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Like its famous four-star counterpart in Toronto, the King Edward Hotel in Calgary dates from the early twentieth-century reign of its namesake, King Edward VII. Calgary's King Eddy is the oldest continuously operating hotel in the city and the sole remaining example of its vintage. Apart from the lavish Palliser Hotel, built by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1914, the King Edward is the only existing building that illustrates Ninth Avenue's early manifestation as Calgary's hotel row.
Atlantic Avenue, as it was originally known, boasted the Canadian Pacific Railway station, the immigration hall, land offices, employment agencies and restaurants. Dozens of hotels gave the avenue its reputation as "Whisky Row," and none were more notorious than the Atlantic Hotel, known after a 1902 murder as the "Bucket of Blood." The Atlantic was the last chance saloon for those leaving Calgary to the east, and the first chance saloon for those arriving from that direction.
In 1904 the city changed its street names to numbers, giving "Whisky Row" the new identity of Ninth Avenue. And in 1909, the Atlantic Hotel was renamed the Oxford in an attempt to clean up its image. The new King Edward Hotel, built immediately east of the old Atlantic, no doubt brought a freshness to this aging corner of the young city. "Spotless linen, changed regularly, lace curtains of shimmery whiteness, the best of beds, mattresses and springs, attract the guest," observed a booster writer in 1914, perhaps too optimistically. He added that the hotel succeeded in "satiating the demands of the modern day traveler and providing a home for the working man, the ranchman and the cattleman."
Louis D. Charlebois (1854-1930) built the three-storey brick hostelry in 1906, and the following year he completed a five-storey addition larger than the original structure. Charlebois had earlier operated the old Windsor Hotel near the railway station, and in 1911 he acquired the Victoria Hotel on Eighth Avenue, to which he added the only public lavatory in Calgary. Charlebois brought some of the King Edward's staff to work in the more upscale Victoria, and from 1911 on he leased the Eddy to a series of hotel operators. In 1922 Charlebois and his wife Celima retired to California, where they died in 1930 and 1938 respectively. The King Edward remained property of his estate until Celima's death.
The hotel's second manager, Scottish-born William Mill (circa 1873-1936), had an excellent background for dealing with his clientele. He had been a warder in a lunatic asylum, then served as a police officer in Edinburgh, Winnipeg and Calgary before retiring from the Calgary force as an inspector in 1911. Police Chief Thomas Mackie wished Mill every success in the hotel business, but within two years his license was removed for unsanitary conditions, "loose and unsatisfactory" management, and serving drunks. Mill went on to manage the National Hotel in Calgary's Inglewood district from 1916 until his death in 1936, a period that included prohibition (1916-24). He is buried in Union Cemetery, with only one burial plot separating him from Calgary's most celebrated tippler - Bob Edwards, publisher of the Calgary Eye Opener.
The next manager was John G. Taylor, whose tenure included the early years of World War I. After a "general mix-up" in the bar between soldiers from Sarcee Camp in October 1915 - the result of "a dispute over something" - their commanding officer declared the King Edward "out of bounds" to soldiers for two weeks. But the troops showed up again in force, along with the city's thirsty civilians, for one last drink on June 30, 1916. Alberta's eight-year experiment with prohibition commenced the following day, and in the words of a Herald reporter, the bars of Calgary - including the King Edward - "turned up their toes and died with their boots on, in plain sight of all present." By ten o'clock every drop was gone. "Calgary went dry Friday night," the Albertan chimed in. "Dry as the burning sands of Arabia. Dry as the bones in the valley described by the Prophet Ezekiel. Dry as the seventh proposition of Euclid."
John Barleycorn's obituary, however, was premature. Bootlegging flourished in dry Alberta, and given its location in Calgary's downscale east end, it is no surprise that the King Eddy acquired an uneven reputation. J. McKinley Cameron (1879-1943), perhaps the city's best-known criminal defense lawyer, counted four of the hotel's operators - Patrick J. McManus, Thomas R. Stone, Nathan Green and James R. Roberts - among his clients. Cameron's extensive files at the Glenbow Archives cast light on some of the hotel's darker episodes.
Patrick J. McManus (circa 1873-1955) and Thomas R. Stone (circa 1882-1956) leased the hotel around 1916. Like Mill, McManus was a veteran policeman, and had served on the Ottawa and Calgary police forces. The Ontario-born detective left the Calgary force around 1909 and took over the Riverside Hotel in the city's Bridgeland district. He later opened the McManus Liquor Company in the Costello Block, one block north of the King Edward Hotel. With the advent of prohibition, McManus closed his liquor store but took over the King Edward in partnership with Stone. A series of liquor violations in 1917 and 1918 repeatedly landed McManus in the police court and nearly cost the hotel its 1918 business license. Lawyer Cameron successfully appealed at least one conviction (despite Police Chief Albert Cuddy's retrieval of sixty quarts of whisky from a "secret cache" in the hotel), but McManus' association with the hotel evidently ended by 1920. He later farmed in the Morrin district north of Drumheller, and eventually retired to Edmonton.
Tom Stone retained the hotel's lease after McManus' departure, and his tenure included the balance of the prohibition years. Stone was born in Missouri, grew up in Vancouver, then moved to Seattle before finally settling in Calgary around 1912. He secured a beer license when prohibition ended in the spring of 1924, but within months the King Edward became the first hotel in the city to lose its license under the new liquor act. Though he lived in the suburban Rideau-Roxboro district, Stone maintained private rooms in the hotel, where in August 1924 police discovered liquor bottles that had no government seal. Stone admitted in court that the liquor was his and claimed it was for personal use. Indeed, under the new liquor regulations, hotel guests were allowed liquor in their rooms. But Magistrate Gilbert E. Sanders ruled that a hotel manager could not also be a guest, and fined Stone $50.00 for keeping liquor in a non-licensed area. The magistrate dropped a separate charge of selling liquor (as opposed to beer), and the court evidently believed Stone's testimony that the empty bottles, labels and corking machine also found in the rooms were not currently in use, but were the remnants of a warehouse that had closed years earlier. A third charge, for selling beer after hours, was also dismissed, as the charge had been laid only two minutes after closing time. But the Alberta Liquor Control Board (ALCB) was less forgiving than the magistrate and cancelled the hotel's license. "From the evidence we have obtained we know whisky has been sold freely from Stone's Hotel," ALCB Commissioner R.J. Dinning wrote to Cameron. "This man has apparently gathered around him a most disreputable crowd. I know stone is no fool and I cannot conceive of him not knowing what is going on in his own Hotel." Stone soon disposed of his interest in both the King Edward Hotel and the Midnapore Hotel south of Calgary, and later operated a recreational club and became a horse owner and trainer.
Nat Green (circa 1883-1923), who hailed from Spokane, began working at the King Edward in 1917; by the time of his death in 1923 he had become its manager. But Green spent part of that time in the provincial jail at Lethbridge. He had already been charged with one liquor violation when John Davidson, a farmer from Three Hills who was staying at the nearby St. Louis Hotel, showed up and asked for a bottle of whisky. It was two o'clock p.m., January 14, 1918, and the repeal of prohibition was still years in the future. Green told Davidson he could supply a bottle of rye for six dollars in one hour's time. Davidson had come to town to pay a debt and had five one-hundred dollar bills with him. He paid for the bottle with one of the notes, and Green provided the balance in change.
"There was some girls in the hall," Davidson later testified, "and I said, there is a nice chicken, and he [Green] said, yes, come back at three o'clock." An hour later, Green furnished Davidson with a bottle, a room, and a "chicken" - Lucille Bosomworth, who had her own room at the hotel and another at the nearby King George. Mrs. Bosomworth poured the drinks, and Davidson gave her a ten-dollar bill for her services. He expected to receive seven dollars in change. According to Davidson's testimony, Green made two or three visits to the room that afternoon; on one occasion he brought another bottle, and on another he spoke privately with Bosomworth. After Davidson and Bosomworth "had connection," Tom Fyfe - a friend of Davidson's from the St. Louis Hotel - showed up. Bosomworth poured him a drink, and before long both men fell asleep. When they awoke that evening the woman was gone. And as Davidson realized after returning to his own hotel, so too was his money. Bosomworth had not even left him the change for the three-dollar trick. Davidson contacted the police.
Cameron defended Green and Bosomworth, who were both charged with stealing from Davidson. Bosomworth was acquitted of theft but convicted of being an inmate of a common bawdy house &endash; the King Edward Hotel. Green was found guilty of theft and of keeping a common bawdy house. Justice William L. Walsh fined Bosomworth $100.00, and sentenced Green to six months on the bawdy house charge. The sentence for theft was reserved pending an appeal that ultimately proved fruitless, and by July 1919 Green was still in prison. He was forty years old when he collapsed on a city street and died in hospital soon after.
James Roscoe Roberts (circa 1888-1955) leased the King Edward in 1925 and bought the property in 1938. Like Stone, Roberts hailed from Missouri, and he moved to Calgary as a teenager. After serving in France during the First World War, Roberts returned to Calgary and established the J.R. Roberts Employment Agency. It was in that connection that he was charged with fraud in 1917, and Cameron defended him successfully. Roberts worked for the Queen's Hotel before taking over the King Edward, and his hotel career appears to have been free of liquor violations. He sold the hotel in 1946 and retired to Sicamous, B.C.
Regina-born Homer S. Meers (1913-2003) owned the King Edward from 1946 to 1962. Meers had quit high school at the dawn of the Great Depression and rode the rails to Vancouver, where there was work in the merchant marine. "I'd never even been on a boat before," he admitted later. He found work on a freighter bound for Japan, and struck a deal with the ship's cook: they would trade jam for Japanese ivory and silk, then sell the goods back home. Meers next worked as a riverboat steward in the Yukon. To get extra work, he lied and said he was a cook. "If you can eat, you can cook," he later explained.
Meers improvised best as an hotelier - first at the Whitehorse Inn in the Yukon, then at the King Edward. He used to tell truckers who drank in the bar to leave their keys on the counter if they ever got "loaded;" the management would pay their taxi fare home. "You know, I never paid a dollar," he recalled. "Their wives came down and paid the taxi fare, and thanked me very much." If a good customer became a father, Meers gave him a silver dollar to start the child's bank account. "Meet the 'babies' now & then," Meers wrote years later, noting that those grown-up children still had the coins he had given their fathers. He discovered all the old liquor caches, including the bottles and labels that had probably been left behind by Tom Stone. Meers renovated the hotel, and paid to have the original fittings&emdash;brass beds and porcelain chamber pots, washbasins and pitchers&emdash;hauled to the dump. He decorated the bar with "pretty good" oil paintings by a professional artist who had an outstanding account. Meers considered his bar a "poor man's club" where beer sold for twelve cents a glass.
Like many establishments of the day, the King Edward had a colour bar when Meers took over - despite its location near the homes of most of the city's black population. Furious, Meers told his staff to serve a beer - on the house - to the first black person who came through the door. He boasted proudly of winning the patronage, and the friendship, of members of Calgary's black community.
A bartenders' strike in 1950 halted the flow of beer when union truckers would not cross the picket lines to deliver the beer. Meers offered independent truckers three times the union rate and, he recalled, effectively broke the sympathy strike.
By the early 1960s, Meers tired of trying to compete with newer establishments and left the hotel business to ranch west of Innisfail. He died in Coquitlam, B.C., at the age of 90. Two decades and a succession of owners later, the King Edward was reinvented as the city's self-proclaimed "Home of the Blues." The hotel that began as a working-class establishment and had morphed into a country-rock bar was now invaded by blues aficionados who savoured its gritty character.
Twenty years on, the Eddy is celebrated as Canada's oldest blues bar. Its current manager continues booking top performers and plans to upgrade the guest floors as low-cost housing. But the building is owned by the city, and it lies within East Village, a massive future development project that will transform the downtown east end. The King Edward might well see its centennial, but its ultimate future has yet to be decided.
Much thanks to Harry for writing and granting us the rights to use his article.... F.O.T.E.
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