Celebrating 50 years of friendship on Canada Day
Seven immigrants met in 1968, became friends, raised families, and stayed close all these years
In the summer of 1968, college friends Glenys Stollstorff and Rosalie Schmidseder boarded the Empress of Canada in England and set sail for a new land, with job offers in hand, both looking for a couple of years of adventure before they would return home.
Joe Gussoni and his friend, Chris McKie, were on the same weeklong sea voyage, but they didn’t meet the two women until they had all taken the train from Montreal to Toronto and were standing outside Union Station, wondering what to do next after missing the employers who were supposed to pick them up.
The four newcomers took a cab to a shady hotel for the night, and then moved to a bed-and-breakfast for a week before starting their new teaching jobs.
It was the beginning of a friendship that pulled in three more fresh young immigrants, from France and Germany, forming a group that for 50 years has supported each other through marriages, children, illnesses and adjusting to life in a strange land.
On Sunday, Canada Day, the friends and their families — 50 people, all told — will gather in Mississauga to celebrate each other and the good fortune they’ve had in this country.
“From the very beginning, we partied together often, yet also helped and supported each other through adversity,” Stollstorff said.
“We witnessed each other’s weddings, our children’s christenings, confirmations and so on. This 50th anniversary of our friendship is special. This is a personal as well as collective thanksgiving in honour of Canada, where we feel fortunate and are grateful to have made our lives.”
Stollstorff, now 71 and a retired principal, had a job offer as an elementary school teacher in Toronto when she set sail for Canada. She met her husband, Peter, a German from Hamburg, shortly after her arrival.
“There was a lot of Canada in the news in the U.K. in 1967 because of the Canadian Centennial and the 1967 Expo,” she said. “We only came for a year of adventure, but turned out meeting somebody. The rest is history.”
While Stollstorff grew to love Canada, her first impression of her new home wasn’t so rosy. When her train pulled into Union Station, she couldn’t help but compare Toronto’s relatively dull architecture with the cosmopolitan scenes of London she had left behind.
“I was 21 and I said to myself, ‘My God, what have I done to my life?’ ” Stollstorff recalled with a chuckle.
The first year in Canada was difficult, said Gussoni, 79, though they all came to Canada with job offers amid one of the country’s worst teacher shortages and didn’t have to worry about employment. He was planning to spend a couple of years here and then teach in Africa.
“It’s a different country and everything was different from what we were used to, even if the language is the same,” he said. Gussoni shared his first apartment, near Islington Ave. and Dundas St. W., with McKie and Michael Murray, a friend of theirs from the town of Nelson in Lancashire, England.
The group of friends soon grew to include others, and the apartment the three men shared was the party house be- fore the trio was kicked out because their gatherings were too loud.
“Nobody had family here. We were all immigrants and could relate to each other better,” said Murray, 76. “We stick together and entertain each other.”
A retired aerospace engineer, he was one of the few in the group who weren’t teachers. Employers at the time, as they do today, asked for Canadian work experience, he said. But he was lucky to meet a fellow Englishman who was already established and helped him land his first job in Canada.
Over the years, the members of the group of seven each got married and had their own families, but they continued to get together for Canada Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s, with their children tagging along.
“We would go to cottages in Haliburton and Muskoka on Victoria Day. We chat and talk. We have never had a period that we don’t get together,” said Rene Lapczynski, 73, who came to Canada with his wife, Evelyne, 71, from Lille in northern France in July 1968.
Lapczynski was not trained as a teacher but was hired to teach French at Our Lady of Peace Catholic School. That’s where he met McKie and others before eventually landing a job as a purser with Air Canada.
“When Evelyne and I came, we had no jobs, but we were paid $48 a week by the government to go to school to learn English,” Lapczynski recalled. “What we have here, we would never have had it in France. All of us, after 50 years in Canada, are more Canadian than wherever we came from.”
A while ago, Stollstorff broke her leg and some of the friends visited her in the hospital.
“Michael and (his wife) Lise came and asked if they could do anything for me. I told them I really wanted to wash my hair. They tilted my wheelchair and washed my hair,” Stollstorff recalled.
She and others have had struggles with their health. “Both Evelyne and I had breast cancer. Michael now has a breathing problem. We are all there to support each other,” she said.
The members of the group all feel grateful for the life they’ve had here.
“Moving to Canada was the best decision of my life,” Gussoni said. “I’m glad my wife never wanted to live in England.”