Class of ’68: Twenty years later

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As you could imagine, tracking down classmates so many years later proved to be one of the biggest challenges researching this book. Two classmates, Dan Raymes and Craig Stephens, were particularly hard to locate. It was only by remembering their old Winnipeg addresses that I was able to begin the search.

In the case of Stephens, I was able to locate his neighbors, the McKelveys, who by then were living in a nursing home on the same street in Charleswood. Mrs. McKelvey said his parents were in Montreal and she was pretty sure his brother Keith worked for Air Canada in Edmonton. Sure enough, Keith was in Edmonton and that led me to Craig in Vancouver.

Raymes’ whereabouts proved to be a tougher nut to crack. His name had appeared in a recent edition of Henderson’s Directory but no one by that name lived in the apartment indicated. I was unable to locate any of his sisters or his brother, and phone calls to the old family home in Wildwood proved to be unproductive.

So then I began going after the Shermans, long­time friends of the family who no longer lived in Winnipeg but still had a cottage at Falcon Lake. It wasn’t until the following summer I was able to reach the Shermans who then put me in touch with Dan’s parents in Outlook, Saskatchewan. I soon reached Dan at a hotel in Winnipeg where he was working as the assistant manager.

For the rest of my classmates, I was able to obtain current addresses from the school or at least a lead as to which city to start looking.

One of the delights of the interviews was being reminded of incidents that I had long since forgotten. A number of chapters were based on these memories. How my classmates evaluated the experience and what impact it had on their life produced fewer surprises.

The one question I enjoyed asking most was “What was your favorite memory?”

There were always several, of course, and more often than not they involved some aspect of the school’s outdoor program. I also asked about any lingering bitterness and what influence the school may have had on their choice of career or their religious and political views.

Terry Baptiste

Terry Baptiste spent four years at the school, leaving after Grade 11. He completed Grade 12 then spent four years at university in business. During his last year, he married a fellow student, however, they separated after a short time.

In 1977, he remarried. He and his wife Sharon have since had three boys. About the same time, he went to work for his cousin who owned Bud’s Office Repair in Calgary. He has since become the sole owner of the company.

If there’s one incident he remembers more clearly than any other it was the night he and three others got caught joyriding with the school Chevy II. He was 16 and no longer a juvenile while the others were a year younger. As a result, he spent the night in a separate cell. Without the camaraderie of the others, he felt lonely, even scared. The one question he remembers being asked was why he was wearing his black school sweater inside out. The reason was it concealed the yellow school crest making it less identifiable.

As serious as the offense was, no one was permanently expelled. Baptiste recalls that the prevailing view was they should be given a chance to learn from the experience and be allowed to finish their time at the school on their own terms. He has appreciated that pardon ever since.

What he has not ever fully understood, however, was the treatment he received from Ted Byfield in the French program. French was his worst subject. Because he was failing so badly in Grade 10 Mr. Byfield put him into Grade 9 French after Christmas. Unhappy about the demotion he recalls working his butt off that term and ended up scoring what he thought should have been an 83 on the Easter exam. To his disgust, he was given a 49.

When he questioned Mr. Byfield about the lower mark he was told 34 marks had been deducted because he was in Grade 10 writing a Grade 9 exam. When he pointed to something that was correct which had been marked incorrect in hopes of at least salvaging a pass, Mr. Byfield simply deducted 35 points from the total and his mark remained a 49. He was so angry at the unfairness of it he never again put any effort into French. He realizes of course he was only hurting himself because he now knows almost no French.

One thing he says he did learn was that there’s nothing you can’t do if you put your mind to it. His business would have gone bankrupt during the recession of the early 1980s if he hadn’t believed in himself. He also discovered the power of prayer and how much more can be accomplished through faith.

“I found that once I turned the business over to the Lord it started to straighten itself out,” Terry recalled. He said it was then he began to appreciate how important faith had been in overcoming the challenges of operating the school on a shoestring.

Mike Byfield

As the son of school founder, Ted Byfield, Mike Byfield was of course involved in St. John’s from day one. He took part in the school’s first rowing trip in 1957 when he was just seven years old. He was a student during the part-time school and then attended Grades 7 to 12 when the school became full-time. (He took a year out before completing his last year.)

After St. John’s his life took him down a number of different paths including a year at technical school, a year writing for Alberta Report, and two years as a technician in the US Navy thanks to his grandmother’s dual citizenship.

By 1984 he had decided reporting was what he liked doing best and went to work for the Calgary Sun. That same year he married his wife Alma, a Mexican girl he had met during an extended stay in her country. They settled in Calgary. Three years later Byfield switched to Alberta Report as its Calgary-based reporter.

One of his strongest memories is the utter misery of the last ten days of the 1964 Hayes River canoe trip. It was in September and it never seemed to stop raining. He recalls saying to himself on one of the worst days:

“You are nearly dead and don’t try and change the memory of it later.”

Despite his determination to remember the horror exactly as it was – always wet, always cold, usually hungry – he admitted that the experience did him no permanent harm. He credits the school’s canoeing and snowshoe program for giving him a lifelong love for the outdoors. Moments like the moody grayness of Lake Winnipeg are forever frozen in his memory.

He also credits the school for giving him the inner strength to survive that period when drugs had taken control of his life and he ended up in a psychiatric ward. He left the school an agnostic but has since had several experiences convincing of the reality of God.

If there’s one area he would be critical of it’s the way the school seemed to “glorify” amateurism – an attitude of often choosing to do things because doubters said it couldn’t be done. He suspects it was this attitude that contributed to the Lake Timiskaming tragedy when 12 boys and an old boy serving as a leader drowned. He recalled that when he was a student, not enough attention was paid to training, particularly what to do in the event of an emergency.

When it comes to the school’s approach to discipline, he is fully supportive. In particular, he believes the school should never abolish spanking. He said St. John’s is somewhere he would seriously consider sending a son for a couple of years, if only because of the outdoor program.

Don Booth

Don Booth was only at the school for two years – Grades 8 and 9 – but he has never forgotten an incident that was clearly designed to illustrate the pet theme of “Finishing the Job.”

He was among a group of boys who set off one spring Saturday afternoon in three school canoes for a little fun hunting carp in Netley Marsh. During the return trip the wind came up and they were forced to beach the canoes five miles from the school.

They decided to return the following day for the canoes and set off on foot for the school. When they arrived back just before dark Mr. Wiens immediately sent them back to fetch the canoes. One by one they carried them back along the road, finally finishing sometime in the middle of the night.

He credits that and other experiences for helping him get through four years of undergraduate work in agriculture and a very demanding Masters of Business Administration degree he took in New Zealand. He now works as an agrologist in Winnipeg. He and his wife Kristen have two children.

Doug Christie

Doug Christie was only at the school one year – Grade 10 – but he has vivid memories of his experiences. His memory is helped by the fact that he based a Grade 12 psychology essay and a University of Manitoba environmental studies project on those experiences. It has always bothered him that before he (and his university classmates) were permitted to interview students for the project they first had to do a snowshoe run. It was as if they had to prove themselves worthy.

Curiously, he feels that he was cheated of the full St. John’s experience. For most of the year, for example, during duty period he worked as Father Sargeant’s secretary, doing bookkeeping rather drying dishes, mopping floors, or shoveling manure.

In the classroom he had no difficulty since he was an A student but on the one occasion he bombed a test he was still given a passing grade. Then, when it came time for awards at Open House, he was passed over despite having what were probably the top marks in the school. His experience was riddled with contradictions he has never understood.

Nonetheless the wacky, often disorganized, ways of the school have left him with memories that always bring a smile to his face: the master who quoted Shakespeare’s “Speak again, 0 toothless one,” in response to a student’s rather loud passing of gas; driving into Selkirk for paint in the middle of a photo session when it was realized the wooden cross backdrop needed painting; the second-floor toilets forever overflowing and dripping down into the dining room.

The school’s religious teaching made a big impact and he decided to be confirmed as an Anglican while there. He was also greatly affected by the outdoor program, particularly the 50-mile snowshoe race. It left him with the confidence to face life’s challenges, whether physical or mental, head on. During our meeting he reminded me of the words I had written on the back of his class photo: “To a fine quitter.” It was my idea of a back-handed compliment but there are times when he wonders if he didn’t miss out by only staying one year. He became a lawyer and lives in Winnipeg with his wife Pat and daughter Celeste.

Ron Churchill

Ron Churchill spent three years at St. John’s, though curiously they were not consecutive years. He started in Grade 7, stayed for two years then, because his parents separated, went to public school in Vancouver for a year before returning to the school for Grade 10. He completed his high school in Winnipeg, obtained a BA at the University of Manitoba, and then qualified as a chartered accountant in Alberta. He and his wife Terri moved to Vancouver in the early 1980s where Ron became one of the principals in the investment company Colony Pacific Explorations. They have two children.

Despite receiving an angry spanking from Mr. Byfield at one point, the Slave River canoe trip remains a favorite memory. He was a crew member in the boat I was steering. He remembers being one of the first over the 13-mile Methye Portage, thankful to be carrying a food box, not a canoe. He vividly recalls visiting the construction site of the first tar sands plant at Fort McMurray – the huge trucks, the barren landscape. Along the way, he remembers his curiosity being piqued by the numerous reminders of Canada’s early history, old fur trade cabins, Indian settlements, and missionary posts.

He says he’ll never forget the night on Great Slave Lake when the lake was so rough the canoes were practically surfing as they rounded a rocky point and landed on a tiny stretch of sand. The danger seemed extreme yet there had been no panic. The many years experience of the crews was on display in such moments.

If he has any regrets it’s that he put too much energy into trying to beat the system. He feels he didn’t get as much out of the school as he could have. He invariably refused to accept anything he considered an injustice and that of course got him into trouble.

On the Slave River, he became embroiled in a heated exchange with Mr. Byfield after our boat was accused of goofing off, causing us to lag behind badly. We felt it was because earlier that day Mr. Byfield had unfairly reduced our crew’s strength by exchanging strong paddlers for weaker ones. But only Churchill was bold enough to say so.

Mr. Byfield erupted in anger, calling Churchill a “big jackass.” He then ordered our boat ashore and spanked him with a piece of willow. In Grade 7, Churchill had done much the same thing following a stretcher test. He simply refused to take more swats than he felt deserved.

David Cooper

David Cooper holds the distinction of being the first member of our class to get married. And while it was a complicated courtship, he has the school to thank for introducing him to his first wife Jill, daughter of Jean and Frank Doolan. Frank was a master for three years. Cooper married in 1970, just two years after Grade 12. David and Jill had two children together.

Considering the roadblocks thrown up during courtship it’s surprising they ended up getting married. It still angers David that his parents Wayne Cooper and Alice Miller sided with the school in the campaign to keep them apart, even during the holidays.

At the time, his parents were also members of the school staff. Officially there was to be no fraternization but of course there was. As a result they were under a constant cloud of suspicion. Pressure on them was so great that after Grade 12 David agreed to Frank Doolan’s request to go away for a year. The following year he returned and they were married.

Because of his lingering resentment, David’s decision to work at the Alberta school in 1973 in the printing plant was probably a mistake. The pressure to conform was so great he felt like he was still a student. He discovered there was no room for a private life and after a year he and Jill left, David more bitter than ever.

One of his favorite memories is the money lending business he and Baptiste operated one year. They kept careful records of each loan, charged as much as 20 percent interest, and developed risk profiles on a great many fellow students.

As their money reserves accumulated they branched out into selling contraband, particularly cigarettes. They developed a string of runners for both purchasing supplies and delivering goods. Occasionally, when it came time to collect, they had to resort to intimidation. Eventually, the staff got wind of the operation and they were told to desist. Everyone was certain they were destined for careers as bankers.

David actually ended up working as a prison guard for many years before deciding to attend university in 1984 as a mature student. He has since completed a Bachelor of Arts in psychology.

Michael Davies

While Michael Davies had been a student for a year and a half during the part-time school it was his parents’ decision to join the staff in the summer of 1964 that brought him back for Grade 9. His family left the school the following summer but Davies stayed on until the end of Grade 12.

He obtained a BA from the University of Manitoba in 1975 and then went to work for the Manitoba government’s social services department in the remote Indian community of Cranberry Portage teaching life skills.

During our interview, he credited the school’s crew system for helping him develop a program that taught the kids to be motivated and to take on responsibilities. He discovered that the problems he faced in social work were similar to those faced by the founders of the school.

His approach proved to be very successful. Promotions within the department came quickly and by 1984 he was the youngest Social Services Coordinator in the province. He and his wife Linda and their two children were then living in Beausejour. Despite being in a profession normally associated with left-leaning politics he says he thinks conservative and votes Liberal.

One of his worst spankings taught him a lesson about honesty that he has never forgotten. He and another student got caught skipping evening Compline. They had been out having a smoke. One at a time they were called into Mr. Wiens’ office. When the other boy was asked whether he had been smoking he said “No” and was given seven swats.

Davies’ conscience got the better of him and he decided to fess up. “You’ve got yourself in double jeopardy then,” observed Mr. Wiens. But still he only gave him 10 swats, seven fewer than perhaps was due. Davies always figured it was Mr. Wiens’ way of rewarding him for honesty.

Richard de Candole

I don’t think there’s any doubt I became a newspaper reporter because of the school. My first real job was organizing subscription sales for St. John’s Edmonton Report, a weekly news magazine then in its second year that had been begun by Ted Byfield and some of the staff of St. John’s School of Alberta. (It was later renamed the Alberta Report.) My brother-in-law Keith Bennett was headmaster at the time and during a visit arranged for me to meet with Ted.

I spent a year at the magazine then left, mostly because it was a bit like still being at the school, and also I wasn’t ready to commit myself to the magazine’s $1-a-day lifestyle. But it gave me a taste of newspaper work. With only one published article to my name – a review I’d done of a Bruce Cockburn concert for a student paper – I landed a job as a reporter with Alaska Highway News in Fort St. John, B.C.

I didn’t really know what I was getting into but because of all the essay writing I had done at St. John’s and university I wasn’t worried about being able to put words on paper. Learning how to make the stories interesting was the first challenge. After jobs at several weekly newspapers I realized I could hold my own as a writer. I next landed a job at the Edmonton Sun where I was working beside several national award-winning journalists.

Four years later I was living on acreage outside Athabasca, Alberta where my wife Wendy had taken a job as archivist with Athabasca University and was looking for a new writing challenge. Could I write a book? What you are holding is the result many years later. The project was acually completed in 1987 as a photocopied manuscript. Early in 2022, with encouragement and much assistance from 1975 alumnus Pierre Bedard, it was first serialized on his website then published as a book through Amazon.

One of the stories I wrote in Fort St. John was about a communal farm based on a Christian way of life that caused a personal awakening that has since grown into a much stronger sense of God in my own life. My mother’s strong commitment to the faith, my father’s wide-ranging search for spiritual enlightenment, and the things I’d learned at the school about Christianity all played a part in me becoming a believer as an adult.

As comprehensive as the school’s religious studies program was it surprises me now that the Bible did not figure more prominently in our education. It wasn’t one of our textbooks and I was never required to study it. My main exposure was hearing the Bible read in chapel or in church.

Don Forfar

Don Forfar left the school haunted by a prediction he often wished had never been made: “In 10 years you could be the next premier of Manitoba.” On his Grade 12 history exam at Easter he had scored a mark of 92. After the holidays Mr. Byfield took him for a walk on the Father Turney Road to discuss his future. He said that if there was anyone in the school who had the ability and personality to be a politician, that was him. In fact, Mr. Byfield said, he had made a bet with another staff member that within 10 years Forfar would be Premier of Manitoba.

After the walk Forfar was put in touch with Derek Bedson, a school supporter and then clerk of the Manitoba Legislature. Forfar went to Winnipeg to meet Bedson but remembers having no interest in what he was hearing. Nonetheless once the idea had been planted he found he couldn’t stop being pulled back to it. He began to resent how much it hung over him.

It was understandable Forfar might be interested in politics. He had run for prime minister in the student elections that year. If he hadn’t been beaten by a Grade 11 student he might have been more favorably disposed to a career in politics. As it was, it took him many years to come to terms with Mr. Byfield’s lofty expectations and do something about it.

In his 30s Don ran unsuccesfully for alderman in Winnipeg Beach where he and his wife Betts owned a grocery store. He admits he enjoyed the experience enough and didn’t close the door on running again. Twenty years later he jumped back into the ring and successfully knocked off the incumbent mayor of St. Andrew’s Rural Municipality. Twice more he won as mayor and then stepped down in 2012. He loved the job, was very popular, and took pride in the many ways he was able to make his community a better place. Three years later when he ran again, this time to be a school trustee, he was unsuccesful. He was glad he had reached the age of retirement and could forever banish being tempted by politics.

Don’s favorite memory of the school were canoeing and the war games. He liked canoeing partly because it was so much easier for him physically than the school’s other main outdoor activity – snowshoeing. He had lots of upper body strength and could paddle for hours. He also loved the sense of adventure that came with paddling along Canada’s famous voyageur canoe routes.

The war games appealed to him for much the same reason. Twice a year on a Friday the school would divide itself into two armies – defenders and attackers – and drive for several hours to the lake country north of Kenora, Ontario. The defenders were given several hours to set up lines of defense around a soccer ball that sat in the middle of some farmer’s field.

An attacker was put out of action when a defender succeeded in stripping him of the white flag on his belt. The game usually got underway late Friday night and lasted until dawn. Darkness, of course, made defending more difficult and attacking more interesting.

Forfar made war games history on one occasion by leading a solo assault on the ball in nothing but his underwear and shoes. In order to avoid bridge crossings, he had stripped down and swum across in the darkness undetected. He had also slipped through a checkpoint by riding in the trunk of a local resident’s car. His tactics were not entirely successful and, as I recall, he came dose to catching pneumonia.

Snowshoeing never got any easier for him during his four years at the school. In fact, if he has any criticisms of the school it is the snowshoe program. There was not enough concern for the dangers of being out in 20 to 30 below weather for six hours or more. And injuries were not taken seriously enough. He remembers running his first snowshoe race with a twisted ankle, half stoned on pain killers.

For Grade 12, he was spared the peer pressure associated with being the slow man by becoming a one-man team. While the arrangement was easier on him physically because he could set his own pace, the loss of dignity was not easily borne. And being out there hour after hour by himself he felt very vulnerable. After falling through the ice in Petersfield Creek one Wednesday, Mr. Wiens agreed a master would accompany him from then on. He took two days instead of one to complete the 50-mile race that year.

Forfar was famous for his clashes with Father Sargeant so it is perhaps surprising that in Grade 11 the chaplain should come to play a very different role in his life – that of a spiritual advisor. They had very lively discussions and the outcome was his confirmation that spring. It was an event that took considerable courage since Forfar’s mother, a strong Presbyterian, was dead set against her son becoming confirmed as an Anglican. She declined to attend the service.

Years later Don briefly considered studying theology but ended up in advertising instead. He remains an active Anglican and has been a vestry (parish council) member at St. George’s, Wakefield on and off over the years. His friendship with Father Sargeant continued after leaving the school. In 1976 he officiated at Forfar’s wedding, traveling from Edmonton to Dauphin, Manitoba for the occasion. Don was best man at my wedding in 1983 and we have kept in touch regularly over the years, occasionally visiting each other.

Sadly, in early January 2022, Don passed away suddenly while clearing snow on his driveway.

Jon Guy

Jon Guy still has the copy of Hugh McLennan’s Seven Rivers of Canada, the book he won for earning the highest mark in Grade 10 French. French was his favorite subject and winning the award was one of his proudest moments.

During his spare time he remembers helping the Grade 12s do their French lab translations of hockey broadcasts. French was something his mother had introduced him to but it was St. John’s that showed him he had what it took to become fluent. After high school he went to Switzerland to work as a ski instructor and came back bilingual.

He also credits the school for playing a big part in his choice of career. From an early age he was fascinated by maps but it was the school canoe trips that really turned him on to geography. Guy had been out of school for four years before he decided to go to university. Six years later he had a B. Sc. in Geophysics from the University of Winnipeg and a Photogrammetry diploma from the South Alberta Institute of Technology. He was on his way to becoming a senior technologist with Petro-Canada.

More than most of my classmates, Jon resented the restrictions St. John’s put on having a social life. He never lost touch with his friends in Winnipeg and did his best to be a part of their social scene. He was also more daring than most when it came to unsanctioned rendezvouses with members of the opposite sex.

He still gets a chuckle about the day he slipped out the window and down the fire escape to meet Jane Harrison, daughter of the Rev. Dean Harrison, in her garage. The meeting went undetected because he was a member of the alto section and for that hour they were studying unsupervised in the choir room at St. John’s Cathedral.

But he always felt self-conscious on weekends off because of the short haircut he was usually wearing. Appearance is important to teenagers and he was glad to hear that since our days the school has relaxed the haircut guidelines. Perhaps surprising Guy was the only classmate I contacted who was still single. He says he was engaged once but arrived back in town early one day to discover there was someone else in his wife-to-be’s life.

Few of my classmates could match Guy’s record for club and community involvement over the years. His association with the Zeta Psi Fraternity goes back to university days and in 1988 had the job of organizing the fraternity’s North American convention in Calgary. He is also a Big Brother, a member of Petro-Canada’s social club executive, and an agent for the Investment Club. Otherwise, he lives for ski season and competes every winter in the Corporate Ski Challenge series at various Rocky Mountain locations.

Peter Jackson

Peter Jackson holds the distinction of having never really left the school. There was a three-year period after Grade 12 when he didn’t actually live there – he was either up north working or at university – but his heart was still with the school.

The third summer away he joined a canoe trip and ever since he has been a master at either Selkirk or Genesee. For most of the 1980s and ’90s he has been headmaster of the Alberta school. He says his choice of career was just something that evolved.

One of his strongest memories as a student is also his first. For him, it typifies the disorganized, rough and tumble atmosphere of those early days. He arrived at the school to begin Grade 8 late one evening with his father, then the Bishop of the Anglican diocese of Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, dressed no doubt due to parental insistence, in a suit and tie.

He was pointed in the direction of the Father Turney cottage as the place he would find a bed to sleep. The cottage was still in the midst of summer renovations and in the dark Jackson and his father had difficulty finding their way in. Eventually Jackson opted to climb through an open window. In his quest for a light switch, he was of course touching the walls and anything else in his way. When finally found the light he discovered he was in a freshly painted room and his suit had been ruined by paint stains. In his first hour he got first-hand appreciation for why no one ever wore a suit at the school.

Jackson remembers his first couple of years as a never-ending ordeal. He feels as if everything he was given to do was calculated to make him miserable. During Grade 8 Math he got spanked far more than he would have preferred – twenty-one (21) swats on one occasion – but he admits he conquered his problems with the subject.

And he still thinks he became one of Mr. Byfield’s rehabilitation projects when it came to curing laziness. He says that more often than anyone else he was given the task of cleaning out the barn, often as a double-duty assignment. And during one snowshoe season Mr. Byfield personally took charge of extra training sessions to the power lines and back. He doesn’t resent the special treatment but he wonders if it was necessary.

Despite his long-time connection with St. John’s, Jackson said he would think very hard before sending a son. (He and his wife Rene had two boys and two girls.) Among my classmates, he was by no means in the minority on that question.

Only a couple classmates gave a definite “Yes.” Most had reservations. If for no other reason I’d like my son to go there for the canoeing and snowshoeing. Neither experience can be duplicated in the home environment. In the end our son Derek did not attend, partly because Wendy didn’t want to send him away, but primarily because we were living on part-time incomes for several of his teenage years.

Dan Raymes

Considering he was expelled a month before the end of Grade 11 Dan Raymes should probably be more bitter than he is. He had a long association with the school going back to the early days of the part-time school.

His parents were members of St. John’s Cathedral when the school was started and continued to be big supporters for many years. They were hurt as much as they were angry when one day Raymes arrived home with the news he’d been expelled. Apparently, no attempt had been made to contact either parent to discuss the incident. Raymes says his mother is still bitter.

The actual incident was relatively minor, although it became major when Raymes refused to apologize. The confrontation involved a junior master. During a Sunday afternoon study students were being allowed to go to the canteen one at a time. Before it was his turn Raymes was given permission to go to the washroom, however, he returned with a bag of potato chips.

The master immediately ordered him to hand over the chips, accusing him of going to the canteen without permission. Raymes replied that he had got them from his locker and that if the master was prepared to give him 10 cents then he could have them. Neither would back down and the whole matter went before the headmaster. He sided with the master and Raymes was told to apologize or face expulsion. He refused and so ended his time at the school.

Twenty years later he remembers the bitterness but he also recognizes that it was the school that helped him choose a career in construction. In the mid-1970s he talked his way into a job as a carpenter’s apprentice by pointing to the fact that at the age of 16 he had helped build a school. His work on a renovation project in 1985 so impressed the owners of the Tourist Hotel that they asked him to stay on as an assistant manager when the job was completed.

By that time he had completed his Grade 12 at night school. An average student as a teenager, Raymes discovered in his 20s that he had a hearing problem. When he went back to school to get his Grade 12 he tape recorded all the lectures. Anything he missed he could then replay at home. For the first time in his life, he enjoyed learning. His Grade 12 marks were all As and Bs.

One of his first jobs after dropping out of public high school also had a St. John’s connection. As with most of us Raymes left the school with a great love for the outdoors, particularly hunting and fishing. And not being afraid of a little isolation he signed up for two years as a trader with the Hudson Bay Company in Northern Manitoba at Cross Lake. He was familiar with that part of Manitoba having been on the Hayes River canoe trip in 1964.

While he too hesitated when asked about sending a son to the school his reasons against were not related to his own experience. He feels the program offered by the school is excellent. What dissuaded him was the rundown, dirty condition of the buildings during a visit. The buildings during his day were much older – one more than 100 years old – but they were kept tidy and usually clean. He wondered about the direction of the school. His son Darcy was approaching the right age at the time but he never went. Dan also has an older daughter Tanya.

Craig Stephens

Craig Stephens’ fondest memory comes curiously enough from an answer he wrote to an essay question during an English exam in his first year. The question: “What would become of St. John’s in the event of a nuclear war?” It was a timely question. A month earlier the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war. It was one of the few times I remember life at the school being interrupted by outside events.

At the height of the crisis we were called to the dining room to be briefed by Mr. Byfield. What exactly he said I don’t recall though he no doubt appealed for our prayers to help President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev resolve the crisis. The drama of that moment was still fresh in Stephens’ mind when he began writing about life at St. John’s in the midst of a nuclear war.

The account began with a Carnation milk radio commercial being interrupted for a bulletin announcing a nuclear war had broken out. The student body was hastily assembled and it was decided everyone would canoe into the mountains to take refuge until it was over.

As Craig recalled almost 25 years later once his pen hit the paper the story rolled forth effortlessly and he was still writing when time ran out. As implausible as his account was Mr. Bennett, our English teacher that year, was so impressed with the maturity and imagination of his writing he read the account aloud during the Christmas banquet. It was not only one of his proudest moments but also highest mark he ever got in English.

In the early days St. John’s was regarded by many in Winnipeg as a kind of reform school. It was the reason Stephens had been sent there. Twice in Grade 6 Math, he had been caught cheating and his parents were finding him more and more unmanageable. So they sent him to the school.

His reasons for being sent were not unlike many of the others in my class. Of the 16 interviewed for the book, four had already failed a grade and another four were on the verge of repeating a year because of their poor marks. Only two of the 16 never completed Grade 12. Stephens was one.

During the interview he wondered if his life would have been different if he had. The school, however, had taught him how to sell and that was one area he discovered post-secondary education wasn’t a pre-requisite. For most of the 1980s he lived in Vancouver and was involved in either newspaper marketing or advertising sales. He married in 1980 but he and his wife have since separated. They had one child.

Barney Timmers

Barney Timmers was the other classmate I interviewed who never got his Grade 12. After leaving school Barney worked as a surveyor in Northern Manitoba for two years then headed for British Columbia. He ended up in Victoria pruning trees. Within a couple of years he had set up Timmers Tree Service and had one full-time and three part-time people on the payroll.

Ten years later his marriage ended so he decided to close down the business and move on. He settled in Kimberley, BC and began looking for work. Prospects weren’t great so he struck on the idea of starting a home renovation business. One classified ad later he had his first job and he’s never looked back. He did some carpentry at St. John’s but he says he has always loved working with wood.

One of the more difficult times for him as a student was the year his brother Dave taught our class Grade 10 Geography. Mr. Timmers relied more heavily than most masters on spanking as a means of achieving results in the classroom. Rarely did a class go by when there wasn’t a stretcher test on the previous day’s reading assignment. It was a low-priority subject so we all got spanked a lot and Mr. Timmers seemed to take unnecessary pleasure in administering the punishment.

Barney bore the brunt of our anger all too often. He says the brother we saw was not the person he knew and wishes it could have been otherwise. In a cruel twist of fate that none of us would have wished on him Mr. Timmers fell through the ice while leading a scout outing a year later and caught meningitis. He survived physically but mentally he was never the same.

As with several classmates one of Timmers’ favorite moments was the Slave River canoe trip. He vividly recalls being hit by a hail storm near the end of the 13-mile Methye Portage, only to watch the skies clear just as he emerged from the trees to make the long descent into the Clearwater River Valley. He remembers the view stretched forever across the northern forest. Outdoor activities have continued a big part of his life. The school’s canoeing and snowshoeing program is one of the main reasons he would send a son to the school (he and his wife had one daughter).

Mike Treacy

Nobody in my class had a tougher row to hoe to be successful academically than Mike Treacy. He’d already failed two grades when he arrived at the school with his younger brother Pat in the fall of 1962.

To his surprise, for a while he thought it was a mistake, he was put in Grade 7. Every assignment was a struggle and his marks that first year hovered around the failing mark. Still, he was promoted to Grade 8 and the struggle continued.

But sometime that year he recalled he started to get the hang of learning and his marks began to creep up. By the time he left St. John’s after Grade 10 the prospect of graduating from high school was within his grasp. Because he no longer had the structure of the school to keep him on track he decided to establish a study schedule as rigorous as anything imposed at St. John’s. Two years later he had earned a Grade 12 technical diploma with a C+ average. Needless to say, he credits St. Johns for teaching him how to get through, something for which he is very grateful.

When asked about his problem with snowshoeing in his final year Treacy thought it may have been due to his apprehension about adjusting to public school. He recalls feeling particularly pressured and the blackouts may have been his body’s way of coping with the situation.

One of his strongest memories is the fact he was almost always assigned to barn crew during duty period. (He vividly recalls he was filling a bucket with hot water in the laundry room to thaw a frozen pump when he heard US President John Kennedy had been shot.)

Very early on he became a crew leader and he remembers one of the immediate benefits was being able to eat breakfast early because the supervising master, Mr. Byfield, wanted time to draw up the day’s work orders before the duty period began. Eating breakfast early meant he got his food hot off the grill. He remembers it being an honor that he was given this kind of responsibility. In Grade 9 he was also one of three boy steersmen.

Curiously, he says, he doesn’t feel that way when offered similar opportunities today. As an aircraft mechanic for Air Canada, the last thing he wants is the responsibility of being a foreman.

It is little surprise that he ended up working in the aircraft industry. Throughout his childhood years the family car had been a floatplane because his father operated a fly-in fishing lodge in Northern Manitoba. Treacy wanted to become a commercial pilot but poor eyesight made that an impossibility. He worked for his dad for a few years but eventually he and his wife Jennifer settled on acreage on the river north of Winnipeg and he went to work for Air Canada. They have two children.

Pat Treacy

If there’s one thing most people remember about Pat Treacy, Mike’s younger brother, it’s that he was more dedicated to his studies than anyone else. His day would begin an hour before everyone else’s – 6 a.m. – and he would spend every waking hour that wasn’t involved in either class, eating or duty period work studying.

In many respects he was a model student except he was totally caught up in his own world and I doubt any of the masters would have been happy if every student responded that way. For his efforts, he got Bs instead of Cs, but he was still behind the brighter members of the class who did half as much work.

Not surprisingly, he doesn’t remember his four years at the school as being a very happy period of his life. Twenty years later Pat pointed to his emotional outburst on the Hayes River canoe trip as the moment that sealed his fate. He says he never recovered psychologically from his public display of weakness. His way of coping was to retreat into his private world of studying. The academic success he achieved helped rebuild his self-worth. Rarely, if ever, during his final two years did he allow his anger and frustration to show.

In the school’s predominantly construction camp atmosphere there was of course little opportunity for Pat to develop his considerable artistic talent. He laughs now about a mammoth map of Manitoba he was asked to draw on the wall of the staff house meeting room. That, he says, was the school’s idea of art.

Today, art is the main focus of the life he shares with his wife Heidi. He pays the bills with the salary he earns teaching school but he considers himself a painter first and a teacher second. He spends weeks working on Dante-like murals, the style of which reflects the work of one of his more famous university teachers, painter Ivan Eyre. He describes himself as being spiritual but doubts the school had much influence on that development. He regards Christianity as being too limited in perspective.

There are two moments that still bring a smile to his face, however. In Grade 9 one of the books he had to read in English was Fate in the Hunter by Ernest K. Gann, the story of a DC-3 aircraft’s adventures flying in and out of the fjords of Norway. As with his brother, airplanes were an intimate part of his childhood and the DC-3, one of the largest prop planes still used in the North, was a particular fascination for him. The book contrasted sharply with the eight paperbacks by Churchill and Costain he had to read that year for Grade 9 History. He found Churchill beyond his limits of understanding.

The other happy memory is provided by some action photographs his brother has that were taken during the second last day of the Grand Portage canoe trip. For part of the journey up the Red River to the school, we were accompanied by a motorboat carrying Mr. Thompson. The pictures he took are some of the best shots of crews in action Treacy remembers from his years at the school. They recapture the moment of triumph that came after successfully completing one of the more grueling segments of the trans-Canada yoyageur canoe route.

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