Canada Corner
Raising Steel
Danny Doyle grew up in the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighbourhood of Bay Ridge, the sixth of eight children of Newfoundland-born ironworker Fred Doyle. His father’s friends were mostly ironworkers and most were former Newfoundlanders who left home for New York in the middle of the last century. They said goodbye to a place of high unemployment and dismal prospects to risk life and limb raising the steel columns and beams that formed the frames of some of the New York’s most famous skyscrapers.
These men earned good money, lived in the same sections of Brooklyn and frequently spent their off-hours together. “My [...]
November 28, 2009, by D'Arcy Jenish
The Last Veteran Of The Plains Of Abraham
A Union Jack snaps in the breeze on a sunny, but chilly November morning. It’s hoisted high on the Quebec City cliff where the St. Lawrence River narrows. Dignitaries have gathered in the Jardin des Gouverneurs near the Chateau St. Louis, the fortress quarters for governors of New France and British North America dating back more than two centuries to Champlain. It is 1827 and the officials are there to lay the cornerstone for the monument to General James Wolfe and Marquis Louis-Joseph de Montcalm.
At the ceremony, dressed in full regalia befitting such an important occasion, are top officers [...]
September 30, 2009, by Peter Black
Rays Of Hope On The Sunshine Coast
In Powell River, B.C., a small balcony at the Manzanita Restaurant overlooks what was once the city’s biggest employer, the Catalyst Paper mill. By 2010, the mill will have just 350 employees, a fraction of the 5,000 people it employed when it was the world’s largest paper mill. And instead of the pungent odours it once spewed, today it emits mainly steam, because the wastewater treatment system has been upgraded.
Inside the Manzanita, customers nosh on bison burgers, warm Brie, and fried local oysters with smoked paprika rémoulade. Eye-catching paintings—many for sale—line the brightly coloured walls. “There’s some incredible artist power [...]
August 11, 2009, by Laura Byrne Paquet
The Short Season Of High Society
It was to be an overseas Utopia for the upper classes of England—lush gardens and orchards, a heavenly climate and all the familiar trappings of aristocracy. It lasted about a decade. What went wrong?
It is high noon in late July sitting here on a long-abandoned water flume in the dry hills of British Columbia’s semi-desert interior. The merciless sun has taken its toll—boards long blackened and split are grown through with sagebrush and bunchgrass or splayed down the mountainside. Looking south across the Thompson River you see tiny Walhachin. A century ago, this flume was to be the lifeblood of [...]
June 4, 2009, by Graham Chandler
All The World’s A Stage
The May/June 2009 issue of Legion Magazine includes a feature article on the lure and popularity of Canadian community theatre. Many of the amateur companies referred to in our story enter productions in yearly provincial drama competitions. Below is a listing of some of the main festivals.
Theatre BC Mainstage: The annual Mainstage festival sponsored by Theatre BC is one of the longest running community theatre traditions in Canada. The program is the culmination of winning plays from the more than 60 community theatre clubs that compete in Theatre BC’s 10 zone festivals held between March and May. www.theatrebc.org/Mainstage
Dramaworks: Each July [...]
May 1, 2009
Highway H2O
Jim Coke graduated from Montreal’s McGill University in 1953 with a degree in electrical engineering, worked for a year and in the spring of 1954 embarked on a backpacking tour of western Europe with a friend. As Coke tells it, they spent the summer sleeping in fields and barns when they couldn’t find an appropriate bed and headed for home when they ran out of money. The young engineer returned to Montreal just in time to land a job on what was arguably the biggest Canadian construction project of the postwar era—the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway. “It was [...]
April 4, 2009, by D'Arcy Jenish
History Rocks In Fundy
In our March/April 2009 issue, Legion Magazine published a story on Nova Scotia’s Joggins Fossil Cliffs. Listed below are just some of the other key attractions relating to coastal geology in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. We present this information with the idea that it might come in handy when planning a trip to the East Coast. It is good to keep in mind though that some of these attractions are seasonal—opening in the spring and running through to the end of summer or fall. Happy travels.
Avalon Highlands: Located in Nova Scotia, the highland is defined by a 100-kilometre-long fault [...]
March 1, 2009
A Century Aloft: The Rise Of The Silver Dart
“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Only 66 years separate American astronaut Neil Armstrong’s memorable moonscape statement from the first flights of Orville and Wilbur Wright. When engine-powered flight began with the Wright brothers on an isolated North Carolina beach in 1903, it developed very quickly. Less than six years later, Henri Blériot flew across the English Channel. Yet, in the development of heavier-than-air powered flying machines, a significant Canadian contribution is often overlooked.
The story of powered flight in Canada starts with Alexander Graham Bell and his insatiable thirst for knowledge, which began at [...]
February 9, 2009, by John Boileau
Milling Through History
Escape the super highways and travel the back roads along popular waterways and you will find significant, but often overlooked connections to Canada’s industrial past. Your reward may be a simple limestone wall or the rough outline of a foundation. Or it could be a working mill that is still operating the way it did 100 or more years ago—grinding grain, carding wool or sawing wood.
It is important though, not to be fooled by the apparent quaintness of these living museums, because what seems old-fashioned today was cutting-edge, high technology a century ago. That’s not all: these historical structures were [...]
February 2, 2009, by James Careless
The Siberian Expedition
On a wooded hillside outside Vladivostok, Russia, 14 Canadians found their final resting place in 1919. Five others died at sea. They were ordinary folk who had enlisted in the closing days of the First World War for service in an unlikely theatre—Siberia.
The Canadian Siberian Expedition Force (CSEF), which consisted of 4,213 men and one woman from across Canada, mobilized alongside 13 Allied armies to replace Lenin’s Bolsheviks with a more friendly government. The mission failed in the face of divided Allied strategies and heated domestic opposition, consigning the story to the margins of history.
Editor’s note: University of Victoria historian [...]
