Photos of student Ken

 





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Ken met lifelong friend Ted Jamieson harvesting crops during war

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I met Ken during the summer of 1943 while I was working as a Burlington farm hand under the auspices of the Ontario Farm Service Force, an organization devoted to placing high school students on vegetable farms to replace workers who had enlisted. The reward to joyful students was an early departure from high school and a waiving of final exams. This enthusiasm was dampened a bit the first day we worked in the fields during a teeming all-day rain.   (Above, Ted Jamieson, third from right, is best man at Ken and Babs' wedding Aug. 18, 1951)  Ken and I became fast friends as our small Ottawa group became integrated with the Burlington high school students, initiating a friendship that lasted some 75 years. It included visits to Ottawa and Port Hope which continued until age made the highway much longer and the body much weaker. One such visit saw Ken and I participate in the creation of the NDP at the Ottawa auditorium. Ken, as you know, went on to become an active and ef...
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David Olive: Behind every great person is a great teacher

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  Ken was one of the greatest  teachers who ever lived. That is not an exaggeration. I am a student of history and  as a journalist  I have studied thousands of lives.  Most of us come up short in certain important ways. We are human. So was Ken, who could be impatient with stupidity – that of Napoleon and of a high school principal who had reached his level of incompetence. As we all do if we fail to recognize our limitations. Ken recognized a limitation he had, which is that he vastly preferred teaching to administration. He repeatedly turned down invitations to accept the higher pay and prestige of management. He chose instead to remain in the classroom, spending his entire days with the students who were the future of the country. That was no sacrifice. Ken immediately earned his students’ respect, and drew from many of us our love. We always had the feeling that Ken was having the time of his life in our company. I signed up for Ken’s his...
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Martha remembers life with father

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Before there was an Energizer bunny, there was Dad. One summer morning, we stopped in to visit Mom and Dad at 5 King Street. While we were chatting and having coffee at the kitchen table, Dad jumped up in the middle of the conversation and announced: “Time to cut the lawn.” Behind the mower, he didn’t walk, he sprinted. When it snowed, he buckled on his skis and bushwhacked around the backyard. Sometimes he got it in his head to do odd projects like paint the basement floor yellow, or sand and finish an old door and make it into a table. He lived full throttle.   He could sit still, too. Usually it was in a straight-back chair at the kitchen table, absent-mindedly tapping a cigarette on the rim of an ashtray, scanning the newspaper or absorbed in the pages of a book. If we drifted into his orbit, he’d pelt us with “you should read this!”   He kick started every day with a coffee and the Toronto Star , his daily dose of caffeine and moral outrage. As a devoted NDPer, he w...
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