The sheer breadth of the list of obvious contenders for the title of the Greatest Manitobans is inspiring all by itself.
There are the award winners. Pulitzer-prize winner Carol Shields. Tony Award winner Len Cariou. Academy Award winner Anna Paquin. Plus Victoria Cross winners and Order of Canada winners too many to mention.
Carol Shields
There are the politicians and leaders.
Tommy Douglas, the father of medicare. Nellie McClung, who won Manitoba women the right to vote, making Manitoba the first province to do so. Arthur Meighen, the only Canadian prime minister to represent a Manitoba riding. Duff Roblin, former Manitoba premier and driving force behind the Red River Floodway. S.I. Hayakawa, whose path from a public school education in Winnipeg to representing California in the United States Senate passes as one of the more unusual career paths ever taken by a Manitoban.
And, of course, Louis Riel, the only politician on this list to have been executed for treason by his government.
There are businessmen like James Richardson, Izzy Asper and Samuel Bronfman, the last of whom lived in Brandon long before he made his billions in liquor in Montreal.
There are writers like Margaret Laurence and Gabrielle Roy, cartoonists like Lynn Johnston (For Better or Worse) and Richard Condie and Cordell Barker (The Big Snit) and artists like Group of Seven members Francis Hans Johnston and LeMoine Fitzgerald.
Corey Koskie
There are athletes like the NBA's Todd McCulloch, Major League Baseball's Corey Koskie and too many NHLers to mention, including the likes of hall of fame goaltender Terry Sawchuk and Billy Mosienko, author of sport's most unbreakable record -- three goals in 21 seconds.
There are the actors and entertainers. Deanna Durbin, who was one of the highest paid actors in the 1930s. David Steinberg, the pride of the north end. Adam Beach. Mimi Kuzyk. Monty Hall. Scott Bairstow.
There's a long list of musicians. World-renowned violinist James Ehnes. Soprano Tracy Dahl, who's performed with most of the major opera companies in North America and shared a stage with some of the greats including Placido Domingo. Burton Cummings, Randy Bachman. Neil Young. The Crash Test Dummies. Bif Naked. Loreena McKennitt. Tom Jackson. Guitarist Lenny Breau.
And, of course, Fred Penner.
There's even a spy -- Sir William Stephenson, better known as A Man Called Intrepid -- and a magician, Doug Henning, considered one of the world's greatest illusionists until cancer claimed him at just 52.
Plus, what kind of backwater would Manitoba be if we didn't have our own resident world-class escape artist in Dean Gunnarson.
Fred Penner
And then there's all the great Manitobans who don't have a household name, who haven't achieved any fame, who just quietly go about doing great things.
We know the names of community activists such as Harry Lehotsky and Sister Geraldine McNamara, but what about all the other people in this community who have made a difference, working selflessly and with regard only for making better the lives of others?
Maybe they're in your workplace. Maybe they're in your neighborhood. Maybe even, they're in your home.
We want to hear about all the great Manitobans -- the ones we already know about and the ones we've never heard about -- as we search this summer for the greatest of all Manitobans.
Right now, we've turned our website, winnipegfreepress2.com/greatestmanitobans, over to the readers so you can nominate a candidate you feel is worthy, second someone else's nomination or just engage in healthy debate.
Your nomination doesn't have to be long -- a few sentences will do. Or you can do a more detailed nomination, whatever you think is best. Got a picture? You can easily post it yourself. Or, if it's someone famous you've nominated, chances are we can track down a picture and post it for you.
Later, we're going to ask you to vote on a pared-down list of nominees, and when we're all done, some four months from now, we're going to tell you all about the people you picked as the Greatest Manitobans.
But before we can get there, we first need to have a discussion about the two crucial elements to this -- what it means to be great and what it means to be Manitoban.
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What It Means to Be Great
The Oxford Dictionary defines great as "of ability, quality or eminence considerably above average."
Which is helpful -- until you consider that the same definition fits both Mother Theresa and Joseph Stalin.
Greatness, then, is often in the eye of the beholder.
But it seems most people agree there are certain qualities attached to what we generally regard as greatness in people.
Topping that list for most people is the force and positive nature of the impact someone had on other people's lives. Burton Cummings made us happy by playing music. Cindy Klassen excited us with her medals at the Turin Games. Carol Shields made us think with her novels.
But sometimes the people who made the greatest impact on our lives are the least well known.
Take Professor Charles Slichter, who in 1912 recommended the City of Winnipeg use a little known, hard-to-get-to place called Shoal Lake as the source of its drinking water.
Many balked at the time, but with the herculean help of engineers, the 155-kilometre Shoal Lake Aqueduct -- considered, in its day, one of the engineering marvels of the world -- was completed in 1919. And it's been transporting clean, crisp water to Winnipeg -- using nothing more than gravity -- ever since.
By any definition of the word, that's pretty great.
Often, there's also an element of self-sacrifice to any discussion of greatness. While it's possible to achieve greatness without it -- what, after all, has guitarist Randy Bachman given up? -- people who have demonstrated a selflessness seem to be held on a higher plane of greatness.
There would seem to be no better example in this regard than Louis Riel, who made the ultimate sacrifice -- he was executed --- for his role in leading a resistance movement to maintain Metis rights.
Finally, there seems to be a special regard paid to anyone who has overcome obstacles on their way to greatness. And this regard seems particularly true of the people of this province who overcome the huge obstacle of climate every winter that we persist and survive and, at times, even thrive.
Simply emerging from a tiny, hostile, out of the way place like Manitoba to achieve international success is, in itself, to overcome massive obstacles.
And so when someone like Dr. Baldur Stefansson, the founder of canola, rises above other obstacles in addition to his Manitoba roots, Manitobans tend to take notice.
Stefansson was born in tiny Vestfold, Manitoba into a pioneer Icelandic family. It was a decidedly humble upbringing, and Stefansson spent his youth working on the family farm and attending local schools.
He then served with the Canadian Army during the Second World War, before he finally got his first of many university degrees, from the University of Manitoba, in 1949.
It was a roundabout route to international greatness -- and he commands all the more respect for having taken it.
Of course, whatever criteria we attach to greatness, there is the very serious question still to be asked: Do we even recognize greatness anymore or has that cognitive ability simply been drowned in a million-miles-an-hour culture that worships celebrity and attaches the tag of "hero" to almost anyone who does something even remotely out of the ordinary.
Wondering the same thing, Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten conducted an experiment last year in the crime-addled subways of Washington, D.C.
Weingarten recruited violinist Joshua Bell, an internationally acclaimed virtuoso widely regarded as one of the premiere violinists in the world.
Weingarten had Bell play his violin -- a $3.5 million Stradavarius -- for 43 minutes during rush-hour one morning at one of D.C.'s biggest subway stops.
Bell pulled out all the stops, playing some of the most complicated pieces and basically giving a performance that in any other venue people would have been happy to pay $100 to attend.
But on this morning, with Bell looking like any other busker playing any other violin, hardly anyone even noticed.
Weingarten recorded the results: Just seven people out of 1,070 actually stopped what they were doing to listen to Bell's performance. And when they counted up all the dimes and quarters, he'd earned just 32 bucks.
Weingarten, on the other hand, earned a Pulitzer Prize for his story about what happened to Bell. So there's hope that at least some greatness can still be recognized -- even if it's a story about how people no longer recognize greatness.
Perhaps its self-flattery, but I'd be willing to be more Winnipeggers would notice if we set James Ehnes up with his Stradavarius at a busy bus stop downtown. I like to think we're less harried and less hurried than people in bigger cities like Washington -- and consequently, we can still recognize greatness when we're confronted with it.
Just not all the time. This is the same city, remember, that back in the 1950s looked at the world-class, electric streetcar system that had been transporting Winnipeggers for six decades, decided it was an eyesore and ripped up all the track to ultimately replace the entire fleet with diesel buses. The last streetcar ran on a Winnipeg street in September 1955.
That decision, alas, has proven to be a colossal moment of Manitoba un-greatness.
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What It Means to Be Manitoban
There are, when you think about it, actually four distinct categories of people we call Manitobans.
There's the most obvious Manitobans, the people who were born here, lived here and died here. For all his international business enterprises, entrepreneur Izzy Asper probably fits this category best. Born in Minnedosa, he got a law degree from the University of Manitoba, worked in Winnipeg and ultimately founded -- and to the delight of his fellow Manitobans, based -- his business empire right here.
And when he died? Well, that happened here too.
Then there are Manitobans who were born here but moved away at a young age. Academy Award winner Anna Paquin, who moved from Winnipeg to New Zealand at age 4, is maybe the best example of this genre of Manitoban.
Then there's the Manitobans who weren't born here but lived the majority of their lives here and recorded most of their personal and professional accomplishments here. Carol Shields, who was born in Chicago, fits this category, living most of her adult life here and producing novels with clearly definable Manitoba settings and themes.
You could also slot Ken Ploen in this spot. Ploen was born in Iowa, but he's best known for what he accomplished in Manitoba as a member of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers from 1957-67. A quarterback, halfback and safety, Ploen led the Bombers to four Grey Cups during his time with the team in what is still regarded as the Bomber's Golden Age.
And unlike many other star athletes who've blown through town over the years, Ploen stayed after his playing days were over, taking a job as a sales representative and doing colour commentary during Bombers games for radio station CJOB. Ploen was rewarded for his loyalty in 2007, when he was given the Order of Manitoba.
And finally there are the Manitobans who weren't born here, lived here for a little while and then moved away again. The best example of this would have to be rocker Neil Young, who was born in Toronto but moved to Winnipeg at age 12. He attended Earl Grey Junior High School and Kelvin High School and formed his first bands here before eventually venturing out on the road to super stardom in the United States.
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So What's It all Mean?
Put it altogether and the question before you this morning is: do you prefer your Great Manitobans to be great Manitobans or Great Manitobans? In other words, how much weight do you give to each category? Can someone with a loose connection to Manitoba -- say, Neil Young or Tommy Douglas, for instance -- make up for shallow roots in this province with the sheer force of the greatness they displayed elsewhere?
Conversely, can someone with what Free Press photographer Ken Gigliotti recently described as "average greatness" make up for it by demonstrating deep Manitoba roots? Would Monty Hall, for instance, make a list of greats anywhere but one that was dedicated to Great Manitobans?
They're all great questions, and they're just a fraction of the head-scratchers that will be posed by our search for the Greatest Manitobans.
It's going to be fun working out the answers together over the next few months.
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