Barris Beat Archives • Page 15 of 86 • Ted Barris

“Sprinter” in April

Written by Ted Barris on April 21st, 2022April 22nd, 2022. Leave a comment

Hopes for an early patio gathering in Manitoba disappeared under a spring snowstorm. CJRB Radio.

It’s my fault. I admit it. I changed my car tires over from winters to summers last week. And that’s why we got whacked by a snow storm on Monday night. I tempted fate – figuring that mid-April wasn’t too early to switch over – and I caused all this rotten winter weather three weeks into spring. Mind you, I did hear Ed Lawrence say on the radio this week that if one wants to be brave planting some hardy trees and bushes early, it’s OK.

“Go for it,” said Lawrence, the former Globe and Mail columnist and chief horticulturist to six governors-general and seven prime ministers. And he was speaking on CBC Radio’s Radio Noon program just as winds and sleet were blowing past both his Almonte, Ont., home and mine here in Uxbridge. (more…)

The case against hoarding history

Written by Ted Barris on April 13th, 2022April 13th, 2022. Leave a comment

RCAF wireless radio operator Cobby Engelberg, during training in Canada in WWII. Photo courtesy Harvey Engelberg.

His original itinerary involved a flight from Canada to Israel, but when Harvey Engelberg received a letter of inquiry from France, a few weeks ago, his plans changed. Thérèse Férey and her husband, current owners of a farm in Normandy, wondered if Harvey was related to one Cobby Engelberg, a Canadian airman shot down in the early hours of June 6, 1944.

When Harvey explained that Cobby was his father, he changed his flight plans to include a side trip to Normandy.

“I own a farm in Bassenville,” Mme Férey wrote in her letter, “and we’ve found pieces of (your father’s) plane that crashed on our property. Would you like them?” (more…)

When atrocity prompts profanity

Written by Ted Barris on April 7th, 2022April 5th, 2022. Leave a comment

Civilian casualties in Ukraine. The Guardian.

For the past week, those of us trying to find words for the horrors of the Russian invasion of Ukraine have learned depravity has no end. First the invaders bombed apartment buildings and theatres indiscriminately. Then, they fired missiles specifically targeting civilian hospitals and schools.

Now Human Rights Watch has reported accounts of Russian occupiers raping women. Maria Mezentseva, an MP in Ukraine, reported one such case.

“There is one … scene when a civilian was shot dead in his house,” she told The Guardian, in the U.K. “His wife was raped several times in front of her underage child.” Added another Ukrainian MP, Lesia Vasylenko, “Most of these women have either been executed after the crime of rape, or they have taken their own lives.” (more…)

What half the world is missing

Written by Ted Barris on March 30th, 2022March 30th, 2022. Leave a comment

Physicist Chien-Shiung Wu (right) at Berkley in WWII.

One morning last week, our daughter called and asked if I would drive our granddaughter to high school. I eagerly took on the taxi duty, if only to help share the load of ferrying kids to school, but mostly for the chance to catch up with our granddaughter. During the trip to school that morning, I learned that she was enjoying her drama, phys ed and French classes. But our granddaughter’s favourite subject was science.

“I did an essay on Chien-Shiung Wu,” she said, “and got 100 per cent.”

“I’ve never heard of her,” I admitted.

“She was known as the ‘first lady of physics,’” she said proudly. (more…)

Identity lost and found

Written by Ted Barris on March 26th, 2022March 26th, 2022. 1 Comment

Last Sunday, about 1 o’clock in the afternoon, I disappeared. I wasn’t hiding. I wasn’t trying to escape. In fact, I’d just returned home from a getaway-weekend hockey tournament in Bancroft – an annual event my oldtimers teammates and I enjoy.

As I arrived home, however, I felt my pocket, noticed my wallet was missing. I began retracing my steps. One of my hockey buddies and I had stopped for coffee. I’d paid the cashier, picked up the coffee cups and pastry and promptly forgot my wallet at the cash.

“Did anybody turn in a wallet left on the counter?” I asked an employee over the phone.

“Not that I know of,” she said.

I asked her to check with a supervisor or manager. But the answer was the same. Nothing in the lost-and-found. Nothing on the counter, the floor, anywhere. The wallet I’d absentmindedly left behind was gone. (more…)

A new assault up Juno Beach

Written by Ted Barris on March 15th, 2022March 16th, 2022. Leave a comment

Cpl Fred Barnard of the Queen’s Own Rifles.

It’s just 20 years ago I learned about the toughest battle of Fred Barnard’s life. On a spring morning in 1944, our Uxbridge neighbour (then just 22) found himself on a landing craft with the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada about to storm the Normandy beach codenamed Juno. He had no family in France that needed saving. He knew none of the German soldiers occupying those Norman towns and seaports.

Rifleman Don Barnard of the Queen’s Own Rifles.

Still, he’d felt so compelled by the call for Canadians to help liberate the French from Nazi occupation that he and his brother Don travelled halfway around the globe to join the D-Day invasion on June 6.

“Give ’em hell,” Fred had yelled to his 20-year-old brother on the same landing craft.

Then, moments later, as he dashed for cover, among the first Canadians to penetrate Hitler’s Fortress Europe, Fred faced a horrific dilemma. There, in the sea water not yet ashore, he saw his brother with a bullet hole in his chest – dead before he’d even reached the sea wall. (more…)

Not yet perished

Written by Ted Barris on March 9th, 2022March 9th, 2022. Leave a comment

Canadian immigration officials called them “men in sheepskin coats,” but Ukrainian immigrants brought with them something greater than dreams.

The other day I spoke to a west-Toronto business group, but I learned as much as I informed that morning. Not surprisingly, during my talk about Canadians’ service in wartime, the subject of the Russian invasion of Ukraine came up. I remarked how very familiar Putin’s actions were to Hitler’s in the 1930s. Anyway, after my talk, a man from the audience approached me. He introduced himself. “Bo Sirota,” he said.

“Sounds Ukrainian,” I responded. And when he asked how I knew, I said I’d lived and worked in Alberta and Saskatchewan for a number of years and I knew a Ukrainian Canadian named Bohan. “Do you have family caught in the invasion?” I asked.

He nodded and described some of his relatives living in the village of Drohobych, on the outskirts of Lviv, Ukraine. (more…)

Resolve against a bully

Written by Ted Barris on March 1st, 2022March 2nd, 2022. 1 Comment

When I was in Grade 3, back in the mid-1950s, an older and belligerent kid chose me as his victim in the schoolyard one day. He picked on me because I wore glasses. He knew I had just arrived in the neighbourhood, so he teased me for being the new boy. He taunted me because he knew I didn’t have any friends to turn to. He made fun of my name.

“Hey, Teddy Bear,” he kept calling from across the yard.

Bad memories of that schoolyard experience returned to me last week when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his columns of tanks, trucks and soldiers charging across his western frontier into Ukraine. (more…)

Mind the gap

Written by Ted Barris on February 22nd, 2022February 22nd, 2022. Leave a comment

A Boston cream donut helps reveal what’s needed to return to normalcy.

It’s been a ritual for years. Generally, on Saturdays, I convene adults and kids in the family Donut Club. I rustle up the donuts. They readily eat them. And through most of those years, the orders for the kids have been the same – chocolate-glazed or sprinkled donuts from Bredin’s Bakery in town. Well, the pandemic and the closure of the bakery changed all that. The Donut Club hasn’t met as regularly as it used to. But last Saturday morning, I put out the call for the donut orders anyway.

“Boston Cream, please,” came back one order.

“Boston Cream? Since when?” I asked.

Well, because everything’s been turned upside down for these past two years. And the donut delivery guy (me) has been separated from the donut eaters (them) for quite a while. (more…)

Line in the sand

Written by Ted Barris on February 16th, 2022February 16th, 2022. Leave a comment

Carolyn Dunn felt the pressure of convoy demonstrators’ threats.

Until last weekend, I’d become kind of blasé to the words of protest and counter-protest. Every day, I’d read the latest on the demonstrations at Parliament Hill and the border crossings and winced at the deadlock and rhetoric. And, as I pointed out last week, I feared for wider freedom being trampled.

But a TV news story the other night stopped me in my tracks. Carolyn Dunn, CBC’s Alberta reporter, stood adjacent to flashing police cruiser lights, and parked semi-trailer trucks near Coutts, Alta., reporting but also looking over her shoulder anxiously.

Some Freedom Convoy truckers at Coutts, Alta., putting limits on freedom with their taunts.

“Things remain tense for citizens and the media,” Dunn said in her report. She went on to say that some of the demonstrators had directed abusive language at her and other reporters. In other words, in a weirdly Trumpian way, media not just mandates, had become the enemy. And Dunn said she felt uncomfortable having to hide who she was from strangers. “We’ve been told to be careful.” (more…)