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.
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.
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.