The 1930s were a difficult decade; dark, dirty, dangerous, and destitute, albeit laden with alliterative possibility. In America the population posed picturesquely in sepia-toned breadlines, while Europeans brooded over the tragedy of the Great War and plotted a rematch. The people of Toronto, like much of the rest of the world, wallowed in a cesspit of poverty and misery from which no number of Shirley Temple films could extricate them. However, in the depths of......