Ted Barris

It was probably the final phone call she made last Sunday night. I’m sure that she had been dealing with a myriad of errands. I imagine that she’d probably checked her to-do list a hundred times. I know for a fact that she had responded to a long list of messages from fellow teachers, her principal and concerned parents. After all, she was about to lead more than 60 students from Uxbridge Secondary School on a 10-day-long trip into history. Nevertheless, U.S.S. instructor Tish MacDonald phoned me.

“Just wanted to say thanks,” she said on the phone. “We’re down to the last few hours before we take off for Holland. Everybody’s all fired up.”

I guess it’s a couple of years ago, that Tish MacDonald left Port Perry High School to join the staff at U.S.S. Partly because I’ve played oldtimers hockey with her husband Mike for a number of years, but also because I’ve helped acquaint high schools in the region with some of Canada’s wartime accomplishments, I discovered how keen Tish was to get young people in touch with veterans and their experiences. Then, in 2009 she suggested that U.S.S. students join the pilgrimage being mounted across the country to get Canadian youth to Holland for the 65th anniversary of the Dutch Liberation next month.

Well, the organizers of the national event couldn’t have recruited a more eager and dedicated disciple. During the next months, Tish read every book on Canadians liberating Holland she could find. She contacted the local Legion and arranged for periodic student visits. She reached out to the Dutch consulate in Toronto to make further contact with people in Holland who could enrich the experience of the students who would go overseas.

And she made sure that every event that might provide information and contact with veterans was arranged, promoted and attended by her fellow staff members, students and their parents. She ensured that those going to Holland had as strong a sense of commitment as she did – or, for that matter, the original Canadian soldiers who liberated the Netherlands 65 years ago.

One night I presented images and stories in the U.S.S. library. Tish had arranged for many of her Holland-bound students, their parents and several veterans to attend. At one point, I acknowledged a man whom Tish had invited as one of those veterans of the Dutch campaign in 1944-45. Tish, her students and I all invited his reminiscences; aside from the man’s family, Tish’s students were probably the first to knock on the door of his wartime memories seeking entry. I’m sure it wasn’t the first time, but those students made him the centre of attention and the recipient of long overdue gratitude. He died not long after that evening of reflection and remembrance.

But Tish MacDonald’s work did not end there. She arranged to have vets come to U.S.S. around Remembrance Day. She took some of her students to those vigils on the bridges as Afghanistan war dead passed by. She never stopped inventing ways for her students to soak up and in turn express their discoveries and reactions to this newfound living history.

In fact, next week in the Cosmos, you’ll see a special insert commemorating the 65th anniversary of Dutch Liberation on May 5, 1945. It will feature some of the personal journeys that U.S.S. students have travelled since Tish MacDonald began exposing them to Canada’s military past via the veterans in our midst.

When Tish MacDonald phoned the other evening, a couple of days before she left for Holland with the U.S.S. students, I hardly think she’d had time to pack her suitcase, let along contemplate the adventure on which she and her students had embarked. In fact, on top of everything else, she had a cold and very little sleep. Yet, there was one other story she wanted to tell me on the phone.

All year long, she said, she had been taking groups of students to the local Legion. She had purposefully and diplomatically introduced her Holland-bound students to the Uxbridge-area vets who regularly gathered there on Thursday afternoons. She had encouraged her charges to approach the vets, ask them questions and listen to their stories. This time it was her turn.

“Suddenly, the vets invited me to their table,” she said. “They asked me to sit down. I went, but I didn’t say anything. I just listened. They talked about Dieppe, D-Day and the Dutch liberation anniversary just days away.”

Right up to the last moment before she left on this historic trip with her students – studying, collecting, caring about the human history her students had been gathering all year – Tish MacDonald never stopped being a student of history herself.