Tour of city could use a tribute to humble hero

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/06/2015 (3741 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I have a question for you.

And my own answer to it.

If you’ve ever given visitors a guided tour of Winnipeg, where did you take them? Or what would you show them if you did? While you’re thinking about that, hop on the tour I recently gave a distinguished friend last month. It ends where most of us will end up: at a cemetery. Beside a gravesite we all know about but never visit.

 

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Doug Gibson, my former publisher at McClelland & Stewart, was at the Radisson hotel for the annual meeting of the Writer’s Union of Canada, which was just winding up when I picked him up to start our tour on a brilliantly blue and breezily warm Sunday morning in late May. By that time, Doug had already taken his own walking tour of the town, down Main Street to Thunderbird House and then through the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. It wasn’t Doug’s first trip to Winnipeg — far from it — and it wasn’t the first time I’d given him a guided tour of my birthplace and home. In fact, he chronicles that first tour in his forthcoming book, Across Canada By Story: A Coast-to-Coast Literary Adventure, from ECW Press. As an editor, Douglas Gibson (as he is more formally known) has helped celebrate Canada through authors as divergent in their style and message as Alice Munro and Ken Dryden.

In his own book, Doug opens early on with what he refers to as the “literary and historic” trip I took him on a few years back; starting with a visit to Louis Riel’s grave, followed by a drive past the childhood St. Boniface home of author Gabrielle Roy, then up north Main to the Battle of Seven Oaks monument; and finally to the Fort Garry Hotel, conveniently located next to the site of Upper Fort Garry. As I recall, we also swung down Wellington Crescent and through Assiniboine Park.

That’s all we had time for that day, which left us that much more to see on our second tour.

So it was we dropped by the Manitoba Legislative Building, where I stood with Doug in that main-floor star-circle of a space directly beneath the dome, where the acoustics are so spookily perfect spoken words resonate with broadcast-booth quality. Then there was the drive by the high school years home of Neil Young, the one on Grosvenor Avenue Bob Dylan paid his respects to one day when he was in town.

And, of course, we drove about that quintessential Winnipeg neighbourhood of Wolseley, where I stopped to introduce Doug to Sally Papso, who famously turned the bus stop in front of her house into a glorious garden, complete with a bench and red garbage can.

“I’ve had the garbage can stolen,” Sally told us. “And somebody stole the bench. So I just put new ones out right away.”

Just kids fooling around, Sally assumed.

“But most people respect it. And they don’t pick the flowers.”

As we left, Sally told Doug she hoped he was enjoying his trip.

“We’re having a grand time,” he responded.

The tour was about to get even grander for Doug. The one and only place he requested a visit to was Ralph Connor House, the National Historic Site at 54 West Gate. The three-storey mansion was built 101 years ago by the Rev. Charles Gordon (a.k.a. Ralph Connor), a Presbyterian minister who was Canada’s bestselling author of the early 20th century and became a millionaire in the process. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get Doug inside the house. But by coincidence, we arrived on the day the University Women’s Club, which maintains the home and meets there, was having an open house complete with guided tours, coffee and cookies.

Our visit was brief, though. I had been invited to a private event that was about to start on the other side of the city, at Brookside Cemetery. One I knew Doug would be welcomed at as my guest from afar.

 

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I had already introduced Doug to the story of Faron Hall; the “homeless hero” who had saved two people from drowning in the Red River only to die by drowning years later in the same waters. I told Doug about Faron when he stopped by the Alexander Docks, where the body of 15-year-old homicide victim Tina Fontaine had been pulled ashore late last summer. That’s why we were going to Brookside Cemetery; because Tina’s family believed the search for Faron had led to Tina being found. In tribute to him, the girl’s family had donated a headstone, which was being unveiled that afternoon.

The black, flat marker features an engraved feather and a spirit-messenger eagle soaring above the river.

“Faron Hall,” the stone reads. “A humble hero.”

That’s where our tour ended.

But that, I told Doug, isn’t where our acknowledgement of Faron Hall should end. One day, when I take a visitor on another tour of the place I’m so proud to call home, I hope there will be a statue of Faron Hall standing in the city centre as a tribute to the struggles and courage of the man.

And his people.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca