My grandparents on my father’s side lived in Chicago before moving up to Canada. My father often told me stories of how my grandfather was a musician who played violin in what he called “pit bands” in Chicago. I don’t know anything about his background in the glove business, though, which afforded my grandparents and their family a decent living later in Toronto. Why move to Canada? My dad never talked to me about that, and now it is way too late for me to ask. I wish I had documented more of that family history. I know they moved up to Montreal first, as my father was born in Montreal in 1917.
It must have been in the early 1920s that my grandfather opened the Queen’s City Leatherworks in the area of Toronto known as The Junction. The Junction was part of West Toronto and it was a separate entity from the City of Toronto. It was also the junction of four rail lines, hence the name, and it was amalgamated into Toronto in 1909 (even back then we had amalgamation going on).
Another interesting historical curiosity about the Junction is that it was a dry community for the longest time. A quick search on the internet tells me that residents voted to make the community alcohol-free in 1904 because of the rough and rowdy drunken behavior of residents who worked in local industries. When I was growing up, and my father had a business in the Junction (one day I’ll tell you more about that), I remember it being dry from Keele west to Runnymede. On Dundas, just west of Runnymede there was a pub, and further west near Jane Street, there was a beer store and liquor store, both of which still exist.
Ontario was pretty conservative about booze in those days, although there were plenty enough drinkers. I recall going with my dad to the liquor store. It was a sterile place, not at all like today’s customer-friendly Ontario liquor stores. My father would write down the codes for the booze he wanted to buy on little slips, with those short pencils which for some reason we called golf pencils – the same ones they used to have in the old Consumers Distributing catalog stores. Dad would write down the code for Canadian Club rye whiskey, his usual poison, and hand it to a clerk behind a counter who would take the slip, walk away and come back with a bottle in a brown paper bag. Looking back, the whole business seems very bizarre. The Junction remained dry until residents voted to change that and allow alcohol to be served in the area – in 1998. Not surprisingly, this move is one of the factors that helped revive this neighbourhood.
The Queen’s City Leatherworks was on Dundas St W, on the south side, just half a block east of Runnymede. We always just called it The Glove Shop in our family. I can’t remember a Queen’s City Leatherworks sign on the building but there must have been one. They made gloves in a basement workshop. There was a retail store on the main floor that sold the gloves (which were also sold wholesale) as well as other items a railwayman might need, from overalls to hats to shirts and work socks. Behind the store, there was what I remember as a big dining room with a very large table. I can recall a somewhat cranky collie usually curled up under it. I think the kitchen was further back on the same level, and bedrooms were upstairs. Maybe my brother and sister, both older than me, can add to the description. I recall my grandmother – we called our grandmother on my dad’s side Nanny, different than our grandmother on my mom’s side, who we called Babcia – held court, often at one end of the big table. I don’t remember my Grandpa Lou that well. He stayed mostly upstairs when I was a child. I don’t know if he was just getting really old or if he was ill or what. I wish I remembered and I wish I knew him better, but I do recall that my mom or dad would sometimes take me upstairs to see Grandpa and that was always a special event. I also recall that when he wasn’t making gloves, my grandfather made and repaired violins.
My dad grew up in the Queen’s City Leatherworks, with brothers Billy, Harold, Eugene and Louis and sister Madeleine. There was a lot of music in that family. Harold had a big talent for piano from an early age. Eugene, like his father, went on to play, repair and build violins, and later became a well-respected violin maker in the Chicago area. My dad played clarinet and sax and drums and at one time played in dance bands. We had a photograph in our house of my dad playing the clarinet. It had been hand-coloured by my mom, who had a work-from-home job hand-colouring photos back in the black & white days. My mom knew I loved that photo and after I had moved out on my own she gave it to me. It still hangs in our house today. By the time I came along, my father had long given up music. Later, as an old man he talked to me about how much he loved to play the clarinet and how he had been thinking he might pick one up and start playing again. I thought about going out to buy him one, and at one point I started pricing them, but at that time his health had started to decline and when I talked to him further about it he said no he didn’t really want to play again.
Joe Knapik, my father
My dad used to tell me that Grandpa invented what he called the “one-finger glove”. I have no idea if that is true, because when it came to my father’s stories, the gap between truth and fiction was narrow and variable. I do know that he made one-finger gloves though because as a child I had a pair. They were tough, made from lined leather, and they were a combination of a glove and a mitten, with one finger and a mitt. As I recall, they were quite long. They went half-way up my arm, flaring out to go over a winter coat. I loved those one-finger gloves because they were unique and because they were made by my family.
The thread they used for the work gloves had tremendous strength. One day when I was a child, my dad bought me a kite. It was one of those bat kites but my dad had me make long tail for it. He stopped by the glove shop and brought home a huge spool of this thread. Dad used to say there’s a mile of thread on this spool, son, let’s go fly that kite. We substituted the glove-making thread in place of normal kite-string. Our goal was to fly the kite out of site. We’d be in the neighbourhood park, and if there was a good breeze we would get that kite up there until it was just a dot in the sky. Because the thread was both strong and had a small diameter, there was less drag than with kite string, and we got great height. One windy day we got this kite so far up there I could barely hold onto it. That was so much fun. I suppose the pressure on the thread finally overcame its strength because suddenly it broke and we watched the kite disappear into the sky. I rode around the neighbourhood on my bike for hours trying to find where it landed and eventually convinced myself it must be in orbit.
27th Street 
I loved that story as I heard them first hand from your father and bought shop coats etc from the glove shop.
Hey Donnie, great to hear from you! I hope all is well with you and your family.
Donnie will be somewhere over 75 these days. Weird to think of him visiting blogs. I bet his daughter showed him the original post.
hi joe I am actually 70 yrs old.i just came back from a 6 k walk,my wife mary &I are doing very well.we have
five grown children,all married and seven grand kids.i have been retired 13 yrs.it really was so nice to hear from
you,so many memories. all the best Donnie&mary
Hey Donnie,
You must know this, but I should say it anyway. My dad was exceptionally fond of you, and even in his last years when he suffered dementia, he spoke about you with great warmth and affection. Those years at Alumacraft were very happy ones for him.
Hi Donnie,
It’s great to hear that you are doing well. For some reason I always put you at about 6-7 years older than me from my memories of working summers at Alumacraft. So many years ago. I will be 68 in a few months. Sadly my knees have pretty much given out and I only dream about going for 6k hikes these days. Seeing you post here brings back so many memories. Wow.
Did I say north…I meant south…corrected. Haha, I didn’t know the dog had bacon and eggs and beer. Did it smoke cigars too? Dad claimed to have once having some kind of tub out back in which he was trying to raise trout. Don’t know if there was any truth to that. Sometimes there was a lot of truth to Dad’s stories, but then on some other day he would tell the same story with a different set of details, adjusted to fit the circumstance. I didn’t know Alumacraft started in the garage. Dad used to say he went 6 weeks before he got a customer.
Ahhhh the Glove Shop, I remember it well sort of. It was actually on the south side of Dundas, just a few doors from Fisken Avenue. It did indeed have a large painted sign proclaiming Queen City Leather Works that spanned pretty much the whole width of the building. The neighborhood was not particularly prosperous. One of the main economic drivers in the area was the railroad and the reason for that was the nature of a train itself. A car can simply turn around if the driver wants to go the other way. A railroad engine is confined to its tracks and once it is pointed east it has to keep going east unless it finds a big honkin loop of track where it can make a U turn. Or unless there is a roundhouse. A roundhouse is a marvelous invention. It is a huge round building where an engine can drive in and stop on a huge tracked pad. Once stopped the pad would be hydraulically rotated 180 degrees (and that happened very slowly) so that when the rotation was done the engine was on the same track it drove in on but it was facing in the opposite direction. Cool as a moose. A roundhouse instantly becomes a major railroad terminal. A freight train could come into the city and unload cargo at various points but when it wanted to return to wherever it came from it had to visit the roundhouse. The roundhouse attracted railway sidings where trains could be assembled or reshuffled and there was always a decent presence of railroad men in the area. The roundhouse complex was on the west side of Runnymede just north of Dundas. The restaurant that you call June and Bill’s was originally called the CPR Lunch and it survived only because it was the closest greasy spoon sort of place to the roundhouse. I will just say that the CPR lunch wasnt a place you would eat unless you didnt have time to go elsewhere.
The glove shop had 2 parts to the business. The most visible part was the retail store. It sold tough work clothes to the railway men. Blue jeans, work shirts, hand made leather gloves, work socks, that sort of thing. It was pretty small. When you walked in there was a center aisle that was flanked by glass cases that ran from the front of the store almost right to the back. Merchandise filled the glass cases and was displayed on top of them. Near the back was a counter that held an antique cash register and a device that mounted a huge roll of 3 foot wide plain brown paper. No plastic bags back then, your purchase was wrapped in brown paper and tried with butcher twine or taped.
The less visible part of the business involved producing hand made leather gloves in the basement. Glove making back then was a fascinating process but I wont go into that here. I will say that the gloves Lou made werent the same as what you can buy now. Nowadays leather gloves are made from what is called split leather. A sheet of leather is actually split so that they end up with 2 sheets each half of the original thickness and modern work gloves in general lack toughness and durability. Lou used only full thickness leather. Mostly quality cowhide but also some sheepskin and mule skin. It was rumored that you just couldnt wear out a pair of Lou’s mule skin gloves. The leather cutting and shaping and matching was all done in the basement. Upstairs at the back of the store behind the cash register was a bank of commercial foot treadle powered sewing mahchines. I think there were 8 machines in 2 rows of 4 and generally there were woman working at the machines sewing together the pre-cut pieces – front, back, thumb, cuffs, and lining to make almost finished gloves. Behind the store was residence. It featured the huge combined living room/dining room and paqst that was the kitchen. Mostly I remember Lou sitting on a sofa hand sanding and fitting violin pieces. I dont actually recall hearing him play a violin though. The dog’s name was Taffy and I recall that she had a bit of a nasty streak to her – definitely not a pooch for a kid to play with. Taffy would regularly get bacon and eggs with one slice of toast for breakfast. After supper she and Lou would split a beer. Honest. Upstairs were bedrooms. Three or four of them. Nothing particularly notable with one exception. Harold’s piano was upstairs. The stairs going up were narrow and steep enough to be a bit scary even to a kid and there is no way the piano went up those stairs. I aked and someone said something about a window and a crane but the window didnt look big enough to let a piano through either. I think there is a story behind getting the piano up there but I was never able to ferret out the truth. Out past the kitchen and through the back door was the backyard with some flower gardens and at the back of the backyard there was a garage. To get a car into the garage you had to drive over to Fisken, turn south for a bit and then turn right and go down a lane to access the garage. Didnt matter though because Lou didnt have a car. The garage is significant though because when dad started up the window making business his first location was that garage. Oh man that was tough. The garage was maybe 10 feet wide, not insulated. Aluminum came is 16 foot bars so if you needed to turn a bar around to cut it you had to first take it outside and turn it out there. Still it was a free space to get the business started and it wasnt long until there was enough business to enable dad to rent a shop across the road.
Enough typing for now except for a quick word on thread. In fact glove shop thread was used to sew together 2 layers of full thickness leather and maybe with 2 layers of lining in between the leather. It looked like extra thick thread but I think it was strong enough to pull a car. I also had a full spool for kite flying although it didnt last long because I also got carried away one day. I put the kite right out of sight and it was still peeling out line when the thread broke. At the time my best guess was the kite was at least a half mile away when the thread broke. Kids cant get that sort of quality thread anymore and kite flying is the worse for it.