Feb. 15, 1965 – Red Maple Leaf flag unveiled for the first time. Radio Canada International photo.
It was a crisp, cold winter day. The sunshine was minimal. But the group of spectators on Parliament Hill was unexpectedly large. People in Ottawa sensed if they didn’t attend they’d miss some history. Next to a flagpole specially erected outside Parliament, then prime minister Lester Pearson arrived. Indeed, he did make history. The Red Ensign, Canada’s flag for a century was lowered for the last time. And Canada’s new flag was raised in its place.
Fifty-six years ago, last Monday, the Red Maple Leaf flag flew nationally for the first time. As noted in his book I Stand For Canada: The Story of the Maple Leaf Flag, Rick Archbold quoted Globe and Mail columnist George Bain who witnessed the flag-raising that day.
“And the feelings that a flag is a flag is a flag,” Bain wrote, “were dispelled, because it looked bold and clean, and distinctively our own.” (more…)
Alex Barris – my father and mentor – had a sign over his desk to inspire him to write.
My dental hygienist has her eye on a second career. The other day, after I’d passed the temperature test and questionnaire at the dental office, one of his hygienists, Vivian, got to work cleaning my teeth. Naturally, with my mouth wide open and instruments inside, she had me as a captive audience. So, she told me about wonderfully uninhibited things her children say. For example, one time her toddler son searched for the word to describe his elderly grandfather’s face.
“It’s crumply,” he said.
“He probably meant ‘wrinkly,’” Vivian said with a chuckle. Then, she added, “I think I’ll write a book about the darnedest things kids say. Maybe you can help me get it published.”
I mumbled an “Uh-huh,” through the gauze and dental instruments in my mouth. (more…)
The occasion was our 20th wedding anniversary. As a gift to my wife Jayne and me, that spring of 1995, my parents had bestowed airfare to the U.K. We’d barely unpacked in London, when we saw on the news that one of our planned tourist destinations – Winston Churchill’s underground Cabinet War Rooms – was the to be visited by Dame Vera Lynn the next morning.
At a press conference, she’d be launching a fundraiser to assist needy veterans. Jayne and I decided to try to “accidentally” arrive there about the same time. I think we were first in line to tour the site the next morning.
“We understand that Dame Vera will be here,” I shared with the commissionaire at the ticket wicket.
“Oh, really?” the commissionaire kidded. “And who might you be?”
“Just a couple of curious Canadians,” I offered.
“Well, how appropriate. Today, Canadians get in free,” and he directed us – stunned but delighted – directly in. (more…)
Barn silos on McGill University campus at Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue hide Montreal tourist attraction.
At first, it didn’t look like much. From a distance the building looked, well, like a barn. It even had a silo. But on closer examination, I could see signage and some outdoor exhibits. No animals. No straw bales. In fact, when I looked up inside the silo, there was no silage, but a scale model of a vintage airplane.
“There are artefacts in here that you’ve never seen before,” said John Lawson, the chair of the Montreal Aviation Museum. “Welcome to my second home.” (more…)
Ted Arnold instructed aircrew cadets for combat roles overseas in WWII.
The last time I spent time with Ted Arnold was in 1991. He had contacted me about his Second World War story. So, I travelled to Port Hope and interviewed him. We communicated again later in the year when he was holidaying in Florida. And while I thought of him often after that, I never actually saw him again. His son Rick contacted me some years later.
“We were wondering if you could help us?” he asked.
I said I would try and then Rick explained that his father had slipped through the cracks at Veterans Affairs Canada. Partly because he was born in Argentina, but mostly because he fell into an odd category as a veteran, the system had denied him veteran status, and therefore funds to cover the expenses at an assisted-living facility in Ontario.
“As you know,” Rick Arnold went on, “he’s not entitled to a veteran’s pension.” (more…)
“Sentimental Journey” B-17 Flying Fortress on tarmac in Hamilton.
I was battling rush-hour traffic. Ironically, I was listening to a Toronto radio station’s traffic reporter tell me I was in gridlock. Then, my cell phone rang. I read the call identification. It was one of my teaching colleagues at Centennial College. And he was excited.
“She’s here!” he said, with more energy in his voice than usual.
“Who’s here?” I asked.
“Sentimental Journey. She’s going to be in Hamilton all this week,” he continued.
It was Malcolm Kelly on the phone. He’s the co-ordinator of Centennial’s sports journalism program. And second only to his love of sports is Malcolm’s love of airplanes. (more…)
Staff Sergeant Joe Taddonio served as a gunner aboard USAAF Liberators during the Second World War. Courtesy Joe Taddonio.
The voice on the phone wasn’t an automated one. An actual human being answered my call, last week, as I attempted to renew the registration on my website and domain name (tedbarris.com). But inevitably my 1-800 call took me outside the country. When I asked, the young man on the line said he was located in Phoenix, Arizona. I told him I was calling from way north of that and he then described a family outing he’d experienced over Christmas.
“I took my family up north during the holidays,” Chris Taddonio said.
“Oh, really?” I said. “Where to?”
“North to Flagstaff, Arizona,” he said. “And my daughter started to cry it was so cold.”
“And how cold was it?”
“Oh, it was around the freezing mark,” he said.
That’s when I told him that our thermometer readings had been nearly 20 degrees Celsius lower than that, this week, and that with the wind chill, we in Ontario were coping with what felt like minus-30 or minus-40 degrees Celsius.
And the phone went silent. He admitted he was sorry he’d tried to impress me with his trip “up north.” Then, we moved on to the job at hand – registering my domain name on the Internet. He looked at my website, realized I had an interest in military history, and then noticed an image on my site of a Second World War Spitfire fighter aircraft.
He mentioned that his grandfather had served in the U.S. Army Air Force during the war and that the man – now in his 90s – might have some stories for me. I said I was always interested in hearing from veterans, and suggested he ask his grandfather, in the Boston area, to call me. On Sunday I received a call from Joseph Taddonio.
Born in December 1920 (he celebrated his 93rd birthday over the Christmas holidays), Joseph Taddonio told me that he and his brother had grown up not far from Boston Municipal Airport. The boys had always gaped at biplanes and auto-gyro aircraft on the tarmac. When the United States was drawn into the war with the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, it seemed a natural thing to join the air force. But despite his love of airplanes Joseph had a problem.
“When I attended optometrist school just before the war,” he said, “I found out I was near-sighted… I kept flunking the (air force entry) course.”
His inability to read the eye charts required for an airgunner, kept preventing Taddonio’s successful entry into the U.S. Army Air Force, until one day, he found a training facility with exactly the same eye chart. He simply memorized the lines of letters, went back to an examiner, passed the test, and got in.
Joe Taddonio’s Liberator crew on occasion of its 200th mission during WWII. Courtesy Joe Taddonio.
Then, to ensure his eyesight would never fail him as a waist gunner aboard the Liberator bomber, he had his combat goggle lenses replaced with the prescription to overcome his near-sightedness. Taddonio served in the skies over North Africa, the Mediterranean, Italy and (late in his wartime career) France.
“On one mission to bomb Vicenza, we had 17 airplanes in our bomber stream,” he explained about a mission on Dec. 28. 1943. “We had no (Allied fighter aircraft escort to protect the bombers) when 60 German fighter aircraft jumped us. Fifteen waves of German fighters, four abreast. Only seven of our aircraft made it through.”
With each Liberator carrying a crew of seven to 10 men, the losses that one night proved disastrous. Taddonio finished the war by participating in the Normandy invasion; he and his aircrew bombed targets on the coast of France just prior to the D-Day invasion in the spring of 1944. He’d survived a year of missions over Europe.
In 1944 – when he turned 24 – Joe Taddonio completed his tour of duty and returned home to Boston. Courtesy Joe Taddonio.
On June 12, 1944 (D-Day-plus-6) Taddonio said he flew a mission over the Cherbourg peninsula in support of American ground forces there. The invasion had held and was moving inland.
“That was my last mission,” he said, “and I came home.”
It occurred to me that flying in the ball turret of a Liberator bomber, which could climb to altitudes of nearly 30,000 feet, that Taddonio might have experienced some extremely cold temperatures at those altitudes.
“The coldest it hit outside our airplane was 60 below,” he said. “We were flying back to England over Denmark that day.”
“How could you possibly keep from freezing to death?” I asked.
“We had jump suits that were like electric blankets,” Taddonio said. “They had rigged up a system for heating pants and coats and even wired our boots to try to keep us warm.”
I began to feel guilty having complained this week about minus-40 temperatures in Ontario. And I doubted whether his great-granddaughter, the one who had cried to her father Chris about the nearly freezing temperatures at Flagstaff, Arizona, would have any concept of minus-60 degrees. Much less facing that cold while German fighters and anti-aircraft guns tried to shoot his Liberator out of the sky.
There’s generally at least one of these in every neighbourhood. This person is most often extremely well grounded in the community or has lived there for years. People next door or down the block all feel they could trust this individual with their mother or their kids. I had a proxy parent like this. Only I didn’t realize I needed her as a surrogate until I was a young adult.
I knew her as “Ma Ross.”
Dick and Betty Ross met on the dance floor at the Palais Royale during the Second World War.
Actually her name was Betty Ross. She was born Helen Elizabeth Watson on July 11, 1920, in Toronto. When she was four, her father died. So, she was raised by a caring brother. Betty came of age during the Second World War, fell in love with an RCAF Spitfire pilot – when they danced on terrace of the Palais Royale on a night in 1940 – and waited for her beau, Richard Ross, to come home safely from the air war overseas. In the 1950s, I met Betty through her son, David, who’d become my closest friend in elementary school in Agincourt, Ont. But that’s not when she became my fill-in mom.
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.
