Yabba Dabba Do! Ontario voters got two Semples and an old-time pamphlet on Ontario Populism!

Above left: One candidate got away from DelD's Hook the last week. In Etobicoke Centre you can still get two Semples for the price of one. Above right: An old-time New Hogtown Press pamphlet.Amazing text transfer via Facebunker Posty Thingamabob

OK, this post was inspired by Eleanor's Book Cover Challenge Post initiative in the Facebunker. It does need some explanation. What on earth do Two Semples at your door and an early New Hogtown Press publication have to do with each other? Well, here goes.

It started on Steve DelD's very bad day (not because of no hair and scary glasses) after the first debate about ten days ago. Close observers will remember that day when he lost three candidates and then maybe a fourth. I went clicking around in the rubble and discovered that DelD was standing by the fourth after a bit of investigation. (So, nobody does any candidate vetting anymore?) The fourth was interesting to me because his name was Semple.

It couldn't be, I thought. It did take a while before I found the pic of Noel and Wynton at the door with a Liberal brochure.

And that took me back to October, 1970. I was travelling back from Boston to Toronto for Canadian Thanksgiving and picked up Greg Kealey and Russell Jacoby in Rochester. Kealey was a friend from UofT and Jacoby was in the grad history program with him at UofR. They needed a ride to the First International Telos Conference on the "New Marxism" that was taking place in Waterloo (October 8-11). It was starting on the Thursday of the long weekend and we had plenty of time to get there. Jacoby was supposed to comment on a paper that Paul Breines was giving. It was a hilarious trip. Jacoby offered very amusing commentary from the backseat and Kealey served as navigator. Instead of consulting an actual map, he started a running commentary of the amazing architecture of the Niagara Frontier.

And then.... it became instantly obvious to the jet-lagged driver that we had been travelling away from our destination (Waterloo) for some time. Our navigator had suffered a case of what would become known as Stockwell Day Syndrome. Like a lot of things in that part of the world, rivers run in the opposite direction one would expect. Anyway, we got turned around and made it to the conference just after Breines started delivering his paper. Jacoby decided that he would not rush up to the speakers table and that the paper could stand without his commentary.

He filled us in on Telos, Paul Piccone and what the conference was about. In addition to Piccone, there were a lot of speakers whose first language was not English. As the session ended, Kealey started noticing old CUS folks from his Student Power Era. Peter Warrian sidled up offered the opinion that the conference seemed to reinforce the caricature that Marxism was a confusing foreign affair. Not quite as funny as Jacoby. Another old CUS exec came by to chat. Wynton Semple had been Warrian's Chancellor of the Exchequer during CUS's final disatrous full year of existence and had been part of the group that decided to fold the organization after it lost the UofT referendum in the fall of 1969. He had formed a small press called Hogtown Press with what could be salvaged to continue the CUS literature service.

He asked Kealey if he knew where he could get in touch with someone named Russell Hann. He wanted to publish an undergrad paper this Hann person had done on 19th-century Ontario populism. Kealey introduced us. I actually had no idea that anyone other than academic people had a copy the paper that was finished only a few months earlier. We exchanged addresses and he said he'd be in touch. I headed off for Toronto. I did not think about becoming a published author for a while until Wynton got in touch about what would become "Farmer's Confront Industrialism."