O wicked wall!

George Patey is a public relations man whose reach exceeds his grasp, but within his grasp, he has the entire wall against which Al Capone's gunmen shot down seven rival gangsters on St. Valentine's Day of 1929. Patey was in his native Vancouver one morning in 1967 when he heard on the radio, that the famous wall on Chicago's North Clark Street was about to be demolished. He immediately got on the telephone and, for a price he keeps to himself, bought it. Says he: "They tore down the wall and shipped it to me wrapped like fine china." Patey's idea, actually, was to use the wall to create publicity for a Roaring Twenties restaurant he was representing, but the restaurant owner thought the whole idea was, well, perhaps a little too roaring. "So I just kept it," Patey recalls. He reassembled the wall and showed it at a wax museum, with gun-wielding gangsters shooting each other in front of it to the accompaniment of recorded bangs. The wax museum went bust. The wall made its last appearance at a Vancouver nightclub, and then Patey dismantled and stored the thing. Now, if any nostalgia enthusiast feels nostalgia for the wall where seven gangsters were shot, George Patey will accept any reasonable offer.

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