Completely intact and with old cement attached, this Coca-Cola bottle emerged from the dust of another era of renovation.
It surfaced a few months ago. We found it along an old, stone foundation during some renovations at our house (built in the 1920s). And while this piece of history wasn’t nearly as old as the house, it dated back nearly that far. It was an empty Coca-Cola bottle. You know, those short, stubby ones, sometimes made of blue-green glass, but more often clear – the ones that were a perfect fit in your hand. Our artefact came from an era when the Coke slogan (c. 1938) was: “The best friend thirst ever had.”
Jeff and Tony pass the walls of the Menin Gate in Ypres, where the "missing" Commonwealth soldiers of the Great War are remembered every night.
About three days into the tour, I saw the two of them walking and talking. Tony and Jeff Peck were pausing to look up at a wall of inscriptions. There in front of them the names of some 54,896 Commonwealth soldiers, for whom there are no known remains, lay chiselled in the stone. They are the so-called “missing” from the Great War. A couple of days later, father Tony watched son Jeff participate in the famous Last Post Ceremony under the same barrel-vaulted archway known as the Menin Gate.
“They shall grow not old, as we who are left grow old,” Jeff recited to the hundreds watching in silence. “Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.”
Students from Uxbridge Secondary School display their Vimy 95th anniversary banner at precisely the spot where Canadian troops made first contact with German soldiers on the morning of April 9, 1917.
It had rained all day. The sun had tried to poke some light through the low-lying clouds and mist of the ridge. But the strong westerly wind – that seemed to cut right through you – quickly erased every attempt. It was not a day to be outside. And yet, people came by the thousand. In particular, the young Canadians – about 5,000 high school students – paraded with banners, cheers and a resolve that was characteristic of their forefathers. One of their teachers summed up the scene.
“They’re wet and chilled to the bone,” she said. “But they realize it’s not right to complain. They’ll get through it.”
Tree cutters arrive to bring down the maple on Balsam Street.
About a week ago, a friend up the street visited my next-door neighbour on a mission. With his pickup truck empty, save for his chainsaw and a can of gas, He began a day-long project dissecting the remains of a piece of history. A maple tree that had stood near the street at the corner of Ronnie Egan’s property for nearly a century had dropped too many dead or dying upper limbs to be safe anymore. So the township decided for the benefit of all concerned that the tree should come down.
“I cried the day they took it down,” Ronnie Egan admitted to me. “It was very sad to see it go.”
TWUC authors (l-r) Greg Hollingshead and Susan Swan as well as library rep Michael Smith hold high the books they treasure at the reference library demo on Sunday.
Towards the end of last Sunday’s Books ‘n’ Brunch event, staged by Shelley Macbeth and her Blue Heron Books staff, I turned to the audience. I had been interviewing successful crime writer, Giles Blunt, author of six books featuring fictitious Canadian detective John Cardinal. Having asked all my questions, I invited some from the audience. One of the first questions came from a librarian from Sandford. The second came from a former librarian in town. It occurred to me that in a room of about hundred avid readers, a goodly number of those in attendance had served in the libraries of local schools and branches of our public library.
When author Blunt later commented on the quality of the audience’s questions, I pointed out how arts focused and well read this community is.
“We’ve got something like 25 or 30 book clubs here,” I told him. “And it’s probably no surprise that at the heart of those clubs are current or former librarians.”
Hap Harris on his Wings (Graduation) Day in August 1943. Photo courtesy Harris family.
Following a recent oldtimers’ hockey game at the arena Sunday night, my teammates and I made our way to the dressing room. The difference this night, however, was that we had won our game. For the first time in our Uxbridge Adult Hockey round-robin playoff, we had won – our first victory in four tries. We were all feeling pretty upbeat as we piled into the dressing room, where a teammate next to me suggested why we had won.
“We can thank Flying Officer Harris for this one,” he said.
When I met CBC Commissionaire Don Nelson, I had no idea he had been a commando (much like these Canadian troops) during the Korean War.
The first time I went to the local chiropractor’s office, I arrived early and got caught up on some National Geographic stories. Then it was time for my session and I prepared myself with excuses. I expected a barrage of questions, such as, how long had my shoulder been bothering me, what previous treatment had I undergone, and why had I waited so long to deal with it. But that wasn’t the first thing Dr. Peter Begg asked me.
“Where did you get all your research for that Vimy book of yours?” he said.
Canadian troops in Afghanistan had to deal with the climate, the combat and the loss. Photo by Stefano Rellandini.
I had a chance encounter with a member of the Wounded Warriors the other night. I had just completed a presentation about the battle at Vimy Ridge at the Whitby Public Library. On our way out of the library, he gave me an update on plans the group has to take about 30 younger Canadian vets on a bicycle tour of Normandy later this spring. (By the way, they’re doing it entirely on private donations. No government funding.) He recounted a recent exchange between his group and a Veterans Affairs Canada committee reviewing the needs Canada’s latest vets – those returning from Afghanistan. He was encouraging greater support for vets with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Give them time,” the VAC rep apparently said. “They’ll get over it.”
Theodore Kontozoglus, my grandfather, doing what he would have considered man’s work on our the family farm in 1967.
It happened after dinner one night, many years ago. At the time, I think I was in my teens. My grandfather, who only spent part of the year visiting us, got up from the dining room table and invited my father and me into another room for a chat. He felt it was time for one of those man-to-man moments exclusive of the women – his wife (my grandmother), my mother and my sister. I promised I would be along shortly, but then added something that caught him off guard.
“I’m going to help clean up the dirty dishes first,” I said.
He gave the dishes and the table a condescending gesture with the back of his hand. Then he scolded me. “No. No,” he said. “That’s women’s work.”
As apparently improbable as Truman defeating Dewey in the 1948 U.S. presidential race, was the realization that 80 million children would be born between 1946 and 1964.
It was the month that the longest serving Prime Minister – not just in Canada, but across the British Commonwealth – Mackenzie King retired after 21 years of service. The Communists officially took over East Berlin; the Wall soon followed. Democrat Harry Truman confounded the political pundits by defeating Republican Thomas E. Dewey and became president of the United States. For the first time TV cameras captured a production (of “Othello”) on the Metropolitan Opera stage in New York.
Oh yes, and sometime during November 1948, I was conceived.
