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Created Apr 03 21
Updated Jun 21 23

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Absent Friends

Those who are no longer with us.
Camp Columbia

Summer camp for disadvantaged kids. Many of us had jobs there.
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Dumont Ducks

A spirited mob of socialist softball practitioners
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On The Line

The community newspaper that was the inspiration for Dumont Press Graphix
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How and why, at the time, students were attracted to radical politics
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Search Results for Tag: Absent Friends

Remembering Absent Friends ~ Rod Hay

Jan 01 21

Gary Robins

Roderick Winston Hay: 1948 2008

Up until his death in 2008, I had known Rod Hay longer than anyone else that I still kept in touch with (not including immediate family of course). We had both commenced our not-so-remarkable studies at the University of Waterloo in September of 1966. Roddy lived next door to me at the student village during our first year, and we often went to math classes together.

We shared other pursuits as well, from our opposition to the war in Vietnam to our shared interest in discovering new music and new musicians. We both liked Dylan, but Rod took me further into his lyrics and poetry. He introduced me to a world of contemporary and traditional folk and blues musicians, from Phil Ochs to Joan Baez to Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot and Leonard Cohen, as well as all the old blues legends from the American South.

I remember the day Roddy came back with a new album, a picture of a hippy sitting hungrily at a dinner table on the album cover. We sat back and listened to the first song on side one, all twenty-three minutes of it. That’s when we came to know Arlo Guthrie’s Alice's Restaurant, and of course, the legendary Group W Bench.

The music of the late ‘60s held enormous power and influence within the emerging counter-culture and the growing political awareness of the times. Music, its forms and its lyrics, meant something in those days, and helped us to understand and feel the world. From Pete Seeger to Pink Floyd (whom Roddy used to refer to as Floyd Pink, a kind of lost country singer), the music was such a big part of our lives. Mind you, the drugs certainly helped...

Though our student paths diverged, we continued to spend time together. We both got involved in student journalism and social justice movements, on campus and off. We even got arrested together once (I think it was just the one time) one sunny October afternoon, and subsequently charged (along with Larry and Fast Eddie and a couple other folks) with trespassing on public property. Fortunately, we had a good lawyer, who later went on to become the mayor of Kitchener.

In early 1969 I was living in a two-bedroom apartment just off campus, Apt. 1009 in Waterloo Towers, with Phil Elsworthy, Fast Eddy, Mike Corbett and Jim Klinck. It was an enchanting and sociable little abode, top floor, lovely view, people dropping by regularly. I was working at the Campus Centre at the time, and I believe Phil was too.

Years later, Phil and I recalled the day in early May of '69 when Roddy showed up at the apartment (unannounced, as usual) with a big case of fireworks under his arm. He had liberated them from the Milton Fireworks factory where he had been working. We used those fireworks a couple weeks later to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Winnipeg General Strike (May 19, 1919), and various other relevant social/political events. Roddy stuck around and lived with us out on the balcony for the summer. It did provide adequate shelter, and Roddy and his wooden crate of fireworks seemed quite comfortable out there. Alas, this same balcony later served as the launch pad one evening for an assortment of firecrackers and other incendiaries that, coincidently, happened to get us evicted from that delightful little gathering spot. I was working that evening – missed the whole darn thing.

So that's when we rented the big house at 192 King Street South in Waterloo, that soon became the Gabriel Dumont Memorial Co-op and later, a commune. It was a good move on many levels, as I believe there were about nine of us stuffed into that two-bedroom apartment at that point. The house had previously been a doctor’s office, with many rooms to accommodate fourteen of us that first winter, plus one dog, assorted fellow travelers passing through, and a fairly regular assortment of dinner guests. There was always room to set another plate.

None of us could afford social media in those days, so there were many conversations throughout the house, both philosophical and political debates, and more mundane arguments over who had the best chicken fricasee recipe.

Roddy was right there in the thick of things, except perhaps for domestic stuff. As Joanne Kennedy recalled, “When it came Roddy’s turn to cook, he stood his ground that it was going to be PBJ or hot dogs…  I think we short-sheeted his bed.”

We did a lot of things together at 192. And when hen we started making plans in early 1970 to establish an alternative community newspaper, Roddy was right there offering his support, doing whatever little task needed to be done. The result was On the Line, a little bi-weekly tabloid that we laid out and pasted up on the dining-room table and sold on downtown street corners for 15 cents a copy.

As it turned out, we didn’t really have a great business plan, and we lost money right from the start. It was this realization that led us to consider sustainable alternatives. Hoping to put theory into practice, we developed a plan to create a worker-controlled typesetting and publishing house, which ultimately led to the creation and establishment of Dumont Press Graphix. As always, Roddy was there as an eager all-purpose volunteer. In those days, Roddie truly believed the Revolution was just around the corner.

Time lapse and flashback:   In the spring of 2008 we learned that Roddy had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, which had metastasized to his liver, and was inoperable. He had received the diagnosis a week earlier and was near death. A lot of folks rallied to his bedside at the hospital in Kitchener-Waterloo. The rest of us kept vigil from afar, keeping vigil in our own way, sending good feelings and sharing fond memories.

Out here in Regina, my long-time pal Jan Stoody came by one evening and we sat out on my front porch drinking wine (Finca, a nice cheap dry red from Argentina) and telling stories. As we contemplated the news from K-W that Roddy might not make it through the night, we thought this could well be an appropriate commemoration, as that particular day was also the anniversary of that Saturday afternoon thirty-eight years earlier when (as some of you might recall) a small crowd of about 5,000 of us tried to storm the American Consulate on University Avenue in Toronto during an anti-war rally. Larry Burko had chartered a bus (or was it two?) to get us all there from Waterloo.

There were, of course, many, many protests against the seemingly endless Vietnam War, in Canada, across the U.S. and around the globe. The many gatherings held on this date in 1970 were especially significant because they came just five days after a group of U.S. National Guardsmen (yes, they were all men in those days) in Ohio opened fire on student protesters at Kent State University, killing four of them and wounding many more. The world was understandably a bit angry,

Roddy was one of the more enthusiastic participants that day in Toronto, and hey, he did manage to avoid arrest. There was a lot of excitement that afternoon and many of our friends will probably remember the moment when those horseback-riding Toronto cops managed to pry us away from the consulate’s front gates, and then the crowd just took off, surging past City Hall through Nathan Philips Square and on towards Yonge Street, passing by, as it turned out, the old Eaton’s store.

I remember Roddy and someone else (mighta been Eddie? – who knows?) picking up a big trash container, which I’m sure must have been impeding their path or something like that, and when they went to set it aside it happened to sail through a large plate glass window, causing a huge commotion and setting off some kind of weird chain reaction that saw a number of other trash containers just spontaneously leap off their sidewalk perches in a variety of interesting directions. I suspect adrenaline rushes were breaking out all over.

So on that evening thirty-eight years later, Jan and I felt it would be kind of appropriate to dedicate our memory of that little bit of history to Roddy, especially since he rallied to survive through that night in hospital, just as he managed to avoid legal entanglements back on May 9th, 1970. We can all recognize Roddy’s enthusiasm and dedication to social justice, whatever the challenges and environment of the day. Jan and I drank a toast to all of that, and then went on to finish off the entire bottle. Rod died about a week later.

I shared this story with a number of friends and the extended family from our Dumont days, and got a note back from Fast Eddie:  “Trudy Chippier and I were with Roddy that day but I remember that Roddy and I were actually trying to hold the trash container down to avoid it flying through the window. I'm surprised that it got away from us as Roddy was usually really stubborn and determined.”

I think Roddy liked to see himself as a regular working guy, and he was also a scholar with a keen interest in politics, economics and philosophy. However, I believe his first love was baseball. As Dumont Press became a regular (in its own unique way) established workplace, it didn’t take long for thoughts to turn toward spring and the upcoming ball season. Roddy found an eager crew of players among the staff at the shop, and in June ’72, the newly-formed Dumont Ducks took to the field as part of the university intramural league. Roddy played second base, but he was also a coach, trainer, cheerleader (in his usual quiet way) and mentor to the rest of us. Win or lose, the Ducks were a huge success, providing a kind of cultural glue to add an extra dimension to our co-operatives lives together.

When I left Kitchener-Waterloo to come west in 1977, Roddy made that journey along with me. We departed the very same day the Toronto Blue Jays played their first ever game. Roddy came along as far as Calgary and got a job, but didn't say goodbye (that was his way, close and distant at the same time). I went on to B.C. before bouncing back here into Saskatchewan.

I suspect it was major league baseball that eventually lured Roddy back to Ontario. Indeed, as Michael Rohatynski later recalled, “Roddy really appreciated baseball. His fondness for the Montreal Expos rubbed off onto so many people.”

After he returned to Ontario, Roddy settled in Toronto, resumed his academic studies, and went on to teach economics at a number of universities. Still quiet and reclusive, he spent a lot of time developing relationships with the kids of his old Waterloo and Dumont buddies. As Brian Iler explained, “Rod’s been a very important friend and mentor to many of our kids, certainly to my Andrew, Brendan and Kirsten, Eddie and Donna’s son Jonathan, and Michael and Jane’s Terrina. Rod and Andrew have spent a great deal of time together, particularly over the past year, as Rod has tutored Andrew in his first year at U of T.”

Arel Agnew also recalled, “One day in about ’84 he appeared at my front door. I had just come home from teaching and was working on supper with two kids running around. He sat down in the living room and read. I said hello and asked if he wanted anything. He said no, just to sit. Then he left without saying goodbye.

“Later on, he announced he would babysit, as soon as our son Brendan no longer wore diapers, and then Andrew too. Over the years he taught me about economics, repeating the basic principles while we walked until they sunk in. I taught him to knock when he arrived at my front door. He always had a key, but I taught him to phone before he showed up.”

Looking back over the years of my friendship with Roddy, I often return to Alice’s Restaurant and the epic lyrics of Arlo Guthrie towards the end of that classic piece, as Arlo noted, "If you want to end war and stuff you've got to sing loud!" For a quiet guy, Rod had a mighty voice. We've all felt it…

— Gary Robins, May 2008 and November 2020

 


Additional thoughts from other friends, colleagues and co-conspirators, gathered just prior to his death in 2008:

From Joe Goodman in Toronto:  I’m not sure why this particular image is so strong, but I truly loved having Roddy on the Dumont Ducks Baseball team. It was a special time with a special guy. I hope that all these names and memories provide a soft pillow for Roddy`s journey. Love and Peace.

From Jann Van Horne (Tennenbaum) in Boston:  When I think of Roddy. I think of a quiet man who always made me feel safe. I met him at Dumont Press and we did not spend much time together. When Roddy spoke, he said few words, but his eyes said to me that whatever I was doing, feeling or believed, it was okay with him. I always felt so accepted and never judged by Roddy. I can easily recall his face and his solitary walk. It is good to know that so many people are with him and that he is loved.

From Winnie in Ottawa: It’s hard to think of Roddy dying; in my mind’s eye he is as young as he was in your recollection, as silent and as brooding, with the same grin and grand sense of humour when up to something mischievous or out of the ordinary. I am keeping a vigil here in Ottawa, remembering Roddy and at the same time thinking of so many of my friends from Waterloo days who welcomed me in my youth and gave me shelter when I needed it most.

From Liz Janzen in Toronto:  It was always great seeing him, sitting together and catching each other up on who we each knew was doing what. Roddy was always a great connector (gossip can be good) that way. I'm thinking of the many nights at Ahrens St. with numerous pots of tea (Mary Holmes just kept them coming) that we talked away, with Roddy listening, throwing in the occasional joke or brief rant. Much love.

From Betty Burcher in Toronto:  I have two strong memories of Roddy. One is when I took Brendan to the Blue Jays game for his fourth birthday Roddy was quite concerned that I didn't know about baseball, so he spent time teaching me the basics! Much later he chuckled big time when Nick (my son) turned out to be such a jock and then I had to know the fine points of baseball and indeed every other sport!

And I also have a very foggy memory of going with Roddy to a strip bar in Waterloo. Yes, this is feminist Betty writing! Can't recall whose idea it was, but I do remember something about "knowing the reality”. Mostly I think of Roddy as an astute observer, gentle soul and decent human being, loved by all our kids and all of us.

From Liz Willick in Oxbow:  Years after we'd stitched ourselves temporarily into the already well-worn Waterloo social patchwork in the mid-seventies, Ron made the discovery that Roddy's quiet grew out of a noisy crowded family with a deaf mom... myth or fact? Ron says he was present when trash can met Eaton's window; but that was before he'd met Roddy and the rest of you lot. I remember the crowd, the cops on horses big, tall, pushing, pushing anger rising, running...

I think the last time I saw Roddy was at Brian and Arel's in Toronto. I was staying there while taking a gender and development course. Brendan had a rat and Andrew was a baby. Roddy was very involved with the kids and it seems to me a huge tribute that they should be so with him now.

From Ron Colpitts in Oxbow:  The first thing I noticed about Roddy was his silence. Unlike a lot of the New Left, in my experience, Roddy was not only comfortable with silence, he sought it out. He probably would have been better able to deal with the sometime isolation of rural Saskatchewan than I have. I gradually came to learn that Roddy always had something (usually thoughtful) to say. You just had to listen, or ask and listen.

Roddy also demonstrated that one could be a critical thinker and an unabashed sports fan and a bit of a jock without it being some form of contradiction. (Definitely not a notion that would have been entertained in the Toronto and Ottawa Leftie communities I was part of; prior to moving to KW.) I can't think of KW without thinking of the Dumont Ducks. I've played team sports all my life, I still do. The Ducks were the only time in my life that being a member of a sports team wasn't completely schizophrenic. (It was nice to have a somewhat common world view and actually like all of my teammates.)

Moving back to rural Saskatchewan brought with it a community of neighbours whom one could count on in an emergency whether you liked each other or not. The unfortunate trade-off, for me, was that I lost a day to day social and political community that I had become used to through the New Left, CUP, and most importantly our time in KW. Despite that, I always felt less isolated when I remembered how many wonderful supportive people I knew across the country, the continent, the world. Just a short trip or a phone call away.

As usual, I'm rambling. Roddy's illness and impending death is an emotional blow. I find I'm of an age that have trouble grieving in particular. The sense of loss and unfairness brings many memories of many people gone before us. It would be better if I could be with some of you to celebrate Roddy's life and your continuing lives.

Anyway, I miss you all. Take care of each other. I'd hate to be the last one standing.

Love, Ron

From Sara Switzman in San Francisco:  As I sit here at my computer and read all of these wonderful remembrances of times of fun, activism, and deep thinking I feel a connectedness to my childhood and a larger community of people who have spread across North America yet still live in one another's stories. My clearest picture of Roddy is of him hanging out on the front porch at 10 Young Street, his bangs falling into his eyes and a cold bottle of coke in his hand. I send my love out to everyone. 

From Alison Stirling in Toronto:  I always thought that Rod would be a constant and outlast the rest of us; grinning as he downed his cola, read a great book, scanned baseball games, and pondered the meaning of life, the universe and everything. I have many fine memories of long conversations, debates and quiet reflections on philosophy, politics and pulp fiction, as well as sharing our dreams, humour and dismay at the ways things sometimes worked out. I am still working my way through Rod's list of the 100 best books of the 20th century, and although I may never get to all those books, I always think of him as I look at it. Roddy is our scholar, our loyal friend, our quiet joy. As Joe said, may his journey be softened by our love and memories.

From Bruce Steele in Regina:  Roddy Hay. The Furry Freaks vs. the Cops. The Dumont Ducks. Grounder to second... hard toss to first... big grin. The Chevron or Dumont late, late at night. Printer chemicals and Karl Marx. Walking the railroad tracks from the U to King Street, cutting across 17 blocks with 7 words spoken. Drawn to full height, eagle eye at the edge of the party. The look of approval. Later, bent quiet over some political triviality, the look that let you know you'd crossed the line.

The campus centre hall, packed, issue du jour, Roddy appears by your side in a whisper, makes some ironic and very funny remark that stuns you into his private perspective – a line seemingly so out of character that the heart of the man is suddenly exposed – and then disappears into the crowd like a rabbit into the fog on a mission of mercy.


7 more photos in this story.

Remembering Absent Friends ~ Sandy Cameron

Created Feb 17 21
Updated Apr 17 21

Rosco Bell

Sandy and his fiddle, onstage during the 1980 Communicart tour.

Robert Alexander Cameron, 1945 to 2004

Sandy Cameron never worked on staff at Dumont Press, but his association with student journalism, the alternate press and the Dumont community was longstanding. A lifetime resident of Saskatchewan who visited Kitchener-Waterloo regularly, Sandy was one of those hospitable fellow travellers who helped to build a strong link between Regina and the K-W communities.

Sandy was the first person from Regina I ever met. He worked for Canadian University Press (CUP) along with Gary, Liz and Ron. When a bunch of folks went to the CUP conference in Naramata in 1970 we stayed with some student radicals and hippies in Regina that Sandy introduced us to. 
 
Though my friendship with Sandy was really only cemented after I had left Dumont, he was a principal reason for my move to Regina. As in Waterloo, there were a lot of young people that had formed communes and coops and were involved in various counter-cultural activities. There was a familiarity and sense of community to Regina that made it an attractive destination for many K-W people like myself.
 
Sandy was a natural leader who had the unique ability to bring people together to make things happen. By the time I arrived in Regina in 1977, Sandy had begun to understand that making change in society couldn’t be limited to politics without there being a cultural component as well. To that end, he established the Saskatchewan Cultural Exchange Society. Initially, SCES was a sort of travelling circus cum art gallery that took artists and musicians from Regina and Saskatoon to various small communities throughout the province. Up to 15 people would pile into an old school bus and tour the province for weeks at a time, putting on shows and conducting workshops in towns, villages and First Nations communities that Sandy had contacted. No one got paid to be on the tours and the communities were not charged. The tours were financed by small grants from government agencies that Sandy solicited.
 
In time, the focus of the SCES changed to putting on workshops in more remote communities as funding increased and permanent staff were hired but in 1981, a different path emerged, thanks to Sandy’s leadership. Many of you will recall hanging out at the the Kent and Station hotels. In Regina, it was the Hotel Saskatchewan — the Sask — that brought people together. In 1980 the owners decided to “upgrade” the barroom, driving most of its patrons to find alternative spaces. After a few months, Sandy and some comrades decided to start their own bar. The way to get a liquor licence was by establishing a private members club for which you needed an existing non-profit organization. Enter the SCES. In a matter of a few months, a space was secured and a group of dedicated volunteers built a clubhouse — named, appropriately, The Club — that brought in bands on weekends and served as a place to meet your friends during the week.
 
The SCES still exists to this day, although The Club had to move to a new location following a devastating fire in 1989. Now, it is mostly involved with sponsoring workshops and with maintaining a performance space for community groups and local and touring bands.
 
None of this would have happened without Sandy’s stewardship and his ability to bring people together. He touched a lot of people’s lives and did so selflessly and without fanfare. His commitment to his community was deep and sincere and I never got the feeling there was anything else motivating him. He was one of the first of our generation to have children (five of them!) which probably kept him grounded and focused on the here and now. He was an art collector, a musician, a writer, and a pretty good cook. I’m happy to say, he was my friend.
 

Additional reflections and comments:

From Gary Robins in Regina:  Sandy was at the core of a number of Regina/K-W connections. Several of us met him (along with Norm Bolen and Ron Thompson at the CUP national conference at the Westbury Hotel in Toronto in December 1968. A year later, he made his first visit to Waterloo for the CUP conference at the University of Waterloo (chaired by Brenda Wilson and Frank Goldspink) in December 1969. 

Ron Colpitts and Sandy Cameron at the CUP National Office in Ottawa, late 1970

A significant discussion at that gathering centred around the emergence of the alternate press in several communities across Canada and other countries, much of it spurred on by activist student journalists going out into their communities. Sandy and a fairly creative and energetic bunch from Regina had recently established a weekly alternate community newspaper, the Prairie Fire. Sandy was also elected to the CUP National Office at that conference. Of greater relevance though, was that the conference discussions also prompted Jim Klinck and Gary Robins to decide to start a community newspaper in Kitchener-Waterloo.

Two months later, Gary and Brenda Wilson (along with Tom Ashman and the Kennedy sisters) stopped in Regina on their way to the West Coast, spending a weekend there learning more about the alternate press and helping to produce an edition of Prairie Fire. Along with a caucus gang of fun-loving activists and writers, they also met Sandy’s partner Barb Cameron, and his daughter Kirsten. Two weeks later, Gary and Brenda stopped in Regina again on their way home to Waterloo, and helped to lay out and paste-up another issue of the paper. It was hands-on research, and they came back with a plan. On the Line published its first issue about four months later.

In April 1971 as he completed his term at the CUP National Office in Ottawa and headed home to Saskatchewan, Sandy stopped for the weekend in Waterloo and then stayed for three weeks. Dumont Press Graphix was about to open its doors, and the Gabe Dumont Memorial Commune was in the process of breaking up. It was a very interesting and exciting time, on many fronts. 

Sandy (and his red van) helped some of us with our extensive search to find a farmhouse to rent within commuting distance of K-W. We spent a lot of days on back roads exploring the Ontario countryside, finally settling into a nice quiet place by the Rocky Saugeen River, about eight miles southwest of Markdale, and only 70 miles north of K-W. It was idyllic, another rural hippie commune.

Sandy became an annual visitor to Waterloo, showing up with a van load of hippies, always looking to party. When I decided, in the spring of 1977, to leave Ontario and head west to the coast or somewhere in the mountains, it was Sandy who waylaid me in a local pub, during our stopover in Regina. He was encouraging almost to the point of being insistent. A strong and supportive community is always inviting. It still is. He was the main reason I ended up in Saskatchewan as well, and though he was sometimes tough to get along with, we worked together on a number of projects and remained close friends up to the time of his death in 2004.


Sod Hut and the Buffalo Chips, a somewhat legendary old-time swing/bluegrass/folk ensemble, in concert for Yorkton TV, April 1979. Sandy Cameron, on fiddle (in the centre of the photo) was a key organizer for the band. Other band members of note included Rosco Bell (far left, as usual) on dobro and Janet Stoody (second from the right but first in our hearts) on percussion and vocals.

Comments

John Deitrich Koop

Mar 02 21

Phil Elsworthy

John Koop  September 15, 1948 — November 18, 2018

I'm not sure when I met John Koop.  I think it must have been 1971 when we lived at 132 University.  We quickly became friends, at least partly because Koop was such an outgoing fellow. We quickly discovered we were born on the same day, and thought of ourselves as twins.  Over the years we always remembered to wish each other a Happy Birthday.

I do remember the summer of 1971.  John had purchased a used Bell telephone van (the charming olive green of course)  which needed some repairs, so he joined the 132 Auto Club in the back yard.  There were four other vehicles being worked on there, so there was plenty of help and advice. 

John decided to run for Parliament on the October 1971 election.  One room in the basement was set up as headquarters, and I recall I painted a 4 by 8 sheet of plywood as an election sign for the front yard.  It's Canada's loss that he wasn't elected.

 


3 more photos in this story.

Joseph George Szalai

Apr 21 21

Wayne Bell

Joe worked for Dumont in the early years. He was a Dumont member from 1977 - 1981? Joe passed away on Novemberr 25, 2020 at the age of 70. He led an active life and really enjoyed his time with Dumont where he learned many skills and made many friends.

 

https://youtu.be/eHpCRKWiTZM

 

https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/therecord-waterloo/obituary.aspx?n=joseph-g-szalai&pid=197171018

 

Wayne Bell

IN THE LOOP: ANOTHER SCOOP OF KOOP

Jun 23 21

James Allen

I know John would get a real charge out of having two entries in Absent Friends.

The following was composed for his 2018 memorial in St. John’s. Some fun stuff was omitted then for reasons of taste. No need to tell the story of John smashing up a fellow’s business on a joy ride to the harness racing track, for example; even less need to tell the tale of O. J. Culvert. Full credit for the multi-course Indian meal on the PEI beach (cooked on a Coleman stove) goes to Jan Peters, John’s ex-spouse, business partner and friend. She remembers it; I’ll never forget it; it was startling that John blanked on it. Of my four trips to the Rock, three were directly attributable to John and I am grateful to him for that (if you’ve never been, do yourself a favour and go; Rick will probably put you up; dine at Raymond’s; thank me later). 

AN ODE TO JOHN KOOP

Rick Page brought John to my Waterloo rooming house in 1968 and while I thought that John had a lean and hungry look, he proved to be a lot more Bacchus than Cassius.

I rarely remember John without a van. Anyone who knew John knew that John knew the value of a dollar, to a degree this Scot could really admire. However, I prefer to believe his failure to replace his beloved Edna decades past her best before date may have had more to do with romantic sentimentality than anything else.

A true romantic, John offered the more staid among us an alternative way to live a life:  

  • avoiding annoying snowscapes whenever possible;
  • obsessing about music and sports while being a musician and athlete;
  • barging into a spectacular spread (with chum in tow) prepared by Mennonite women to whom he was related;
  • getting married so certain people would visit St. John’s (or so he said);
  • facilitating a multi-course Indian meal on a PEI beach, then forgetting all about  it;
  • dropping in unexpectedly, most memorably from Las Vegas to a person’s surprise birthday event;
  • appearing incongruously on a televised Raptors game from Phoenix;
  • being ejected with nephews from a giant inner tube being pulled by a motorboat on an Ontario lake.

 

When I saw photos of this last stunt in 2014, I told him he was defying the aging process for all of us. As far as I could tell, he continued to do that right to the end. I really liked that. For as long as I live, I doubt that many days will go by when my mind won’t conjure up a John memory, which means I’ll be smiling. I really like that too.

 

--James A., Victoria BC


1 more photos in this story.

Remembering Absent Friends - Charlotte von Bezold

Jun 25 21

Rosco Bell

Charlotte von Bezold - March 6, 1948-December 12, 1984

I have struggled for some time with what to say about Charlotte that would convey both what she was like and what she meant to me. I have decided that I would write about the first time and the last time I saw her. The parts in between I leave to the reader’s imagination and discretion.

I met her in September 1967 in the arts coffee shop at the University of Waterloo, introduced by our mutual friend Henry Shields. She was nineteen and I was smitten. She was unlike any woman I had ever known, not that I knew very many, and I was taken with her immediately. In those days, women and girls were generally constrained by expectations of modesty and decorum. They were not, as Charlotte did, expected to talk about birth control on first meeting someone. That day, she told me about her experience trying to access the birth control pill from the university’s Health Services. I was painfully shy in those days and hardly knew what to say to a girl, any girl, let alone one so open about something so personal. She was very matter-of-fact and unassuming, as if we were old friends chewing the fat over coffee and grilled cheese sandwiches. She even laughed at my jokes and, again unlike any girl I’d ever known, she made me laugh at hers. In short, she was a revelation -- beautiful, smart and fun to be around. How could I have not fallen for her?

The last time I saw her was in October 1984. Gary Robins had told me she was very ill and if I wanted to see her again I should get to it. I called her at her home in Charlottetown and asked if it would be OK if I visited her soon. In typical Charlotte style, she said, “You mean, before I croak.” I had not seen her for several years, since around the time that her son, Ting, was born. I learned that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer about 18 months previously and had refused treatment for it, a decision that had alienated her from even her closest friends, try as they might to convince her to give up her disdain for the patriarchal medical establishment and do something about her fucking cancer! I knew it would be pointless to add my voice to the chorus of concern. I just wanted to be a good listener.

She told me how it was her uncle, a doctor in the States, who first noticed the lump on her chest. Once she got the diagnosis, she determined that she would not allow them to mutilate her body with a mastectomy, believing she could control it through diet and mental exercises. She showed me the cancerous growth on her breast, by now a multi-hued rosetta a couple of inches in diameter. She painted pictures of it. She joked about how cancer was a growth experience. She said her favourite TV show was “Die-Nasty”. I think she realized she had gambled and lost. While I was there, she finally broke down and got the pain killers she had refused until then. I remember being with her when the pills took effect and she relaxed and for a moment became more like the Charlotte I had always known. She didn’t need me to be her judge. She died six weeks later.

Tears do not come easily to me; I have only ever cried twice when someone has died. The first was when John Lennon was shot. The second was for Charlotte von Bezold. She told me once that I was like a tree – I don’t move around very much but I am always in motion. For me, Charlotte was like a butterfly – colours flashing in the sun, flitting and fluttering through the air, beckoning, aloof, just out of reach. Suddenly there, suddenly gone.

Jim Nagel’s articles on Waterloo’s 60s radicals

Jul 25 23

Steve Izma

I received these clippings of articles from the Kitchener-Waterloo Record from rych mills.

Since the text is a little difficult to read, I will gradually add transcriptions of the articles. Here is the introduction to part one of the two-day series.


New outlook, but still radicals


Jim Nagel, former editor of the University of Waterloo student paper and then a reporter for The Record, is now working in a religious communal farm he helped organize at Glastonbury, England. On a trip to K-W, he revisited radical students. In the first of a two-part series, he reports what they are doing today and what they thought about the student activist days.


By Jim Nagel

Special to The Record

Whatever happened to the student radical wave of the 1960s?

At the University of Waterloo for much of the period, editor of the student newspaper for two years, I knew all the activists and probably had an idea of what they were about—even if I was too much of a fence-sitter to play a passionate role,

A full decade—the 1970s—has passed since the crest of the radical wave. I have looked up my friends who were active in Waterloo student affairs then to see where life has led them.

Some went into law; others into government to save the environment. Some went into organized labour; others into their own small businesses.

Some went into (or stayed in) the news and publishing game. Some went back to the land. Some went into university faculties to analyze where the movement went.

Most of the radical wave of the 1960s is still rolling, although the ripples have changed. The individuals who made up the wave, for the most part, have not changed their radical personalities of the past. But they have spread thin. Students of the baby boom are no longer concentrated on a campus, reinforcing one another’s ideas, but are separated across the country.

It was Hush, the Toronto tabloid, I think, that headlined Waterloo as “the Red university.” The UW, along with Simon Fraser University in the West, had the reputation of being English Canada’s radical hotbed.

That reputation surprised me, because the most spectacular thing that ever happened at Waterloo was the bookstore sit-in of 1966. For example, in all of Canada, the only real violence of that era was the 1969 computer-burning at Sir George Williams University in Montreal. While students here held Protests, outside Canada it was different.

In Paris in May 1968, student revolutionaries were on the verge of overthrowing De Gaulle’s reactionary government. The Sorbonne was occupied, riot cops faced cobblestones in the streets, ten million French workers joined a nationwide strike led by the students.

At the same time in New York, police were dragging Columbia University students from buildings. In Washington, the widowed Mrs. Martin Luther King was opening the Poor People’s Campaign and its plywood city at the Lincoln Memorial.

In Bonn, the government was laying down the law on student demonstrators. Someone tried to assassinate the radical leader Red Rudi Dutschke. In Prague, Alexander Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face” was blooming. And the wind was blowing rumours of Soviet troops massing on the border.

Back in Canada it was the time of flower power. Pierre became prime minister in April and called a general election three days later; Trudeaumania was sweeping the country.

In Saigon, a secret U.S. army directive was calling for an all-out Vietnam offensive. President Johnson asked Congress for $3.9 billion more for the war. Paris peace talks stalled.

Today, a full decade separating us from these concurrent hurricanes, that world has calmed down. The Vietnam war has at long last been repudiated, blacks got civil rights, students got some say on university boards.

The campus is quiet. Students today are more concerned about jobs amid high unemployment than they are about causes.

Students of the ’60s are now in the wide-open world beyond university. Most of the students whose integrity I respected in 1968 have not lost it in 1990. And they’re still concerned about worldwide problems:

Unemployment, education cutbacks, power of huge corporations, half the world starving, the bomb still hanging over it all, authoritarian government lurking to “save” us.

4 leftists turn into lawyers

In 1969 and 1970 a half-dozen of the University of Waterloo student leaders intended to carry their ideals from university polities into law school.

Their intention: Gain understanding of the power structure. Learn to use the system to carry their ideals into the real world.

While at school they planned to live communally in a big house. During the next two years, the household &endash; and some of the marriages and friendships &endash; split up.

Now in 1980, they are practising law, each going their own way, with varying political positions.

Steve Ireland says of the law school commune it was “really bourgeois” to other radical students sharing housing. “That was the time when Stewart (Saxe) had the Mercedes,” he chuckles.

Success surprised us, ’60s “firebrand” recalls

“Firebrand Ireland” I used to call him for fun when he was student-radical president at the University of Waterloo 12 years ago.

Today Stephen W. Ireland, B.A., LL.B. ts a respectable Toronto lawyer wearing a [obscured; maybe “sports jacket”?] but at least it’s corduroy,” he is quick to point out.

Ireland never was one of those slogan-shouting types that, at least in media imaginations, characterized the 1960s. At Waterloo, the most outwardly spectacular event in that period was the bookstore strike of November 1966, when several hundred students sat in the campus shop with guitars, protesting; the university’s high-profit prices on textbooks.

Former university president Dr. J.G. Hagey refused to come to talk to the students, so 210 students trooped up to his office. It was all good-natured, and it worked. The university changed the pricing policy.

“Nobody thought that sort of thing could happen,” said Ireland, “Least of all those who organized it.”

The bookstore success bolstered the student leaders’ confidence. Issue followed issue. “There was a lot of controversy,” said Ireland, “And that was the point.”

Students “saw that if you made your concerns known and had a bit of force behind them — if you were organized and had numbers behind you — you could be heard.”

As a result of student pressure while the new athletics building was planned, for example, planning was done for the general student apart from league sports. Similarly, a sit-in persuaded the library to adopt more flexible hours.

Get the student federation incorporated: that was one of Ireland’s first priorities as president. That legal framework proved to be a structure that weathered the turbulent months following.

Ireland’s biggest contribution was in “getting the principle recognized about student participation in university government.”

He was one of the main authors of a 1967 report that opened a long debate. Some faculty were bitterly opposed but students were granted seats on most university governing bodies.

“How that’s being followed up today— whether, students are playing a meaningful part—I have no idea,” said Ireland.

(One seat on UW’s board of governors today, as it happens, is filled by John Bergsma. An engineering graduate, he is now president and general manager of Columbus McKinnon Industries in Burlington.)

Times have changed for students since the economic slump of the 1970s, Ireland says. In our era, “We had the world by the tail. We were able to flaunt the authorities, to say obnoxious and unpleasant things without worrying about the consequences,

“We all got degrees, got tickets into the Establishment, and we’re all doing good work.” Today students worry how to support themselves.

Ireland and a partner (and a secretary each) are now set up above a bank opposite the central Toronto law courts: “Not plush, but convenient.”

"Criminal cases, “which I’m not all that fond of,” used to make up half his clientele, He now devotes most of his work to family law — divorce, separation, custody of children and property. Working with real people he finds more satisfying: &endash; especially when out of the blue a year later comes a thank-you from a past client.

Steve and his wife Sally, themselves recently separated and reunited, own a [obscured] musical taste might be a barometer of his political views: some Beethoven and a “fair amount of not-too-hard rock.”

Activist student now activist lawyer

Brian Iler, barrister and solicitor dressed in cords and cardigan, drives a 1971 Datsun with 132,000 miles on it and prefers to do his legal work in Toronto with community groups “which tend to be substantially to the left of the NDP.”

It’s 12 years ago that Iler, from Guelph, was elected student president and helped form the Radical Student Movement. [obscured] Today he believes in getting housing, food and such co-ops legally established because “the process people go through in running their own lives is an important part of social change. It’s a matter of bringing institutions down to a size people can feel comfortable with.”

Toronto now has a federation of housing co-ops, each with 10 to 100 units. The federation’s staff of a dozen helps new groups set up, does management services, deals with the mortgage corporations, and so on.

Brian and his wife Arel Agnew — a fellow Waterloo student — and their two children share a house in central Toronto with another couple. They take turns at chores in a day-care centre and food co-op. Iler is involved in the Law Union of Ontario, a federation of 500 left-wing lawyers, law students, and legal workers. He is not in a political party.

Iler practises on his own, sharing space with two native-rights lawyers. He rides his bicycle four blocks to work — even in winter.

An engineering student in 1965, he became active through Circle K, a campus service club and went on to organize the university’s Tenth Anniversary Week in 1967 to mark UW’s first decade. He succeeded Ireland as student president in 1968, the year of the radical crest.

Behind the scenes, radical action was being orchestrated by a small cell including ILer, tongue-in-cheek calling themselves the Committee for Intellectual Mobility. They met Thursday midnights.

“We’d hatch issues to raise shit on.”

They organized an outdoor rally on the shortage of student housing and decided to set up a protest tent city. Iler laughs that the tent city was not very successful. “Gerry Hagey (then UW president) came round one Sunday morning to visit people in their tents, and there was hardly anyone there.”

A mass resignation of student council and Iler as its president was another Thursday-midnight idea aimed to stir up discussion by students.

That was how Iler’s presidency ended, in October 1968 in a “town-hall” impeachment referendum of over 2,000 students. In the ensuing election he was defeated by conservative John Bergsma.

A 1971 summer job in Morley Rosenberg’s law office in Kitchener brought Iler into the middle of the Market Square controversy. The city council and the K-W news media had kept quiet about a deal with Oxlea Investments Ltd. to rip down the old city hall and farmers market to make way for a new mall.

Someone leaked news of the deal to The Chevron, and the student paper hit the streets with a special city-wide extra.

“We fell down badly on organizing the opposition to that afterwards. No one had had any experience organizing that kind of campaign.”

In his Toronto office, one of Iler’s biggest cases was a successful suit in 1976 against a guard at Millhaven maximum-security prison &endash; apparently the first such action against a prison guard to come to court.

Is he still reading Marx?

“I’m not too familiar with his stuff any [obscured] have been. Tom Patterson and Cyril Levitt (in 1968) theorized; I worked.

“I practise law because I enjoy working with people and doing practical things.

“And not just that. It's working with people towards a saner society.”

Student organizing “taught us a lot”

Steve Flott, one of the chief theoreticians at UW in the heyday of campus radicalism, admits that life now is outwardly “upper-middle-class traditional.”

He specialized in transportation law and since 1978 has been executive vice-president and general manager of the Ontario Trucking Association, in Toronto. !Some of the basic (radical) “concepts are still there They take a [obscured].”

Finding his job challenging enough, Flott has decided to stay low-key regarding politics for the next five years. The job involves him with trucking companies of all sizes in their licence applications to the provincial transport board.

One of his ex-radical friends calls him a workaholic. He always was one. He polished off an MA degree in history in only eight months in 1968 at Waterloo. American by birth, he had come to UW from Catholic priesthood training.

He was in on the secret steering committee at Thursday midnight.

You learn as much from working on student council or the campus newspaper as you do on your degree courses. “Part of the success that a number of us have had since leaving school was due to our experience at organizing things and managing during our student-politics days. We gained a lot of political skills which weren’t only used in politics.”

He was wearing his Saturday cords, turtleneck, and 10-year-old sweater at the interview at the large house he and his wife own in Toronto’s suburbia.

“I’m not saying society works well, but it’s there. I can’t see why I shouldn’t take advantage of that situation.”

Ex-radical maps out battles with labour

Stewart Saxe in 1968-69 published 1,000 pages of radical manifestos as editor of the University of Waterloo’s student newspaper The Chevron.

Today he has become a member of the biggest law firm in the world, representing multinational corporations.

Besides becoming a lawyer, he is owner of a modest estate, a rather isolated country house overlooking the Credit River near Georgetown.

Moreover, he has become son-in-law to Morton Shulman, Ontario’s outspoken ex-coroner, ex-MPP and author of Anyone Can Make a Million. Dianne Shulman Saxe is also a lawyer.

He sports a pocket watch in the vest of his three-piece suit and in its inside pocket the inevitable Daytimer, the efficient appointment diary like the one radical student executives carried back at Waterloo in the late ’60s.

He practises labour law — on the management side, How does this fit with his left-wing ideals?

“Poorly!” said Saxe laughing. “But let’s say it’s no trouble in my case. There are some people who practise labour law in ways that I will not.”

His job is to make quick deals between management and union, avoiding public battles. “I don’t think there’s anything anti-employee in this.”

After four years of legal studies at Osgoode Hall plus articling, he started in 1975 as a senior solicitor at the Ontario Labour Relations Board in Toronto. A year later he was its director &endash; meaning in charge of the 100-person secretariat responsible for deploying a field staff of [obscured].


1 more photos in this story.