On February 1, 1895, the day Conn Smythe was born, the reigning Stanley Cup champions were known somewhat prosaically as the Montreal Hockey Club, or Montreal HC, an amateur team that had captured what was then known as the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup in 1893 – the first ever awarding of the brand new prize – and hung on to it.
The trophy was a silver bowl sitting on an ebony base purchased in London by an aide to Baron Stanley of Preston, the Governor General, whose sons, Arthur and Algernon, were mad about the game. The Montreal HC wore jerseys with a distinctive crest – a wheel with two wings attached – that would later be appropriated by a grain merchant named James E. Norris, a big fan of the club, for a team he called the Red Wings.1
It may be just coincidence that the Cup holders on that day happened to be one of the more disputatious teams ever to serve as champions. When the Cup’s custodian arrived for the presentation, he mistakenly delivered it to a representative of the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association (MAAA), believing the club and the association to be intertwined. Turned out he was wrong: the players had a testy relationship with the MAAA and refused to accept the trophy.2 Conn Smythe, if it hadn’t been his first day on earth, might have appreciated a club that was so firm in its convictions it would turn down the Stanley Cup. For five decades he would be among the most irascible men in the game, though he would never have rejected the Stanley Cup.
It’s also doubtful either Albert or Polly Smythe, Conn’s parents, knew or cared much which hockey team happened to be classed as Canada’s best. The Cup was hardly a national symbol yet; not until 1903 – when Ottawa won its first of many – would it belong to a team from somewhere other than Montreal or Winnipeg. Hockey wasn’t widely accepted as the national game, or the national passion – though it was making headway – and neither Albert nor Polly were big fans. Even after Conn became famous as the man with the most popular team in the country, Albert didn’t go to the games. Smythe’s parents had immigrated just six years before his birth. Albert was a gentle, quiet, scholarly man of simple tastes, son of an Irish Protestant choirmaster from Gracehill, a village northwest of Belfast. He was far more interested in Dickens and Tennyson than in the winter sporting activities of his adopted home. He had already published a book of poetry, Poems Grave and Gay, and was deeply immersed in theosophy, a mix of spiritualism, philosophy, and the occult created by the splendidly named Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian wanderer whose death had sparked a power struggle within her church.
Besides, the Smythes had bigger worries than men on skates chasing a puck. It was already evident their union had been a mistake. They met on board the SS Sarnia as it headed to Canada in the summer of 1889, travelling separately in cabin class, a step up from steerage. Mary Adelaide Constantine – known as Polly – hailed from the Manchester area and boarded ship in Liverpool. Albert Ernest Stafford Smythe was twenty-eight, and joined the ship in Belfast on its first day out.3
The Smythe and Constantine families were acquainted with each other,4 though whether the two shipmates had previously met is not clear. In any case, Albert was clearly smitten with Polly, who was seven years younger, short, cheerful, and outgoing. According to the Sarnia’s manifest, Polly planned to catch the train to Winnipeg when the ship docked in Montreal. But somewhere on the Atlantic her plans changed; Smythe told people his parents were married before they landed August 5, though the match wasn’t officially registered until December 19 in Toronto.
It must have seemed logical enough – romantic even – to tie the knot before starting their new life together in their adopted homeland, but it was never a likely match. In adulthood, Conn Smythe developed a habit of comparing people to racehorses and declared he’d been “sired by an Irishman and dammed by an Englishwoman. I’ve got my father’s fight and my mother’s good sense.”5 It was an oftquoted line, but wasn’t accurate: Albert Smythe wasn’t a fighter and Polly’s strong point wasn’t her common sense. He was disciplined, studious, not given to displays of affection. He didn’t drink or eat meat. Polly liked to have a good time. She drank too much, put on weight, liked to laugh and make friends. Albert, not being the partying type, was ignored and Polly made friends on her own. In Conn’s memory they were rarely together. His mother would disappear for long periods, never explained, before turning up again with a cast of new acquaintances. That would be his father’s cue to leave.6 The temperance movement was already a powerful force in 1895, and a woman who drank openly and to excess was about as socially acceptable as the plague. This was especially so in Toronto, a straitlaced, narrow-minded, God-fearing town that considered fun a blasphemous concept invented by heathens, to be avoided at all cost.
Nonetheless, Albert and Polly gave it a go. They settled in Toronto and produced two children, the second of which they named Constantine Falkland Cary Smythe – Constantine after Polly’s family name and Cary after Albert’s mother’s maiden name. Falkland may have derived from a distant tie to the Viscount Falkland, whose family name was Cary. Young Constantine hated the name from the time he was old enough to understand it. He would grow up to be a lot of things, but pretentious wasn’t one of them. The first chance he got – which came after Polly’s premature death – he shortened it to Conn, after an Irish king known as the “hero of a hundred battles.”7
Albert was enjoying a temporary bout of prosperity around the time of Conn’s birth. His small family was living in a house at 51 McMillan Street, a short walk from Church and Carlton, where Maple Leaf Gardens would later be built. City records identify him as the owner of the property, which was valued at $3,200, pretty average for a middle-class home.* It was a respectable enough neighbourhood, a block west of the northern reaches of Jarvis Street, a far more expensive and desirable address, home to some of the city’s most splendid names. Albert listed his occupation as “cement sales,” having started up his own company around the same time he moved the family to McMillan. It was a sensible occupation, even if Albert wasn’t cut out for it. The city was growing, though not as rapidly as hoped. It was a compact place, not yet two hundred thousand in population, packed along the north shore of Lake Ontario between High Park and the Don River. The most northerly tip was near Yonge and Summerhill. Streets were mostly hard-packed dirt. Heat came from coal, sold by Elias Rogers Co., which had two immense coal mountains on the waterfront. Milk trucks trundled through town with large open vats from which people filled their household containers.8
It was a two-tiered town. The upper stratum was High Protestant, rigid, prosperous, grey, dull, and very Victorian. The lower orders were just trying to get by. The approved religion came in three flavours: Church of England, Presbyterian, or Methodist, none of which was known for being the life of the party, or even having attended one.
The best-known families were the Eatons (retail goods), the Masseys (overpriced farm equipment), and the Gooderhams (whose distilleries annually produced enough hooch for a town twice the size). They were all proper, distant, and hidden behind the protective walls of immense mansions. They presided over a town that was overwhelmingly British, loyal to a fault, and closed on Sundays. City politics was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Orange Order of Canada, which disapproved of Catholics, the French, and anything that might threaten the eminence of the British Empire. Toronto’s devotion to the Lord’s Day dictated that the newly electrified streetcar system must stop for a day of rest, even if that slowed the expansion city council had been advocating. As late as 1912 it was still forbidden to toboggan on the Sabbath.
Soon after arriving, Albert had formed a partnership with two other men, providing contractors’ supplies. Nichols, Smythe and Co. operated until some time in 1894 when it was dissolved and Albert set up AES and Co., cement dealers, on the first floor of a building on Bay Street. As a sideline he also established Albert Smythe and Co., publishers, whose main product was The Torch, the voice of the Toronto Theosophical Society.
Albert was a man of character and intellect, but he had no business sense. “My father was a tender man, not like me at all,” according to his son.9 He cared little for material things, wasn’t good with money, and was easy prey for charlatans. What Albert liked was books, and he had a collection that never ceased to expand no matter how challenged the family circumstances. He hauled them from address to address as the family migrated from one home to another, Conn viewing the library and the effort expended on it as a waste of time.
AES and Co. disappeared from the city directory in 1898, by which time the Smythes had made the first of several moves down the economic ladder. They relocated to North Street, a short residential block stretching from Bloor south to Charles, which later became part of Bay Street, to a dark, inexpensive, badly built home. When Conn was barely two, he put his fist through the wall while raging against being put to bed.10 In the winter, Albert, Conn, and his older sister, Mary, born in 1890, would huddle around the meagre fire, a screen stationed behind them in the faint hope of trapping the fleeting heat. Polly’s whereabouts weren’t altogether clear. Her drinking was already a problem. Alcohol was cheap, easily obtained, and considered so damaging a social scourge that the federal government, under pressure from the temperance movement, held a national referendum on Prohibition in 1898. It passed in every province except Quebec, but so few Canadians voted (only men could cast ballots) that the result was ignored and the boozing continued. Polly’s frequent and prolonged absences left the children largely to Albert’s care.
It was on North Street that Conn began noticing there were different socio-economic levels in society, and he was in the wrong one. Although North Street was barely two blocks long, it touched two distinct worlds. Bloor was a pleasant, narrow, tree-lined route with comfortable homes, churches, and a few shops, bordering the outskirts of town. At the Bloor end of North Street, families had horses, carriages, and servants. There were several barristers, including Frank Arnoldi, a prominent lawyer who owned a pony cart for his children and whose son, nicknamed “Bay,” befriended the younger Conn. But the south end was something else, perilously close to the outskirts of the Ward, a notorious downtown slum teeming with saloons, sweatshops, and ramshackle houses lacking water, heat, or indoor plumbing, swarming with immigrants and the unemployed, where children were put to work the moment a job could be found for them.
Although there were laws requiring children to attend school, there was little enforcement. Sometime during the 1890s a society established to prevent cruelty to horses was persuaded to extend its mandate to children, but only as an afterthought.11 Children could beg, peddle newspapers, or pimp for prostitutes. They could be sent off to jail before age ten for minor crimes. Conn’s upbringing was light years ahead of those unlucky urchins. He was sent to school the moment he was old enough, and his home, if chilly in winter and often absent a mother, was safe and relatively secure. But the impression of poverty stuck with him. He would see himself as the kid who’d dragged himself up from nothing, the self-made man who didn’t need handouts to get ahead and didn’t approve of them for others. He wasn’t against privilege, but he felt it should be earned. He couldn’t abide people who had things handed to them on a platter, who hadn’t worked for the benefits they enjoyed, who didn’t chase their goals as diligently as he had.
Albert sent him to kindergarten at a school on the corner of Wellesley and Bay. Though not a hard man, Albert had been raised with all the anti-Catholic prejudices of the Church of Ireland and passed them on to his son. It was common wisdom in the Smythe household that the only people as untrustworthy as Catholics were the French, who were a priest-ridden breed with dubious morals and questionable loyalty, answering to the Pope rather than the Crown. Conn grew up terrified of nuns in their flowing black habits, their pinched faces hidden save for pursed lips and eyes ever on the alert for children to kidnap. His daily route to school required passing St. Michael’s College; to survive, he and the other Protestants developed a convoy system, the smallest children in the middle with the bigger boys acting as outriders for protection.
“It was a known fact if anybody straggled that in a very short time a gentleman in a long black robe would come out, you would disappear into those robes and into the big building there, and that would be the last seen of you,” Smythe later related in a speech at St. Michael’s. “It was a proven fact, because we used to hear, as we passed the place, the cries and yells and screams of some innocent Protestant kids having the other faith pounded into them.”12
If Catholics were to be feared, they were also to be admired for their fighting abilities. Smythe once watched a running battle between two boys picking on a third. “One fought the other two up a lane and then along street after street, always with his back to the wall or he would never have been able to hang on. It was a lesson I didn’t forget: If you looked after your rear, you could keep going. It works in fights, war, business.”13
Smythe wasn’t sure what his father did for money during their tenure on North Street – a national census in 1901 showed his profession as “bookbinder” – but funds quickly ran short. The 1890s were not happy years for the Canadian economy, which was struggling under an ill-conceived tariff regime that was strangling trade. The national railway had been built, but the immigrants hadn’t come yet, and Canada was actually losing more people than it gained. It was a difficult time to make a living, and Albert Smythe wasn’t able to overcome the hardships. Soon after Conn had finished kindergarten, the Smythe family left North Street for a new home in the distant reaches of Scarborough, an unheated ramshackle house without power, water, and plumbing. There was a one-hole outhouse just beyond the back door and a pump for water. A woodstove in the kitchen provided the only source of heat as well as the means of cooking. The house belonged to a friend of Albert’s from the theosophical society, and the price was right: the Smythes paid no rent or taxes and no fees for services because there weren’t any to pay for.
Beachell Street was a dead-end dirt road in Scarborough Village, a farm town established at the dusty crossroads of Eglinton Avenue and Markham Road. In many ways it was an idyllic location, a bucolic little community surrounded by farmland well to the east of the city limits, located where the ground begins to rise toward the bluffs along Lake Ontario. A village history described it as “consisting only of a brick schoolhouse, a general store, a blacksmith shop, a building for the sale of farm implements, the Methodist parsonage, less than a dozen dwellings, and a large railway hotel converted to other uses.”14
The Smythes’ house was at the end of the street, which ran into the railway tracks, near the school. Albert’s benefactor owned a number of other similar homes nearby, mainly empty. They scrounged for wood for the stove, kept chickens, and grew food in a garden where Conn, a short, slight boy with sandy hair, scratched away at the dirt as part of his chores. In the winter he rose early to heat water on the stove, poured it down the well to melt the overnight ice, then pumped up enough water for the rest of the day. Another task was to fetch his father’s daily paper. Albert had a friend on the railway, which ran along the bottom of a hill outside the back door. Each morning Conn raced out the door and down the bank, watching as the train approached around a bend, and chased the paper as Albert’s acquaintance flung it from a passing car.15*
They lived simply, breakfasting on porridge, which Conn hated. He blamed it on the milk, which they obtained unpasteurized from a local farmer. Conn thought the milk tasted like turnips, and when his father wasn’t looking he’d dump his share in the yard for the chickens. Eventually Mary tattled on him, setting off a row that fed Conn’s belief that she was Albert’s favourite.
He was self-centred and didn’t share well. “I would give something freely, didn’t mind giving it, but nobody was going to take it away from me, or just move in and use it.” Although Mary was the first-born, Conn felt she intruded on his claim to his father. Their first Christmas in Scarborough, Conn threw an epic tantrum, angry at having to share Albert’s attention, flinging things around the room and wrestling with his father and sister.16
It was their only Christmas together in the Scarborough home. Shortly after, Mary developed a swelling in her throat that her brother blamed on the turnip-tasting milk. Albert took her to the hospital, where she died in May 1903, at age twelve. The death devastated Albert, but Conn felt freed of the burden of competing for attention. The sense that he hadn’t been the favourite stayed with him and may have had much to do with his drive to succeed. Success brought attention and acceptance. Long after Conn Smythe had all the money and attention he could ask for, he continued to fight for what he considered his. He enjoyed the competition, but he especially liked to win.
In 1905, when Conn was ten, Albert obtained a job with the Toronto World newspaper, and the Smythes moved out of the shack and into the city, taking a single room in a building where St. Michael’s Hospital now stands, at $1.50 a week. Although small and threadbare, the room had one great advantage in that the building’s main stovepipe ran through it, keeping it warm in the winter.
The World offices were located just around the corner on Yonge Street, a hard-packed road still dominated by horses and carriages, though trolleys ran up its centre and there were a growing number of motor-powered automobiles. Albert had plenty of experience as a writer, both through the theosophical society journal and his work as a poet. Now he found himself employed by one of the most entertaining figures of the day, William Findlay Maclean, a member of Parliament and incorrigible rabble-rouser, who is largely forgotten today, but was a well-known figure in Ottawa for more than thirty years. Maclean was a vibrant, outspoken, independent-minded backbencher who launched the World in 1880 as a mouthpiece for his visionary ideas, which included renaming Hudson’s Bay “Canada’s Sea” and jettisoning the Governor General for an elected head of state.
He may have been skilled at creating controversy, but he had little business acumen, and World staff regularly went weeks, or months, without being paid, adding to the pressure on the Smythe household budget.17 Nonetheless, Albert was delighted. The World allowed him to write about anything and everything that interested him. A devotee of the theatre, he became the theatre critic; Conn said the only time he ever saw his father truly angry was when someone laughed during what was meant to be an emotional moment in a play he was attending. He reviewed books and music and covered the horse races, which was by far the most popular sports pastime of the day. Conn would accompany him to the old Woodbine racetrack on the lakefront east of downtown and hustle the results back to the paper so they could make the morning edition. It was while hanging around the jockeys and touts that he developed his lifelong affection for horses and for the colourful, free-spirited culture of the racing world. He found a special nobility in horses and the men around them. It was a masculine world, grounded and no-nonsense, filled, he said, with “honest, real men. They’re workers and producers. They give every ounce of stuff they’ve got. Just like the horses.”18
Despite his unreliable wages, Albert enrolled Conn in private schools, first St. Alban’s Cathedral School on Howland Avenue and later Upper Canada College (UCC), which had recently acquired a sumptuous campus on a woodsy expanse of land north of the city. They made him aware of his poverty, and he disliked them intensely.
“In St. Alban’s I was again the poor boy,” he wrote, “and by then I was old enough to know it. I think maybe that hating so much to be the poor boy then gave me the urge not to be poor, the sooner the better. I didn’t covet what others had, but I hated what I was, that I had to have a handout, that when I had to go somewhere urgently another fellow had to lend me his bicycle, that my clothes weren’t as good as the others had.”19
He often got by on handouts: the parents of wealthier boys sent in sumptuous food packages, which he was allowed to share. The mother of a friend gave him his first pair of decent skates – Albert never bought him sports equipment, “even at Christmas” – which he promptly lost. He filched change from Albert’s trousers, knowing his father was indifferent to money, and when a collection plate overturned during a service at St. Alban’s, he tucked some under a rug where he could get it later.
It was worse at UCC, which he entered in mid-year when he was thirteen. “I hated Upper Canada College. I hated the new-boy duties, fagging [running errands, doing odd jobs] for seniors. It seemed an unjust place from the first. They made me serve a full year of the new-boy stuff; I had entered just after Christmas, so I had the rest of that school year and the first half of my second year to be at every senior’s beck and call.”20
UCC made no bones about its ambition to serve as an elite school for the upper crust. The school’s board of governors was a who’s who of Ontario’s great and mighty. To celebrate its seventy-fifth year, it had recently moved to an expansive new campus on high ground north of the city, from which it could look down on the less fortunate. It had its own flag, its own college poem, its own rifle corps, infirmary, dining hall, library, gymnasium, and prayer hall.21
“When I was there,” wrote Conn, “two or three other poor kids and I would run together like mice, admiring the moneyed people, practically saluting when we were allowed to share the fantastic food parcels that would come from some boy’s mother, delivered by chauffeur.”22
Scraping together the modest fee was all Albert could manage. Conn would sometimes deliver it a week at a time. Once, stacking coins in little piles on the registrar’s desk, he looked up to see tears in the man’s eyes. It was an embarrassment he never forgot. “I don’t think he cried any when the Heintzmans and others among my rich classmates sent in their fees,” he recalled.23
Adding to his sense of isolation was the fact he was now motherless. Polly had died while he was at St. Alban’s, and while he’d seen her only occasionally in life, her death left him with the sense of a boy against the world and a deep feeling of guilt over an incident that took place on one of the last occasions he’d seen her alive. During a choir practice at the school she had appeared unexpectedly at the church with a bag of cookies.
“She had on a fat and frowzy looking straw hat and was carrying a paper bag,” he recalled. “She looked half stewed. We were all up there in the front of the church when I saw her coming down the aisle. The other boys saw her about the same time I did. You sure couldn’t miss her. One of them said: ‘Gee, who’s this old bird coming?’
“I hadn’t thought it out in advance. I just said it, bang. ‘It’s my nanny.’ ”
He was still justifying the incident to himself decades later. “It wasn’t that I didn’t love her – it was something else,” he related. “She could make great cookies and the bag was full of them. I shared them around and my friends enjoyed them. It gained me a lot of stature to have a nanny who could bake like that, but if I’d owned up to her being my mother it would have been something very different.”24
She was just thirty-eight when she died, worn out by drink. The last time he saw her was at the hospital, the same hospital in which his sister had died. He borrowed a bicycle and pedalled over to visit. On the way he stopped and bought her a pack of jujubes; when he presented it to her she burst into tears. “She couldn’t help it, she said. I was her little boy and was so kind, bringing her jujubes. I don’t remember seeing her after that. She died.”
Albert’s aloofness made the loss that much worse. As a boarder at school, he saw his father only when absence from school was approved. Once, he skipped Sunday school and went to visit Albert instead. When he was caught, the housemaster called him to his office, where there was a row of hockey sticks. He invited Conn, who weighed just 112 pounds, to pick one out. When he did, the master hit him with it, “a hell of a blow,” adding another item to his list of grievances.
When he did see his father, he felt unable to measure up. Albert would have preferred a more scholarly son who shared his literary interests; instead, Conn was boisterous, competitive, and increasingly involved in athletics. Albert didn’t begrudge him his love of games and sports, but he didn’t encourage it either. He was busy with his books, his poetry, and his ever-deepening involvement in his religion. Once Polly was gone, he also developed new friendships with women, which left Conn once again feeling he was in the way.
“I had got used to the idea that with him, sometimes I came second to somebody else. We loved one another, but he had his life and I had mine, part of mine being that I was so attracted to sports.”25
In place of a family life he discovered sports. He was drawn to the competition and the camaraderie, the levelling effect that sports had on social barriers, and the degree to which determination and effort could make up for variations in raw talent. Despite his size he was named captain of the UCC junior hockey team, which played ten games and lost just two. The college had its own covered arena, a long wooden building with a sloping roof, large enough to contain a sheet of ice but not much more. He was one of the smallest boys on the team and certainly the poorest. His teammates included two scions of the Heintzman family – Howard and G. Bradford – heirs of the wealthy piano manufacturer. But money had no effect on the ability to score goals or prevent opponents from scoring them, and once the boys were on skates, family background became unimportant. Perhaps best of all he discovered a productive outlet for his natural bossiness and organizational skills. Most players just wanted to skate around and shoot the puck; if he was willing to take on additional tasks, they were happy to let him.
“There were extra duties in being captain that others didn’t want to be bothered with, but I loved. It meant being in charge, telling the others we had to practise at such and such a time, you play right wing and I play centre, and so on.”26
He liked to give instructions. He liked people to do what he said. He liked the fact that, poor kid or no, as captain even the Heintzmans had to listen to him.
After a year and a half at UCC he convinced Albert to let him quit and transfer to Jarvis Collegiate, a less ostentatious school where he buried himself in games. He and his new friend Harvey Aggett – nicknamed “Wreck” – joined everything in sight. Hockey, football, rugby, basketball – if there had been a tiddlywinks team, they’d have been on it. At five-foot-seven, Smythe was again the shortest member on any team he joined; the 1912 basketball team photo shows the boys ranked by height, with Smythe at the bottom of a sloping hill, the runt of the litter, a little blond boy wearing a serious expression and an enormous J on his jersey. Not much good at dribbling or defence, he spent hours practising his shot and learned to stand around the net looking inconspicuous until one of the taller boys could get the ball to him. He had the same approach to hockey, positioning himself at the goal and shovelling loose pucks past the netminder.
The World was a morning paper and Albert worked late, so home was often empty. Conn spent most of his time on the rink, the field, the basketball court, or killing time with Wreck, whose father was a plumber prosperous enough to own a Cadillac he occasionally lent to the boys. Never enthused about school, as the end of grade twelve approached, Smythe decided he’d learned enough and determined to quit school and make his fortune as a homesteader in northern Ontario. The provincial government was advertising great opportunities for enterprising men and women willing to put up with difficult conditions in a remote setting.
The Great Clay Belt was an area stretching from the recently established town of Hearst to the Quebec border, with horrific winters and bug-infested summers. The government was eager to build up the population and promised rosy prospects to anyone willing to give it a try. “Twenty million acres of virgin soil await the farmer’s plow … Where men with determination, good health and strength need have no fear of failure,” it advertised. The Temiskaming and Northern Railway would get them there, but homesteaders were otherwise left on their own to clear the land and try to make something of the hard, wet clay.27
Albert objected to his plan, but Conn, at seventeen, wouldn’t listen. In March 1912, he headed north to Clute Township, closer to James Bay than to Lake Superior, where he bought 150 acres and spent the summer laboriously constructing a rough log home for himself. His notebook carefully tallied his costs: $75 in dues at 50 cents an acre, $9.90 in interest on same, $63.78 to clear two acres, $23.35 for logs for his house, 500 feet of lumber for $7.50, $12.25 for roofing, $1.15 for nails, 45 cents for hinges, $3 for windows … 28
It was backbreaking work. At the end of the day he was too tired to eat. In midsummer, with the log house complete, he visited Toronto, where he was watching a horse race when he learned fires had swept the area – the result of homesteaders burning bush – and destroyed his house. He informed Albert he would not return, and they had another row, this time because Albert wouldn’t abide a quitter in the family. Neither would give ground, and when Conn enrolled in civil engineering at the University of Toronto that fall, Albert wouldn’t give him the tuition. So Conn, Wreck, and a group of friends hit on a scheme to win the money at the track by picking a mediocre horse and bribing other jockeys to let the nag win. The plan almost worked until a mix-up prevented them from getting their bets in on time. Although the bribed jockeys kept their end of the bargain, the boys barely made enough to cover their expenses. All in all Smythe’s plans weren’t unfolding as he’d planned. But the disappointments were bearable thanks to the presence of Irene.*
* Conn Smythe maintained that his parents were renting the house he was born in, but the Toronto city directory from that year shows Albert as the owner.
* The Smythe house was at 44 Beachell and has since disappeared. In 2010, a two-storey home (with parking for ten cars!) at the same address was for sale with an asking price of $639,000. A new development of townhomes runs west off Beachell, named Conn Smythe Drive in Smythe’s honour.
* Although he wasn’t naive about what went on at racetracks, Smythe said that was the one and only time he became involved in a fixed race. There were too many imponderables that could upset even the most carefully laid plans.