Where’s our sense of history?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/11/2008 (6351 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was just last week that I struggled to explain why I purposely drove by the Lipton Street address where my parents lived when I was born.

“Visiting the homes where we used to live,” I told a Free Press colleague, “is like a spiritual experience.”

Although I didn’t know it then, Bob Dylan had already proved my point.

Except he was having a spiritual experience visiting someone else’s old address.

The Rolling Stone website is already telling the story of Dylan’s unannounced pilgrimage to the Winnipeg house where Neil Young lived while he was cutting classes at Kelvin High School.

Dylan visited the same bedroom where young Neil sat listening to early Dylan.

What hasn’t been mentioned is how Dylan knew where Young used to live.

John Kiernan, who lives in Young’s former house, knows the answer.

Kiernan saw Dylan’s companion holding a print-out from the Internet that featured a photo of the house and recommended Young drive-bys such as Kelvin High School and Crescentwood Community Club.

Short of asking Young himself, Dylan would have had few other ways of locating the home.

That’s because, like most other homes where Winnipeg’s international elite once slept — and dreamed dreams that came true — there’s no visual evidence that a rock giant grew up there.

No marker.

Not even a simple, dignified, unobtrusive plaque.

Nothing like the marker outside one of the few Winnipeg homes that has been officially designated historic: author Gabrielle Roy’s childhood home in St. Boniface, from where she and her mother would trek across the Provencher to shop at Eaton’s.

And be humiliated for being speaking French

In contrast, there’s the Wolseley residence once occupied by internationally renowned Canadian women’s rights activist Nellie McClung.

Today, the house at 97 Chestnut St. is lovingly being restored by its owners. But the only marker is a “Beware of dog” sign.

Kurt Markstrom, the University of Manitoba historian who bought the McClung house in 1999, can’t understand why there’s nothing else on site to honour her last Winnipeg address.

“If this house was in any other city,” says Markstrom, “in any other city in Canada, it would be a landmark.”

Where I’d like it to start, though, is with historic plaques outside the homes of the city’s most accomplished and celebrated.

Even Hibbing, Minn., where Dylan grew up, has taken advantage of his fame to draw tourists to the town.

Kiernan, who regularly sees Neil Young fans staring at his house (but never knocking on his door to come in, for which he is thankful), likes the idea of a marker.

He’d also like to see drive-by tours of former homes of our most celebrated citizens.

“As one who may be affected, I am a fan of doing it tastefully,” Kiernan says. “And in the case of our home, I think that it would also be important to draw in the larger context of community centres, schools and halls where the real events happened.”

Kiernan has even considered whose homes would qualify.

Just top of mind, there’s Neil and Nellie’s houses, of course. Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings boyhood homes in the North End. And Group of Seven artist Lemoine Fitzgerald’s house in St. James.

I’m ashamed that, before I did the research, the only one of those houses I could point out is Fitzgerald’s.

And then only because I grew up walking to school along Deer Lodge Place, where he painted and lived.

Anyway, Kiernan seems to have come a long way from the last time he recalls me writing about placing a Neil Young plaque outside his home.

He remembers thinking, “Eeeek!”

Having proposed the plaque idea once and getting no response, this time I decided to address the concept directly to someone who might be able to make it really happen.

So I called Hubert Mesman, the president and CEO of Travel Manitoba.

“I like the idea,” Hubert said. “I’ll peruse that. It should be at least part of our promotional literature.”

At least that would be a start.

I wonder, though, what took us so long to begin thinking about celebrating the places that gave root to our historic Who’s Who.

It’s about celebrating where we all live and, in most cases, came from, too.

Why did it take Bob Dylan to make us understand our overlooked wealth of heritage homes?

As for how we’d choose whose old homes to celebrate, that’s easy enough.

My Free Press colleages have already gathered a long short list in book form.

It’s called The Greatest Manitobans.

And it launches on Monday.

Nudge, nudge. Plug, plug.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca