Late on June 6, 1944, Lt. Garth Webb (standing at centre) and his 14th Field Regiment artillery crew paused to reflect on the highs and lows of their D-Day experiences.

The day before the big opening the French police built a security fence around it. Workers set up wooden benches for an audience of 5,000. Rain left the glass and titanium-clad building on the Normandy beach glistening like a polished jewel. And inside the museum itself Canadian army cadets removed the pins from nearly 44,000 poppies – the pinless Remembrance symbols would be dropped from an aircraft during the ceremony – symbolizing the number of Canadians killed in the Second World War.

“I was on this beach 59 years ago,” Garth Webb said during the opening of the Juno Beach Centre on the D-Day anniversary in 2003. “And it’s just as big a thrill to be here today.”

Garth Webb, the man who created the Juno Beach Centre, died in Burlington, Ont., this past week at 93.

The thrill Garth Webb got on the 59th anniversary of D-Day only begins to describe what the man accomplished there. In the first place, he was part of the Royal Canadian Artillery that landed on Juno Beach in 1944. His 14th Field Regiment helped the Canadian infantry advance farther inland than anyone that day. Then, after the war, during a series of youth exchanges between France and Canada in the 1980s, Webb had bristled at how young people concluded that D-Day had been a purely Anglo-American show and that Canadians hadn’t even participated.

“Canada had a great presence in Europe,” Garth Webb told me back in 2003. “But we had nothing, except graveyards and a few memorials to show Canada’s participation in the Second World War.”

That’s when the former artillery officer, then a successful businessman after the war, switched gears and began a one-man crusade to build a museum on Juno Beach. It took him 10 years and pitches in every government, corporate and public forum one could imagine – not to mention a few radio and TV interviews (where I first met Garth Webb) – before his Juno Beach Centre Association eventually unveiled a completed museum in Normandy that June day in 2003.

But just like the Jimmy Stewart character in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” I think it’s safe to say if Garth Webb hadn’t existed, much of what we now know as the Juno Beach story might never have happened.

In the first place, without Lt. Webb at the helm of his 14th Field self-propelled gun, called a Priest, it’s possible his gun crew might never have made it to the beach that morning. He spent the night, as the D-Day armada of landing craft made its way across the English Channel, reviewing the fire plan (of firing the gun even as the landing craft delivered his Priest vehicle to the beach) and feeding his crew anti-nausea pills (preventing seasickness). He never considered the odds of survival.

“Guys who waited all night wondering, ‘Am I going to live through tomorrow?’ they had more concern and fear that I did. I was too busy… I looked where I was going and walked right through it,” he told me in a 2003 interview.

His Priest gun and crew got ashore on D-Day without a scratch. But if it weren’t for Webb’s skill and confidence, his gun crew might not have made it all the way to VE Day, in Holland in 1945. Similarly, when it came to coaxing dollars from Canadians’ pockets to finance his JBC, if it weren’t for his determination and focus, it might never have succeeded. Initially, I was one of the naysayers; I remember interviewing Webb on CBC Radio’s “Fresh Air” program in the 1990s.

“Who’s going to finance this?” I asked him.

“I expect the Canadian and provincial governments, corporations and the general public will donate to this cause,” he said and added, “just watch.”

On June 6, 2003, Garth Webb leads D-Day vets across the parade square at the newly inaugurated Juno Beach Centre.

Well, in spite of my scepticism, the country did watch. Thanks to Webb, the country did donate. As well, he and his merry band of volunteers convinced the residents of Courseulles-sur-Mer to donate a beach campground on which to build the Juno Beach Centre. He then personally presented his pet project to thousands of school children, their parents and every level of government and every corporation in the country. Eventually, more than 11,000 Canadians bought commemorative bricks to finance construction. Governments from Ontario to B.C. and from Paris to Ottawa kicked in millions. And corporate Canada, especially Wal-Mart (to the tune of $3.5 million), made sure Canadians understood the significance of Canada and the Juno Beach landings.

“History occurs when character meets circumstance,” Mario Pilozzi, then CEO of Wal-Mart, said at the JBC opening in 2003. “(Garth Webb) and the veterans have ensured that a learning facility exists to pay tribute to the accomplishments of their generation.”

But if Garth Webb hadn’t been in command aboard that landing craft on June 6, 1944… if he hadn’t taken his crusade to so many people… if he hadn’t given as much of himself on the battlefield or the board room… then we wouldn’t be the beneficiaries of his extraordinary gift, the Juno Beach Centre.

“That’s the ‘socialist’ Toronto Star for you,” he said.

In fairness, he did it just to get a rise out of me. And it worked. But more to the point, the Toronto Star is no more socialist than the National Post is reactionary. True, each has its stock of writers known for either their left-of-centre or their right-of-centre attitudes. But those writers are editorialists, assigned to offer interpretations of events of the day based on their hearts and their heads. They write columns based on years of experience having reported on a beat – whether education, the arts, science or politics. Editorialists editorialize.

In contrast, reporters report. Consequently, they uphold principles of the profession that go back hundreds of years. Among the tenets of journalism is serving the public interest – informing people so that they can make up their own minds. Reporters seek verification – in simple terms they seek out multiple witnesses.

They try to be fair, covering news impartially. Reporters try to distinguish between conjecture and fact. As much as possible they attribute their information to sources. And perhaps most important of all, reporters try to be original, not presenting someone else’s work as their own. I have always liked the definition of what a journalist does drafted by the former head of CBS news, Fred Friendly.

“A journalist is an explainer of complicated issues,” he once said. “Before he can explain, he must understand… And before he can do that, he most be predisposed to examine with equal parity, facts and personalities he dislikes as well as those he may support.”

None of that involves opinion, comment or either socialist or fascist doctrine. But what the job description often does demand, according to Friendly, is that journalists/reporters do a lot of searching. Good reporters search documents both written and online. They search what has been said before. They search for anomalies, things that look out of place or irregular.

They just get out there on foot and search the backwoods, back roads and, yes, back alleys. Snooping is Daniel Dale’s job. As Toronto Star editorialist Royson James aptly pointed out this week:

“(There isn’t) anything wrong with a reporter being a peeping Tom. It goes with the job. We are proud of such name-calling… It’s what we do.”

The sour gas well blowout at Lodgepole, Alta., lasted 68 days in the fall of 1982.

I offer one of my own experiences as both an explanation of the job description as well as the proof of the value of the practice. Back in October 1982, a gas well (owned and operated by the U.S. oil company Amoco) southwest of Edmonton experienced a blowout.

People near the well (outside Lodgepole, Alta.) were relocated. The area was cordoned off. And nobody – least of all reporters – was allowed access to the well site. CBC Radio wanted the story covered. I offered my services. When I got to Lodgepole, I immediately searched out an Amoco public relations officer.

“There’s no danger to the public,” she said. “Everything’s under control. And we have a contingency if anything happens.” And she ended the interview there.

At the municipal office, I approached the town administrator.

“There’s no danger to the public,” he said. “Everything’s under control. And we have a contingency if anything happens.” And he took no further questions. When I got to the local RCMP detachment, you can guess what answer I got from the officer in charge. Ditto.

I was beginning to think I was trapped in an episode of “Twilight Zone.” I was worried I’d have nothing for my radio report. Then I bumped into an air-quality monitoring crew from the Alberta environment department. They allowed me to record their air pollution readings, which indicated the sour gas escaping from the well was powerful enough to turn house exteriors yellow and too toxic for humans within several kilometres.

However, my real breakthrough on the story occurred when I ambushed a mud-compacting crew, recently arrived from the West Coast. They had seen the site, but hadn’t been told by Amoco what to say. They were about to check into a motel I’d staked out and I asked them to describe the well site.

“It’s a mess,” one of the crewmen said. “Like a lunar wasteland.”

And I had my story, much to Amoco’s chagrin and my producer’s delight. Not that the object of the effort was to tarnish the oil company’s reputation. It had done that on its own. My point is, whether there’s a cover-up or not, whether there’s culpability or not, if the public has the right to know (and Canada has enshrined that in its constitution), then it’s a reporter’s job to facilitate that right.

Parks Canada guide, Sylvie, greeted our tour group to Beaumont-Hamel, this past spring.

As we arrived, she emerged from the information pavilion. She wore her identifiable green uniform, complete with department identification and Maple Leaf insignia. She offered a warm welcome and explained she would be our guide for the next half-hour. She was a long way from home, but made us feel as if we had never left Canada.

“Welcome to the Beaumont-Hamel National Historic Site,” the young woman said. I learned later her name was Sylvie, a student from Winnipeg, and that she was employed for several months by Parks Canada to guide visitors around the site.

This was a few weeks ago, when the tour I was leading across France stopped at this famous battlefield of the First World War. Because Beaumont-Hamel was the place where the Royal Newfoundland Regiment was decimated during the first day of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916) in the Great War, of course, the site has significance for Canadians. But because Sylvie is in the employ of Parks Canada (likely for minimum wage) and works there to learn while in the service of her country, I was deeply impressed by her passion and knowledge.

Her minimal salary and maximum commitment came to mind this week as we received word that the Harper government plans to cut up to 638 civil service jobs in the Parks Canada department. I haven’t been able to determine if Sylvie’s job is among the planned cuts, but I am angry that whatever part of Parks Canada’s budget is slashed, I think, the federal government may be cutting off its nose to spite its face. The minister in charge, former broadcaster now Environment Minister Peter Kent, claimed that putting 1,600 Parks Canada employees on notice that their jobs could disappear, was fiscally responsible.

“The changes we are making,” he told the CBC, “ensure that staff are (at the park sites) when the most visitors come to our parks.”

Doesn’t cause and effect work the other way? Keep historic sites open and Canadians will come?

Lock masters along the Trent-Severn waterway may soon be laid off.

But Canadians won’t have to go all the way to Beaumont-Hamel in France to feel the impact of diminished service at historic sites and national parks. All of the people who operate the locks along the Trent-Severn and Rideau Canal systems received notice that their jobs may well be cut by the Flaherty budget.

That means those who wish to sail from the Georgian Bay to the Ottawa River this summer may find their boats high and dry, not to mention the scores of Ontario communities that depend on the flow of tourist traffic to offset slower off-season business. As rabidly anti-government bureaucracy as some people in these communities may be, I suspect they won’t soon forget losses to their business bottom line.

Planned cuts have apparently arrived on another front, if you will. Just two weeks ago, we learned that the Harper government had also made cuts to another vital line of defence – literally.

Pat Stogran in battle dress during his deployment to Afghanistan in 2002. Canadian Press photo.

Members of a branch of the Royal Canadian Legion, in Whitehorse, Yukon, revealed (April 19) that as many as 100 case workers – the civil servants at Veterans Affairs who help veterans gain access to programs and services – were being cut across the country. Pat Stogran the veterans’ ombudsman (also let go by the federal government nearly two years ago) indicated his disgust over the loss of those services.

“Afghanistan is out of the sight and mind of the public now. We’re all heaving a collective sigh of relief. We’re glad that’s over with,” he told the CBC. “But it’s the tsunami that’s coming after the earthquake that is going to impact.”

Stogran went on to say that the flow of servicemen and women from overseas home to Canada will place additional stress on case work, a service he said was essential for veterans. I don’t mean to be fast and loose with statistics, but I don’t think it’s any coincidence that (on May 1), Walter Natynczyk, chief of the defence staff, admitted to a Senate defence committee that 20 Canadian Forces personnel committed suicide in 2011, a figure that is up from 12 in 2010. Other stats ferreted out of Defence Department documents show another 31 Canadian vets attempted suicide in 2011.

Cuts to the public service may prove optically appropriate to the fiscally conservative politician and/or voter. But in at least two vital areas of Canadian heritage – historic sites and service veterans – such political decision-making may inflict more harm than good.

Oh, and did I mention that on the same day it announced cuts to the federal civil service, the federal government trumpeted its plans to have Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, visit New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and Ontario later this month – approximate cost, $1 million.

I think I’d protect guides’ jobs at Beaumont-Hamel, lock masters along the Rideau and case workers for vets over another Royal Visit.

Completely intact and with old cement attached, this Coca-Cola bottle emerged from the dust of another era of renovation.

It surfaced a few months ago. We found it along an old, stone foundation during some renovations at our house (built in the 1920s). And while this piece of history wasn’t nearly as old as the house, it dated back nearly that far. It was an empty Coca-Cola bottle. You know, those short, stubby ones, sometimes made of blue-green glass, but more often clear – the ones that were a perfect fit in your hand. Our artefact came from an era when the Coke slogan (c. 1938) was: “The best friend thirst ever had.”

Like the slogans, this bottle was a unique survivor of an era when Coke featured its first radio ads, expanded production into more than 40 countries and when its corporate execs decided they better keep Coke’s original formula secret. When I spotted the bottle in the dirt, I couldn’t believe it had survived. But that’s not the oddest thing I’ve ever seen survive the wear of earth, water and time.

Emperor Hadrian's Wall has survived two millennia of wear and tear.

During a trip overseas some years ago, my wife and I visited Hadrian’s Wall, in northern England. There along the 120-kilometre-long stone barricade designed to keep the Celts out of Roman-occupied Britain, we visited an unearthed Roman fort. Of course, it had the usual surviving stone tablets, iron spears and breastplates. But what surprised us was the existence of cloth garments, a pair of sandals and even a parchment birthday greeting. All had survived more than 2,000 years in the ground.

Even more amazing to me, however, are the stories of human survival. About a week ago, in a feature I wrote for the National Post, I recounted three human tales of survival from the greatest nautical disaster of all – the sinking of RMS Titanic on April 14, 1912. Late that night, a hundred years ago, an 18-year-old purser, named Steve Prentice, was clinging to the stern of an almost vertical Titanic, just before the ship sank.

“There were a thousand people aboard, just waiting for death,” he told me in 1978. He let go of the stern and dropped passed the propeller blades. “I hit the water with a terrific crack. I was all alone … I felt myself freezing up. Then, a passing lifeboat picked me up and saved me.”

As amazing as it seems, two years later (1914), purser Prentice was aboard RMS Oceanic, another Atlantic liner, on a trip from New York to Europe. With war just declared, the ship was commandeered by German officers, turned into a gunboat and sunk off the Shetland Islands. He survived that sinking too as well as service in the army in both World Wars!

Of course, they say the most remarkable survivors are politicians. They said it of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They said it of “The Iron Lady,” Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. They said it of the man who brought charisma to Canadian politics, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, until that night of his fabled “walk in the snow.”

“I walked until midnight in the storm,” Trudeau said on Feb. 29, 1984. “Then I went home and took a sauna for an hour and a half. It was all clear. I listened to my heart and saw if there were any signs of my destiny in the sky, and there were none — there were just snowflakes.” He retired shortly after.

Canadian literature has given us iconic survivors. Lucy Maud Montgomery gave us Anne (of Green Gables) Shirley. Margaret Laurence created Hagar Shipley in “Stone Angel,” while W.O. Mitchell created “Jake and the kid.” And while you won’t immediately recognize Sam Slick, the character created by Maritime author Thomas Chandler Haliburton, you’ll recognize the clichés he invented: “The early bird gets the worm,” was a Sam Slick-ism. So was “A stitch in time saves nine.”

Lt. Col. John McCrae was a soldier, physician and poet. He died of pneumonia 10 months before the Great War ended.

I’ve just returned from a tour of the battlefields of France and Belgium, where there are no more enduring words than those of a Canadian medic in the Great War.

“In Flanders Fields the poppies blow, between the crosses row on row,” John McCrae wrote in May 1915.

Most don’t realize that McCrae composed those lines as he presided over the funeral of fellow soldier Alexis Helmer, who died at the second battle of Ypres. Also not widely known is that McCrae apparently created the poem in 20 minutes, then discarded the first draft, only to have it saved by some of his comrades in the medical corps. It was published on Dec. 8 that year. And while his famous poem survived the Great War, McCrae did not. He died in January 1918, after contracting pneumonia and then cerebral meningitis.

“If ye break faith with us who die,” he wrote in the final lines, “we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders Fields.”

Remarkable how such things as cola bottles, political careers and poems survive when so much that seems more permanent, does not.

Jeff and Tony pass the walls of the Menin Gate in Ypres, where the "missing" Commonwealth soldiers of the Great War are remembered every night.

About three days into the tour, I saw the two of them walking and talking. Tony and Jeff Peck were pausing to look up at a wall of inscriptions. There in front of them the names of some 54,896 Commonwealth soldiers, for whom there are no known remains, lay chiselled in the stone. They are the so-called “missing” from the Great War. A couple of days later, father Tony watched son Jeff participate in the famous Last Post Ceremony under the same barrel-vaulted archway known as the Menin Gate.

“They shall grow not old, as we who are left grow old,” Jeff recited to the hundreds watching in silence. “Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.”

Every evening at 8 o’clock, the fire department of Ypres, Belgium, arrives at either end of this massive Menin Gate Memorial, stops the traffic and allows veterans, citizens and hundreds of tourists to watch this famous, presentation. In addition to the recital of this famous poem “For the Fallen” by a designated veteran, buglers from the town fire brigade play the Last Post and Reveille.

Except for the period of German occupation (during the Second World War) the citizens of Ypres have repeated this nightly ritual uninterrupted since 1928. For Jeff Peck, a veteran of the War in Afghanistan, reciting the Laurence Binyon poem, he said, was a distinct honour.

Equally distinctive, following the ceremony, Uxbridge’s recently retired fire chief, Tony Peck, presented crests and pins displaying the emblems from our local firefighters to the fire brigade buglers of Ypres.

“I felt very proud,” Tony Peck said later. “Quite an evening.”

Just back from a tour of First World War battlefield sites and Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries in northern France and Belgium as well as a side trip to Dieppe and the D-Day beaches of Normandy, I’ve been reflecting on some of the memorable times shared by the 55 adults and 18 students and three teachers who travelled with me. There are many indelible moments. Remarkably, many of them resulted from six sets of fathers and sons travelling in my tour group, among them Tony and Jeff Peck.

George Jr. with George Sr. and Robert Bracken pause during their visit of a First World War battle site.

Also during the tour, 80-year-old George Bracken (from Kingston) and his two sons – George Jr. (from Lombardy, Ont.) and Robert (from North Vancouver) paid tribute to Bill Bracken, George Sr.’s brother. Lt.-Col. William Bracken had flown photo reconnaissance Spitfires in Europe, Burma and North Africa. One day following the summer of 1942, the Brackens recalled, pilot Bill Bracken and a fellow pilot were driving across a recently seized battlefield near El Alamein, in North Africa.

“At one point they stopped and began firing abandoned weapons as a lark,” George Bracken recalled. “Suddenly, two German soldiers came out of hiding and surrendered to my brother Bill… It was one of the few instances when RAF pilots actually captured German ground troops.”

Interviewing veteran John Moroney in front of fellow travellers in France.

Then there was the night, during our tour, I interviewed another veteran travelling with us, in front of the rest of the group. At 86, John Moroney has never considered his work in an aircraft manufacturing plant in Montreal as wartime service. Nevertheless, as a teenager, he worked on an assembly line building the under-carriage sections of Hurricane fighter aircraft. But Moroney’s supervisor had a very specific job for John in mind.

“My boss put me on the assembly line right between these two older men,” Moroney said. “I soon discovered that I was put between an Irish Catholic and an Irish Protestant. And my job was to keep them from fighting with each other.”

Then John Moroney recalled his overseas service with the Black Watch helping to restore law and order in the streets of occupied Germany in late 1945. On the final night of our trip through First and Second World War sites, we gathered for a Farewell Dinner in Caen, France. I asked John Moroney’s son Jim how the trip had affected his father.

“He’s never had so much fun,” Jim Moroney said. “I think it’s added years to his life.”

Also during the evening’s final send-off, veteran Jeff Peck rose to offer a toast to soldiers past and present. He explained that during one stop at the Juno Beach Centre, where Canadians had launched the D-Day invasion in Normandy, he’d found a commemorative plaque honouring the four members of his Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry killed in the so-called friendly fire incident in Afghanistan. Peck witnessed their deaths in April 2002. At that point in his toast, he found it difficult to continue.

I looked to his father seated nearby and Tony Peck was teary-eyed too. “It’s been an incredible trip,” he told me later. This overseas journey had been a gift from son to father in honour of Tony’s retirement from the Uxbridge firefighting force.

Given how much the fathers and sons had shared on this trip, I suspect the gift was a two-way affair.

Students from Uxbridge Secondary School display their Vimy 95th anniversary banner at precisely the spot where Canadian troops made first contact with German soldiers on the morning of April 9, 1917.

It had rained all day. The sun had tried to poke some light through the low-lying clouds and mist of the ridge. But the strong westerly wind – that seemed to cut right through you – quickly erased every attempt. It was not a day to be outside. And yet, people came by the thousand. In particular, the young Canadians – about 5,000 high school students – paraded with banners, cheers and a resolve that was characteristic of their forefathers. One of their teachers summed up the scene.

“They’re wet and chilled to the bone,” she said. “But they realize it’s not right to complain. They’ll get through it.”

This was Vimy Ridge on the 95th anniversary of the historic battle that changed both the momentum of the First World War and the status of the British Commonwealth nation on the northern half of North America. On April 9, 1917, nearly 100,000 Canadian soldiers – about the same ages as the young people observing the anniversary this week – climbed out of their trenches and took the ground that British and French armies had failed to wrest from the Germans the previous two years. The cost was severe – 10,000 casualties, including 3,495 dead – but for the first time in that war to end all wars, a force of colonial soldiers had prevailed and in the process, historians say, they gave birth to a nation – Canada.

Uxbridge Secondary School student, Liam Banks Batten has a sense of that moment. On Monday, the actual anniversary of the victory at Vimy, Liam and 17 classmates, marched through the same kind of wind and rain his great-great-cousin did 95 years ago. Wilford Joliffe (interviewed by the CBC in 1963) remembered “the whole sky was lit like giant fireworks,” when the creeping artillery barrage they had rehearsed led the way up the ridge. By the end of April 9, 1917, Joliffe’s battalion had achieved the unachievable; it had seized the ridge permanently.

“(Vimy) was the ideal attack made on a large scale in modern warfare,” Joliffe told the CBC 50 years ago.

And while history reported the elation of the victory, Joliffe’s young descendant, Liam, later researched and discovered that his ancestor had also witnessed enemy machine gun bullets rip his best friend to pieces; the young soldier had to cope with his chum’s blood on him for days. Similarly, Liam’s modern high school mate, Chris Perry, had researched another member of the Canadian Corps in the Great War – his great-great-uncle. Chris learned that James George Moore had enlisted in August 1914 and that his attestation papers revealed a unique body feature.

“Multiple tattoo marks on both arms,” the document said, “with a snake on his upper right arm.” But Chris had also learned his great-great-uncle was listed as missing and presumed dead during the first ever German Army gas attacks of April 1915.

Among the other U.S.S. students who marched up Vimy, last Monday, with stories of their ancestors in their heads, was Matthew Fearnley-Brown. As the rain pelted down on him that 95th anniversary afternoon, Matthew had memorized the history of his great-great-uncle. Ted Rogers, he told us, drove one of the first ambulances behind the lines at Vimy, but like so many he suffered the lasting effects of being gassed at Ypres. He later married one of the nurses who attended him in hospital.

“But unfortunately he died of tuberculosis in 1970,” Matthew said.

These were the stories the 18 students and their three teachers – Tish MacDonald, Carolyn Allen and Adam Cooper – carried with them up Vimy Ridge last Monday. As their ancestors had waited for all the preparations to be ready during that crucial battle to win that hilltop in 1917, so had the students waited in 2012. The broadcast equipment had to be readied. Security checks had to be carried out. The dignitaries had to arrive. All the while the rains and winds made the venue not unlike the muddy landscape Vimy veterans had known 95 years before.

But like their ancestors, the Vimy commemorators hunkered down under ponchos and other makeshift rain gear. And like their military predecessors, the students had to endure pronouncements from leaders. The French Veterans’ Affairs minister applauded Canadians’ “courage and diligence.” The Canadian Veterans’ Affairs minister called on Canadian youth to “pick up the torch of service.” And the Governor General of Canada applauded the students’ enthusiasm and resilience.

When the original Vimy veterans reached the top of the ridge, in 1917, the French press called their achievement “Canada’s Easter gift to France.” When the modern pilgrims reached the ridge top, last Monday, they heard average French citizens applaud them wildly. Among those citizens was a local electrical worker. When he was asked why he had given up his holiday Monday for an afternoon in a rainstorm, he shrugged:

“Back then, you came out for us,” he said. “Today, we come out for you.”

Tree cutters arrive to bring down the maple on Balsam Street.

About a week ago, a friend up the street visited my next-door neighbour on a mission. With his pickup truck empty, save for his chainsaw and a can of gas, He began a day-long project dissecting the remains of a piece of history. A maple tree that had stood near the street at the corner of Ronnie Egan’s property for nearly a century had dropped too many dead or dying upper limbs to be safe anymore. So the township decided for the benefit of all concerned that the tree should come down.

“I cried the day they took it down,” Ronnie Egan admitted to me. “It was very sad to see it go.”

Ronnie remembered the first time she saw that maple. She had come to Uxbridge, Ont., from Halifax. As newlyweds during the Second World War – she as a chief petty officer in the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service, her husband Willis as a VIP chauffeur in the Canadian Army – the couple had come to Uxbridge on what was known as “compassionate leave.” When the war ended they would settle in that residential part of town. The maple was already a third of a century old when they arrived.

“It was maybe eight or 10 feet tall when we came home at the end of the War,” she said. “The trunk was maybe a few inches around.”

That was 1945, when the downtown boasted at least two hardware stores – one run by the Moore family, the other by the McEnany family – the dairy, a tannery, several shoe stores, Dominion Dry Goods, some drug stores, Montgomery woodworking store, some industrial businesses (manufacturing cement and cinder blocks) and the Brownscombe store that had a grocery department.

By the time Uxbridge Beverages began bottling Coca Cola, in 1948, couples in this community had begun raising the children of the baby boom. No doubt that street-side maple tree – nearing 50 years of age – had become the perch for many a climbing kid or a silent partner in skip-rope when the game was short one rope-holder.

Once, one of Ronnie’s neighbours suggested the maple was in the way and should be cut down.

“Over my dead body,” Ronnie protested. And the maple remained.

Sometime later, in the 1970s and ’80s (when our family arrived next-door to the Egans) I learned what a gift, saving that tree had been. When we came to town in 1988, I remember the welcoming sight of a street dotted with older homes that were all guarded by a row of maple sentinels.

That maple on Ronnie’s property line and the others lining our street provided an all-weather, all-season canopy, shading our homes from the intensity of the mid-summer sunshine and then providing a windbreak during the wildest storms of the winter. The maple may have made us work extra hard each autumn raking up its characteristically large golden leaves, but the labour was worth the protection the tree offered through nature’s seasonal extremes.

At the end of a day of cutting, the sentinel of a century was a skeleton.

And if that tree could talk, the stories it could tell – of the politicians who’ve come and gone, of the evolution from county to regional municipality, of the commercial struggle between downtown merchants and edge-of-town chain stores, of the evolution and revolution from twice-a-day trains to automobiles, highways and GO Trains, and  of the rise and fall of weekly newspaper enterprises in the community.

The day Uxbridge Tree Service came with its chainsaws, block and tackle, wood chipper and hydraulic cherry-picker box, a number of us watched as the handful of crew set up protective cones on the street and began to bring the maple down. As the upper limbs fell to the ground, the midday sun broke through. As the main trunk tumbled like broken building blocks across the lawn, scores of inner rings revealed the maple’s age – well over a hundred of them.

But the heart of the cut tree revealed more than its age. Among its growth rings was a chunk of wire, apparently a piece of fencing absorbed by the trunk perhaps half a century ago. Nature had overcome progress then. Now progress had evened the score.

Ronnie Egan stands at the stump of the maple she remembers as a slip of a tree in 1945.

Before my friend up the street took away the fruits of his all-day labour – cutting the fallen slabs of maple into pieces small enough to put in his fireplace sometime next winter – Ronnie asked for a couple of mementos. Since she had a greater attachment to that tree than of any of us, we obliged and put a large cross-section of the maple on her veranda.

“The view is different from here now,” she said. “There’s more sun coming through than I need. But one of the pieces of the maple makes a beautiful table. It reminds me of what was there all those years.”

TWUC authors (l-r) Greg Hollingshead and Susan Swan as well as library rep Michael Smith hold high the books they treasure at the reference library demo on Sunday.

Towards the end of last Sunday’s Books ‘n’ Brunch event, staged by Shelley Macbeth and her Blue Heron Books staff, I turned to the audience. I had been interviewing successful crime writer, Giles Blunt, author of six books featuring fictitious Canadian detective John Cardinal. Having asked all my questions, I invited some from the audience. One of the first questions came from a librarian from Sandford. The second came from a former librarian in town. It occurred to me that in a room of about hundred avid readers, a goodly number of those in attendance had served in the libraries of local schools and branches of our public library.

When author Blunt later commented on the quality of the audience’s questions, I pointed out how arts focused and well read this community is.

“We’ve got something like 25 or 30 book clubs here,” I told him. “And it’s probably no surprise that at the heart of those clubs are current or former librarians.”

Blunt, a long-time Toronto resident, who admitted he “rarely ventured north of Dupont Street,” expressed some surprise that a small town could generate such a lively arts and literary culture. I suggested that having a proactive bookstore operator and a regularly engaged community of musicians, visual artists, writers, actors, photographers, cinematographers, producers, directors, and librarians didn’t hurt. All those artists have not only chosen to reside in the township, I said, they have also chosen to foster local arts events throughout the year. For them, having readings, plays, concerts and exhibitions in town is just as important as having youth sports, garbage pickup and snow removal.

Co-incidentally, when the Blue Heron event was over last Sunday, I drove to my next appointment. The Writers’ Union of Canada (I have been a member of this union of some 2,000 Canadian authors since 1977) had decided to express its support for Toronto Public Library workers by joining their pickets in front of the main reference library in downtown Toronto.

In the bright mid-afternoon sunshine, librarians, authors and several hundred members of the public gathered to hear some of this country’s favourite book writers. They had come to encourage the city to reach an equitable and early resolution in its contract dispute with 2,300 members of Local 4948 of the Toronto Public Library Workers Union. Among the first to speak to the demonstration was TWUC chair Greg Hollingshead.

“A library is a place to read … to find a job and to connect with the city and its services,” said the award-winning novelist and poet. “A library is a place for people to discover who they want to be.”

Former publisher, now author, Douglas Gibson speaks at the Toronto Public Library rally.

Other internationally published Canadian authors spoke, including Susan Swan, Ken McGoogan, Douglas Gibson and Erika Ritter. They all explained how the Toronto Public Library gives their work shelf space and exposure. They applauded the library for helping to build their followings. But they also credited the library for being the birthplace of so many of their ideas.

When I was offered an opportunity to speak, I thought about the hundreds of students I’ve instructed in journalism during the past decade at Centennial College. I recalled how often those novice journalists had begun to explore their world and their profession by tapping the physical and electronic resources of the busiest library system in the world.

“Sometimes the first and best contact my journalism students had, starting out, was a Toronto reference librarian who helped them toward their first published story,” I said. “A reliable librarian just might be a young journalist’s first and most important contact.”

Among the full-time library staff I met Sunday afternoon was Joseph Romain, who started working at the TPL in 1980. I asked him what kind of money was at stake in the contract negotiations, what the working salaries were for professional librarians these days. He said that some of the most experienced staff – some with a master’s degree and decades of experience – earned perhaps $50-60,000. He emphasized that salary was not unreasonable; but it wasn’t exorbitant either. But Romain warned that a work stoppage and stalled negotiations presented a more serious threat.

Interviewing library staff member Joseph Romain about the hidden threat to public libraries.

“Earlier this year they said all the attention that Margaret Atwood brought to the Toronto Library system had saved it,” he said. “Unfortunately, she couldn’t save the jobs.” He explained that after all the publicity involving the mayor and his brother died down, the city went ahead and cut staff, “when the public wasn’t looking.” Since the beginning of the year, 107 full-time library positions have been cut at TPL; since the amalgamation of the city, in 1998, 17 per cent of staff has been chopped.

The lesson learned for me on Sunday – a day exposed to the input of librarians – was never to take them for granted. They help build a community. They kindle its culture. They spark initiative and hope in its citizens.

Hap Harris on his Wings (Graduation) Day in August 1943. Photo courtesy Harris family.

Following a recent oldtimers’ hockey game at the arena Sunday night, my teammates and I made our way to the dressing room. The difference this night, however, was that we had won our game. For the first time in our Uxbridge Adult Hockey round-robin playoff, we had won – our first victory in four tries. We were all feeling pretty upbeat as we piled into the dressing room, where a teammate next to me suggested why we had won.

“We can thank Flying Officer Harris for this one,” he said.

It took a second to sink in. Since early last fall, I’ve been skating with the same 15 or so players on Team Red each Sunday night. And most of my teammates know that I have a fascination for gathering (and often retelling) Canadian military stories. It’s come to the point that my teammates ask me to recount the story of a soldier, sailor or airmen before each game. I guess the guys think of my war stories as a sort of emotional lift, an inspiration just before we hit the ice.

Last Sunday night, I described events from earlier that day. I told my teammates that I had travelled to Guelph, Ont., to participate in the 90th birthday celebration for former Second World War pilot Joseph Howard Harris. I hadn’t gone because he was family, nor even a close friend. I went because a few weeks ago, Harris’s son Keith had contacted me. Keith had told me about his father’s wartime career.

He recounted though his father had earned his RCAF wings (graduated in 1943) in the middle of the war, Hap, as he was known, had never made it overseas. He’d never flown Spitfires in the Battle of Britain, nor Halifax bombers to Berlin and back through flak and night-fighters. No. Hap had served as an instructor in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan and had never left Canada. His air force had chosen him to teach others to fly Spits and Hallies. Not him.

“Unfortunately, my dad feels he did not contribute enough during the war,” Keith Harris told me. “He actually teared up the one time he mentioned his feelings.”

That’s when I had decided I had to go to Hap Harris’s 90th birthday that day with proof that he had indeed contributed, that despite not serving overseas, Flying Officer Harris had served in one of the most successful (and dangerous) endeavours of the war – giving a fledgling air force the tools to win back the skies over Europe, North Africa and the Pacific. Having interviewed many other self-effacing instructors like Hap Harris, I felt I was on a mission of my own.

Hap Harris (right) having received his letter of acknowledgment from the current C.O. of the RCAF at his 90th birthday party. Photo courtesy Rob Wells.

But I couldn’t go empty-handed. When Keith Harris introduced me at Hap’s birthday party, not only did I have to describe what Hap and his fellow BCATP instructors had accomplished – training some 225,000 air crewmen in less than five years – but I also had to provide some proof of their worth. And I had it: a letter from the commanding officer of the modern RCAF, addressed to Hap Harris himself.

“As an integral part of the BCATP,” Lt.-Gen. J.P.A. Deschamps wrote, “you and all the instructor pilots were the backbone to Canada’s contribution to the war’s successful outcome.”

When I finished reading the commander’s letter at the 90th birthday party in Guelph, I told my Sunday night hockey teammates, Hap Harris was tearing up, but busting with pride. And at the end of my storytelling in the hockey dressing room, I realized I had caught up all my teammates as well. Their faces looked as proud as Hap’s. And, as it turned out, it seemed to inspire our game.

Of course, winning an oldtimers’ hockey game at the local arena doesn’t compare to inspiring young pilots to carry their training into a life-and-death struggle around the globe. But when my teammate on the bench said, “Thanks to Flying Officer Harris,” I realized how inspirational one man’s story can be to others.

Uxbridge Minor Midgets hockey club en route to All-Ontario final, March 2012.

Then, I thought about the young men – Uxbridge’s Minor Midget hockey team – in the midst of their All-Ontario finals against Welland, Ont., this week. And I wondered how the team’s coaches might be inspiring those 15 and 16-year-old hockey players. By co-incidence, another of my Sunday night teammates helps coaching our Minor Midgets. I wondered out loud if our Minor Midget team might be inspired to win the championship, if – like the old days – their victory entitled them to a ride through town aboard one of the local firefighting vehicles with lights flashing and sirens blaring.

“Not anymore, I don’t think,” he said. “Couldn’t do it these days.”

Well, OK, if not lights and sirens, maybe they need the inspirational stories of their heroes. Maybe they need the equivalent of Flying Officer Hap Harris and his flight into history, in their dressing room. It worked for us.

When I met CBC Commissionaire Don Nelson, I had no idea he had been a commando (much like these Canadian troops) during the Korean War.

The first time I went to the local chiropractor’s office, I arrived early and got caught up on some National Geographic stories. Then it was time for my session and I prepared myself with excuses. I expected a barrage of questions, such as, how long had my shoulder been bothering me, what previous treatment had I undergone, and why had I waited so long to deal with it. But that wasn’t the first thing Dr. Peter Begg asked me.

“Where did you get all your research for that Vimy book of yours?” he said.

I was so surprised by his choice of icebreaker, that I didn’t quite know what to say. But I quickly recovered and for the next 20 to 30 minutes Peter Begg and I had one of the liveliest discussions about story gathering I’d ever had. I figured it was all a ploy to distract me from the various treatments he tried on my shoulder. Whether it was or not, I realized how much more there was to this chiropractor than just his lengthy professional career and his service to the community.

The next time I arrived as his office, he asked me about the mission in Afghanistan and how it was affecting young Canadian men and women in uniform. The next time I think we solved world political unrest. Or maybe it was world hunger.

Dr. Begg died on Tuesday after battling cancer for many months. And I’ll join many in this community who’ll miss his assistance and advice. But more than that, I’ll miss the man beyond the medical professional. I’ll miss the book, not just its cover.

Ironically, this week, I lost another acquaintance. Much like Dr. Begg, I really only knew Ruth Doble from a few visits, not from a lengthy friendship. One evening a few years ago, my hockey buddy, Ron Doble, (Ruth’s son) and I happened by his mother’s home in Pickering. He introduced me to Ruth, a woman in her early 90s then. Inside her well-kept house, I noticed that everything was in order – neat furnishings, tidy cupboards and a fair number of books around. Because our stop was a short one, I didn’t get the chance to talk to her about those books. Then, last fall, when I spoke to the Pickering Historical Society, among the last to approach me to purchase a book and have it autographed was none other than Ruth Doble.

“I want you to tell me how you write these books,” she announced. An avid supporter of the historical society, I sensed she had probably read her fair share of memoires, biographies and local histories.

“Carefully,” I said in jest. And we talked about our mutual love of researching and reading history. She knew what she liked and what she didn’t like. Mistakenly, however, I saw a woman in her 98th year as merely a reader of history, not the active historical society member she was. Another book whose cover I had clearly misread. Unfortunately, that was our last conversation. Ruth Doble died last Tuesday.

I could recount scores of others whose inner self defied their outer shell – politicians with unique hobbies, sports figures on more than athletic missions, entertainment stars with hearts of gold, and business executives with secret philanthropic interests. One man I remember in particular, Don Nelson, was a commissionaire at the CBC.

One day somebody told me he’d fought in the Korean War. After refusing me several times, he finally consented to an interview. As unlikely as it seemed in 1950, he’d run away from home, joined a U.S. commando unit, and was dropped behind Communist army lines to blow up fuel dumps, disrupt communications and conduct hit-and-run raids. His only weapon was a Bowie knife.

“When I arrived home,” he told me, “there were lots of hugs and kisses from family, but when I dropped my knapsack and the Bowie knife fell out, my father just looked at me. As far as he was concerned, I had dishonoured him.”

Later, Don told me, he presented the knife to his father as a kind of peace offering, but it was refused. It was only following his father’s funeral in 1973, that Don’s mother told him, “We buried it with your father.”

“Buried what?” Don asked. His mother had quietly placed the Bowie knife in Daniel Nelson’s coffin. It was only in death that father and son could be reconciled. Don’s gone now, but I often think about him as two people – the calm CBC commissionaire we all knew on the outside; on the inside, the unhappy veteran whose family never really accepted his wartime service.

Not everybody’s exterior hides such a tempestuous interior. But often there’s so much more than the outer person to know.