Lynn (Kingdon) Barnes has posted a message at a post entitled: Ian Roach shares two great photos of his 1959-60 Grade 7 class at Cartierville School
Back Row: Stephen Phillips, George Glasser, Bob White, Graham Webb, Henry Godin, Rickey Kake, Wolfgang Jehle, Douglas Arsenault, Brinley Owen, Donald Speller, Tommy Baxter, Ian Roach, Stewart Smith. Middle Row: Leslie Giles, Ruth MacLeod, Brenda Farnsworth, Lynn Kingdon, Arje Uotila, Judy Wood, Betty Shaw, Linda Kerr, Lena Lawrence, Linda Sanders, Rosalind Morris, Teacher Mrs. Mary Jackson. Front Row: Arlene Milburn, Suzette Milburn, Simone Lowe, Karen Boyle, Sheila Brodie, Ingrid Karbin, Karin Karbin, Marilyn Chapman, Susan L’Africain, Louisa Mathias, Lesley Wade. [Missing from photo: Ian Strachan] Source: Ian Roach
1960 Grade 7 Graduation Party Picture. Source: Ian Roach
Lynn (Kingdon) Barnes has posted a message at an earlier blog post, entitled:
Ian Roach shares two great photos of his 1959-60 Grade 7 class at Cartierville School
The photos on the right are from the latter post.
Lynn’s massage, which I’ve posted as a separate post – the one you are now reading – as a means of bringing attention to it, reads:
Oh my, so many memories! So happy I came across this post. I moved away from Montreal in 1978 to Calgary and in 1980 I moved to Vancouver. I am married, have 2 children and am still working at an accounting firm downtown. I love to keep busy. My brother , Ron Kingdon is out here too and will retire at the end of this year. It is raining very hard here in Vancouver and I couldn’t sleep so I decided to search the web. So glad I did. I am on Facebook under Lynn Barnes and would love to connect with some of these school mates. Hope you are well and enjoying life!
Lynn
[End of text]
My own comment reads:
Hi Lynn, what a treat it is to read your message!
I met your cousin Colleen (Kingdon) Weaver at the reunion. It was a delight to meet het and her husband, Steve Weaver.
I thought at first it was your sister, but Lynn (Hennebury) Legge has set me straight, for which I owe many thanks.
I love the story of how the rain in Vancouver brought you to this blog post!
Best,
[End of comment]
In the next while I will figure out (my apologies for being slow about such things) what the names are (I don’t like to guess at any names; I will check my varied lists to get the correct spellings of names), of the participants in this photo from the Business Card Game organized by Lynn (Hennebury) Legge at the opening of the MCHS 2015 Sixties Reunion, which took place on Oct. 17, 2015 at Old Mill Toronto. Walter Psotka photo
Further comment
It’s now been almost a month since the Oct. 17, 2015 MCHS ’60s Reunion. I’m just now starting to get back to work, on tasks that still remain to be completed, in connection with the reunion.
But first I’ve taken some time off to catch my breath, from two years of at times quite intensive work, on the planning of the reunion along with the rest of the organizing team. Plus, I’ve been catching up on a few projects that I have put on the wayside while I worked on the reunion.
I’m now getting back to work – back to work as a volunteer. I’ll catch up in the next while with posting more and more photos and comments from the reunion.
Nov. 18, 2015 meeting of MCHS 2015 Event Committee
On Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015, the MCHS 2015 Event Committee will meet at a Boston Pizza in Kitchener, at which time we will share reflections concerning the reunion, and the reunion planning process, and will get an update on where we stand, now that the figures are in, with regard to the budget. I have the sense that the budget ended up in pretty good shape.
Left to right: Klaas Vander Baaren (MCHS 1964), Soryl (Shulman) Rosenberg, who was a Phys Ed teacher at MCHS in the 1960s, and who is just a few years older than the students she was teaching in the early 1960s, and Bob Carswell (MCHS 1963), with whom I have coffee once a month, as he lives nor far from me, in South Etobicoke in Toronto. Walter Psotka photo
We will know the final financial figures when we meet in Kitchener on Nov. 18. As always, any MCHS grad who would like to join us for the meeting is most welcome to attend.
At an earlier point, we were concerned that we might be facing a deficit. Fortunately, we were able to make a change from Brule Room C to the Humber Room, at Old Mill Toronto, at close to the last minute, and that meant that we had to spend less money on the meeting room that would otherwise have been the case.
We owe special thanks to Lynn (Hennebury) Legge for suggesting to me that I speak with the Sales Executive, at Old Mill Toronto, who was our initial contact at the hotel. I contacted the Sales Executive, and she said at once that the solution, in the circumstances, was to change the room where we were planning to hold the reunion. That worked out beautifully.
It was a great reunion, from all indications. I will post more photos and reports in the next while. In the meantime, I’m getting ready for another of the projects that I’m involved with – in this case simply as a blogger, providing updates on the news in a community immediately to west of where I live in Toronto, at the Mississauga-Toronto border:
Public Meeting – Nov. 16, 2015 – Lakeview Waterfront Connection
Another project involves helping out in a small way with the founding of the Long Branch Neighbourhood Association:
Click on the photos to enlarge them; click again to enlarge them further
I want to thank the committee for inviting me to the reunion. I had a great time and even came back for the brunch on Sunday. I also want to thank the committee for planning their next committee meeting on my 71st birthday though I do not think it happened on purpose.
As I look at this graduation photo from Grade 7 of Cartierville School I came to realize how my learning disabilities which seem to show up more in high school than public school affected my schooling. I would say that the names and faces in this picture were 95% familiar to me and it has only been the past few years that I realized that all my learning is visual. Thank heavens for 20/20 vision.
Airplane fumes
My parents both wore thick lens which I attribute to their being around a lot of airplane fumes during their military service during WWII. In this photo are people I grew up with, dated and knew from Saraguay and other groups like scouts and church. I never saw myself as three years older than them when I attended Malcolm Campbell High School.
Life did not go the way I had hoped it would but in time I found my way and learned all my strengths and weaknesses. I do not know how much longer I will be around as my health is deteriorating and there are no promises. At the same time I look at the list of those who have died along the way and wonder “how come them and not me?”
We are approaching the end of our lives and we are full of stories. I keep thinking about things I need to record and publish. There are already a dozen ebooks out in the Internet that I wrote over the years and there are others I am working on. Unfortunately, there are also mistakes in them because of my dyslexia and only a few have been edited by others. That is life and sort of tells the reader who I am.
Arthur LismerToronto High Park Ski Club
It frustrates me every winter because my closest friend here who lives a few blocks away is a ski instructor in the same Toronto High Park Ski Club that I was president of for two years. I got my grandmother’s bad kidney problems, my mother’s arthritis and diabetes and my learning disablities that seem to have come down through the same grandmother as far as I can tell.
My English grandmother died of TB in 1926 at the age of 30 so I never got a chance to meet her. My English grandfather fought in WWI and came home to his previous job on the London Stock Exchange which he began as a young lad. Throughout WWII he made daily trips to the stock exchange in London and I suspect it eventually killed him after it all ended unless it was the British diet of meat and potatoes. He only lived to be 54 dying in 1949 after two strokes.
At least he had 20 reasonably good years between the wars. My large size is a family frame that only certain members of the family get and the body seems to turn everything I consume to bone, muscle and fat. Even running 10K races at 220 pounds when I was about 40 seemed normal for me.
These days I barely get enough exercise to keep my weight under 350 pounds which it has reached at times. I tried on my uncle’s old car coat the other day and realized that he too had this frame as did his cousin who also ended up with canes and a wheelchair late in life. I also seem to be going bald and there is more and more hair in the brush and on my shoulders these days. I guess I got someone’s hair “fallout” genes. At least it is gradual.
Life is a journey which for some of us does not go as hoped. Nevertheless, the rent is paid each month, there is food everywhere in my apartment and Wheel Trans comes to my door when I need to get anywhere. I have a 2-year old computer on my desk, a heavy duty BENQ screen that is 16 years old and a more modern HP 20-inch HD second screen that is less than a year old that I got in a Tiger store for $80 just as they were closing down for good.
Montreal Y2K Reunion
Great deal and I love it as I can have them both running at the same time for different things and move images from one screen to another as in want to. The new screen is good enough to allow me to take photos with my phone camera from Googled sites of places in England once owned by my ancestors and make you think from the photos that I was there when I took them. Talk about high definition…it certainly is that.
For all of you who I met at the first reunion in Montreal in 2000 and those who I also met at the second reunion in Toronto, I am glad that I was able to use my selling skills, knowledge from running a number of large conventions and brain to give someone the idea of planning a school reunion rather than just a class reunion It attracted a larger group of 1,200 to the Montreal reunion.
The word went around the world. I always said that how the reunion started in Montreal of which this recent gathering at the Old Mill in Toronto was a followup, needed younger hands than mine to make it work. I was already getting sick back in 1996 so I could not of have been much more help than coming up with the initial idea of a reunion in 2000. The two committees did did all the work knowing what it takes to cover all the things that needed to be done.
Not all of the 2015 committee members were present at the second gathering but they gave of their time along the way thanks to modern technology and that too is greatly appreciated by those of us who attended. I would like to attend the November 18th meeting but unfortunately, I have to go to the hospital to have my toe nails done. I haven’t been able to reach them for decades with my developing arthritis and besides, the guy who does them is a fellow named Elliot To(e)….how can I lose with a name like that.
Birthdays
Maybe next time the committee can celebrate my birthday when we have a reunion say in 10 years if I am still around or maybe we can meet in the dialysis unit on Islington Avenue in Toronto if I live long enough and you can buy me a coffee afterwards. Bye for now….keep the chin up as someone said to Ronda Rousey who lost her first fight in her career….sometimes other things happen when you least expect them.
It was great to meet with you for coffee at the Birds and Beans Cafe on Friday, Nov. 13, Bob.
We talked about many things. Your description of a time when, I guess around the late 1950s, you and your older brother, and me and my older brother, were walking somewhere along some inclined stretch of land covered in gravel, near Lavigne Street in Cartierville, is among the things that have stayed in mind for me, from our recent conversation at the coffee shop.
Some people have really good recollection of things that happened in the past. In contrast, I remember not too many things at all. But if someone describes something that happened long ago, as in the case of the walk that you’ve described, hearing the description is for me like watching a movie. The image comes to life at once.
So, I want to thank you, Bob. You’ve brought back an event, that I would have long ago forgotten, a walk near Lavigne Street, in the 1950s.