Archive for March, 2000

In September 1924, more than 3,000 excited children gathered at Exhibition Park in Toronto to meet a kindly gentleman who was known across Canada as the Picnic King, the Summer Santa Claus or the Orphans’ Friend. Each child who visited the park that day received an orange, some peanuts and candy, a large scoop of ice cream and a thick slice of cake. The children also came away from the picnic with a nickel and a “shin-plaster”. The latter was the name [...]

There it was…on the bottom corner of page 25 in the Yellowknifer newspaper: “Handyperson–Department of Environment, High Arctic Weather Station, Eureka, Ellesmere Island. Position open to residents of the Northwest Territories and northern Alberta.” I qualified as a Northwest Territories resident by a scant three months because I had moved–in early October–from Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, to the barren flats of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories where it was already -22 C. I knew one person in Yellowknife–the sister of a friend back home. She and her family had put up with me for three months while I looked for work. [...]

Tom Wood’s paintings depict life in the Royal Canadian Navy during WW II. From top to bottom: The Beach at Courseulles-sur-Mer and Stokers. There is a rusty, industrial look to Tom Wood’s [...]

The Allied commanders planned the battle of Normandy as the first phase of a long deliberate campaign to liberate France. On D-Day plus 90–Sept. 6, 1944–they hoped to control an area bounded by the rivers Seine and Loire and then pause long enough to build up resources for a series of operations that would bring them to the borders of Germany. Hitler and his generals, meanwhile, poured all their resources into the defence of Normandy and so when the Allies broke through, the enemy could not muster enough troops to hold Paris or stop an Allied advance. The situation was so [...]