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.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

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.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

This one’s for you, Christopher Heard

I have never accepted a Facebook invitation for an app. In fact, just recently, I have blocked Zynga Bingo, BINGO Blitz, Criminal Case and Slotomania Slot Machines, although I admit, Criminal Case is kind of tempting to check out . Philosophically, it’s not that I have a problem with them. They’re no better or worse, I suppose, than a myriad other things you can do on Facebook. They’re just not my thing.

Bingo? Well, my only connection to bingo in recent years has been working some monthly ones as fundraisers at St. Lawrence Parish Hall here in Thompson with my brothers from Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961. Hey, you can’t be Catholic, right, and have no connection to bingo? Before I joined the Knights of Columbus, the last bingo games I had been to were circa 1972 and 1973 when I was 15 and 16 years old, working for Len Ovenden and Doris Metcalfe, selling refreshments on the wooden flooring over the hockey ice surface at the old Civic Auditorium in Oshawa, Ontario. In those days, bingo players used plastic chips, not daubers, a fact I didn’t discover until 2013. It wasn’t as good a gig entertainment-wise as working OHA Major Junior A hockey games – where we worked the first two periods only – so I could watch with undivided attention the Oshawa Generals play the often crucial third period – for free.

But bingo players were big spenders (as were women at wrestling when wrestling made occasional appearances in Oshawa in the early 1970s … Jody Hamilton, the American masked wrestler, who wrestled solo at the time under the ring name The Assassin, once either deliberately or accidentally [probably deliberately] kicked over a whole tray of pop in waxed cups with lids, I had sitting on the floor, as I served another patron, en route to the ring.  His manager promptly but discretely bought them all with a generous tip. Just a bit of unscripted show biz for the fans.)

As well, while I “like” posts and photographs that I spot on Facebook with some frequency, and even comment on some of them occasionally, I rarely accept out of the blue invitations to “like” a particular page, but there are exceptions. Like this morning when I got an invitation to “like” Christopher Heard’s,  The Suite Life: The Magic and Mystery of Hotel Living, which you can find a link to here at: https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Suite-Life-The-Magic-and-Mystery-of-Hotel-Living/231463750263919?notif_t=fbpage_fan_invite

Mind you, in the interest of transparency, I have to tell you Christopher Heard, an accomplished author and film historian, is my second cousin. While I haven’t seen Christopher, who is about six years younger than me, in about 40 years now, we both grew up in Oshawa, and crossed paths at family events, often at my Aunt Norma and Uncle Ray Seager’s place, which had an above-ground pool. What I remember was Chris was a tall and quiet kid. Not how you would describe (quiet) my five Seager first cousins, who were a fun-loving rambunctious lot! Me? I was probably somewhere between those two poles. A bit on the quiet side, but not above getting up to a bit of mischief, especially in my teens and 20s, as Joanne, David, Sharon, and Maurice Leveille, Joanne’s husband, could attest to and no doubt happily would if the occasion was right. The recurring common elements of various escapades seemed to revolve around motorcycles and girls.

Christopher Heard’s dad, Bill Heard, was my sacrament of confirmation sponsor on May 8, 1968 at St. Mary of the People Roman Catholic Church, built 11 years earlier in 1957, when Bishop Francis Marrocco, still an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Toronto, confirmed me. Bishop Marrocco was named bishop of the Diocese of Peterborough just over a month later on June 10, 1968. My confirmation name is James. Bill Heard was a convert from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism.

What I only learned a couple of years ago, at least that I recall, from Marie Heard, the family genealogist, was that my father, William Barker, himself a convert from the United Church of Canada to Catholicism, had been Bill Heard’s confirmation sponsor years earlier.

As I wrote here not so long ago on Feb. 20 in a post headlined, “Newsgathering travels: From Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories to Churchill, Manitoba to Middle Musquodoboit Harbour, Nova Scotia, and a few places in between” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/02/20/newsgathering-travels-from-tuktoyaktuk-in-the-northwest-territories-to-churchill-manitoba-to-middle-musquodoboit-harbour-nova-scotia-and-a-few-places-in-between/),  “As a journalist, I always enjoyed getting out of the office or newsroom to travel whenever the opportunity presented itself and I could talk my way into a trip somewhere. Newspaper travel meant someone was spending money to send me somewhere, hence the story was usually interesting….” I’ve been able to write about polar bears and beluga whales in Churchill, after a boat trip out on Hudson Bay into the territorial waters of Nunavut, and up the Seal River; travel to The Pas to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Cathedral for the episcopal ordination of Archbishop Murray Chatlain, as the sixth bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas; take Manitoba road trips into Cross Lake, Nelson House and Snow Lake for stories and photographs, while former Churchill riding Liberal MP Tina Keeper, and  Kevin Carlson, then with Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak (MKO), were kind enough to let me fly into Tadoule Lake and Lac Brochet with them on a day trip; fly into Tuktoyaktuk at 69.4428° N in the Northwest Territories from Inuvik on an 18-seat  Twin Otter for a story; drive for almost three hours through continuous freezing rain out to the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) Strait Area Campus in Port Hawkesbury to hear then Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative Premier John Hamm talk about a proposed Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project to be located on the Strait of Canso; as well as more pleasant drives on assignment in Nova Scotia, such as one on a balmy Maritime spring evening into Middle Musquodoboit Harbour on the Eastern Shore’s Musquodoboit Harbour River, or the Folly Lake-Folly Gap-Folly Mountain area and through the Cobequid Mountains and Wentworth Valley to Londonderry, formerly known as Acadia Mines, in Colchester County.

Pity my poor cousin, Christopher Heard, then. While I was traipsing around in such Canadian glamor destinations as Tuktoyaktuk and Middle Musquodoboit Harbour, chasing stories, Chris was making something of a name for himself as a luxury hotel living Toronto writer ensconced comfortably as writer-in-residence at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel! The Suite Life: The Magic and Mystery of Hotel Living, pun, of course, intended, was published in 2011 by Dundurn Press and is an exploration of hotel culture.  As Mark Medley noted in a Nov. 13, 2010 National Post story on Heard (http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/11/13/the-royal-york-is-haunted-and-author-christopher-heard-should-know-he-lives-there/), “living in the Royal York, one of the poshest hotels in the city, means you encounter a curious assortment of people. Since moving in, Heard has run into Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), Slash, Ricky Gervais, Martin Sheen and the Dalai Lama, among others.”

Heard has also written a number of other books, including celebrity biographies on subjects such as Britney Spears, Kiefer Sutherland, Johnny Depp, John Woo and Mickey Rourke.

He got his big break 20 years ago in the mid-1990s working as a movie reviewer for CBC Newsworld’s On the Arts, when he was sent to New York to interview Kapuskasing, Ontario-born Titanic director James Cameron. In an Oct. 18, 2011 story, Heard reportedly told Matt Bone of the Toronto-based online entertainment magazine, The GATE (http://www.thegate.ca/spotlight/interviews/010958/how-christopher-heard-became-a-biographer-to-some-of-hollywoods-elite/),  “We had this wonderful conversation in New York, Cameron and I. When I got back to Toronto, I checked my stuff and the tapes for the interview weren’t there. “The tapes of the other people were there, Katherine Bigelow and all these other people but Cameron’s wasn’t there. So I panicked, as that was the main person I was there to interview. So I called New York and said, ‘Jeez you forgot to put the tape in,’ and it turned out that Cameron had enjoyed the chat so much, he had kept the tapes aside to make a copy so he could use that tape in his corporate video for his company Lightstorm Entertainment. So when the show aired, Random House Doubleday publishers called me and said ‘nobody has written a book about James Cameron, would you consider that?’ I’d always wanted to be an author but I had grown up such a painfully shy and introverted kid, that’s not something you think would be possible. I signed the contract to do the Cameron book [Dreaming Aloud: The Films of James Cameron], and as it was released [1997] at the same time as the film Titanic, the success of Titanic sort of dragged the book up with it, and Random House said ‘whatever you want to do with your next book, you can have it’.'”

Heard, who met and interviewed actor Leonard Nimoy once (in a hotel room, of course), talked to CTV News last week about why the death of the actor, who played Spock on Star Trek, at the age of 83 on Feb. 27, touched so many people. You can watch a clip of the interview here at: http://video.theloop.ca/watch/nimoy-touched-so-many-people/4084457360001#.VPYM-Y5LOld

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

The perils of being categorical

Column writing is often an exercise in making points. Sometimes that can mean an excursion into hyperbole. Sometimes it means posing rhetorical questions to make a point.

I got to thinking about this some years ago rereading the ending of one of my own columns where I had written, “Was there ever a better right-handed shot playing left wing than Bill Lochead, who scored 57 goals with 64 assists for 121 points in 62 games for the Generals in the 1973-74 season before being selected in the first round, ninth overall and as their top pick that year by the Detroit Red Wings? I think not.”

Well, maybe. At least when it comes to the OHA Major Junior A Oshawa Generals of the early 1970s that might well be true. But many of you may just have been asking, “Bill who?”

Lochead, from Forest, Ontario, is now 59 and has lived in Germany for most of the last 30 years, playing and coaching hockey. During his rookie season with the Red Wings in 1974-75 he scored 16 goals and hit the 20-goal mark in 1977-78 when the club reached the playoffs for the first time in eight years.

Halfway through the 1978-79 season, Lochead was claimed by the Colorado Rockies after Detroit placed him on waivers. In the off-season he was traded to the New York Rangers but dressed for only seven games in 1979-80. He spent most of the year with the AHL’s New Haven Nighthawks where he scored 46 goals and was named to the league’s first all-star team. After the season, Lochead retired from North American pro hockey and moved to Germany.

According to NHL statistics from several years ago, only about one per cent of right-handed forwards play left wing, while 71 per cent of them play right wing and 28 per cent play centre. Other figures showed a slightly higher 8.7 percent, with 16 right-hand shots out of 183 left wings in the NHL. Since we haven’t turned hockey into baseball yet, the exact percentage probably isn’t that important. It is inarguably a distinct minority.

The thing about playing your off-wing, shooting right on left wing in this instance, is you have an advantage inside your opponent’s blue line on the angle coming in on the net. Think of it as geometry. That’s the good news. The bad news is the same math works against you taking a pass. You’re going to be on your backhand a lot, unless the puck is trailing you – and for those times when you can’t cut back to centre toward the net and take advantage of the angle – you better have a good backhand shot.

Oh yeah. And then there was that other guy: Paul Henderson, now 71, of Kincardine, Ontario, who played 13 seasons in the NHL for the Detroit Red Wings, Toronto Maple Leafs and Atlanta Flames between 1962 and 1980, and is best known for scoring the winning goals in the last three games of the 1972 Summit Series against the USSR, including the most famous moment in Canadian sports history when he scored the game-winning goal in Game 8 with 34 seconds left in the third period in a 6-5 victory, clinching the series 4-3-1 for Canada on Sept. 28, 1972.

Paul Henderson: Shooting right, playing left wing

This is the column I owe Paul Henderson. Not necessarily because he scored the most iconic goal in Canadian hockey history for Team Canada almost 42 years ago on Sept. 28, 1972, with 34 seconds remaining in the third period in Moscow’s Luzhniki Ice Palace, to win the game 6-5 over the Soviet Union and clinch the eight-game Summit Series 4-3-1; no, far better sportswriters have applied their best prose recently in that direction.

No, I owe Henderson a column, if for no other reason, than waxing nostalgically almost four years ago in a column on Dec. 1, 2010 about a part-time job I held at Oshawa’s Civic Auditorium selling refreshments to hockey fans at Oshawa Generals games, caught up in the happy reflective moment I briefly took leave of my senses (and broader memory, apparently) to write this ending paragraph to the column: “One of the great perks is that we put the hotdogs and Coke cart away at the end of the second period intermission and were free to watch the usually decisive third period. Was there ever a better right-handed shot playing left wing than Bill Lochead, who scored 57 goals with 64 assists for 121 points in 62 games for the Generals in the 1973-74 season before being selected in the first round, 9th overall, by the Detroit Red Wings? I think not.”

What I thought, probably even before the column on it electronically reached the printer were two two-word phrases, which apply just as aptly used in either order: “You idiot” and “Paul Henderson” or “Paul Henderson” and “You idiot,” or simply as the single phrase, “Paul Henderson, you idiot.”

I was 15 when Henderson scored his “goal of the century.” I grew up in Oshawa, Ont., 30 miles east of Toronto. The Toronto Maple Leafs, including Number 19, were hockey for us.

Lochead, 59, has lived in Germany for most of the last 30 years, playing and coaching hockey.  He is now a successful hockey player agent living in Frankfurt Germany. During his rookie season with the Red Wings in 1974-75 he scored 16 goals and hit the 20-goal mark in 1977-78 when the club reached the playoffs for the first time in eight years. Halfway through the 1978-79 season, Lochead was claimed by the Colorado Rockies after Detroit placed him on waivers. In the off-season he was traded to the New York Rangers but dressed for only seven games in 1979-80. He spent most of the year with the AHL’s New Haven Nighthawks where he scored 46 goals and was named to the league’s first all-star team. After the season, Lochead retired from North American pro hockey and moved to Germany where has gone onto a successful career at first coaching in Switzerland and Germany and now working as hockey player agent in Germany.

As well as both shooting right and playing left wing, Lochead and Henderson have a couple of other coincidentals in common: They are both from southwestern Ontario; Lochead from Forest, and Henderson, from near Kincardine. They also both spent part of their NHL careers playing with the Detroit Red Wings. And in the spring of 1986, Lochead was chosen to play for the Dave King-coached Team Canada in the Pravda Cup tournament in Leningrad.

Henderson, 71, is being treated for chronic lymphoid leukemia and responded  well to experimental treatment as part of a clinical trial he participated in last year. For several reasons, including salary disagreements with then Leafs’ owner Harold Ballard, Henderson slid into angst, anger and alcohol, with a full measure of bitterness, shortly after his 1972 golden goal. But in the 1973 off-season, Pastor Mel Stevens, knocked on Henderson’s door. The founder of Teen Ranch, a Christian sports camp in Caledon, Ont., Stevens wanted Henderson as an instructor for free. “I thought, ‘Do you not know who you’re talking to?’” Henderson has said many times since.

Henderson would spend the next two years studying 20 books – along with the Bible – under Stevens’ tutelage before becoming a Christian in March 1975.