Barris Beat Archives • Page 11 of 87 • Ted Barris

When Canada’s sovereignty was young

Written by Ted Barris on April 6th, 2023April 6th, 2023. Leave a comment

Seventeen years ago, a number of Canadian and American scientists set off on a unique voyage – sailing the Bellot Strait, a narrow channel in the Arctic Ocean that separates the most northerly point of North American mainland from Somerset Island in Canada’s Far North.

For the first time in history their vessel crossed the strait in October (when typically it would be frozen). One of the scientists on the trip in 2006 noted that Canadian Coast Guard officials aboard the ship all had the same reaction.

“They were collectively terrified,” explained Michael Byers then director of the Liu Institute for Global Issues at UBC. Terrified that the strait was entirely ice-free during the voyage, and therefore open to passage. (more…)

Wonders need a Canadian update

Written by Ted Barris on March 30th, 2023March 27th, 2023. Leave a comment

Locomotives crossed the Koksilah River gorge atop the Kinsol Trestle for 60 years.

Nobody told him to go looking for a wonder of the modern world. But about 30 years ago, when he moved from Calgary to Vancouver Island, model-train buff Ken Ortwein kept hearing about an architectural treasure not far from where he now lived.

He took his son and grandsons up the island on the Trans-Canada Highway, then into the remote Cowichan Valley. There, across a deep river gorge near Shawnigan Lake, he saw the Kinsol Trestle for the first time.

“I fell in love with the crazy thing,” he told a local news reporter. Then, as he noted in his diary, “I thought I ought to build a scale model of it. And so, it began.” (more…)

Canada’s nuclear legacy

Written by Ted Barris on March 20th, 2023March 21st, 2023. 2 Comments

The archivist at the museum had no idea it was there. In fact, when Jean-Phillippe Stienne applied for and landed the job as new archivist and collections manager of the museum, archives and art gallery in Nelson, B.C., back in 2017, he knew nothing about the explosive history buried beneath his new office.

“I came here because it’s a beautiful part of the world,” Steinne, 43, told me during a speaking stop I made in British Columbia last week. “I’d actually been working here a few years before I knew about the mystery under the museum.”

When I asked what he was talking about, Stienne, or “J.P.” as everybody calls him, walked me out the front door of his museum (formerly the Nelson post office) and down a back alley to an adjacent building. He unlocked an exterior door, which revealed an inner door with a thick circular porthole window and a black-lettered sign that read, “Nelson’s Cold War Bunker.” (more…)

Retail life cycle

Written by Ted Barris on March 15th, 2023March 15th, 2023. Leave a comment

Dominion Dry Goods served Uxbridge for 42 years until this “goingout of business” sale in 1961.

One day last summer, I shared a walk with several of my grandsons. They wondered about an empty storefront on Toronto Street. “What did it used to be?” they asked.

“Ballinger’s store used to be there,” I told them. “You could buy clothes and shoes and all sorts of dry goods there,” I said.

“What’s dry goods?” one of them asked.

“Just about everything you’d ever want to buy that’s not food,” I said.

“You mean like on the internet?”

Well, you can imagine where the conversation went after that. (more…)

Drinking, more or less

Written by Ted Barris on March 9th, 2023March 7th, 2023. Leave a comment

My wife queued up at the grocery store the other day, she told me. The cashier began tallying her purchases, but then hesitated. She said she wasn’t qualified to process the purchase of beer and had to call on another cashier qualified to check through beer and wine.

“Does it matter that the beer is zero alcohol?” my wife asked.

“Oh, I see,” the cashier said.

And the person next in line at the cash behind my wife piped up, “Mine are zero-alcohol too,” he said.

Is it just our imagination, or has all this talk about the link between alcohol and cancer sparked a sea change in the habits of casual drinkers? (more…)

Trivial Tuesday

Written by Ted Barris on March 2nd, 2023March 1st, 2023. Leave a comment

The room started off sounding pretty rowdy. Many of the regulars had arrived – including Team SMRT, the 74s, Upper Mondolia, the Whatevers and Jan’s Clan – and they’d all begun settling in for Tuesday night’s festivities. A voice on the microphone welcomed everybody to the weekly gathering. And the room went quiet, everybody listening to what the MC was about to say. She paused and read:

“Question No. 1,” she announced. “What fictional doctor lives in Puddleby-on-the-Marsh?” (more…)

Rhythm of responsibility

Written by Ted Barris on February 23rd, 2023February 24th, 2023. Leave a comment

Number of abandoned pets found in parks is up threefold. Photo – Animal Rescue

The first time she went missing, the rest of the family nearly went crazy with anxiety. We searched in neighbouring yards, down the block, around most of the village. We were beside ourselves with guilt and worry that we’d never get her back. We even put up signs:

“She’s three. She’s friendly. She’s been missing for several days,” our handmade poster proclaimed. “She answers to Topsy.”

She was my family’s first real household pet, a three-year-old collie, the spitting image of TV’s Lassie. And because we knew everybody around us felt the same way about their family pets, we figured she’d be returned to us really quickly. But that was the early 1960s. (more…)

The balloon menace

Written by Ted Barris on February 16th, 2023February 16th, 2023. Leave a comment

Anita Anand, minister of national defence, addresses 204th Toronto Garrison Officers’ Ball on Feb. 11, 2023.

The evening was all about military pomp and circumstance. Hundreds of Canadian Armed Services personnel had gathered last Saturday night at the Beanfield Centre on the CNE grounds for Toronto’s premier social event in the military community. I actually landed a ticket and was seated at a table of Navy regulars and reservists. The 204th edition of the Garrison Officers’ Ball was well underway, when the Minister of National Defence arrived in time to address guests at the ball.

“I have important news to share with you,” Anita Anand said. “Today at 3:41 p.m. aircraft assigned to NORAD successfully took down (a) high-altitude airborne object. The object, flying at an altitude of 40,000 feet, had unlawfully entered Canadian air space and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight.” (more…)

The art and chemistry of survival

Written by Ted Barris on February 8th, 2023February 8th, 2023. Leave a comment

Ron Moyes (left end) crewed up with Hugh Ferguson, Don Walkey, Stu Farmer, Alvin Kuhl and Jake Redinger in 1944. They survived 29 combat operations in Bomber Command.

It happened kind of like choosing a partner at a high school dance, where the girls all lined up on one side of the dance floor and the boys on the other.

Only in this case, during the Second World War, the Commonwealth airmen gathered in a hangar in England – pilots in one group, navigators in another, gunners in another, etc. As RCAF gunner Ron Moyes told me the other night, bomber pilot Don Walkey first picked a navigator, Hugh Ferguson.

“Then, Fergy picked the rest of us,” said Moyes, just shy of his 97th birthday (Feb. 11). (more…)

A winter tale of music lost and found

Written by Ted Barris on February 1st, 2023February 1st, 2023. Leave a comment

It happened sixty-four years ago tonight. Their tour, “the Winter Dance Party,” had just finished a show at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa. But several of the rock ’n’ roll performers were suffering under winter conditions on the road in the U.S. Midwest.

Singer J.P. Richardson, a.k.a. Big Bopper, had the flu. Drummer Carl Bunch had frostbite in his feet from travelling on a frigid tour bus for 10 days. Bass guitar player Waylon Jennings was suffering too. A long bus ride in the cold to Moorhead, Minn., lay ahead.

Waylon Jennings – back in 1959 a very fortunate sideman for Buddy Holly.

“Buddy (Holly) told me he had chartered a plane for me and him and (guitarist) Tommy Allsup,” Jennings said in a YouTube interview 10 years ago. “But the Big Bopper had the flu real bad. He asked if he could have my seat on the plane. I said OK.”

Meanwhile, Tommy Allsup and Ritchie Valens met backstage, Allsup explained. “And Ritchie said come on (Tommy), let me fly. So, I pulled a half-dollar coin out of my pocket and flipped it. He called ‘heads’ and it came up ‘heads.’” (more…)