THE BLACK MARKET BABIES SCANDAL IN SAINT JOHN, 1948

BLACK MARKET BABIES, a 1945 noir film made by Monogram Pictures. It would be fifty years before any movie described a Canadian baby smuggling ring - BUTTERBOX BABIES.

Lost Valley readers have shared many wonderful stories with me since this Blog was launched in 2007. Among the most harrowing were the experiences of young and often desperately poor Saint John girls forced to make the painful sacrifice of giving up their babies to adoption rings. My own mother, a Valley girl, was sent upriver to live with a doctor in Grand Falls when her pregnancy started to become obvious. She very nearly played into the hands of that cunning medicine man who had brokered my sale to a waiting couple. I haven't yet published any of these adoption stories, but I continue to research the illicit market in babies which once blackened New Brunswick's reputation. I knew of Karen Balcom's work, including her 2007 doctoral dissertation, but couldn't access a copy, so I was pleased when it was published last year by the University of Toronto Press as THE TRAFFIC IN BABIES. In this article I supplement Balcom's work with material from my own research files.

THE TRAFFIC IN BABIES was written by Professor Karen A. Balcom, and was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2011. It is essentially an edited version of her academic thesis and lists at $75.

The most infamous baby-selling-ring in Canada operated as the IDEAL MATERNITY HOME (I.M.H.) in East Chester, N.S. from 1928-45. The story was told in a book entitled BUTTERBOX BABIES. which was filmed. The DVD is available on Amazon.ca. It was Balcom who alerted me to a direct connection between the Young's who ran the I.M.H. in Nova Scotia and a Saint John lawyer who first tried to help the Young's save their business, but who finally replaced them with a Saint John baby-ring of his own.

Balcom describes how in 1944 an amendment to Nova Scotia's adoption law forced the Young's to begin working with lawyer Benjamin R. Guss, who began processing all their cases through the New Brunswick Court, where there were few impediments to rapidly placing babies with willing buyers. By 1946 Guss, who was Jewish, was a "partner" in the Young operation. Guss had a pipeline to firms in the New York area where it was very difficult, almost impossible, for Jewish couples to adopt across the religious divide. He was not required to disclose what he charged American couples but it was alleged to be several thousand dollars - a great deal of money in the 1940s. When it became obvious that the Nova Scotia government was going to shut I.M.H. down permanently, Benjamin Guss urged the Young's to move their business to Saint John. They declined, and as Balcom writes, "Guss became an independent operator, building up his own black market baby business out of Saint john, New Brunswick."

In the absence of photographs U.T. Press included graphics such as this one showing that the customers for Saint John babies were families in Delaware, New Jersey and New York.

So who was Benjamin R. Guss ? If you read tribute pieces, and "ethnic history" published in Saint John, you get a portrait of a man who devoted his life to the public welfare. Yet behind every carefully crafted profile there are less noble motives. Balcom's findings exist in three versions. When Ms. Balcom submitted an initial article to UNB's ACADIENSIS in 2001, she may have been cautioned to avoid digging any deeper. For most of his career Benjamin Rex Guss was a member of the Saint john monied establishment, and he ended his days as a retired judge and legal advisor to the provincial government.

Ben Guss was born of Lithuanian Jewish parents in 1905. The family of eight arrived in Saint John in 1907, first settling on Chapel Street and later on Acadia Street. (This was a Jewish neighborhood which I have previously discussed in a Blog article.) His father worked hard as a junk dealer in the North End and later established a scrap metal business. Guss attended Dalhousie University and got his Bachelor of Laws in 1930. He was called to the New Brunswick Bar in November 1931 and immediately began to work at shaping a political career. He started by joining the Zionist Council, canvassing for the United Palestine Appeal and becoming active in the Conservative Party of Canada.

Guss made a point of travelling to regional and national events and he secured his first party position, election to the post of Vice President of the National Young Conservatives. [He later competed for and took the presidency.] At the 1938 Conservative Party Convention in Ottawa Benjamin Guss was one of 3000 delegates to salute outgoing leader R.B. Bennett, "We are losing a true Jewish friend." and to pledge allegiance to the new Tory leader, Dr. Robert Manion. It was the genesis of the era of the so-called "Progressive" strategy of the Conservative Party and Dr. Manion in his speech won the hearts of Jewish Canadians by claiming "Conservatives were always progressive since the days of Benjamin Disraeli." Disraeli was Britain's first and only Jewish Prime Minister.

Guss had done so brilliantly well in Saint John political circles that he felt confident enough to reveal his ambitions to a reporter for a Jewish press. His plan was published. "He is slated to become the next member of Parliament from his city, and, if elected, he will be the first Jewish Conservative M.P. in Canada." The final step to complete the political profile was a bride, and on Dec. 2, 1938 he was married in a ceremony conducted in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Clearly lawyer Guss believed he had control of the nomination inside his riding association, and by supporting Dr. Manion in Ottawa he could be assured that the Party Leader would sign his nomination papers. But fate intervened - and we call it World War Two. We all know the rest of the story - Liberal leader W.L. Mackenzie King, the creepy oddball who travelled to Berlin to meet Adolph Hitler and found him worthy, retained power and was our wartime Prime Minister. The P.C.s were banished to the political wilderness and Ben Guss did not become Canada's first Jewish M.P.

Well, a man of energy whose ambition is thwarted is prone to redoubling his efforts, and directing them elsewhere. Ben Guss chose to make money the old fashioned way - he earned it, client-by-client, and he quickly built up his business with the same dogged effort he had put into networking the Tory archipelago. During the war he fell in with the Young's and their baby selling business. In that era all the larger Maritime towns and cities in Atlantic Canada had Maternity Boarding Houses, and Saint John was no exception. Much is made of the Catholic Sisters' work with orphans and unwed mothers, but in fact the nuns had plenty of organized competition. At some point, and I'm thinking it was around 1944-45, Ben Guss opened one of his own. He kept his personal residence at 70 Orange Street from 1946 - 1974.

Saint John lawyer Benjamin Rex Guss was a lifelong Tory stalwart. He is shown here in a portrait made c1960. His political ambitions stymied by the 1948 baby selling scandal, he concentrated on his legal career and ultimately was appointed a judge. (Lost Valley Collection)

The Saint John police became aware of the baby smuggling ring sometime in late 1946. Provincial authorities and even the RCMP were made aware of it by the Saint John City and County Children's Aid Society which privately demanded a halt to babies being processed in the city for export to the U.S.A. Mum was the word until Society President Travis W. Cushing decided to expose the traffic to the media. The ring was disclosed at a meeting on May 20, 1948 and it was a bombshell. He said that the C.A.S. had become so distressed by the shear volume of the traffic in Saint John babies, that his group had "snatched" five children from the ring during the previous month. The press came running for more and Cushing played a careful game, only providing names off the record, or in private correspondence with investigators and with the Premier's office. (Premier John McNair was also the Attorney-General of N.B.)

The market was entirely profit oriented he said, with no consideration for the needs of the children, with babies sold for an average of $1,500. He estimated that the leader of the baby-selling-ring was pocketing $1,000 per week, after expenses. The ring had its own boarding house and had insinuated itself inside Saint John hospitals. The C.A.S. reported that at least fifty babies had been sold to Jewish families in three American states, and that the ring had all the advantages - using careful contract language with clients, while maximizing on lax wording or non-existent protection in provincial statutes. Privately the police acknowledged that Guss and his associates could not be charged "since the selling price for children could be described as a high legal fee for arranging adoption."

Travis Cushing and the C.A.S. had made their point and the government was stung. With both the RCMP and FBI actively investigating his baby racket, and the Legislature working to plug the more obvious loopholes, lawyer Ben Guss began to rethink his business strategy. More to the point it was the end of any political ambitions he still harboured. From that point onward he became heavily involved in local causes related to child welfare, cultural development, and Jewish philanthropy, but he knew people in his home town had long memories. He was appointed a Queen's Counsel in 1952 and in August of 1971 he was made a judge of the Family Court Division of the Provincial Court. Today he is known for what he did from 1950 to 1974, the date of his retirement from the practice of law, and nothing is said of the 'Wonder Boy' years when he was expecting to represent his community in Ottawa.

When the Wicker Shopping Basket was King in Saint John

Before the brown paper grocery bag or the infamous plastic sack, the wicker basket was King in Saint John.

When I was growing up on Churchill Boulevard in the North End, one of the many household items hidden away in our cubby hole was a brown wicker basket. It rarely got used, but it might one day be needed, and therefore we held on to it. I suspect the basket was borrowed from my grandmother, and never returned. My guess is, it got the toss when we left our flat in the Rifle Range, but I recall it was virtually identical to the one above.

Out of curiosity I did a little research, and found more than I can use in a Blog article. Our basket was well travelled. It was made in a little town in Poland, imported into Canada through the Port of Saint John, shipped to Toronto by train, and then sold back to Saint John by a wholesaler. When I was a toddler living on Taylor Avenue, that happy wholesaler was selling 5,000 Polish wicker baskets a year into Saint John. Saint John, N.B. was his top market, and the reason was that Saint John women had grown accustomed to using grocery baskets in the 19th Century. You can find many newspaper accounts of Indians bringing large bundles have hand crafted baskets downriver and selling them wherever crowds gathered - the ferry dock in Indiantown, along Main Street and across Portland Bridge to Saint John street corners.

The square "Hollander" type basket was preferred by my grandmother's generation of women in Saint John because of its exceptionally rigid frame and reinforced handle. You could pound it with canned goods for years, and it would never break down. It's a thing of beauty, light weight and durable. My ancestors immigrated from Sligo into Saint John in the 1830s, and the only change for them was buying baskets from the Indians, rather than using the traditional Irish version.

This photo from 1910 shows a variety of wicker baskets hanging above the canned goods and produce. The grocer made a buck or two for a basket that would take a decade of hard use.

When this photo was taken of Dunham's store in Saint John, round baskets were still the most common. The square Hollander basket became popular in the late 1940s.

This lady, crossing at the head of King Street in 1955, had about all she could carry, but the basket handle kept one hand free. [detail from a photo owned by Grant Kelly in S.J.]

I collect anecdotes about any and all aspects of life in old Saint John, so I had to smile when I read one recently that complimented my research into wicker baskets. Janette Lachance was attending St. Vincent's, the Catholic High School, in 1955. (The year the photo above, was taken) She had a basket on her arm, when she caught the attention of some American sailors in port. They teased her about carrying a "lobster trap". Says Janette, "I used a wicker basket to carry schoolbooks all my years in St. Vincent's."

Heavy canned goods, or a load of text books - all in a days work for a wicker basket.

1908 Birds-eye-view of Saint John, N.B. - when commerce was dramatic

Visible in this 1908 (BEV) map of Saint John, N.B. are:

A) New Brunswick Cold Storage Co. Limited

B) The Patrick Brown residence, 92 Paradise Row

C) Intercolonial Railway (ICR) Grain Elevator and conveyor line over Mill Street

D) the dome shape of Victoria Skating Rink

E) Union Station, with a streetcar passing in front

F) the Hospital

[scanned by Doreen Hayes]

Everyone loves to pour over antique Birds-Eye-View maps of their city or town. In the 19th Century the B.E.V. was a much desired trophy for successful men of business to hang on the office wall - because the salesmen who canvassed for the Lithographer ensured that every prominent business was drawn in. Even the stately homes were drawn in, with much detail, in the hope that proud homeowners would buy a copy of the B.E.V. portrait of their town. Today, every tourist district from Mexico City to Ottawa offers reproduction B.E.V.s to visitors looking for a quality souvenir.

Several B.E.V. portraits of Saint john were drawn over a 75 year period, and I think the hardest to find is the 1908 view published by James Lovell Wiseman, a Montreal Lithographer. I have never seen an original, but I like it because the Saint John Valley (THE LOST VALLEY) is pencilled in with such dramatic effect. My other favourite is the view of the docks of Montreal Harbour, produced by Wiseman but I am only hunting for an original of the 1908 Saint John map. Until I find one, these scans provided by Doreen Hayes will do.

I do not know what, if any, subscription fees Wiseman charged the businesses which were given prominence in this 1908 map, but I do see that commerce in the old valley was prominent. Saint John had just gone through a building boom, which added approximately $2 million worth of new commercial buildings, and upgrading of the port infrastructure. The port was heavily subsidized by Federal policies and rate structuring, which did promote an air of confidence - that is until a brief economic slump just before WW1.

When one enjoys these old charts, we should not assume that what we see is literal truth. These are promotional products, not faithful renderings. Often these B.E.V.s deceive as much as the old postcards of that era, which removed the poorly dressed pedestrians and the horse apples dropped in front of a proud man's business. For example - "INTERCOLONIAL ELEVATOR". When our ancestors walked down Mill Street they would actually read INTERCOLONIAL RAILWAY on the massive wooden structure. Note that the tenement houses on the north Valley wall are depicted as neatly terraced, but of course nothing was ever so neat on either slope. Folks crowded in wherever they could acquire a lot of sufficient square footage to be able to squeeze in another structure.

1908 Birds Eye View of Saint John, N.B. which was produced by J.L. Wiseman, a Lithographer in Montreal. (This section is the left third of the chart.) This surviving copy of the map, somewhat damaged, was reproduced in the 1970s and given out to retail customers. [These scans provided by Doreen Hayes]

Fortress Saint John - 8th Anti-Aircaft Battery on Fort Howe during WW2

I do feel guilt for having neglected the LOST VALLEY readership, but I have been flattened by my work commitments of late. Still, Remembrance Day is a good time to make amends, so I thought I would assemble a few items relating to one of my favorite topics - the military history of Fort Howe. Going through old files tonight I had the pleasure or reading a few pieces I had not even looked at since I wrote them in the 1970s. One article, written in 1980, was quite interesting to re-discover. It covers the camouflage schemes used to conceal the coastal artillery and anti-aircraft batteries in and around Saint John during WW2. In it I found details concerning the 8th Anti-Aircraft Battery R.C.A., which was dug in at the eastern end of Fort Howe hill, and camouflaged as well as such an exposed and obvious position might be. Most of the photos used with my article, Harold had found on a research trip to Ottawa.

If any reader has further information on the men named below, I would be happy to add it here.

FORTRESS IN THE SHADOWS: Camouflage Deception in Saint John 1940-1944 was published in NEW BRUNSWICK magazine, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1980. Article written by Ronald Jack and the D.N.D. Ottawa photos supplied by Harold Wright. We were students back then, but we knew our stuff.

A souvenir wall pennant made for the 8th Anti-Aircraft Battery canteen in Saint John, N.B. probably at the end of WW2. One example recently sold on Ebay for $15.

Some men from the 8th A.A. Battery pose with a 3.7 inch A.A. gun on Fort Howe hill, 1941.

A partial ID of the names include (L to R) Acting Sgt. Les Cull, Bombardier R. Collins, Bdr. Clifton Lovett, Sgt. Olie Cormier, and two unknowns.

Seven Saint John gunners of the 8th Anti-Aircaft Battery gather in the cookhouse. The names are, (L to R) are Reg Tapley, O. Cormier, O. Oram, A. Whittaker, F. Jones, Joseph McFarlane and Leo Conway. The date was 2 September 1939. Note that Gunner Cormier is wearing a sweatshirt with "8TH A.A. BTY". Most of the men purchased one of the locally printed sweatshirts.

Brigadier Phillip W. Oland was a WW2 veteran. He died in Rothesay, N.B. on Nov. 29, 1996. Demobilized in August 1945, he returned to Saint John, and in October 1945 was given command of the 8th A.A. Battery. The appointment lasted only one month as Fort Howe battery and other gun positions in and around Saint John were stripped of their weapons and stores.

Nov. 26/11 - Reader Response

I thought I would share the response of Harvey Kennedy, who contacted me by email. Harvey, who joined the RCAF in the jet age, recalled playing the War Heroes game with his chums in the gun pits and shelters on top of Fort Howe hill circa 1946, after the site was abandoned and the guns and military stores removed. He was student at St. Peter's School, behind Fort Howe.

"

In your last blog you mentioned Fort Howe during the war years , in particular the camouflaged bunkers that were built. A half dozen of us kids made good use of them after the war fighting thousands of the enemy and we always came out unscathed.--beats the hell out of the electronic games nowadays.

In the

1940's I was 7-11 years old and had a great time exploring life and events in the old city... we lived on Moore Street and I was one of eight kids in rough times as a lot of people were in those years...War movies as you know were a common past time with kids, as were Westerns, so to my way of putting it...they were the catalyst for the chemistry to spark the imagination. Another thing is we all wanted to be the star from the movie so that was determined and away we went."

The K-CLUB Army Camp - Echoes of WW2 in the North End

Since my article (below) was web-published six months ago, a sharper version of the SHAMROCK PARK photo has come to light. We now know this photo was taken by Saint John photographer Joe Michaud in 1954. I wasn't too far off in dating it as "Circa 1950". Vintage Photo & Frame Ltd have the original negative and can sell you a print.

So much interesting correspondence was generated by the previous article on Main Street in the 1950s-60s and the arrival of the Fairview Shopping Plaza, that I felt I should do a followup. Today I concentrate on what was there before a wide swath of Crescent Valley was paved over for Fairview Plaza parking. I suppose I am not straying too far off topic, because the postwar reality was that hundreds of working class families, including my own, left the tenements of the Portland Valley and foreshore and took up residence in the government housing projects built in the Rifle Range (later termed Crescent Valley).

Air photo of the "K-CLUB" army camp, taken August 4, 1942. The vehicle entrance was at the end of Lansdowne Avenue, which is easy to see here. In the 1930s the local chapter of the Kiwanis Club maintained a sandlot ball field /circus ground between Lansdowne and Adelaide. A rifle range and war gases range was built for the training of infantry housed at the camp, which is why the postwar neighborhood took on the name of the "Rifle Range". (I have a photo of an old blue S.J. transit bus with RIFLE RANGE displayed above the drivers head.) A trimmed version of this photo resides on a website run by staff at a S.J. community college. The photo credit is - Directorate of History and Heritage, D.N.D., Ottawa.

This shot is fabulous because it shows St. Lukes Church from the air, before Metcalfe Street was put in between Adelaide and Lansdowne. That really bothers me because the 1925 street map clearly shows that block of Metcalfe already existing - and fully 60 feet wide. This aerial photo shows a stretch of winding dirt track. That would make the photo pre-1925, which I doubt. The photograph illustrated a memoir written by the late Harold McQuinn, which was published by the Times-Globe in 1996. The pen lines across the image are detailed annotations made for me the parents of Paul Cusack, who for 17 years operated a Florist business across the street from Fairview Plaza.

I have never seen ANY photographs taken from the spire of St. Lukes, and yet any North End photographer might have begged for the opportunity to shoot from that vantage point. The bell tower would have been the best position prior to WW2, from which to photograph the old Kiwanis Grounds and the adjacent Shamrock [Baseball] Club Grounds. The problem was that the old facilities, including the older Dominion of Canada Rifle Range, were not attractive to the camera, in spite of the large crowds which used to gather for events. In the photo we can just see the bleachers of the K-Club, a field which was completely fenced in, as well as the intersection of Lansdowne Avenue and Main Street which was discussed in the previous article.

I tentatively date this photo of the old Shamrock Park, as circa 1950. When the municipality took over the land after WW2, the first thought was to revert to its old use - recreational activities. An oval track was laid out and playground equipment installed. This is an "event" photo, with almost 40 children visible, under magnification, and cars in the parking lot. The cluster of tenements in the background, festooned with lines of wet washing, are on Metcalfe and Adelaide Streets. This corner of the playing field is well to the west of the acreage covered in the 1942 aerial photo of the army camp. By the 1950s government housing projects were going up from one end of the valley to the other, and then the city approved redevelopment of the park as a shopping centre. Shamrock Park was relocated a few blocks beyond Adelaide Street. [Photo - Wesley Foster]

Earlier this week I discussed this photo with a few LOST VALLEY stalwarts and I couldn't resist pointing out the boy climbing the swing set. Note that the chains and seats are either missing or haven't yet been installed. North End kids, its so true, were always very rough on playground equipment and public monuments. I thought of that when this past spring the press covered a new aqua-playground which was installed in the Courts off Churchill Blvd., at a cost of over half a million dollars. I noticed that it was engineered to resist the destructive capabilities of today's urban youth. Of course when you over do the child proofing, you sometimes end up with a playground that looks like the steel and wood obstacles Albert Speer used to defend the beaches of Normandy.

When Main Street was still part of the N.B. Provincial Highway System

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This is a photo I used in a previous article. Taken c.1958, it shows two Saint John policemen directing traffic on Main Street, possibly because the power was out at the intersection lights. One officer is cropped from the image and the other is a block downhill, but their vehicle is visible below the Irving Oil Sign. This section of Main Street was then part of the N.B. Provincial Highway system and it was designated part of Routes 1 and 2. The photo shows the tail of a truck which has just turned onto Douglas Avenue, heading for the Falls Bridge.

This photo was taken down slope a few years after Fairview Saint John Plaza had been constructed. (It opened in 1961) The Irving gas filling station is visible in the far distance. The illuminated sign shows how Routes 1 and 2 traffic had been diverted briefly in the 1960s, which required the tourist maps to be amended. The posted speed limit for this block of Main Street was 15 MPH in the 1960s. Fairview Plaza is today a shadow of what it once was, as the North End was depopulated by an extraordinary out migration accelerated by urban renewal schemes.

The hybrid traffic diverter put in at the intersection of Main and Lansdowne was remarkable. It placed an illuminated commercial sign out in the middle of a busy arterial with no curbing, (perhaps FAIRVIEW SHOPPING CENTRES LTD. paid for the work?) and even though there was a small striped warning sign at its base, I do wonder if any driver ever plowed into it. I recall that in the early 1970s there were squat, square concrete boxes placed at intervals on Main Street, between Elm and Lansdowne. I have a distinct memory of standing at the window in Miss Murray's classroom at St. Peters Intermediate, and looking down at the intersection of Main and Elm. I caught the instant when a car plowed into one of those median barriers.

A 50 year old tourist map indicates Routes 1 and 2, which included Main Street from Douglas Avenue to the Mill Street Viaduct. Note "Proposed Shopping Centre" astride Lansdowne Avenue. This became Fairview Plaza, Saint John's first shopping centre. The project used up most of the property that had been the old Kiwanis Grounds and it was intended to revitalize the North End. It did that, but only for a few years. For one generation at least, the plaza was a neighborhood focal point as its offerings included SEARS, a laundromat and a bowling alley.

[My mother worked for a time as a cashier in the DOMINION store and I recall lugging the "specials" home on my shoulder - it might be a 50 pound bag of potatoes or Campbell's tomato soup when they were "on," five or six cans for a dollar. The annual University Women's Club book sale was usually held in Fairview Plaza and my back has never forgiven me for the time, circa 1973, when I filled a whole banana box with books and somehow dragged it down to our flat at the far end of Churchill Blvd.]

LOST VALLEY reader Al Graham sent a query about the metal "M" which formed part of the support bracket for the traffic lights on either side of Main Street, at the corner of Douglas Avenue. There would seem no point to indicating "M" - Main Street, so my thought is that it referred to the Main Routes 1 and 2. But I just do not know. Perhaps another reader can give Al the answer he seeks. [Reader comments - Below - provide answers.]

Will Saint John's Catholic Cathedral be Saved?

Few institutions in Saint John have much hope of surviving the wrecker's ball, but the one structure which seemed impregnable is the enclave of Patrician families whose lineage stretches back to the industrial and mercantile growth era of the 19th Century. The ghastly murder which shattered the Oland family will produce repercussions indefinitely, but I worry that in the near term it may have contributed to the demise of Saint John's Catholic cathedral.

There were several factors which contributed to Saint John's decline in the closing decades of the 20th Century. The program of creative destruction known as "Urban Renewal" was but a precursor, and truth be told, social change made it very unlikely that old city would hold together. Birth control, the decline of Christianity and the political mantra of the Canada Health Act first, last and forever, pretty well guarantees that the present will always remain irrevocably disconnected from the past. Still, there is something to be said for a stubborn determination to remember where we came from.

I have been thinking of late about the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, a landmark heritage building which continues to serve its original purpose, but which is broke. In Saint John an institution which does not have its beak in the public $$ trough, has virtually no chance of survival... unless it attracts a champion with a loud voice and a shillelagh in his mitts. Richard "Dick" Oland might have become that man. On July 5th Mr. Oland held talks with Catholic Bishop Robert Harris, the subject of which was his crafting of a fund raising campaign to finance the urgently needed repairs. The roof of the cathedral is shot, and when it rains buckets and plastic sheets are deployed under five leaks. The building, erected in the 1850s, does not meet current code and ballpark estimates of the money needed for repair and upgrading span from ten to twenty million dollars. Oland was the most experienced fund raiser to step forward so far, and now that he has been murdered the Bishop may not find another civiv leader to speak up for one of Saint John's most important houses of worship.

A rare view of uptown Saint John in which the only spire visible is that of the Catholic Cathedral. Taken circa 1930, this FOLKARD shot directs the eye north toward the Valley. The Cathedral spire dominates the skyline but its silhouette is merged with the broad shoulders of newly constructed Saint John General Hospital.

FOLKARD Letter Cards were printed by the U.S. company's Montreal subsidiary. This example notes that "Saint John has 35 schools, 63 churches. 16 banks, 2 radio stations, and numerous industrial plants, as well as the largest Dry Dock in the British Empire." Not... any... more.

Concerned about what the death of Dick Oland might mean to the health of one of Canada's few great cathedrals, I gave thought over the weekend to what I might write here. It was startling to read in this morning's edition of the Saint John newspaper, the TELEGRAPH JOURNAL, no update at all (or editorial) on the Oland murder investigation, but instead an opinion column written by Maureen Dowd, of the NEW YORK TIMES - "The End of Awe". The T.J. doesn't carry the Times column, so why did they choose to buy and publish this Dowd column in particular? Dowd quotes a fiery speech given by Ireland's political leader, in which he thoroughly denounced the Catholic Church. His opportunity to launch an assault was the release of an official report on the pedophilia scandal in Ireland, and Enda Kenny did not pull his punches. The report, he says, "excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism, the narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day. The rape and torture of children were downplayed or 'managed' to uphold, instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and 'reputation'. " Well fine, we all loath pedophiles, especially teacher and priest sex predators, but Saint John has a long history of sectarianism, and this 21st Century assault on the Catholic church is an echo of age old sentiments. Does the populace of Southern New Brunswick really care about Irish politics, or what Ms. Dowd of New York thinks about the Vatican? No.

[AUG. 9 - I correct myself: A couple of well travelled copies of the TELEGRAPH JOURNAL reached me yesterday, and I see that Ms. Dowd's NYT column IS in fact run in the T.J. every Tuesday. I'm extracting a few East Coast terms to share with students. It's fun to spot terms like "cop cars" in a newspaper article. Incredibly, the SJPD has yet to make an arrest in the infamous Oland axe murder case. The national papers lost interest two weeks ago.]

The roof of Saint John's Catholic Cathedral leaks in five places, damaging the ceilings and walls as well as creating a slipping hazard for the mostly senior parishioners. When it rains many oak pews are shrouded in plastic sheet and the sound of water dripping into plastic buckets creates a forlorn atmosphere. (Paul Cusack photograph)

What concerns me is that the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception needs many friends or it may vanish. The City of Saint John would be acting within the law to demand it be repaired or closed, and that may well happen. As the TELEGRAPH JOURNAL is the primary means of selling ideas in the old city, a staff which harbours antagonisms to the Catholic Church may guarantee that any Cathedral fund raising effort may get lukewarm press, if indeed "God's house" gets any supportive press at all.

The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Saint John. The historic structure was consecrated in 1855 A.D. and is still operating, although in dire need of repair. This photo emphasizes the detail of the stone masonry. The recently restored west wall was a restoration project which cost $1.2 million. It exhausted all available funds. (Paul Cusack photograph)

My special thanks to Paul Cusack of North End Saint John, a very supportive reader of the LOST VALLEY BLOG. Paul provided a wonderful selection of photos of the cathedral, from which I was invited to pick.