Natalie’s mother, family, and friend Annie Kidder all began to correspond with Rowling, and a transatlantic friendship developed. Unknown to Natalie’s family and friends, Rowling commemorated the young fan, who did not live long enough to read a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by giving the name Natalie McDonald (on page 159 of the first edition) to a first-year student of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. This sad-but-inspiring story was told by Brian Bethune in the article “The Rowling Connection,” in Maclean’s, November 6, 2000.
003. Did Al Capone go into hiding in Moose Jaw?
Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, may seem an unlikely place for Al Capone to go into hiding, but the Chicago gangster did disappear for three months in 1926, when U.S. prosecutors wanted to indict him for the murder of fellow gangster Joe Howard. No one knows where Al Capone found sanctuary, but local stories are rife with indications that he took refuge in Moose Jaw.
The city, located on the CPR line with the Soo Line running to Chicago, was easily accessible to Capone. From the early 1920s to the early 1930s, prohibitionists put a damper on the sale of liquor, but gangsters expedited its illegal traffic and trade. It is said that secret tunnels beneath the city’s streets were used in the transport of bootleg beverages.
According to reporter Craig Wong, in “Canadian Mysteries: Rumours Rife, Hard Evidence Scant on Gangster Al Capone’s Time in Moose Jaw,” The Ottawa Citizen, July 11, 2001, local traditions boast of Capone’s presence in the city whenever there was “heat” in the Cicero district of Chicago, where he established his crime empire.
004. Has Elmer Fudd ever appeared in a cartoon as a Mountie?
Elmer Fudd, the fuddy-duddy cartoon character, played a Mountie in Fresh Hare (1942) directed by Friz Freleng, with story by Michael Maltese, animation by Manuel Perez, and musical direction by Carl W. Stalling. He fumbled his investigations with much muttering and stammering. According to film exhibitor Reg Hartt, “This is a great little film but the ending is cut from current prints as it features Black folks.”
005. Who was the Le Page of LePage’s Glue?
Generations of Canadian and American schoolchildren grew up with small, bell-shaped bottles of glue, or mucilage, as it was called. Each bottle was surmounted by a tip of red rubber. The bottles were labeled, LEPAGE’S GLUE. The company that manufactured these bottles was founded by William Nelson Le Page (1849–1919), an inventor and businessman who was born on Prince Edward Island, worked in Massachusetts, and died in Vancouver, B.C.
He was a youngster when the Le Page family moved to the United States. He was raised in Massachusetts, where trained as a chemist. In 1876, he established the Russian Cement Company in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which sometime later was renamed the LePage Company. His first glues were formed from fish skins. The company’s first product was the “original” glue and mucilage, and bottles of these made “LePage’s” a household name throughout North America. Between 1880 and 1887, LePage’s sold fifty million bottles of glue worldwide. Today, the company has special expertise in prepared industrial adhesives with long shelf life. It produces a range of adhesive products and is the world’s largest producer of private-label, pressure-sensitive tape. Its newest product is Power Grab.
Vanessa Le Page, the great-great-granddaughter of the founder, is a resident of Toronto who collects LePage memorabilia. By 2001, the company’s 125th anniversary, she had over 3,000 items in her collection. The items document LePage’s history and the wide range of products it produced.
006. Who is the singer Eilleen Twain?
Eilleen Twain is the name given at birth to the popular singer and performer — otherwise known as Shania Twain — by her parents, in her native city of Timmins, Ontario. On the advice of her producer and husband Mutt Lange, she changed the Eilleen part of her name to Shania. This occurred sometime after the year 1988, and success as a composing, performing, and recording artist followed suit. Shania is said to be a woman’s name in the Algonkian language of the Ojibway. (The singer’s adoptive stepfather is Ojibway.) Nicholas Jennings, writing in “Overture,” Maclean’s, December 3, 2001, identifies Twain as “the highest-selling female artist in the history of country music.”
007. Did Mary Pickford ever appear in a Canadian movie?
Mary Pickford (1892–1979), the silent film star who enjoyed so much popularity with audiences in the silent-film period that she was dubbed America’s Sweetheart, appeared in 147 short films released between 1909 and 1913 and in fifty-four feature films released between 1913 and 1933, when she retired. A filmography appears in Eileen Whitfield’s appreciative biographical study titled Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood (1997).
All of these shorts and features were produced in the United States. She never appeared in a Canadian-made movie. Yet of special interest to Canadians is the fact that she was born in Toronto and made special arrangements with the Department of Citizenship to regain her Canadian citizenship before she died.
In one of her movies (and possibly in another), she plays the part of a Canadian woman — an Eskimo lass in Little Pal (Famous Players, 1915). Set in the Yukon, the feature film was based on a short story by Marshall (Mickey) Neilan and was directed by James Kirkwood. Pickford played an Inuit girl in a “dispirited style,” according to one reviewer. It was greeted with dismay, her biographer Eileen Whitfield noted, perhaps because she hid her well-loved golden curls beneath a long black wig.
One of the short films might have Canadian content and might be set in Nova Scotia. It is called An Acadian Maid (Bioscope, 1910). No print of that film is known to survive. No description of its setting or action is known.
So the short answer to the question posed above is “No.” She never appeared in a Canadian movie. But she played a role identified with Canada. She has since then been described as “cinema’s first superstar.”
008. Did Buckminster Fuller have any Canadian associations?
Yes, the American designer and futurist Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983), who is identified with the words “Spaceship Earth,” has a number of associations with Canada.
Fuller is internationally known as the creator of the geodesic dome, and the largest and most imaginative of his geodesic domes was the one he designed to house the U.S. Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. It focused attention on American design and technology, and the image of the glass-ribbed dome became an icon associated with this most successful of world expositions.
In his memoirs Fuller mentioned that as a youngster he worked in the machine plant in Sherbrooke, Quebec, where he learned valuable lessons about assembly line production, with its efficiencies and the rationalization of effort.
As an innovative designer, twice he turned his attention to the city of Toronto, which he described in interviews as a city that “works.” In the 1960s he prepared “Project Toronto,” a three-month-long study of the city and how it works. He recommended, among other imaginative schemes, a floating city for the waterfront, a bold forerunner of the pale Harbourfront complex. In 1972 he promoted “Project Spadina,” a vast, futuristic highway that was to fill the ditch remaining from the city’s abandoned plans to extend the Spadina Expressway. His projects were utopian, attention-getting, and caused much comment but no commitment.
009. What is the meaning of Anishinaubaek?
Anishinaubae is singular for “human being” and Anishinaubaek is plural for “human beings.” The words may also mean “good human being” and “good human beings.” It is the way the Native people known as the Ojibway or the Chippewas refer to themselves in their own language.
010. What are the five basic functions of humanity according to the Ojibway?
Native elder Basil Johnston, writing in The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway (1995), explains that there are five basic functions