Ed Broadbent: From my parents’ Oshawa Times daily paperboy on Church Street in the late 1940s to hometown NDP MP in the late 1960s

While he wasn’t much fond of politicians of any stripe collectively, my dad 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 from 1957 to 1963, but he 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 parents’ paperboy for a time, delivering the daily 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 guy; a kindred spirit, although my dad would have put it more plainly than that.

Ed Broadbent, the former federal NDP party leader, has died at the age of 87. His public resume is, of course, well known. He was born on Warren Street in Oshawa in 1936, the second of three children, and grew up comfortably middle class in small town (yes, Oshawa) in Southern Ontario in the post-Second World War world of Rotary and Kinsmen fairs, he told CBC in 1988. According to my parents, Ed, whose route included Church Street, was a good paperboy. My parents told me this some 20 or so years later when he first ran federally in the Oshawa-Whitby riding in 1968, when I was at an age Ed was probably near when he commenced his paper route. While I would go onto to become a newspaper reporter and editor for more than three decades, I never was a paperboy like Ed.

Broadbent’s first academic interest in Grade 10 was in American, not Canadian history. He wrote an essay arguing Dwight D. Eisenhower, appointed in April 1951 as the first supreme commander of NATO, should remain at his headquarters near Paris, rather than return to the United States and run on the Republican ticket in 1952 for president, as Republican emissaries had persuaded him to do. Broadbent thought Adlai Stevenson, the governor of Illinois, and the Democratic nominee in 1952 (and again in 1956) was a “fine man” who would make a good president. He moved from what he called being a “small-l liberal” to democratic socialism while a student at Trinity College at the University of Toronto. Broadbent received a PhD degree in political science from the University of Toronto in 1966, with a thesis titled “The Good Society of John Stuart Mill” under the supervision of C.B. (Crawford Brough) Macpherson. He was a York University professor when he he won the “Trudeaumania” federal general election of June 25, 1968. Broadbent later said if it hadn’t been summer with an election falling at the end of the university academic term, he may never have run.

Broadbent’s father, Percy, a clerk at General Motors, and Mary, his homemaker mother, were both steadfast Progressive Conservative voters. Apparently, this was an era when families could agree to disagree about politics and it wasn’t a catastrophe. In fact, how you voted back then was more of a private matter for many Canadians. I don’t remember either of my parents ever discussing how they had cast their federal or provincial ballots until they had retired from Oshawa to living on a lake between Buckhorn and Bobcaygeon, Ontario, when they allowed Patrick Daniel, the losing NDP candidate in their riding of Victoria-Haliburton, to erect a lawn sign for the 1979 election.

It was in that election in 1979, at the age of 22, I cast my first federal ballot and a vote for Ed Broadbent, who had been leader of the federal NDP since 1975, and had held the seat in what had been the old Oshawa-Whitby riding for almost 11 years, but was now known as Oshawa riding. I would joke years later that I happened to live in a riding that had made me one of those uncommon winning NDP voters ahead of their time in 1979, no small accomplishment and piece of good fortune, I remember thinking.

Requiesce in pace, Ed.

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The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: ‘According to a legend of the Chippewa tribe, the lake they once called Gitche Gumee never gives up her dead’

It started as a shipwreck, followed by a newsmagazine story in the still-golden age of newsmagazines like Time, U.S. News & World Report and Newsweek. And then a song.

“According to a legend of the Chippewa tribe, the lake they once called Gitche Gumee ‘never gives up her dead.’”

Forty-four years ago today on Nov. 10, 1975, 18 kilometres off Coppermine Point, and 60 kilometres north of Sault Ste Marie, Ont., the 222-metre iron ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald, with a crew of 29 aboard, sank. All were lost to the depths of Lake Superior. The laker, the pride of the American side, was still bigger than most, and had been the largest freighter to sail the Great Lakes when it was launched in 1958.

“The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy.”

Some of the most famous lyrics in Canadian music history, anchored to what would soon become the most famous shipwreck on the Great Lakes, first appeared as the lede of the bylined story “Great Lakes: The Cruelest Month” by James R. (Jim) Gaines, national affairs writer, and Jon Lowell for a Nov. 24, 1975 Detroit-based story in Newsweek magazine. Gaines, who began is career at the Saturday Review, the storied American weekly magazine that had started out as The Saturday Review of Literature in 1924, is now a Paris-based writer, would go onto become the first editor in chief of People magazine, as well as the editor of Time magazine, and also to serve as regional editor for the Americas, and then global editor-at-large for Reuters.

Lowell, who died in 2016, started out as a journalist in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, and had already covered politics, and civil rights events and disturbances, for the Detroit News, then Newsweek; including events like the 1967 Detroit Riot, the May 1970 Kent State shootings in Ohio, and the September 1971 Attica Prison riot, as well as covering organized crime, labour, and the auto industry, by the time the Edmund Fitzgerald sunk in November 1975. In July 1979, he would go onto co-author the book Great American Dreams: A Portrait of the Way We Are with the Washington Post’s Robert Kaiser.

Inspired in large part by reading Gaines and Lowell’s Newsweek story, Gordon Lightfoot recorded “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” the following month in December 1975 at Eastern Sound, a recording studio made out of two Victorian houses at 48 Yorkville Ave. in downtown Toronto. Ed “Peewee Charles” Ringwald and the late Terry Clements, a Detroit native who had played guitar for Lightfoot since the early 1970s, came up with the haunting guitar and steel riffs. The studio was, yes, indeed, later torn down and replaced by a parking lot. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was released as a 7-inch 45 rpm A-side single in August 1976, taken from Lightfoot’s album “Summertime Dream” released that July. The B-side on the single was “The House You Live In.”

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was also the first commercial early digital multi-track recording tracked on the prototype 3M 32-track digital recorder, a novel technology for the time.

The Headstones – originally hailing from Kingston, Ont. – released a very fine and very different tempo  cover of Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” last March 15. You can listen to it here at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8LBkYjniTU

The final voyage of the Edmund Fitzgerald began Nov. 9, 1975 at the Burlington Northern Railroad Dock No.1 in Superior, Wisconsin, Sean Ley, a development officer at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point Light Station in Whitefish Point on the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan, wrote in a blog post for the museum titled “The Fateful Journey” (https://www.shipwreckmuseum.com/edmund-fitzgerald/the-fateful-journey/?fbclid=IwAR33M-6_G0X15ab73z4KkAIM3owr3GaVpRsHdaE5n_OIbSP3PzX7_FTMIGo).

Don McIsaac observed last July that “Gordon Lightfoot, who wrote ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ is from my hometown, Orillia.” McIsaac, executive vice-president and chief financial officer of Cirrus Aircraft, based at headquarters in Duluth, Minnesota, added, “From where I sit now, I can see the port the ship last left.”

The Edmund Fitzgerald was bound for Zug Island, a heavily industrialized island in River Rouge, Michigan at the mouth of the River Rouge, where it spills into the Detroit River, near Detroit, and where it was set to unload a cargo of taconite iron ore pellets before heading onto Cleveland, her home port, to wait out the winter.

Capt. Ernest M. McSorley had loaded her with 26,116 long tons of taconite pellets, made of processed iron ore, heated and rolled into marble-size balls – 26,116 long tons more than the great iron boat weighed empty. Departing Superior about 2:30 p.m., she was soon joined by the Arthur M. Anderson, which had sailed from Two Harbors, Minnesota under Capt. Bernie Cooper. The two ships were in radio contact. The Fitzgerald being the faster took the lead, with the distance between the vessels ranging from 10 to 15 miles.

McSorley and Cooper agreed to take the northerly course across Lake Superior to avoid a storm that was developing to the southwest, so they would be protected by highlands on the Canadian shore, taking them between Isle Royale and the Keweenaw Peninsula.

They passed several miles offshore from Split Rock Lighthouse, on Minnesota’s North Shore. They would later make a turn to the southeast toward Whitefish Point.

“Weather conditions continued to deteriorate,” Ley wrote. Gale warnings had been issued at 7 p.m. on Nov. 9, upgraded to storm warnings early in the morning of Nov. 10. “While conditions were bad, with winds gusting to 50 knots and seas 12 to 16 feet, both captains had often piloted their vessels in similar conditions. In the early afternoon of Nov. 10, the Fitzgerald had passed Michipicoten Island and was approaching Caribou Island, steaming toward Whitefish Bay at Superior’s east end.. The Anderson was just approaching Michipicoten, about three miles off the West End Light.

Cooper later said he watched the Edmund Fitzgerald pass far too close to Six Fathom Shoal to the north of Caribou Island. He could clearly see the ship and the beacon on Caribou on his radar set and could measure the distance between them. “He and his officers watched the Fitzgerald pass right over the dangerous area of shallow water,” Ley wrote. “By this time, snow and rising spray had obscured the Fitzgerald from sight, visible 17 miles ahead on radar.”

The last radio communication between the Fitzgerald and the Anderson was at 7:10 pm. The Fitzgerald was disappearing and reappearing on the Anderson’s radar – the height of the waves was causing interference.

Cooper asked McSorley how they were doing. McSorley replied, “We are holding our own.” A few minutes later, the Fitzgerald disappeared from the radar screen for the last time, sinking without giving a distress signal.

George Stegner recalled last year how he was on duty that night: “I was on duty this night. Stationed at K.I. Sawyer AFB in the UP of Michigan, crew member on a rescue helo. Never could have found any survivors in that storm but we sure tried hour after hour. Was a bad night. Still remember it after all this time.”

Every year since the sinking, the Episcopal Mariners’ Church – the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral – on East Jefferson Avenue in downtown Detroit, along the riverfront, has held a memorial service for the Edmund Fitzgerald crew. This year’s service was held at 11 a.m. this morning, with the bell tolling 29 times for each man on the Fitzgerald.

Dave Sproule, a natural heritage education and marketing specialist with Ontario’s Department of Environment, Conservation and Parks’ Land and Water Division in Sudbury, has written Lake Superior is a “weathermaker … so big it creates its own weather…..”

By late autumn, writes Sproule (http://www.ontarioparks.com/parksblog/edmund-fitzgerald-40-years-later/), the “Gales of November” have usually set in on Superior, creating hazardous conditions for even large modern ships.

The cause of the sinking is still a matter of much historic debate, both Ley and Sproule note.

On April 15, 1977 the U.S. Coast Guard released its official report on “Subject: S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, official number 277437, sinking in Lake Superior on 10 November 1975 with loss of life.” While the Coast Guard said the cause of the sinking could not be conclusively determined, it maintained that “the most probable cause of the sinking of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald was the loss of buoyancy and stability resulting from massive flooding of the cargo hold. The flooding of the cargo hold took place through ineffective hatch closures as boarding seas rolled along the spar deck.”

However, the Westlake, Ohio-based Lake Carriers’ Association, representing U.S.-flag vessel operators on the Great Lakes, responded in a letter to the National Transportation Safety Board in September 1977 disagreeing with the Coast Guard’s suggestion that the lack of attention to properly closing the hatch covers by the crew was responsible for the disaster. They said, however, they were inclined to accept that the Fitzgerald passed over the Six Fathom Shoal Area as reported by Cooper.

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A still bigger picture: Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF), Samaritan’s Purse, ZMapp and the 2014 Ebola Crisis

One of the first things I knew I wanted to write about almost four years ago when soundingsjohnbarker started was something about Samaritan’s Purse and the 2014 Ebola crisis, particularly in Liberia in West Africa. “A bigger picture” https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/a-bigger-picture/ became my third blog post here on Sept. 3, 2014.

It interested me because Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian international relief ministry run by Franklin Graham, son of the late North Carolina evangelist Billy Graham, and based in nearby Boone, North Carolina, was best known in recent years by many in North America for its Operation Christmas Child, which was started in 1990, and by 1993 it had grown to the point it was adopted by Samaritan’s Purse.

Samaritan’s Purse was founded by Dr. Bob Pierce in 1970 as a nondenominational evangelical Christian organization to provide spiritual and physical aid to hurting people around the world. Samaritan’s Purse Canada was established in 1973.

As of 2014, Operation Christmas Child had collected and distributed over 100 million shoebox gifts in more than 130 countries worldwide.  Each shoebox is filled with hygiene items, school supplies, toys, and candy. Operation Christmas Child then works with local churches to put on age-appropriate presentations of the gospel at the events where the shoeboxes are distributed. Here in Thompson, hundreds of shoeboxes are collected each Christmas season for Operation Christmas Child through efforts co-ordinated in recent years mainly by the First Baptist Church, and previously the Thompson Pentecostal Assembly, which have co-ordinated efforts on behalf of a number of local churches, including St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church, and other places including University College of the North (UCN), Thompson Public Library, and individual donors.

Rev. Leslie-Elizabeth King, who pastored the Lutheran-United Church of Thompson, and was in active ministerial service here for 19 years, until she retired in June 2014, touched a nerve in her “Spiritual Thoughts” column in the Nickel Belt News Oct. 26, 2012 when she mentioned using the Canada Revenue Agency website to look at how the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association of Canada’s Calgary-based Samaritan’s Purse Canada operates.

In a nutshell, while King had no problem with the charity’s six per cent management and administration budget expense, while 90 per cent went directly to the charity, which, she said, was “very good,” she didn’t much like the concept of sending shoeboxes stuffed with a pillowcase, toothbrush and a few pencils to a poor child on the other side of the world. “Wouldn’t it be better, if we truly want to be of use to others, to send our money to a church, agency or Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in the destination country so local people could decide what is needed and where? That way, it would be more likely that our gift would build the economy in a community that needs it?” she asked.

Frank King, no relation, communications manager for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association of Canada’s Samaritan’s Purse Canada, pointed out “our work in developing nations, including distributing Operation Christmas Child shoe box gifts, is always done through local partners. This is a priority for us because we want to build up local churches and we want to rely on local expertise to do (or financially support) the work that best benefits those communities.”

The Ebola story and Samaritan’s Purse was to me the international back story to the local Operation Christmas Child story. “Wouldn’t it be better, if we truly want to be of use to others, to send our money to a church, agency or Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in the destination country so local people could decide what is needed and where?” Leslie King asked in 2012. Well, speaking of NGOs, in 2014 it would be Médecins Sans Frontières, also known in English as Doctors Without Borders, the highly respected international humanitarian medical non-governmental organization, founded in Paris in 1971, but stretched beyond their limits in Guinea and Sierra Leone in the midst of the deadliest Ebola viral hemorrhagic fever outbreak recorded in West Africa since the disease was discovered in 1976, that would ask Samaritan’s Purse on July 8, 2014 to take over the management of ELWA (Eternal Love Winning Africa) Hospital — the main facility, founded in 1965 by the medical mission group Serving in Mission (SIM) USA, caring for all Ebola patients in Monrovia, Liberia. The West African Ebola crisis — the world’s first urban outbreak as opposed to primarily rural previous ones — began in December 2013 in Meliandou, a small, isolated village in Guinea with only 31 households. It wasn’t until March 21, 2014, that the disease was identified as Ebola. The outbreak peaked in October 2014 and ended in June 2016.

Writing back in September 2014, what I knew then was that Dr. Kent Brantly, 33, medical director at Samaritan’s Purse Ebola Consolidated Case Management Center in Monrovia, contracted Ebola and was the first patient ever medically evacuated to the United States with a confirmed case of Ebola, to be treated at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. Brantly originally moved to Liberia with his wife and children in October 2013 to be a general practitioner.  Immediately after Samaritan’s Purse took over Ebola treatment operations in Liberia, he traded his hospital scrubs for a full-body hazmat suit.

I also knew that Brantly was the first Ebola patient ever treated with ZMapp, a highly experimental three-mouse monoclonal antibody drug serum treatment produced by U.S.-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, based in San Diego. ZMapp was produced for Mapp Biopharmaceutical in the Reynolds American tobacco plant Kentucky Bioprocessing facility in Owensboro, Kentucky inside the leaves of tobacco plants. Two of the drug’s three components were originally developed at the Public Health Agency of Canada’s containment level 4 National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg.

But what I didn’t know until I recently saw Samaritan Purse’s compelling 2017 documentary Facing Darkness on Netflix was that at the time Brantly was given ZMapp there were only four courses of ZMapp treatment in existence anywhere in the world. A specially-equipped isolation chamber Phoenix Air modified Gulfstream III air ambulance, the only one of its kind at the time in the world, chartered by Samaritan’s Purse to medically evacuate and repatriate Brantly, and en route from the United States to Liberia, had turned back half way across the Atlantic Ocean with a mechanical problem. Phoenix Air is headquartered in Cartersville, Georgia.

And then, a miracle by many measures. One of Brantly’s colleagues, and one of the physicians treating  the critically-ill doctor, Dr. Lance Plyler, medical director of the Disaster Response Unit at Samaritan’s Purse, located one of those four courses of ZMapp in neighbouring Sierra Leone. A Styrofoam box containing three frozen vials of straw-colored fluid was flown to the border, canoed across a river and put on a plane to Monrovia, the Liberian capital. But there was enough to treat only one person, and meanwhile, Nancy Writebol, 59, with Serving in Mission, (SIM), had also contacted Ebola.

The day the ZMapp arrived in Monrovia, Brantly was actually having one of his better days since contracting the virus, and insisted that Writebol, who appeared sicker, be given the available ZMapp. But as the frozen vials were literally warming up under her arm, Brantly took a sudden and dramatic turn for the worse, and started to seize. Plyler made what must have required the Wisdom of Solomon-like Hippocratic Oath decision to retrieve the ZMapp vials from under Writebol’s arm, and administered the drug to Brantly instead. Brantly started to feel better almost immediately.

Both Brantly and Writebol would both wind up being treated with ZMapp and be medically evacuated by Phoenix Air within days, Brantly first, to Emory.  Both made full recoveries.

Facing Darkness also provides insights into the character of Franklin Graham, as head of Samaritan’s Purse, that I had never seen before. While it may not be charitable to say so, in truth I have wondered more than once if Franklin Graham is up to being his father’s son. He’s a bit too of-this-world political and too cozy with President Donald Trump and his band of cronies for my taste. But recalling how he learned about Brantly contracting Ebola while he was in Alaska, Graham was almost ashen-face still as he recalled the moment. Speaking in the same measured tones Billy Graham often did, doesn’t take away from Franklin Graham’s sense of being overwhelmed by shock and grief. Initially, “I didn’t even know how to pray,” he says. But Graham would soon enough pray. And Samaritan’s Purse with Franklin Graham at the helm, would, in the best tradition of the United States Army Rangers nemo resideo, and “leave no one behind,” move heaven and earth to medically evacuate Brantly and Writebol from Liberia back to the United States.

A true-life page-tuner worthy of the best of the late Michael Crichton’s medical thrillers.

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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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Faith and reason. Pray, think: Some recent posts on religion on soundingsjohnbarker

Some recent posts on religion on soundingsjohnbarker. Most have a decidedly Catholic flavour, but definitely not all, as my writing on religion can be as eclectic and wide-ranging into other areas of the Christian realm as my writing on non-religious topics can be. So, if you’re a Catholic, buckle in for some discussion of eschatology in the form of Bible prophecy, premillennial dispensationalism, Petrus Romanus, the Prophecy of Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes, the Antichrist, the False Prophet and The Rapture, and if you’re a Protestant evangelical … well, welcome to my world, which includes St. Denis, patron saint of Paris, and one of the Catholic Church’s most famous cephalophore (a.k.a. head-carrier) saints.

Retroactively spiked: The post-publication killing of Msgr. Charles Pope’s blog post on New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade

In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time “kill” a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone. Freedom of the press is the last thing they want when it comes to staff.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/retroactively-spiked-the-post-publication-killing-of-msgr-charles-popes-blog-post-on-new-york-citys-st-patricks-day-parade/

EWTN: The late 19th century English Catholic poet Francis Thompson and The Hound of Heaven

Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) routinely offers intelligent television viewing, employing the best in Catholic faith and reason. But sometimes it offers something truly extraordinary such as its Oct. 16 special telling the story of the late and now largely forgotten 19th century English Catholic poet Francis Thompson and his famous 1893 poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” published in his first volume of poems.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/10/17/ewtn-the-late-19th-century-english-catholic-poet-francis-thompson-and-the-hound-of-heaven/

St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Saints vs. Scoundrels – EWTN’s TV for the Thinking Catholic (and atheists, too)

Whoever said television can’t tackle big ideas apparently forgot to tell that to Benjamin Wiker. Tomorrow Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), the network which presents around-the-clock Catholic-themed programming, founded by Mother Mary Angelica, which began broadcasting on Aug. 15, 1981 from a garage studio at the Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Irondale, Alabama, which Mother Angelica founded in 1962, will air in several different time slots Part 1 of its series Saints vs. Scoundrels, hosted by Wiker, a senior fellow at the Veritas Center for Ethics and Public Life at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. Wiker guides viewers through pairs of influential Catholic saints and thinkers and those the church considers important historical figures, but scoundrels and sinners nonetheless.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/st-augustine-and-jean-jacques-rousseau-saints-vs-scoundrels-ewtns-tv-for-the-thinking-catholic-and-atheists-too/

The Prophecy of Malachy

While most people looked at U.S. President Barack Obama’s first meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican March 27 as a brief getting-to-know you session at the Vatican between two charismatic world leaders, who while they both champion economic social justice, are deeply divided philosophically on other moral issues such as abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage, others see them working in concert ushering in an eschatological end times.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/the-prophecy-of-malachy/

Blood Moon rising

Science and religion. In astronomical terms, on April 15 there was a total lunar eclipse. It was the 56th eclipse of the Saros 122 series. But in religious terms, it was known as the first Blood Moon of the 21st century.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/blood-moon-rising/

News and religion: Where the twain meets

“Is this the Gate of Hell? Archaeologists say temple doorway belching noxious gas matches ancient accounts of ‘portal to the underworld.’” For a minute, I thought I must be reading a headline on April 4, 2013 (after checking to make sure it wasn’t April 1) from what had to be the second coming of the late Generoso Pope, Jr.’s Weekly World News, a supermarket “news” tabloid published out of Lantana and later Boca Raton, Florida from 1979 to 2007.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/news-and-religion-where-the-twain-meets/

Spiritual warfare

Spiritual warfare?

In The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, the novel for children published in October 1950, C.S. Lewis, one of the leading Christian apologists of the 20th century wrote, “There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.”

Spiritual warfare was what Lewis was talking about almost six and a half decades ago, just as the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Ephesians almost 2,000 years earlier had said, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/spiritual-warfare/

We’re caught in a trap: Suspicious minds

Way back when, 20 or more years ago, when I decided religion was a subject journalists should take seriously if they wanted to understand the world around them and what animates many people, I happened to read a book called Faith, Hope, No Charity: An Inside Look At the Born Again Movement in Canada and the United States, published 30 years ago in 1984 by Judith Haiven, now an associate professor in the Department of Management at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/10/were-caught-in-a-trap-suspicious-minds/

Today marks the Oct. 9 Feast of St. Denis, patron saint of Paris, and one of the Catholic Church’s most famous cephalophore (a.k.a. head-carrier) saints

St. Denis, one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, who sometime after 250AD was martyred but not before, according to the Golden Legend, miraculously is said to have picked up his severed head and preached a sermon with it in his hands while walking seven miles from Montmartre where he had been beheaded.

The Catholic Church, of course, when it investigated the story of St. Denis wanted to make sure the distance he walked with his head in his hands was correctly asserted as about seven miles. There was some suggestion it was only six miles. Now, that’s a true Catholic debate. Also honored along with Saint Denis today are his two companions, a priest named Rusticus, and a deacon, Eleutherius, who were martyred alongside him and buried with him.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/today-marks-the-oct-9-feast-of-st-denis-patron-saint-of-paris-and-one-of-the-catholic-churchs-most-famous-cephalophore-a-k-a-head-carrier-saints/

John McCandlish Phillips

John McCandlish Phillips, who died last year at the age of 85, lived in relative obscurity in New York City, where he was affiliated with the Manhattan-based New Testament Missionary Fellowship, a small evangelical Pentecostal congregation of perhaps three-dozen members; it is a church he helped co-found in 1962.

From time to time, as part of their evangelization effort, Phillips could be heard proselytizing for Christianity in Central Park or the Columbia University campus, near his home. Phillips also spent part of his time managing Thomas E. Lowe, Ltd., a small religious publishing house that buys remaindered religious books and reprints a few others, selling them to Christian bookstores.

John McCandlish Phillips, with his plain-sounding declarative writing voice, also happens to have been perhaps the single best writer who ever tapped the typewriter keys as a reporter at the New York Times. That is until he retired after 21 years at the age of 46 in December 1973. He had joined the paper as a night copy boy in 1952.

Just how good was McCandlish Phillips, the byline he would eventually write under after first writing as John M. Phillips, although colleagues knew him as John in the newsroom, as a reporter and writer? According to Timesmen, he was without peer. Fellow New York Times writer and noted author Gay Talese described Phillips as the “Ted Williams of the young reporters” after the legendary baseball slugger. “He was a natural. There was only one guy I thought I was not the equal of, and that was McCandlish Phillips.” His stories often focused on forgotten people and he was best known as a feature writer with a flair for style.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/john-mccandlish-phillips-the-best-reporter-of-his-generation-walked-away-for-god-at-the-top-of-his-game/

Shemitah: The next sabbath year begins Sept. 25

Most of us are familiar with the concept of sabbaticals every seven years for tenured professors in academia, where their university employers release them from regular teaching and research duties to re-charge their intellectual batteries and perhaps pursue some specialized interest or write a book in some suitably warm climate. What more convivial or better place to write a monograph on your latest polar research than some island in the Caribbean after all is said an done?

The roots of such sabbaticals or shemitahs, also spelled as shmitas, however, long pre-date the modern or even medieval university. Their ancient roots are 3,000 years old and are grounded in the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the Land of Israel and still observed in contemporary Judiasm. During a shemita year, the land is left to lie fallow. Israel has alloted $28.8 million to farmers for the upcoming shemitah year, budgeting $863,000 less than the last shemitah, when lands were left fallow seven years ago. More recently, some Wall Street analysts have pondered the mystery of what appears to be seven-year economic cycles tied to shemitah years. And wondered why crashes often seem to come in September and October.

The next shemitah year – and the first since the demise of Lehman Brothers investment bank on Sept. 15, 2008, triggering the financial meltdown that resulted in the Great Recession, the most financially cataclysmic event since the decade of the Great Depression from 1929 to 1939 – begins in less than three weeks on Sept. 25, running until Sept. 13, 2015. Before declaring bankruptcy in 2008, Lehman Brothers, founded by Henry and Emanuel Lehman in 1850 in Montgomery, Alabama, was the fourth-largest investment bank in the Unites States, behind Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, doing business in investment banking, equity and fixed-income sales and trading, especially in U.S. Treasury securities, research, investment management, private equity, and private banking.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/shemitah-the-next-sabbath-year-begins-sept-25/

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.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/high-school-redux/

Flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar: Christian movie genre is ‘hot’

The 10-day Toronto Film Festival (TIFF) from Sept. 4 through Sept. 14 just wrapped up yesterday. In the cinema world, TIFF is a big deal. An important arts event eagerly anticipated every September.

But flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar there is a whole slew of movies released over the last year or just about to be released, which  might surprise you both in their totality and who stars in them because Hollywood, for a season at least, has rediscovered the Christian movie genre and the religious, spiritual and supernatural themes that are woven into their fabric. In a word, Christian movies are “hot” in 2014. Hollywood, which is usually a synonym for  Sodom or Gomorrah  in the vocabulary for many Christians, is this fall on the side of the angels. There is apparently an upside for Hollywood where commercial potential stands in for faith in salvation if need  be.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/flying-largely-under-the-mainstream-cinematic-radar-christian-movie-genre-is-hot/

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

Today marks the Oct. 9 Feast of St. Denis, patron saint of Paris, and one of the Catholic Church’s most famous cephalophore (a.k.a. head-carrier) saints

St. Denis, one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, who sometime after 250AD was martyred but not before, according to the Golden Legend, miraculously is said to have picked up his severed head and preached a sermon with it in his hands while walking seven miles from Montmartre where he had been beheaded.

The Catholic Church, of course, when it investigated the story of St. Denis wanted to make sure the distance he walked with his head in his hands was correctly asserted as about seven miles. There was some suggestion it was only six miles. Now, that’s a true Catholic debate. Also honored along with Saint Denis today are his two companions, a priest named Rusticus, and a deacon, Eleutherius, who were martyred alongside him and buried with him.

Born in Italy, much of St. Denis’ life remains shrouded in the mists of history, and nothing is definitely known of the exact time or place of his birth in Italy, or indeed, of his early life.  St. Fabian, the 20th Pope, sent him with five other missionary bishops to Gaul  where the Church  had been persecuted under the Roman Emperor Decius.

Ascertaining the historical facts of St. Denis life hasn’t been made easier by the erroneous conflation in the Middle Ages of St. Denis of Paris with St. Dionysius the Areopagite, and with the Pseudo-Dionysius, the composer of the Areopagitic writings.

St. Denis was enrolled in the catalog of saints in 1568 by St. Pius V, performing what we might  today call  an “equivalent canonization,” a process established in 1632 by Pope Urban VIII. Until the formal canonization of St.  Udalric, Bishop of Augsburg, by Pope John XIV in 993,  sainthood was often more a matter of local rather than universal veneration within the Church.  St. Walter of Pontoise, also known as St. Gaultier, was canonized by Archbishop Hugh de Boves, archbishop of Rouen, in 1153, and was the last saint in Western Europe to have been canonized by an  ecclesiastical authority other than the Pope.

While the average time between the death of an eventual saint and canonization is 181 years and the Church usually uses a rigorous three-stage process where the Pope first declares the person a Servant of God; then Venerable; and then  Blessed, before they are canonized as a saint. Popes, however, from time-to-time use equivalent canonization to extend to the whole Church, without carrying out the ordinary process of canonization, the veneration as a saint, the “cultus” of someone long venerated as such locally, also known as “confirmation of cultus.” There are three conditions for such a canonization: an ancient cultus, a general constant attestation by trustworthy historians to the virtues or martyrdom of the person, and an uninterrupted fame as a worker of miracles. Pope Francis enrolled Angela of Foligno and Peter Faber in 2013 in the catalog of saints through equivalent canonization, as he did earlier this year adding José de Anchieta, Marie of the Incarnation and Francis-Xavier de Montmorency-Laval.