Jogging our memories

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This article was published 12/07/2016 (3599 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeggers will get a rare glimpse into the life and legacy of a Canadian icon this summer.

A new exhibit, Terry Fox — Running to the Heart of Canada, will be on display at the Manitoba Museum starting Thursday.

Fox, who was born in Winnipeg in July 28, 1958, was diagnosed with bone cancer when he was 18 and had his right leg amputated 15 centimetres above the knee in 1977. In 1980, he decided to run across Canada to raise money for cancer awareness. Fox’s Marathon of Hope began in St. John’s, N.L., on April 12, 1980.

Roland Sawatzky, the curator of history at the Manitoba Museum, says the exhibit will feature artifacts from the Marathon of Hope. Museum-goers can watch video footage and listen to interviews with Fox, as well as look at gifts Canadians sent him during his run.

One of these gifts was a paper chain made of 3,339 gum wrappers — each wrapper representing a single mile in the total distance Fox covered before his run came to a premature end on Sept. 1, 1980. A 1972 Summit Series Team Canada jersey given to Fox by hockey great Bobby Orr is also on display, an artifact that Sawatzky calls “a huge, huge deal.”

Sawatzky says he was able to look through Fox’s journal and was “amazed” at how much the athlete wrote each day of his journey.

“He filled a page for each day, so he had a lot on his mind. It wasn’t a log — it was partially that, of course — but it was much more than that. He kept his innermost thoughts and feelings for his journal.

“He would talk about the good days and the bad; if he was in pain, if he was discouraged, if he wasn’t having a great fundraising day. Then beyond that, if he had a really good day when he ran more miles than he wanted to or he had a really good fundraising day with a lot of great media, then he would write about that, so it was full of his emotions, too.”

When Fox began the Marathon of Hope, he filled a jug with water from the Atlantic Ocean. “His goal was to run across Canada and then deposit that water into the Pacific Ocean,” said Sawatzky. “And that jug is (on display) and it’s still full of the water from the ocean, because he didn’t make it to the Pacific. So that’s a pretty emotional artifact right there.”

After 143 days of running and covering 5,373 kilometres, Fox stopped running in Thunder Bay, Ont. Cancer had spread to his lungs, and despite receiving treatments of chemotherapy and interferon, he died on June 28, 1981, at the age of 22.

The sock that Terry wore on his artificial leg throughout the Marathon of Hope will also be on display in the exhibit. Darrell Fox, Terry’s younger brother, said Terry wore it from April 7, when he flew to Newfoundland, and every day during the run.

“He never took it off, he never washed it; throughout the Marathon of Hope that sock remained on his artificial leg,” Darrell says.

Even after he was forced to stop his run, Darrell Fox says, Terry continued to wear the sock “because he thought that there was a chance that he could get out there and finish the Marathon of Hope. It was only at the end of the year, in December 1980, that Terry finally took that sock off because he realized his fate and he realized he wasn’t going to live.”

This year marks the 36th anniversary of the Marathon of Hope and Terry Fox’s legacy lives on. In 2015, Manitoba designated its civic holiday, the first Monday in August, as Terry Fox Day. This year, it falls on Aug. 1.

“I live and breathe it every day and I still, 36 years removed from the Marathon of Hope, I still cannot get enough of it, of the story, of what Terry attempted to accomplish in 1980,” Darrell says. “And it is still very much alive, it’s his story and his legacy… I believe that Terry is still very much with us and still running and will continue to run until we fulfil his dream of finding a cure for cancer.

“It doesn’t seem like 36 years ago; it seems like just yesterday that Terry was running across the country and that’s because his legacy and his memory is very much alive in many Canadians.”

The Terry Fox Foundation has raised more than $700 million for cancer research, and the Terry Fox Run, an annual fundraising event that started in 1981, takes place in more than 9,000 communities across the country, as well as in many cities worldwide.

The exhibit was initially on display at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que. In April 2017, the exhibit will be moving to the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, B.C., to coincide with Canada’s 150th birthday.

In addition to the exhibit, the Manitoba Museum will host a speaker series with Terry’s siblings — Judy, Darrell and Fred Fox — tonight at 7 p.m.

alexandra.depape@freepress.mb.ca