This story is published in the Saskatchewan History & Folklore Society Magazine - Folklore Winter 2021-2022.
Small-town cafes have always been an integral part of the history of communities throughout Canada. This is the story of one such establishment, the Paris Cafe, Leask, Saskatchewan.
THE EARLY YEARS
A lady by the name of Mrs. Game and her son, Monty, who was the first teacher at the school, opened a cafe and rooming house in 1913. When Monty was killed in World War I, she sold the business and moved to Ontario in 1917.
Charles Mack Hun Sung Sr. was born in 1900 in Canton, China. He immigrated to Canada in 1912 and worked in Prince Albert. In 1917, he came to Leask and began operating the business as the Paris Cafe. In 1922, Charles Sr. travelled by train to Vancouver, where he married Mah Fay Ping, born in 1908 in Canton, China. Together, they returned to Saskatchewan to operate the cafe.
Fire destroyed the original building in 1928, but a new one was soon built in the same location. For those familiar with Leask, it was where the village office is now located. As the building had also been their home, the family, which consisted of three young girls and a three-day-old baby boy, lived with the Howe family in Marcelin during the construction.
Charles Sr., Fay Ping and their family, which grew to include twenty-one children, all worked in the cafe. The upstairs living quarters consisted of a dining room with a veranda that overlooked the backyard and a sitting room was at the front overlooking Main Street. A fire escape led down to the backyard. Five bedrooms and a bathroom completed the layout.
Charles Sr. spoke English, but Fay Ping was not fluent in the language and was more comfortable working in the kitchen. The kids helped out in different capacities: waiting tables, doing dishes, preparing food, cooking, cleaning, unloading delivery trucks and looking after younger siblings. In later years, their grandchildren helped out as well. Charles Sr. also ran a radio repair shop out of a small room at the back of the building.
According to the local constable, the western pronunciation of their last name was McHanson (Mack Hun Sung), and that version took hold.
THE NEXT GENERATION
When Charles Sr. passed away from cancer in 1951, his oldest son, Leo, who was twenty-three at the time, ran the cafe and radio repair business and helped raise his younger siblings. Fay Ping passed away in 1964. Leo and his brother, Leslie, eventually legally changed their last name to McHanson.
Leo’s brother, Charlie, born in 1933, took over running the cafe in the mid-sixties and purchased the business in 1975.
Leo moved his radio repair business to a building next door, eventually expanding into selling hardware.
Main Street Leask circa 1970s Left to right - Hotel Windsor (not in view), Drug Store, Jerry’s Barber Shop, McHanson Home Hardware, old hardware building, Paris Cafe, Spriggs Meats
A new hardware store was built in 1985. Leo’s son, Robert and his wife, Jo-Anne, worked in the business with his parents starting in 1976 and eventually took over. Leo passed away in 2014, and his wife, Sue, in 2016. In 2015, the building was purchased by the Village of Leask.
CHARLIE’S
As kids, we stopped at the Paris Cafe with our parents to get treats, and as teenagers, we gathered there after school activities and on weekends to eat fries and gravy and plan our lives. To us, it was simply “Charlie’s”.
To enter the cafe, you went through an outside door into a tiny vestibule and then through an inside door. A red jukebox filled with 45s (45 rpm 7” records) sat to the left with the till and confectionery area to the right. Charlie briefly had tabletop jukeboxes and a pinball machine was installed.
Bags of potato chips were clipped to metal wall racks. A low counter lined with red leather and chrome diner stools provided seating for solo patrons. A double row of red leather booths ran down the restaurant's centre, with three booths on each side of a partition. Tables along the far wall and in front of the street view window provided additional seating.
Tubs of ice cream were stored in a freezer behind the counter. Pies were tantalizingly displayed, awaiting the addition of a generous scoop of ice cream before being served. A milkshake machine sat on the counter with dishes and glasses on shelves below. Waitresses weren’t keen on making milkshakes during busy hours as the process was messy, noisy and time-consuming.
It embodied the characteristics of a small town cafe, there was a comfortable familiarity amongst the regular patrons. When someone new walked in, discussions ensued as to their purpose for being in the village. One of the regulars would venture over to ask who they were and why they were in town and then report the information back to the other tables.
CHARLIE’S ANGELS
Charlie Mack
I worked at the Paris Cafe as a waitress in the summer of 1978 before entering grade eleven. That was the closest I ever came to spending a summer in Paris. I remember how nervous I was asking Charlie for a job. He indicated that he had enough help but would try and give me some shifts, and he did. The local boys jokingly called us waitresses “Charlie’s Angels”, referring to the television series; they thought they were so clever.
Charlie was a bachelor, and lived above the restaurant. Papers and random items, on their way up or down, lined the outer sides of each step with a well-worn path visible in the middle. The waitresses speculated what it looked like upstairs, but none of us ventured up to take a look. For years I thought Charlie’s last name was McHanson and that Mack was his nickname.
I’m an autumn baby, so I was still fifteen and didn’t have a driver's license that summer. My dad faithfully dropped whatever he was doing on the farm to drive me to work. The parking spots in front of the cafe were full at noon, so he would quickly stop and drop me off on the street and carry on. Dad or my boyfriend (The Hubs) picked me up after my shift.
When I worked at the cafe the building was fifty years old, but the structure was made of brick and mortar and had stood the test of time. Equipment upgrades over the years had modernized it. The Paris Cafe sign that had once hung front and centre on the building had deteriorated and was taken down, only the sign pole remained. Thin bamboo blinds hung from the front windows.
I braved going down to the dimly lit basement to get some restocking items. It was the only place for storage, so everything had to be hauled down and eventually lugged back up. I remember cases of pop piled to the roof and boxes filled with individual bags of potato chips, cartons of cigarettes and tobacco and smaller boxes of chocolate bars and candy down there.
Waitressing was hot and exhausting work, but it was fun as a couple of my friends also worked there. The learning curve was steep as it was my first job. I had babysat a bit for neighbours, but that was the extent of my employment experience. Many people worked for Charlie over the years as waitresses and cooks. Even though they were of different ages, they bonded through this shared experience.
We wrote orders on beige-lined paper pads and clipped them to a wheel in the kitchen. In its heyday, the kitchen was a bustling place with a deep fryer, stove and grill cranking out meals. For years dishes were washed by hand with soap and scalding hot water. When I worked there, waitresses brought a steady stream of dirty dishes to the kitchen, where they were loaded onto a small industrial dishwasher.
We were often run off our feet serving meals, clearing dishes, collecting payments, selling confectionery items and scooping hard ice cream. Minors were allowed to sell cigarettes then and patrons puffed away freely in the cafe.
When my shift was over, I left smelling of cigarette and cigar smoke, deep fryer and grill grease. There were many customers: local people, construction workers, business people and travellers. It was hard to get a table on some days.
When we cleared dishes, we sometimes found small tips. It wasn't common to receive large ones; there wasn't a percentage expected like today. The travellers and construction workers liked to flirt with the servers so those guys were our best hope for gratuities. We kept the tips from the patrons we personally served; there wasn’t a communal tip jar.
I recall filling napkin, sugar, ketchup, and salt and pepper containers and restocking pop, candy, chips and cigarettes during slow periods.
Charlie was good to his staff. He was a jokester who liked to tease, and had a great sense of humour; his customers loved him. He moved about quickly and efficiently, bursting through the swinging doors from the kitchen to survey the tables and greet customers with a big smile before darting off.
He did a lot of the cooking himself but also hired cooks to work the busy midday hours during the week. The cook when I worked there was a short, feisty lady. She was an excellent cook, and she moved around the kitchen like a whirlwind; it wasn’t her first rodeo. The weekday noon specials were full course feasts that included soup, a drink and dessert. You even got a glass of water without having to ask for it. Those were the days.
WHAT I LEARNED
I learned many things working at Charlie’s, such as:
- how to apply for a job in person
- the importance of being on time
- teamwork
- managing my money
- cleaning procedures
- communication skills from working with coworkers and serving the public
- multitasking
- working independently
- the experience of working evenings and weekends when I had to give up time with family and friends
The Paris Cafe closed in the late eighties, Charlie continued to reside there until 1995. He passed away that year in Saskatoon of cancer, he was sixty-two. The building was demolished in 1996 along with the old hardware store and the old Spriggs Meats building to make way for a medical clinic.
Main Street Leask 2021
Bramshott Spirits, IG Wealth Management, Ace Hardware (2 buildings), Leask Village Office, Woodland Pharmacy, Medical Clinic, Lori Saam Hair and Healing
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND REFLECTIONS
I would like to thank Charles Sr. and Fay Ping’s grandchildren (Leo and Sue’s children), Roberta, Janet and Robert, for helping with the research for this story. Your insight, memories and pictures helped bring this story to life.
Thank you also to all who shared recollections of the Paris Cafe with me during casual conversations and through social media over the past few months, here are some of those memories:
- local teens showing up at the cafe during off hours looking for something to eat and Charlie, in jest, saying, “why don’t you go the .... home and eat?”
- they served the best french fries
- at one point, the menu offered plain white or vanilla ice cream as two options
- a couple of girls were looking through 45s that had been changed out of the jukebox, and one of the girls picked up a record by Kenny Rogers with the song Something’s Burning on it and said, “something’s burning”, Charlie ran out of the kitchen yelling, “where?”, the girl held up the record, and he returned to the kitchen muttering something about crazy kids
- owners and employees from other businesses going daily to join coffee row
- a waitress recalling coming through the swinging doors carrying a burger order, tripping on the old lifting tile, and the burger hitting the floor (I am not sure if the three-second rule applied)
Their kids played outside around town, eventually waiting in the vehicle or gathering upstairs at Charlie’s, to watch a movie until their parents came to collect them. He sometimes joined their parents at the parlour and his brother, George, watched the kids. The evening was often capped off with Charlie cooking food for the group back at the cafe. When I imagine this scene, I can almost smell the french fries and hear the laughter.
They say you never forget your first love or your first job. I certainly will never forget my summer at the Paris Cafe.
If you enjoyed this look back at Saskatchewan history, I would love it if you shared it.
Thanks, Norma
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