An old thermometer, iconic clock, and the keeping of a city's temps

Jun 13, 2023

"I wouldn't be okay with it just being lost in time. It's something that needs to be kept for the city."

A big, long-forgotten thermometer lies on a table in an empty building. It’s taken Saskatoon’s temperature for more than a century, so maybe it’s time for a rest.

The thermometer monitored the city’s coldest colds and hottest hots, from the roaring ’20s, through depression, war, space exploration, right up to last month.

It’s lost its sheen. Tarnished brass, cloudy glass. A metal screen that used to protect the bulb is missing. It could use scrubbing, love, a bit of attention. But when you lug its 17.6 pounds from the inside to the outside, on a bright, warm day, the mercury climbs just like it always has.

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The thermometer used to be bolted to the 102-year-old StarPhoenix clock, which — as the city’s first First World War memorial — is an iconic Saskatoon landmark.

At some point, the brass Tycos thermometer, with its patent date of Dec. 17, 1907 etched on the front, was removed from the clock. It’s long been bolted to an outside second-floor wall at the StarPhoenix, near the window of a seldom-traveled walkway, seen by very few eyes.

Now, with the StarPhoenix property up for sale, some men with long-time ties to the place drove there at 6 a..m. recently. One, the SP’s now-former production and building manager Jeff Golding, got on the roof with a rope, and looped it around the thermometer. Another, retired SP maintenance man Ron Wiebe, used a forklift and ladder to climb up and unbolt the brass-and-glass instrument.

The procedure took about half an hour.

“It went really quick,” Golding says. “It was just me dangling over the edge, and Ron scurrying up a ladder to unbolt it and pull it off. It’s saved.”

The thermometer has been in the vacated SP building since that removal, waiting for the next step, whatever that may be.

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The StarPhoenix clock itself was a gift to the people of this city from the Daily Star newspaper in 1920, commissioned to remember co-owner Talmage Lawson, who was killed in a Flanders trench explosion in 1915 that claimed the lives of more than 20 soldiers, many from Saskatoon.

Time and temperature are a constant source of chatter and conversation. For many decades, the ornate, 15-foot clock — which still keeps time in its spot at 204 5th Ave. N, where it was relocated in 1966 during a shift in newsrooms — provided both bits of information for those passing by.

During a heat wave in August 1922, our reporter wrote that at 1:45 p.m., the StarPhoenix thermometer reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit; at 2 p.m., the mercury had climbed to an even 100.

“In one candy store,” he wrote, “the bar chocolate on the counter had dissolved in its wrappers to a glutinous mass. The coloured candies kept for festive occasions in a city home doubled over and drooped limply from their stands like the branches of a weeping willow.”

In February 1936, the thermometer showed -47 C — a temperature so cold that the hands on the SP clock stopped moving.

The glass-and-mercury concoction was not always noted for its accuracy. In January 1949, we reported that a police officer, walking the downtown night beat in sub-zero weather, passed the time by checking each thermometer on his route.

“… he discovered that scarcely two agreed,” we wrote. “From a degree or two they varied to the extreme of one that, on rechecking, was found to vary up to 10 degrees above or below the correct reading.

“That one was on the StarPhoenix clock.”

The thermometer stands 35.5 inches high, and a frame was added for its connection to the building. Two still-existing holes on the clock’s pedestal align exactly with where the thermometer would have been fastened.

The idea of reuniting time and temp is a dubious one — “It would get trashed, or gone in a day,” Golding says about a possible reattachment — so for the time being, it measures the temperature in the emptied office where it’s been placed. Accurately, too, as far as we can tell.

Is it just a thermometer? Sure. But Golding notes that it’s a thermometer with a history. It gave thousands of downtown strollers every year an updated measurement of the air around them, and was attached to a locally-famous clock that continues to do its job, hands sweeping from 12 to 12 just like it did in 1920.

“I think of my own existence here,” Golding said. “When people think of the StarPhoenix, there’s that history, and part of it is the clock. I wouldn’t be okay with it just being lost in time. It’s something that needs to be kept for the city.”

Which is why they took such pains to get that thermometer down.

It’s an old, weathered, forgotten piece of Saskatoon’s collective story — but what’s a city, without stories?

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