The education of Ted Barris

Written by Ted Barris on July 14th, 2022July 11th, 2022. 1 Comment

Canada’s 10th Father of Confederation, Joseph R. Smallwood. Historica.

He was the only source I’ve ever interviewed who intimidated me. And it wasn’t his personality or his manner that scared me. In fact, he proved to be among the most gracious, easy-going people I’ve ever interviewed. We met over the telephone back in the winter of 1976, and I began our conversation very formally, addressing him as “Mister.” And he immediately broke the ice with his first response.

“Please. Call me Joey,” he said. “Everybody does.”

“Thank you, Joey,” I responded, and I began my first and only interview with a Father of Confederation, the then recently retired premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, Joseph R. Smallwood. (more…)

Flying emblems for good and evil

Written by Ted Barris on June 28th, 2022June 26th, 2022. Leave a comment

A few weeks after the storm, amid our yard debris, I found the tattered remains of the Canadian flag that had hung over the entrance to our house for a number of years. The state of the cloth – shredded and torn by the fury of the storm – inspired me to buy a new Red Maple Leaf (albeit a smaller one than usual) and hang it outside our home. One of my neighbours noticed that the replacement flag looked a bit different.

“Your other one was a lot bigger,” he pointed out. “Why a smaller Maple Leaf?”

I shrugged and said, “For the moment, that was the only size I could find.” But what I didn’t say to my neighbour at the time was that these days I’m a bit conflicted about displaying national emblems, and in particular the Canadian flag in anything that looks like a grandiose statement. (more…)

Tony Mellaci – first responder for two generations

Written by Ted Barris on June 20th, 2022June 20th, 2022. Leave a comment

Sergeant medic Tony Mellaci overseas 1945.

He saved my father. Then, he saved me. In fact, he saved both of us multiple times. The first instance occurred 80 years ago this December. Just before Christmas of 1942, both Tony Mellaci and my father, Alex Barris, arrived at Camp Phillips – a U.S. Army training facility in Kansas. The army had posted them there to train as medics in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. Then, something happened Christmas Eve.

“They told me to go to the headquarters barracks and pick up a soldier who was sick, and deliver him to the hospital. So, I and another ambulance driver picked up your father (although I didn’t know him at the time) and we took him to the hospital,” Mellaci told me. “But we never saw the sick soldier. We stayed in the cab while other medics loaded him into the ambulance.” (more…)

Only as strong as the weakest link

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

Tool hooks salvaged from May 21 tornado that hit Uxbridge.

In our quest for some normalcy around the house, my wife and I are still trying to sort and reorganize stuff after the windstorm on May 21. As a consequence, our back porch (whose screened-in space we normally enjoy on summer evenings) has become a repository for salvage from the garage, tool shed and dishevelled yard. The other day, for example, I came across a bunch of short 2X4s with tool holders attached. They’d bounced loose when the garage was crushed. So, I began prying the holders from the wood.

“If I salvage the tool holders now, I won’t have to track them down when we restore the garage at some point,” I thought. “Who knows whether they’ll even be available down the road?” (more…)

Steps to recovery

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

What is now wreckage was once a garage of tools, nuts and bolts and sports gear.

It’s funny what the eye never sees or what’s in plain sight, but not noticed. A week or so into the aftermath of the derecho – that’s now part of our weather history – I attempted some clean-up around our yard. A piece of chrome in the grass caught my eye. When I brushed off the dirt and shingle debris it’d been hidden under, I realized it was a tightly coiled spring. It was so clean and shiny, it could’ve come right out of a hardware store bin. Then (as I’ve found myself doing a lot the last couple of weeks) I put the spring in my pocket and asked myself:

“Where did that come from?”

I don’t think I’m alone when I suggest Uxbridge residents have experienced scenes like those we’ve watched for years on CNN of Americans in tornado alley sifting through the debris of their decimated homes after the twister went through. They were trying to salvage something of what was, a morsel of the normalcy from just hours before. (more…)

A new D-Day story 78 years after June 6, 1944

Written by Ted Barris on June 6th, 2022June 7th, 2022. Leave a comment

D-Day: 78 Years After His Father Endured a Nazi Attack, a Canadian Man Travelled to France to Retrieve Remnants of His Harrowing Survival

Ted Barris | June 6th, 2022

Cobby Engelberg training in Canada as a wireless radio/air gunner (WAG) in 1943 at approximately age 23. A year later he survived a Nazi attack and plane crash during the D-Day invasions — the story of which his son has been tracing for decades. Photo: Courtesy of Harvey Engelberg

The mere mention of “June 6” triggers images of Allied troops storming the iconic beaches of Normandy during D-Day, the greatest invasion gamble of the Second World War. And with all those years of research, analysis and interviewing of the battle’s veterans since 1944, it seems impossible that any stories remain unfound or untold. Freelance contributor and military historian Ted Barris contends there will always be new D-Day stories unearthed — such as this one, in which a son is gifted physical remnants of his father’s harrowing survival following a Nazi attack.

One day in April, almost 78 years to the anniversary of D-Day, at a farm kitchen table in Basseneville, France, Harvey Engelberg came face-to-face with his father’s June 6, 1944, war story. There, on a red-and-white plaid tablecloth, Thérèse Férey and her husband Ghyslaine opened a towel to reveal 42 pieces of wartime-era aluminum. The Féreys had recently salvaged the Second World War artifacts from a forgotten corner of their farm. The jagged bits were all that remained of a DC-3 transport aircraft that had carried RCAF wireless radio operator Cobby Engelberg and a plane-full of paratroops into the middle of the greatest amphibious invasion in military history — Operation Overlord.

“Here,” Madame Férey said to Engelberg, now 69, at that first-ever meeting of the two. “We found these, but they belong to you.”

(more…)

Where have all our sentries gone?

Written by Ted Barris on June 2nd, 2022June 2nd, 2022. Leave a comment

Spruces, pines, basswoods and maples were Ronnie’s sentry trees on our street.

I remember a sultry afternoon in the 1990s, a few years after my wife and I and our two daughters had arrived and put down roots here in Uxbridge. I was sitting on our neighbour’s porch. The July sunshine beat down on Balsam Street North with all the intensity of a mid-summer heat wave. My neighbour, Ronnie Egan, had invited me to sit for a few minutes’ rest from cutting grass. We were both enjoying the shady respite, when she pointed to the Manitoba maple trees that deflected the intense rays of the afternoon sun from both her house and mine.

“Sentries,” she said. “They’re like sentries up and down our street.”

I noted her military terminology referring to the trees – she being a Second World War veteran of the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service – and wondered why she’d chosen that word to describe the mature trees along our street. (more…)

Not quite Oz

Written by Ted Barris on May 24th, 2022May 27th, 2022. Leave a comment

Victoria Day weekend storm came right up my street in Uxbridge.

About midday on Sunday, nearly 24 hours after the storm that hit south-central Ontario, a cluster of people came walking down Balsam Street North toward us. My wife and I were piling a wall of tree debris in front of our home. We must’ve looked like zombies dragging branches and brush to and fro. We suddenly realized the cluster of people was our three grandsons, our daughter and son-in-law from a few blocks away in Uxbridge. My grandson ran up and embraced me.

“Just wanted to hug you,” he said.

“Me too,” I said and for the first time in hours I felt human again. (more…)

Peek-a-boo election campaign

Written by Ted Barris on May 18th, 2022May 18th, 2022. 1 Comment

More election signs in front of the arena than candidates inside at the forum.

At about 6 o’clock, last Wednesday night, my Cosmos editorial cohabitant, Roger Varley, and I arrived at the Uxbridge arena and began setting up chairs. It was the night of the election debate that the newspaper had organized. And, as usual, it was an all-hands-on-deck effort. By about 6:30, Roger and I had pulled about 50 or 60 seats from the storage closet out onto the floor. We paused a moment, each scanning the arrangement as if to say:

“Do you think that’s enough? How many people do you think will show up?”

During most federal, provincial and municipal elections over the past 20 years or so, our all-candidates forums here in town, have indeed reflected the title. All the candidates (and sometimes more than we expected) have arrived and joined the discussions. (more…)

A stage without Kenneth…

Written by Ted Barris on May 8th, 2022May 8th, 2022. 1 Comment

The look Ken Welsh often brought to his December readings of *A Child’s Christmas in Wales*. Photo – Charlotte Hale.

I can think of all kinds of memorable spoken quotations. Winston Churchill’s wartime proclamation, “We will fight them on the beaches…” Oprah Winfrey’s motto, “Think like a queen.” Danny Gallivan’s “Savardian Spin-o-rama” on Hockey Night in Canada. Not only are the words etched in my memory, so are their voices. But there’s another memorable voice I’ve always heard around Christmastime offering these memorable words:

“I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was 12, or whether it snowed for 12 days and 12 nights when I was six.” Of course, those are words of Dylan Thomas, from the opening of A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

But I have only ever heard one voice associated with those lines, that of Kenneth Welsh. (more…)