Updated: date
Published: SEPTEMBER 2024
Never try Dingbat humour on an enraged airline passenger
By WARREN PERLEY
Writing from Montreal
Working in the lost baggage department of a major airline is a thankless job. Just ask Yvan Beaudry who served in customer service at Air Canada for more than five decades.
“Nobody liked dealing with the problem of lost baggage,” Yvan recalled in several interviews with BestStory.ca during the week of August 26, 2024. “The customers are coming at you all day long, and they’re mad – really mad and worried! They think they’re never going to see their bags again.”
Yvan – 73 years old and retired since 2020 – is a fanatic, lifelong collector of Dingbat memorabilia. He stores all his collectibles in his man cave located in the basement of his bungalow in Terrebonne, 14 miles (22 km) northeast of Montreal. His treasure includes some 50 Dingbat calendars, 15 posters, and five original Dudley Ward paintings featuring that artist’s beloved Dingbats.
Like the Dingbat characters with whom he is enamored, Yvan considers himself a joker. In French, they have an expression for a deadpan sense of humour à la Dingbat – such a joker is known as ‘un blagueur à l’humour pince-sans-rire’. “Everybody at Air Canada knew I loved telling jokes and playing tricks,” Yvan tells me.
In 1968 at age 17, Yvan followed his dad, Roger, into a career with Air Canada. Later as part of customer service, he looked pretty spiffy in his Air Canada uniform – blue suit, white shirt, red tie, black shoes – sporting a brass-coloured lapel tag printed with the name ‘Rufuss’.
Rufuss? Oh, yeah, that was the name (but not the double-s spelling) of his Air Canada buddy who won a $5 million lottery and promptly took early retirement. Perhaps lightning would strike twice if Yvan adopted the same work name? Likely just another example of his Dingbat sense of humour. But adopting a so-called ‘nom de guerre’ didn’t bother the Air Canada brass at Trudeau lnternational Airport, so why not keep it going?
He was quite the picture of sartorial splendour when he occasionally strolled in uniform down the corridor arm-in-arm with an attractive female colleague as they headed for some coffee and browsing time in the airport book store. Everywhere they went, passengers stopped and stared – pointing and giggling.
What could be so funny? Could it possibly be Rufuss looking like the C-3PO robot of Star Wars fame wearing over each of his eyes a punch-holed, chrome-metal endcap from a roll of printer paper? Oh yes, the passengers couldn’t contain their mirth at his antics, but they were likely also relieved that Rufuss was not their pilot.
“I was always looking for a laugh,” Yvan – a.k.a. Rufuss – confides to me. And when dealing with stressed airline passengers, staying calm usually helped the fluently bilingual Yvan defuse potentially volatile situations in both French and English. “You have to be pretty even-tempered because people don't have too much patience. The minute they walk in the airport, they're stressed out.”
His typical shtick when working customer service in the airport lounge? “Tell a joke or two, make everybody comfortable, get them laughing.” But if that didn’t work to placate them, he’d cut to the chase, employing Dingbat straight talk to explain why their flight was late taking off.
“I'm going to be very honest with you,” he’d tell irate passengers. “We don't know what the problem is with that aircraft. We're looking into it, and as soon as we can tell you anything concrete, I will let you know.”
But the understated jocularity of his Dingbat humour definitely didn’t fly in the lost baggage department where Yvan was occasionally stationed. When passengers arrive looking for their lost luggage, they’re beyond stressed: they’re fighting mad. Like the middle-aged man who started banging the counter demanding to know where his suitcase was.
Yvan’s Dingbat cool didn’t work its magic that day. “I’m gonna kill you,” the enraged passenger yelled. “I’m gonna kill you.!” Rather than wait for the fellow to hop over the counter and take a swing at him, Yvan told him to “hang on!” while he called the airport police and asked in a deadpan voice: “Is it a crime in Canada to threaten to kill someone?”
The menacing passenger didn’t wait for the answer. He turned and fled towards the exit…right into the arms of police officers arriving to take him away. Chalk up another win for Dingbat Nation!
Since his retirement four years ago, Yvan no longer frets about having to deal with frustrated, short-tempered airline travelers. Divorced with two grown children – Daryl, 45, and Megan, 39 – he now has ample time to indulge his passion collecting both carnival glass antiques and Dingbat memorabilia.
He credits his mother, Yvette, with getting him started on the Dingbat kick in the 1960s. Mama Beaudry herself got hooked when she saw Alex McLaren, Dingbat artist No. 4 – who happened to be their next-door neighbour in Lac des Deux Montagnes – painting original Dingbat scenes for the Charles E. Frosst & Co. annual calendars in the 1960s and ‘70s.
Mama Beaudry was so enthused that she even wrote to Merck Frosst officials asking for back copies of the Dingbat calendars. They sent her a courteous reply that they did not have calendar reprints available. Instead they sent her a package of Dingbat posters depicting Dingbat calendar illustrations dating back to about 1920.
Yvan cherishes his memories of growing up in the house next to Alex McLaren, his wife, Christine, and their three children – Joyce, Ian, and Lois. Joyce, the eldest of the McLaren children, grew up to be a very accomplished artist in her own right known as Joyce Kellock Boyer.
“The McLaren family was super,” Yvan says. “They were the best neighbours you could possibly have.” Yvan recalls about 10 couples on the block – including his parents, as well as Alex McLaren and his wife, Christine – getting together on a regular basis in each other’s homes to play team bridge. There would be four or five tables set up to accommodate the cardplayers in each home on the block.
Yvan’s sister, Brigitte, still lives in the family home at 298 10th Avenue attached to the house at 296 10th Avenue where Alex McLaren and his family lived in Lac des Deux Montagnes. Yvan and his five siblings used to watch through the open window of McLaren’s studio as he painted during the day. Sometimes, he would let the kids into his studio for a close-up view.
One of Yvan’s prized possessions is the first painting that McLaren did to commemorate the 1976 Montreal Olympics for a Frosst calendar. He ended up redoing the scene and gave the original painting to Brigitte, who subsequently gave it to Yvan. Now it is safeguarded in his 15-foot-by-15-foot man cave in Terrebonne, Quebec. And Yvan has lots of other goodies in his collection, including five original Dudley Ward paintings – signed and dated – all of them featuring Dingbats.
He bought two of them on eBay in the mid-1990s. One is a nude lady dated 1921 that cost him $900. The other painting features Dingbats in a tree preparing to attack a giant grasshopper. That one cost him $600. In 2019, he paid $400 to an antique dealer in Perth, Ontario for a 1915 Dudley ward painting showing a bunch of Dingbats curling outside on ice.
His last two Dudley Ward paintings came from an auctioneer in St. Hyacinthe, Quebec in about 2009. One of the paintings, dated 1933, shows Dingbats fishing on Brome Lake in the bucolic countryside of The Eastern Townships, 100 miles (170 km) east of Montreal. It’s titled ‘Brome Lake Bass’. He paid $400 for it. His final Dudley Ward painting – also dated 1933 – has no title. It shows Dingbats catching a big fish in a lake. That one set him back $150.
After collecting Dingbat artifacts for half a century, even Yvan can’t remember all the bijoux that lie buried under layers of dust in his man cave. “Oh,” he said excitedly in a phone call on August 29, 2024, “I just found some more Dudley Ward Dingbat illustrations: a 1921 ad and recipe book for Magic Baking Powder and a hangtag for Canada Paint.”
I can feel the joy in Yvan’s voice crackling like electricity through the air as he continues to wax eloquent about his lifelong affair with Dingbats. “You know I love the whole story of the Dingbats,” he gushes. “The characters have always reached out to me. Everything about them is fascinating. The Dingbats have meaning for a lot of people. They’re a big deal, they’re huge!”
Now with BestStory.ca posting an extensively-researched, 17,300-word article on September 19, 2024 about the five Dingbat artists, Yvan has a new lease on life, busy rummaging through his man cave and dusting off his inventory in anticipation of showing select visitors his amazing collection.
“Want to come and see my Dingbats?” he asks during our last phone conversation of the day on Thursday, August 29, 2024. “You know, I just don’t let anybody down into my man cave. I have to trust them.”
I feel Dingbat fever slowly taking control of my body and brain. I’m thinking to myself there cannot be a better way to start celebrating the long Labour Day weekend that’s coming up. “Count me and my Dingbat researcher Karen Boor in,” I tell Yvan without hesitation.
“Fantastique,” comes the reply. Bienvenue dans la Nation Dingbat!
• Story of Dingbat creator Dudley Ward and his four talented successors
• Radio personality Al Randall interviews Dingbat author Warren Perley
• How two Montreal artists fell in love with Dingbats
• Dingbat Wall of Fame at Castor Pharmacy Museum
• The chicken or the egg? How the Dingbat story and 2025 calendar came together
• Purchase the 2025 Dingbat wall calendar