the east end of the picnic grounds, cinders showered through the aura as the steam-powered Merry-Go-Round made its turns, the wooden horses running counter-clockwise laps pulling two-seat chariots between emanations of steam. A calliope, positioned in the centre of the platform, whistled its haunting symphony as an eager crowd lined up for a spin on the fantastic machine, each of them certain the ten cent fare was a small price to pay to complete the mythic journey from this world of everyday realities to the other.

The Merry-Go-Round became the nucleus for the feverish comet that was McNab's Island. At the outset there was nothing particularly striking about it. It was ancient then, an old-fashioned rickety wooden contraption that rested on wheels which ran on a circular track. The horses were not suspended by poles, but rather on sweeps protruding out from the centre underneath the gapped boards. This meant the twenty-four horses in rows of two did not pounce vertically as they do on more modern carousels, but instead circled the track stationary. Still, on those hot summer nights, nothing could have been more sublime. The equine sculptures were not merely running in circles; they were running straight through the imaginations of everyone who took a turn on them. The Merry-Go-Round was the last touch the island needed to divide itself completely between two worlds. Across the harbour, reality sat waiting for vindication, but here on the north end of McNab's – on Findlay's Picnic Grounds – the real world was replaced with something more sensual, something only imagined during the week, but which had taken form here. It was written on the faces, heard in the air and felt through vibrations in every direction. The awe-inspiring spectacle of people basking in the wonder of life was a thrill like no other. It felt like the entire populations of Halifax and Dartmouth were on this island, dancing and whooping it up in the summer air, celebrating some newly interpreted version of the Golden Age.

The party had started years before, up the hill from Findlay's at Woolnough's Pleasure Grounds. Halifax restaurateur Charles Woolnough had recognized a need for a permanent facility for picnickers and opened up a portion of his property on the island to the public in 1873. McNab's had been used as a recreational site as far back as the 1760s, when men would travel to the island's sheltered confines to hone their skills at an early form of a ring-toss game called quoits. Woolnough knew the history and was sure to include an area for that pastime on his grounds as well as space for football, while also installing dining and dancing pavilions. The 1840s saw a massive spike in leisure interests as city residents took full advantage of their own little ocean playground. On some afternoons picnics on the island reached a roaring crowd of over six thousand people. The successful civic picnic for Governor General, Lord Dufferin, in 1874 cemented the island's reputation as the capital of earthly delights within the city. Shortly after, local newspapers were filled with ads and notices of picnics to be held at Woolnough's for the rest of the summer season. The Halifax Steamship Company cancelled runs to Bedford in order to accommodate the tremendous demand from “bathers and beer-drinkers” determined to revel in their own slice of the new paradise.

But by the 1890s, James Findlay's Picnic Grounds were attracting more visitors than Woolnough's, due in part to the better location on the Halifax side of the island. There was more of a carnival atmosphere at Findlay's that included games, snacks, drinks and of course the old Merry-Go-Round.

Down the gentle slope from the picnic grounds, between the hundreds of beached rowboats in Findlay's Cove, the twentieth century was washing ashore in the black harbour night. But the spectre of the past is never really that far away in the Maritimes. Across the cove from the grounds sat Hugonin Point, the site of a mass grave of cholera victims less than thirty-five years earlier. Thirty-five years was not a long time for a place to transform from infected graveyard to fashionable mecca. There were still people alive in Halifax who remembered the
S.S. England
pulling into McNab's Cove with over four hundred sick passengers on board in April 1866.

The prognosis was grim for those infected by the dread disease in the nineteenth century. Once stricken, victims would have twelve hours or so to suffer through gangrene, vomiting and purging, followed by a discoloration of the hands and feet, dehydration and the inability to urinate before collapsing and expiring with their arms and legs twisted up in contorted terror. It was hard to fit them in coffins after that and cleaning up the feces that poured out of them on collapse was a burden, too.

Fearing an outbreak in the city, port authorities ordered the ship to anchor in McNab's Cove on the Halifax side of the island. It was on its way from Liverpool, England to New York but was forced to detour after passengers and crew felt the first rising waves of the illness. The infected passengers were transferred to a surplus naval ship and quarantined off Findlay's wharf, while the remaining eight hundred passengers were detained on the island, where some took up residence in buildings used for workers constructing Fort Ives while the ship was fumigated and the sick treated. A lot of passengers and potential cholera carriers camped out on land that would eventually become the site of Findlay's Picnic Grounds and that little island paradise. But in April of 1866, that land was a hellish purgatory where the strong fought the sick and elderly for food when it arrived from the mainland. The shelters proved inadequate and the passengers' clothing not sufficient for spring in Nova Scotia. Eight hundred mean, half-crazed and cold cholera carriers running around McNab's stealing food and beating the weak was enough incentive for most of the island's dozen or so inhabitants to flee. Some didn't come back. Eventually, soldiers were dispatched to the island to restore order. The passengers were moved to the southern tip of the island where they were guarded from trying to make a break for the city. Within two weeks, the ordeal was over and an estimated two hundred cholera victims were buried on the island in different locations. One gravesite is located at the south end of the island at Little Thrum Cap and the other graves were dug by criminals from the city prison on land overlooking Findlay's.

All of this was not heavy in the minds of the revellers who would show up for a good time at Findlay's near the turn of the century. The brush had grown over the unmarked graves burying the stink and the gnarled limbs. That kind of gloomy stuff could make a person introspective and Findlay's was certainly not the place for solemn contemplation. It was a place where human desires were satisfied, if only for a few beautiful hours.

The raging parties caught the attention of the local temperance movement, who protested the consumption of alcohol on the island. In a tidy bit of fire-and-brimstone hyperbole, one member of the temperance movement, a man by the name of John Wesley, condemned McNab's and anyone who set foot on the pleasure grounds in a local religious newspaper.

A curse is in the midst of them: the curse of God cleaves to the stones, the timber, the furniture of them! The curse of God is in their Garden, their Walks, their Groves; a fire that burns to the nethermost hell! Blood, blood is there: the foundation, the floor, the walls, the roof, are stained with blood!

He went on to conclude:

McNab's Island is more frequently a place of Drunken Riot than any other place in the vicinity of Halifax; therefore, Churches & Temperance men should not patronise it either as individuals or societies.

Although the threat of eternal damnation was spelled out for them in capital letters and exclamation marks, people continued to take their lonely, tired, bored souls to the island for revitalization. There was something liberating about celebrating life in wholly secular, fleshy abandon.

In any case, greater atrocities than drinking had taken place on McNab's if anyone was willing to remember. About a kilometre south from Findlay's cove was Sherbrooke Tower on Mauger's Beach, a strip of beachfront that juts out from the rest of the island. On the other side is the infamous Hangman's Beach where executed military personnel were strung up in gibbets as a warning to all ships that entered the harbour. That practice began in the 1780s and lasted well into the nineteenth century. A kilometre in the other direction of Findlay's Picnic Grounds sits Indian Point, so named for the natives who were exiled there in the 1760s in an attempt to diffuse growing tensions with European settlers in Halifax. That was the official reason, but the island was for all intents a prison for the natives who would occasionally swim to shore to attack the citizens of Dartmouth in retaliation.

But here at Findlay's on this late June night on the eve of the twentieth century, the party was winding down for the week with wistful regret. People were piling into their rowboats and sailing back across the tenebrous harbour to the cities, back to the real world. Late stragglers were jumping on the last ferry home to greet responsibilities in the morning: work and school, bills and decisions. In short, the dull routine of life.

The new century would change McNab's once and for all. The island between the cities, at the mouth of the harbour that stretched beyond, the place where at one time anything could happen, would be almost entirely abandoned a couple decades into this fresh century and erased from the collective memory like a long-dead relative whose face recedes more as the years wear on. The ferries would cease running services to the island, individual weekend excursions would be scrapped and McNab's left to sink.

But as the past has a way of lingering in the Maritimes, it would be lurking under the surface for years to come. The party was no longer confined to the island; it was about to embrace a larger audience. The vital spark of McNab's Island in those days was destined to burn in all corners of the region because of a curious twist of fate that would bring a new lighthouse keeper and his family to the island in the spring of 1905.

A Young Man Named Lynch

M
atthew Lynch was a solid, hard-nosed Maritimer with salt water running through his veins. Born at Falkland Village on the western shore of Halifax Harbour in 1865, he spent his early life at sea in different pursuits that included conducting wreckage operations in the Atlantic and other diving activities. At the age of forty, he accepted a position to maintain the two-year-old McNab's Island Rear Range Lighthouse and quickly fell in love with the little island, a place he would call home for the rest of his life. It was clear to Lynch the position would afford him the opportunity to continue living by the sea where his heart had always been. What wasn't as clear was the effect it would have on his children.

Lynch's four children grew up on the island, afternoons interrupted in the summer by good-time carousers wandering through their backyard on their way to Findlay's Pleasure Grounds, which happened to border their property. His youngest son William took a special interest in the festivities that occurred on the island during the summer months and for a boy, this kind of mirthful human revelry was worth exploring. William and his sister Gladys held weekly religious conversions, depending on which church was holding a picnic on the island that day, in order to participate in the different Sunday School races. On a few occasions the religious fraudsters were discovered and ejected from the grounds, but that hardly discouraged the young Lynch children. There was always a way to have fun on McNab's in those days, especially for kids. The party was always raging and if it had to end early one day, that was fine, there would be another, better party the next. Quietly marvelling over the celebrations of life also proved a worthwhile exercise in expanding the Lynch children's imaginations on certain evenings.

Growing up with your backyard the centre of bacchanalian revelry for an entire city could have any number of psychological effects on a kid's personality over the years. Jay Gatsby never had any children, but if he had, they would have been troubled souls: crazy on the punch and inevitably developing the quixotic illusion that life is something to be frittered away in pursuits of pleasure and entertainment, without ever asking why.

Well, as kismet would have it, young William Palmer Lynch's father was a lighthouse keeper and not a crooked millionaire. Although born in 1903 and living most of his young life on the hedonistic island, Master William had drilled in his head early a collection of fundamental Maritime values that included a hard work ethic, the true appreciation of a dollar's value, loyalty, integrity and an inherent compassion for his fellow man.

With these essentials firmly entrenched, ten-year-old William Lynch took a summer job driving a horse and wagon in Halifax for the princely sum of three dollars a week. It was good work and correlated conveniently with a few of those intrinsic principles. Not a glamorous job, but it was a hard earned buck and work to take a bit of pride in. On those hot, dusty summer days of driving team, thoughts of the island crept into Lynch's imagination and lingered like smoke from a fantastic firework display on a still night. It was hard to concentrate on a menial job when there was excitement and magic out in the harbour, devoured by a thirsty crowd, all of them escaping the eternal pits of boredom for at least a few hours. There seemed to be no escape for Lynch on some of those tedious afternoons.

So he quit the dull routine life and took a job at Findlay's Pleasure Grounds racking balls for one of the games and offering his assistance on the old Merry-Go-Round when the opportunity presented itself. Gladys, too, took a job working the canteen on the island. The Lynch kids knew there was more to life than settling for a day-to-day existence and that fun didn't necessarily mean the lack of hard work.

The Halifax Explosion of 1917 changed things forever. The real world came roaring back to this newly fashioned Neverland in a large flash. Lynch found work in one of the local machine shops that were operating full-tilt after the disaster. He quit school around then, after finishing the tenth grade, and settled down to hard work and everyday realities with everyone else. Those afternoon revellers started to take things seriously as well, forced to stay home and put their lives back together after the explosion, rather than sneaking out for thrills. Things went like this for a couple of years, until the old twitches started to itch their way up Lynch's skin.

During the winter of 1919-20, Lynch escaped the humdrum life again, this time sneaking out in the evenings to play the banjo with a local orchestra. He had seen musicians years before on the island and figured that would at least break up the monotony he had thus far avoided with great care. Musical talent is a tangible thing, however, and an intelligent man possessed with none can usually figure it out quickly. And so Lynch did, after comparing himself to a few experienced musicians the orchestra had recently hired. He was a man blessed with unshakable determination, but he wasn't blind with pride, either. So he left the orchestra and again found his way back to that enchanted little island that was never far away in his thoughts.

The island had changed after the explosion and the crowds were not showing up in the same magnitude they had before. But Lynch knew he wanted to be in the amusement business for himself and in the spring of 1920, he bought the Merry-Go-Round for $800 with money he had saved from working at the machine shop. He operated it on McNab's until the end of the 1924 season, at which time he was forced to face the reality that there just weren't enough people coming to the island to make it profitable. Those magical nights he remembered as a child were over.

If the people weren't coming to Neverland, Neverland would have to go to the people, he figured. So in the spring of 1925, Bill Lynch and a fellow by the name of Ray Rogers formed a partnership to play the small villages around the Maritimes. Lynch supplied the Merry-Go-Round and Rogers operated the concessions, which in this case meant those tricky games of chance. They travelled the rural communities of the Maritimes by rail in one baggage car, setting up wherever a place would have them. The two parted ways after the end of that first season. Rogers went on to form Barnett Bros. Circus, which operated as a successful enterprise in the States for some years, and Lynch stuck to his native territory where he would, in a matter of a few years, become the renowned Showman Bill Lynch. “Smilin' Bill,” as one paper called him, “who never gets sore, he gives more than you pay for every time. That's Bill's motto...”

By the start of the 1926 season, he had acquired a string of concessions of his own and continued to travel the small community circuit. Two years later, he was playing small venues with a Ferris Wheel, a chair-o-plane and the old steam-powered carousel, which still had a little magic left in its creaking platforms to offer weary Maritimers.

Lynch was never content to play only small towns. He harboured a much larger vision of his carnival and worked hard to see it born into this world. In what would prove to be the biggest leap of his career, Lynch put a bid in for the Halifax Exhibition of 1929 and won it. Although he only possessed three rides and three shows, the venue demanded seven of each. Lynch cashed in his savings that winter, borrowed wherever he could and by August had acquired the necessary amount of each. And by all accounts, the show went well.

It was the second year of the Halifax Exhibition's revival after the war and promoters were counting on it to make money as it had the previous year. There were feelings amongst a lot of citizens that the exhibition was a drain on the taxpayer, but two years of profit would have proved the doubters wrong. And although the first year of its resurrection had proved successful, there were a few problems. The editorial board of
The Halifax Herald
were sufficiently annoyed after the 1928 exhibition to express their concern for a group of 12 or so American carnies who had managed through cunning, of course, to seize control of a few concessions and work the grift. They were subsequently arrested after local police raided their stands. There was no place for this kind of behaviour in Halifax, the
Herald
made it known.

“The slick gentry who regard the public as so many ‘rubes' and ‘suckers' to be ‘trimmed,' must be taught that there is no place for vicious games at the Nova Scotia Exhibition,” proclaimed the editorial in the August 24, 1929, newspaper. “Things went on in the midway last year that provoked most vigorous protests from press and public. It should not be necessary this year to repeat the warning.”

Lynch's contract did not call for concessions, so those matters were out of his hands. But the rides and entertainment he provided were impressive enough to earn Lynch an invitation back. The show made money and the directors declared the whole exhibition a success for the second year in a row. There was the grim business of the Minister of Natural Resources being struck and killed by a streetcar on Gottingen Street as he made his way home from the Ex Grounds one night, however. John Mahoney was killed in his automobile as he passed through an intersection and collided with an oncoming streetcar.

Twenty-six-year-old Bill Lynch had problems of his own arise shortly after fulfilling the exhibition date. Ben Williams, the Glace Bay barber who had established himself as an American showman and held with great esteem the sobriquet of “Carnival King of the Maritimes,” took exception to Lynch's run and made it known to the young upstart. The two met in a Halifax hotel in early September of 1929 to hammer things out. Williams arrived for the encounter immaculately garbed in a fine suit and hat, chomping on a cigar, with a few rough words for this new kid who had the audacity to think he could usurp dates and locales from the king.

Ben threatened in loud, violent tones. Bill shot back with matched intensity. There was something about Williams' persona Lynch admired, even if he was the enemy on this night. He seemed to take his role seriously and he had that air about him the best showmen have – maybe it was the cigar. But the kid was not going to back down, no matter how high and fast this rotund royal figure roared. Lynch understood he was where he belonged and nobody was going to tell him any different. After a few hours of bad noise, they agreed Williams would keep the New Brunswick circuit and Lynch would take Nova Scotia. It was the big break he needed after doubling the size of the business. He was now guaranteed the contracts for the large fairs in bigger centres across the province, still retaining the smaller villages in between. The gentleman's agreement held up until the Second World War suspended the big fairs across the region.

Little is known about Williams' operation as it existed throughout the Maritimes between the two wars. He held contracts for all the major fairs in the Maritimes and Maine and around the end of World War One he purchased the Joseph G. Ferari Shows out of the states and toured it through the Maritimes under its original name, later renaming it Williams Standard Shows. He died at his home in New York in 1943 and was repatriated in a ceremony at Hardwood Hill cemetery in Sydney.

Lynch, on the other hand, took a right at the second star and rolled into the future, purchasing the most exciting rides found anywhere and growing his business as fast as he could. Within five years, he had cemented a strong reputation throughout Atlantic Canada as a showman with extraordinary class. His name was quickly becoming synonymous with warm summer evenings and magical midway excitement. It wasn't a real summer in Maritime communities until the Bill Lynch Shows arrived, lugging the necessary equipment to transform any town into the City of Lights.

“August evenings are just made for loitering and there is no gayer, happier place to loiter than an exhibition midway,” proclaimed a story in the August 25, 1934, issue of
The
Halifax Mail
. “Bill Lynch and his carnival boys and girls will be back again. No need to introduce him, for his aggregation of tents, rides and booths is known from one end of the Maritime Provinces to the other...There is surely no brighter, cleaner, better-run outfit of a similar type on the road.”

Stories from a variety of publications throughout the 1930s demonstrate Lynch's expanding eminence.
The Nova Scotia Provincial Exhibition News
of September 1, 1931, called Lynch “the showman with a conscience” and went on to commend his operation. “Bill Lynch, a local boy, deserves credit for his enterprise in presenting the greatest midway attraction that Halifax has ever seen.” The same impressions popped up all over the region. Charlottetown's
The
Guardian
of August 18, 1934, said Lynch “is a far cry from the days when he started out comparatively unknown to his position today as the premiere midway proprietor east of Toronto.”

Legions and fire departments everywhere were clamouring to book Lynch to play their town. He was the man they wanted and accepting less was not considered an alternative. He was a fair businessman, they were beginning to learn, and willing to share a portion of his profit with the different organizations that booked him. “The legion is to be congratulated in being behind the move to bring a good clean show to town with business methods above board,” the
Sydney Post
declared in July 1934.

To fully appreciate the significance of Lynch's reputation, it is important to understand how the travelling carnival began on this continent. The phenomenon of the rolling carnival has its origins in the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. The mile-and-half-long midway at the Chicago World's Fair was the first of its kind, offering rides (including the original Ferris Wheel), entertainment, games and sideshows which, although proving financially successful and attractive to fair-goers, was deemed on the lower end of social activities. It lacked sophistication and was considered generally immoral by many, which meant it was separated from the respectable parts of the fair that were of “high culture”. The whole aim of the fair was to educate and enlighten people with the world's greatest technological and cultural advances, but the midway steered away from that, a lot of people felt. The term midway originated at the World's Fair that year, when the rides and sideshows were sectioned off from the rest of the fair in an area known as the “Midway Plaisance”. To elevate its cultural significance, fair directors had labelled the Midway Plaisance an “anthropological” exhibition but near the end of the fair it was clear the midway was only erected to provide cheap entertainment and amuse the patrons. But it also proved to be one of the more lucrative exhibitions.