Paul Wilson: Grey Cup bets – Hamilton's worst losers

You make a bet with a buddy on the big game. A hundred bucks. You lose. 

You’ve gotta pay up. But nobody said anything about how. And that’s the way it started, some 40 years ago, when Americo Mori told his wife’s cousin, Ray Paradisi, that the Ticats would win at Ivor Wynne.

That was the Grey Cup of 1972, and with a field goal on the last play of the game, the Cats beat Saskatchewan. And Mori beat Ray.

Days later, Ray paid up. A Brinks truck arrived at Mori’s Smoke Shop and out spilled the winnings. Yes, one hundred dollars equals ten thousand pennies.

The die was cast. For 15 Grey Cups, the pair tried to top each other. Once there was a cheque for $100 written on a toilet seat. Another time, there were two foiled-wrapped $50 bills in a cement-filled toilet. The winnings also showed up in the middle of a massive block of ice. 

With the Ticats fighting for the Cup again this weekend, let’s take the latest edition of A Sign Past Its Time to Sherman Street North.

Sherman North was alive

Long ago, when big factories filled the sky, Sherman North positively bustled. Waves of Italian immigrants arrived in the early 1900s and the street was lined with businesses to serve them. Shoe stores, clothing stores, groceries, a theatre, restaurants.

Americo Canadiano Mori – everyone called him by his last name and that’s the way he liked it – was born a hundred years ago on Imperial Street, steps off Sherman. And a girl named Inez Galassi lived next door.

She watched as that big lug skipped for two hours in the backyard. Then he would break into opera. Inez was smitten.

One problem. Mori liked the ring, wanted to be a professional wrestler. “You’ve got a choice,” Inez told him, “the fighting or me.” Mori found a job at Stelco.

In 1957, the pair opened Mori’s Smoke Shop across the street from where they grew up. They served home cooking. The clientele was mostly steelworkers, hundreds of regulars. They tapped on the window at 4 a.m. and Mori, already into his first cigar of the day, had their coffee ready.

Young Leanna got up early

He didn’t do it alone. For starters, there was daughter Leanna, now 72. She was 16 when she started at the shop. She too got up at four, helped get the roast beef, egg salad, ham and pickle ready to go. 

She lined up those coffees too. “The styrofoam cups went right down the counter, with the guys names on them and the sugar in them,” she says. “It was three or four deep at that counter. You talk about Tim Hortons. Honey, we were busy.”

Morning rush done, Leanna hiked up to classes at Cathedral. Her mother Inez was the business head. Her Aunt Blackie was the one who had zingers for every customer.

Leanna later had another duty at the shop. Today, for the first time, it can be told. It was Leanna, smart girl that she was, who had to come up with those crazy ways of paying off the debt whenever her father lost.

She remembers the walnuts. She cracked open 50 of them, put little messages like “try again” in 49 of them, and $100 in the 50th. Then she glued them all back together and dumped them in a whole bushel of walnuts.

Smelly sardines

It was she who rounded up eight pounds of rotting, truly putrid sardines. Ray had to cut into all of them to find his winnings.

The live turkey, Leanna admits now, may have been a mistake. The cheque was tied to one of its legs, she explains, “and it crapped all over the counter.”

Twenty-seven years ago, ready to slow down, Inez and Mori sold the place. A young couple were going to keep it going, but they didn’t last much more than a year. Today the old restaurant space is offices for the Hamilton Korean Businessmen’s Association. But the sign for Mori’s is still up.

Mori died in 2001, a day before his 88th birthday. Inez died four years later, age 84. Leanna figures she last went by the shop a year or so ago. It is hard, buildings boarded up or gone. She hasn’t yet decided whether to take her grandchildren down and tell them the story.

When Mori and Inez sold the store in 1986, there was a group photo out front. That was organized by Laura Florek. She and her late husband, Bronco, both worked in steel, and went to the restaurant every day. “It was like family,” she says.

She’s 72 now, lives in Grimsby. If she’s driving home from downtown Hamilton, “somehow my car always takes me up Sherman North. I still miss Mori’s. I never found another place that called my name.”

A Sign Past Its Time pops up every now and then on CBC Hamilton. If you’ve spotted an old sign that needs its story told, do let me know.

Paul.Wilson@cbc.ca   | @PaulWilsonCBC

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