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WINNIPEG/TORONTO — On a sunny Friday afternoon in May, 1965, to the lush strains of Sibelius and Rachmaninoff, about 300 graduates of Winnipeg's Kelvin High School assembled in the school auditorium for what was formally known as closing exercises. Well dressed (on this occasion), we were distinguished principally by our colour, which was uniformly, almost absurdly, white. In fact, our demographic mix — no blacks, no Hispanics, no Asians — would be virtually unimaginable in contemporary urban Canada. Among us, there was precisely one Italian, one Greek, one Lithuanian, a few Mennonites and Ukrainians and 22 Jews. The rest, the vast majority, were Protestant descendants of the Scot, Irish and British immigrants who had largely settled south Winnipeg — the Feasbys and the McCulloughs, the Briggs and the Joneses, the Hurleys and the Robinsons.
This was our known universe and we did not think twice about it. I suspect it would not have been appreciably different in Edmonton, Toronto or Halifax, before the late sixties waves of immigration began to enrich Canadian culture.
That same year, Kelvin had celebrated the opening of a new wing, needed to accommodate projected enrolments. The addition replaced part of the original structure, a beloved, storied, 50-year-old, ramshackle, four-storey behemoth whose wooden floors, warping and woofing like oceanic waves, made transit through the corridors a comic adventure. The remainder of the building would come down over the summer. Sometimes literally, and certainly metaphorically, our Grade 12 class might have been said to have one foot in the old world and one in the new.
In his valedictory address that day, my friend Tim Wilson captured something of our essential divide. “This is not the end,” he said, appropriating Winston Churchill's inspirational wartime rhetoric to define our adolescent circumstances. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”
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Today, Tim shudders slightly at the recollection. After many years in Toronto and Kingston, he lives with his second wife, Simone, and three sons (all under the age of 5) in Bear River, N.S. (pop: 200), just down the road from Digby. He has been here since 2001, writing, editing and narrating, as he has done for 35 years, beautifully crafted documentaries for radio and television from a basement studio.
We are standing on a porch overlooking the river and the babbling brook that runs along his property. His sons are playing in the woodpile. Other former classmates may live in more bucolic settings, but I doubt it.
The quote seems too arch by half, Tim says, sipping his wine. Only in hindsight, I suggest. It was entirely apt for the moment.
That moment is gone, however, and now the Class of '65 — Canada's first baby boomers (a phrase, of course, that had not then been coined) — stands poised, precariously, on the brink of 60.
“I have a problem,” says my old friend Harold Arkin, a former corporate and commercial lawyer who now does mediation work in Toronto. “Outside, I've grown old. People call me ‘sir.' But I still feel as if I'm in my 20s or 30s. I don't know what's happened. Time has passed.”
And time is passing. “I don't need more toys,” echoes Joe Barnsley, one of Winnipeg's leading commercial lawyers. “I need more time. It's my only regret — that time passes so quickly.”
For the Me Generation, one that has long had things pretty much its own, self-indulgent way, the spectre of Time's winged chariot hurrying near is not a happy one. It's a phone call in the night that cannot be ignored. No one reaches 60 without intimations of mortality. Discs bulge, knees creak, the heart races inexplicably. We had best not speak about the hair. Inescapably, we confront the beginning of the end.
Closing exercises, indeed.
What became of us, this first class of first boomers, these Dojacks and Curries, these Teskeys and Penners? Did our lives measure up to our early promise and ambition? What happened, asks Gillian Watts, a star of Kelvin's team on the quiz show Reach for the Top and now a trade-book editor in Toronto, to our brave idealism, our conviction — our anthem — that to change the world, all you really need is love? How did Cat Stevens' universal Peace Train get so easily derailed? How were we affected by the great social currents that washed across the decades — feminism and the sexual revolution, war and the environment, fitness and religion — movements that we sometimes played a major role in shaping?
