EL Ruddy, by Chris Bateman
Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2022 11:58 am
This is quite good. There could be some overlap with John Lorinc's piece on Neon in Toronto, so we should wait to edit this until John submits. We could edit down that section, if need be. I am going to ask him to write a sidebar about the EL Ruddy photo collection in the Archives.
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If it was for sale in Toronto in the 20th century, E. L. Ruddy probably told you to buy it.
The New Englander, who arrived in Toronto via California, started a billboard and sign company that came to dominate the city’s outdoor advertising industry during the early decades of the 1900s. Ruddy’s ads were painted on brick walls, pasted on rooftop and roadside billboards, and later even beamed through the night in the form of neon signs.
The company grew from an office on Wellington Street to encompass outposts in towns and cities across the country. Its clients included some of the biggest regional and international brands of the day: soft drink and Canada Dry Ginger Ale inventor J. J. McLauglin, Christie Biscuits, OXO stock cubes, Wrigley chewing gum, and many more.
Ernest Lawrence Ruddy was born in 1870 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, the youngest son of thread mill manager and town politician “Honest Mayor Ruddy” and Elzina Drake.
The family moved to Los Angeles in 1884 when Ernest was 14. As a young adult, he worked in the printing department of the Los Angeles Times and later became involved in the local publishing industry.
It’s unclear what brought Ruddy to Canada aged in his mid-20s, however, between 1894 and 1903, he worked as advertising representative for magazines and ran a publishing company that printed histories of military regiments like the Queen's Own Rifles and the 48th Highlanders.
In 1904, Ernest Ruddy co-founded the advertising sign company Connor-Ruddy Co. with G. J. Connor. Among of the company’s first clients were Sweet Caporal cigarettes, Lea and Perrin's Worcestershire sauce, Bovril beef broth, and Quaker Oats.
The company’s earliest advertisements were documented in blue-tinted cyanotype photographs, many of which are now held at the City of Toronto Archives. Taken together, they are a fascinating record of how companies pitched their products to the public.
As evidenced by the Ruddy photographs, the company primarily painted their elaborate and intricately detailed signs on the bare walls of building exteriors, or on large billboards that were positioned around the city. Although Connor-Ruddy didn’t create the content of the advertisements, its artists and printers rendered them on a grand scale, often in exquisite detail.
For Bovril, Connor-Ruddy’s artists published a campaign that (by today’s standards) would appear cruel even to the most ravenous carnivore. The ads mocked a lonely cow searching for “missing relatives” who had been slaughtered and turned into powdered extract.
In one, a young boy hides a can of Bovril behind his back while a cow looks longingly through a wooden fence. The caption reads: “Guess where your brother is”.
Despite the macabre message, it’s clear that Ruddy’s Bovril ads were intricately detailed. Painting posters and signs that could be several stories high took considerable skill. Artists working just arms length from a wall or sheet of poster paper were tasked with rendering imagery and perspectives designed to be viewed from a distance.
Much of the artistic work took place on-site or at Connor-Ruddy’s outdoor yard, located at Yonge and Severn Streets, where company artists hand painted billboards in sections. Multiple artists worked on a single poster at the same time with each person given a segment to complete.
One image in the Ruddy cyanotype photograph collection shows a team of workers on a wooden scaffold painting an advertisement for Wampole’s Yunora brand perfumes that would later be installed on top of a building or at a roadside — a practice that was becoming increasingly bothersome to advocates of civic beauty.
All over the world, companies like Connor-Ruddy were increasingly filling public space with their advertisements. At the same time, the City Beautiful movement was working to improve urban public space with gardens, parks, architectural beauty, and grand avenues.
For some, Connor-Ruddy’s billboards and outdoor advertisements were a form of visual pollution that needed to be cleaned up.
In 1908, a Toronto city alderman protested against a routine Connor-Ruddy proposal to erect several new billboards in Toronto. “It is time we had legislation giving us power to control these signboards,” said Toronto city alderman Daniel Chisholm — and others agreed.
“Legislation to control the billboard nuisance and advertising monstrosities which disfigure architectural beauty as well as natural scenery [would be desirable],” wrote Professor H. L. Hutt of Guelph in a Globe newspaper article about the state of civic improvements in Ontario.
Hutt equated outdoor advertising with the problem of stray dogs and the “butchery of streets and roadside trees” by telephone wires.
By 1910, a bylaw was brought forward that would give the city power to regulate the size and location of billboards. The bylaw proposed all billboards be kept at least 20 feet back from the street line and 150 feet from any parks, public buildings, and churches.
Ruddy vehemently opposed the bylaw and collected a “largely signed” petition opposing the regulation, which he said would destroy his business. The bylaw ultimately found little support among city aldermen and was quietly abandoned.
Though victorious in this case, Ruddy and his competitors did have to abide by some rules: Any new advertising device in Toronto had to be approved by the Fire and Light Committee and could not be more than 10 feet in height. (To dodge this restriction, some crafty advertisers built multi-level advertising structures that contained multiple 10-foot billboards stacked on top of eachother.)
It wasn’t just the placement; the content of advertisements also caught the attention of civic improvers. In the leadup to prohibition in Ontario, which was in effect from 1916 to 1927, ads for alcohol were frequently the target of negative press. Likewise, posters for theatrical performances that featured scenes of violence were condemned for their supposed influence on children.
It was in this political climate that Connor-Ruddy underwent its first major change when, in 1912, it was restructured and renamed E. L. Ruddy Co. Ltd. The newly tweaked company pushed back against the notion that advertising was inherently detrimental to civic beauty and public morals.
E. L. Ruddy ran a campaign advertising its own “clean advertising” policy, promising never to advertise “cheap nostrums, fake schemes, or indecency.” The slogan was “put your clean product in clean company”.
Also in an effort to boost its public image, Ernest Ruddy also donated advertising space and his personal time to causes like the fight against tuberculosis. During the First World War, he was chairman of publicity for Canada’s Victory Loan campaign and he arranged for a tank to be brought to the city to “pep up” the recruitment drive.
Ruddy also donated space on a large sign at Queen and University near the South African War Memorial to the push for recruits to fight in Europe. “[T]he erection of this sign was inspired by the most patriotic motives and solely in the interests of the public,” he said.
As the E. L Ruddy Co., business exploded — by the late 1920s, the company was one of the largest outdoor advertisers in the country with offices in 26 towns and cities nationwide. Ernest Ruddy, however, was done. In 1929, he retired from the company that carried his name and sold his stake in the business worth approximately $1M (about $15M in 2022).
The writing was on the wall for advertisers like Ruddy. Around this time, neon signs were beginning to invade the outdoor advertising market. E. L. Ruddy Co. started its own neon division but was quickly swept up by competitors.
Claude Neon General Advertising — named after Georges Claude, the French inventor who commercialised neon signs in the 1920s — opened its New York office in 1924 and rapidly franchised the Claude Neon brand across the continent and around the world.
By 1931, the E. L. Ruddy Co. was operating as a subsidiary of the Canadian franchise of Claude Neon. The two companies shared an office at 317 Spadina Avenue near D’Arcy Street and produced electric signage for countless bars, restaurants, movie theatres, and businesses. Even the company vans had little built-in neon signs above the windshield.
Unlike illuminated painted signs or incandescent bulbs, neon tube lighting cut through the night in electric colours. Some signs appeared to dance, move, or change shape thanks to creative lighting sequences. Critically, they were also bright enough to catch the eye during the day.
One of Claude Neon’s early clients was El Mocambo Tavern, a short walk up Spadina Ave. from the company’s offices. The first neon palm tree to adorn the exterior was created by Claude and was recorded in a company scrapbook in 1948, the year the El Mo opened. The words “Fine Cuisine” above the door reveal the venue’s early life as a cocktail lounge and restaurant that also offered live entertainment.
Interestingly, the neon palm Claude created for the El Mocambo was inspired by (or possibly copied from) a San Francisco nightclub of the same name frequented by one of the founders of the Toronto establishment.
In addition to local businesses the El Mocambo, Claude also created substantial neon sign structures for major brands like Christie’s and Wrigley chewing gum.
Wrigley had been a major client for the company as far back as the Connor-Ruddy days. The gum manufacturer, whose Canadian operation was based on Carlaw Avenue from 1915 until 1962, was a skilled and creative advertiser who understood the value of brand loyalty and worked hard to build it.
During the Second World War, for example, the company lost access to chicle, one of the key ingredients in chewing gum due to rationing and disruption in the supply chain. The company decided to make limited quantities of its famous brands — Doublemint, Juicy Fruit, and Spearmint — from the raw material it could procure and send all of it overseas to soldiers.
At home, it released Orbit — “a good wartime chewing gum” — made from available ingredients. It advertised its decision to export its best products in ration packs on streetcar ads and in newspapers.
The famous brands would return, they said, but for now it was supporting the war effort. Soldiers receiving packs of Wrigley gum became familiar with the product, and when they returned were more likely to buy it themselves. Cigarette makers adopted a similar strategy that proved extremely effective.
One of Wrigley’s bigger neon displays in Toronto loomed large over the intersection of Yonge and Bloor Streets, using the roof of the Stollery’s menswear store as a podium. “QUALITY WRIGLEY’S”, the sign said. In one picture, the words shine as bright as the full moon visible in the night sky through a tangle of telephone wires.
The sheer captivating power of neon over other forms of signage was made particularly clear by two photos, taken from the same vantage point, at the present day site of Yonge-Dundas Square.
The first, taken in the 1930s, shows a branch of the Honey Dew cafe, along with Wilson’s sporting goods, Murray’s Lunch, Yolles furniture, and Knickerbocker millinery, all with standard incandescent signs. On the roof of the Honey Dew cafe a large billboard advertising Claude Neon is a sign of things to come.
The second picture, taken around 1960, shows Yonge Street awash in neon: Yolles furniture — the only company still in the same place — has adopted a bright neon sign above its main entrance that looks like handwritten script. Coles bookstore and Continental clothes also light the night, with the latter particularly dazzling at the corner of Yonge and Dundas Streets.
In the background, the giant vertical marquees of the Downtown and Imperial theatres with their vertical neon lettering stand like electric monoliths.
The E. L. Ruddy Co. and Claude Neon brands were both eventually subsumed and merged into larger entities before disappearing entirely. Claude — Canada’s largest sign maker by the 1970s — became part of Mediacom and then Pattison Outdoor Advertising in the 1980s.
Ernest Ruddy died in 1954, aged 84, during the 50th anniversary year of the company he founded, and received a brief obituary in Advertising Age, the major advertising industry trade publication.
Although it has been many decades since Ruddy’s company painted an advertisement, a few may still survive in Toronto as ghost signs, shielded by siding or by adjacent buildings long after the neon signs have burned out.
- - - - - - - -
If it was for sale in Toronto in the 20th century, E. L. Ruddy probably told you to buy it.
The New Englander, who arrived in Toronto via California, started a billboard and sign company that came to dominate the city’s outdoor advertising industry during the early decades of the 1900s. Ruddy’s ads were painted on brick walls, pasted on rooftop and roadside billboards, and later even beamed through the night in the form of neon signs.
The company grew from an office on Wellington Street to encompass outposts in towns and cities across the country. Its clients included some of the biggest regional and international brands of the day: soft drink and Canada Dry Ginger Ale inventor J. J. McLauglin, Christie Biscuits, OXO stock cubes, Wrigley chewing gum, and many more.
Ernest Lawrence Ruddy was born in 1870 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, the youngest son of thread mill manager and town politician “Honest Mayor Ruddy” and Elzina Drake.
The family moved to Los Angeles in 1884 when Ernest was 14. As a young adult, he worked in the printing department of the Los Angeles Times and later became involved in the local publishing industry.
It’s unclear what brought Ruddy to Canada aged in his mid-20s, however, between 1894 and 1903, he worked as advertising representative for magazines and ran a publishing company that printed histories of military regiments like the Queen's Own Rifles and the 48th Highlanders.
In 1904, Ernest Ruddy co-founded the advertising sign company Connor-Ruddy Co. with G. J. Connor. Among of the company’s first clients were Sweet Caporal cigarettes, Lea and Perrin's Worcestershire sauce, Bovril beef broth, and Quaker Oats.
The company’s earliest advertisements were documented in blue-tinted cyanotype photographs, many of which are now held at the City of Toronto Archives. Taken together, they are a fascinating record of how companies pitched their products to the public.
As evidenced by the Ruddy photographs, the company primarily painted their elaborate and intricately detailed signs on the bare walls of building exteriors, or on large billboards that were positioned around the city. Although Connor-Ruddy didn’t create the content of the advertisements, its artists and printers rendered them on a grand scale, often in exquisite detail.
For Bovril, Connor-Ruddy’s artists published a campaign that (by today’s standards) would appear cruel even to the most ravenous carnivore. The ads mocked a lonely cow searching for “missing relatives” who had been slaughtered and turned into powdered extract.
In one, a young boy hides a can of Bovril behind his back while a cow looks longingly through a wooden fence. The caption reads: “Guess where your brother is”.
Despite the macabre message, it’s clear that Ruddy’s Bovril ads were intricately detailed. Painting posters and signs that could be several stories high took considerable skill. Artists working just arms length from a wall or sheet of poster paper were tasked with rendering imagery and perspectives designed to be viewed from a distance.
Much of the artistic work took place on-site or at Connor-Ruddy’s outdoor yard, located at Yonge and Severn Streets, where company artists hand painted billboards in sections. Multiple artists worked on a single poster at the same time with each person given a segment to complete.
One image in the Ruddy cyanotype photograph collection shows a team of workers on a wooden scaffold painting an advertisement for Wampole’s Yunora brand perfumes that would later be installed on top of a building or at a roadside — a practice that was becoming increasingly bothersome to advocates of civic beauty.
All over the world, companies like Connor-Ruddy were increasingly filling public space with their advertisements. At the same time, the City Beautiful movement was working to improve urban public space with gardens, parks, architectural beauty, and grand avenues.
For some, Connor-Ruddy’s billboards and outdoor advertisements were a form of visual pollution that needed to be cleaned up.
In 1908, a Toronto city alderman protested against a routine Connor-Ruddy proposal to erect several new billboards in Toronto. “It is time we had legislation giving us power to control these signboards,” said Toronto city alderman Daniel Chisholm — and others agreed.
“Legislation to control the billboard nuisance and advertising monstrosities which disfigure architectural beauty as well as natural scenery [would be desirable],” wrote Professor H. L. Hutt of Guelph in a Globe newspaper article about the state of civic improvements in Ontario.
Hutt equated outdoor advertising with the problem of stray dogs and the “butchery of streets and roadside trees” by telephone wires.
By 1910, a bylaw was brought forward that would give the city power to regulate the size and location of billboards. The bylaw proposed all billboards be kept at least 20 feet back from the street line and 150 feet from any parks, public buildings, and churches.
Ruddy vehemently opposed the bylaw and collected a “largely signed” petition opposing the regulation, which he said would destroy his business. The bylaw ultimately found little support among city aldermen and was quietly abandoned.
Though victorious in this case, Ruddy and his competitors did have to abide by some rules: Any new advertising device in Toronto had to be approved by the Fire and Light Committee and could not be more than 10 feet in height. (To dodge this restriction, some crafty advertisers built multi-level advertising structures that contained multiple 10-foot billboards stacked on top of eachother.)
It wasn’t just the placement; the content of advertisements also caught the attention of civic improvers. In the leadup to prohibition in Ontario, which was in effect from 1916 to 1927, ads for alcohol were frequently the target of negative press. Likewise, posters for theatrical performances that featured scenes of violence were condemned for their supposed influence on children.
It was in this political climate that Connor-Ruddy underwent its first major change when, in 1912, it was restructured and renamed E. L. Ruddy Co. Ltd. The newly tweaked company pushed back against the notion that advertising was inherently detrimental to civic beauty and public morals.
E. L. Ruddy ran a campaign advertising its own “clean advertising” policy, promising never to advertise “cheap nostrums, fake schemes, or indecency.” The slogan was “put your clean product in clean company”.
Also in an effort to boost its public image, Ernest Ruddy also donated advertising space and his personal time to causes like the fight against tuberculosis. During the First World War, he was chairman of publicity for Canada’s Victory Loan campaign and he arranged for a tank to be brought to the city to “pep up” the recruitment drive.
Ruddy also donated space on a large sign at Queen and University near the South African War Memorial to the push for recruits to fight in Europe. “[T]he erection of this sign was inspired by the most patriotic motives and solely in the interests of the public,” he said.
As the E. L Ruddy Co., business exploded — by the late 1920s, the company was one of the largest outdoor advertisers in the country with offices in 26 towns and cities nationwide. Ernest Ruddy, however, was done. In 1929, he retired from the company that carried his name and sold his stake in the business worth approximately $1M (about $15M in 2022).
The writing was on the wall for advertisers like Ruddy. Around this time, neon signs were beginning to invade the outdoor advertising market. E. L. Ruddy Co. started its own neon division but was quickly swept up by competitors.
Claude Neon General Advertising — named after Georges Claude, the French inventor who commercialised neon signs in the 1920s — opened its New York office in 1924 and rapidly franchised the Claude Neon brand across the continent and around the world.
By 1931, the E. L. Ruddy Co. was operating as a subsidiary of the Canadian franchise of Claude Neon. The two companies shared an office at 317 Spadina Avenue near D’Arcy Street and produced electric signage for countless bars, restaurants, movie theatres, and businesses. Even the company vans had little built-in neon signs above the windshield.
Unlike illuminated painted signs or incandescent bulbs, neon tube lighting cut through the night in electric colours. Some signs appeared to dance, move, or change shape thanks to creative lighting sequences. Critically, they were also bright enough to catch the eye during the day.
One of Claude Neon’s early clients was El Mocambo Tavern, a short walk up Spadina Ave. from the company’s offices. The first neon palm tree to adorn the exterior was created by Claude and was recorded in a company scrapbook in 1948, the year the El Mo opened. The words “Fine Cuisine” above the door reveal the venue’s early life as a cocktail lounge and restaurant that also offered live entertainment.
Interestingly, the neon palm Claude created for the El Mocambo was inspired by (or possibly copied from) a San Francisco nightclub of the same name frequented by one of the founders of the Toronto establishment.
In addition to local businesses the El Mocambo, Claude also created substantial neon sign structures for major brands like Christie’s and Wrigley chewing gum.
Wrigley had been a major client for the company as far back as the Connor-Ruddy days. The gum manufacturer, whose Canadian operation was based on Carlaw Avenue from 1915 until 1962, was a skilled and creative advertiser who understood the value of brand loyalty and worked hard to build it.
During the Second World War, for example, the company lost access to chicle, one of the key ingredients in chewing gum due to rationing and disruption in the supply chain. The company decided to make limited quantities of its famous brands — Doublemint, Juicy Fruit, and Spearmint — from the raw material it could procure and send all of it overseas to soldiers.
At home, it released Orbit — “a good wartime chewing gum” — made from available ingredients. It advertised its decision to export its best products in ration packs on streetcar ads and in newspapers.
The famous brands would return, they said, but for now it was supporting the war effort. Soldiers receiving packs of Wrigley gum became familiar with the product, and when they returned were more likely to buy it themselves. Cigarette makers adopted a similar strategy that proved extremely effective.
One of Wrigley’s bigger neon displays in Toronto loomed large over the intersection of Yonge and Bloor Streets, using the roof of the Stollery’s menswear store as a podium. “QUALITY WRIGLEY’S”, the sign said. In one picture, the words shine as bright as the full moon visible in the night sky through a tangle of telephone wires.
The sheer captivating power of neon over other forms of signage was made particularly clear by two photos, taken from the same vantage point, at the present day site of Yonge-Dundas Square.
The first, taken in the 1930s, shows a branch of the Honey Dew cafe, along with Wilson’s sporting goods, Murray’s Lunch, Yolles furniture, and Knickerbocker millinery, all with standard incandescent signs. On the roof of the Honey Dew cafe a large billboard advertising Claude Neon is a sign of things to come.
The second picture, taken around 1960, shows Yonge Street awash in neon: Yolles furniture — the only company still in the same place — has adopted a bright neon sign above its main entrance that looks like handwritten script. Coles bookstore and Continental clothes also light the night, with the latter particularly dazzling at the corner of Yonge and Dundas Streets.
In the background, the giant vertical marquees of the Downtown and Imperial theatres with their vertical neon lettering stand like electric monoliths.
The E. L. Ruddy Co. and Claude Neon brands were both eventually subsumed and merged into larger entities before disappearing entirely. Claude — Canada’s largest sign maker by the 1970s — became part of Mediacom and then Pattison Outdoor Advertising in the 1980s.
Ernest Ruddy died in 1954, aged 84, during the 50th anniversary year of the company he founded, and received a brief obituary in Advertising Age, the major advertising industry trade publication.
Although it has been many decades since Ruddy’s company painted an advertisement, a few may still survive in Toronto as ghost signs, shielded by siding or by adjacent buildings long after the neon signs have burned out.