Distinctive, pride-inspiring, the Hockey Canada logo is now tarnished.
It displays our national colours – red and white. It depicts our official winter game – the game we invented and generally dominate at both the women’s and men’s elite level of play. It has always captured a sense of nation, sport and community. And even though I’ve never had the privilege of wearing it in any official capacity, I always feel an overwhelming sense of pride whenever I see it.
“It’s as familiar a sight to Canadian hockey fans as Marie-Philip Poulin coming through in the clutch and Jonathan Toews wearing a gold medal around his neck,” says the Hockey Canada website. “A skater seemingly breaking through the maple leaf while wearing the national symbol.” (more…)
Road signs do more than help travellers find their way – they can be a fire lifeline.
I escaped to a remote Ontario lake for some R&R last week. And as a guest at a wilderness property, I tuned in to what Ontarians at their cottages on holiday have on their minds. I figured they’d probably be talking about how many days it’s rained or encounters with bears at garbage dumps or the cost of gas just to get there and back. One night my hosts invited over a couple of their friends and I learned just what is top-of-mind in cottage country.
“You know the Smith’s Bay Road sign on the main highway’s been gone quite a while,” their woman guest said. “That means fire crews won’t know where to find us.”
A few seconds of silence followed as her timely concern sank in.
“I think we ought to get the ministry (of natural resources) to replace that sign quickly,” she added. (more…)
For broadcaster Dave Fisher, the real work happened before he opened a mike..
You know that little trick radio disc jockeys use when they’re introducing a song on the air? It’s the ability to talk over the instrumental lead-in, and finish the intro just before the singer sings the first lyric. It was the trademark of all the best DJs on private Top-40 radio stations we listened to back in the 1960s and ’70s.
I learned how to do that – make a live, smooth-as-glass intro end just before the vocalist begins to sing – from a contemporary of mine in broadcasting, friend Dave Fisher. Let me tell you, it’s a lot harder to accomplish than you think. But I learned from Dave, if you prepare your program – I mean really prepare – then you can make broadcasting sound seamless, professional and natural. (more…)
Friday afternoons in the mid-1960s had a special rhythm for me. While most of my high-school pals gathered in the corridors to plot their party plans for the weekend, I left class early to catch the Sheppard Avenue bus west from Agincourt. With my trumpet case in hand, about 5 o’clock I caught the southbound Yonge Street bus, then the subway from Eglinton to Bloor. And then I walked west on Yorkville Avenue into what everybody called “the Village.” There, just before Avenue Road, I climbed up a back-alley fire-scape staircase to a third-floor rehearsal studio.
“Hi, Donny,” I’d call out to my trumpet teacher Don Johnson.
“Come on in and warm up that horn,” he’d tell me.
It took me a few visits in 1965 to discover I had climbed to the top of a Yorkville landmark, and an even more important music mecca. (more…)
In the 20th century’s greatest war, one battlefield held the key to victory or defeat – the North Atlantic. It took 2,074 days and nights to determine its outcome, but the Battle of the Atlantic proved the turning point of the Second World War.
This September, HarperCollins publishes Ted Barris’s 20th book – Battle of the Atlantic: Gauntlet to Victory.
Check Ted’s “Events” page to learn when and where he will bring his powerful talk/presentations to an event near you.
For five and a half years, German surface warships and submarines attempted to destroy Allied transatlantic convoys, mostly escorted by Royal Canadian Navy destroyers and corvettes, as well as aircraft of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Throwing deadly U-boat ‘wolf packs’ in the paths of Merchant Navy convoys, the German Kriegsmarine nearly strangled this vital life-line to a beleaguered Great Britain.
In 1939, Canada’s navy went to war with exactly 13 warships and about 3,500 sailors. During the desperate Atlantic crossings, the RCN grew to 400 fighting ships and over 100,000 men and women in uniform. By V-E Day in 1945, it had become the 4th largest navy in the world. The Battle of the Atlantic proved to be Canada’s longest continuous military engagement of the war. The story of Canada’s naval awakening in the bloody battle to get convoys to Britain, is a Canadian wartime saga for the ages.
Photo Sinisa Jolic / CBC Licensing
Ted Barris has published 19 non-fiction books, half of them wartime histories. His book The Great Escape: A Canadian Story won the 2014 Libris Award as Best Non-Fiction Book in Canada. His book Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid Against Nazi Germany received the 2019 NORAD Trophy from the RCAF Association. And his book Rush to Danger: Medics in the Line of Fire was listed for the 2020 Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction in Canada. Battle of the Atlantic: Gauntlet to Victory is Ted’s 20th published non-fiction book
Advance praise for Battle of the Atlantic…
“Ted Barris has a reverence for the stories of veterans. Barris’s work is hallmarked by thorough research and respect for the people whose stories he retells. This book serves to put faces and emotions on the facts and dates of the Battle of the Atlantic, the longest campaign of the Second World War. The battle was waged for nearly six years—2,074 days. In human terms, that period represents five North Atlantic winters, thousands of bleak dawns, thousands of days and nights of vigilance despite desperate fatigue, thousands of days and nights during which death might arrive unheralded. This book effectively, reverentially, and thoroughly records and passes on that story.”— Gordon Laco, RCN (Ret’d), from the Foreword to Battleof the Atlantic
“This is not the story of a few days of battle—like Vimy or D-Day. This story lasts six years. This book covers an awful lot of what we experienced. It’s detailed. And I discovered so much. I’ve read a lot of books on the Battle of the Atlantic. This is a good one!”— Norman Goodspeed, Second World War RCN (Ret’d),HMCS Saguenay
“Ted Barris puts a human face to a Goliath of a subject. Battle of the Atlantic lures you in, paying homage to the men and women who risked their lives in this epic battle. Barris effortlessly weaves a gripping narrative that provides a multitude of historical perspectives. It brings you right into the action and keeps you on edge. Essential reading for anyone wanting to gain an understanding of the war waged in the Atlantic.”— Sean E. Livingston, RCN and author
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…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
