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sales slips pushed their way back to the central desk, where clerks were supposed to relay the latest figures to the ticker and to the boys chalking prices on the big board in the gallery above. But the clerks found it impossible to keep up with the mounting piles of paper.
    Gordon Bongard, who was thirty years old at the time, remembered that “there was a hell of a roar and it was pretty smoky, so it was awfully hard on your voice.” He told Doug Fetherling that “it was hard to find a buyer because everybody wanted to get out fast … and a lot of mistakes were made in the rush. At times there might be two or three different prices being quoted in different parts of the room.” Traders were supposed to fill out a slip and get the buyer to initial it, after which it went to an exchange employee who put it on the tape. But the confusion was such that many slips were improperly filled out and others were simply lost.
    Beneath the big board, exhausted traders occasionally paused to scribble prices in their notebooks – prices that were already outdated. Then, “like cattle milling in a stampede,” they returned to the fray. There was scarcely time to draw breath, let alone light a cigarette. One man tried, but as he reached for a match, another order came along. He shouldered his way through the packed group near the centre of the floor with the cigarette dangling from his lips. It was still there, unlit, eleven minutes later.
    In the scramble to sell, people were pushed, shoved, even trampled. Human values were forgotten. “There’s no more sympathy on that floor than at an abattoir,” one Montreal trader exclaimed. “It’s the coldest, cruelest thing in the world. Nothing matters but the dollar.” So much for the Regina
Leader’s
predictions of “a greater measure of brotherhood” in 1929.
    The brokers got no rest again that night, for the records of the day’s business – the little slips on which buy and sell orders were recorded – were in chaos and had to be sorted out. St. James Street, that gloomy cavern of brick and stone, took on the deceptive trappings of high carnival as crowds jammed the financial area. Office windows, usually dark after five, glowed with light. Two thousand automobiles, many of them chauffeur driven, were angle-parked against the austere façades. Newsboys dashed about shouting the day’s shocking headlines: “ WORLD MARKETS NOSEDIVE TO NEW DEPTHS .” Taxis sped through streets usually deserted, bringing worried investors to the financial houses. Restaurants stayed open and did a roaring business. Those who had no time for dinner fortified themselves from the lines of peanut and popcorn wagons. Far into the night the spectacle continued, like a tribal rite marking the end of innocence – the final flare-up of a gaudy, get-rich-quick decade, which some future sloganeer would dub the Roaring Twenties.
    The legacy of Black Tuesday was disillusionment. “Fundamentally sound!” shouted one man, as he dashed into his broker’s office with the afternoon paper. “Fundamentally sound? Look: Tunney and Dempsey are in the ring, and Tunney knocks Dempsey out. There he is, lying on the canvas. Fundamentally sound? Sure he’s fundamentally sound. But he’s out.”
    Thousands who had counted their paper profits and found themselves rich now discovered that they were hopelessly in debt,like Tom Gallagher, the manager of Dominion Securities in Montreal. Gallagher had invested everything he had – eight thousand dollars – to buy, on margin, eighty thousand dollars’ worth of stock. As the price soared he expected to pay for his shares with the profits and eventually become wealthy.
Eventually
– that was the weasel word that trapped so many. On the evening of Black Tuesday, Gallagher found that events had overtaken him, that his savings had vanished, and that he now
owed
eight thousand dollars.
    There were those who took their losses philosophically. According to one story,