Ted Barris

The man told me my future. It happened back in the 1980s. But back then, Charley Fox, my oldest and dearest veteran friend, looked me straight in the eye and told me what I ought to be doing with the rest of my life.

“It’s your job to tell our stories,” he said. And each time we’d meet – usually every month or so at the Husky truck stop on Hwy 401 just east of London, Ont. – Charley would remind me with a “to-do list,” exactly how I was to research famous battles, conduct first-hand interviews and then write and publish the eye-witness stories of Canadian veterans’ experiences. Forty years and a dozen published books later, I realize Charley was right. History storytelling has become the centre of my life. Then last November on my way home, I pulled into that same Husky truck stop – more out of homage to my veteran pal than anything else – and my cellphone rang.

“You’ve been appointed to the Order of Canada,” said Emma Grace, analyst at the Governor General’s office at Rideau Hall in Ottawa.

Of all places, the very spot where Charley Fox had redirected my writing energies from newscasts, reporting and commentaries largely to wartime history, I learned I was to receive one of the country’s highest civilian honours “for advancing our understanding of Canadian military history.” I was overcome with emotion that November day, but I had to keep the appointment secret until Rideau Hall announced it officially on Dec. 29, 2022.

In part, I owe acknowledgement of my efforts to give Canadians fair recognition in military history to that same former RCAF Flight Lieutenant Charley Fox, who taught me commitment, and led by example. He made the decision to join the Air Force on a summer day in 1934 when a flight of Hawker Fury fighters “came zooming over College Hill (in Guelph). Then swoosh they were gone. But I never forgot it.”

Two years into the Second World War, when he was 21, Charley graduated near the top of his class in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, but was told he’d serve the wartime RCAF as an instructor in the very same BCATP. Finally sent overseas to Fighter Command in 1944-45, he completed 222 sorties, destroying 153 enemy vehicles, successfully strafing Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s staff car in 1944, and earning two Distinguished Flying Crosses.

When, after 15 months of Allied operations over occupied Europe, they told F/L Fox to retire to flying a desk, he said, “If you don’t want me flying ops anymore, I’m going home to my wife and son,” thus living up to his civilian commitment to support his young family.

If one reason for my recent appointment to the Order of Canada comes from a sense of service, I learned that from my longtime next-door neighbour in Uxbridge. Rodine Egan – Ronnie to her friends – got her calling from her father.

“My father served in the Royal Navy, so when the (Second World) War came along, I knew I’d serve in the (Royal Canadian) Navy. That was that.”

After training, Ronnie rose in rank to petty officer in charge of hundreds of Royal Canadian Navy servicewomen – Wrens – at Halifax from 1943 to ’45. Post-war she raised a family of four, served in the Catholic Women’s League and at St. John’s School, became life member of the Cottage Hospital Auxiliary Association, served 20 years with Community Care of Durham Region, and earned the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her volunteerism.

“Without volunteers,” she said simply, “where would we be?”

Though neither is here to share my Order of Canada investiture (expected to take place later this year or next), I believe my parents deserve credit for giving me a wider view of the world.

Perhaps because Kay and Alex were immigrants to Canada from the United States, my mom and dad made sure I understood the difference between north and south of the 49th. Because they believed in more than traditional patriarchal authority, they encouraged my sister and me to participate in division of household responsibilities, dinner table conversation, and family decision-making.

Even when it came to documenting showbusiness history in this country, against the tendency of his peers to kowtow to American stars, my father chose to give more ink in columns and airtime on his broadcasts to Canadian than to American performers. Thus, in the year 2000, he was appointed to the Order.

“For any country’s culture to develop,” his citation read, “it must have its immediate and lively chroniclers and promoters.”

So, from a mentoring veteran, a selfless neighbour and model parents, I owe much of the sparkle this Order of Canada gives my life.