Ted Barris • Page 58 of 103 • author

Why we teach

Written by Ted Barris on May 14th, 2014May 14th, 2014. Leave a comment

Each spring, when students graduate, those of us who teach get to share their sense of accomplishment.

It came out of the blue. I hadn’t really expected to hear from this former student ever again. But there she was, contacting me by email several years later. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. The college year is just about done (as are we the instructors at the college done in more ways than one). But her words made all the tough teaching moments of the year evaporate in an instant.

“I’m not sure if this will reach you,” she said. “I just wanted to say thank you for not giving up on me and giving me more determination than I could have imagined.”

Janet was one of those college students for whom nothing ever came easily. Whenever my colleagues at Centennial College and I asked Janet and some of her classmates to come up with story ideas, it often proved as difficult as teaching them to swim in deep water. Then, there was the problem of finding sources for her stories; nobody was ever available and none of the leads we offered seemed to yield the information she needed. In addition, there was always plenty of adolescent angst swirling around her as she battled to balance schoolwork with life.

And deadlines always loomed large for her; there was more than one occasion when just one more extension for delivery of the news story was one concession I wasn’t prepared to give and she wasn’t prepared to lose. As her editor, I found that Janet required attention and coaching nearly 24/7. But she eventually passed the course. She went on to enroll in yet another course in corporate communications and public relations and she eventually landed a permanent job in the public service sector.

That’s not to say that teaching young people is ever totally rosy. This past winter semester proved a trial for a lot of my fellow journalism instructors and their students. Many more students than I care to tabulate had psychological difficulties, including such illnesses as attention deficit, depression and even post-traumatic stress. A number of our students had to cope with oppressive home situations – perpetrated by a dominant parent, a troubled sibling or sometimes even an out-of-control roommate.

More and more these days, the problems of the home end up in the classroom and those of us who’ve emigrated from being journalists to teaching journalism are not always up-to-date on the latest effective techniques for dealing with student psychoses or trauma.

I guess my least favourite moment involved an undergraduate student (not Janet), studying both university level academics and journalism at the same time. She was struggling with a news story about a long-standing strike in Toronto. I had suggested to her, in order to deliver the perspectives of both management and labour in her story, that she ought to go to a corporate representative for the management view and then to walk the picket line to listen to average employees explain their side of the story.

“That seems like an awful lot of work,” she said.

“Journalism is often like that,” I said. “You wear out a lot of shoe leather trying to get close to the subjects of your story.”

“But I’m just here for the marks,” she said. “I don’t want to be a journalist. I want to go on to law school.”

I didn’t quite know how to answer that one. But if she was paying attention, the young woman must have sensed my frustration at trying to steer her in the right direction only to learn she was only studying journalism like a minor subject and really just wanted the quickest way out.

In truth, we teachers often complain among ourselves. But what helps those (who’ve been teaching many more years than I) come back to the front of the lecture hall or the classroom semester after semester, is the hope that among the freshmen in the class will be gems in the rough.

As some of you know, I’m a stickler for the proper use of language. Just ask my daughters or my writing students. Some call me a “CP Style fanatic.” All journalism in Canada begins with the “Canadian Press Stylebook” for proper spellings, grammatical forms, rules of punctuation, structure for quoting sources, methods of attributing interviewees and when to use abbreviations and when not. The smaller version of the 500-page CP Stylebook is a companion volume called “CP Caps and Spelling” for thumbnail references to all the correct English usage in Canadian journalism. For some, including my former student Janet, coping with the rigid rules of language was never easy. But as she concluded her email to me last week she paid me the ultimate compliment.

“I am now the content manager for (a large Canadian charity,)” she said. “Sitting on my desk … are my Stylebook and Caps and Spelling. I use (them) every day.”

Sometimes, it’s the small victories that mean the most.

Honouring a covenant

Written by Ted Barris on May 7th, 2014May 7th, 2014. 1 Comment

At 22, Tim Laidler didn’t have a worry in the world. As a reservist in the 2^nd Battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in 2008, he felt confident he could accomplish his eight-month commitment in Afghanistan – guarding supply convoys in Kandahar Province.

This particular day, however, Cpl. Laidler had been assigned an additional task, guarding the gate at Kandahar Airfield. A civilian ambulance approached. He opened its doors for a routine check and was suddenly faced by an Afghan girl of 16. She’d apparently been forced into an arranged marriage and felt her only way out was to set herself on fire, to be saved by the Canadians, or die by her own hand. She died.

“What had the global community come to, that a young girl had resorted to kill herself in front of me?” Laidler asked himself. “I suddenly felt myself disconnect. I felt myself die inside.”

Nearly 30 now and a survivor of post traumatic stress disorder, Laidler spoke to an audience of MPs, senators, active and retired soldiers, and a number of invited guests (myself included) on Tuesday. The 1st Annual Sam Sharpe Breakfast (exploring Veterans’ Mental Health and Wellness) was arranged by Durham MP Erin O’Toole and co-hosted by retired Gen. Romeo Dallaire, now a Canadian senator.

As MP O’Toole described it, the gathering over a breakfast in the Centre Block on Parliament Hill was designed to bring together key advocates trying to help Canadian veterans coping with operational stress injuries (OSI). O’Toole explained that he organized the event in honour of one of the original sufferers of PTSD.

Col. Sam Sharpe campaigned for, financed and led the 116th Bn to war in 1916.

“Col. Sam Sharpe was a Member of Parliament (for Ontario North) who served on the battlefields of the First World War,” O’Toole said last week in the Commons, “before returning to Canada where he took his life struggling with his mental injuries.”

Unlike Uxbridge’s own Col. Sharpe, Tim Laidler found help before harming himself. A former comrade-in-arms recommended he participate in the Veterans’ Transition Program, a research initiative at the University of British Columbia, connecting veterans with other veterans struggling with OSI. At first, Laidler said he resisted saying he didn’t need counsellors telling him what to do. But he learned to open up to his peers and that in turn opened up a brand new career.

“Otherwise,” he said, “I’d have gone off to a little corner of the country and disappeared.”

Laidler is now a Masters student at UBC as well as executive director of the resulting Veterans’ Transition Network. He explained that VTN all started with about a dozen guys in 1999, and has grown to about 400 volunteers whose goal is to launch similar programs across the country by 2015 allowing VTN to one day assist 150 veterans a year. Through his own story, Laidler emphasized that help had come from his community, from his buddies, from his family, but not from either the local or national offices of Veterans’ Affairs Canada.

Laudable for community, I thought, but not for the federal government or its civil service whose job is to help the veterans constituency. Indeed, VAC via the government’s current Veterans’ Charter has in some cases paid veterans lump sums to eliminate them from being a long-term drain on federal pension budgets.

Romeo Dallaire served in the United Nations mission to Rwanda in 1994.

Co-chairing the information breakfast with O’Toole this week, Senator Romeo Dallaire offered his own take on the growing PTSD problem. In 1994, Gen. Dallaire had commanded the United Nations assistance mission in Rwanda. The genocide he witnessed in the African nation became the subject of his 2003 non-fiction book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. The resulting PTSD had forced Dallaire’s release from the Canadian Forces in 2000, when he turned to lecturing and conducting research on conflict resolution.

During the Tuesday morning session, Dallaire lamented that despite the end of the Afghanistan operation last year, Canada “is still taking casualties. Not just the walking wounded,” he said, “but those taking their own lives.”

I asked Dallaire about the elephant in the room at Tuesday’s Sam Sharpe Breakfast. Why wasn’t the body most responsible for veterans’ welfare, Veterans’ Affairs Canada, present and accounted for at the breakfast?

“Canada’s veterans are an unlimited liability… and (caring for them) is a lifelong covenant,” he said.

“What about the Veterans’ Charter?” I asked. “Isn’t paying veterans lump sums instead of living up to that unlimited liability, cutting them out of the system, violating the covenant.”

“We can’t talk about the charter,” he rationalized. “It’s still before Parliament.”

It appears, nearly 100 years after the Ontario Regiment was decimated at Passchendaele, Belgium, sparking Col. Sam Sharpe to take his own life in 1918, that just like it was back in the Uxbridge colonel’s day, the fate of Canada’s veterans lies more in the hands of family, community and fellow soldiers than it does in Veterans’ Affairs Canada, the body most responsible to service that unlimited liability.

Spring in my step

Written by Ted Barris on May 1st, 2014May 7th, 2014. Leave a comment

In the year 2000, I joined my daughter on the annual Terry Fox Run.

They’re ba-ack! Over the past few weeks, I’ve watched masses of Canada geese – in giant Vs – winging their way north. I’ve seen a few muscle cars, out from under their custom-fitted winter blankets, taking to the streets. I’ve watched the local hardware stores erect their portable garden shops for the growing season ahead. I’ve watched a few pairs of shorts and bare legs – on both men and women – return to neighbourhood sidewalks. But that’s not the return I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the outdoor runners. They’re back and they’re everywhere.

The week the snow had retreated from the bike paths and walking trails… the day they felt they could safely expose their knees and calves and not suffer frostbite… the moment the pavement was dry enough, the runners were out in their Spandex, their ear buds and their blissful running trances. Of course, there were lots of the diehard year-round runners out there all winter, but I’m talking about the fair-weather runners, who can’t wait to parade their fitness regimen outside, huff and puff stylishly in the early spring air, and make sure the rest of the world takes notice and wonders why.

Well, some of the running is a desperate response to cabin fever. People with a penchant for exercise, suddenly feel they have to get out of the house at any cost. And sprinting to somewhere is as good an excuse as any. Runners appear more eager than most to fight off the effects of being cooped up for the winter. They run outside as a kind of statement of defiance, that spring has finally taken hold, that it’s time to escape the relative inactivity of the living room couch and lead the annual human migration back outdoors. I suspect that’s one of the reasons they stage the Boston Marathon early in the spring.

I spent the part of the weekend down in southwestern Ontario, where warmer temperatures tend to arrive first. There, I spotted plenty of shorts-clad runners along country roads near Woodstock, on the downtown streets of London, and deep into the bike paths that crisscross all of the Thames River Valley. In places they were fighting for space with bicyclists, motorcycle enthusiasts, and even automobile traffic. I visited my oldest friend (celebrating his 65th birthday) in London, and we talked about running this time of year.

“I lose myself when I run,” he said. “I focus on a spot ahead and I’m in the moment. Everything else kind of disappears.”

I can relate to that feeling from my days as a long-distance runner back at high school. Our brand of outdoor running happened in the fall for the cross-country championships and in the spring before track and field trials. When I ran my requisite three or four miles (I can still relate best to miles, despite over 40 years of trying to learn metric) per night, I lost myself in the run just like my friend. Especially in April, the early spring chill, the late winter cobwebs, and the pain of the day before, all went away the moment I began a spring distance run. Like goalies, runners “get into a zone.”

Take for example the case of half-marathoner Krista DuChene, last weekend, in Montreal. As she closed in on the final few klicks of the Montreal half-marathon, she suddenly felt a pain in her leg apparently much greater than lactic acid build up.

“One person in the crowd yelled out, ‘Crawl if you have to,’” she told the Toronto Star, “and in my mind I said, ‘You bet I will.’”

It turned out that a minor undisclosed fracture in her leg grew to a full fracture and she ran the last five kilometres of the race effectively on a broken leg. DuChene is the second fastest woman in Canada at the marathon distance. She’s preparing for the Commonwealth Games in 2014, the Pan-Am Games in 2015 and the Rio Olympics in 2016. And her time proved particularly speedy – one hour, 16 minutes and 37 seconds. But finishing the run on a broken leg wasn’t exactly the way she’d planned it.

I don’t think I could ever run through that kind of pain. But I can relate to it. The last time I competed in a long-distance competition, the regional championship run (about 1968) had us climbing a 30-degree hill right at the end of the race. As I began the stretch, I pushed and felt the pain in my chest and legs move outside me. I felt myself flying up the grade until I saw the finish line. I think I placed 67th in a field of 200 that day. To me it felt like winning the Olympic Marathon. I had beaten the hill, the clock and the elements. And suddenly having the outdoors in springtime … seemed reward enough.

Dangerous at any age

Written by Ted Barris on April 24th, 2014May 7th, 2014. Leave a comment

Seniors do not cause car accidents simply based on their age. — Prudent drivers come in all ages.

You can almost set your clock by it. The moment the latest story hits TV or the front pages of the daily newspapers about an elderly driver being involved a car crash, you can be sure the following day people on coffee row or at the gym will raise the subject. They’ll be indignant. They’ll blame the government for being too lax. But the thinking will be almost unanimous.

“Seniors are causing too many accidents,” they will insist. “People over 80 shouldn’t be on the roads.”

The case against older men and women getting behind the wheel of a car has grown in intensity in recent years. Small wonder. Each time a senior is involved in a car collision, it headlines the news. There was the recent case in Cooksville, Ont., where a 71-year-old man decided to make a left-hand turn by bypassing five vehicles waiting to turn and executed the turn from the middle of the intersection. The resulting crash killed his sister-in-law, her best friend and maimed him and his wife. A judge sentenced the crippled man to 10 months in jail.

A year or so ago, there was the incident in Winnipeg, where an 86-year-old driver pulled backwards out of a parking stall, but then continued in reverse the full length of the parking lot where he struck a child and ultimately came to a stop when his car hit a tree. The small girl survived, but the driver was charged.

And again the chorus screamed in unison for a ban on the elderly to drive. Well, in fact Manitoba is considering the implementation of stiffer restrictions or prohibitions much like those in Ontario. Currently, when a driver reaches age 80, according to the Government of Ontario site, s/he gets a letter and renewal form. The octogenarian then goes to a clinic for a vision test, an interactive group session about traffic laws, a complete screening exercise and a driving record review. Only then is the individual’s competency for driving determined. What’s important to remember, however, particularly in the case of the guy who made the illegal left-hand turn in Cooksville, is that he exhibited bad judgment; he didn’t screw up because he was 71.

“(The turn) is a marked departure from the standard expected of a prudent driver,” the Crown prosecutor said in court. “This manoeuvre, although brief, was highly dangerous.”

As a Manitoba publication pointed out recently, sometimes the danger posed by senior citizens behind the wheel comes from a deterioration of motor skills. In other words, it’s very likely age will cause eyesight to blur, reflexes to slow or one’s wits to become muddled. But any of those shortcomings can occur among young people too. Introduce the sense of invincibility or entitlement that the young often feel and the result can be speeding or drinking under the influence. Throw in a dash of smart phone addiction or the vanity that your “followers” can’t do without you before you park and you have equally dangerous distracted driving. When was the last time you saw a senior texting an LOL on the 401?

Sure, there is the potential for the invisible crippler – dementia – to hasten the need for an elderly driver or the family to take action. And statistics appear to be working against the elderly. In the past 20 years, the number of drivers over the age of 65 has doubled in Ontario, from 600,000 to 1.2 million. And at the same time the Alzheimer’s Society reports that half a million Canadians have dementia, with a new case reported every five minutes. In a generation, the babyboomer numbers will increase the frequency of to a new case every two minutes. All that doesn’t alarm Dr. Shawn Marshall at the Hospital Rehab Centre in Ottawa. The Toronto Star quoted Dr. Marshall’s “Candrive” study two years ago.

“The vast majority of older drivers are safe,” Marshall discovered in his research and he decried “crazy blanket comments (about seniors) that are ageist and unfair.”

I remember distinctly when my mother gave up her driver’s licence. Nobody told her she had to. Neither the police nor the DOT people came down on her with a legal ruling. Nor did her family apply any pressure. She simply recognized that her strength, her reflexes and her ability to see after dark were not what they used to be. She, like so many seniors who fear the loss of independence, but fear hurting someone even more, did the right thing. She decided to leave the car in the parking garage until a member of her family came along to help her get somewhere. Or she took the bus or a taxi.

One of the most powerful lobby groups representing seniors, the American Association of Retired Persons, recommends in-person licence renewals and screening that is not aged based.

“What determines your safety isn’t your age, but your ability,” AARP said.

Dollars and education sense

Written by Ted Barris on April 17th, 2014May 7th, 2014. Leave a comment

In the 1960s, CKLY Radio occupied an old house on the main drag of Lindsay, Ont.

That summer of 1969 came to an end for me with a flourish. I pulled out all my favourite LPs (record albums) from the CKLY Radio (Lindsay, Ont.) library to air that night of the finale. I assembled all the best recording star anecdotes that I could use with each of my choices of songs. I called all my friends who’d been listening to many of my all-night broadcasts from Victoria Day to Labour Day, through that summer, in hopes they would listen. And when 6 a.m. arrived and my final show of the summer came to an end, I signed off.

“That’s my final All Night House Party broadcast,” I said into the microphone. “Thanks for listening. Maybe I’ll see you next year.”

That summer I had worked from May 24 weekend – 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., six nights a week – through to the September Labour Day Monday. I was proud of the broadcasting I had done. I was honoured to have gathered a pretty loyal following around the Kawartha Lakes region. And I felt pretty confident the manager of CKLY Radio would invite me back the next summer to repeat the show. (He didn’t.) But most important, I deposited my last on-air pay-cheque in the bank. I had worked about 13 weeks. I had added an important broadcast credit to my resume. Even better, I had raised enough cash from my CKLY pay-cheques, to cover my tuition – about $1,200 – to go back to Ryerson that fall and complete the courses for my Radio and Television Arts diploma.

I discovered this week, from data released by Statistics Canada and from listening to senior economist Armine Yalnizyan of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), that by comparison I had it very easy back on 1969. Yalnizyan explained on both CBC Radio and TV that I had probably worked – on average – about 230 minimum-wage hours at CKLY to pay for my undergraduate diploma, while students attending much the same kind of media course today would have to accumulate the equivalent of 570 minimum-wage hours.

“We say to our kids, ‘Go to university if you want a good professional degree,’” Yalnizyan told the CBC. “But that’s getting more difficult to do.”

In other words, tuition – the money today’s youth and their families have to save to keep those students in class and accumulating the appropriate credits – costs two and a half times as much today as it did when their Babyboomer parents or grandparents were saving cash for a college or university education 40 years ago. According to the latest research from Yalnizyan’s CCPA the smallest increase in the number of hours required to pay for tuition was n Newfoundland and Labrador – about 16 per cent; while Ontario has experienced the greatest increase of minimum-wage work to pay tuition – about 173 per cent.

There’re a lot of numbers in there. But what they mean essentially is that our kids and grandkids, trying to pay for their post-secondary educations, have to work at two or three jobs during their down time (usually in the summer) in order to emerge from their holiday break with enough cash in their bank accounts to pay colleges and universities the tuition for the coming year.

In addition to the hardship this whole scenario inflicts on students, it also creates an odd result at colleges and universities, perhaps to their benefit. The post-secondary institutions now have to gear their programs to have students in their halls of higher learning not for three or four years. Now the students enroll in programs over a period of five or six years, inflicting even greater hardship on families funding their kids’ education. And if the students can’t raise the cash in their savings accounts, it means they have to go further into debt, not by just a few thousand dollars, but more often by tens of thousands of dollars.

“I’ll be paying off my student loans well into my 40s,” I remember hearing one of my students lament.

Just this week, I overheard a number of my own journalism program students. They were discussing the nature of the courses, the background of the students and the tuitions they paid for their educations. Typical are the tuitions for University of Toronto (Scarborough College) – somewhere in the neighbourhood of $8,000 per semester. That’s about five times what I would have paid 40 years ago. But when I asked one of my students about the UTSC tuitions, she shocked me.

“That $8,000 is nothing,” she said. “I’m an international student (from outside Canada). Our tuition for the same course is nearly four times that amount, over $30,000.”

I wondered how many more summertime all-night shows I might have had to broadcast had I been an international student. I’d never have made it.

70th Anniversary return to D-Day and Normandy

Written by Ted Barris on April 16th, 2014June 16th, 2014. Leave a comment

Join CBC broadcaster and bestselling author Ted Barris and attend the 70th anniversary of D-Day at JUNO Beach in Normandy, France. We are pleased to have Ted Barris lead a unique tour to this historic Second World War region in France. Travellers will fly to Paris and arrive in Normandy in time for the 70th anniversary observances at Canada’s D-Day landing site – the new Juno Beach Centre.

The tour will also include visits to one of Europe’s best war and peace museums, Le Mémorial de Caen, Canada’s D-Day cemetery at Beny-sur-Mer, the Pegasus Bridge museum, the Arromanches Mulberry harbour site, and home of the famous Bayeux tapestry. The Normandy tour will include a guided, day-long immersion into the life, diet and transport of the Canadian soldier 70 years ago, and a one-day side-trip up the coast to the site of Canada’s other history Second World War landing site at Dieppe to see the beaches, museum and cemetery.

Playing it safe

Written by Ted Barris on April 8th, 2014April 8th, 2014. Leave a comment

Over the weekend, my wife and I arrived at our daughter’s and son-in-law’s house. As usual, we brought the coffee and donuts. Our grandchildren supplied the entertainment. Last Saturday, Wyatt (who’s nearly two) and I played a little floor hockey in the kitchen. I flipped a rubber ball his way. He chased it – arms and stick flailing every which way – and then he whacked the ball back to me. It wasn’t too long before I cautioned him out loud.

“Be careful,” I said. And then almost instinctively, I added, “I don’t want you knocking somebody’s eye out.”

A playground in Washington, D.C., deemed unsafe was cordoned off by police.

It wasn’t a really serious warning. In fact, he’s not old enough to understand many of the words in the warning. And, in truth, the only damage he might have inflicted would have been chipping a bit of plaster from a wall or denting a baseboard or two. My blurting out the warning was just a grandparent being protective and playing it safe.

But isn’t that a telltale sign of the times? We’re always telling our kids to take care, watch out and be safe. Funny, I don’t remember my parents ever saying that to my sister and me when we were growing up. In fact, like most parents back in the 1950s and ’60s, our folks pretty much kicked us out of the house most early evenings and weekends just to get us out of their hair.

As long as we came back for suppertime or bedtime, I don’t think our parents ever worried where we went, because we were often in the company of the rest of the kids on the block. I don’t imagine they cared what we did, because we generally played in the backyard of one set of parents or another. And nobody worried just when we got home, since somebody along the block would call one of the kids inside and that would usually break up the playmaking for another day. Safety never really became an issue, unless somebody got more than a bruised knee or a cut lip. Those were just flesh wounds and to most families that seemed par for the course.

The other thought I had when I warned my grandson about his flailing stick was that scene in the movie “A Christmas Story.” That’s when the character Ralphie says, “I want an official Red Ryder air rifle.” To which one of his parents says, “No way. You’ll shoot your eye out!” And I guess that was the genesis of the paranoiac parent, who fussed and worried over everything his/her children explored for fear it could kill him. (Frankly, I’d have used the “shoot your eye out” line just to keep my kids away from any real firearms or even toy guns, but that’s a different discussion.)

In the 1970s and ’80s, as parents of young children, my wife and I were very conscious of the need for safe playgrounds and even safer streets. I remember “street-proofing” our kids not to talk the strangers and on occasion volunteering to stand around teeter-totters and swings just to make sure nobody got hurt to make the school liable for damages. It was the beginning of the era when municipalities, school boards and parents suddenly felt kids had to be protected from everything.

But wasn’t it our moms who told us, “You have to eat a peck of dirt before you die”?

And we often did eat dirt in pursuit of being king of the castle. I remember with both horror and gratefulness one occasion when a bunch of us kids went off into the woods to climb the tallest and most accessible of the trees – the cedars. My sister had absolutely no fear of heights. I was just the opposite. She scampered up the oldest, driest cedar tree, while I just hung upside down from the lowest, thickest branches.

Then it happened. I heard a crack above me and my sister came crashing down breaking through every cedar branch en route to the ground; in retrospect I guess the cedar limbs probably saved her. On the ground, she was screaming in pain, but she was very conscious. No matter. I was off like shot to retrieve the doctor who lived next door. And he was back just as rapidly, only to find my sister cut and sore, but with all the climbing kids gathered around her laughing about the commotion she’d caused.

There was something about play 50 years ago. Rightly or wrongly, we never considered the danger – either real or imagined. We all looked out for each other. And we never worried because our parents never appeared to worry. Today, I guess everything’s reversed. We teach our kids (or their kids) to worry because we worry, whether danger lurks or not. We want everybody to be safe from all risk at all cost.

In so doing, we may have taken away our kids’ best defence mechanism – lack of fear.

How history survives

Written by Ted Barris on April 1st, 2014April 1st, 2014. Leave a comment

50 young RAF officers marched with pictures of the 50 murdered officers.

The rain was steady. The air must have been as cold as the day they were commemorating – a few degrees just above zero. The years had changed the way the place looked. But neither the weather nor time had washed away the memory. During the 70th anniversary ceremony of The Great Escape, I witnessed, 50 young Royal Air Force officers marched in single file past the reviewing stand. Each contemporary soldier carried the photo of one of the 50 air officers murdered following famous prison breakout in March 1944. One of the commemorating airmen was Simon Flynn.

“I loved the movie, but I knew it wasn’t fact,” Flynn said. “But I feel honoured to be part of the commemoration.”

The more I attend these observances harkening back to wartime events of the 20th century, the more I’m reminded that these conflicts happened nearly two generations ago. People wonder out loud to me in another generation whether anyone will remember, whether anyone will care. If you’ll allow me this column to respond to that suggestion, I’d like to illustrate why stories such as The Great Escape will not die with its last witnesses, but will continue to capture the public’s imagination and prompt further questions, research and more stories.

Simon Flynn, a 25-year-old helicopter pilot in the RAF, is a primary example. Yes, he is military. Yes, he does have a direct armed forces connection – via the air force – with the story of the Commonwealth air officers who built the famous tunnels out of Stalag Luft III in 1943-44. And yes, he’s been taught to preserve the past while serving the future.

But the difference was that on the day following the commemoration of the escape – March 24 – he and the other 49 RAF air officers marching in that rainy ceremony were going further. On March 25, they packed up their kit bags and marched for four days on foot 107 miles to the town of Poznan where the cremated remains of the 50 murdered officers are housed today. And Flynn wasn’t just following his superior’s orders. He’d volunteered.

“We all went through 10 weeks of training,” he said. “We walked four-to-five miles a day at first; but then we worked up to 18 miles a day near the end.”

Jon England beside his line of portraits of the 50.

But the unique commemoration instinct was not limited to the RAF officers. The first day I spent in Zagan, Poland, the town adjacent to the wartime German POW camp, I met a young contemporary artist named Jon England. In fact, he joined me over dinner at a reception staged by Alexandra Bugailiskis, the Canadian ambassador to Poland. I asked why a man as young as he – in his 20s – cared about something as apparently ancient as The Great Escape.

“The story,” he said. “It’s such a compelling story.”

An artist from Somerset, England, Jon England had originally become interested in the story because of its ties to his part of the U.K. But more than that, the young artist became curious about the day-to-day life among the POWs at Stalag Luft III during the war. In particular, he was drawn to the product called “Klim” (milk spelled backwards) and its versatility in the lives of the prisoners-of-war.

Not only did the contents of the Klim cans – powdered milk – sustain the men in their diets. But 750 of the empty tins (when put together) became the ventilation duct for the tunnellers in the escape Tunnel “Harry.” Jon England felt so inspired by the Klim, that he reconstituted the milk powder into sepia-toned paint, which he then used to paint portraits of the 50 slain officers.

“There’s a particular physical and metaphorical resonance in utilizing milk to reproduce the identity card photos of the 50,” England said. “It is the most basic, humble, elemental foodstuff, sustaining life by multiple means.”

The portraits lined the reception hall on the anniversary of the escape.

And beside me as we dined that night in our best bib and tucker, I met British Warrant Officer Maxine Staple, the young woman who had assisted RAF Group Captain David Houghton orchestrate the formal reception on the anniversary. Not unlike artist Jon England WO Staple had dedicated much time and effort to this event. She had helped arrange for the RAF band, the food catering, the speakers’ list and even the civilian guest list, including myself and another dozen Canadians who’d travelled 3,000 miles to pay our respects to the survivors of Stalag Luft III and the murdered 50 officers. Yes, it was her duty, as an officer in the Royal Army, but like RAF chopper pilot Simon Flynn there was more than duty here.

“We are here to honour the men who were killed,” Flynn said. “But we’re also here to learn what gave them the spirit, the strength, the courage to survive and become the actual legend of The Great Escape.”

Memorial to the 50 at Stalag Luft III POW compound

Great Escape in Port Colborne

Written by Ted Barris on March 29th, 2014April 5th, 2014. Leave a comment

By Dave Johnson (Erie Media)

On the night of March 24, 1944, 80 Commonwealth airmen crawled through a 400-foot long tunnel, escaping Stalag Luft III, a POW camp near Sagan, Poland.

Of those 80 men, including Canadians, British, Poles, Greeks, Australians and others, only three — two Norwegians and a Dutch pilot — successfully escaped.

The remaining 77 were caught by the Germans, and of those, 50 were murdered by the Gestapo on the orders of Adolf Hitler.

The Great Escape, as it was known, was considered the greatest prison breakout in the history of the Second World War.

And, despite what the Hollywood movie of the same name would have everyone believe, it was not planned and carried out by Americans. No one escaped by motorcycle or plane and the 50 murdered men were not all shot at the same time.

“Hollywood never let facts get in the way of telling a good story,” Canadian author Ted Barris told a packed house at Readings at Roselawn Thursday evening.

Barris wrote The Great Escape: A Canadian Story, and told the real story of how Canadians were behind it all.

The Great Escape, the third most popular war film, has stars like Richard Attenborough as a British soldier who masterminds the whole plan, with Charles Bronson as a Polish trench-digging expert, James Garner as an American with a talent for theft, Donald Pleasence as a master forger, and Steve McQueen as an American rebel.

“Hollywood would have us believe the tunnel king was Charles Bronson … it was Wally Floody from Chatham, Ont., not a Polish RAF officer”

Barris said Floody worked gold and ore mines of northern Ontario, and it was there he learned his tunnelling skills.

The real scrounger in the escape from Stalag Luft III was Barry Davidson, of Calgary, who had offered to fly for Chinese General Chiang Kai-shek against the Japanese.

Davidson had learned to fly well before the Second World War.

Tony Pengelly, of Truro, Nova Scotia, Barris said, was the master forger in the operation, and flew all manner of planes when he was with the RAF.

Barris revealed a local connection to the Great Escape during his talk.

He said Gordon Kidder, of St. Catharines, who was one of the 50 officers murdered by the Germans, was instrumental in teaching other escapees German.

One day before his talk, Barris had been in Poland at the former POW camp with Kidder’s nephew.

“It was a moving time.”

He said the Great Escape was actually years in the making.

Many of those involved in the action had been in other POW camps and had made many unsuccessful escape attempts.

Several of the men, he said, were together in Stalag Luft I near Barth, Germany.

“Escape was a private enterprise then,” said Barris, adding there 47 tunnels dug at Stalag Luft I.

Stalag Luft III was the Luftwaffe’s main POW camp for those prisoners considered to be troublemakers, meaning those who had tried to escape from other camps.

With the German air force running the facility, it abided by the Geneva Convention, which meant officers didn’t have to work. All they had to do was show up for roll call.

Barris said it freed them up to plan the escape.

With the camp built in the middle of a pine forest on powdery white sand, the escapees had to find a way to dispose of the coarse yellow sand found 30 feet below ground where the tunnels were.

One element the Hollywood movie got right, the author said, was how soil was disposed of. Prisoners, called penguins, had bags of sand in their legs and dispersed it near a fire pool that had been dug in the ground and had the same coarse yellow sand.

The sand was later dumped underneath a theatre built on site. The theatre had a basement, and unlike every other building, a solid foundation.

Barris said the POW’s buildings were built on stilts so the Germans could watch and make sure no one was tunnelling below.

The prisoners, however, exploited the one weakness of the buildings – the chimneys, which were built of concrete and went into the ground. They went through that concrete and rebuilt a floor system so perfectly, the Germans never knew it had been broken through.

Barris said the POW’s had a system set up with stooges, basically lookouts, in the camp to alert the men tunnelling.

“They could close up a tunnel in 60 seconds if they had to,” he said.

Anatomy of a tribute

Written by Ted Barris on March 27th, 2014March 28th, 2014. 1 Comment

March 24, 2014, ceremony at Stalag Luft III with the newly built replica sentry tower. — March 24, 2014, ceremony at Stalag Luft III with the newly built replica sentry tower in background.

When two recent acquaintances of mine arrived at the former Stalag Luft III location, in September 2013, they expected that the former German prison camp, while now a museum site near the town of Zagan in western Poland, would be fairly peaceful. The two Britons (as well as builder David Dunn and painter Johnnie Tait) had plans to erect a replica sentry tower in time for the upcoming 70th anniversary commemoration of The Great Escape eight months later. Andy Hunter, one of the two tower builders, was suddenly startled by what he saw.

Re-enactors at Stalag Luft III provided frighteningly real portrayals of 70 years ago. — Re-enactors at Stalag Luft III provide frighteningly real portrayals.

“The day we arrived, we were suddenly confronted by a World War II German military motorcycle and sidecar,” Hunter said. “The occupants were dressed in German military uniform. And they had guns pointed at us.”

Hunter’s heart palpitations, while understandable, were unnecessary. He soon discovered that the entire area around Zagan, including Stalag Luft III (the location of The Great Escape in 1944,) was in overdrive preparing for the commemorative ceremony, scheduled to happen right next to the replica sentry tower. And the men with German uniforms, motorcycle and guns were simply re-enactors also preparing for the 70th anniversary observances. In fact, the curator of the site, the Museum of Allied Forces Prisoners of War Martyrdom, Marek Lazarz, when I caught up with him just before the commemoration on Monday, seemed startled by the momentum.

Museum director in RAF uniform escorts real kriegie Andy Wiseman to mock inspection at the camp. — Museum director in RAF uniform, Marek Lazarz, escorts real kriegie Andy Wiseman to mock inspection at the camp.

“We’ve had more visitors here in the past few days,” Lazarz said, “than we’ve had in a year.”

Lazarz and I first met three years ago as I prepared my telling of The Great Escape story with a Canadian perspective. Even then, the tall and lean director of the museum explained that he prayed everything would be ready for the anniversary – the new exhibits hall, the souvenir sales area, the replica of Hut 104 (from which the famous Great Escape tunnel “Harry” was excavated to deliver 80 Commonwealth air officers outside the wire on March 24/25, 1944), the ceremony site near the exit shaft of tunnel “Harry,” the military personnel, the ambassadorial dignitaries, any surviving POW vets, and the re-enactors.

In fact, when I caught up with Lazarz on Sunday afternoon he was dressed in an RAF officer’s uniform as part of the re-enacting team himself. At that moment, he’d found Stalag Luft III POW veteran Andy Wiseman, who’d come in from the U.K. for the commemoration. Lazarz was escorting the 90-year-old Stalag Luft III alumnus to a mock inspection.

Wiseman took great delight as a kriegie unravelling guard systems and protocol.

“The Germans conducted a roll call twice a day,” Wiseman told me. He further explained that the Luftwaffe guards in the camp counted each row of POWs calling out the total from front to back to front. Whenever they could the Canadian, British, New Zealand, Australian and South African air officer inmates moved around in mid-count.

“We did our level best to mess things up for them,” Wiseman said. “It was our job to confuse the enemy as often as we could.”

Later that Sunday evening, my fellow travellers to Stalag Luft III – Mark Christoff from Uxbridge and Gord Kidder (whose uncle RCAF navigator Gordon Kidder escaped through the tunnel, but was later killed) – attended a reception hosted by the Canadian ambassador to Poland. Besides the requisite diplomats, civic officials and military dignitaries, Ambassador Alexandra Bugailiskis acknowledged another important volunteer component in the anniversary.

(l-r) Author, Keith Ogilvie, Casey Ogilvie, Ambassador Alexander Bailiskis, Peter McGill, Paul Tibolski, Jean Ogilvie. — (l-r) Myself, Keith Ogilvie, Casey Ogilvie, Ambassador Alexandra Bugailiskis, Peter McGill, Paul Tibolski and Jean Ogilvie.

“I remember seeing the Great Escape movie as a little girl,” she said. “But I had no idea the extent to which the POWs families contributed to their survival of Stalag Luft III.”

Among her invited guests, brother and sister Keith and Jean Ogilvie were representing their father Keith (who was recaptured, but survived); Peter McGill and son Adam attended in remembrance of Peter’s grandfather, George McGill (murdered by Gestapo); and Gord Kidder was honouring his namesake, Gordon Kidder (killed by Gestapo after the escape).

“We often forget the impact of these events on their families,” Ambassador Bugailiskis said. “And yet the families’ connection to these POWs likely gave them hope to get through their days as POWs.”

Andy Hunter, with the British Ministry of Defence, and British Army Col. Phil Westwood, his team leader in the construction of the replica sentry tower at Stalag Luft III, represented another blood connection to events this week near Zagan. Westwood served 38 years in the British Army with deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Falkland Islands and Northern Ireland, he told me.

Joining me at a post-reception part were Phil Westwood (l) and Andy Hunter ®. — At a post-reception party were Phil Westwood (l) and Andy Hunter (r).

“We built the replica of Hut 104 (with the trapdoor to Tunnel “Harry” under a stove,)” Westwood said, “and with some of the donations leftover, we came up with the idea of building the sentry tower… It just seemed the right thing to do.”

Monday’s commemoration at Stalag Luft III and tribute to the 50 murdered Commonwealth officers succeeded because the re-enactments and artifacts were frighteningly believable… but more because volunteers involved knew a legacy was at stake and felt moved to contribute.