47. A Plate Cleaner Mystery!

Hi-Ho who?

Every time I’ve gone thrifting over the past few months I’ve kept an eye out for The Edible Man, Anne Kingston’s 1994 book about Dave Nichol and the President’s Choice brand.

Having grown up in Toronto in the ’80s, I have strong memories of Nichol, President’s Choice, and The Insider’s Report, his J. Peterman-esque flyer telling stories about all the new things coming to Loblaw stores soon. I also worked on the brand early in my advertising career. In fact, it was the first campaign I ever sold and it’s still one of my favourites.

Nichol was long-gone from Loblaw and President’s Choice by the time I got to work on the brand, and he would pass away only a few years later, in 2013. And though I definitely have less than favourable feelings about Loblaw these days, there’s still a place for PC in my heart—just not my shopping cart.

So I was happy to have finally found a copy of The Edible Man last weekend. But it wasn’t until a few days later, when I actually sat down to read it that I realized I hadn’t just bought a secondhand copy of the book—I had bought a signed, inscribed copy of the book.¹ What’s more, it had a very specific inscription:

For Hi-Ho

Here’s to a lifetime of Sunday morning breakfasts with the President’s Blend Coffee² & your fabulous bagels.

Keep Me Sane

Dave Nichol

He’s expressing such a clear fondness and familiarity that I have to know: Who is Hi-Ho?³ I can no longer ask Nichol of course, and Kingston died in 2020, so I can’t ask her either.

But surely someone out there knows the answer. I even have a hunch, by not many degrees of separation, there’s a connection between Plate Cleaner subscribers and that answer. If I’ve remembered anything from The Tipping Point, it’s how far a network can get you from two seemingly unconnectable points in shockingly few steps. So if you can think of anyone who might move us closer to solving this mystery, please ask them if they know who Hi-Ho is (or if they know someone who might know who Hi-Ho is). Together we can solve this!

1. I will admit that this may not make it the rarity it seems at first glance. Remembering Nichol after his death, Kingston wrote that she realized it had topped the Toronto Star’s bestseller list in its first week of release because of how many copies Nichol had bought to hand out.

2. President’s Blend Coffee was the 1983 precursor to the President’s Choice brand that was made of a higher percentage of Arabica beans than other supermarket coffees. Originally created as a promotional gift to suppliers, its success convinced Nichol and his team that a premium private label was a viable thing.

3. Or possibly “What is the Hi-Ho?” There’s a Hi-Ho Diner in Windsor that is mentioned by classmates of Nichol in several yearbooks from Walkerville Collegiate, where he went to high school. It opened in 1937, but they don’t (currently) have bagels on their menu. It’s also not clear if there is a connection between the original Hi-Ho, which closed in the late 70s and its current incarnation and, indeed if any incarnation was open in 1994, when Nichol presumably signed my book.