Shay Duffin: Character actor and singer

(This story is one of a series entitled “One Person’s Journey” telling how people from all walks of life, including a few rogues and rebels, have left their marks upon the world. To see a list of others featured in the series, click here.)

Shay Duffin 1931 – 2010

Shay Duffin
1931 – 2010

Shay Duffin had much in common with Brendan Behan, the boozy Irish playwright he portrayed thousands of times in a one-man stage play that toured North America for more than 30 years starting in the early 1970s. Both were born in Dublin into Catholic working-class families. Both left school as young teenagers to serve apprenticeships in trades designed to bring them future prosperity. And both eventually found their calling in the theatre, where critics for The New York Times and other major newspapers hailed their achievements. The big difference between them: Behan was a drinker; Duffin was not.

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Stu Hart: Wrestling promoter

(This story is one of a series entitled “One Person’s Journey” telling how people from all walks of life, including a few rogues and rebels, have left their marks upon the world. To see a list of others featured in the series, click here.)

Stu Hart 1915 – 2003

Stu Hart
1915 – 2003

Professional wrestling took Stu Hart around the world, made him wealthy, and gave him the chance him to rub elbows with the likes of Bob Hope, Prince Phillip, Muhammad Ali, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. In a business that often gets no respect, Hart was a well-respected figure.

Wrestling became part of his life starting in 1929 at age 14 in Edmonton, where the local YMCA provided free opportunities for youngsters to become involved in sports. For four years before that, Stu had been living with his parents and two sisters on a farm near Tofield, about 65 kilometres southeast of Edmonton, where survival took precedence over all else. The family camped year-round in two tents because Stu’s father, Edward, was involved in a legal dispute over the ownership of the homestead, and did not want to build a cabin until the problem was resolved.

Tent living began as a grand adventure for Stu at age 10 as he milked cows with his father in an open corral, and hunted birds and small animals with his slingshot to put food on the table for his mother, Elizabeth. But he soon found it difficult to deal with the black flies and sweltering heat of a prairie summer and the long dark nights and subzero temperatures of a prairie winter. With no heat in the tent, he cuddled up next to his dog to stay warm at night, and prayed that the rocks his mother heated in the campfire before bedtime would keep his toes from freezing.

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Clyde Gilmour: CBC Radio host

(This story is one of a series entitled “One Person’s Journey” telling how people from all walks of life, including a few rogues and rebels, have left their marks upon the world. To see a list of others featured in the series, click here.)

Clyde Gilmour 1912 – 1997

Clyde Gilmour
1912 – 1997

For more than 40 years, Clyde Gilmour had the best-known and most mimicked salutation –”huh-LO”– in Canadian broadcasting. As the host of CBC Radio’s popular Gilmour’s Albums, he used that trademark greeting – which seems to have anticipated Jerry Seinfeld’s famous “hell-OOO” routine of later years – to forge a personal connection with the half million listeners who tuned in every Saturday and Sunday to hear what kinds of classical arias, train whistles, novelty songs, animal sounds, and comedy routines Gilmour had pulled from his 10,000-plus record collection that week.

He wasn’t a trained broadcaster, but Gilmour knew what not to do on the air from having listened as a child to any number of phony-sounding announcers on local radio in Medicine Hat.

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Edward Arthur Wilson (Brother XII): Cult leader and swindler

(This story is one of a series entitled “One Person’s Journey” telling how people from all walks of life, including a few rogues and rebels, have left their marks upon the world. To see a list of others featured in the series, click here.)

Edward Arthur Wilson (Brother XII) 1878 – 1934

Edward Arthur Wilson (Brother XII)
1878 – 1934

The gold may still be there. That’s why fortune seekers and beachcombers still flock annually to DeCourcy Island in the Strait of Georgia, 10 miles southeast of Nanaimo, British Columbia. They are hoping to find some of the estimated $400,000 in $20 gold coins that went missing after a notorious cult leader calling himself Brother XII fled the island in 1933.

Brother XII was the founder of an occult society called The Aquarian Foundation that – at its height in the late 1920s – claimed more than 2,000 followers, including many wealthy Americans and Britons. The name Aquarian, taken from the sign of the zodiac, referred to the coming astrological age when people would live in peace and harmony, be able to recall their past lives, and be spiritually enlightened.

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Mike Mountain Horse: First World War veteran

(This story is one of a series entitled “One Person’s Journey” telling how people from all walks of life, including a few rogues and rebels, have left their marks upon the world. To see a list of others featured in the series, click here.)

Mike Mountain Horse 1888 – 1964

Mike Mountain Horse
1888 – 1964

Like his fellow Canadian aboriginals, Mike Mountain Horse didn’t have to enlist for service in the First World War. Treaties between the Crown and the First Nations had designated the Natives as wards of the government – in effect, minors – and thus they were deemed exempt from military service. Yet despite this exemption, Mike and more than 3,500 others – representing more than one-third of the aboriginal male population of military age – volunteered to become warriors for King George V.

Why did they undertake to fight the white man’s war? Historian James Dempsey, a great-nephew of Mike Mountain Horse, offers three possible reasons.

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