What’s with these guys? This week, Stephen Harper, the leader of the largest dominion in the 64-year-old, 53-member Commonwealth – covering a quarter of the world’s total land mass and including a third of the world’s total population – told fellow members he’d decided not to attend the upcoming meeting of the community in Sri Lanka. He said he wasn’t happy with the human rights record of the host nation’s president. So, in a desire to protect what he felt are the values of Canadians, he’s decided not to show up. It was the prime ministerial equivalent of a schoolyard child’s pout:
There’s generally at least one of these in every neighbourhood. This person is most often extremely well grounded in the community or has lived there for years. People next door or down the block all feel they could trust this individual with their mother or their kids. I had a proxy parent like this. Only I didn’t realize I needed her as a surrogate until I was a young adult.
I knew her as “Ma Ross.”
Dick and Betty Ross met on the dance floor at the Palais Royale during the Second World War.
Actually her name was Betty Ross. She was born Helen Elizabeth Watson on July 11, 1920, in Toronto. When she was four, her father died. So, she was raised by a caring brother. Betty came of age during the Second World War, fell in love with an RCAF Spitfire pilot – when they danced on terrace of the Palais Royale on a night in 1940 – and waited for her beau, Richard Ross, to come home safely from the air war overseas. In the 1950s, I met Betty through her son, David, who’d become my closest friend in elementary school in Agincourt, Ont. But that’s not when she became my fill-in mom.
WCDR volunteers at the “Word on the Street” booth last Sunday afternoon in Toronto”s Queen’s Park Circle. (l-r) Ted Barris, Deepam Wadds, Donna Thompson & Adele Simmons.
The man approached us with plenty of confidence. He seemed self-assured, but had an inquisitive look on his face too. He pulled out a pen and paper ready to make some notes about who we were. One of us at our booth, on Wellesley Street in Toronto, asked him the burning question of the day:
“Are you a writer?”
“Sure am, “ he said. “I’m a poet. Have been all my life.”
I remember it like yesterday. Students in my broadcasting class seemed particularly rowdy that morning. They didn’t appear to want to calm down to take in the lecture. I’d had an unusually difficult commute to the campus. I began the prerequisite attendance check, couldn’t get the students to respond and came to a name on the attendance list I sensed had been a regular absentee. She bore the brunt of my frustration.
“You know, you should pay more attention when I call your name,” I said to the young woman. “If you paid more attention, perhaps your grades would be better.”
Even a decade ago, heart specialists would have to cut open a cardiac patient in order to see the inside of a beating human heart. Ultra-sound has changed all that.
Throughout the day, following my operation, I was restless. In fact, that night – last Friday – I couldn’t sleep in the hospital ward where I was recovering. Coincidentally, however, the Registered Nurse on the night shift had a few minutes to spare as she recorded my blood pressure and heartbeat, so she stopped for conversation. We talked about her birthplace – East Africa – and how she’d come to Canada in search of a career. Eventually, I asked her what her name was.
“Meseret,” she said. “It means foundation. My father chose it because it was a strong name.”
Last year’s Lunch at the Legion event was so well received, Ted’s been invited back. On Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2013, he’s back to talk about and present visuals from his brand new book, The Great Escape: A Canadian Story. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Hollywood blockbuster movie The Great Escape, (with Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, etc.). But as Ted will demonstrate drawing from his book, the most famous WWII POW breakout was not a story of British heroes and Yankee know-how. The Great Escape was very much a story of Canadian leadership and courage. It’s more exciting than the Hollywood movie. And it’s all true!. As always, he will have copies of his books for sale and autographing.
When: Noon, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2013.
Where: Royal Canadian Legion, Branch 170, 109 Franklin St., Uxbridge, Ontario.
This 1961 Metropolitan Nash was the featured classic car at Thursday’s Cruise-In Car Show in Uxbridge.
If your travels have taken you by the Uxbridge arena Thursday evenings, over the summer, you might have been drawn into the parking lot by the colour, the commotion or just the sheer number of cars. That is, of course, if you could find a spot to park. All summer long the extra daylight, the warm evenings and word-of-mouth, have brought classic-car buffs to the arena by the hundred to show off their prized possessions.
In fact, last Thursday night, I asked one of the organizers of the Cruise-In car show, Rob Holtby, how many exhibiters had driven in.
“Oh, there’re 250 cars here tonight,” he said. “Yes, it’s getting so popular, we’re even outgrowing this space.”
On the night of March 24, 1944, eighty Commonwealth airmen crawled through a 400-foot-long tunnel, code-named “Harry,” and most slipped into the darkness of a pine forest beyond the wire of Stalag Luft III, a German prisoner-of-war compound near Sagan, Poland. The event became known as The Great Escape. The breakout, more than a year in the making, involved about 2,000 POWs and a battle of wits inconceivable for its time. Within days of the escape, however, all but three escapers were recaptured; subsequently, Adolf Hitler ordered fifty of them murdered, cremated, and buried in a remote corner of the same prison compound.
What most casual readers, history buffs, moviegoers, and even some who participated, don’t readily acknowledge is that The Great Escape was in many ways “made-in-Canada.” In The Great Escape: A Canadian Story, bestselling author Ted Barris recounts this nearly mythical escape operation through the voices of those involved, many of whom trained in Canada, served in RCAF bomber and fighter squadrons, were shot down over Europe, imprisoned at Stalag Luft III, and ultimately became co-conspirators in the actual Great Escape.
Based on his original interviews, research, and assembly of memoirs, letters, diaries, and personal photos, Ted Barris reveals that many of the escape’s key players – the tunnel designer, excavators, forgers, scroungers, security and intelligence personnel, custodian of the secret radio, and scores of security “stooges” and sand-dispersal “penguins” – were all Canadians.
The book reads like a Hollywood movie, but is, in fact, the true story!
Praise for Ted Barris’s The Great Escape: A Canadian Story
“A magnificent story … I spent 18 months in Stalag Luft III North Compound [as a POW, but] I was unaware of the vast work that went on. … So many of the interviews are all news to me. [This book] brings it all to life.” – Albert Wallace, Second World War RCAF officer and former POW at the Great Escape camp
“As always, Ted Barris, our best writer on Canadians at war, paints small personal stories on the broad canvas of epic conflict, and in The Great Escape, gives us the real truth on a story we thought we knew. Riveting.” – Linwood Barclay, bestselling author of Trust Your Eyes
“With new insights and a fresh perspective, Ted Barris takes us deep inside The Great Escape. In fascinating and meticulous detail, he unravels the plotting and planning, completely befuddling German prison guards, that led to one of the most daring real-life dramas in modern history.” – Lloyd Robertson, CTV News
Mustafa Ahmed in a spoken word performance. Photo SpeakOutPoetry.
Five days from now, he and a lot of young people in Canada will wrap up their summer holidays. They’ll all be putting away their T-shirts, cut-offs and flip-flops and starting to wear school shirts and pants again. Instead of baseball gloves or tennis rackets, they’ll all be carrying their smart phones and backpacks full of textbooks again. Only this teenager I met from Toronto’s inner city, last week, has something in addition to school on his mind.
“There are friends out there who bring real benefit to your life,” he said this week, “and there are friends who don’t. It’s important to know who your real friends are.”
The Bonner Boys Splash Park earlier this past week, before the official opening – Sunday, August 18, 2013.
Recently, my daughter took her children to the park area just west of the arena in our town. Enjoying the last days of my summer holidays, I joined them. The kids seemed pretty excited, but that’s what being a kid is all about – looking forward to the next adventure. Anyway, when they arrived at the hillside beyond the arena, they saw the animated figures and waterworks flowing. My grandson’s remark kind of summed it up.
“Wow!” was all he said. And he just repeated, “Wow!”
