"I don't even know what street Canada's on." -- Al Capone C'mon, Al -- you just didn't know it was a one-way street.
The latest thing hurtling down it is a beer wagon, Sleeman Breweries having just struck a deal with a major Chicago distributor to sell the popular Canadian ale in the Windy City -- and play up, at every opportunity, the Scarface connection.
It seems that back in Prohibition days, the Ontario brewer was nailed for illegally shipping booze to Chicago through Detroit. The ensuing bankruptcy put an end to the family brewery that had been operating in Guelph since 1851. The business wasn't revived until John Sleeman started it up again in the mid-1980s.
No one can say for sure if the Ontario beer was headed for Capone and his gangster underlings, but, no matter, the distributor plans to play it up anyway as part of the "heritage" of both Chicago and Guelph.
That puts Guelph in the same room as Moose Jaw, Sask., and the remote Ottawa Valley village of Quadville, all three with their treasured Al Capone connections.
"The Tunnels of Moose Jaw" have been a major Prairie tourist attraction for years. People line up to pay $13 to walk about the ancient heating vents that run under the Saskatchewan town and be entertained at various stops by local actors and high-school students pretending to be either Chinese railway workers trying to avoid the dreaded Canadian government head tax or American gangsters, including Al, hiding out in "Little Chicago" for a while until the heat dies down back home.
The Chinese connection is pretty solid history; the Al Capone show is all show, highly entertaining but far more based on imagination than reality.
True, Moose Jaw was involved in Prohibition, sending Canadian booze south to dry America. One local claimed he used to pick up dimes running errands for the gangsters and another said her barber father used to be taken down into the tunnels to cut Al's hair -- but there is no rock-solid proof he ever set foot, let alone head, in the province.
The best Al-Capone-in-Canada story, for my money, concerns the little village of Quadville deep in the hardwood bush of Eastern Ontario. Out on gravel-covered Letterkenny Road is a log "fort" hanging off the side of a hill that locals claim was once Al Capone's secret hideout.
Built of thick, rough-hewn logs and with oddly tiny windows, the hideout is said to have had a hidden tunnel that went back through the hill into even deeper woods, where the slick-suited, shiny-shoed men who arrived in long dark cars to "holiday" could give Canadian Mounties or American G-men the slip if the authorities ever decided to raid.
There are still locals who claim one particular man, who seemed quite ill, would arrive in the mid-to-late 1940s and lie low, presumably recuperating from something. Capone would have been out of prison then, and suffering from the syphilis that would contribute to his death in 1947.
An area theatre group, Stone Fence Theatre, had a minor hit on its hands this past year with a revival of Al Capone's Hideout, a musical written by local artists, several of whom are originally Americans who came north during the Vietnam War years and stayed on to become Canadian.
They grew up knowing the magic of the Capone name in America; they were startled to discover it had equal meaning in the backwoods of Canada.
"There's a fascination with him," says Ish Theilheimer, Stone Fence's producer and one of the songwriters for the musical.
"There are Al Capone fans out there. I don't know exactly how you can be a fan of a sadistic killer, but there you go."
One of the songs Theilheimer wrote for the musical captures rather nicely the continuing area fascination:
Strangers, we've seen a few around
Strangers, right here in our town
Strangers, I wonder what they're doing here?
Some 60 years later, people are still wondering.
During stagings of the play this year, elderly people would sometimes stay on to tell the cast about their personal connections.
One woman said her brother had run away with the gangsters and become one himself. A woman who had run away with the gang is said to have returned and quietly slipped in to see the play. Another woman said she used to play at the log house with a child who arrived with the gangsters and their flashy women and that she had been shown a pistol that was kept under a bedroom pillow.
She remembered, also, an ill man "with a scar" who would sit in a rocking chair and watch the kids play pick-up sticks. The man was called "Uncle Al" by her American playmate.
"We heard stories," Theilheimer says.
The type of stories that are best told, and best believed, over a few beers.
Which is exactly what John Sleeman must be hoping.
CORRECTION
The lyrics of a song in the musical Al Capone's Hideout, quoted in Roy MacGregor's column on Oct. 26, were written by Marnie MacKay. Incorrect information was provided by a theatre producer.
Roy MacGregor