"Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Harry 'Red' Foster"

Duncan McDowall is a professor of history at Carleton University and the
author of Quick to the Frontier: Canada’s Royal Bank.

The proponents of amateur sport habitually trot out the argument that
sports build character. The rigors of football or hockey, they maintain,
instil in the young citizen the seemingly contradictory but ultimately
complementary virtues of teamwork, empathy for others, and
competitiveness. This is exactly what the teenage Harry Foster (1905-85)
took from the playing fields of Ridley College in the early 1920s and
carried through his remarkably versatile life as a galvanizer of
Canadian sports, advertising, and philanthropy.

Lewis opens windows on each phase of Foster’s protean career: amateur
athlete in the 1920s, playing for the Toronto Marlboros and savouring
the Grey Cup in 1930 as a member of the Balmy Beach Football Club; radio
broadcaster in the 1930s; pitchman for such products as Vaseline and
Crown Brand Corn Syrup; wartime patriotic organizer; pioneer of Canadian
advertising at the Harry Foster Agency; and, finally,
advertiser-turned-patron of “retarded” children. Of particular
interest is Foster’s role as the “king of ballyhoo” in the 1930s,
the sparkplug of the Crown Brand Sports Club for kids and the Lowney
Young Canada Club (“Make Safety a Habit!”). Foster had a genius for
realizing the organizing and promotional power of radio. In the
“golden age of radio” after World War II, Foster was second only to
the CBC in transcribing radio shows across the nation. In 1948, he
produced the first commercial television in Canada. Riding these
intuitions, Foster’s advertising agency prospered; by 1964, it had
annual billings of $20 million.

One could have wished for more detail in each of the episodes of
Foster’s life. The history of Canadian advertising cries out to be
written. Here we learn only of Foster the advertiser, little of the art
of advertising itself. Lewis has instead given us a life of many
fleeting dimensions. Through it flows a cast of influential
Canadians—Lorne Greene, Harold Ballard, Sir Ernest MacMillan, Frank
Selke—all of whom sensed Foster’s dynamism. Throughout his varied
life, Foster retained an essential Canadian humanitarianism; his
late-in-life advocacy of the Ontario Association for Retarded Children
and the Special Olympics was not what one would have expected from a
Madison Avenue advertising executive.