An apocalyptic beginning of the End of Days? Make my solar eclipse a chance to sing again Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’ from 1972

Is today’s partial 38 per cent solar eclipse over Thompson, Manitoba, under clear blue skies and balmy 16°C temperatures (the normal April 8 daytime high is 4°C), a sign of a premillennial Rapture signalling the beginning of the End of Days, as today’s total eclipse crosses two towns in the United States named Nineveh in Ohio and Indiana, as well as Rapture, Indiana? The original Nineveh, the oldest and most-populous city of the ancient Assyrian empire, is situated on the east bank of the Tigris River and encircled by the modern city of Mosul, Iraq. Interestingly, today’s solar eclipse is not visible in Mosul.

Not being either a scholar of eschatology or astronomy, I probably wouldn’t even be contemplating such a question about the April 8 solar eclipse if it hadn’t been for my old Left Coast friend Ron Graham posting on Facebook today, “To those religious nutcases that believed the upcoming solar eclipse would be ‘the rapture’, be sure to check in with us on Tuesday. It quite possibly did happen for some, but appears that Jesus overlooked you and your friends for some reason.”

While it is true that Christian scripture records that Jesus preaching on the Mount of Olives, a mountain ridge in East Jerusalem, east of and adjacent to Jerusalem’s Old City – in what is called the Olivet Discourse, found in Matthew 24 – talks about the end times and says the sun will be darkened, belief in apocalyptic happenings portended by solar eclipses are not proprietary to Christianity. Throughout history, eclipses have been interpreted by many cultures and religions as a disruption of the natural order.  

Hindu beliefs involve demons swallowing the sun. In ancient China, the etchings discovered in Anyang depicted solar eclipses as celestial dragons attacking and devouring the sun. In South America, ancient Incans believed solar eclipses were a “sign of wrath and displeasure” from Inti, the “all-powerful sun god.” Choctaw Indians from the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States believe a mischievous black squirrel gnawing on the sun causes solar eclipses, and legend holds the squirrel must be frightened away by the clamor and yells of the event’s human witnesses. In West Africa, the Tammari people, also known as Batammariba from the northern regions of Togo and Benin, believe the celestial bodies intersecting during an eclipse represent human feuds on Earth.

Well I hear you went up to Saratoga
And your horse naturally won
Then you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun

I have always loved Carly Simon’s 1972 song “You’re So Vain.” In the early 1980s, many of us thought the song was about singer James Taylor, who was married to Carly Simon from 1972 to 1983. But in a 1983 interview with the Washington Post, Simon said, “”It certainly sounds like it was about Warren Beatty, He certainly thought it was about him – he called me and said ‘thanks for the song. ‘” Later, she said two other men, who so far remain unidentified, along with Beatty, also inspired elements of the song. So who knows?

As I said, I am neither a scholar of eschatology or astronomy, so perhaps it is not surprising my interest in solar eclipses is anchored elsewhere.

In the 1980s, I spent a too short part of many a summer at the Dell family’s summer home on the Atlantic Ocean in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, where my mother-in-law, Carol Dell, a Vineyarder by both birth and disposition, would tell me stories of Carly Simon and James Taylor, who were also both in many ways Vineyarders themselves. Stories about Island events such as live performances at the Hot Tin Roof, opened in 1979 by Carly Simon, George Brush and Herb Putnam. Close your eyes, and you were transported back a few years in time and were there, so it seemed. Magical. The full lyrics to “You’re So Vain” go like this:

Son of a gun

You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht
Your hat strategically dipped below one eye
Your scarf it was apricot
You had one eye in the mirror, as you watched yourself gavotte
And all the girls dreamed that they’d be your partner
They’d be your partner and

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you

You’re so vain (you’re so vain)
I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you, don’t you?

You had me several years ago when I was still quite naive
Well you said that we made such a pretty pair and that you would never leave
But you gave away the things you loved
And one of them was me
I had some dreams they were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee and
You’re so vain

You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain, you’re so vain
I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you don’t you, don’t you?

I had some dreams they were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee and

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain (you’re so vain)
I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you don’t you

Well I hear you went up to Saratoga
And your horse naturally won
Then you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun

Well you’re where you should be all the time
And when you’re not, you’re with some underworld spy
Or the wife of a close friend, wife of a close friend and

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain (so vain)
I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you don’t you, don’t you, don’t you now

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain
Probably think this song about you
You’re so vain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGQ2DJ65-ok&t=6s

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The challenge of being here now and the illusion of ‘Golden Years’ living

I was deeply touched yesterday by two old friends – Paul Mason and Ron Graham – and the insights they shared on Facebook on Paul’s timeline about the reality of aging parents and the choices we all will or have faced as grown sons and daughters in that regard. My friendships with Ron and Paul dates back to the mid-1970s at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont. Almost 50 years on, I still cherish their wisdom and empathy – as well as the ongoing and civil religious debates between us.

As Paul writes, “There’s something unnatural about a community made up predominantly of old people. Yes, there are plenty of young and middle-aged staff, several of whom I’ve come to know and like very much, but everywhere one looks there’s evidence of ill-health and decrepitude. Visiting a seniors’ residence swiftly dispels any illusions one might have about the ‘golden years.’”

At some level, I agree. I, too, think it deeply unnatural that old people live together in community alone. Unless perhaps you don’t have that option.  The Northern Spirit Manor Personal Care Home in Thompson, Manitoba opened months before I arrived here in 2007, built in no small part through volunteer community fundraising. Now, grandparents, and other elders, can remain in the community, closer to their children and grandchildren, an unbroken circle. That matters to us here deeply.

Still, I get the servicing model for older folks, both here and in the south, especially in terms of medical needs, that makes a facility such as where Paul’s mom now resides a reasonable choice. And I also understand there are often difficult, if not near impossible, choices involved. In the Summer of 1989 I was married to Heather, who was accepted into the PhD program in cultural anthropology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina for September of that year. Heather has gone on to become an associate professor in women’s studies and cultural anthropology at the University of Illinois Springfield.

My parents had moved to Bridgenorth, Ontario in 1980 while we were living in Boston. My mother died in 1986 after a year-long illness. While she spent that year in and out of hospital, she continued to live at home in their apartment in Bridgenorth, just north of Peterborough on Chemong Lake. My father’s homecare efforts, while supported by provincial homecare staff and doctors, still to my mind, became Herculean. My dad’s idea of cooking, up to that point, had been summer barbecuing, which he was quite skilled at. Overnight, quite literally, he took over the marital indoor domestic cooking in the kitchen, as well as cleaning and laundry chores without complaint, and also attending to my mother’s personal needs, while in mixed health at best himself. There was absolutely nothing in my dad’s background up to that point that would have suggested to me he could rise to the occasion such as that. He wasn’t a saint or a martyr, but his unexpected and surprising example still serves as a lodestar pointing to the meaning of unconditional love in my eyes. He continued to live in the apartment in Bridgenorth after my mother died as a widower for three years from 1986 until 1989.

By 1983, we were living in Canada again, and Heather began a master’s program at the University of Western Ontario in London. She spent from September 1983 to August 1984 in London, and then followed me to Toronto and Peterborough for the next five years from 1984 to 1989, as I spent most of the early years of my journalism career at Ontario Lawyers Weekly and the Peterborough Examiner, after starting at The Standard-Freeholder in Cornwall, Ont. in June 1983. We agreed in March 1985, when we moved back to Peterborough, having spent several years there earlier as undergraduates at Trent University, the next move would be where Heather wanted to be, wherever that might be. My dad and Heather got along well. My parents treated her as a daughter, and she was fond of both of them. In fact, in August 1987, my dad was planning a trip to Indiana to visit my Uncle Bob and Aunt Joan. I was working, and Heather’s thesis defence coincided with my dad’s trip, so he drove her to UWO in London, where she showed him all around campus for a day before he continued his journey to Indiana. I chuckled later when he also told me he had got his first VISA card shortly before in 1987 for gas and hotels on the trip, as gas/oil company cards, which he did have a few of, were starting to disappear by the late 1980s.

Fast-forward two years from 1987 to 1989. My dad’s health had declined some, but he was still living in his apartment in Bridgenorth and driving, Heather, meanwhile was on the cusp of starting at Duke in North Carolina. And I was working still at the Peterborough Examiner, faced with the likely choice of being near my spouse, or my father, who was still living at home, but showing signs he might need to move to a retirement home sooner than later. Yet, his decline wasn’t linear, although he was starting to spend more time in hospital by the Spring of 1989; a few days here, a few days there. While he was in hospital for his 70th birthday on July 13, 1989, he was well enough for to go out for a birthday dinner at the Ponderosa Steakhouse on Chemong Road in Peterborough on a day pass. My dad was a Ponderosa aficionado (along with Dixie Lee Fried Chicken). But there were warning bells. Around the same time, he asked for my help for the first-time in his life writing a cheque, in this case to pay his Ontario Hydro Bill.

He died exactly a month later on Aug. 13, 1989. I gave my two weeks notice at the Peterborough Examiner and moved to North Carolina with Heather. I returned to work at the Peterborough Examiner as a reporter in the old Hunter Street second-floor newsroom almost eight years later in April 1997. Jack Marchen was still sitting directly across from me and Phil Tyson beside me.

Back in 1989, Heather and I had spent the summer looking around Peterborough and surrounding area for a possible retirement home for my dad to move to, although we hadn’t reached the point of broaching the subject with him. All of this was a very long time ago (I was 32 years old), but I have two still distinct memories. One is of being overwhelmingly depressed by the cumulative effect of visiting such facilities. The other is a particular memory, although which retirement home it was, mercifully escapes me 34 years later. What I do remember with clarity is seeing a group of retirement home residents at a place Heather and I were checking out, sitting in their wheelchairs in eerie silence, eyes glued to the overhead communal television set. Heather and I used to say afterward, only half-jokingly, that my dad had known when to make his exit.

My own thoughts on aging gracefully, aging well, wherever you may live, might be summarized thusly: If you can, be mellow, be grateful. Much easier said than done, I know from personal experience, if you are sick or otherwise in pain.

First, some words on mellowing with age: As a young reporter, and even much later as an editor, I several times came very close to quitting newspaper jobs as a matter of principle over some story, editorial or column dispute with my bosses. While I still think there are times when that is the only appropriate and ethical thing to do, I have come to realize they are probably few and far between, and ego and arrogance were bigger factors driving my soapbox fury than I realized at the time. 

My gratitude has also increased with age. Reality can be sobering. I have two first cousins who lost their husbands last year and are now widows. In the Knights of Columbus, our fraternal Latin motto is “tempus fugit, memento mori,” which translates in English to “time flies, remember death.” When I was tempted to think of counting a cash drawer at the hotel (regularly) for seven years until last summer, or at the university college library (occasionally) still, as tedious tasks, I usually catch myself and think something to the effect of thank God that I am still blessed with the cognitive skills (aided by a pocket calculator) to count the cash. The late Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, who died in January 2022 at the age of 95, had many useful things to say over many decades of teaching on mindfulness and seemingly ordinary and mundane tasks. If you’re still able to look them up, count yourself fortunate.

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The magic of deep-fried onion rings: From Kirby’s Pig Stand to A&W

A&W is credited for popularizing onion rings after adding them to their menu in the 1960s. I make my own contribution to their continued popularity here in Thompson, Manitoba many a Wednesday evening while stopping by my local A&W for a $5.25 order of onion rings on my way between the University College of the North (UCN) Thompson campus library and Quality Inn & Suites Thompson. I could call it a pandemic takeout indulgence perhaps except for the fact I’ve been doing it since around 2015.

Roy Allen and Frank Wright, founders of A&W Restaurants, were very likely the first true hamburger franchisers, selling franchises in California way back in 1921. In 1956, the first A&W drive-in restaurant in Canada opened on Portage Avenue right in Winnipeg.

It wasn’t long after A&W added onion rings to their menu in the 1960s that I discovered them, thanks to my late Uncle Bob Barker, who lived in Crown Point, Indiana at the time, and introduced me to onion rings on a visit, with my Aunt Joan, and cousins Lynne and Bob, to our home in Oshawa, Ontario circa 1970. I was about 13 at the time. Uncle Bob didn’t buy our onion rings at A&W, but rather at a food truck in Lakeview Park in the south end of Oshawa on the north shore of Lake Ontario. I’ve loved them ever since

I wrote back in September 2014 here: “It is, of course, not fashionable in 2014 to offer praise of any kind for fast food. Let’s put that on our table here as a given right away. But what a satiating trip down memory lane, admittedly as guilty pleasure, it can be to recall those more modest ghosts of hamburger joints past.” Almost three years later in March 2017, I would also write here in a post headlined, “The Accidental Lowbrow Fast Food Blogger” that back in 2014, I’d never have guessed some 80,000 views and 2½ years later, how often I’d have written about food, especially fast food joints and other greasy spoons in Canada and the United States. I’m not quite sure what I thought I was going to be writing about, but I don’t remember food being on my composing radar for blog posts. Premillennial dispensationalism? The Rapture? Young Earth Creationism? Spiritual Warfare? Petrus Romanus? Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes? Any and all things Catholic? Sure, all of these and more, some pretty arcane and from the fringe of the respectable-thinking universe. But food?

An onion ring is a form of appetizer or side dish commonly found in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and some parts of Asia, mainland Europe, and Latin America. They generally consist of a cross-sectional “ring” of onion (the circular structure of which lends itself well to this method of preparation) dipped in batter or bread crumbs and then deep fried; a variant is made with onion paste. While typically served as a side dish, onion rings are often eaten by themselves. The cooking process decomposes propanethial oxide in the onion into the sweet-smelling and tasting bispropenyl disulfide, responsible for the slightly sweet taste of onion rings.

The exact origins of deep-fried onion rings are unknown. A recipe called “Fried Onions with Parmesan Cheese” is included in John Mollard’s 1802 cookbook The Art of Cookery Made Easy and Refined. Within the recipe, it suggests cutting onions into 1/2 inch rings, dipping them into a batter made of flour, cream, salt, pepper, and Parmesan cheese then deep-frying them in boiling lard. It also recommends serving them with a sauce made of melted butter and mustard. A recipe for onions that are dipped in milk then dredged in flour and deep-fried appeared in a 1933 advertisement for Crisco in The New York Times Magazine.

One claimant to the invention of the onion ring is the Kirby’s Pig Stand restaurant chain, founded in Oak Cliff, Texas in the early 1920s. The once-thriving chain, whose heyday in the 1940s saw over 100 locations across the United States, also claims to be the originator of Texas toast.

A Dallas entrepreneur named Jessie G. Kirby built the first Pig Stand along the Dallas-Fort Worth Highway in October 1921. It was a roadside barbecue restaurant unlike any other: Its patrons could drive up, eat and leave, all without budging from their automobiles. (“People with cars are so lazy,” Kirby explained, “they don’t want to get out of them.”) Kirby lured these car-attached customers with great fanfare and spectacle. When a customer pulled into the Pig Stand parking lot, teenage boys in white shirts and black bow ties jogged over to his car, hopped up onto the running board—sometimes before the driver had even pulled into a parking space—and took his order. (This daredevilry won the servers a nickname: carhops.) Soon, the Pig Stand drive-ins replaced the carhops with attractive young girls on roller skates, but the basic formula was the same: good-looking young people, tasty food, speedy service and auto-based convenience.

That first Pig Stand was a hit with hungry drivers, and soon it became a chain. (The slogan: “America’s Motor Lunch.”) Kirby and his partners made one of the first franchising arrangements in restaurant history, and Pig Stands began cropping up everywhere. By 1934, there were more than 130 Pig Stands in nine states. (Most were in California and Florida.) Meanwhile, the chain kept innovating. Many people say that California’s Pig Stand No. 21 became the first drive through restaurant in the world in 1931, and food historians believe that Pig Stand cooks invented deep-fried onion rings, chicken-fried steak sandwiches and a regional speciality known as Texas Toast.

But wartime gasoline and food rationing hit the Pig Stands hard, and after the war they struggled to compete with newer, flashier drive-ins.

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Lisa Montgomery is scheduled to die Jan. 12 in the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, and would be only the fourth woman ever executed by U.S. federal authorities and the first in more than 67 years

Lisa Montgomery drove from Kansas to Missouri and fatally strangled a pregnant woman, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, cut open her body, and kidnapped her baby on Dec. 16, 2004, as part of a premeditated murder-kidnap scheme.

Montgomery, 52, the only woman among 52 federal death row prisoners, is scheduled to be executed Jan. 12 by lethal injection by the Federal Bureau of Prisons in the federal death chamber at U.S. Penitentiary Terre Haute, Indiana. The Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, D.C. based a national non-profit organization, says 22 of the federal death row inmates are white, 22 are black, seven are Latino and one is Asian.

She would be the first female United States federal prisoner executed since Bonny Brown Heady, 41, was executed in Missouri’s gas chamber, along with co-defendant Carl Hall, 34, in Jefferson City on Dec. 18, 1953, for the Sept. 28 kidnapping and murder across the state line in Lenexa in Johnson County, Kansas of six-year-old Robert “Bobby” Cosgrove Greenlease Jr. from Kansas City, Missouri, whose father Robert Greenlease Sr. was a multi-millionaire auto dealer, and the requested $600,000 ransom payment was the largest in American history at the time.

As well as being the first female federal inmate executed in more than 67 years, Montgomery would be only the fourth woman to be executed by federal authorities, the first being Lincoln assassination conspirator Mary Surratt, one of eight Lincoln co-conspirators tried by a military court and found guilty on June 30, 1865, and given various sentences depending upon their involvement.

Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Surratt were charged and convicted of conspiring with John Wilkes Booth, who entered President Abraham Lincoln’s State Box at the Ford Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865, and shot and mortally wounded him. All were hanged at the Washington Arsenal on July 7, 1865 – with Surratt becoming the first woman executed by the United States federal government.

Ethel Rosenberg, 37, who, along with her husband Julius, 35, were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage as Soviet spies, and were executed by electric chair on June 19, 1953, six months before Heady.

Montgomery, who doctors, psychologists and social workers have all concluded over the last 15 years, is seriously mentally ill after being sexually abused as a child in what amounted to torture enduring across years, drove from her home in Kansas to Stinnett’s home in Skidmore, Missouri, purportedly to purchase a puppy.  Once inside the residence, Montgomery attacked and strangled Stinnett – who was eight months pregnant – until the victim lost consciousness.  Using a kitchen knife, Montgomery then cut into Stinnett’s abdomen, causing her to regain consciousness.  A struggle ensued, and Montgomery strangled Stinnett to death.  Montgomery then removed the baby from Stinnett’s body, took the baby with her, and attempted to pass it off as her own.  Montgomery subsequently confessed to murdering Stinnett and abducting her child.  In October 2007, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri found Montgomery guilty of federal kidnapping resulting in death, and unanimously recommended a death sentence, which the court imposed.  Her conviction and sentence were affirmed on appeal. On Jan. 1, a three-judge federal appeals panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed a Dec. 24, 2020 district court ruling that had vacated her execution date, and reinstated her execution date subject to review by the full appeals court.

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From the McLaughlin Motor Car Company of 1907 to GM in 2019: End of an era as Oshawa Assembly winds down to close

End of an era for my hometown.

On Nov. 26, 2018, General Motors announced plans to “unallocate production” by December 2019 to Oshawa Assembly, which made the Chevrolet Impala; Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly, where the Chevrolet Volt, Buick LaCrosse and Cadillac CT6 are produced; Lordstown Assembly in Lordstown, Ohio, which made the Chevrolet Cruze compact; Baltimore Operations in White Marsh, Maryland; and Warren Transmission Operations in Warren, Michigan.

And now, December has truly arrived.

Unifor Local 222 is set to lose roughly two thirds of its membership due to the end of 112 years of auto assembly in Oshawa sometime next week. The McLaughlin Motor Car Company, incorporated on Nov. 20, 1907, began automobile manufacturing the following month in December 1907 – 112 years ago this month – in Oshawa, producing 154 McLaughlin-Buick Model F cars – called McLaughlins – with Buick engines that first year.

The last truck will roll of the assembly line the week before Christmas, as GM stops production in Oshawa of the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra full-size, light-duty trucks, the last of which were being shipped from Indiana for final assembly in Oshawa. The end of production will leave about 2,300 workers unemployed. Unifor Local 222 president Colin James says the local is re-evaluating its future and potentially downsizing from its union hall on Phillip Murray Avenue in Oshawa.

GM will continue to manufacture parts and employ about 300 workers people at its sprawling soon-to-be-very-underused Oshawa plant, stamping parts for GM and, potentially, suppliers. The automaker has made a 10-year commitment to build parts, such as quarter panels, trunks, doors and hoods at the plant. The company is also building a 55-acre (22-hectare) autonomous-and-connected-vehicle and smart technology test track on the Oshawa site.

I arrived to work at General Motors in Oshawa shortly before the halcyon days of the early 1980s when employment at GM in Oshawa would top out at more than 23,000 workers.

I spent the first of five summers, beginning in July 1976 as a Trent University-bound first year student, fresh out of Grade 13 at Oshawa Catholic High School, working in the very same GM Oshawa West Plant high-seniority Completely Knocked Down (CKD) department that my dad, Bill Barker, had retired from the year before. Some of his buddies were still there; some I had heard about for years and met for the first time.

My dad worked as an hourly-rated employee for 32½ years before retiring in 1975. He was a proud rank-and-file trade unionist, a member of Local 222 of the old United Autoworkers of America (UAW).

In the fall of 1970, he walked the picket line for 3½ months in the second-longest strike against his employer since the Dirty Thirties. I remember it because I was 13 and in Grade 8 at St. Christopher in Oshawa at the time. He also walked the picket line 15 years earlier in 1955 in the five-month UAW strike against General Motors of Canada, the longest strike against the company.

While he wasn’t much fond of politicians of any stripe collectively, he did have a bit of a liking individually for Mike Starr, Oshawa-Whitby riding Progressive Conservative MP, and a federal labour minister in the Diefenbaker government for a time in the 1960s, but was truly fond of the man who defeated Starr by 15 votes in the June 1968 federal election, future NDP leader Ed Broadbent, who in his youth had been my parent’s paperboy for a time, delivering the Oshawa Times to the south-side of their rented Church Street red Insulbrick duplex, my first home.

Truth be told, my dad liked Ed not so much because of his NDP affiliation, although as a trade unionist that carried weight, but mainly because he saw him as a hardworking, honest politician; a kindred spirit, although my dad would have put it more plainly than that.

I well remember my dad’s General Motors’ ring, presented to him in 1967 for 25 years of “Loyal Service.” In fact, I have it now. My dad and mom, along with his co-workers getting their rings, took a GM-provided train trip from Oshawa to Toronto to the Royal York Hotel for dinner and the presentation by the company. After another five years of seniority in 1972, GM added a diamond to it for 30 years of service.

My first hourly-rated job was hammering large wooden crates together. It was just an amazing cavernous building that old West Plant with great big windows and wooden floors. I remember once going across the tunnel (or bridge, I’m not sure now how it was referred to) connecting the West Plant and the North Plant over Division Street. Later that summer, I hung rads in the “Rad Room” of the old North Plant across the street. My last summer job at GM was many years later in the Summer of 1992, working on the acid side of the Battery Plant.

The Canadian Automotive Museum was created in Oshawa in 1961. The city at various times has been known by mottoes that include “The City that Motovates Canada” and “The City in Motion” and, most recently, the “Automotive Capital of Canada.”

While my hometown of Oshawa is a lot bigger (and for that matter older) than Thompson, Manitoba where I live now, it was in many ways, at least as I recall it from growing up there, a lot like Thompson in being a working-class blue-collar town.

The men in my Nipigon Street neighbourhood – guys like Earl Kirkpatrick, Snow Willson and my dad – were often working six days a weeks, with overtime on Saturdays when they were on day shift. If they were on nights, they’d be busy flooding the Nipigon Park outdoor rink at 2:30 a.m. – after their eight-hour night shift ended and they went to bed – so us kids could skate the next day. That’s how I remember my dad.

Instead of going to INCO or Vale, as the company is now, and down into a mine, the men (and they were invariably men back then) I knew in the 1960s carried their metal lunch pails into the factory at General Motors to build cars and trucks. When they were leaving at the end of their shift, they punched the same clock they had coming in.

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William Marshall Barker: My dad would have turned 100 today

My dad would have turned 100 today. Sadly, he left us almost 30 years ago in 1989. My cousin, Sharon Seager posted this picture of her mom and my dad two years ago.

William Marshall Barker, shown here at right, beside his youngest sister, Norma, my sweet aunt, was called “Bill” by everyone who knew him (aside perhaps from my mother, Pat, who called him “William” on rare occasions, which never failed to get his attention), and my Uncle Bob Barker in Indiana, who always called him “Will.”

My dad would have been 100 today if he was still alive. He died in 1989.

He was the finest man I’ve ever known. His word was his bond. I never knew him to tell an untruth, which is simply remarkable. He never equivocated. He was always straight forward, meaning what he said and saying what he meant.

He worked at General Motors of Canada in Oshawa, Ontario, his hometown, as an hourly-rated employee for 32½ years before retiring in 1975. He was a proud rank-and-file trade unionist, a member of Local 222 of the old United Autoworkers of America (UAW).

The men in my Nipigon Street neighbourhood – guys like Earl Kirkpatrick, Snow Willson and my dad – were often working six days a weeks, with overtime on Saturdays when they were on day shift. If they were on nights, they’d be busy flooding the Nipigon Park outdoor rink at 2:30 a.m. – after their eight-hour night shift ended and they went to bed – so us kids could skate the next day. That’s how I remember my dad.

I spent the first of five summers as a university student, beginning in 1976, working in the same West Plant in the high-seniority Completely Knocked Down (CKD) department my dad had retired from the year before. Some of his buddies were still there; some I had heard about for years and met for the first time.

My first job was hammering large wooden crates together. It was just an amazing cavernous building that old West Plant with great big windows and wooden floors. I remember once going across the tunnel (or bridge, I’m not sure now how it was referred to) connecting the West Plant and the North Plant over Division Street. Later that summer, I hung rads in the rad room of the old North Plant across the street.

There are other memories, of course, which I haven’t quite got around to writing about yet. Like how he used to take me tobogganing in the winter at the Oshawa Golf Course. Or before I had a driver’s licence, pick me up after the third period of Oshawa Generals games, where I sold pop and hotdogs when I was 14 and 15 at the old Oshawa Civic Auditorium. That’s where the two of us would go together many winter Friday nights to cheer on our hometown Junior B Oshawa Crushmen, especially our neighbour, Scott Willson.

While my parents came a bit late to the appeal of pizza, I do recall my dad heading out on the occasional Friday night when some of my Nipigon Street friends, perhaps Mike Byrne and Paul Sobanski, were over, and dad coming back with a box of Mothers Pizza from Simcoe North, the first and only Mothers in Oshawa at the time.

Before that, and well into the 1970s anyway, my dad still picked up fish-and-chip dinners for us on Fridays after work, first at Paul and Helen Plishka’s Rose Bowl Fish and Chips at the corner of Bond and Prince streets, and later Pat and Mike Volpe‘s Pat & Mike Fish & Chips on Hortop Street, as well as from the H. Salt, Esq. Authentic English Fish and Chips franchise on Simcoe Street North in Oshawa, where we also enjoyed their fish and chips. Haddon Salt had operated his fish and chips store in Skegness, in the northeastern corner of England, before moving to the United States and, along with his wife, Grace, opening their first shop in Sausalito, California, under the name of Salt’s Fish & Chips in 1965. Pope Paul VI’s proclamation of Paenitemini (Apostolic Constitution On Penance) on Feb. 17, 1966, allowed episcopal conferences to permit Catholics in their jurisdictions to substitute some other penitential practice aside from abstaining from meat on Fridays, a practice which had been in force in the universal church since Pope Saint Nicholas 1, also known as Saint Nicholas the Great, in 851, so dad was in no hurry to abandon eating fish on Fridays, especially Halibut. I was nine years old, growing up in Oshawa, Ontario, when all this came to pass in 1966.

Instead of going to Inco or Vale and down into a mine or working at the surface in a refinery or smelter, the men (and they were invariably men back then) I knew in the 1960s carried their metal lunch pails into the factory at General Motors to build cars and trucks. When they were leaving at the end of their shift, they punched the same clock they had coming in. Every time I hear Men of the Deeps sing Rise Again or Working Man, my union resolve deepens just a little bit more.

In the fall of 1970, he walked the picket line for 3½ months in the longest strike against his employer since the Dirty Thirties.

While he wasn’t much fond of politicians of any stripe collectively, he did have a bit of a liking individually for Mike Starr, Oshawa-Whitby riding Progressive Conservative MP, and a federal labour minister in the Diefenbaker government for a time in the 1960s, but was truly fond of the man who defeated Starr by 15 votes in the June 1968 federal election, future NDP leader Ed Broadbent, who in his youth had been my parent’s paperboy for a time, delivering the Oshawa Times to the south-side of their rented Church Street red Insulbrick duplex, my first home.

Truth be told, my dad liked Ed not so much because of his NDP affiliation, although as a trade unionist that carried weight, but mainly because he saw him as a hardworking, honest politician; a kindred spirit, although my dad would have put it more plainly than that.

My dad had a Grade 8 education and wasn’t much for reading. I don’t think I ever saw him read a book, other than maybe to consult the odd one for some factual information. His idea of leisure was to work with his hands at carpentry or upholstery, and he built me, the reader, several fine custom-size wooden bookcases, with a larger than normal shelf sometimes for oversized books.

My non-book reading father, however, made time every day to read the local daily newspaper, and from 1983, when I began working as a newspaper reporter, until his death in 1989, quite likely read every newspaper story I wrote during that six-year period, and, as I learned only after he died, would often point out my byline in the Peterborough Examiner to shopkeepers and acquaintances in Bridgenorth, a small community just outside of Peterborough on Chemong Lake, where he lived from 1980 to 1989.

That man, an ordinary man by the measures of the world, yet an extraordinary man of character by any measure, was my father.

Bill Barker. Born on July 13, 1919. Gone from this earthly plain to his true home, but never forgotten by those of us who knew him here. My dad.

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The Truth is in Here? U.S. National Archives set to release final JFK assassination records Oct. 26

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland is set to release on Oct. 26 the final 3,000 never-before-seen documents the federal government says it holds related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  The records at issue are documents previously identified as assassination records but withheld in part or in full.

An additional 34,000 previously redacted files are also scheduled for release with the redacted text restored for the new releases. Under the terms of The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, the United States government was given 25 years to make public all Kennedy assassination-related files. That deadline expires Thursday. President Donald Trump tweeted Oct. 21 that “subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as president, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.” The records are to be released this week “unless the president certifies, as required by The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, that continued postponement is made necessary” by specific identifiable harm, including harm to intelligence, law enforcement, military operations or foreign relations. A statement from the White House on Saturday said: “The president believes that these documents should be made available in the interests of full transparency unless agencies provide a compelling and clear national security or law enforcement justification otherwise.”

The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 resulted from filmmaker Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, which added more fuel to 28 years of inflamed public fascination with the idea of conspiracy and cover-up connected to the Kennedy assassination, despite the official finding of the 1964 Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Earlier this year, the National Archives and Records Administration released at 8 a.m. on July 24 a set of 3,810 documents, along with 17 audio files, previously withheld in accordance with The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The materials released July 24 were available online only initially, with access to the original paper records promised “at a future date.” The National Archives and Records Administration established the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection in November 1992, and it consists of approximately five million pages of records. The vast majority of the collection, about 88 percent, has been open in full and released to the public since the late 1990s, the National Archives says.

Highlights of the July 24 release included FBI and CIA records and 17 audio files of interviews of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who defected to the United States in January 1964. Nosenko claimed to have been the officer in charge of the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald during Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union. The interviews were conducted in January, February, and July of 1964. The set of documents released in July included 441 documents previously withheld in full and 3,369 documents previously released with portions redacted. The redacted text is restored for the new releases.

Josh Sanburn, a writer for TIME, suggested last December “the files – many of which trace back to the House Select Committee on Assassinations from the 1970s – promise to be less about second shooters and grassy knolls and more about what the government, particularly the CIA, might have known about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before Kennedy’s death.”

According to the National Archives, the final records release includes information on the CIA’s station in Mexico City, where Oswald showed up weeks before JFK’s death; 400 pages on E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate burglary conspirator who said on his deathbed that he had prior knowledge of the assassination; and testimony from the CIA’s James Angleton, who oversaw intelligence on Oswald. “The documents could also provide information on a CIA officer named George Joannides, who directed financial dealings with an anti-Castro group whose members had a public fight with Oswald on the streets of New Orleans in the summer of 1963,” says Sanburn.

As President Kennedy’s presidential limousine, a modified 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza around 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, three shots rang out as the motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository. If you were born in 1957 or earlier, you have a highly detailed and exceptionally vivid flashbulb memory snapshot of that moment and where you were and what you were doing. I was in my Grade 1 class in Oshawa, Ontario here in Canada at St. Christopher Separate Elementary School on Annapolis Avenue that day. Kennedy, who was born 100 years ago, was the fourth United States president to be assassinated, after Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881 and William McKinley in 1901.

Secret Service Agent William Greer, 54, the limousine driver, sped to Parkland Hospital where Father Oscar Huber, a 70-year-old Vincentian priest from Holy Trinity Catholic Church, who had been watching the presidential motorcade, having walked the three blocks, arrived to administer the sacrament of last rites (extreme unction) to the mortally wounded 46-year-old president.

Just  two hours and eight minutes after Kennedy was shot, Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), who was also in Dallas, riding in a car behind the president with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, was sworn in as president of the United States aboard Air Force One at Love Field, as the presidential plane’s four jet engines were being powered up, by Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes,  a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the only woman in U.S. history to have sworn in a United States president, a task usually executed by the chief justice of the United States, using a Roman Catholic missal taken from a side table in Kennedy’s airplane cabin, which Larry O’Brien, a member of JFK’s inner circle as  special assistant to the president for congressional relations and personnel, is said to have mistakenly taken to be a Bible, as it was bound in calfskin and embossed with a crucifix. Would O’Brien, a practicing Irish Roman Catholic, mix up a missal with a Bible in the chaos of the moment? Perhaps. Or maybe he thought it was a perfectly natural thing, given his own religious background, to have Johnson, a Stone-Campbell  Movement Disciple of Christ adherent, sworn in with a missal.

Also, while the oath should have been, according to Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Hughes said in 1968 she also mistakenly added, “So help me God” to the end of the oath she read on the plane: “Every oath of office that I had ever given ended up with ‘So help me God!’ so it was just automatic that I said [it].”

While conspiracy theories about Charles Harrelson, actor Woody Harrelson’s father, being one of the “three tramps” on the grassy knoll – a second shooter in Dallas – along with two other shadowy figures, Charles Rogers and Chauncey Holt, continue to have some currency, it appears the boxcar tramps actually were Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle and John Gedney, and that Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Warren Commission concluded, acted alone. Harrelson, however, was later convicted of the assassination of U.S. federal district court Judge “Maximum John” H. Wood, Jr., shot dead in the parking lot outside his San Antonio, Texas townhouse on May 29, 1979. Harrelson, 69, died March 15, 2007, incarcerated at Supermax, the United States’ most secure federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.

Some conspiracies, however, are … well, conspiracies. Others remain unproven matters of conjecture. And still others exist on the fringes of tinfoil hat conspiracy theory speculation.  In April 2016, then Republican presidential primaries candidate Donald Trump accused Canadian-born Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael B. Cruz, a Cuban-American Christian preacher, of being alongside Lee Harvey Oswald several months before he shot the president, “channeling a National Enquirer story that the Cruz campaign has denounced as false,” wrote McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Maria Recio for the Miami Herald at the time. Responding in Indiana, Ted Cruz, challenging Trump for the Republican presidential nomination at the time, quipped: “I guess I should go ahead and admit that yes, my dad killed JFK, he is secretly Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa is buried in his backyard.”

The assassination of Lincoln, however, was part of a larger conspiracy, a fact that’s largely forgotten today. What is remembered is that actor John Wilkes Booth entered Lincoln’s State Box at the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865 undetected and shot him in the back of the head. Lincoln, mortally wounded, was taken to the Petersen House across the street and died at 7:22 a.m. April 15. On April 26, Booth was found hiding in a barn near Port Royal, Virginia and was shot and killed by a Union solider after he refused to surrender and the barn in which he was hiding was set ablaze.

Co-conspirator Lewis Powell attempted to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward, but only managed to injure him. At the same time, another co-conspirator, George Atzerodt was supposed to have killed Vice-President Andrew Johnson, but backed out.

Eight Lincoln co-conspirators were caught over the next few days and tried by a military court. They were found guilty on June 30 and given various sentences depending upon their involvement. Powell, Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Elizabeth Jenkins Surratt were charged with conspiring with Booth, along with various other crimes, and all were hanged in Washington on July 7, 1865 – with Surratt becoming the first woman executed by the United States federal government.

It was also on Nov. 22, 1963 that C.S. Lewis, the former atheist-turned-Anglican apologist died, as did Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian novel Brave New World, which anticipated developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and operant conditioning, leading Modern Library in 1999 to rank it fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley all died within hours of each other, In January 1982, Reformed Protestant Calvinist-turned Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft, a professor at Boston College since 1965, published Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley, where he imagines the three discussing life after death and the claims of Christ.

The deaths of Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley came one day after CBS aired what is believed to be the first major U.S. news report to feature The Beatles on Thursday, Nov. 21, 1963. Correspondent Alexander Kendrick interviewed The Beatles in England, including in his 5:09 clip footage recorded at the Winter Gardens Theatre in Bournemouth, England five days earlier, which you can watch here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeolhjIWPYs

Did the assassination of President Kennedy, in ending Camelot, change the course of history for the worse? It’s a popular, if not almost universal view. But historian David Hackett Fischer, in his 1970 book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, warns of the dangers of counterfactual historiography, which extrapolates a timeline in which a key historical event did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. Had Kennedy lived would the United States have exited Vietnam closer to 1964 than 1975? Would LBJ’s landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 have passed so soon under JFK? We can only wonder.

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Aloha: ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to Hawaiian pizza?

 

In the Great Pizza debate there is really only one main question: Is Hawaiian pizza a delight or an abomination?

Sure, there are some subsidiary questions connoisseurs ask about, such as whether anthracite coal-fired or wood-fired ovens bakes a better pizza pie, although it’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison because the answer partly depends on the kind of cheese topping and other ingredients, or whether the best pizzas in North America come out of a handful of pizza joints in New York City or New Haven, Connecticut? That sort of thing.

Coal-fired ovens typically run between 800°F and 1,000°F, sometimes even higher, according to Pizza Today, the industry’s leading trade magazine, which was launched in 1984 by pizzeria owner Gerry Durnell in the tiny town of Santa Claus, Indiana.

Durnell had worked his way through college as a rock and roll disc jokey, a TV cameraman, and as an announcer for the Ozark Jubilee. He was running an ice cream shop in Santa Claus, in southwestern Indiana, not too far from the Kentucky state line , when he decided to add baking pizzas to his restaurant menu.

In a Dec. 15, 2104 article in Pizza Today, headlined “Respecting the Craft: Wood vs. Coal,” Tony Gemignani, who got his start in 1991 as a pizza thrower at his brother’s Pyzano’s Pizzeria in Castro Valley, California, notes “specialty cheese like a dry mozzarella, also known as a Caprese loaf, is common. This cheese is typically sliced and applied before the sauce. Common pizzas are tomato pies, clam and garlic, and sausage, says Gemignani, the first and only Triple Crown winner to date for baking at the International Pizza Championships in Lecce, Italy. “When you’re cooking at such a high temperature, even higher than a wood-fired oven,” he says, “you still have a longer bake time because a coal oven doesn’t have a high flame like a wood-fired oven. The pizza is typically 16 to 18 inches in diameter and is charred yet pliable. It has a slight crispness, with some stability.

“A wood-fired oven typically runs between 650°F and 900°F. At 900°F, pizzas can cook in 60 to 90 seconds. Fresh mozzarella and buffalo mozz are typically used. The pizzas that come from these ovens are typically 11 to 13 inches in diameter and come out of the ovens charred, soft, delicate and sometimes wet (even soupy at times). They are not recommended for delivery.

“When it comes to the price of wood and coal, they are very similar.”

Lombardi’s (a favourite of Italian tenor Enrico Caruso) was founded in 1905 on Spring Street in the Little Italy section of Manhattan in New York City, and is the oldest pizzeria in the United States. While it is generally agreed pizza originated in Italy, the date of its invention is hard to pin down with exactitude. 

Neapolitan pizza is first mentioned by name in the late 18th century, and that’s usually considered to be the origin date for pizza, but a minority opinion in recent years is that pizza dates back to 997 in the 10th century, when it appears on a Latin list of foods to be supplied annually at Christmas and Easter as a tithe to the archbishops of Gaeta (“whether to us or our successors”) in central Italy, payable by the tenants of a mill on the nearby Garigliano River.

In support of the later Naples origins of pizza theory, an often recounted story holds that on June 11, 1889, to honour the Queen consort of Italy, Margherita of Savoy, the Neapolitan pizza-maker Raffaele Esposito created the “Pizza Margherita”, a pizza garnished with tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil, to represent the national colours of Italy as on the Italian flag.

Carol Helstosky, an associate professor of history at the University of Denver, and the author of Pizza: A Global History, told CBC Radio earlier this year that “pizza never had that great a reputation throughout much of its history. As people tried pizza, it had its origins in Naples, right, in the 17th century. And as people outside of Naples, even other Italians or foreigners, tried pizza they reacted with absolute disgust. I believe American inventor Samuel Morse, when he visited Naples and tried pizza, he described that as a type of ‘nauseous cake.'”

In Naples, Helstosky says, there were several different types of pizza, but “mostly pizza was consumed by the poorest of the Neapolitans – soldiers, workers, families who didn’t have access to kitchens and purchased cheap street food. This was also a place where people could eat pasta street side, and so pizza would be a cheap takeaway snack. And so the pizzaiolo would make pizza out of whatever ingredients he happened to have on hand. Near Naples, tomatoes were certainly popular but also fish. And then some mozzarella made out of buffalo milk, fresh herbs like basil or oregano. Whatever was on hand would be sprinkled on top of a pizza.”

Morse, who hardly tried to telegraph his opinion on the matter, apparently was of a minority view on the subject of pizza, which in the 21st century is, if not quite a universal dish worldwide, well, at least and international dish. In March 2015, Pope Francis told Valentina Alazraki, the veteran Vatican correspondent for Mexico’s Noticieros Televisa,  the only thing he really missed after two years as pope was the ability “to go out to a pizzeria and eat a pizza,” adding that even as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires he was free to roam the streets, particularly to visit parishes (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/catholic-cooking-from-pope-francis-love-for-buenos-aires-pizzerias-to-father-leo-patalinghug-the-tv-show-filipino-cooking-priest/).

Almost half the population of Buenos Aires can rightfully claim Italian heritage, so it is little surprise the Argentinian capital is so well-known for its Napoletana pizza. “The only thing I would like is to go out one day, without being recognized, and go to a pizzeria for a pizza,” Pope Francis said, comparing his life now to how it was when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. “In Buenos Aires I was a rover. I moved between parishes and certainly this habit has changed. It has been hard work to change. But you get used to it,”  Pope Francis told Alazraki.

Last year I wrote about Glenview, Illinois-based Family Video (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/who-shot-the-video-store-and-how-did-glenview-illinois-based-family-video-survive-to-thrive-and-still-rent-movies-and-now-sell-pizza/), which continues to survive and thrive and still rent movies, but also mentioned how they now sell pizza made in their video stores from Marco’s Pizza of Toledo, Ohio. Marco’s Pizza, founded in 1978 by Pasquale “Pat” Giammarco, is one of the fastest-growing pizza franchise operations in the United States. The Toledo-based delivery pizza franchisor opened 116 stores in 2015. Pizza is a $46- billion market in the United States that continues to grow at a rate of about one to two per cent per year.

I’ve written here and elsewhere about driving a Plymouth Duster to deliver for Mother’s Pizza Simcoe North in Oshawa during my last spring in high school for $2.65 per hour – plus tips (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/a-taste-for-yesterday-mothers-pizza-and-pepis-pizza/). Mother’s was an iconic Canadian pizza parlour chain from the 1970s – with its swinging parlour-style doors, Tiffany lamps, antique-style chairs, red-and-white checked gingham tablecloths, black-and-white short silent movies shown on a screen for patrons waiting for their meal to enjoy, root beer floats and pizzas served on silver-coloured metal pedestal stands.

I also recall writing on Oshawa’s “Share Your Memories” webpage that “in keeping with the spirit of the thing, my own comment Feb. 3 [2014] reads, ‘Pepi’s Pizza, eh? Simcoe and John streets. I had a friend who worked there circa 1973-74. I still have fond memories of the pepperoni pizza … greasy, yes, sure. But superb also.’”

Mother’s Pizza was founded in 1970 by three partners, Grey Sisson, Ken Fowler and Pasquale Marra, and got its start in the Westdale Village area of Steeltown. The chain eventually grew to about 120 locations in Canada, the United States and England.

In 2008, Brian Alger acquired the then-expired trademark to Mother’s Pizza – one of his favourite childhood brands – and along with another entrepreneur, Geeve Sandhu, re-opened April 1, 2013 at 701 Queenston Rd. in Hamilton, Ont.

When Sam Panopoulos emigrated, along with his two brothers, when he was 20, from Greece to Canada in 1954, pizza was an oddity. “Pizza wasn’t in Canada – nowhere,” he told CBC Radio’s As It Happens last February.

“At the time, the food was available in Detroit and was slowly making its way to neighbouring Windsor, Ont., not far from Chatham, Ont., the small town where Panopoulos had settled and opened a restaurant,” CBC reported.

“When visiting Windsor, he dined on pizza and decided to try making it at home. ‘Those days, the main thing was mushrooms, bacon and pepperoni. There was nothing else going on the pizza,'” said Panopoulos.

“Inspired by a can of pineapple on his shelf, he took a chance and tossed the fruit on his pizza. The year was 1962. Hawaiian pizza had arrived at the Satellite Restaurant in Chatham.

“We just put it on, just for the fun of it, see how it was going to taste,” Panopoulos told the BBC News last February. “We were young in the business and we were doing a lot of experiments.

“Customers ended up loving the savoury sweetness of the dish.

“The creation also capitalized on the mid-century tiki trend, which popularized Polynesian culture in North America.

“Nobody liked it at first,” said Panopoulos. “Those days nobody was mixing sweets and sours and all that. It was plain, plain food.”

That debate continues 55 years later. Icelandic President Guðni Th. Jó­hann­es­son made world headlines earlier this year at a university in Iceland, in a story that became known as “Pineapplegate” after he was asked  whimsical question about his views on pineapple as a topping on pizza and he responded in a lighthearted way that he thought that it should be banned and that he was “fundamentally opposed” to pineapple on pizza and suggested. “I like pineapple, just not on pizza. But I can’t make laws that make it illegal for people to put pineapples on their pizzas,” Guðni said. “I am happy I don’t have that authority, presidents shouldn’t be tyrants. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where those in my position could ban things they don’t like. But I recommend putting seafood on pizza.”

Sam Panopoulos, who was 83, died last month. “From what I have read, Sam was a decent man with a good sense of humour,” Guðni wrote on Facebook. “Indirectly you could say we crossed paths after I jokingly (yeah, right) said that this particular topping should be banned.”

Me? Well, I don’t know that I tried any kind of pizza until maybe the early 1970s when I was 13 or 14. My parents came a bit late to the appeal of pizza, although I do recall my dad heading out on the occasional Friday night when some of my Nipigon Street friends, perhaps Mike Byrne and Paul Sobanski, were over, and dad coming back with a box of Mothers Pizza from Simcoe North, the first and only Mothers in Oshawa at the time.

I think I may have had my first Hawaiian pizza in the late spring or early summer of 1976, at the very, very end of my Oshawa Catholic High School Grade 13 days, on a picnic table at Lakeview Park in the south end of Oshawa on the north shore of Lake Ontario, hanging out in those last glorious days of high school freedom with my comrades in numerous adventures, both big and small, Ann Marie (a.k.a. Annie and A.M.) McDermott, and Gerry Byrne, both of whom are friends to this day. I might even have been just finishing up my part-time after-school driving job for Mothers Pizza Simcoe North at the time, as I got ready to move to a higher-paying student summer job at General Motors of Canada, before beginning my higher learning at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario that September.

The Hawaiian pizza verdict? Well, last night I had both chunks of pineapple and anchovies’ paste on the pizza I constructed at home (pictured above), suggesting I’m quite OK with mixing sweets and sours, and enjoy the savoury sweetness of the Hawaiian pizza model (I tend to improvise a bit) that Sam Panopoulos first offered us in 1962 at his Satellite Restaurant in Chatham.

Thanks, and aloha, Sam!

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Holy Christmas, Batman … they’re thinking, talking and writing about Christianity

Several times a year (today being one of those times) I’ll see a post on my Facebook timeline from some old friend or colleague, who I haven’t seen for years, saying something to the effect, “Heard you(‘re) pretty religious.” Actually, that’s a verbatim quote from today on Facebook. But similar sentiments crop up several times a year, sometimes seemingly out of the blue, sometimes in relation to something I’ve recently written and posted on Facebook, or perhaps just re-posted from somewhere else. Usually it is framed more as a statement with a dangling question mark rather than a direct question.

The questioner in this case was a former roommate, who last I checked in with him on the matter about 30 years ago, was himself a committed atheist. And also a good guy, as we might say, principled and ethical. A good friend. A third member of our university roommate trio, who visited me after more than 20 years last summer, had also heard I was “pretty religious,” he told me. His wife, who I haven’t met yet, had suggested that before he visited, after reading some of my Facebook posts. My friend isn’t actually on Facebook himself but trolls his wife’s account from time to time, as do most Facebook objectors I know. A non-committal agonistic, he told me his response was sort of to shrug and say not to worry, “John’s always been a Catholic.”

When I hear or read this kind of thing, several things occur to me. One is the sobering fact that people I consider friends or former colleagues, who I worked with years ago, apparently in many cases find any connection between religion and me surprising and noteworthy enough to comment on. What, I wonder, does this say about how I lived my life in the years that I worked with or lived near them? As I said, sobering. And a bit rhetorical, as I’m not sure that I’d want them all to answer that, at least not on my timeline on Facebook.

As for their question, which might be paraphrased as, “When did you get religion?” how exactly does one answer that? I suppose Protestant evangelicals might point to their “born again” experience as that moment. Catholics …. well, infant baptism.

I can almost picture Pope Francis reminding me about the Sadducees, Pharisees and clericalism, should I start boasting about how religious I am. Pope Francis really is not a fan of legalism or legalists. He sees the Church as a big field hospital for sinners, of which he includes himself.

Given that I work 18 hours on Saturdays and Sundays, my parish priest might be surprised to hear how religious I am, too, given my mass attendance for the one mass I might attend weekly on Saturday nights at 6:30 p.m., after working 10 of those 18 hours, is pretty abysmal. No excuse. Sadly, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” many times and an after-work nap beckons.

But when I am awake, I do write about religion with some frequency. I also read about it, think about it and think it matters far more than most journalists understand. However, that’s not exactly a new realization that I’ve come to. Almost 18 years ago, I was among the 270 participants on both sides of that great divide, interested in the intersection of religion and politics in the public square, when I attended the first-ever Faith in the Media conference at the Carleton University School of Journalism in Ottawa for three days from June 7-9, 1998. The Peterborough Examiner, while it didn’t have a religion beat in 1998, graciously picked up the tab for their city hall reporter to go.

Toronto’s Roman Catholic archbishop at the time, Aloysius Cardinal Ambrozic, noted that the Church makes truth claims and demands, which are absolute, while the media tends to be liberal, and, as such, opposed to absolutes. “(The) media are adept at showing the ills of society, but not the remedies … Most of our media are not interested in Christ’s self-emptying death, only in sweating and weeping Madonnas. The media love religious kitsch.” But Ambrozic quickly added, “We, the religious professionals, are not very forthcoming sometimes, perhaps out of a fear of sensationalism. Nor do we always explain ourselves well. At other times we kowtow to the media when we should question its mindset.”

I had also been able to write about religion some during the early to mid-1990s at the Kingston Whig-Standard, where religious coverage was quite possible on weekends, especially if you initiated it. One of my more surreal moments of religion coverage came in June 1995, less than two months after Timothy McVeigh, radicalized after the Waco Siege and Ruby Ridge incident, killed 168 people when he bombed the Oklahoma City federal building, and I covered a conference in Kingston called “Take A Stand ’95: Defending Your Faith in the New World Order.”

Gary Kah, of Indiana, and Eric Barger, of Texas, two of the rising stars of the televised Bible prophecy circuit, told me it was tough going in the immediate wake of Oklahoma City to deliver their message. I imagined it would be.

McVeigh himself was a baptized Roman Catholic but self-professed agnostic, who would later receive the Roman Catholic Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick, formerly known as Last Rites or Extreme Unction, administered through a federal Bureau of Prisons chaplain, minutes before his execution in the federal death chamber at Terre Haute, Indiana on June 11, 2001.

While it may have been tough going at the time in 1995, Kah and Barger are still going – strong, or at least, so it seems.

And the interesting thing is that much of what they talked about that June day more than 21 years ago has come to pass.

A “cashless” society, biometrics, including palm geometry and retinal scanning;  these things are no longer the stuff exclusively of the religious right and tin foil hat meme.

Or how about Implanted  RFID (radio frequency identification) chips? … hmm … sounds kinda like something from the pages of a script for one of the late Iowa filmmaker Russ Doughten’s movies, such as his 1972 film, A Thief in the Night, followed by its three sequels – A Distant Thunder in 1978, Image of the Beast in 1980 and The Prodigal Planet in 1983. Doughten, who earned his master’s degree from Yale Drama School in 1954, died at the age of 86 in August 2013.

While one friend on Facebook today was musing, “Heard you(‘re) pretty religious” another a few hours later sent me a link to Laurie Goodstein’s keynote address at the symposium on religious literacy in journalism earlier this month at Harvard Divinity School for the Religious Literacy Project.

I had read part of her speech last week. “I’m glad that we’re all here because we now have urgent work to do,” Goodstein said in her keynote speech Dec. 8. “Religious literacy has probably never been more important, or more of a challenge. The grounds are shaking, the fissures are cracking open all around us, and the faultlines all seem to intersect. Race, class, gender and underneath it all like molten lava: religion.”

Goodstein is the national religion correspondent for The New York Times. After earning a B.A. from University of California Berkeley and an M.A. from the Columbia School of Journalism, she began her journalism career in 1989 at The Washington Post.

She started as news assistant before becoming a metro reporter and then national reporter. While at the Post in both 1995 and 1996, she won two major awards for religion newswriting, The Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year and the Supple Religion Writing Award.

She joined The New York Times in 1997. “Her work for the Times has covered a wide range of topics and religious traditions, offering a nuanced rather than monolithic view of American Catholics, evangelicals, and Muslims, among others,” said Harvard Divinity School. “In 2004, she won the American Academy of Religion’s award for best in-depth news reporting on religion, an award she won again in 2009. In 2015, she also won the Religion Newswriters Association’s award for excellence in religion reporting. Her recent work has covered American evangelicals’ support for Donald Trump, the possibility of female deacons in the Catholic Church, and Muslim opposition to ISIS.”

I grew up Roman Catholic in an extended family of mainly Protestants (primarily United Church, but with a smattering of Anglicans) with a few Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses also added to the mix. I still have my dad’s 1927 United Church certificate for perfect Sunday school attendance. He was a member of the United Church when he married my mother in June 1942 – an era when “mixed marriages,” as they were quaintly called, were still rather uncommon and somewhat frowned upon by both Protestants and Catholics.

Eventually my dad converted to Catholicism of his own accord. But it was strongly suggested to me by my parents during my childhood that religion wasn’t a particularly suitable topic for discussion at large extended family events given the plurality of beliefs and the conviction with which they were held. I thought religion and politics were about the two most interesting topics one could talk about at the dinner table, so this imposed considerable restraint on me. Still, if my Uncle Morley and Aunt Dot weren’t bringing The Watchtower or Awake! around to the house on visits (and they weren’t), it seemed a reasonable accommodation. My dad and Uncle Morley found their common ground in a boat fishing. All in all, my parent’s live-and-let-live theology has struck me as increasingly wise as I get older.

Christmas dinner next week for many means travelling long miles only to be thrust together in close quarters with other annually seasonally-close family members and friends who hold somewhat different cultural, political, sports or even religious beliefs than you do.

In terms of the latter, this happens even among Christians, hard as that may be to believe, marking the birth of the saviour some 2,000-plus years ago in Bethlehem – or is it Nazareth? Take your pick.

The Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke opt for Bethlehem, while Saint Mark and Saint John seem to lean more toward Nazareth.

As for the year, month or day of Jesus’ birth, you can likely rule out Dec. 25 for the latter two and settle on sometime between 7BC and 4BC for the year. Pope–emeritus Benedict XVI in his book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives wrote that Jesus was born several years earlier than commonly believed because the entire Christian calendar is based on a miscalculation by a sixth century monk known as Dionysius Exiguus, or in English, Dennis the Small.

Given these antecedents it perhaps should come as no surprise then that Roman Catholics and their Protestant brethren some five centuries almost after the Reformation still don’t see eye-to-eye on some of the theological fine points of Christianity. In fact some evangelicals are pretty sure Catholics aren’t really Christians when it come right down to it and remain “unsaved” if they’re not “born again.”

The Catholic response is often a dismissive exercise in pulling rank and saying, in essence, “we were here first” and we are therefore synonymous with being “the Church.” As in one and the same in an unbroken line from Saint Peter to Pope Francis.

How this might play out at a Catholic-Protestant Christmas dinner has been nicely illustrated by Chris Castaldo, lead pastor at New Covenant Church of Naperville in Naperville, Illinois. Castaldo, who was raised as a Catholic and who had an uncle who was a cardinal,  several years ago did a 4:38-video promo for his book, Holy Ground: Walking with Jesus as a Former Catholic, where he plays the role of the Catholic brother, “Vito” at the Christmas dinner because, he says, he was a natural as a former Catholic – and “a Long Island Guido” – to play the role.

“Pastor Dave,” Castaldo’s good friend, Lon Allison, pastor of teaching and evangelism and missions at Wheaton Bible Church in West Chicago, Illinois, plays the Protestant minister.

The video, which can be seen at http://vimeo.com/2702601, is based on a true incident that happened to Castaldo as a minister at College Church in Wheaton, but whereas the actual incident happened right in the church, the fictional video setting has been moved to the family Christmas dinner. To say more about it here would make me a spoiler.

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1968: Bobby Kennedy, described by Arthur Schlesinger as one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Representative Men’ for his times

On the morning of Wednesday June 5, 1968, I was an 11-year-old nearing the end of Grade 5 at St. Christopher Separate School, as it was known then, a Catholic elementary school on  Annapolis Avenue in Oshawa, Ontario, about 30 miles east of Toronto. My mother and me had a daily ritual of listening to the 7:30 a.m. news together at the kitchen table from CKLB, Oshawa’s AM radio station, as I ate my breakfast getting ready for school.

That morning,  as the news came on, I saw the same look on my mother’s face that I had seen on my father’s just two months earlier on the evening of Thursday, April 4 when the television news bulletin interrupted regular programing: Shock, and something else; fear.

The world was turned upside down.

At 3:50 a.m. EDT on that June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy had been shot in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel. Only two months earlier, Martin Luther King had been was shot dead while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

Although I was only six on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, I remember well that same look on my teacher’s faces that afternoon at St. Christopher, and again on my parent’s later at home, when Bobby Kennedy’s older brother, John F. Kennedy, 46, riding in the presidential limousine, a modified 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza in Dallas around 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time, and three shots rang out as the motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository.

If you were born in 1957 or earlier, you have a highly detailed and exceptionally vivid flashbulb memory snapshot of that moment and where you were and what you were doing. While the memories of the Kennedy brothers and King’s assassinations were no doubt shaped by the endless news coverage we subsequently, for those of us, like myself, who were quite young in the 1960s, the flashbulb part of the memories may well be the looks we saw contemporaneous with hearing or seeing our first news coverage of the events on our parent’s or teachers’ faces. I can only speak for myself, but shock and fear were not looks I often saw on my parent’s faces: it registered. I saw similar looks at times during the summer of August 1968 during my first trip outside of Canada on a visit to the United States on both sides of the racial divide as we drove through the South Side of Chicago. “Don’t roll your windows down, don’t stop,” my uncle from Crown Point, Indiana, a long distance truck driver previously from Beamsville, Ontario, warned my dad.

America was metaphorically, if not literally at times, burning. But truth be told, I may have missed the full significance of that history unfolding, as 11-year-old Cathy Ryan, a cute Catholic girl from Crown Point, and most fortuitously, a friend of my cousin Lynne’s, the same age as me, had also caught my eye during that summer visit.

Bobby Kennedy had been the attorney general of the United States in 1963 when his brother was assassinated in Dallas. By 1968, he was a 42-year-old United States senator from New York and the presumptive heir-apparent to the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidency, as the incumbent President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), mired deep in the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, had announced in March he would not seek re-election.

Johnson, who served as JFK’s vice-president, was also in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and just  two hours and eight minutes after Kennedy was shot, Johnson, who was riding in a car behind the president, with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, was sworn in as president of the United States aboard Air Force One at Love Field, as the presidential plane’s four jet engines were being powered up, by Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes, a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the only woman in U.S. history to have sworn in a United States president, a task usually executed by the chief justice of the United States, using a Roman Catholic missal taken from a side table in Kennedy’s airplane cabin, which Larry O’Brien, a member of JFK’s inner circle as  special assistant to the president for congressional relations and personnel, is said to have mistakenly taken to be a Bible, as it was bound in calfskin and embossed with a crucifix.

A year later in 1964, as the Vietnam War was just starting to heat up, Johnson, basking in the still fresh memory of Camelot, had easily defeated Republican nominee Barry Goldwater, to be elected president.

Senator Robert Kennedy was shot at 12:50 a.m. in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California presidential primary. Immediately after he announced to his cheering supporters that the country was ready to end its fractious divisions, Kennedy was shot several times by  22-year-old Sirhan Sirhan, a Jordanian national, born a Christian in Jerusalem under the British Mandate for Palestine, who angered by Kennedy’s support for Israel during the Six-Day War, which had begun exactly a year earlier on June 5, 1967, stepped forward with a rolled up campaign poster, hiding his .22  Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver. He was only a foot away when he fired eight rounds at Kennedy. Five bystanders were also wounded. Kennedy, mortally wounded, died almost 26 hours later the following day.

Sirhan, now 71, was convicted at trial and sentenced in April 1969 to die in California’s gas chamber for Kennedy’s assassination, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1972 after the Supreme Court of California’s decision in The People of the State of California v. Robert Page Anderson, which  held the death penalty violated the California state constitution’s prohibition against cruel or unusual punishment, and further declared its decision was retroactive, thereby invalidating all prior death sentences in effect that had been imposed in California. The death penalty was later restored in California.

Sirhan is currently serving his sentence at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, a medium-maximum state prison in San Diego County, California. He has been denied parole 14 times. Sirhan’s next parole hearing is scheduled for March 2, 2016 when he will have served 47 years of his life sentence.

By June 1968 Bobby Kennedy was perceived by many to be the only person in American politics capable of uniting the country with his integrity and devotion to the civil rights cause. After winning California’s primary, Kennedy was in position win the Democratic presidential nomination and face Richard Nixon, who won the Republican presidential nomination in Miami in August, in the November 1968 general election.

Writing a decade after Kennedy’s assassination in 1978 in his book, Robert Kennedy and His Times, the American historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, commenting in the foreword, said Kennedy “possessed to an exceptional degree what T. S. Eliot called an ‘experiencing nature.’ History changed him, and, had time permitted, he might have changed history. His relationship to his age makes him, I believe, a ‘representative man’ in Emerson’s phrase – one who embodies the consciousness of an epoch, who perceives things in fresh lights and new connections, who exhibits unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries.”

What if Bobby Kennedy had lived and been elected president in 1968 and Richard Nixon had remained a historical footnote?

Would the Vietnam War have ended years earlier?

Would RFK have advanced the cause of civil rights and the promise of America in a way that would have meant the 1970s would not now be remembered as the “Me Decade” after the 1960s, as novelist Tom Wolfe coined the term in his essay “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening”, published by New York magazine in August 1976 referring to the 1970s and the atomized individualism that followed the communitarianism of the 1960s?

These many years later, I still can’t see a news clip of Bobby Kennedy speaking and not experience heartache at some level for the lost possibilities of what might have been. But historian David Hackett Fischer, in his 1970 book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, quite rightly warned us of the dangers of counterfactual historiography, which extrapolates a timeline in which a key historical event did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur.

We just don’t know.

Especially when it comes to 1968, which has been described by many as the year that rocked the world. Apart from the Kennedy and King assassinations in the United States, there was popular rebellion in the air across societies and cultures over disparate issues around the world in 1968, including Czechoslovakia, Cuba, France (“May 68” and the student strikes in Paris, led by Daniel Marc Cohn-Bendit, a.k.a. Dany le Rouge) West Germany, Mexico and Nigeria and the civil war surrounding its oil-rich southeastern state of then secessionist Biafra, just to name a few.

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