Classic image from Woodstock Festival in 1969. Smithsonian Magazine.
I happened to be hitchhiking that life-changing afternoon. My parents had purchased a hobby farm outside Bethany, Ont. But with my family away in the late 1960s, suddenly the farm became my responsibility. So, this early August day, not owning a car to get me from Toronto to the farm, I chose to hitchhike my way there. My last ride pulled over at the intersection of Hwys 115 and 35, and I ran toward the car for the lift.
That’s when I tripped off the curb of the road, twisted my ankle really severely. And everything changed. (more…)
Uxbridge Messiah Singers at the Baptist church, Dec. 19, 2022. John Cavers.
About 90 minutes into the Christmas concert at the Baptist Church on Monday night, the conductor signalled his entire choir and solo performers to stand, his musicians to be at the ready. Instinctively, those who knew the music stood in the pews. Then, Tom Baker brought down his baton for the climax of the composition.
“Hallelujah!” the audience and choir sang in celebration together. “King of Kings, and Lord of Lords. Hallelujah!”
I am not a church-goer. But I still love Christmas traditions, and they include attending performances of George Frideric Handel’s masterpiece, the Messiah, presented every few years by our own Uxbridge Messiah Singers. (more…)
He stood at the lectern in front of hundreds of us. A lit cigarette dangled from his left hand (they were allowed indoors back then). He spoke almost entirely without notes, as if his words were a credo he’d crafted over years until the message came out as his own. I’m paraphrasing now, but here’s what this man from Quebec said on stage at the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall that day:
“We are heirs to a fantastic adventure – an early America that was almost entirely French,” he said. “We are heirs to an obstinate group which has kept alive that portion of French America we call Quebec…”
The year was 1969. I’d sat mesmerized for the better part of 90 minutes inside Convocation Hall, listening to the man who wanted to lead Quebec out of Canada. (more…)
First Peoples of Canada print of Battle of Batoche, 1885.
It was the climax of the chapter, about a 19th-century military battle in western Canada. It was an important feature in my first non-fiction book, written 44 years ago. It pitted a massive force of army militia troops from eastern Canada against Métis communities defending their land rights in the Saskatchewan territory. That spring of 1885, it became known as the Battle of Batoche.
In my book, Fire Canoe, I referred to the stand that Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont made at Batoche as “the Riel rebellion.” (more…)
Vaccine rollouts are missing the so-called vaccine deserts for the other less populated hot spots. healthing.ca
Earlier this week, a delivery van pulled up at my neighbour’s house. The driver hopped out of his vehicle. He was fully masked and went to the door, kept his distance, and ensured that the package was delivered into the right hands. He then photographed the street address of his delivery and was walking back to his van when we exchanged greetings.
“Pardon me for asking, but have you received a COVID-19 vaccination yet?”
“I don’t mind,” he said, “but no, not yet.”
“I’ll bet you do dozens of deliveries a day and run the risk of either being infected or infecting others,” I suggested. “Don’t you think you should’ve had a shot by now?”
“Of course, but the company hasn’t made it a priority.” (more…)
Technologist at Connaught Labs in Toronto. Toronto Archives.
It took fluid in glass vials, monkey tissue and a gentle rocking motion to make a Canadian research scientist a heroine and put her laboratory on the international pharmaceutical map.
It 1952 the worst polio epidemic was spreading across North America. In Canada, the disease peaked in 1953 with 9,000 cases and 500 deaths, the worst national epidemic since the 1918 influenza pandemic.
However, Dr. Jonas Salk, an American biologist and physician specializing in the study of virology, experimented with inactivated poliovirus cells to generate the first successful killed-virus polio vaccine.
Salk’s dilemma? How to mass produce the vaccine. Tucked inside the Department of Hygiene at the University of Toronto, a small lab had discovered that the polio virus grew rapidly on monkey kidney tissue in a synthetic liquid form. A PhD fungus specialist named Leone Farrell managed to adhere the tissue to the inside surface of a five-litre bottle. Then, she continuously agitated the bottles to allow the medium to generate cell production.
Dr. Farrell’s system became known as “the Toronto technique.” (more…)
The faceless, helpless time writing Grade 13 Departmentals.
They crammed us into a single hall at the school. Often it was the high-school gymnasium filled with rows and rows of movable desks and chairs. We were allowed pencils, an eraser, a ruler and limitless sheets of what we used to call “foolscap” paper on which to write our answers. In came an adjudicator, who announced the name of the exam, the time available to complete it and strict guidelines for decorum during the exam.
“If we catch you cheating,” the adjudicator announced, “we will disqualify your mark. You will fail the term.”
In my day – back in the 1960s – these meat-grinding assemblies to test the cumulative knowledge of students at year’s-end were known as “Departmentals.” (more…)
My writing staff and I had just completed a production meeting. I had just given our writers – the senior students of our online newspaper at Centennial College – their Remembrance Day assignments. With the recent loss of two reserve soldiers here in Canada, we were all sharply focused on Nov. 11 coming next week. So, I’d gone around the table and assigned stories to our student reporters. One would write about a woman in the Royal Canadian Navy in the Second World War. Another had an interview with an Afghanistan vet. A third would feature young military cadets.
And one reporter, a young man named Jasun, needed a phone number for a D-Day vet I asked him to interview.
“May I give you a bit of background?” I asked him.
He started writing notes on a single sheet of paper with his other hand as the writing surface.
I invited Jasun into my office. He sat at my desk. I stood across from him and gave him as much detail as I could about the 90-year-old veteran he would be interviewing later that day or the next. (more…)
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.
A few weeks ago, as I showered, shaved and made my way to work, CBC Radio’s local Toronto morning show invited audience comment. Host Matt Galloway wondered: “Where do Torontonians go, to find absolute silence?”
In a matter of a few seconds, I had an answer and texted it to him: “Sealed inside the rare books section at the Robarts Library, right down to the white gloves so your hands don’t rustle pages.”
I hadn’t thought about Ontario’s 17th premier in a long time. But when Galloway posed the question, I quickly remembered research I had conducted back in the early 1970s. I needed to find excerpts from particularly rare books and the only source was the then brand new John P. Robarts Research Library at the University of Toronto. By coincidence, this past week, I’ve been reading my colleague Steve Paikin’s new book, “Paikin and the Premiers.” Among other things, Paikin reminded me that Premier Robarts gave this province much more than a quiet research library.
