ROOM FOR AMERICA
Canada 150 capsule
Public historian Arthur Milnes of Kingston, a veteran political speechwriter, has edited or co-edited three academic volumes about U.S. presidents such as Franklin Roosevelt, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter. In 2001 he had the honour of interviewing president Gerald R. Ford about Ford’s relationship with Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau and other historical matters.
It was in the late 1970s that my mother and father took us kids to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, so we could see the famous U.S. Civil War battlefield.
Dad was a well-briefed tour guide and needed to consult no pamphlet as he took his children to Little Round Top, stood us at Cemetery Ridge to look out of the never-ending field that Picket and his southerners walked into death and history, and we were taken to the spot where Lincoln, once the guns had fallen silent, had delivered the Gettysburg Address as a military cemetery was dedicated.
And my mom, she too needed no pamphlet when she showed us kids the name of her maternal great-great grandfather — and maybe it was only a single great? — that was on a monument there. It still is. And don’t get me wrong. Mom’s ancestor wasn’t Gen. Robert E. Lee or anyone like that. He was a lowly private, and each man in his regiment who fought at Gettysburg in July of 1863, is named as well.
Since that fateful trip in the 1970s, I have, without my parents, travelled twice to Gettysburg. The first time was in 1985 when my best friend from Scarborough, Louis Koikas, and I drove around America for three weeks that summer. Louis’s dad gave us his rusting old car and told us we should leave it by the side of the road if it broke down and we should then just take the bus back to Canada.
And like my parents before me, I didn’t need a pamphlet or guide as I took Louis to the monument that had Mom’s ancestor’s name on it, and as we walked through the cemetery where Lincoln spoke and more.
Fifteen years later, in 2000, I took my wife, Alison, to Gettysburg and repeated the tour I’d given Louis. The funny thing, however, was that Alison also didn’t need a pamphlet. Her parents had taken her and her siblings to that hallowed American place as well when the Bogle kids were young.
So that’s a long way of saying that when Alison Bogle and Arthur Milnes, now of Kingston, began writing letters into the U.S.A. for items to populate our Confederation 150 Time Capsule this winter, the mayor of Gettysburg, Thomas Streeter, was one of the first to receive our snail-mailed request.
As early as March of this year he’d already agreed to issue an official proclamation from his city that declared July 1, 2017, Sir John A. Macdonald-Canada Day in Gettysburg.
And that meant a lot to me and Alison. And it would have meant a lot, in particular, to my late history-teacher father.
You see, more than once when I was a teenager dad told me that one of the best things about being Canadian is the fact we get to live next door to such a friendly and dynamic people as are Americans — regardless of who their president of the day might temporarily be.
So in terms of his son and daughter-in-law’s Confederation 150 Time Capsule, I know that among the hundreds of items we secured from the U.S.A., the proclamation from the mayor of Gettysburg would be Dad’s favourite.
I suspect he’d also have liked the written message from past president George H.W. Bush. And, finally, he would be more than pleased that a picture of Jimmy Carter — in Canada this summer, helping to build 150 Habitat for Humanity houses for Confederation 150 — is in the Time Capsule as well.
A final thing I should mention: When dad died in 2006 I really didn’t have many requests or demands of my siblings regarding his funeral. Except one.
I insisted that a U.S. Civil War hymn be played as they took dad out. It is called Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Funny thing: Lester Pearson and John Diefenbaker, proud Canadians like dad was, also had that hymn from U.S. history played at their funerals.