Before the canoe, there was the cutter. And even before that, St. John’s had a full-on ship, the St. Peter. But before it all, there was the printing press. Ted Byfield knew the power of print and propaganda. This is a very well-written piece.
It posits that cutter trips, snowshoe runs, and canoeing by St. John’s proves Kruschev wrong that the West is soft. (I guess we were the exact antidote for all those youth Spetsnaz kids running around the Moscow suburbs.)
The one thing about canoeing long distances, paddling for hours at a time, your mind goes numbingly, slowly, and surely insane. You think about anything and everything. Food used to be my favourite. What will I gorge on once we get back to the school? I’ll have three burgers because if I have four, I’ll blow chow. And through it all, you are in cadence with at least 6 others, with every stroke. If your stroke is uneven, the canoe slows. A steady and powerful stroke is everything in canoeing, the ability to maneuver around a rock might be determined by your momentum, and your ability to change directions.
The April ’61 article so enthused my parents that they sent me there in Sept of 1962. And yes, we were being trained to fight the godless Communists.
To put the establishment of St. John’s in its historical contexrt, bear in mind that the US were building the first Minuteman missile silos in South Dakota 200 miles south of Winnipeg and Kruschev was saying the USSR would “bury the West”. The Berlin Crisis was just over and the Cuban Missile Crisis was on its way. WWII was a recent memory and the first think you asked when you met a new boy was “What did your Dad do in the war?”
Any boy with any sense knew that another world war was just around the corner!
Hi.. I went to St Johns in Sept of 1962. What grade were you in. I was in 10 with Weins, Holden and Jackson.
Terry Ellwood
Terry. You are a true OG. I was in the infamous NewBoys documentary in 1973 and graduated in 1975 from Selkirk. Mike Martyn sent me the scans and I cleaned it up and posted it on my unofficial St. John’s page that I’ve had up for a while.
I attended much later, started in September 73. Jackson was my English teacher by then. Mike Martyn originally sent me this to post.