On July 1 – Canada Day 2010 – residents of Uxbridge Township assembled at a local park to celebrate the nation’s 143rd birthday. Hundreds settled in for food, refreshments, amusements and, of course, the evening’s annual fireworks display. Wedged into the evening’s slate of activities was the annual announcement by the Uxbridge Times-Journal newspaper of the “Citizen of the Year.” T-J reporter Don Campbell invited several dignitaries to the stage – including MP Bev Oda, MPP John O’Toole, Mayor Bob Shepherd – and finally the recipient … Ted Barris.
A voice of unity
He helped save Canada.
Aside from times during the two world wars, I think some of this country’s darkest days occurred in the years immediately following the Centennial in 1967. First with the St-Jean-Baptiste riots and bombings in Montreal (1968), then during the October crisis (1970), when the FLQ kidnapped and killed cabinet minister Pierre Laporte in Quebec City, hope for maintaining a united Canada seemed bleakest in those early 1970s.
Then, in November 1976, the Parti Quebecois came to power on a platform that included Quebec’s separation from Canada. I worked as a radio producer/host for CFQC in Saskatoon in those years. Our morning program was heard all over the three Prairie provinces. And I remember our station manager, Dennis Fisher, calling us together soon after the PQ’s historic victory that autumn.
“The nation has never been so threatened,” he said. “It’s up to us to do something.”
Memorable but forgotten
The morning that 90,000 troops of the People’s Army of North Korea crossed the 38th Parallel to invade South Korea — June 25, 1950 — Don Hibbs was driving the first of his nighttime cab customers across town in Galt, Ont. If he’d turned on his car radio, Hibbs might also have heard that the five-year-old United Nations Security Council was then considering a resolution to “furnish assistance to [South Korea] to repel the armed attack and restore international peace and security in the area.” The resolution amounted to a declaration of war between the Koreas. And it changed Don Hibbs’ life.
To read more, click here for the full story.
A claim of security
It was about 6:15 the other morning. Nothing was stirring outside. I happened to be out giving the dog one last run past the fire hydrant before leaving for the city. My wife had pulled the car into the street. I noticed her staring straight ahead with a look of total surprise on her face. I looked in the same direction.
There, about 20 metres away, a deer (I think it was a doe) dashed across the road, paused on a neighbour’s lawn, then just as quickly bounded several times into a backyard and disappeared over a fence.
“She looked petrified,” my wife commented.
Just give it time
We played the part of the cavalry last Friday night. You know, charging in at the last moment to save the day. Well, maybe it wasn’t quite that dramatic. But my wife and I provided our tag-team babysitting service to our daughter and son-in-law that evening. Of course, for us, the assignment was anything but a hardship. We revelled in the chance for quality time with our two-year-old granddaughter and nine-month-old grandson. And it turns out that’s exactly what our adult kids needed too.
“It was nice to have some time to ourselves,” our daughter has said on occasions such as that.
Holland vets remember
In May 2010, Ted Barris led a tour of veterans and their families to Holland for the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the country by Allied soldiers. Among those on the tour were three Canadian vets who had participated in the liberation. Images of Don Kerr, Ron Charland and Barclay Craig accompany their comments from the revisit to the Netherlands.
Copyright gone wrong
One day last winter at the college where I teach, I stood waiting for a copier/printer to complete a job so that I could photocopy a letter. Initially, I paid little attention to the pages landing in the printer discharge slot.
Then I noticed the material was repeating itself. Every third page was identical to the one printed three pages earlier. The photocopied pages, I noticed, came from a book. The printer kept spitting out the sequence until nearly 50 versions of the same three pages had piled up. Somebody somewhere in the building was copying the book excerpt and planning, I guessed, to circulate copies among students. The person didn’t realize the copying was happening at this printer in my corner of the college, because he never came to pick up the copies.
“Who would waste all this paper?” I thought.
Then, I got even more ticked off that the person doing the mass printing was simply ripping off the author – copying all those pages and giving away the content for nothing. Lawyers call it a breach of copyright.
Way of the dodo bird
I stopped at one of my favourite art-supply shops in the city, the other day. Out of habit, I passed the cashier, said hello and walked directly to the aisle with the portfolios. They’re those bound folders that contain those see-through plastic sheaths for photos, clippings or other important papers you want to display. Anyway, like old Mother Hubbard, when I got there the shelf was bare. I asked what had happened.
“Oh, they’ve been discontinued,” the sales clerk said.
Deadlock in Korea
Deadlock in Korea: Canadians at War, 1950-1953
Thomas Allen Publishers, May 2010
ISBN 9780-0-88762-528-2
Politicians called it a “police action.” The Canadian working volunteers who went to Korea to fight the Communists remember it as a bitter, grinding shooting war.
In the summer of 1950, thousands of Canadians – some veterans of the Second World War and regular army servicemen as well as adventure-seekers, unemployed and even some in trouble with the law – eagerly signed on for a UN-sponsored mission to stop the Communist foray into South Korea. They joined a forty-eight-nation, U.S.-led expeditionary force that quickly found itself embroiled not in a “police action,” but a full-scale hot war.
Ted Barris interviewed hundreds of Korean War veterans to then retell their stories of heroism and survival, tragedy and absurdity, successful operations and total snafus.
The Korean War was the first explosion in cold war between the USSR and the US after 1945. Canadian air force, naval and infantry volunteers were among the first to join the defence of South Korea. They etched locations such as Chinnampo, Kap’yong, Chail-li and Kowang-san onto the list of notable Canadian battlegrounds. Then, after twelve months that saw U.N. troops fighting up and down the Korean peninsula and drew Communist China into the conflict, the war settled into a bloody stalemate in the mud and cold around the 38th parallel.
Deadlock in Korea tells the stories of the men who fought in Korea, giving this war – that cost Canada more than a thousand casualties and was virtually ignored back home – its rightful place in Canadian history.
The book was a national best-seller on both the Maclean’s magazine and National Post top-ten lists in 1999-2000; and it has been officially recognized as the official history of Canadians at war in Korea by the Korea Veterans Association of Canada (Barris was made an honourary member of the KVA).
Springtime poppy
About a year ago, I received a letter from a stranger. He had read my book “Victory at Vimy,” the story of Canadians pushing the German Army from its nearly three-year occupation of strategic heights in north-central France. Born in Chile in 1944, the man said he had immigrated to Canada in 1976. In what had clearly been an important step in their lives, Pat Carvacho, his wife and two children became Canadian citizens soon after. Now a semi-retired architect, he wanted to share a dream he had experienced prior to reading my book.
“I saw a soldier of the Great War. I instantly learned his name, Charles Roy,” Carvacho wrote me. “Later (in the dream) I saw this soldier in a trench immediately before an attack, then advancing with his rifle and bayonet. There was a powerful explosion and the rifle and bayonet broke in pieces.”