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Joy 101 with Hoda Coffee is presented by CVS. Hey and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck Jerry's here too. She's just on mute and she's sitting in for a day and for it's not here.
And this is short stuff. That's right, about the Toronto Clown Riot. That was dead on Toronto that was supposed to be a clown horn. It sounds like a sick mule in my head. It was kind of come out better.
And I thought about doing a second take, but who cares? Let's leave it in there and it's fun. It was a sick mule doing the disco call. Wow. We also cold a lot of information from the Toronto Star, spacing magazine, specifically
Adam Bunchun, spacing magazine, and the circus diaries. That's right, the sexiest mini series. The Red Shoes Circus Diaries. But we are talking about one of our towns that we love a lot, Toronto. And we are coming back there to Massey Hall, by the way.
As part of our Canadian tour, we always love Massey Hall in particular and playing to our
friends there.
“I think that, I think our very first live show ever was in Toronto, right?”
I think it was actually, yeah. Our bars episode. Good call. Chuck, that was our first one. That's right.
That gave us the taste, everybody. The taste of Toronto. That's right. And also, I've spoken to Chuck everybody. He's promised to do like 90% less Gordon Lightfoot jokes this time.
That's right. But we need to hop in the way back machine for this one because we're going back to 1855. When Toronto was a different place than not me, it wasn't the metropolitan kind of refined big city that it is now.
“It was tough, it had like 352 drinking establishments for the 40,000 people there.”
Had a lot of brothels and they were people that like to mix it up, it seems like back in the day. Not just the people at Toronto, but the people who were in circuses, too, like to mix it up. And specifically in July 1855, when our event takes place, the SB House Star Troop in
Managerie and Circus was in town, and that circus was from New York State, and they showed up in Toronto. They set up their tents and said, hey, everybody come see, and, of course, this is a circus, even in 1855. Circus, there were a bunch of clowns there, Chuck.
And these clowns, they had a long day of performing, and they said, let's go to a local brothel, and they did as a group. That's right. They said, let's go get drunk and doing other things you can do at brothels, and they went to Marianne Armstrong's brothel, it's a corner of King and John Streets, and this
happened to be a brothel where it was kind of the main hangout of the Hook and Ladder Fire Brigade. So we need to explain a couple of things about these two groups. The clowns, at the time, are not the lovable psychopaths that we have now in our circuses. They were, you know, they were kind of the road crew, as well as clowns, so they had to
put up these big tents, break everything down, get all the gear in place, so they were brony, like big dudes, and the firefighters of the day in Toronto, at least, and a lot of places. Before the city government had, you know, was in charge of that kind of thing, so you had private fire departments and private companies that, you know, build for their services,
like we'll put out your fire for this amount of money.
So you have fire, private fire companies like racing to fires to get their first, and there
were several instances of them arriving at the same time, and like fighting one another to put out the fire while the fire is burning. Yeah, several instances, one is recent is just a couple of weeks before that Hook and Ladder
Company, who called Marion Armstrong's house, so they'll repute their hangout.
They showed up to one, and there was already another company there, and they got into a fight, and a riot broke out, right? So there was a firefighter riot at a burning house. The firefighters all decided instead of putting the house out, they let it burn and looted the houses around it.
It was that kind of riot.
“These are the firefighters in Toronto at the time, right?”
So by the time the Toronto clown riot happens, the Hook and Ladder Company has already been in one riot within the last few weeks, and I guess they were itching for another one or something. Yeah, so they were there, and they were hanging out, and they were drinking, and the clowns show up, and they're ready to do their thing, and pretty much everyone's account is
the same as that the clowns started it. I didn't see anything that said that the firefighters did, so it was either like clowns cutting in line, or there was a clown that knocked, this is all sounds very funny, by the way. And as it's coming out of my mouth, or a clown knocked, the firefighters had off and
went on, and all of a sudden a big brawl breaks out, and maybe we should take a break there, and tell everybody who won right after this. Now, the lane, instant oil change presents wisdom from the road. Some are means wide open spaces in a whole lot of extra miles. Last place you want your engine to give out is halfway to nowhere.
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I'll tell you who won, Chuck, the clowns won, you know it. I don't think anybody disputes that because the one firefighter was seriously injured, so he was kind of removed from the brothel, and as his fellow firefighters were dragging him off, they all retreated as well. So the clowns were like, "Great, well we're here now, so they just enjoyed the rest
of the night there." That's right. The problem was that the city of Toronto at the time was run and was for like a hundred plus years by an Irish Protestant group called the Orange Order, which was kind of like a fraternal order, and if you wanted to be an elected official, a cop, a firefighter, if
you wanted a government job, you basically had to be an orange man, a member of the order,
and the hook and ladder company were all orange men, which meant they were deeply connected to a lot of other people, they called brothers in town, and the clowns had just stepped in at big time.
“Yeah, this has got to be from Syracuse University's Orange Man, it's got to be related, right?”
I don't know. I meant to look that up, but as soon as that's all orange men, I was like, "Wait a minute, Syracuse." So I imagine that came from the same Irish Protestant order that would be a weird coincidence. How many Orange men are there after all?
Well, they grow a lot of oranges in Syracuse, so maybe that's it. Okay, that's probably a gentle winter's there, good for the fruit. So word spreads about what happens at the spite, and the next day, a bunch of mad orange men show up, and they're like, "We're going to kick the, kick the fun out of these clowns.
They started attacking the circus basically, and it got really out of hand."
Yeah, it did get out of hand, they were throwing rocks, they were beating up the clowns,
The crowd just kept growing and growing, and so just the clowns, but the enti...
was overwhelmed, then the hook and ladder company, who had been in the fight the day before with the clowns, they showed up, and rather than put out any fires, they actually started burning down the dents, they had fire axes, which they used to break up the property of the circus. Like everybody kind of dragged the circus performers wagons down to this lakeside and tip them over, it was a bad jam for sure.
Yeah, so the circus is in big trouble at this point, so they're like, "Thank God, the police, the police show up," but they were also corrupt, because they were also orange men, orange people, or at least the chief was, and a bit a lot of the cops were.
Mayor Quimby finally steps in and calms everything down. He arrives on the scene, and
this is, I love this, because this is totally made up lore, but I've got to read it anyway. He said to have grabbed the axe out of the hand of a riot or mid-swing, as he was about to bring it down upon a clown. Yeah. The mayor's office put that up the next day. First year, he was shirtless to when you did it.
Yeah. The police chief who, like you said, was an orange men and was very corrupt. He is supposedly credited with saving the animals or keeping the rioters from harming the animals, which, yeah, not the elephants. It's a big mark in his favor, frankly.
No, for sure. Aside from that, though, the police just sat on their hands. They purposefully did not intervene, right? Yeah. Eventually, this riot, what became known as the Turana clown riot or the Toronto Circus riot,
I prefer clown riot. What about you?
“Yeah, that sounds, that's the better band name, so that's what I'll go with.”
Sure. It eventually settled down the mob dispersed and the Circus people came back and grabbed their things and they high-tailed it out of town. They were like, "We're going to Ottawa. This place is way too hot for us."
You know what? No, I'm thinking though. You can't use Toronto clown riot as a band name, because once in saying clown posse he did that, you just can't even come close to touching that word. Could you?
Could you? Can a band name, I don't think? Could you use it as an album name? Maybe, but I don't know, who wants to be associated with the juggleos, you know? I know some juggleos are former juggleos are good people.
Oh, yeah, all right. I'm going to stand up for 'em, sure. Look at you going to bat for the juggleos. Sure.
“I feel like Aaron Cooper has done, we talked about juggleos before and I believe there are”
pictures of us as juggleos if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, for sure. I think for our magnets episode, maybe. Yeah, that sounds right. So check, okay, obviously the whole thing settles down, everybody gets levelheaded again
and justice prevails. Yeah, we'll see, we'll let the audience decide, 17 people were charged with rioting.
It was basically because of the corruption that there wasn't a big widespread drag net over
this whole thing. But the one, you know, it took a while. But the one good thing that came out of this was it was kind of the last straw for the people of Toronto with like, these corrupt Orangeman kind of running everything. It was kind of like the, you know, New York City's, uh, Tammany, right?
Yeah. And they were like, we're not going to handle this anymore. We can't be like New York. And so the reform party comes into power and the idea reform is top of mind. It took about a hundred years to kind of get the Orangeman completely out of the picture.
That's kind of the, the weird part. Yeah, Adam Bunch, in that spacing magazine, article, he says those, he points to the clown riot is like the turning point that eventually became the foundation for the modern less corrupt and less orange, I guess, police force and truth. Yeah, I'm going to look and see it when I'm there when I'm walking around, which is,
I love to do that one and there. I'm going to see if I see any like Orangeman stuff anywhere.
“Well, you know, how you find out somebody's an Orangeman, you should walk up to a cop.”
And what you do is you hold out your hand, like you're going to shake it. And then the Orangeman handshake is when the cop goes to grab your hand to shake it. You take it away and smooth the side of your hair and he or she will do the same things just watch. Oh, okay.
I thought you would go up to them and squeeze their skin like you were popping a zet to see
if any Orange essential oil comes out.
That works too. Yeah. All right. Okay. I think short stuff is that.
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