Stevedore Steve - Steve Foote - Stompin' Tom Connors - Steve Fruitman - Saint John

Since 1948 The Horseshoe Tavern (or Hotel) has been one of Toronto's prime entertainment venues. Today the tavern is co-owned by a consortium that includes actor Dan Akroid, X-Ray McRae, and Kenny Sprachman, and although the bar has remained very much the same, the rest of the place has changed. Used to be that there was a dining lounge in a separate room with a separate door off Queen Street. That has now been converted into a private shop with no access to the tavern. And the main entertainment lounge now faces a stage on the back wall; it used to face west where a smaller bar has been installed, near the stairs going down to the washrooms. One thing that has remained the same though is the windowless basement dressing room.

I walked into the Shoe for a pre-arranged interview with Stompin' Tom Connors. He had been a hero of mine since I was just a kid up in Timmins, Ontario where I used to listen to his daily radio program "Live from the Skyway Room at the Maple Leaf Hotel" over CKGB. After he left Timmins I lost contact with him until one day, after watching Hockey Night In Canada, which used to end when the game was over and CBC would switch us into the program already in progress - Countrytime with Vic Mullen from Halifax, Nova Scotia. I wasn't into country music back then in 1968 but I kind of liked it. It was the music we had to listen to up north because 'our music', rock music, could only be heard late at night during the Hilltop Rendezvous. So out comes this special guest star dressed in a black leather vest, big cowboy boots and a hat and a board to beat his heal into and he sings, "Twang twang, a diddle dang a diddle danga - twang twanga diddle dang another dang twang", and I said, "That's the guy from Timmins!"

Stompin' Tom Connors was only Tom Connors back in Timmins. Now he was an up and coming star singing Canadian songs, most of which he wrote. By 1971 he had already recorded a number of albums for the Dominion label owned by Canadian Music Sales in Toronto, including a box set of Old Time Favourites containing 5 LPs. Bud The Spud and Sudbury Saturday Night were synonymous with Stompin' Tom - everybody knew those songs. I had been sneaking into the Horseshoe as an under aged 18 year old up till now; when I was 19 the government of Bill Davis lowered the drinking age (temporarily) to 18. I'd go to the Shoe with my school friends, get a good seat which was a difficult thing to do even on a week night, and get into it. I purchased my first Stompin' Tom album, Bud The Spud, and got him to stomp on the cover for me (having removed the record first). For a kid into The Who, early Zeppelin and stuff like that, this was rather different indeed.

So I'd go to these Connors shows, got to meet the man and speak with him a bit, told him that I used to listen to him in Timmins and imprinted myself into his incredible memory. I was doing a radio program at Thornlea Collegiate, what we called Radio Thornlea, and asked Tom if I could interview him sometime. Sure, he said, how bout tomorrow afternoon, right here in the Horseshoe? He said 2 pm would be just fine, that I would find him eating in the dining room.

I found a copy of Steve's second album (first for Boot), Hard Workin' Men, at Sam The Record Man's main store. The cover flipped me out: a guy in a basement with a sledge hammer in his hands, shovels, axes and picks, rolls of coiled wire and a guitar strapped around his shoulder, hanging off his back.

I took the album home and put it on the record player and was shaken much the same as I had been when I first heard Stompin' Tom. It was Canadian, no mistake about it, passionately Canadian without the patriotic non-sense. No Canadian flag wrapped around the shoulders like the Americans liked to do. This was just being Canadian, and Steve Foote was singing about being Canadian as a Canadian. That was all. That was all he had to do. I was hooked.

Stephen J.H. Foote was born in Saint John, New Brunswick in 1938. His father was a hard working man and a Pentecostal "holy-roller"¹. Discipline was extreme in the Foote household: no music on Sundays, church get-togethers, picnics, Sabbath-camps when the weather was good. Steve wasn't all that interested in it but it certainly left its mark upon him². He was a free spirit with wanderlust in his eyes. The thought of working the waterfront docks of old Saint John, as his father did, did not appeal to him. Either did going to school.

Fate is a very interesting thing and just about everybody develops their own take on it, it seems. Call it destiny, whatever you like, but although it sometimes seems improbable when looking at it from the NOW end, looking back reveals that it's those small things, those succinct things, and sometimes those difficult events in our lives that propel us into certain futures. For Steve Foote it happened when he was only 7 years old coming out of the anaesthetic in the Saint John hospital after having undergone an appendectomy.

"I began to check out my surroundings. Along two walls there were a half a dozen or so beds containing a half a dozen or so gentlemen of various ages. The third wall had no beds along it, as it was largely made up of two doors; one of which led to the toilet, and the other I never did find out about. The two large swinging doors that formed the entrance to our room, were housed in the fourth wall, and left only enough space for two beds, mine and the one to the right of me. The occupant of this bed was sitting up, watching me come to from the ether-induced sleep. He said he, too, was seven years old, and that his name was Tom something-or-other. His middle name could have been "Hell-Raiser", for in the ensuing couple of weeks, he got into more mischief than a half a dozen other kids his age would ever have!"¹

Steve would sit around the old Philco radio listening to music programs when his father

wasn't around. The old man forbid music in the house - the radio was strictly designed for weather reports or listening to the evening news. He would turn on "Maritime Frolics" and other country music programs and was fascinated by the simple charm of blue collar music. It was most likely the music of Hank Snow, Wilf Carter (Montana Slim), the Carter Family and stars of the Grand Ole Opry that he heard. Certainly local celebrity gone national: Don Messer, broadcasting from the Charlottetown studios of CFCY over the CBC Dominion network. And certainly another local star, Ned Landry.

The music and the programs that Steve Foote listened to in those chilling days of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the world was changing ever so rapidly after years of depression and war, sent him places that he could only marvel at in magazines. Texas! Nashville, Tennessee! New York City! He longed to go places that he could only dream about. The reality of his home-life were the strict edicts enforced on his family by its patriarch which only forced the boy away. If he had to sneak and do things behind his parents' backs, so be it. If it meant the swift back of a hand, it was still worth it. Steve was strong within himself and was determined to be a strengthened soul.

Then it happened! He walked his sixteen year old half-man, half-boy frame into the Silver Rail in Saint John where he would sometimes hang out. He put some money into the juke box and was just about to choose a selection when somebody shouted: "Play a good one, huh?" He turned around and found himself staring at a long, tall, stringbean with an ear to ear grin. "And what's a good one," Steve asked? "Anything by Hank Snow," came the reply. Steve obliged and sat down at the table with the guy. After a long chat they discovered that yes, they were the two boys from the hospital when they were seven.

Tom invited Steve up to his room in the boarding house he was renting. At 16 he was on his own, having worked the coal boats for a couple of years after escaping from his foster home in a forlorn part of Prince Edward Island. He wanted Steve to listen to some of the songs he knew so they made arrangements to do so. They were a couple of kids with visions in their eyes and could see that in each other. In their own ways, they were both loners, and wanted to do something about it. The world was a big and formidable place and the odds seemed stacked against them, two teens from blue collar backgrounds. Steve finally got it together and took leave of his parents, taking a bus to Montreal. Connors worked a coal boat for the winter. But when they hooked up the following spring they knew what they both had to do. Young Tommy Connors with his guitar and street-smarts; Steve Foote with a belly full of grit and determination. They bonded a friendship that would take them a million miles to the very places of their dreams.

"From the time that I was a little child, I wanted a brother. But I never got a brother. Then I met Tom and the friendship that has tied us together over the years is a friendship that I shall always cherish very deary⁴."