Remembering Sister Andrea

Sister Andrea Dumont, the longest-serving religious in Thompson by far when she retired back to Ontario in mid-June to live with other members of her order in a residence in Toronto, at the insistence of her general superior, has died at the age of 86.

Originally from St. Catharines, Ontario. and a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto, Sister Andrea arrived in Thompson in 1991 and spent 29 years working here.

Her parents, William Dumont and Orienne Gauthier, were from Quebec.

Sister Andrea graduated as a registered nurse from St. Joseph’s Hospital School of Nursing in Toronto in 1955. She worked as a nurse in Windsor and then at the emergency department and in the nursing service office at St. Joseph’s Hospital before seeing a notice from the sisters seeking volunteers for some missionary work, Thompson Citizen editor Ian Graham wrote May 28 in a nice piece on her impending retirement (https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/news/thompson/after-29-years-in-thompson-sister-andrea-dumont-returning-to-toronto-1.24143006).

Sister Andrea entered the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto in February 1956, and received the habit in August 1956. She made her final profession in August 1961 and celebrated her diamond jubilee in June 2016.

Sister Andrea spent 14 years in Guatemala until the mission closed and after returning to Canada lived in Grand Rapids, Easterville and Thompson, where the main focus of her work was in adult education, which included training lay presiders for times when there is no priest available, organizing and instructing in the various ministries, sacramental preparation and RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults). There are no parochial Catholic schools in the area. As well as Guatemala, the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto at one time also had foreign missions in Hong Kong, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nicaragua, Honduras and Haiti. They continue to serve in Honduras and Haiti.

In April 2015, she received the St. Joseph Award, the highest honour Catholic Missions in Canada bestows for outstanding missionary work. The Catholic Missions in Canada was founded in 1908 as The Catholic Church Extension Society of Canada. The organization comes to the aid of isolated missions across the country where a lack of resources makes it impossible to maintain a Catholic presence without outside financial help.

Sister Andrea’s order also included some of the same sisters – a fact I only learned here in Thompson years later – that taught some of my high school classes from September 1971 to June 1976, when Sister Conrad Lauber was principal, and Sister Dorothy Schweitzer taught me several English and math classes  at Oshawa Catholic High School (now Monsignor Paul Dwyer Catholic High School). Both Sister Conrad and Sister Dorothy, so it turned out, happened to be good friends of Sister Andrea.

About 10 years ago, I asked Father Eugene Whyte, then pastor of St. Lawrence Church here in Thompson, and a member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, about the prospects of a particular sister soon retiring. Without missing a beat, Father Eugene’s deadpan reply was, “Nuns don’t really retire, John. Ever.”

I wasn’t quite sure then that was quite literally true, but pretty darn close, I thought as I caught Father Eugene’s drift.

For my Catholic friends, it will come as no surprise for me to say there are at least two other truths in addition to non-retirement about Catholic nuns, always worth remembering: you don’t want to incur their wrath and you can never say “no” to a request from a sister, which usually is stated more in the form of a direction assuming compliance, than an actual question. Such, of course, was the case in my relationship with Sister Andrea.

In November 2010, I had Ryan Flanagan, a new reporter at the Thompson Citizen, which I was editing at the time, write a story on charitable organizations who sold homemade goodies at community events as fundraisers for their many good works. One of his stops that crisp fall Saturday morning was the St. Lawrence Pastoral Centre, where Sister Andrea and other volunteers were making their famous perogies for the upcoming Catholic Women’s League (CWL) Annual Christmas craft sale and raffle, scheduled to be held a few short weeks at St.. Lawrence Parish Hall, and the premier fundraising event of the year for the CWL.

Sure enough, Ryan, would wind up writing, “Among the guidelines are that the event must be registered with Public Health at least 14 working days before it begins, that the event operator must maintain a list of all vendors including contact information, and that any food qualifying as ‘potentially hazardous’ must be prepared and packaged in an approved establishment. Foods qualifying as ‘potentially hazardous’ include antipasto, cabbage rolls, chocolate (unless it has been heated as an ingredient in, for example, chocolate chip cookies), coleslaw, pastries filled with cream or custard, dairy products, fish, garlic spreads, homemade soups, meat or meat products, perogies, pickled eggs, pumpkin pie or any pie with meringue, salsa, ungraded eggs, and whipped butter. None of these foods can be sold unless they were prepared in a facility that has been approved by the province as a food handling establishment” (https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/news/thompson/strict-public-health-rules-in-place-for-volunteer-groups-food-and-bake-sales-1.1368718).

I found myself in Sister Andrea’s “if-looks-could-kill” deep freeze for several months. The gradual thaw came a few months later, as Father Eugene made a point of being extra nice to me (no small feat perhaps, as Father Eugene’s opinion of the media wasn’t so very removed from Sister Andrea’s in general, as I recall, from our many conversations) when Sister Andrea and I were sharing the same space, such as reaching extra far to shake my hand when he was processing at the beginning of mass and I was standing near the end of a pew, perhaps suggesting to Sister Andrea that despite apparent evidence to the contrary, I might not be quite beyond redemption.

Sister Andrea, of course, forgave me in time, which is what sisters do. Within a couple of years she was swapping movie lists with Jeanette and I.

She may have also had the last laugh, as it were, a few years later, although she was also may have just been being practical and solving a problem on the fly on short notice. Or a little of both maybe.

In May 2013, The Christophers, a non-profit organization founded in 1945 by Maryknoll Father James Keller, were in Thompson to offer a Christopher leadership course. The ancient Chinese proverb – “it’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness” – guides the organization’s programs. The name of the group is derived from the Greek word “christophoros,” which means “Christ-bearer.”

The Christopher leadership courses teaches participants speaking skills to organize ideas an think on their feet; conquer shyness or fear of public-speaking; speak with conviction and “captivate” their audience; and effectively express themselves in business, socially, in the community and in the larger world.

The New York City-based Christophers emerged in the wake of the Second World War, with the rapid dawn soon after of the Cold War, as periodic historical suspicions of Roman Catholic loyalties in the United States re-emerged in the public conspicuousness. In response, a number of Roman Catholics began to find new ways of commending the Church to the public, including the new medium of television. The most popular and influential television presentation was The Christophers, a weekly half-hour program aired on ABC beginning in 1945. The Christophers, as Keller, from Oakland, California envisioned it, would have no formal organization, no memberships, and no dues. “The reason for this somewhat unusual formula,” he explained, “was to focus attention on personal responsibility.”

The wrap-up to the Thompson Christopher leadership course seven years ago was to be held on Saturday, May 4, and was to feature a keynote speech from Archbishop Sylvain Lavoie, who had just recently become the most recent archbishop emeritus of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas.  However, plans changed at the last minute, and His Grace was unable to keep the speaking engagement.

Sister Andrea telephoned me around mid-afternoon on Friday, May 3 in my office at the paper. And that was how I came to fill in with less than 24 hours notice for the archbishop – a sad disappointment I’m sure to unsuspecting participants – as the keynote speaker for the wrap-up session.

I’m not sure, but I could swear I saw a grin on Sister Andrea’s face, as I mercifully finished up, and heard from somewhere above me a good-natured celestial “got you.”

The last time I wrote about Sister Andrea until today was in an email I sent to Thompson Mayor Colleen Smook May 30:

“I was thinking about the departure of Sister Andrea next month back to Toronto, after being recalled at the age of 86, after 29 years in Thompson  by her religious order, the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto, and it occurred to me that I could think of no one any worthier to receive a Key to the City of Thompson than Sister Andrea. I also know it is an infrequently bestowed honour, but having known several of the previous recipients over the last decade – Dr. Alan Rich, when he departed for Swan River in 2014, and provincial court Judge Murray Thompson, and his wife, Linda Webstob, when they moved to Winnipeg the same year – left me thinking  Sister Andrea would be in good company with those keyholders of high character and purpose, and vice versa.”

I don’t know if the City of Thompson has ever awarded a Key to the City posthumously, but I think, if not, Sister Andrea would still be a good candidate for one, after touching so many lives, Catholic and non-Catholic, during her 29 years of service in Thompson, Manitoba.

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Richard Bocklage was a former pharmacy student at the University of Missouri. He is wanted for a 1980 murder. His car was found in Thompson, Manitoba.

Richard Bocklage was a former pharmacy student at the University of Missouri, and is wanted for the murder of his ex-fiancé, Dr. Tatjana “Tanya” Kopric in Kansas City, Missouri, on Sept. 18, 1980.

Six days later, his car was found abandoned by RCMP here in Thompson, Manitoba, about 900 miles (1,448 kilometres) north of the crime scene. He was reportedly seen by two local residents.

I only know this because my friend Ken Bodnar sent me an email March 18, describing bit about the Bocklage story from almost 40 years ago, adding, “This got me to wondering if he disappeared into woods or city of Thompson, and has lived there all these years under an assumed name. (Authorities think that he may have made his way back to the States, but who knows?).

Ken lives in Nassau in the Bahamas for most of the year. He is a past contributor to Outdoor Canada Magazine where he was the author of “Tales from the Rusty Hook Club”, and numerous magazines and newspapers across Canada and the United States. His calendar “Fishing Dreams” sold coast to coast. He’s a pretty eclectic guy, a renaissance man of sorts, who is also fascinated with the intersection of blockchain, big data, analytics, machine learning, and the Internet of Things. Ken specializes in tokenization and data-centric enterprise blockchains.

Our fathers both worked at General Motors in Oshawa in the West Plant in the high-seniority Completely Knocked Down (CKD) department.

Richard Gerard Bocklage, alias Dick Bocklege, alias Dick Boch, was ten years younger than Dr. Tatjana “Tanya” Kopric, 34, and had grown up in St. Louis. He studied pharmacy at the University of Missouri. She was from Yugoslavia and had immigrated to the United States in 1975. The two had started dating in March 1980, after a gynecologist, who worked with Tanya, who was a resident at Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City, introduced her to his cousin Richard; a few weeks later, he moved into her apartment. Six months later, they were engaged. However, her friends did not like him and felt that he was just using her for money.

Bocklage began spending more time with Kopric and less time in class. Midway through his sophomore year, he fell behind in his studies. At certain points, he became close to dropping out of school. On July 19, 1980, he was notified by administrators that he was academically ineligible. He demanded that Kopric use her connections in the admissions department to get himself re-enrolled. However, she refused to help him. Soon, he began to exhibit wild mood swings.

Three weeks later, on Sept. 2, Kopric broke off the engagement and kicked him out.

Two weeks later, Bocklage returned to class and acted as if nothing had changed. His professor contacted an administrator who spoke with Bocklage.

He argued with the administrator and then angrily left. He later wrote to the admissions office, begging the officials to re-consider his case. At 3 p.m. on September 18, the admissions committee met to determine his fate at the college. The committee agreed unanimously that Bocklage should not be re-admitted to the school.

Hoping to avoid a confrontation, the committee quickly dispersed. At 3:45 pm, two professors spotted Bocklage driving towards the dean’s office. They immediately headed in the opposite direction. He roamed the hallways, searching for the dean of admissions. He carried a manila envelope; some believe that it contained a handgun. Three hours later, Kopric returned to her apartment. As she exited her car, Bocklage appeared and shot her three times in the head with a .45 automatic pistol. A witness identified him as the shooter. Investigators learned that he had purchased the weapon just weeks prior to the murder.

Ken’s March 18 email included the YouTube link below to this Feb. 20, 1991 “Unsolved Mysteries,” Season 3 episode, where the first segment features the Bocklage-Kopric story. I always loved Robert Stack’s narration years ago and the associated format on “Unsolved Mysteries.” A real guilty pleasure, so to speak.

The FBI was at both of his parents’ funerals to see if he would show, but with no luck. Bocklage has a sister who still lives in St. Louis.

Whatever happened to Richard Bocklage? Why did he apparently drive from Kansas City, Missouri to Thompson, Manitoba almost 40 years ago now in late September 1980:

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Friends, Catholics and accidents of geography: Here we are at 55.7433° N latitude and, yes, it’s been a long and sometimes strange but always interesting trip

Photos courtesy of Ken Bodnar, My OCHS, Dave Beirness and Jeanette Kimball

Many people, myself included, subscribe to the notion that even if you haven’t seen a childhood or teenage friend for decades, you can both pick up pretty much where you left off 10, 20, 30, or even 40 years ago. That’s how comprehensive the comfort zone is between you.

I have a handful of friends, mainly from my days growing up in Oshawa in the 1960s and 1970s that fall into that category. It’s quite a small list. In most cases I went to school with them at some point, although many of my classmates I did lose touch with after high school. In fact, it wasn’t until I got an e-mail from Ken Bodnar June 30 that I learned Kathleen Taylor, a classmate all through school from St. Christopher Separate Elementary School on Annapolis Avenue to Oshawa Catholic High School on Stevenson Road North, had just been appointed a member of the Order of Canada.

Taylor, 58, is the chair of the board of RBC and the former president and chief executive officer of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts in Toronto. Thank goodness for Ken or I’d have no idea probably about Kathleen’s recent honour. Congratulations, Katie!

Ken Bodnar’s blog called My OCHS at http://myochs.blogspot.ca/ is the first and last word on our high school days and years. Ken has it all: history, both official and unofficial, trivia, the arcane, milestones, biographical sketches and old photos from his own archive of old negatives, yearbooks and other sources. Ken is the unofficial archivist for all things relating to St. Joseph’s High School, Oshawa Catholic High School, or Monsignor Paul Dwyer Catholic High School, as students now call its hallowed halls.

In a new study published in April in the journal Royal Society Open Science in London, the authors set out to explore “the way life history influences human sociality and the way social networks are structured.

“Our results indicate that these aspects of human behaviour are strongly related to age and gender such that younger individuals have more contacts and, among them, males more than females.

“However, the rate of decrease in the number of contacts with age differs between males and females, such that there is a reversal in the number of contacts around the late 30s. We suggest that this pattern can be attributed to the difference in reproductive investments that are made by the two sexes. We analyse the inequality in social investment patterns and suggest that the age – and gender-related differences we find reflect the constraints imposed by reproduction in a context where time (a form of social capital) is limited.”

“The number of friends a person has can be difficult to quantify, especially when social media has served to widen the definition of ‘friend,’” observed freelance reporter Elsa Vulliamy in a May 23 piece on the study in the London-based Independent, “but these scientists stuck to the basics – they measured how many people subjects contacted via telephone.

“The study shows that both men and women continue to make more and more friends until the age of 25, when the numbers begin falling rapidly and continue to fall throughout the rest of a person’s life,” wrote Vulliamy.

“Researchers found that the average 25-year-old man contacts around 19 different people per month, where 25-year-old women contacted an average of around 17.5 people.

“By the age of 39, however, men and woman are calling an average of only 12 and 15 people per month respectively.

“The rapid decline in the number of people being contacted by both men and women comes to a stop around the age of 80, where the numbers plateau at around eight for women and six for men.”

What I have observed personally is that after my mid-20s, most of my new friends over the years have tended to be professionally or work connected, directly or indirectly. Or at least travel in the same social circles. Sure there are some exceptions to that observation, but not many.

On the other hand, I would venture to say most of my friends up to my mid-20s, when I began working as a daily newspaper reporter, were of greater variety – eventually – in terms of occupational backgrounds. That may well be because none of them really had an occupation, unless playing road hockey or house league baseball counts. Mind you, we did get a few chances to rub shoulders, however, briefly through road hockey and baseball with greatness, even if their greatness was just starting to shine through when we were kids.

I didn’t get to skate with Bobby Orr, hockey’s greatest defenceman. But I did get to play a bit of road hockey with him. My occasional contact with Orr between 1964 and 1966 was limited to some road hockey shinny in our Oshawa neighbourhood.

Orr, from Parry Sound, Ontario, was playing OHA Major Junior A Hockey then for the Oshawa Generals, a farm team of the NHL Boston Bruins. He was between 16 and 18 then. Bobby boarded with a family on Walmer Road, as did Wayne Cashman, the hardworking right-winger, who would go onto captain the Boston Bruins.

Sometimes they’d let us younger kids, who were seven to nine, join in. Bobby and Wayne were like that.

Hockey was our lives. Every Saturday meant a dinner of steak and fried onions at 4 p.m. After dinner it was off to mass at St. Gregory’s for 5 p.m., and back home again only to be knocking on Mike Byrne’s door at 6 p.m. to “take shots” with him on net. Mike shot left. I used a right-handed Hespeler. I am quite convinced that childhood friendships like I had with Mike Byrne are largely accidents of geography, as it were. There is a common saying that while you can’t choose your family, you can choose your friends. Maybe. Sort of. At least after you’re old enough mid-high school to get a driver’s licence or later when you’re off at college or university. But the pool or circle you are going to choose friends from when you are say between six and 15 is going to be based largely on geographic proximity to where your family lives, likely within walking distance. Accidents of geography. Sure you can make choices within that pool or circle; not everyone within it is going to be your friend, but what friends you do have as a kid are going to, for the most part, come from within it.

In 1972, Mike Byrne and I were both 15 and coached a Nipigon Park house league baseball team, which included future Winnipeg Jets’ hockey legend Dale Hawerchuk, then nine-years-old. Unlike road hockey, where we had been the youngsters hanging out with Orr and Cashman, in baseball the reverse age factor was in effect for baseball. We were the old guys. The coaches.

Last Thursday, I saw my old friend Dave Beirness, from Oshawa. He was in Winnipeg for a few days and rented a car and made the 750-kilometre drive up Highway 6 to Thompson for an overnight visit. I’ve known Dave since about 1974.

In the spring of 1976 we both drove white company-owned Plymouth Dusters delivering pizzas for Mother’s Pizza Simcoe North in Oshawa for $2.65 per hour plus tips. Those beasts could just fly! What pizza company delivers in that cool a car today? Or for that matter, what pizza company has a fleet of staff delivery vehicles of any kind? “I’ve always said it was the best pizza restaurant with good food!” Dave said in an e-mail back in 2013. “I even loved working for them, even if I had to drive a Plymouth Duster!!!”

You can imagine how pleased we both were then to read a few years ago, around the same we re-connected in 2013 actually, that the iconic Canadian pizza parlour chain from the 1970s – with its swinging parlor-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, was to be reopened by two local entrepreneurs, Brian Alger and Geeve Sandhu, in April on Queenston Road in Hamilton, Ontario. By all accounts they are doing well with the venture.

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.

Sisson, Fowler and Marra sold their stake in Mother’s Pizza in the mid-1980s, after taking the company public. In 1986 there was a leveraged buyout and Jerry White became chief executive officer. He sold franchises to a group of Toronto Blue Jays players but revenue began to plummet.

Little Caesars bought some assets of the Mother’s Pizza chain when it was in receivership in 1989, while existing franchisees also had the option to purchase their restaurant outright.

Locations began to close a few years later, including the landmark first one in Westdale in 1992, although one Mother’s Pizza franchise from the old days has apparently hung on all these years at 10 Country Hills Landing NW in the Beddington Mall in Calgary, making it something of a cult favourite for Mother’s Pizza aficionados.

Dave and I went to different high schools (R.S. McLaughlin Collegiate for Dave, while I was across the street at what was then Oshawa Catholic High School) but in the fall of 1976, months after our pizza delivery experiences, we both wound up heading off to Trent University.

The last time I saw Dave before July 7 was 24 years ago in July 1992 at a Sunday barbecue at his place in Oshawa before I headed down to North Carolina for a week. Dave went on from university to be an elementary school teacher in the Durham Region for many years before retiring in 2011.

While Dave is not on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook (except for trolling his wife’s Facebook page occasionally when curiosity gets the best of him) he does Google searches and uses email. He tracked me down in Thompson almost 3½ years ago now when I was editing the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News.

It started with an e-mail I received at work on Feb. 5, 2013: “Dave Beirness here! I have finally (I think) found out where you are. Ron G. and I were both thinking about you and your whereabouts during our high school reunion this past fall.

“We have a lot of catching up to do so keep in touch and please give me a home email address so I don’t have to correspond through your work address.

“P. S. I knew it was you when I saw your picture. Your head still has the same tilt.” Dave calls it my “thinking” pose. Friends like Dave can get away with implying work email really wouldn’t be appropriate to use from here on out because of the possible nature of the ensuing correspondence, and also remark on the tilt of your head in your newspaper photo they spotted in your online column without sounding offensive, but rather simply candidly familiar.

It’s rather refreshing because who actually tells you how it really is after you reach a certain age and stage of life? Your spouse or partner? OK, sure. And your former university roommates, that’s who.

Dave and I have shared more than four decades of friendship from high school days in Oshawa and delivering pizzas for Mother’s Pizza through being roommates off-campus from September 1977 to April 1978 at a townhouse at 1100 Hilliard Street in Peterborough, along with Ron Graham, another friend from Oshawa, while we were at Trent University in Peterborough.

While not all former roommates considered themselves friends (I had several excellent roommates who were just that and not really friends per se) they were the people who lived with you under the same roof when you were 19, 20, or 21-years-old, or whatever. In many cases, they were the first non-family, non-related people we lived with as young adults after leaving home.

A photo from that academic year, taken no doubt after a night of hard studying, shows me with Dave in my room and what appears to be a mickey of Canadian Club rye in one hand and a libation in the other. The colourful shirt is my dad’s, which was his favourite cottage shirt at Lake Simcoe, and which I somehow must have convinced him to donate to his son for university.

The purple and gold headboard were also my dad’s handiwork. As a teenager in Oshawa, I had some fondness for both the UCLA Bruins basketball team and the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings, both of which were sporting purple and gold uniforms in those days, so I convinced my father to paint my bedroom at 537 Nipigon Street in Oshawa, along with some of the furnishings … purple and gold, of course. I remember the realtor and my father discussing just how many coats of paint it might take to cover over my inspired idea (especially the purple) when my parents retired and put the house up for sale in June 1976. It seems some of the furnishings went off to university with me and escaped any repainting.

Sitting out in my backyard late in the afternoon last Thursday with Dave, and then later at Santa Maria Pizza & Spaghetti House on Station Road (where else would ex-Mother’s Pizza drivers go for dinner but to a pizza joint?) and Pub 55 (as in Thompson at 55.7433° N latitude) did yield several surprises though, as we put back a couple of Shock Top Belgian Whites and other libations.

While some of the conversation inevitably trended to things like “whatever happened to who?” questions back and forth, I learned a couple of things about Paul Sobanski, who is a mutual friend, but one Dave has kept in touch with over the years, while I sort of lost track of Paul. Truth is I’ve known Paul probably 10 years longer than Dave. I met Paul when we were six and seven-years-old and he lived in the next block down from me on Nipigon Street in Oshawa. I met Mike Byrne the same year. He lived on the same street between Paul and me.

Paul went off to Queen’s University a year before I finished high school, if I recall correctly (again, like Dave, Paul was at R.S. McLaughlin Collegiate, while I was across the street at Oshawa Catholic High School) to study engineering.  From our conversations before he went off to university, it seemed Paul wanted to pursue engineering at Queen’s and then maybe do some specialized work at General Motors Institute (GMI) in Flint, Michigan before launching his career with General Motors Canada at the plants in Oshawa. In fact, during my summers working at GM in Oshawa as a university student from 1976-1979, I heard that Paul was also working elsewhere in the plants for the company at least some of those summers.

So not seeing Paul, I simply assumed his trajectory put him on a 30-year or so career with General Motors that only would have ended a few years ago with retirement.  Journalists learn early on never to assume anything. Perhaps that rule should be extended to friendship also; Dave, when he stopped laughing, told me Paul had only worked for General Motors for the first three or four years of his career perhaps in the 1980s, before heading off to work as an engineer outside the automotive industry. Now Paul has indeed retired. To Peterborough. A place I lived for years and to which Paul had no known connection prior to retirement. At least that I know of. But I won’t assume anything.

Before he ventured north last week, Dave’s wife remarked to him I was a rather prolific poster of Catholic articles on Facebook. Which is quite true. Dave was nonplussed. “John’s always been a Catholic. He went to Oshawa Catholic High School,” Dave said his reply was. Dave himself is Protestant or perhaps what might more likely be described today as among that growing cohort pollsters describe as ”nones” (as opposed to nuns). While my Protestant friends went mainly to R.S. McLaughlin Collegiate, part of the public school system, a good number of my Catholic friends in what was then known as the “separate school” system wound up transferring to R.S. McLaughlin Collegiate after completing Grade 8 at St. Christopher Separate Elementary School or even more so after Grade 10 at Oshawa Catholic High School, spending their last three high school years at R.S. McLaughlin Collegiate for Grades 11, 12 and 13, as Catholic schools in the 1970s in Ontario were only taxpayer-supported as far as the end of Grade 10.

After that they were considered private schools and parents were required to pay tuition, which in the early 1970s, was running at about $300 per year, I believe. It sounds like a modest sum, and while it wasn’t prohibitively expensive for most, it was at the same time not an inconsiderable expense for Catholic parents who were middle-class blue collar wage earners making under $4 per hour on average in 1973, along with the added costs of mandatory school uniforms – grey flannel pants and navy blue blazer and tie for the boys and white blouse and blue kilt for the girls.

According to Statistics Canada historical data, the average manufacturing wage earner in Ontario in 1973 made $8,042 in annual salary, which works out to $154.56 per week or about $3.87 per hour for a 40-hour work week. So $300 in private annual tuition for a Catholic high school for senior grades represented almost two week’s annual salary. It was a sacrifice for many Catholic families. Other Catholic students, however, transferred from the Catholic to public system in the early 1970s for philosophical reasons flowing from the great social changes sweeping the Catholic world in those early years after the end of the Second Vatican Council, while others transferred simply for reasons of being with their peers and friends, if the majority were in the public system. The reverse occurred, too, as a small number of Protestant families sent their children to the private Catholic high school system, attracted not by Catholicism per se, but rather a sense, justified or not, that Catholic schools had a somewhat higher quality of education and more rigorous discipline.

I’m not sure how reassured Dave’s wife must have been when he went onto to tell her that Paul Sobanski had told him as kids I used to excitedly want to talk to him about the Second Vatican Council, which ended on Dec.8, 1965, when I was eight, and had opened on Oct. 11, 1962, when I was five. Mind you, as a kid, my idea of fun late on a Saturday afternoon at the cottage at Lake Simcoe, near Beaverton, Ontario and down the road a small piece from Orillia and Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock’s somewhat fictional, somewhat true Mariposa setting for his 1912 classic Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, was walking the beach road past the Talbot River and down to the blue Toronto Star “honour” coin box and buying the unbelievably fat Saturday Star. My main interest was the “Insight” section and the rotogravure colour-printed Star Weekly magazine.

More than four decades of friendship with Dave. It’s been a long and sometimes strange but always interesting trip.

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High school redux

Being a Catholic high school graduate wasn’t high on the list of things top of mind when I moved to Manitoba in 2007. That’s mainly because my high school days were some 30 years behind me – or at least so I thought at the time.

Turns out, however, Sister Andrea Dumont, the longest-serving religious in Thompson, is originally from St. Catharines, Ontario and a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto, who – wait for it – just happen to be the same sisters who taught some of my classes from September 1971 to June 1976 when Sister Conrad Lauber was principal and Sister Dorothy Schweitzer taught me several English classes – and Grade 10 general math at Oshawa Catholic High School (previously known as St. Joseph’s High School and later Monsignor Paul Dwyer Catholic High School.) Sister Dorothy also taught high school in Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton, as well as Oshawa.

Trying to teach me high school math must have given real meaning to terms like “long suffering” and “patience of a saint.” As I recall, there were two mathematics “streams” back then: “advanced” and “general.” Since these were in the days before there was much articulation of the concept of “bullying,” many of your classmates had no reservation about saying that “general” math was for “dummies” or “dunces.” Self-esteem aside, I’d have been hard-pressed to argue the point, especially since I struggled with math no matter what the label: algebra, geometry, functions and relations – shoot me now, just remembering the words, much less the symbols and equations. If I had known how many percentages I would have to convert as a journalist, I might have paid more attention to high school math, but perhaps not.

It was only after meeting up with Sister Andrea, who spent 14 years in Guatemala and since returning to Canada has lived in Grand Rapids, Easterville and Thompson, where the main focus of her work is in adult education, which includes training lay presiders for times when there is no priest available, organizing and instructing in the various ministries, sacramental preparation and RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults), when I became a parishioner at St. Lawrence Catholic Church here, that I realized Sister Dorothy and Sister Conrad, more than three decades on, are still alive and active – and that Sister Andrea knows them and often sees them on visits home to Southern Ontario.

Sister Conrad Lauber, ministry director for Fontbonne Ministries’ Village Mosaic in Etobicoke, described as an “unsung hero,” was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal in June 2012. Village Mosaic’s focus is always, Sister Conrad says, “about relationship building, bringing participants together to form community.”

I remember Sister Conrad, then my principal, sitting in her office my last year of high school, as she showed me her debating awards, after I had once again been defending some decidedly non-Catholic propositions in inter-high school debating tournaments. She got it. She understood the intellectual exercise. But unlike me at the time, she also understood more was at stake. She didn’t ask me to stop debating, but only if I could perhaps tone down some of my rhetoric a bit when representing the school in public at debates.

I had a wonderful e-mail reply from Sister Dorothy several years ago, where she said in part: “You write very well (this is your former English teacher speaking!) and astutely. And thank you for your kind words – it’s comforting to know, so many years later, that my efforts were not all in vain!”

A wonderful flash, indeed, of Sister Dorothy’s characteristic good humour, not to mention perhaps a diplomatic or discreet indirect reference to Grade 10 general math class.

For any of you reading this who may have grown up in the Durham Region of Southern Ontario, just east of Toronto, or still live there, and are interested especially in Catholic post-secondary education in the 1960s or 1970s,  Ken Bodnar’s blog called My OCHS at http://myochs.blogspot.ca/ is the first and last word on our high school days and years. Ken has it all: history, both official and unofficial, trivia, the arcane, milestones, biographical sketches and old photos from his own archive of old negatives, yearbooks and other sources. Ken is the unofficial archivist for all things relating to St. Joseph’s High School, Oshawa Catholic High School, or Monsignor Paul Dwyer Catholic High School, as students now call its hallowed halls. You can contact Ken by e-mail at: ochsblogger@rocketmail.com