Pickering College - Voyageur Yearbook (Newmarket, Ontario Canada)

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track and we all have great hope in the future of our country and this school because of your shining faces, clean, fresh minds, and short hair - sheared every September by the Headmaster, I am told, without any regard for artistic values. So now that I have given you my finale, I can get on with the speech. I have proved, I hope, that I am not anti-youth, I wouldn't dare. Still I am going to stick up for your ancestors, now that I am beginning to feel more and more like an ancestor myself. Recently The Times of London published a special supplement on Canada which began with a statement of a young Canadian from Alberta where, if you believe the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, people stay young till the age of ninety. She said she had a lot of faith in this country, and that was nice of her. She and Edmonton seemed to be doing very well, but she had a great big chip on her shoulder about everybody who had had anything to do with Canada up until about February, 1967. The only way to make progress, she seemed to sug- gest, was to kick over the traces. This isn't unusual, I shared the same view until about September, 1933, when Istarted confronting thebrute facts of life as Master in charge of the senior corridor. It was during the Depression, and as jobs were scarce, tired parents used to send their sons back to school till they were about 44. At least, I was 22, and that's how old they looked to me. Now I have aged, like a piece of old Ontario cheddar, and I have acquired more interest and affec- tion for the ingredients that went into me. We can't build a strong country unless we understand the nature of its foundations. Surely that is one of the elementary facts of construction. In our case that means going back much more than one hundred years - back to the more glamorous parts before our souls were deadened in the noble but boring struggle for responsible government. Professor Purdy may leave the room. One of the crazy ideas we must get rid of is the illusion that we are a young country. We are young in the sense that we have good teeth and our best years are ahead of us, but there has been a country called Canada for three and a half centuries. It is important right now to get our vision of this country straight by recognizing that we didn't start with Sir John A. Macdonald or even Sir Guy Carleton but with Samuel de Champlain - the man from Orillia. This is not the hundredth birthday of Canada, it's the hundredth birthday of Confederation. Even as a Confederation we are about the same age as Germany and Italy and really ancient compared with most members of the United Nations. And we are older even than Champlain because our political and cultural roots began in Britain and France and the many other countries from which our ances- tors sprang - or were sprung. For too long we have used this excuse of youth to explain away our failures - as the reason why we don't produce great plays, beautiful cities with sidewalks, or beautiful television shows like The Beverley Hillbillies - or win international tournaments. Moscow is, after all, over nine hundred years oldg so how could we expect to stand up to their hockey team with a few nice boys from Winnipeg and little Carl Brewer. As a respectable old lady of 350 - well partly respectable - it is time we got off this youth kick. Tll'L7llfC'

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This is the unique occasion also because it is the only chance any of us will have to hold our 100th and 125th birthdays at once - or even separately. This is also the unique school. For me it still recalls the happiest and perhaps even the most profitable days of my life. When I finally tore myself away, I made sure of a permanent connexion and free meals by picking out the man most. likely to succeed and introducing my sister to him. As Mr. Rogers talked about the history of this, one of the oldest schools of Canada, I know we all felt happy to be part of that distinguished tradition. I 'think we are all aware further- more, much more aware than they are themselves, of what we all owe to the remarkable Rogers family - and I am not just thinking of the fact that Sam Rogers used to sign the first pay-cheques I ever got. There are so many old friends and worthy people here that I shall be in trouble if I start mentioning them. If I miss any of you I shall pick you up at the next centennial. However, I cannot refrain from noting with respect the great Headmaster who brought me here and put up with me. The McCulley impact on Canadian education was a remarkable one. I find myself remembering him today, however, less as the great educator he was and more as the towering figure who had almost as much vitality in his thirties as he has now. When we used to try to play tennis where these floors now rest, we could always hear Joe rendering for us from his bath the entire choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. This year, 1967, is being proclaimed a year to look forward, a time to con- template our second century or, in the case of this College, the last three quarters of our second century. I am all in favour of the forward look, but on this occasion I would like to defy the fashion and direct your attention backwards. Sometimes, like hockey players, we have to turn backwards to see our own goal. Put this down to my extreme old age if you like. I don't pretend to be the voice of youth, I am getting ready for my own personal second century, and I feel like it. I promise, however, to end up on the note you have every right to expect - that young people of today are a very good thing and on the right 4 V .lflrf--,.T 'P I '3 f ' 'TCE' 5 XB'- gg :- '. 1----'T' gqs-:lf-5'-4 Q.. Centennial Dinner Speaker, John W. Holmes, with Eric Ferguson, Edmund Ryncrd, The Headmaster, and Clark Lockley. Eleven

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, -A L 'a 4 W' -4 4 4 John W. Holmes speaks to the school on Canada. I am not arguing that we should wrap up our great figures of the past in Hollywood-style glamour - although I would putSimon Fraser up against Batman any day, or Louis Riel against Fidel Castro. We had plenty of fools and crack- pots, like other countries. It is well, however, at this time to pause and think of the fabulous miracle that we are. There was Father Brebeuf making his way to Midland without a skidoo, and all those other hearty chaps two and even three hundred years ago climbing over mountains or building railways or fighting off bears and Yankees at sixty below - before the invention of nylon or Instant Breakfast. You may think you hear too much just now about the Fathers of Confederation. They look pretty stodgy in that picture with all their shrubbery. But they were very young men by today's political standards - nearly all in their thirties and forties - and they had the crazy faith to believe that a million or so scattered colonists could establish dominion from sea to sea and make a success of it. Next time you are flying to Vancouver or Halifax or Inuvik for the week- end just look down all the way and think of it. Of course, we owe a great debt of gratitude as in so many things to our American neighbours. During the 1860's they were good enough to scare the pants off us at regular intervals and make us Thirteen