The Globe (later the Globe and Mail) incorrectly reported that the reception had been held in the St. Michael’s College library. However, one detail seems to have survived intact: Chesterton was huge in every sense, and the need for a special chair to accommodate him was real. “If G. K. Chesterton didn’t mind being gigantic and joking about it—you remember the one about giving four ladies his seat in a tramcar—we would never say that...he was otherwise than a man who could give four ladies his seat in a tramcar.” That piece ran without a byline.

David Mulroney, the current president of St. Michael’s, tells me Chesterton visited Toronto at a time when Catholics there had not yet come into their own. English celebrity was also of outsize significance, since Canada “still [saw] itself as an adjunct of the UK,” he said. It’s no surprise, then, that Chesterton delighted his small audience that Thursday evening. A young boy asked him why he became a Roman Catholic, and Chesterton answered, “It was, I suppose, because I wanted to have my sins forgiven”—a reply given “without hesitation,” McCorkell observed. Interviews Chesterton gave ran in local papers the following day, and the hubbub he created helped grow anticipation for the main event of his Toronto visit: a Friday evening lecture at Massey Hall.

The lecture was a great success. According to advertisements in local papers, tickets sold for between $0.50 to $2—roughly $7.50 to $30 in today’s Canadian dollars—and “surplus funds” from the event made possible the purchase of “student gowns.” Undergraduates wore these while processing to daily Mass at St. Basil’s on the St. Michael’s campus, according to Fr. McCorkell’s memoirs.

Chesterton left Toronto on Saturday, October 4, to continue his tour. He would be awarded an honorary law doctorate at Notre Dame, visit “Meyer’s Film Studios at Hollywood,” and engage opponents in debates in many North American cities on topics such as “Will the World Return to Religion?” (Scrawled in pencil on an archival reconstruction of Chesterton’s itinerary, someone helpfully added a note that G.K.C. “takes affirmative” on this question.)

But well after Chesterton had departed North America for the last time in the spring of 1931, Fr. McCorkell tells us, a memento of his visit remained behind: the “rocking throne.” Evidently, “this relic remained in the president’s office for several years as a memorial of the Chesterton visit.”

Where is the chair now? Every lead has run cold. The room in which Chesterton sat and spoke on the night of October 2 was bulldozed in a midcentury renovation; the current president’s office sits more than two hundred feet away. The storerooms have been checked and re-checked at the president’s request, but nothing has turned up. What remains are a handful of yellowed pages of memoir and itinerary, newspaper clippings, and the stories that are still told in the shadow of the skyscrapers surrounding campus.