017. Who wrote the score for the musical Duddy Kravitz?
Mordecai Richler’s novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was the basis of both a successful feature film and an unsuccessful musical comedy. The music for Duddy was written by Galt McDermot, co-creator of the fabulously successful Broadway musical Hair. By all reports, McDermot, who was born in Montreal, composed a lively score for Duddy. The production opened at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, where it bombed. It reopened at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, in May 1984, where it bombed again. It has not been heard from since, but given the prominence of the author and the composer, it is not likely to lie fallow forever.
018. Who took the photograph that appears on the cover of Rush’s 1984 album?
The rock band Rush posed for the camera of famous portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh of Ottawa, and the image was reproduced for the cover of their 1984 album Rush.
019. What success story was told in the CBC-TV movie Breaking All the Rules?
Breaking All the Rules, which premiered on CBC-TV in 1987, told the story of the invention and marketing of the Trivial Pursuit board game. The game’s originators are two Canadians: John Haney and Scott Abbott. The game was conceived in 1981 at the Jester Arms Inn at Stratford, Ontario After a rocky year and a half, the concept caught on, and before long everyone, it seemed, was playing Trivial Pursuit.
020. Which painter did Oscar Wilde praise as “the Canadian Constable”?
The Anglo-Irish writer Oscar Wilde toured Central and Eastern Canada in 1882. At an exhibit of art in Toronto in May, he saw a painting called Fleeting Shadows. The pastoral landscape of Waterloo County impressed him as a work with “soul” and “feeling.” Wilde felt the artist to be “an exceedingly clever fellow” and proclaimed him “the Canadian Constable.” In an address later that evening at the Grand Opera House, Wilde praised the painting for being “full of the highest art and beauty.”
Fleeting Shadows was painted by a young artist named Homer Watson (1855–1936), who was a native of Doon, Ontario, and a self-taught artist with no social connections. His career was given a great assist by Wilde, who commissioned a landscape painting of his own and helped secure additional commissions from friends in the United States. When the painter made his first trip to England in 1888, Wilde introduced Watson to Whistler with these words: “Mr. Watson is the Canadian Constable, and Barbizon without ever having seen Barbizon.” These details are noted by Kevin O’Brien in Oscar Wilde in Canada: An Apostle for the Arts (1982).
021. Who was the only French Canadian ever to meet Victor Hugo?
Today, it is difficult to imagine the degree to which Victor Hugo (1802–1885) dominated the cultural life of France and French-speakers throughout the world in the second half of the ninteenth century. The only English writer to be compared with the great literary Frenchman is Charles Dickens. Yet, the English novelist was less versatile than the French littérateur. Hugo, after all, was not only a novelist, but also a leading poet and dramatist — and Dickens lived only fifty-eight years to Hugo’s eighty-three.
Victor Hugo’s life and work mightily impressed Louis-Honoré Fréchette (1839–1908). The Quebec poet and littérateur was accorded recognition as the unofficial poet laureate of French Canada and was the first Canadian to be honoured by the illustrious Academie Française. Fréchette initiated a correspondence with the Hugo. In an address delivered before the Royal Society of Canada in 1890, Fréchette recalled how ten years earlier he had been received by the great French writer, then in resident of the isle of Guernsey. Fréchette greeted Hugo as one “saluted by the entire universe.” Hugo replied that Fréchette was a victim of “the follies of Louis XV” during whose reign France lost Quebec.
It was Fréchette’s suggestion that he was probably the sole French Canadian ever to meet Hugo — or at least to be received by him.
022. Which American president is remembered in Quebec as le petit juge?
The American president William Howard Taft (1857–1930) served from 1909 to 1913 as the twenty-seventh president of the United States. Thereafter, he served as chief of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1921 until his death. Taft had an association with French Canada that is recalled to this day. For the last thirty-eight years of his life, Taft summered at the family lodge at Murray Bay, the resort community on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, known today as La Malbaie. The French Canadians were fond of le petit juge — the little judge — for Taft was short of stature but outgoing and friendly in nature. In fact, it is Taft who as president established the “special relationship” that was said to have existed between Canada and the United States until the Trudeau administration in 1968.
023. Was Benjamin Franklin’s son a traitor?
Benjamin Franklin’s son is judged a traitor to the cause of American independence, but not to the British and Canadian cause of the Imperial connection.
Benjamin Franklin was one of the signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. His son, William Franklin, served as governor of New Jersey. Identified with the British during the Revolutionary War, he was arrested as a spy, jailed for two years, and deported to England. In England he enjoyed the perquisites of a lifetime pension.
Interestingly, William’s son, William Temple Franklin, was an American patriot and stuck with his grandfather.
024. What is Canadian about “The One Who Got Away”?
The One Who Got Away is the title of a British movie released in 1957. It was directed by Roy Baker and shot in Switzerland, despite the fact that the setting was Canada. It told the true story of Franz von Werra, a German pilot (played by Harvey Kruger) who had the distinction of being the sole prisoner of the Second World War to escape from a Canadian internment camp. He succeeded in making his way to the still-neutral United States, where he generated publicity for the Axis cause.
025. Who is the father of anthropology?
Many anthropologists consider Joseph-François Lafitau to be the father of anthropology. He has also been called the father of ethnology, anthropology’s cousin discipline. A Jesuit from France, Lafitau served as a missionary among the Mohawks at Caughnawaga. From 1712 to 1729, he observed the life and customs of the Natives and described them in Jesuit Relations. He identified the ginseng plant growing in the St. Lawrence valley and was thus responsible for the profitable trade in the plant, which continues to this day. One of his notions, since discredited, was that because the Iroquois had many customs in common with the Lycians — who lived in what is now southwest Turkey — the Natives of North America are their descendants.
026. Was Glenn Gould a fictional character?
Glenn Gould, the celebrated pianist, died in Toronto in 1980. As a recording artist, he has reached an immense audience of classical music lovers. As a fictional character, he has made appearances in two works of fiction. He figures in Austrian author Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser (1991) and in American author Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991). In both novels he is described as a hermit-like performing genius alienated from his country and century. Robert Fulford discusses these novels in this column in Saturday Night, September 1992.
027. Who were “Your Eminent Residences” at the Stratford Festival?
Tyrone Guthrie, artistic director of the Stratford Festival, was wryly amused when he arrived in Stratford to find in his company a house, a hut, and a mews — the talented actors Eric House, William Hutt, and Peter Mews — so he addressed them as “Your Eminent Residences.”
028. Who rode Scout?
Tonto, the faithful Indian companion of the Lone Ranger, rode a piebald Indian horse known as Scout. The Mohawk actor Jay Silverheels, a Native of the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario, played Tonto on radio, television, and in the movies in the 1940s and 1950s. The Lone Ranger rode “the great horse Silver.”
029. Who composed the women’s anthem “Give Us Back the Night”?
The words and music of the women’s anthem “Give Us