Disaster for the Human Cannonball
Plus my role in this year's Doors Open, the grisly history of the Rideau Canal, and more...
Bobby Jean Bernhardt was flying. She had just been shot out of a cannon — a human missile fired four storeys into the air above a huge outdoor stage. It was the summer of 1936, and the Canadian National Exhibition was in full swing. Thousands of Torontonians and tourists had packed the CNE Grandstand that night to witness one of the strangest spectacles in the entire history of the fair. But something was about to go wrong.
Bernhardt was playing a small but dramatic role in the proceedings, a daredevil feat to awe the crowd. And as she sailed through the sky, it became clear her trajectory was off. Bernhardt wasn't flying anywhere near as far as she was meant to. As she began her plummet toward the hard surface of the wooden stage, she was falling short. The men who were supposed to catch her were still worryingly far away. They rushed forward as quickly as they could, desperately trying to reach her before disaster struck. But she was coming down fast. Too fast.
Bernhardt had always been a performer. She was born in Kansas, but she was raised on the road. A distant cousin of the famous actor Sarah Bernhardt, she won her first song-and-dance competition at the age of two, was touring the country by the time she was seven, and became a fixture on the vaudeville circuit as a twelve-year-old.
Dancing was her greatest love, but when she signed on with a vaudevillian travelling dance troupe, she was called upon to perform another role. Their show was inspired by the circus. And Bernhardt was tiny: just four-foot-ten weighing eighty pounds. She was the perfect size to become a human cannonball. They began regularly firing her into the air as part of their performances. And so that's how she found herself sailing through the sky at the CNE.
Every year, the Ex would put on a spectacular show at the big grandstand that stood where BMO Field is today. There were military extravaganzas, historical re-enactments, and elaborate pageants performed by casts of hundreds, sometimes even accompanied by horses and pyrotechnics. But the one held in 1936 was surely one of the weirdest events ever staged at the CNE.
It was called Mystic Mars. The idea, as The Globe explained, was to provide the crowd with "a glamorous and dazzling view of the future." In the first act, the audience was given a glimpse of what the CNE might look like in 200 years — in 2136. In the second and third acts, they were transported to a futuristic version of Mars. The gargantuan stage was dwarfed by massive sets; the painted backdrops took months to design and weeks to build. They depicted Martian architecture, columns and staircases dramatically lit by spotlights during each night's show as a vast array of brightly costumed performers played the part of the Martians.
It was all capped off by a thunderous fireworks display. And for some reason, before they got to the big finale, they rolled out a whole series of vaudevillian circus troupes. At least thirty of them had been invited. There were high-wire trapeze artists, animal tricks, elephants… and more than one human cannonball, including Bobby Jean Bernhardt.
Promotions for the spectacle had been appearing in Toronto newspapers for weeks before the CNE began. On its opening night, Mystic Mars drew a crowd of more than 30,000 people. The first three performances seem to have gone off without a hitch. It was on the fourth night that things would go wrong.
Bernhardt didn't take her safety for granted. She knew how dangerous her job could be. "I was scared every time," she would later remember. While other human cannonballs landed in a net, her act was even more daring than that — she was, instead, caught by a pair of her fellow performers. It wasn't unusual for the length of her flight to vary a bit; she often fell a few feet short or a few feet long — but never so much they weren't able to catch her. It was always okay.
That night, she had extra reason to be nervous. It had been raining in Toronto that week. And the cannon from which she was fired could be unreliable when wet. The elastic mechanism became unpredictable. That day, one of her colleagues was worried enough to do something about it. He tried to dry it out, placing a heater inside it for a couple of hours. But that wasn't enough.
The show began as usual. The audience cheered and clapped as the Martians danced across the stage. But when the time came for Bernhardt's big moment, the mechanism was still damp. As she soared through the air, she didn't have the same velocity as usual. She was falling short by seven metres or so — nearly half the entire distance she was supposed to travel. The men raced forward to catch her, but try as they might they couldn't quite get there in time. They could only grab her upper half as it came down. Her legs slammed into the wooden stage with full force.
Something cracked. Some sources say it was her hip; others claim she broke her thigh bone. Either way, it was a brutal injury — the kind of thing that ends careers. It must have been horrifically painful.
In the moment, they managed to cover it up. "Few of the many thousand people realized that an accident had occurred," according to The Toronto Daily Star. "It could be seen that something had gone wrong with the act, but the show was carried on with such smoothness that the crowd did not suspect the seriousness of the injury."
Even Bernhardt herself doesn't seem to have immediately understood how bad it was. She was in good spirits as she was carried off to St. Michael's Hospital — more concerned about her pet terrier than her leg. "Don't feed Poochie any of that terrible hamburger," she commanded. "Make sure he gets some of that good steak and don't worry about me, I'll be all right."
At the hospital, however, the scene was much more sombre. The Star's reporter found Bernhardt's colleagues in tears. Her manager was deeply shaken, convinced she could have died. As it was, the bone would take weeks to heal. She's said to have been in the hospital for months.
The doctors' diagnosis was heartbreaking. They told her she would never dance again. The reporter assumed that at the very least she might have second thoughts about ever being fired out of a cannon again. But Bobby Jean Bernhardt was no ordinary performer. She'd been on the stage all her life and she wasn't about to leave it now.
In the years to come, she would perform with Ginger Rogers and George Burns, appear on The Ed Sullivan Show and Captain Kangaroo. She became such a familiar face on screen in the early days of television that people began calling her Miss TV. Others dubbed her Little Miss Broadway. She worked as a choreographer and as a comedian and for the Metropolitan Opera Company. She danced on tables in the Bahamas until she was seasick, performed five times at five different venues during a single New Year's Eve in New York. During the Second World War, she gave hundreds of free performances, entertaining American soldiers and wounded veterans. Even when she was finally forced to retire from the stage, she refused to give up her passion. She opened a series of dance schools across Kansas and Missouri, teaching ballet and ballroom and tap and polka to generations of children. She lived to be nearly 100 years old, so that even today you'll find hundreds of her students with fond memories of their time at her studio — a legacy that still lives on more than a century after she was born.
A cracked hip or a snapped femur wasn't about to derail all that. And it certainly wasn't going to keep her from flying through the sky again. Bobby Jean Bernhardt was made of tougher stuff than that.
"Sure, I'm going back to the cannon act," she scoffed at that reporter from her hospital bed. "What do you think?"
The number of paid subscriptions to The Toronto History Weekly has been falling quickly over the last few weeks. And since this newsletter involves a ton of work, it’s only by growing the number of paid subscriptions that I’ll be able to continue doing it. Thank you so, so much to everyone who already has — and if you’d to make the switch yourself, you can do it by clicking right here:
A Wonderfully Bizarre Thank You!
It’s been seven days since The Festival of Bizarre Toronto History ended and I’m still recovering from the wonderful exhaustion of the week. Thanks so much to all of you who attended the events — whether you tuned in on Zoom or were able to make it out to one of the walking tours in person. And thanks, too, to all the extraordinary speakers, panelists and tour guides who shared their strange stories with us.
You all made it such a resounding success that I will definitely be bringing it back again in the spring of 2025!
If you’d like me to notify you once the dates have been announced and tickets go on sale for next year’s festival, feel free to send me a message or leave a comment.
I’m Curating Doors Open’s Walking Tours This Year!
Doors Open is coming up next weekend (May 25–26) and I’m particularly excited for this year’s edition because I’ve helped put together the guided walks portion of the event. The theme for this year is “Hidden Histories” and there will be more than a dozen walking tours uncovering those stories in neighbourhoods all over the city, from the Hidden Queer Histories of Hanlan’s Point to the Secrets of Rexdale to the Women of Park Lawn Cemetery (a tour created by Chantal Morris, who also led our Bizarre Tour of the Necropolis Cemetery during The Festival of Bizarre Toronto History last week).
The walks are all free with registration, and while a few of them have already filled up, there are still a few final slots you can snap up if you’re interested:
(I’ll also be giving a free talk about The Toronto Book of the Dead and the city’s morbid history as part of Doors Open this year, but I’m afraid that event has already sold out!)
The Grisly History of the Rideau Canal
We recently released a new episode of our Canadian history documentary series Canadiana — and with nearly 700,000 views it’s already our most popular yet! We filmed it a couple of summers ago, travelling up and down the Rideau Canal tracing its gruesome origins. It might seem like just a peaceful tourist attraction these days, but it has a bloody past. Built out of fear of an American invasion, the canal’s construction claimed a thousand lives — including the duke who championed it.
As always, the episode is free to watch on YouTube. You can do that — and subscribe to our channel! — right here:
The Torontonian Roots of Doctor Who
It’s one of my favourite facts in Canadian history and one of my favourite stories to tell: not only was Doctor Who created by a guy from Toronto, he also ended up on a list of potential targets for the FLQ. And since the British sci-fi show returned to our screens last weekend, I took the chance to tell the tale on this week’s edition of my Weird Toronto History radio segment.
I also shared the full story in the newsletter a couple of years ago. You can read that right here.
Weird Toronto History airs every Tuesday afternoon at 3:20pm on Newstalk 1010.
The Strange Mackenzies & Their Moms
If you weren’t able to make it out for my Weird Toronto Mother’s Day Walk as part of The Festival of Bizarre Toronto History last weekend, you can still hear a couple of the stories I told as part of the tour. I shared them on my Weird Toronto History radio segment last week: the role William Lyon Mackenzie’s mom played during his rebellion, and his grandson’s strange obsession with his own dead mother.
QUICK LINKS
The best of everything else that’s new in Toronto’s past…
SIXTIES ICON NEWS — The new documentary about Jackie Shane, the Black trans soul singer who mesmerized Toronto audiences in the 1960s, made its local premiere at Hot Docs this year. Anthony Milton recently interviewed the filmmakers for Toronto Life. Read more.
ACTING MAYOR NEWS — William Peyton Hubbard was one of the first Black politicians in our city’s history, once saved George Brown’s life, helped champion public ownership of hydro power, and even served as acting mayor for a while. This summer, we’ll be getting a new walking tour about him thanks to Lanrick Bennett and Marie Wilson. The pair were recently interviewed about it by the CBC. Read more.
ALICE MUNRO VS. BOOK BANNING NEWS — With the sad news that Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro passed away this week, Jamie Bradburn shared the story of how she fought those who wanted to ban her books in the 1970s — which she did with a little help from Toronto’s Timothy Findley. Read more.
GLOW UP NEWS — After seven years of restoration and construction work and decades hidden away behind ugly metal plates, the beautiful old facade of 2 Queen West (the curved building next to the Eaton Centre on the corner of Yonge & Queen) has been fully unveiled. Read more.
CRUNCH NEWS — Jason Kucherawy of Tour Guys dug up the details of Toronto’s first car accident from all the way back in the year 1900 — when an electric taxi smashed into a horse-drawn carriage. Read more.
TREE PENALTY NEWS — On Twitter, Francesca Bouaoun (@frantasticx) shares one of Raymond Moriyama’s memories of the construction of Ontario Place: the extreme care taken to protect the trees now threatened by the Ford government’s megaspa plan and the penalty levelled against any contractor who failed to comply. Read more.
INTERNMENT NEWS — Elizabeth Compa has a new article for Heritage Toronto looking at the Toronto connections to the internment of Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War. Read more.
WEIRD HEADLINE NEWS — Adam Wynne recently shared some strange finds with blogTO: weird Toronto newspaper headlines from 1881, including fires, theft and nudity. Read more.
TORONTO HISTORY EVENTS
DOORS OPEN TORONTO
May 25 & 26 — 10am to 5pm — Various locations
“Each May, Doors Open Toronto invites the public to explore the city’s most-loved buildings and sites, free of charge. The event provides rare access to buildings not usually open to the public and free access to sites that would usually charge an admission fee. Since its inception in 2000, it has attracted more than two million visits to nearly 700 unique locations and remains the largest event of its kind in Canada.”
And as I mentioned above: this year, I curated the guided walks portion of the festival and am giving a talk about The Toronto Book of the Dead!
Free!
AUTHOR VISIT: CAROL WILLIAMS-WONG
May 28 — 3pm — Spadina Road Library
“Author Carol Williams-Wong shares her life story through readings of her memoir/books, Letters to My Grandchildren: memoirs of a dragon lady, and Conversation with a Hakka Dragon Lady. From Jamaica to Canada and back, daughter born to Hakka Chinese immigrants in Jamaica during the mid-1900s, Carol draws on her memory to recall her happy and carefree life growing up in Jamaica, studying and getting married in Canada and returning to Jamaica only to follow her destiny to become a Hakka Chinese Dragon Lady in Toronto.”
Free!
THE SINKING OF HMHS LLANDOVERY CASTLE: A FORGOTTEN TRAGEDY OF WWI
May 29 — 7pm — Northern District Library — North Toronto Historical Society
“On June 27, 1918, an unarmed clearly-marked Canadian hospital ship was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland by a German U-boat. Most of the ship's crew and Canadian Army Medical Corps personnel on board died in the sinking and the machine-gunning of lifeboats which followed. A handful of survivors escaped to bear witness to this war crime. Nate Hendley, Toronto-based journalist and author, will give an illustrated presentation on this little-known tragedy based on his recently-published book Atrocity on the Atlantic.”
Free, I believe!
MEMOIRS OF A DRAGON LADY
June 1 — 2pm — Riverdale Library
“Join Carol Williams-Wong for a reading of her memoirs and presentation, followed by a Q&A session… From Jamaica to Canada and back, daughter born to Hakka Chinese immigrants in Jamaica during the mid-1900s, Carol draws on her memory to recall her happy and carefree life growing up in Jamaica, studying and getting married in Canada and returning to Jamaica only to follow her destiny to become a Hakka Chinese Dragon Lady in Toronto.”
Free!
COULD THE HUMBER RIVER HAVE BECOME BRÛLÉ LAKE?
June 8 — 1:30pm — Walking tour: Meet at 8 South Kingsway — Swansea Historical Society
“In 1929, a coalition of amateur sports leaders called for the creation of a grand rowing regatta course on the lower Humber River between Bloor Street and Lake Ontario. Had it happened, the largely natural river we experience today would have been transformed into a two kilometre-long recreational area with significant implications for local development as well as the environment and future natural disasters including Hurricane Hazel. This walk will explore the story of “Brûlé Lake” by walking the length of the course. We will explore how it almost came to be, what it could have meant, why the effort failed, and how the saga could be viewed as symbolic of the end of the predominance of amateur sports in favour of professional sports in Toronto.”
Free with registration!
THE HUMBER: TIME TRAVEL THROUGH PICTURES
June 13 — 7:30pm — Lambton House — Heritage York
Explore the pictorial history of the Humber River with David Wallace in this talk at historic Lambton House presented by Heritage York.
Free, I believe!
ANNE POWERS: ON THE PATH TO JONI MITCHELL
June 17 — 7pm — Toronto Reference Library
“Joni Mitchell has spellbound listeners for decades as one of the most influential singer-songwriters to emerge from the Folk music scene of the 1960s, and her musical legacy left a loud imprint on musicians, fans and storytellers of all walks of life. In Traveling, Ann Powers brings her honed skills as a music biographer to trace the story of Joni from rural Canada to her ultimate international stardom and her recent triumphant comeback after the aneurysm that nearly took her life. And along the way, Powers delivers a new type of music biography that contradicts the traditional idea that a fan can ever truly and deeply know their musical icons.”
Free!
TORONTO GONE WILD
Until August 3 — Wednesday to Sunday from 12pm to 4pm — Museum of Toronto
“Toronto Gone Wild explores the city as a multi-layered habitat — starring the animals, plants, and insects that call Toronto home. Venture through different Torontonian terrains from city streets to burrows, hives, and nests, all seamlessly woven together in our downtown exhibition space. You’ll emerge with a renewed appreciation for the interconnectedness of life in the city.”
Free!
HERITAGE TORONTO WALKING TOUR
Until October
“Through our events, including tours, community discussions, the Heritage Toronto Awards, and more, Heritage Toronto engages the public to reflect on the city’s heritage.”
Usually $9.85