In his article, "The Great McGeer" (Maclean's, April 15, 1947) Clyde Gilmour notes that Gerald Grattan McGeer's more than thirty razzle-dazzle years in public life are perhaps unique in Canadian history. He held a succession of titles: MLA; MLA-mayor; mayor-MP; senator; senator-mayor. He prepared for these posts with 3 months in high school, which he quit, denouncing the system as "medieval." He then apprenticed for 5 years as an iron molder. On a sudden decision, Gilmour says, 19-year-old Gerry crammed and breezed his way through law school, becoming the No.1 orator of the Law Students' Society. He studied constitutional and commercial law at Dalhousie Law School in Halifax, and at age 27 was admitted to the bar of B.C. The following year, l9l6, he was elected Liberal member for Richmond in the B.C. legislature.

McGeer began his public record with a bang. He crusaded for reduced west-coast freight rates on prairie grain - which at that time flowed mainly to Fort William. The railways employed some of the most expensive counsel in Canada in the ensuing battle, but McGeer won. Vancouver's waterfront doubled and redoubled itself almost overnight. After unsuccessfully contesting Vancouver Center (1925), Vancouver North (1926), and Fraser Valley (1830), at the Federal level, the indefatigable McGeer won the Vancouver-Burrard seat to the provincial assembly in 1933. He then proceeded to form some views on banking and currency. A year later, summoned to Ottawa by the Commons Banking Committee, he lectured - and reduced to but a few respectful questions - some of the chief bankers, economists and parliamentarians in the country. Ultimately, Canada got the McGeer-proposed central bank.

Soon after this Gerry won the mayor's race in Vancouver with 25,000 votes cast out of 35,000 cast. He plunged into the job, firing the police chief and two magistrates, declaring war on gambling, confiscating a thousand slot machines and issuing one and a half million dollars worth of low-interest "baby bonds" to materialize his dream of a glittering white sandstone City Hall in Strathcona Park, at West 12th Avenue and Cambie Street.

The year 1936 marked Vancouver's fiftieth birthday. Showman Gerry stamped its memory on the town by inviting the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Percy Vincent, to help lay the City Hall cornerstone. The Lord Mayor arrived with a gift for Vancouver - a great 5-foot silver-and-gold replica ofLondon's civic mace. Gerry met the Lord Mayor decked out in a $1500 mayoral gold chain and his cusom-designed $527 outfit of black silk cape lined with purple and gold, and a cocked hat to top it all.

Gerry carried on his crusade for monetary reform both in and out of Parliament. He found time to appear as a lay preacher, discussing "Christian economics," and to write a 359-page book, The Conquest of Poverty, (1935), the final chapter of which was an imaginary dialogue between Abe Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Gerry's harangues and barbed remarks never got him in serious trouble. He was widely quoted, amid chuckles, for having called City Hall "a sarcophagus of embalmed mediocrity", and the Vancouver Board of Trade of the time "a museum of congealed plutocracy." McGeer was in the very act of campaigning for Mackenzie King in 1945 when that gentleman appointed him to the senate. In 1947, he ran again for mayor, doing so in true McGeer style. Part way through his campaign he checked into hospital for a peritonitis operation. Two days out of surgery he was barking orders into the bedside telephone and posing for photographs with pretty nurses. Twice-daily bulletins on his condition were issued. Naturally he received more newspaper space than his 2 opponents put together. He polled 29,000 out of 58,000 ballots cast, 12,000 ahead of his nearest rival.

At city hall, McGeer was known as an excellent chairman. He kept things moving briskly, and he knew how to cut corners without any sacrifice of parliamentary dignity. In private life, he jogged in baggy pants and old sweat shirts. He drank very little, but said he smoked too much. His basement den contained more than a thousand books, half of them dealing with Abraham Lincoln, Gerry's idol since boyhood.

Senator-Mayor McGeer died while back in the mayor's office but a few months. His decease was typical. Doctors and aldermen were urging him to take it easy. With his usual savvy, he remarked, 2 weeks before it came true: "Say, one of these days you'll see the goldarndest funeral this town's ever had." ___Paddy Rees, 1976

Lincoln Money Martyred