Look closely on the walls of their sunlit living room: There’s a framed lifetime achievement certificate, as recognized by the Ontario Historical Society. The citation praises Barry Penhale and Jane Gibson for their many years of professional and volunteer work bringing history and heritage to the attention of Ontarians.
The OHS presented the award to this extraordinary couple in 2019. Seated in his favourite armchair in that living room, Penhale smiled modestly.
“History isn’t something any one person owns,” he told me last week. “It’s about preserving and celebrating what we’ve all experienced.”
Last Thursday, I drove several hours up into the highlands of Grey County for a special presentation. Every couple of years (or each time I finish another book) Penhale and Gibson invite me to join them for their Friends of the Markdale Museum Speakers’ Series, this time at the Annesley United Church.
In the local municipality newspaper, The Advance, he promoted the event by writing, “If you have not been in the audience for one of Barris’s presentations, just imagine a human Energizer Bunny.” In truth, Penhale and Gibson have devoted so much time, attention and yes, energy, to Ontario history as to make the rest of us seem like slouches.
The husband-and-wife team has always believed the way to get history out there for people to discover is to explore its characters.
Decades ago, I remember one episode of his television series Sketches of Our Town in which he visited a pair of personalities in Paris, Ont. Father and son, Wally and Dusty West, lived on a houseboat on the river and “Wally called himself the Bard of the Nith (River)” while Dusty, Penhale said, “pulled a windup gramophone around the streets of Paris as the town’s self-appointed entertainer.”
In my view, Barry Penhale is himself a character. He started his career as a journalist and publisher; in particular, he loved the sport of wrestling and regularly reported for periodicals Wrestling as You Like It and Canadian Wrestling Illustrated.
The latter featured all aspects of arena and TV wrestling – including coaches, tag teams, promoters and such iconic pugilists as Whipper Billy Watson and Killer Kawalski. I can only imagine the razzle-dazzle atmosphere in which Penhale gathered and recorded the experiences of these fighters. “They (were) individuals who marched to the beat of their very own drummers.”
For many years, I had the pleasure of working as the backup host for a regional CBC Radio show called Ontario Morning. The program, produced first by Len Sher and then Sandy Mowat (Farley Mowat’s son), broadcast the latest news, weather and sports, but more importantly (and more fun), the daily three-hour broadcast showcased grassroots Ontario.
Barry Penhale visited the studio regularly to present the stories of the people behind those roadside plaques and cairns we see all over the province. There were poets, paddlers, pioneers and personalities of every conceivable background. I’m sure that his travels were the inspiration for some of Penhale’s own books, A Stringerful of Memories, Grassroots Artisans, and The Fur Trade That Put Upper Canada on the Map.
And writing eventually drove him to form his own publishing house, Natural Heritage Books, which published scores of books on Canadian athletes, outdoorsmen and -women and works about Indigenous and African-Canadian culture.
Sharing countless stories in that sunlit living room, Jane Gibson proudly pointed out the book Broken Shackles: Old Man Henson, from Slavery to Freedom, (originally published in 1889) which Gibson and Penhale helped republish in 2007.
It documents the account of an African-American man who escapes his slaver in Maryland and travels the Underground Railway to Canada, finding freedom in Grey County.
More than helping to preserve Henson’s story, Gibson and Penhale over the years, have devoted time, money and effort toward the restoration of the Old Durham Road Black Pioneer Cemetery, just down the road from their home.
While I visited last Thursday, Penhale told me of a new project he’s working on. An independent production company has decided to retell the tale of Grey Owl, a.k.a. British writer, public speaker and conservationist Archibald Stansfeld Belaney, who claimed he was born of a Scottish man and an Apache woman. Penhale remains one of the few Canadians to document and collect artifacts of the Grey Owl impersonation.
“It’s a unique story, that of a character we need to understand,” Penhale said. “I’m honoured to be able to share his extraordinary story.”
There’s no plaque on that living-room wall about being national treasures, but in my view Barry Penhale and Jane Gibson certainly are.