by Doug Munro
Canada by a kind of endless chain’: ‘how shall we weld this heterogeneous
mass into one people?’44 The Protestant Church was one answer. A public
school system was another. And attracting as many as 20,000 members
worried about strangers, foreigners and Catholics, the Ku Klux Klan was
yet another in 1920s Saskatchewan.45 But, in the main, political, religious
and civic leaders looked to the churches, the schools and, after the Second
World War, the Canadian Citizenship Act.
‘For years,’ the Morden Times observed, ‘Canadian-born citizens have
suffered the humiliation of being classified according to their hereditary
nationality’, as Ukrainian Canadian, German Canadian and Chinese
Canadian. But soon ‘Canadian citizens will be able to travel the world and
say with pride, “I am a Canadian.”’46 In subsequent editorials, Ray Evans
– the Times’s editor whom Cook remembers as a ‘tolerant’ newspaperman
but ‘shaky’ businessman – lamented Canada’s residual ‘Anglo-Saxon
superiority complex’, adding that the best answer to persistent prejudice
was to banish the hyphen altogether: no longer should we ‘tag ourselves
as French-Canadians, Scotch-Canadians, Polish-Canadians, or other
hyphenated Canadians’.47 John Diefenbaker – then the member
of parliament for Lake Centre, Saskatchewan, later the prime minister
of Canada – agreed when, speaking in favour of the Act, he imagined an
‘unhyphenated nation’ premised on ‘unity out of diversity’.48
43 Roger Gibbins and Sonia Arrison, Western Visions: Perspectives on the West in Canada (Peterborough: Broadview, 1995), 46.
44 J.S. Woodsworth, Strangers Within Our Gates (Toronto: F.C. Stephenson, 1909), 203.
45 See James Pitsula, Keeping Canada British: The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Saskatchewan (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014). See also Jonathan Fine, ‘Anti-Semitism in Manitoba and the 1930s and 40s’,
Manitoba History, 32 (1996), 26–33.
46 ‘Editorial’, Morden Times, 11 December 1946; ‘I Am a Canadian’, Morden Times, 15 January 1947.
47 Ramsay Cook, email to author, 11 May 2015; ‘Pride and Prejudice’, Morden Times, 30 April 1947.
48 Quotation in Richard Sigurdson, ‘John Diefenbaker’s One Canada and the Legacy of
Unhyphenated Canadianism’, in D.C. Story and R. Bruce Shepard, eds, The Diefenbaker Legacy (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1998), 75.
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6 . CECI N’EST PAS RAMSAY CooK
Russell Cook agreed as well, holding a special service at his church to
mark the Act’s coming into effect and, a few weeks later, becoming
a Canadian citizen. He still subscribed to the Methodist Recorder, a British
weekly; he listened to Churchill’s speeches on the radio; and J.R. Green’s
Short History of the English People – a history not of Carlyle’s great men
but of the English people, of men like himself, ‘figures little heeded’ in
conventional ‘drum and trumpet history’ – had a permanent place on the
family bookshelf.49 But after 34 years on the prairies, he had exchanged his
broad accent for a flat accent and become a Canadian, adding that ‘more
should be made of the citizenship ceremony by the public’.50 And because
he saw himself as one more immigrant in a country full of immigrants,
he never brandished his English birth, appeals to race being a political
dead end.
In Raymore and Wynyard, Rev. Cook had opened his churches to any
and all, from the Scottish farmer to the Chinese merchant.51 Where
the Anglican Church – until 1955 the Church of England in Canada –
tended to be ethnically English, the United Church was not, making it
‘as Canadian as the maple leaf and the beaver’.52 And because welcoming
‘newcomers to Canada’ mattered to him, he would do the same thing
in Morden, a town with many first-generation Canadians, or ‘not-yet
Canadians’, to borrow W.O. Mitchell’s phrase.53 In 1948, Morden United
hosted a special Kinsmen banquet honouring that year’s recipient of its
award for ‘meritorious community service’. Mark Ki had come to Canada
46 years earlier, working first in British Columbia, at one point as a cook
at the Sullivan Mine in Kimberley, before opening a small business in
Morden in 1919, a common enough economic strategy for Chinese men
on the prairies. He quickly integrated, joining the Morden Gun Club,
taking up curling, giving his time and money to the Freemason’s Hospital
and in 1939 winning a contest for the best-decorated store window to
celebrate the Royal Tour. When he received his citizenship award, the
49 J.R. Green, A Short History of the English People (London: Macmillan, 1888), xvii–xviii.
50 ‘Citizenship Court’, Morden Times, 15 October 1947.
51 Ramsay Cook recalls that the Chinese restaurant owner in Wynyard joined his father’s church.
Ramsay Cook, email to author, 20 May 2015.
52 John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 519, doi.org/10.3138/9781442683044.
53 ‘About the Town’, Morden Times, 1 June 1949; Mitchell, Who, 131.
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CLIo'S LIvES
Times praised his ‘quiet, unostentatious doing of good deeds’ and when,
a few months later, he received his actual citizenship, it described the
event as ‘historic’.54
Morden was not perfect. The 1947 ice carnival included ‘squaws’, ‘braves’,
a ‘chief’, and a beautiful ‘Indian maiden’; two years later, the carnival
included a couple of boys in blackface on skates providing yet ‘more
laughs’ to the 1,200 spectators; and the Times referred to the Japanese
as Japs.55 But Canada was not perfect either. The imagined Indian as
a romantic figure doomed to disappear was everywhere; ‘elements of
blackface continued to appear until the early 1950s’ in Canadian amateur
music and theatre; and the Globe and Mail also referred to the Japanese
as Japs.56 Moreover, and to its credit, the Times described Canada’s two
languages as ‘enriching’, adding that the problem is not the French
language, it is the ‘holier-than-thou attitude adopted by many otherwise
intelligent Canadians’.57 A couple of years later, it ran a guest editorial
marking the anniversary of Booker T. Washington’s death that called Jim
Crow a contradiction and an embarrassment to American leadership in
the Cold War.58 On balance, Morden was a decent town and as good
a place as any to attend high school.
Ramsay Cook was now 15 years old, almost 16, and coming into his own
physically, flexing his muscles, and discovering a passion for competition
and testing himself through sports. School was easy. But sports demanded
more from him. In Brandon he had joined the YMCA, learned to dive,
and in 1946 won the provincial diving championship and the western
Manitoba swimming championship. In Morden, he played hockey in the
winter and baseball in the summer. But he also curled, ran the 100-yard
dash and, when he was older, hung out at the local pool hall playing
snooker and smoking what he and his friends called two-centers, a single
cigarette sold for two cents by a Chinese shopkeeper.
54 ‘Mark Ki Receives Citizenship Award
’, Morden Times, 12 May 1948; ‘Mark Ki Becomes Canadian Citizen at Local Court Sitting’, Morden Times, 15 September 1948. See also Allison Marshall, Cultivating Connections: The Making of Chinese Prairie Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014), 81–93. Mark Ki sold his business in 1948 and moved to Winnipeg, where he died in 1957. He lived a happier life than the Chinese restaurant owner in Who Has Seen the Wind, who commits suicide.
55 ‘Local Skaters’, Morden Times, 12 March 1947; ‘Ice Show of ’49’, Morden Times, 16 March 1949.
Ramsay Cook participated in the 1949 ice carnival as one of the male skaters, but not in blackface.
56 Elaine Keillor, Music in Canada: Capturing Landscape and Diversity (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 163.
57 ‘Canadian Unity’, Morden Times, 12 November 1947.
58 ‘Booker T. Washington’, Morden Times, 30 November 1949.
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6 . CECI N’EST PAS RAMSAY CooK
Because the Times covered local sports almost religiously – a strike was
not thrown and a goal was not scored without the Times reporting it –
Cook became something of a local celebrity. After one baseball game,
the Times described how ‘Speedy Ramsay’ had crossed the plate; after
a hockey game, it reported that he had picked up an assist when ‘he
carried the puck to the blue line’ and ‘dropped a pass’ to neatly set up an
insurance goal; after another hockey game, it singled out his hat-trick in
a ‘shellacking’ of Winkler, Morden’s great rival; and after a 16-rink high
school bonspiel in Carman, readers learned that he and his teammates
had brought home the ‘curling laurels’.59 It is not clear when, because
the articles were not signed, but Cook started working at the Times as
a cub reporter on the sports beat as early as December 1948. Actually,
one story was signed ‘GRC’, or George Ramsay Cook, almost certainly
making it his first publication: do not worry, he told his readers, ‘the boys
will be curling their best to keep the Sifton Trophy in Morden’.60 For the
next couple of years, the sports page was sprinkled with words like ‘razzle
dazzle’, ‘thrills and spills’, ‘pucksters’, and ‘batsters’.
The Times’s coverage missed one element, though: intensely competitive,
Cook often got into fights, a fact that did not go into his reporting. As one
of the smallest boys, he used his size and speed to his advantage. If that did
not work, he would drop the gloves, letting everyone know that he could
not be pushed around. Of course, his parents were not amused, objecting
‘strenuously’.61 It was the same in baseball, although his best friend, Paul
Sigurdson, managed to restrain him. Cook’s hero was Ted Williams,
a player known for his bat and his temper. But he most resembled his
other Boston hero, Dom DiMaggio, aka ‘The Little Professor’, because,
like Cook, he was short and wore glasses.
By his own admission, Cook was a ‘desultory’ student.62 Because the
curriculum was easy and grades came effortlessly, he ‘never worked’
because he did not have to.63 Still, he won awards and prizes, receiving
two Kinsmen scholarships in grade 10, one for the highest overall average
59 ‘Junior Ball Clubs Split Games on Labour Day’, Morden Times, 8 September 1948; ‘Morden Scholars Capture High School League Title’, Morden Times, 30 March 1949; ‘Hockey’, Morden Times, 12 January 1949; ‘Local High School Curlers Add More Conquests’, Morden Times, 25 February 1948.
60 GRC, ‘School Rinks Will Defend Sifton Cup’, Morden Times, 22 December 1948.
61 Ramsay Cook, email to author, 11 May 2015.
62 Ramsay Cook, ‘Who Broadened Canadian History?’ H. Sanford Riley Lecture, University
of Winnipeg, 19 October 2009. Copy in possession of author.
63 Author’s interview with Ramsay Cook, 14 July 2014.
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CLIo'S LIvES
and the other for English and history.64 Grades 11 and 12 were more of
the same. He did little to no work, got good grades, but had no idea what
he wanted to do, except maybe to work in Winnipeg at Baldy Northcott
Sporting Goods. The ministry was never on the table and his parents never
expected that of him. His brother, yes – in fact, the Raymore congregation
had recommended him for the ministry. But with graduation approaching
in the spring of 1950, and with his father pushing him to make a plan,
Cook agreed to meet one of the lawyers in town, a friend of his father’s,
thinking maybe that would not be such a bad thing to be.
History did not interest him, especially after he had been condemned to
read George Brown’s mind-numbing but widely used textbook, Building
the Canadian Nation – a title, Cook says, that pretty much ‘described its
contents’.65 Relentlessly teleological, it was a standard account of discovery,
exploration, settlement, colonial growth and nationhood. Canada from
sea to sea was not ‘forecast’, Brown wrote, it was ‘prophesied’, making
the prairies – once the ‘Indians gave up their old way of life’ – first
colonies and later provinces, but never a focus, Manitoba appearing twice
in the index, Saskatchewan and Alberta once.66 To a kid at Maple Leaf
Collegiate in Morden, Manitoba, especially a bright kid, history written
from downtown Toronto could not ‘but deceive and deceive cruelly’.67
The spring of 1950 brought more than the end of high school when
the Red River flooded, forcing the evacuation of some 70,000 people
up and down the Red River valley, including 550 people from the small
Franco-Manitoban village of St Jean who were taken to Morden where
service organisations, churches and women’s auxiliaries set up emergency
shelters, arranged billets, gathered used clothing, collected old toys and
made hundreds of sandwiches. As a member of a quickly convened
Red Cross committee, Rev. Cook opened Morden United as a clearing
station and dining room for the ‘long cavalcade of trucks and cars’ and
people leaving St Jean.68 Later he would be singled out by one of the
many evacuees who, although ‘foreign of language and faith’, believed
64 ‘Graduation’, Morden Times, 12 May 1948.
65 Cook, ‘Who Broadened Canadian History?’
66 George W. Brown, Building the Canadian Nation (Toronto: Dent, 1942), 177, 336.
67 W.L. Morton, ‘Clio in Canada: The Interpretation of Canadian History’ (1946), reprinted in Carl Berger, ed., Approaches to Canadian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 47.
‘Teaching inspired by the historical experience of metropolitan Canada’, Morton argued, ‘cannot but deceive, and deceive cruelly, children of the outlying sections.’
68 ‘Shelter 550 Evacuees Here’, Morden Times, 17 May 1950.
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that she had found ‘unity and true socialism’ in Morden.69 The arrival
of so many francophones – ‘especially those of the opposite sex’ – filled
a young Ramsay Cook ‘with both curiosity and a sense of adventure’:
‘there was something exotic about them’. Looking back, Cook now sees
the flood as part of his discovery of French Canada. He had played hockey
and baseball against teams from Letellier and St Norbert, which were
‘positive, if sometimes bruising, meetings’. But the 1950 floo
d was ‘more
dramatic and personal’. Of course, there was no mention of bilingualism,
biculturalism, founding nations or asymmetric federalism – unless, he
jokes, those ‘heated discussions’ took place ‘at the local beer parlour’ – but
there was enough innocent flirting to satisfy an 18-year-old boy.70
On 27 May 1950, Cook graduated from high school in front of nearly
800 people packed into the Legion auditorium. In a ‘well-delivered’
valedictory address that ‘held the attention of the audience’, he told his
peers to ‘aim high’, reminding them that ‘a successful person is one who
had done his best’. Despite his lousy study habits, he won the Governor
General’s Medal for his ‘exceptional’ marks, athletic accomplishments and
popularity.71 He also won the languages prize, even if French was ‘poorly
taught’ at Maple Leaf Collegiate.72
That fall Cook left Morden to attend university and, although he did not
know it then, he would never live in a small prairie town again. But he
never resented where he had come from, or felt that he had been deprived
because Raymore did not have an art gallery, or because Wynyard did not
have a museum, or because Morden did not have a library. The prairies
had something else: they had, he says looking back on his childhood, ‘a lot
of freedom’.73 As long as he was home in time for supper, he was allowed
to go to the edge of town, explore the fields, walk the stream beds and
run beyond the next rise. In this, his childhood was like something out of
Who Has Seen the Wind and its promise of wide open spaces to young boys
whose hair was ‘as bleached as the dead prairie grass itself’.74 And it was
like something out of Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow, a memoir of growing
69 ‘St. Jean Evacuees Return to Flood Ruined Homes’, Morden Times, 14 June 1950.
70 Ramsay Cook, ‘Introduction’, in Ramsay Cook, Watching Quebec: Selected Essays (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), viii–ix. The sentence, ‘there was something exotic about them’, comes from author’s interview with Ramsay Cook, 14 July 2014.
71 ‘G.A. Fitton, Brandon, Speaks to Grads Friday’, Morden Times, 31 May 1950.
72 Cook, ‘Introduction’, Watching Quebec, ix.
73 Author’s interview with Ramsay Cook, 14 July 2014.