Churchill High School - Victory Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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TRAPPED Maureen Kendall 8-52 Pollution! Oh! It wasn ' t carbon monoxide, either. The flies and mosquitoes were biting me, the bees were stinging my arms and legs. The rotting wood held many insects to add to my discomfort. The little piece where the wood was cut out of the door was my only source of air. The catalogue on the wall, frail with age, was losing its pages, which were now scattered numerously on the floor. I yelled and screamed. I even tried to break down the door. I passed out and came to several hours later. It was dark. Suudenly, I heard a noise which sounded like a rusty lock. Hurriedly, I pushed on the door to find it opened. Someone rushed by and I followed in pursuit. I just had to find out who it was that locked me in the outhouse. A man ' s reach should exceed his grasp. Or what ' s a heaven for? Should we be content with what we ' ve got. Or should we try for more? Is it wise to try to reach To something far away? Some say yes, some say no. Who ' s right? Nobody can say. I think the failures in life aren ' t those who fall In attempts to reach past the sky. But those who give up before they start, Those who never even try. Laurie Webb 10-47 Joan McFadzean 9-37 Beware, beware, the howling police sirens seemd to scream. Men and women panicked. Children cried pitifully. The world was about to shatter into a million inhuman pieces. Invasion was now reality - not just a whispered word. Was there no escape? They could only hope. . . .

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Leslie Brown 11 -5 OF BEARS AND BINS I have been afraid many times in my fifteen years, but one incident sticks in my mind as a terrifying experience that I can never laugh or even smile at. Everyone remembers accidents that they had as a child - a car accident, a fire, a near-drowning - but very few have experienced my fear. When I was three, I fell in the Moose River, parka and all, but the first breath of choking water is only a dim recollection in my mind. The incident I talk of occurred three years ago, when I was living in Churchill, Manitoba. In order to continue I must describe Churchill. Most people know that it is a port of Hudson Bay at the mouth of the Churchill River. It consists of several small are as, within a two or three mile radius. The part that I am concerned with is called Fort Churchill. It consists of the government offices and residences, the Navy PMQ ' s and recreational facilities, and the research worker ' s homes. The town is made up of long, two-storey units, each with about thirty or forty apartments linked by heated corridors. The housing units are contained in one area except for one isolated unit for Department of Transport and R.C.M.P. employees, where I lived. The recreational facilities are concentrated in F area, which also holds the pupils of the vocational school and the single quarters. One significant fact about Churchill which I have failed to mention as yet and which distinguished it from other northern towns is that it happens to be in the middle of the migration route of the great polar bear. The reader must understand that this is through no fault of the animals, since they were there first. Actually, the majority of the bears wait near the town site only until the bay is frozen over and they can continue their journey, but in recent years, they have been more and more attracted by the town dump and the numerous garbage cans on the doorsteps. Each winter the residents are prepared for another onslaught of stragglers and lazy bears. One Wednesday evening in late November, I discovered that the Garrison movie was “The Agony and the Ecstasy”, and decided to go at 7:30. When I set out it had been dark for several hours and the air was a clear forty below. A wide band of green spanned the sky, and the snow reflected the stars. To get to F area I had to leave A area, walk along the road away from the bay and around the arena, past the hospital and turn to the closest entrance. A t that time the bears had been around for a few weeks, each night leaving our block surrounded by footprints and crushed garbage bins. A few months later a bear came into our laundry room because someone had left the door open, and before the police could get him out, he had torn the stairs to splinters and left his mark scratched all over the walls. A bear is nothing to take for granted and all the people in Churchill know it. I made my way safely to the theatre but the one thought in my mind as I walked was, “Where is the best place to run if I bump into something huge and yellowish? I never gave the animals a thought for two hours as I disappeared into Renaissance Rome. I made my way home, giving corners a twenty yard radius and almost but never quite running. As I walked over a rise in the road a form emerged from the right. I knew immediately that it was much too small to be a bear, but the reflexes of my brain were ahead of the logic. As the dog passed me I broke into a run. Oddly enough many people in situations like mine think that nothing would ever happen to them. When people read of accidents they are a separated and indifferent case. People in general find it impossible to identify with victims of accidents, for they are always certain that they are the exception. People who smoke are aware of the danger of cancer, but they, of course, are invulnerable. In Churchill I was faced with reality, and I accepted it for what it was. I know people who had been mauled, and I also knew the Indian couple that had died at the hands of a bear that year. I know many people will think that I mad e a mountain out of a molehill, but I must deny that; I never thought that my fears were stupid or needless, and I still do not think they were. The north, bears included, is a beautiful land, but it is a land where nothing can be taken for granted. My only hope is that civilization will not spoil one of the last stretches of unburdened land and sea and air.

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THE TRIAL OF MARGOT AMES Sharon Miller 10-39 The soft July breeze was a gift from heaven after the torturing heat of the afternoon. Margot found the city especially hot after having lived in the country all her life, right near a lake where whe could go for a cooling dip when it got too warm. She didn ' t know how much longer she would be able to last in the city but she knew she would never to able to return to the town where her very presence made people move when she walked by and talk behind her back. It had happened almost a year ago when she was eighteen and fresh out of high school. Funny, she thought, how she always referred to her father ' s death as ' ' it”, as though it was an animal that she lived in fear of instead of an incident in her past. How the town had talked when the coroner announced that her father had died of arsenic poisoning, and not a heart attack like everybody thought. Margot could still remember, only too clearly, what Mr. Jackson, the coroner, had said. Hugh Ames did not die of a heart attack, he died of arsenic poisoning! The wizened old man never took his eyes off Margot ' s face during his whole testimony and the look of suspicion and accusation which they held made her shiver. Everybody knew that Margot had hated her father with a passion, had accused him of murdering her mother when her newly checked brakes had given out on the highway and she sailed over a cliff. Everybody knew that Margot only stayed with her father because she felt it was her duty and could hardly wait till he died so she could go to the city and write. So of course when the town newspaper got wind of this, it left no stone unturned. It cried out that justice had to be done and even went so far as to imply that, It would have been easy for the person who cooked his meals and looked after the sick old man to slip a bit of arsenic into his food. This was the statement which got Margot arrested and this was the statement which got Margot charged with first degree murder in the death of her father, Hugh Ames. When the date of her trial finally rolled around, the courtroom was packed. She was sure that every man or woman who had ever held a grudge against her was sitting out there, ready to testify that she had a violent temper and obviously hated her father, ready to testify that if pushed she was probably capable of murder. This trial, she thought, will show who my real friends in this town are. Apparently Margot had no real friends in the town, because every testimony was against her. They called the coroner to the stand so he could verify his first statement as the cause of death and also as to the time of death. By the end of the day the District Attorney had called half the townspeople to the stand to testify about Margot ' s fierce temper and other pertaining characteristics. And to each one Margot ' s lawyer asked the same question. Do you like Margot Ames? And each time the answer was a flat, No! After two days of a trial where nothing was proved except everyone ' s intense dislike for Margot, the State rested its case, and so did the defense. And after another hour of debate the jury found Margot Ames not guilty of murder in the first degree because of insufficient evidence. With that the courtroom was cleared with whispered conversations echoing throughout, of She was obviously guilty, and She probably paid the jury off! Within four hours Margot was on a train headed for New York and her new life as a professional writer. Now as she sat on a bench in Central Park, she wondered how she could even think of going back to that town full of phonies after it had embarrassed her and treated her like dirt. She laughed a little as she took a little vial out of her purse and read the label. Arsenic! How she had fooled them all!