Uxbridge Messiah Singers at Uxbridge Baptist Church, 2022.
About an hour into the concert, we could feel the anticipation. The church fell silent for just a few seconds. Conductor Tom Baker, all 14 musicians in the orchestra and the 80-voices-strong choir seemed to collect themselves for the climax of their performance. The singers rose in unison. Then, so did the audience in rapt attention.
“Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah,” the choir began to sing, somewhat muted at first. Then, their voices rising in crescendo, the mass choir filled the sanctuary with the final refrain: “And he shall reign forever and ever. King of kings. Lord of lords. Hallelujah!” (more…)
Sergeant medic Alex Barris in Czechoslovakia, 1945.
It was April 1945. The Second World War was just days from ending in Europe. My father’s medical battalion had received a few days’ leave in the then Allied-occupied German city of Düsseldorf.
There, Alex and his comrades enjoyed hot meals, hot showers, and billets with beds and clean sheets. Somewhere in the chaos, somehow in the uncertainty, my father found a place and some time to sit down and compose a letter.
“Dear Koula,” he wrote to a pen pal in New York City. “We have known each other so long, yet I never saw you very often after I finished school.”
Koula Kontozoglus, a pen pal worth writing to,
The words spoke to me deeply because Dad was expressing emotion in a war zone that allowed little room for feelings. He was admitting frailty – delinquency for not writing often enough. And his words flowed because they were written cursively. (more…)
Gerry OIdham in front of the “notice of meeting” sign posted in the King Street Parkette.
It only took a few minutes into Monday morning’s Planning Committee meeting at Uxbridghe Township offices to realize that no citizen’s protest versus the closing of the King Street Parkette had a chance of changing Council’s mind and that the outcome appeared predetermined.
Minutes into the planning meeting, Coun. Todd Snooks, the chair, called upon a township planning officer to review Council’s history with the park. She called for a slide on the screen.
“Here is the King Street Parkette timeline,” she said, and then indicated the single-lot-sized green space had first been deemed by Council “surplus in 1981.”
The slide showed type inside an information box with no identification, no source and no specific date. It just said, “Surplus 1981.” (more…)
Three extraordinary booksellers (l-r) Barbara Pratt, Marilyn Maher and Shelley Macbeth – who owned and operated Blue Heron Books over 35 years – celebrated the store’s 35th anniversary Nov. 23.
Recently, I dropped into one of my favourite haunts in Uxbridge and asked a member of the staff if she had a copy of the new book by Philippa Gregory. After a quick dash to the non-fiction section, she retrieved Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History. She recommended it, something I always appreciate from staff members at Blue Heron Books. In fact, as I left, I offered the best compliment I could think of at the time.
“Lots of women making history at this establishment,” I said. And I meant it.
In Dr. Gregory’s nearly 700-page treatise, the author doesn’t focus on the obvious handful of heroines in British history – Elizabeth I, Agatha Christie, Florence Nightingale or Margaret Thatcher – but rather the legions of women who competed in jousts, designed ships, mills and houses, or enlisted in the armed services. (more…)
The storytellers of our society tend to be our elders. In most European cultures, and indeed First Nations cultures, the laws, the lineage and the lore are generally gathered and told by the senior members of society. That’s why the stories of young researcher and military historian Rebecca Murray proved so refreshing to me.
“Kate Reid served as a WD (Women’s Division) in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War,” Murray explained during her presentation at a history conference I attended in Calgary last week. “She was my Nan, and one of 17,000 WDs in the Air Force.” (more…)
The public-speaking appearance was half done. At intermission, last Friday night in the central-Alberta city of Camrose, I sat at a table signing books and listening to feedback from members of the audience.
A woman approached; with her British accent she offered her take on the subject of my evening talk, the Battle of Britain. She was a child in London during the Blitz in the summer of 1940, when she said her father had served in the London fire brigade fighting fires German bombers ignited each night.
“When he came home in the morning after fighting fires all night, I remember his face was completely black with soot,” she said, then drawing imaginary circles around her eyes, “except the white around his eyes where he’d warn protective goggles.” (more…)
Fire watchers had tools, but during the Battle of Britain their greatest weapon was courage.
I’ve flown into Heathrow, the city of London’s major civilian airport, dozens of times – seeing a sky full of jetliners lined up to land at Europe’s largest commercial airport. But not until I met Torontonian Dorothy Firth, who lived there during the Second World War, had I ever imagined what the skies over that city might have looked like during a period known as “the Blitz.”
“It was always a nasty sound and a horrible feeling when the air-raid sirens went off,” she told me when I met her a few years ago, “because you never knew how fast the German (bombers) were coming.” (more…)
You know how you sometimes rundown a mental checklist on your way to work or play? Have I called so-and-so? Have I got all my ducks in order?
This week, on my way from Halifax Airport to deliver an audio-visual presentation at a bookstore in LaHave, Nova Scotia, I suddenly wondered if I’d asked the bookstore proprietor to supply a digital projector for my talk.
“No,” said the LaHave bookstore owner. “We don’t have one.” (more…)
Barry Penhale & Jane Gibson receive lifetime achievement award from Ontario Historical Society. 2019.
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.” (more…)
Ontario’s premier wants to replicate Boston’s “Big Dig” under Hwy 401
Among our Thanksgiving traditions, particularly when we invite guests to our gatherings over Turkey dinner, our family usually engages in “What if?” talk. Often the Q&As reveal attitudes among family members we didn’t know. Other times, it’s a chance for guests to tell us about themselves and stimulate conversation. Over Monday’s turkey dinner, my granddaughter hit me with this question:
“Twenty years from now, what looming event do you think you’ll have difficulty explaining?”
I thought long and hard about challenges we’re all facing today – democracy threatened by the race for the presidency in the United States, global preparedness for the next pandemic, pushing back xenophobia in Canadian society, ensuring career opportunities are there for our grandchildren and their children.
But I guess, if I’m still around in 2044, I’ll probably find it difficult to rationalize how western civilization, with as much access to information as any society in modern history, didn’t recognize and rise to the challenge of slowing climate change.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to rationalize our incompetency,” I told my granddaughter “for failing to save the planet from greenhouse gases.” (more…)
