Amid children playing, friends and families picnicking, and people out for a stroll in any Toronto park on a clear summer day, you might catch the occasional sunbather soaking up some rays. Both men and woman can legally do so topless, if they so choose: Women won the right to do so through a 1996 court ruling. The fact that men can is due to an eccentric, litigious provocateur who was dubbed “the terror of the traffic courts” during the 1960s.
Zoltan Szoboszloi loved stirring the pot throughout his life. Born in Hungary in 1915, he claimed that he had deserted the army toward the end of the Second World War to engage in black marketeering. After the war, he allegedly borrowed a friend’s identity to travel around Europe as a ski instructor and auto mechanic until the friend, who he’d assumed was dead, asked for his name back. He claimed he had studied law in several countries and had amassed a substantial personal legal library. After immigrating to Canada in 1951, he settled in Windsor and worked as a machinist at several automotive plants.
Szoboszloi first made headlines in May 1958, when, after losing a job at Chrysler following a probationary period, he accused United Auto Workers Local 444 president Charles Brooks of actions ranging from perjury to betraying local union members. Brooks charged Szoboszloi with unbecoming conduct and “circulating, publishing, and posting false, malicious, and defamatory literature.” A union trial committee exonerated Brooks; Szoboszloi received a $100 fine and was suspended indefinitely after he continued to distribute literature that defamed Brooks.
Two months later, on July 22, 1958, Szoboszloi was sunbathing in Reaume Park along the Detroit River. Civil-defence special constable James Larkin noticed he wasn’t wearing a shirt and asked him to put one on. Szoboszloi, clad only in Bermuda shorts and sandals, said he had a shirt in his car but refused to retrieve it. Windsor police soon arrived. When Szoboszloi suggested that hauling him off “would be a shame of democracy,” an officer replied, “You are going to see democracy.” Szoboszloi claimed he was bruised while being transported to the police station; he was released after a short stay.
First page of a profile in the October 22, 1966, edition of The Canadian.
Szoboszloi sued, demanding $50,000 in damages for false arrest and assault. He also claimed there’d been many other shirtless people in the park that day. When the case reached trial in late 1959, he won $1,250, which he indicated he would use to finish writing a novel. Thanks to further lawsuits stemming from the case — including one that involved an attempt to have the senior master of Osgoode Hall charged with forgery — he never collected the money. He also didn’t get his confiscated shorts back.
Giving up on Windsor, he soon moved to Toronto and put his interest in the legal system to use. Though not an accredited lawyer, he assisted people who challenged parking tickets. His clients usually found him guzzling coffee at one of the Hungarian coffee houses along Bloor Street West. He couldn’t charge for his services, but his impressive success rate led to plenty of client donations, which supplemented welfare payments and wages from occasional bouts of employment. By 1964, Toronto Daily Star columnist Ron Haggart had dubbed Szoboszloi “the terror of the traffic courts and Canada’s leading authority on how to beat the parking ticket.”
Judges and magistrates quickly learned that any case Szoboszloi handled could drag on, as he had a tendency to argue legal minutiae. “Traffic court is just a big collection agency,” he told TheCanadian in 1966. “They get away with all sorts of sneaky things. I have a good time being just as sneaky right back.” Some tolerated his antics, while others didn’t, and he made frequent short stays at the Don Jail.
On September 22, 1965, Szoboszloi was lying shirtless on a blanket in High Park when he was arrested for violating a city bylaw, enacted in 1930, that regulated the wearing of swimwear in public. According to the regulation, “no person clothed in bathing suit only shall frequent, use, or appear in any public highway, park, or public place, excepting a public water or the beach or shore adjoining same, provided that this shall not apply to children under the age of 12 years.”
Photo from the October 6, 1966, edition of th eGlobe and Mail.
When the case went to court in December 1965, Constable Robert Green admitted that many people sunbathed in their bathing suits in High Park but added that most put on more clothes or moved along when told they were violating the law. Szoboszloi had done neither. He claimed the police were after him for his court work, but magistrate A.E. Newall indicated there was no evidence to back this up. A Globe and Mail editorial observed that “it does seem curious, when one considers the blush of bikinis to be found far from the water on any warm summer’s day, that the police should choose to draw the line at Mr. Szoboszloi’s shorts.”
After being fined $10, Szoboszloi attempted to have the charge dismissed. At a January 1966 hearing, he argued that the letter that commanded him to appear in court “in Her Majesty’s name” violated his human rights, as he believed the Queen of England was outside Toronto’s jurisdiction. Although Queen Elizabeth II was legally Canada’s ruler, he asked Newall to disqualify himself from hearing the case because he’d sworn allegiance to a foreign monarch. Newell ignored both requests before getting on to the proper case. Green testified that he had seen Szoboszloi lying on the grass wearing only white bathing trunks. He’d told him about the bylaw, and Szoboszloi had asked whether he was kidding. Green then went over the bylaw with him.
“You told him what?” Newall exclaimed in astonishment.
Green continued, saying that Szoboszloi told him he had been sunbathing for nine years and would continue to do so. Green drove away, then came back 10 minutes later to find Szoboszloi wearing a legal pair of beige shorts. Green drove away again; 10 minutes later, he returned and found the sunbather back in his swim trunks. “There was shocked silence in the courtroom,” the Star observed.
Szoboszloi defended himself and asked whether Green had seen at least 200 people wearing bathing suits in High Park that summer. Green admitted that he had and that he had seen at least one other man sunbathing that day (Newell told Green he didn’t have to indicate whether the other man had received a summons).
In the end, the $10 fine remained. Refusing to pay it because it was “crazy, idiot legislation,” Szoboszoli was sent to the Don Jail, although he was released after 15 minutes.
On May 14, 1966, Szoboszoli was again charged by Green for sunbathing at the same spot in High
Photo of Zolton Szoboszloi sunbathing during the 1960s. (Toronto Star, August 2, 1992)
Park. Police continued to insist that they’d warned and charged others but said that “this fellow defies us.” Szoboszloi planned to subpoena the medical officer of health to prove the health benefits of sunbathing, then argue the charges were illegal because all law officials swore an oath to a foreign monarch. He’d also discovered he’d been 20 to 30 feet from a small stream and intended to argue he was on its shore.
During an appearance before Newall in August 1966, Szoboszloi cited documents ranging from the Municipal Act to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. When he suggested that the bylaw infringed human rights, Newall chewed him out. “Why don’t you just stop this?” the magistrate asked. “You are a reasonably sensible man. The police have a duty to perform. Anyone who does this risks prosecution.”
Szoboszloi received a suspended sentence with appeal. According to Haggart, Szoboszloi was disappointed he wouldn’t have a chance for another free meal at the Don Jail.
As the 1966 municipal election approached, Haggart asked in his September 12 Star column whether there was “one candidate who will pledge himself to remove this bathing-suit bylaw which is the perfect parody of Toronto?” His call was answered two days later when controller William Archer, who would run for mayor that year, raised a motion at city council to repeal that portion of the bylaw.
It passed unanimously.
The sunbathing saga gave Szoboszloi his 15 minutes of fame. The Star ran a front-page interview in which he discussed his belief that Canada needed a legal ombudsman. The Canadian weekend newspaper supplement profiled him. When the Ontario Supreme Court ruled that rubber-stamped signatures on the information sworn when police laid charges invalidated the information, he appeared on CBC-TV to teach a monkey how to rubber-stamp summonses. The University of Toronto Student Law Society invited him to give a lecture to, according to a spokesperson, “injeclaw,t some life into lunch programs which previously featured only judges and government officials.” He told the students that “courts can be more responsible for crimes against the individual than individual can be against society.”
Photo from the January 24, 1969, edition of the Windsor Star.
But his fame soon faded. As court officials figured out his tactics, he lost more parking-court cases. His obsession with severing Canada’s ties to the British monarchy led to several incidents: At a federal-provincial constitutional conference in 1968, for example, he was escorted out by the RCMP after a heated exchange with British Columbia premier W.A.C. Bennett (he filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against Pierre Trudeau for the RCMP’s behaviour). On his birthday in 1969, he burned a copy of the British North America Act in the Centennial Flame on Parliament Hill. In 1977, he disrupted the opening-day ceremony for a speaker’s corner behind Scarborough Civic Centre when he attempted to give an unscheduled rant about his pet peeve. Among his significant arrests during the 1970s were ones for illegally swimming in a Toronto Islands lagoon in 1971 and stabbing his landlord with a leather punch in 1976.
Szoboszloi ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Toronto six times, promoting such ideas as draining Toronto Harbour to provide easier access to the Toronto Islands. He formed his own church and so was able to buy tax-free booze at the LCBO. His past resurfaced in the early 1990s following the arrest of Gwen Jacob for going topless in Guelph in 1991. Then living in a nursing home in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, he said he saw nothing wrong with her actions: “That’s her business.”
When he died in March 1994, only seven names were listed in the funeral register. His Globe andMail obituary declared him “one of the foremost nuisances of his time” — a description he would doubtless have been pleased with.
Sources: the October 22, 1966, edition of The Canadian; the December 4, 1965, December 6, 1965, May 16, 1966, August 13, 1966, July 11, 1977, and March 30, 1994, editions of the Globe and Mail; the November 6, 1959, edition of the Detroit Free Press; the May 6, 1964, January 18, 1966, May 31, 1966, August 13, 1966, September 12, 1966, September 16, 1966, October 5, 1966, November 2, 1966, and August 2, 1968, editions of the Toronto Daily Star; the August 2, 1992, edition of the Toronto Star; the March 1, 1967, edition of the Varsity; and the May 13, 1958, May 16, 1958, May 30, 1958, November 3, 1959, and January 24, 1969, editions of the Windsor Star.
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