Donald Trump (presidential portrait, cropped). Intelligence is one thing. Wisdom is something else entirely. Saddest are those with a plethora of intelligence and a paucity of wisdom—or even common sense. They are doomed to failed, unhappy, and often destructive lives. The greatest and most destructive failures combine intelligence with unwisdom, wealth, and power. We are […]
Category: Personal history
Toronto in great uproar as U.S. seeks fugitive slave
John Anderson, a proclaimed fugitive slave in Toronto who escaped from Missouri to Canada on the Underground Railway, was wanted by the Americans in 1860. English engraving, from “The Story of the Life of John Anderson,” 1863. “It was an anxious moment, as the Chief Justice produced his papers and began to read. The life […]
A walk across the Northwest Passage
It is September 1969 and I am aboard the SS Manhattan as it sits trapped in polar ice while attempting to complete a crossing of the Northwest Passage through McClure Strait, around the northern coast of Banks Island. The Manhattan is stuck in the polar ice grip for 34 hours before she is released […]
Storing the family car for winter is big job in 1920s
Cold and dampness must be excluded so far as possible from the place in which one stores his car during the winter months. They will do great harm to the paint and to the mechanical features of the vehicle when it is left to their mercy for a long period. Therefore, it would be a […]
Shotgun wedding of an 80-year-old man
From the Lindsay, Ontario Post, May 20, 1910. “The story of the courtship and marriage of Mr. Michael Fraser, of Midland, a man of 84 years and worth about $100,000 [almost $2 million in 2017], and Miss Hannah Margaret Robertson, aged 30, daughter of the Rev. William Robertson, formerly a Presbyterian minister, now editor of […]
Angel ushers fluster papa, needle mama
Angelic young ushers are adapt at wheedling extra money from pappa when they pass the offering plate at church, much to the consternation of mamma, notes Kit Coleman in the following item from the Toronto Mail and Empire, January 22, 1898. The latest fad is Angel ushers. One Reverend already has them. They are charming. They glide around with the plate and stare […]
First woman lawyer trumps misogynists
Among the pantheon of leaders who crashed the doors and shattered the glass ceiling that held women back from the professions and business, few have done as much crashing and shattering as Clara Brett Martin (1874-1923) of Toronto. A member of a prominent Anglican-Irish family, Martin was an iconoclast even as a teenager. At […]
Kayoed by blizzard in street brawl
Prairie blizzards were so fierce and blinding that a lifeline was once necessary between the farm house and the outhouse to avoid getting. Things were sometimes not much better in town. Shortly after his arrival at Regina, the new Lieutenant-Governor of the North West Territories, Charles Mackintosh, penned a letter to a friend in […]
Tenacity beats incredible agony on 10-day prairie winter walk
The Battleford Saskatchewan Herald, December 16, 1878, tells the of story of an Indian woman’s incredible tenacity on 10-day journey, caught in an early winter. Because of domestic trouble, Meskacis decided to leave the home of her stepmother near Regina, where she and her husband had lived, and join her sister at Battleford. It was a walk of […]
Light of the Great Lone Land shines at Battleford
It is “the light that is destined to dispel the gloom that has so long enveloped the Great Lone Land,” Patrick Gammie Laurie promises in the first issue of his Saskatchewan Herald, August 25, 1878, at Battleford, a fur-trading post and police station chosen as the capital of the North West Territories because […]