Archive for March, 1998

He just couldn’t turn down such a brazen dare. All his life Louis Cyr had been called upon to prove the immense strength bestowed upon him by nature. He was not about to allow some upstart to arbitrarily strip him of the title of World’s Strongest Man, earned and bolstered at countless public demonstrations and weight-lifting show-downs throughout North America and England.

So, on Feb. 26, 1906–when he was 44–Cyr took on Hector Décarie, a young buck at the peak of his rigorous and scientific physical […]

Jay Willar straightens stiffly, knuckles kneading his backbone, and surveys the hard-won efforts of a morning’s labor: a 10-foot-wide swath of ground-laid netting festooned with tangled ribbons of pink-brown dulse. The noonday sun is already working its magic, baking it to a deep reddish-purple. Jay’s easy smile invites small talk. He’s putting in a third summer on Grand Manan Island, off the south coast of New Brunswick, harvesting dulse. While he admits that ‘dulsing’ isn’t easy, I’m flabbergasted when he tells me that four months’ picking is worth a whopping $7,000. Hard work notwithstanding, he’s put himself through three years […]

The war art of Jack Nichols includes from top to bottom: Normandy Scene, Beach in ‘Gold’ Area; Drowning Sailor; Troops in Hospital.

Jack Nichols paints people. He has no formal education, but his strong canvases have placed him among the top Canadian […]

by Ray Dick

It started with a whimper, a dark omen on a weather radar screen that was tracking steadily from the southern U.S. towards the Canadian Great Lakes region, and ended with a crippling bang that caused half a billion dollars damage, at least 20 deaths and left more that a million people without heat, light and transportation in southeastern Ontario,Quebec and New Brunswick.

This is Bosnia without the bullets,” said one soldier, who recently returned from the former Yugoslavia, about the devastation he found in the Montreal area from the worst ice storm in recent history.

The soldier was quoted by […]

The long frustrating debate over the timing and location of a Second Front in Northwest Europe came to an end at the Quebec Conference of August 1943. Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and their senior military advisers were briefed on the progress of Operation Neptune, the planned assault phase of Operation Overlord. They agreed the invasion of France would take place in May 1944. The planners outlined four conditions that had to be met if the landings were to be successful. First, the enemy must remain ignorant of the actual landing area. Second, the Allies must achieve complete air and naval […]