My un-air-conditioned blood boiled last week when I heard a pair of morning radio chat show hosts calling Honest Ed’s an “eyesore.”
Eye of the beholder, I’d say. Mine hurt when skyscrapers get in front of them.
Neither of the two commenting on the looming sale of the store had ever been inside the bargain emporium whose walls convince you via photographs of another era that Toronto must have been a very glamorous place. Honest Ed was a magician.
Mirvish and his wife, Anne, started out with a little “sportswear” shop supplying affordable clothes to the women who entered the workforce during WWII. The Mirvishes would buy a skirt, a frock or two from the manufacturers on Spadina, sell them and buy a few more.
Ed adopted the handle “Honest” in the late 1940s, around the same time he was offered a load of bloomers – a few thousand pairs maybe, I think they were red – that went for a nickel. He strung them across the shop hillbilly-style, his autobiography says. I can’t find a copy in the store any more.
Like the best comedians, Ed performed serious work through outrageous humour. Picture the scene: there were no malls, no dollar stores. Shopping in staid, WASPy Toronto meant Eaton’s or Simpsons, where a person of small means with iffy English could expect to be met with controlled disdain if not overt contempt. Woolworth’s carried cheaper small goods but was just as Britishy. Honest Ed Mirvish revolutionized Toronto.
With a combination of intuitive brilliance and chutzpah, he sold affordable everything in a carnival atmosphere, his outlandish promotions effectively taking the sting out of poverty by encouraging people to laugh.
Honest Ed is revered all across the islands of the Caribbean. Come at opening time and hear the calypso number spelling out his name. Look at the life-size photo of Ed and Peter Tosh and see the love.
As I recall from the book, Ed’s mother kept food on the table by running a little neighbourhood grocery counter in the front of their place down around Dundas. There, they quietly defied the laws of Protestant Toronto. They stayed open late for their neighbours who worked long hours, and sold goods on Sunday, which to their clientele wasn’t the Sabbath but their only day off.
“Uncanny business timing,” store manager Russell Lazar, Ed’s right-hand man, who remains enthusiastic after 55 years on the job, tells me. Lazar not only takes my phone call, but engages in a long and generous conversation, displaying the store’s mensch ethic, the polar opposite of the big box mentality.
For the last few years, watching the buckets multiply to catch the leaks from the store’s roof, I’ve expected the announcement that the store and Mirvish Village were going on the block.
Thirty years ago, I found a way too big Christian Dior alpaca overcoat at the store. I took it to Christine to cut down. She had a little made-to-measure shop in Mirvish Village. When her window was broken, Ed not only had it repaired but also sent her a bouquet of flowers to make her feel better.
I was so excited to have a top-quality coat no one else had ever worn, I wore the tag on the outside until it fell off. That coat has travelled everywhere with me, and doubled as a blanket. There’s a cut in the pocket from carrying a ready blade around nasty old London. Of course, London is now new, safe, shiny – oh, right, and expensive as everything everywhere threatens to be. The coat, like Honest Ed’s, like me, is showing some wear. Loving care could keep us all going a lot longer. I do persist in my anachronistic thinking.
Walking north on Markham on Sunday, July 21, I think I’ve got the wrong day. I expect the street to be closed, with rides and a stage with bands playing. That’s how it was when Ed was around and we celebrated his birthday. This is the store’s 65th anniversary – the old retirement age for a worker, just a drop in the bucket (uh-oh) for a landmark business in France or someplace. But this is Toronto, where an “era,” I’ve figured out lately, lasts about three years in these sped-up times.
The store is crowded like it never is regularly any more. When Honest Ed established himself, shopping wasn’t a recreational activity. You bought what you needed to survive, and he turned a necessary chore into a theatrical pleasure.
You can line up for free espresso and cake in the basement, where I go to pick up staples – porridge and liquor chocolates. You can find made-in-Canada Miss Canada pantyhose left over from BiWay, and Canadian-made skirts in the ladies’ department, which is normally as off-limits to men as a harem.
In menswear, a steel pan player is so quiet he could be miming. I chat with a woman from Downsview for about half an hour while we wait, next to the hotdogs, for something priceless. The two sign painters who turn out the hundreds of signs throughout the store are brushing the names people ask for onto big cards for one-of-a-kind souvenirs. The queue is cut off before we make it, but I watch as the letters take shape. Decades of flow give the words that distinctive look of action and excitement that defined Honest Ed and his crazy deals.
In his attempt to warm up the crowd amongst the racks, the magician tells us about his driving time from Burlington to the 427 to here. It falls a little flat. We don’t know. Ed never thought much of cars or parking lots downtown. He grew up having fun running around the streets that have been taken over by fuming drivers.
The magician produces not one, but two live doves. Then they disappear. He makes like he’s bringing them back. But he doesn’t. And I know we all want to see them again.
But we can’t. It’s over.
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