“I wasn’t a great skater,” Gairey says, “but I was good enough to show my buddy and have fun.”

Instead of going to the outdoor rink in their College-Spadina area, they set out for the more glamorous Icelandia indoor arena on Yonge St., north of St. Clair Ave.

Neither had been there before.

“I go up to buy tickets and the guy says to me, `We can’t sell your friend a ticket,'” Jubas recalls, latent incomprehension surging in his voice.

“I turn around and look behind me, then I turn back and say, `Are you talking to me?’

“And he says, `Yeah, I’m talking to you. We don’t sell tickets to Negroes. We don’t let them in here. So do you want only one ticket?’

“And I turn and say, ‘Let’s get out of here.'”

Gairey, who is black, and Jubas, who is Jewish, are pushing 80 now.

Certain beaches were understood to be off-limits. Certain restaurants were known to keep some diners waiting indefinitely. The Icelandia, they later discovered, often turned away Jews as well.

But until the moment at the ticket booth, the boys had been spared such realities.

“Like a slap in the face,” Jubas says.

“I always remember it,” says Gairey.

When Gairey returned home that day, he told his mother, who told his father, Harry Gairey, Sr., a railroad porter with a reputation for standing up for his rights.

“I was crazy for a moment,” Gairey Sr. later recalled in a memoir, A Black Man’s Toronto.

That Monday morning, he went to see his alderman, who got him an appointment the next day to address city council and Mayor Robert Saunders, a populist known as “Grassroots Bob.”

Let black boys be banned from the Icelandia, Gairey Sr. told them, if they will be exempt from fighting in the next war.

“But, your Worship and gentlemen of the council, it’s not going to be that way,” the father said. “You’re going to say he’s a Canadian and you’ll conscript him. And if so, I would like my son to have everything that a Canadian citizen is entitled to.”

On Thursday, The Toronto Daily Star ran a sympathetic interview with the boy.

On Friday, the paper carried a story saying 25 University of Toronto students picketed the Icelandia carrying signs saying, “Color Prejudice Must Go” and “Racial discrimination should not be tolerated.”

It took another two years, but as a result of the Icelandia refusing a ticket to Harry Gairey Jr., Toronto city council passed an ordinance against discrimination based on race, creed, colour or religion.

The Icelandia has long since closed.

Gairey Sr. went on to become one of the most prominent activists of his generation, a lifelong promoter of black rights. He died at 98 in 1993.

Three years later in his honour, the neighbourhood rink where his son and Jubas normally skated as children, at Bathurst St. just south of Dundas St. W., was renamed the Harry Ralph Gairey Ice Rink.

At the naming ceremony, Gairey Jr. and Jubas rekindled their childhood friendship and have been meeting monthly for lunch ever since.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2009/02/16/we_dont_sell_tickets_to_negroes_they_said.html