Author of ‘What’s So Funny?’ hopes readers will hone their own humorous take on the world

By Louise Rachlis

During the day, Dick Bourgeois-Doyle, 62, is Secretary General at the National Research Council.

Evenings and weekends, he’s the thoughtful writer and illustrator who created What’s So Funny?, a personal review of the 67 books that have won the Leacock Memorial Award for humour.

What’s So Funny? was initiated “for fun, and learning something new, past the age of 60,” said Bourgeois-Doyle.

The book chronicles Canadian humour from the “old days” to the present. “Because humour is so contextual, it is really hard to compare the funniness of material from one era to another,” he said.

“Certainly, some stuff that was funny to 1940s Canadians would fall flat now. This is not too surprising, but I am struck how some books, like the 1948 winner Sarah Binks still stand up, still resonate particularly with Canadians, and still make us smile.”

When writing his book, he tried to set aside a minimum of an hour a day to “stare at the keyboard.” “Setting goals of quantity or quality of words never seems to work for me.  But I can always find or make an hour - and this drip, drip, drip approach eventually turns into progress.”

He has written other books - “for the most part, biographies, history of science and technology, and serious stuff” - so he found the latest book a diversion and “an effort to break into a more creative format.” “Even finding the old books was a treasure hunt and enjoyable … so part of it is discipline and another part lies in mysterious way we can always find time for things that we really want to do.”

He hopes readers of his book will whet their appetite and be encouraged to read the Leacock Medal books and other Canadian humour - “and to do it through that lens of personal references for that insight that comes from looking in the mirror and realizing that what we laugh at is a reflection of ourselves.  It also frees you to judge for yourself what is funny and what is not.”

The Canadian award began in 1947 with Ojibway Melody by Harry Symons and the winner in 2014 was Bill Conall, with The Promised Land: a Novel of Cape Breton.

He figures most readers would agree that some books are more deserving than others, and he does have his own particular favourites.  “But I think the Leacock Medal is a peculiar beast that does not lend itself to easy judgements.  It is awarded by human beings with their own set of references, memories, and biases and work within a framework that is far from clinical.”

The award clearly values “funniness”, he said, “but literary merit counts too, as well as that magical capacity to resonate with the subset of Canada that honours Stephen Leacock’s memory.”

The result is a collection of accomplished authors like Richler, Davies, and Mitchell “whom the medal tries to encourage to access their funny side, as well as developing naturally funny authors whom the medal tries to encourage toward a career in literature.”  “It also honours the poignant, but mildly funny.  I see a pattern and design to it all, but others might not.”

In the fall of 2012, Bourgeois-Doyle set out to collect and read all of the Leacock Medal books. “I wanted to steal techniques, study different writing styles, and laugh,” he says in the book. “But when you spend hours asking yourself, ‘What’s so funny?’ or why one thing strikes you as funny and something else falls flat, you find the answers not in writing tricks and topics but in the memories, biases, and cares that induce reaction and define who you are.”

He learned a lot in the process, such as: “I now see sad thoughts as the seeds of funny ones, and I get up every morning looking differently at the place where I live.”  He said that “comes those hours of thinking about this and realizing that my laughter was induced by memories linked to something sad like a lost loved one - and also to realizing that Ottawa is my anchor reference and has, after 30 years, evolved into my home town.”

Aside from content and shared experiences that change with time, he feels “the tightness and quality of the writing has improved over the years.” “This could be a function of the tools, like computers, that we have at our disposal today or the editing resources that professional writers have to draw on, or, perhaps, the arena is more competitive.”

He is more struck by how some things have not changed.

“The most recent Leacock Medal winners, Dance, Gladys, Dance in 2013 and The Promised Land in 2014 pursue themes like the value and nature of community and respect for others and their differences that you would find in the very early books like Ojibway Melody and even Leacock’s work.”

More than anything else, he hopes readers of his book will whet their appetite and be encouraged to read the Leacock Medal books and other Canadian humour - “and to do it through that lens of personal references for that insight that comes from looking in the mirror and realizing that what we laugh at is a reflection of ourselves.  It also frees you to judge for yourself what is funny and what is not.”

He himself would like to write like Donald Jack, a three-time Leacock Medal winner whose books took the form of mock memoirs of a character who started out as a World War I pilot.  “Jack uses all the tools of a solid writer, elegantly, intelligently, and to great effect, particularly a satire of war.  But I would recommend many of the books - certainly, the very creative hockey story King Leary, Sarah Binks, Gregory Clark’s War Stories, Saturday Night at the Bagel Factory,  and the books by Robert Thomas Allen, and the surprisingly profound and influential Ojibway Melody.”

He thinks the best single book might be Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version.  “For me, it was a modern, edgier, Canadian Don Quixote story that explores the interface between the real and the imagined around a solid story and out-of-the-box techniques.  “And my favorite book - non-Leacock Medal, non-Canadian book - by far is - Don Quixote.”

He has put a lot of thought into the writing exercises at the end of each chapter. “I did a lot of them in a serious attempt to ingrain the lessons.  But my real expectation is that the exercises will merely echo the lessons to be learned from the Leacock Medal book in question and help people, particularly writers and students, to remember them.  For example, one exercise invites readers to write a first person account of his or her own birth - to point out the interesting way Ian Ferguson launched his own memoir Village of the Small Houses.”
One of his aims with the book was to capture humour writing techniques and writing styles that might provide writers of any kind, speech writers, people giving presentations, or writing a blog, with some practical tools and tricks.

He also hopes people will think about the things that make them smile and why, “and leave the book with more confidence in the merits of their own, personal sense of humour and developing their own humorous take on the world. To try to be a little less serious.” 

What’s So Funny? Lessons from Canada’s Leacock Medal for Humour Writing is published by General Store Publishing House Inc. for $22.95. It’s available on Kobo, Amazon Kindle, and other e-book formats, as well as Books on Beechwood, or anyone wanting a copy of the book can contact the author at bourgeoisdoyle@gmail.com .

'The guys at the Y' is a morning ritual

It’s the Y gym, 7 a.m.

“One more!” exhorts Barry, the aerobics instructor, over the driving music.

It was “one more” for me at the downtown Taggart  Family YMCA/YWCA gym once again a few years ago.

And the amazing thing about coming back was that it was as if I’d never left. The instructor, and most of the people in the class, were the same as when I first joined the downtown Y when I moved from the suburbs in the late 1990s.

They didn’t look any older. Even their “dress-down” faded t-shirts for obscure events or Y promotions hadn’t changed.

 “These folk have been coming to the Y for decades and taking part in the early morning class for just as long,” says Jill Pomeroy, regional director of the Taggart Family Y. “Bill Dawson comes to mind as one of the oldest and likely most spry for his age,” she said. “He is 91 years old and continues to take part in the 7 a.m. class.  My sense is that a big part of why these members come is to be with friends they have made over the years.”

“People continue with a healthy lifestyle when a bond is formed with that lifestyle, just like a relationship between people,” says Cheryl Mason, volunteer class leader of the 7 a.m. Thursday class at the Y. “That is why social is an element of healthy lifestyle at all ages. Social is just as important as physical activity and movement and nutrition when establishing healthy habits in your weekly routine.”

Barry Davis, another of the volunteer instructors, has been teaching at the Y for 25 years. “I started taking noon hour classes 27 years ago,” he says, “because although I was biking to work, I wanted something to balance out the biking.”

He says the biggest factor for sticking with exercise is motivation - “so teaching the class, I had to be here.”

After a year or two of the noon class, he switched to the morning class. “Some of those participants are still around,” he says, “like Bill Dawson and his wife Marita, and Barry Blair and his wife Nicole Diotte.”

Blair, 83, and Diotte, 67, drive in every morning from Orleans. “We’ve been coming here for at least 14 years,” he says. “I got in the habit in 1984 working downtown and kept it up. It’s the socialization. It would have been a lot handier to go to the Orleans Y but it’s the social aspect here.”

Another longtimer, Renaud Prefontaine, 80, started doing the morning training when he left the Air Force. “I needed something to go to. I met Bill Dawson and we went to the Holiday Inn and it became like a social club. I’m not disciplined to do exercises on my own; I didn’t like it. With the Y, if you don’t show up one morning, the next day they say ‘where were you?’”

When the hotel closed, “the refugees from the Holiday Inn” joined Barry’s exercise class at the Y.

Volunteer Andre Rancourt, a chartered accountant, has been leading classes at the Y for 35 years, teaching Mondays for 25 years and then switching to Fridays. “The participants are very supportive,” he says. “I think of retiring but they say they still enjoy the class so I keep on doing it.”

He says “we’re a supportive group as well.” “When I notice some of the old folks haven’t shown up for awhile, I make a point to call and see how they’re doing.”

The group celebrates birthdays and weddings, and holds potlucks. They raised $9,500 for treatment for an instructor with MS. “It’s such a diversified group,” says Rancourt. “We have engineers, accountants, psychiatrists, ex-military, physicians...the common denominator is the fitness class.”

A highlight of the 7 a.m. year is the pre-Christmas Master Class when instructors from Monday Boot Camp, Tuesday Core Conditioning, Wednesday Step, Thursday Group Strength and Friday Cardio Combo each take a turn leading part of the class.

 “I forced myself to get up in the impossible dawn hours and began the 7 a.m. class 10 years ago, and have never stopped,” says participant Marie Gibson.  “It has become extremely important to me.  The men and women who come regularly to the class are an inspiration. The class gives me more than exercise.  It gives me social connections that are invaluable, physical, mental and emotional satisfaction, and my life is immeasurably enriched because of it.”  

Scrapbooking 1963: The Kennedy Scrapbook

By Louise Rachlis

As I burst through the door for lunch on November 22nd, 1963, the radio on the kitchen counter was loud with frantic voices.
My mother in her apron was hunched over, listening.
I had been in a grade 12 French class when I first heard the news that President Kennedy had been shot.
Like everyone else, I’d thought it was a joke.
Nobody at Ridgemont High School believed such a thing could possibly happen, and we were overwhelmed when we found out it was true.
Everyone ran home (high school students still ate lunch at home) to listen to more news on the radio, and then on the TV where there was live coverage.
A few days later, on Sunday November 24th, we saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald live on TV. GRIEF-CRAZED CLUB OWNER SLAYS SUSPECTED ASSASSIN.
Everybody was in shock for a week, and talked about almost nothing else.
A young and naïve 16-year-old, I automatically kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings, because even I knew it was history in the making. No other news event in the nearly half century following moved me to do the same thing.
The Kennedy scrapbook is A Hilroy Product No. 707, price 29 Cents. The cover is a cowboy on a bucking bronco, and the words Scrap Book in script writing in the upper right corner.
The clippings are attached to the scrapbook with yellow, peeling cellophane tape. The pages themselves are now yellow too. The scrapbook has travelled in a shopping bag through my childhood in Ottawa, my apartments and houses in Toronto, and back to Ottawa. Many other pieces of paper and memorabilia have been abandoned along the way, but the Kennedy scrapbook remains.
Each day for that week in 1963, I spread out on the living room floor with my clippings and the scrapbook, adding items as I cut them out from the Ottawa Journal and the Ottawa Citizen.
By the end of the week, I’d easily filled the scrapbook:
A paper boy fed papers into reaching hands. He had never been so busy.
He looked at the silver in his hand.
“I feel funny taking it,” he said.
As Ottawa received word of President Kennedy’s death, government offices ground to a halt. Most Ottawans worked for the federal government, where “civil servants laid down their pens. Typewriters were silent.”
As the Journal reported, people in restaurants topped eating. In stores already decorated for Christmas, shoppers froze. They remembered the Kennedy’s visit to Ottawa in 1961. Some wept quietly.
Teenagers passed with transistors to their ears. They were not listening to the hit parade. They were not talking…
Telephone switchboards at radio and television stations and newspapers were jammed with calls from information-seekers.
An ambulance firm said it had handled two cases where elderly people had collapsed at home shortly after hearing word of the President’s death.
The large photographs from the newspaper are all black and white, and framed by giant headlines like DEATH SHOCKS WORLD and ‘MY GOD…THEY’RE SHOOTING AT THE PRESIDENT!’ There were dozens of photographs of Inauguration Day 1961, of “the many faces of John F. Kennedy”, of John and Jackie with Caroline, six, and John Jr., three. And over and over, black and white photos of Jackie, 34, in her pink suit stained with blood.
One of the newspaper stories was about the reaction in New York City: “Sense of doom as N.Y. halts.”
Eerily foreshadowing the reaction decades later to 9/11, the Herald Tribune News Service noted that “No news ever hit New York harder. Or more visibly.”
By now the reaction on the streets was close to a sense of doom. So many people rushed to telephones to get in touch with loved ones, relatives, home and hearth that entire telephone exchanges and long distance circuits were tied up for an hour…Traffic jams cropped up all over town as drivers stopped, often in mid street, to shout to one another or simply stare and try to take stock of what had happened.
It was the same around the world. “Nations mourn, statesmen weep,” reported the Canadian Press. Moscow radio and television interrupted its regular programs to tell Russians the President was dead. The radio then played funeral music.
The Ottawa Citizen noted that the Citizen switchboard was a mass of red light as people tried to call for information, and in many parts of the city the telephone service was out as circuits became overloaded within minutes.
Some classes at Carleton University and University of Ottawa were cancelled Friday afternoon and others were dismissed because students had congregated in hallways to listen to portable radios.
Into the coverage came “the new president”, Lyndon Johnson. “He leans to affability, to back-slapping and shoulder-hugging, but on occasion he can be irascible.” I didn’t really care or pay attention to Lyndon Johnson, but somehow I felt that his clippings had to be in the scrapbook too, because this was history.
Through the United States Embassy doors in Ottawa, a steady procession came to pay respects to the President. Prime Minister Pearson’s name topped the second page. Mayor Charlotte Whitton’s signature is “spotted among those of work-a-day Ottawa – signatures ranging from the shaky scrawl of the elderly to round, childish efforts of youngsters.” The embassy announced Sunday that Ambassador and Mrs. Butterworth have cancelled their receptions scheduled for Dec. 4 and 6 “due to national mourning.”
The discussion that would continue until this day began with stories asking, “Did Sniper Have Help In Firing Fatal Shots?”
On Thursday December 5th, 1963, the Ottawa Citizen reprinted Theodore H. White’s article from Life Magazine, “For President Kennedy an Epilogue.” White quotes Jackie as saying: “There’ll be great presidents again – and the Johnsons are wonderful, they’ve been wonderful to me – but there’ll never be another Camelot again…At night, before we’d go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records: and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were: ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.’”
More than forty seven years later, I put the crumbling “Scrap Book” back in its plastic bag, into the shopping bag, and return it to the attic. Don’t let it be forgot…

Protecting children’s brains: The more concussions you get, the worse off you’re likely to be

By Louise Rachlis

It’s hard not to discuss the timely topic of concussions without the name Sidney Crosby coming up.

“He was the face of the NHL and now he is 10 months out from his second concussion and has yet to play,” says concussion expert Dr. Kristian Goulet. “That really exemplifies the need to be cautious when you return from the first concussion.”

Dr. Goulet and Dr. David Mai provide sport medicine services with a specialty in concussions for paediatric and adult patients at the Pediatric Sports Medicine Clinic of Ottawa and the Eastern Ontario Concussion Clinic.
The first of their kind in Ottawa, both clinics located at the ActiveCare Sport Medicine Centre in Kanata were established to offer the most comprehensive and up to date treatment for a wide variety of pediatric and adult sports injuries.

Dr. Goulet says that the effects of concussion are cumulative, meaning the more concussions you get worse off you are more likely to be.

“You are more likely to get another concussion if you are still
symptomatic from the first. That second concussion is also more likely to be much worse than the first.”

In Boston at the Pediatric Sports Medicine Clinic at the Children`s Hospital, he would often see kids with three, four, six and eight months of symptoms, “and the majority of those kids took a second hit while they were still symptomatic from the first hit.”

“Treating childhood sport injuries and preventing future injuries is my passion,” says Dr. Goulet, who trained at the clinic in Boston and was present for the launch of their Concussion Clinic. “I’m familiar with the most cutting edge treatments and am eager to apply this experience in Ottawa.”
He is currently writing up a paper in association with the Sports Legacy Institute (the Brain Bank). “This organization gets the brains from NFL players after they die. What these brains show is that multiple concussions can cause a condition like Alzheimer’s.”

When he speak to parents or children about concussions, he gives specific examples - such as the fact that only 0.03% of minor hockey players go on to play professional sport - to show the importance of protecting their brains.

“I have been very impressed with the parents of the kids I have seen thus far. The parents understand that the vast majority of kids’ future is with their brain and the parents are happy to be
conservative regarding returning their sons or daughters to sports after obtaining a concussion.”
The goal of the clinics is to help young athletes return to their discipline as quickly and safely as possible, as well as to educate parents and patients to help prevent future injuries, says Dr. Goulet, who founded the OPSMCO and EOCC after completing a Pediatric Sports Medicine Fellowship at Harvard University.
Dr. Goulet is originally from Ottawa and played junior hockey in the area. He did a Sports Medicine Fellowship at Harvard University where he was the head team physician for the Northeastern Huskies Men’s Varsity Hockey program.

The EOCC is the first clinic in Ottawa dedicated exclusively to the treatment of children up to 18 years of age with concussions.
“The clinic uses the most up to date management techniques to get children back to sport as quickly and safely as possible,” says Dr. Goulet, who also places a large focus on concussion education and prevention. “The clinic uses both conservative measures as well as the latest medicinal interventions.”
Baseline and post concussion neurocognitive testing (IMPACT) are available, says Dr. Goulet, one of a select few Certified IMPACT Consultants in Canada, meaning he has been trained to properly administer and interpret the IMPACT test. “We also offer physical therapy on site designed to treat current concussions, such as vestibular therapy, and to prevent concussions in the future.”
The PSMCO is modeled after the Sports Medicine Clinic at the Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard University.
They specialize in all acute sporting injuries, muscle strains and ligament sprains, all types of joint pain, “Little League Elbow,” “Little League Shoulder,” and many other conditions.
Dr. David Mai completed his Family Medicine Residency, Emergency Medicine training at the University of Western Ontario and Sport Medicine Fellowship at the Fowler-Kennedy Sport Medicine Clinic.

He currently oversees the medical care of the varsity athletes at the University of Ottawa.

“Over the past 10 years, several international bodies have come together to bring together all the tools physicians were using,” says Dr. Mai. “Consequently, there are many more tools available for managing concussions than there were a decade ago. As the program director for the University of Ottawa Sport Medicine Training program and the chief physician of the University of Ottawa Sport Medicine and Physiotherapy Centre, I teach my students the best and latest way to treat concussions.”


Dr. Mai sees patients of all ages for primary care concussions and sport and exercise related conditions. Many family doctors refer patients to him, from older people who have slipped on a sidewalk, to children who have had a schoolyard accident. “It’s the whole gamut of the population.”

He says that now all athletes and the general public can now get the kind of treatment that only elites got years ago. “What we’ve learned can be applied to any level of athlete. Health care in Canada does not discriminate.”

Physiotherapy can also help, says physiotherapist Matthew Claxton. He describes the example of a 15-year-old boy who was recovering from his second concussion in two years. “He came into the clinic one afternoon looking horrible. He indicated that he was suffering from a terrible headache after math class. We were able to reduce his headache by about 90 per cent through heat treatments and appropriate neck stretches.”

The boy left the clinic “much happier,” says Claxton. “We all had a sense of how much his headaches were due to poor posture and neck strain in class compared to the cognitive functioning required for math.”

“Concussion occurs from impact of some sort which rattles the brain - but that also means strain to the muscles of the neck,” he says. “Therefore, physiotherapy can help with the pain and loss of movement associated with a whiplash type injury.

Further, he says, “whiplash-type injuries not only cause neck pain but often headaches. Concussions cause headaches, and physiotherapists can help sort out if the patient’s symptoms are neck-related or brain-related which helps us determine how much activity is safe as their recovery proceeds.”

Physiotherapists can provide exercises to address visual disturbances, imbalance and dizziness. “By determining the dysfunctions producing the patient’s symptoms, we can provide patients with short term goals during their recovery,” says Claxton. “Giving the patient a goal to focus on reduces the frustration often associated with the imposed rest required during concussion recovery.

“We also have objective measurements to help us gauge their recovery. This can be a big boost to a patient’s morale during what is often a very frustrating experience.”

All are at the ActiveCare Sport Medicine Centre,
1108 Klondike Rd., Unit 4 Kanata, tel. 613-595-0222.
.
kanata@acpottawa.ca www.concussioncentre.com

If you or someone you know is interested in learning more about concussions, Dr. Goulet or Dr. Mai are available to give presentations free of charge to groups of 40 or more. Contact Dr.Goulet@yahoo.com or dmai@uohs.uottawa.ca .

Bhat Boy receives Lucille Broadbent Award for Artistic Achievement

By Louise Rachlis

“I suggested a doubt, that if I were to reside in London, the exquisite zest with which I relished it in occasional visits might go off, and I might grow tired of it.”
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

Ottawa artist Bhat Boy has just returned from four months in London, with a cluster of new paintings reflecting the “exquisite zest” of his British sojourn.
“London was an exciting and colourful experience, but I was a bit homesick,” he says. “When I bought catfood in the Glebe recently, the cashier inquired after my cats Elizabeth and Alexander by name; that would never happen in London.”
He has done 10 British paintings, some reflecting his melancholy feelings about leaving one home for another. Others are happy paintings of Hampstead where he was living. One of the paintings is ‘Mum in Flask Walk’; “the view from my flat to the antique store across the way.” “I had known that in the 1950s before my mother married my father she had a boyfriend who lived in Flask Walk, the very same street that I lived on. It was very exciting for me because I knew she used to walk up and down the street there. It gave me a personal sense of comfort and familiarity,” he says, and he included his mother in the painting, walking down Flask Walk.
Some of the paintings are more typical of his fantasy work with goldfish, with the city of the London mounted on the backs of goldfish.
Bhat Boy and his husband Carl were married upon their return back to Canada. “One of the reasons we wanted to be married in Ottawa instead of the U.K. was that it is called a ‘civil union’ there instead of an actual marriage,” he says. “I liked the idea of being married, not just ‘civil-ized.’”
And at the same time he is sharing his wonderful images of London, the citizen of the world is also being honoured by the Lucille Broadbent Award to commemorate the lifelong support to the arts given by the late Lucille Broadbent.

It’s presented to an individual or organization that has made a significant contribution to Canada’s and Ottawa’s artistic community.

“I’m very happy to be back in Ottawa and honoured by the recognition bestowed upon my by the Broadbent Award. It’s wonderful to be recognized by the community, and not be just another face in a big city.”

A longtime Glebe resident, Bhat Boy is the founder of Art in the Park, the largest outdoor fine arts festival between Montreal and Toronto now named The New Art Festival. Art in the Park is an Ontario registered not-for-profit corporation established as a platform for emerging artists to exhibit their work without the formal constraints of a gallery. The event has grown from 25 to more than 250 juried artists.
A self-employed painter since 1992, the colourful artist is represented by the Gordon Harrison Gallery in Ottawa.
As a member of the Art of Imagination Society he shows throughout Europe and the United States. His unique style is described as representational but imaginative, often conveying complex ideas and scenarios.
Places you’ll have seen Bhat work range from his Ravensburger puzzle in the Canadian Artists Collection to the large scale commissioned work for the Sunnyside Branch of the Ottawa Public Library.
Bhat Boy has painted dozens of large scale commissioned works ranging from the Limited Partners Lounge in Scotiabank Place in Ottawa to the Brown Derby in Los Angeles. Other public installations of his work in Ottawa include paintings at Bank Street and Third Avenue, traffic calming figures on Bronson Avenue, and numerous large scale commissions for businesses all over the city including pubs, funeral homes, and grocery stores.
As well, Bhat Boy regularly does smaller commissioned works for private homes and businesses.
Some of the places you can see his London work are:

Visions of London
at the Artist’s Studio
53 Strathcona Avenue, Ottawa K1S 1X3
November 11, 12 & 13, noon to 6 p.m.
.
Gordon Harrison Gallery
Autumn Landscapes
495 Sussex Drive, Ottawa K1N 6Z5
November 18, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
November 19-20, noon to 4 p.m.

Fish
at Gallery 240
240 Guigues Avenue, Ottawa K1N 5J2
November 25, 5 p.m to 7 p.m.
November 27, 2 p.m to 6 p.m.

To see his work online, view www.bhatboy.com .

Masters’ swimmer has overcome hurdles to set world records

By Louise Rachlis
Many in Ottawa know Lynn Marshall from her long experience as head coach at the Carleton University Masters Swimming club, and from her presence on the pool deck at the Early Bird Triathlon giving the 10 second signal to “go” into the water.
Others admire the six-foot-tall blonde swimmer as a masters’ record holder recently inducted into the International Masters Swimming Hall of Fame. She has been among the world’s top 10 masters swimmers every year and she has set 11 long course and 30 short course world records from 1986 to 2011.
But behind those records the Carleton computer engineering professor’s tale is one of adversity overcome, of discipline and perseverance.
On July 25th, 1993, in her third season as a triathlete, Lynn was doing the Kingston Triathlon. She was the first out of the water, and heading out on her bike behind the lead police car when a driver unexpectedly pulled out and stopped in front of her, causing her to crash into him.
Her bike was in pieces, and accompanied by fellow triathlete Rudy Hollywood, she was taken to hospital, where to her dismay she overhead a resident say, “She used to be a swimmer.”
She was x-rayed through her mouth and elsewhere, the x-rays were misread, and she was released and just told she’d be sore for a few days.
With only a bathing suit to wear, she put on some hospital scrubs borrowed by Rudy, and found someone to drive her car most of the way home. Then she stopped at the pharmacy for painkillers, with her hair still full of blood, and made what turned out to be an erroneous call to her parents to say that she was okay.
On the following Monday she didn’t go to work because she was picking up a new car. She arrived back home to a ringing telephone: The hospital in Kingston had re-read the x-rays, and she’d wrongly been sent home with a broken neck. She was advised to go straight to the hospital in Ottawa.
It was summer, and the hospital was on half-staff; it took six hours to admit her and finally do more tests. A CAT scan and x-rays revealed a Jefferson fracture of the C1, the same area of fracture that happened to Christopher Reeve the following year.
She called her parents back and told them she wasn’t okay after all. They drove to Ottawa from Winnipeg to see her during her week in the hospital.
Because her ligament was in good shape, she was able to wear a lighter aluminum neck brace instead of a halo, but she had to wear it for three months. “Sleeping was the worst.”
Nevertheless, after her accident, she went right back to her regular routine, at the same time of day. She couldn’t swim, but still did water running and poolside stretches and the stationary bike. “Not to do it would have been harder. My goal was always to get back to swimming. It never occurred to me not to try.”
There was still a long way to go. “I felt as if the brace were still on when I finally got it off,” she says. ““I’ll never have the same mobility I had before, but things could have turned out much worse so I’m grateful.”
The year before her accident she’d had a spectacular swim at the 1992 Master’s Worlds in Indianapolis. Less than a year afterward, she was in Montreal swimming for the Worlds again. “I was glad to be there swimming, but it was upsetting to hear comments that I wasn’t swimming very well, when they didn’t know what had happened.”
She still sees a chiropractor ever month or so. “The first six months the mobility was coming back, and then I reached a plateau. Now it’s not perfect, but it’s not too bad. I can swim. I get tight, but everyone gets tight.”

The part-time professor in Carleton University’s department of systems and computer engineering swims herself with the Ravens of Carleton Swimming triathlon group and the Carleton University swim team.
With a doctorate in formal methods of software engineering, she teaches one or two programming courses a term. Her students call her Dr. Marshall or Prof. Her swimmers call her Lynn.
She usually swims in the morning before she coaches her first class at 7:30 a.m. “It works out nicely, because it’s one trip to the pool.”
Over the years she has also found time for other pastimes such as trapeze and judo.
The interest in trapeze began when in 2003 six women from the Carleton Masters team went on holiday together to the Dominican Republic. There was a flying trapeze at the resort, and Lynn was entranced.
For a year afterward she took the bus to and from Montreal on Friday nights once a month to attend the closest trapeze school to Ottawa.
She also has a black belt in judo, an interest which began in England in grad school, and ended quite a few years later after it became exhausting to do the judo after a long swim workout.
In 1999 she had another set-back, with a pinched nerve called Brachial Neuritis and couldn’t move her arm for a week. It took months to get her swimming back to normal and she had to build the muscle back up. One bicep is still smaller.
This summer she was away from swimming for three weeks with cataract surgery, and it took her six weeks to feel better in the water again.
Most of the time she loves swimming, “and other days you feel you’re flogging a dead horse.” Because she trains with younger swimmers, she is aware that at age 50 it takes her longer to recover for a tough workout session.
For her 50th birthday she joined her sister in Las Vegas. “We did so much walking that I felt a lot older than 50,” she laughs. “But with any age group competition, milestone birthdays are less traumatic. I set higher expectations for myself when I enter a new age category.”
Her own experience gives her insight into the varied motivations of the swimmers she coaches. The coaching training she learned the most from was a segment called “why different people do sports.”
Some want the team atmosphere; others need goal setting such as attendance milestones, she says. “Decide what your goals are – social, cross-training, competition in master’s swimming. People know what motivates them. I try to make it so everyone has something they can aim for. As a coach, you want your people to have stress relief and some exercise.”


A large part of sport success is scheduling, she says. “Some people are there in class all the time, some are there so rarely that I forget their names. The more regular you are with your training, the more satisfying it is. Whatever sport you’re in, find something that fits into your schedule well. If it doesn’t fit, it’s not going to happen. You have to find a way to go.”

Ottawa woman writes tribute to ‘Least-expected Heroes of the Holocaust’

By Louise Rachlis

In 1944-45, Ottawa resident Vera Gara and her parents, like many other Hungarian Jews, were rounded up by the Nazis, deported to a forestry work camp in Austria, and then taken to Bergen Belsen concentration camp, where her father died.
Now Vera has written a memoir, Least-expected Heroes of the Holocaust. It’s about her experiences as a girl in Austria and Hungary during the period of Nazi domination of Europe in which 6,000,000 Jews died, and some of the people who tried to help.
“The only reason I’m doing this is that these heroic people have to be acknowledged,” says Vera, her brown eyes flashing. “They could have shot them right then and there.”
In her book she mentions Swedish businessman Raoul Wallenberg whose heroic actions helped to save Hungarian Jews. In recognition of her work bringing Ottawa’s Raoul Wallenberg Park into being, she was awarded the Swedish Order of the Polar Star in 2004.
“Since then, thinking about my wartime experiences and Wallenberg’s heroic deeds, I became convinced that I must do something to honour the people who were not ambassadors or of other high rank,” she writes, “but who tried to help me and my parents during our awful journey in 1944–45. People in ordinary walks of life showed themselves to be extraordinary by taking risks and acting like decent human beings during those dark days. They are just as important as the heroes we read about in the history books. I cannot honour them all with parks and monuments, though I would if I could. Instead, I have written about some whose lives touched mine, to convey my gratitude.
Today, Vera still lives with her husband George in their home on Island Park Drive where they’ve been since 1975. They have two daughters, Susan and Judith, and three grandchildren, Daniel, Mara and Rebecca. Vera, 78, is a former nurse, and George, 79, was an engineer at Northern Electric, later NorTel Networks.
Twice a week for the past 30 years Vera has been a volunteer at the Civic Campus of the Ottawa Hospital.
In another book, by Ruth Latta published in 1993, The Memory of All That: Canadian Women Remember World War II, Vera was the only Jew and the only survivor included. In arranging the stories for that book, Ruth Latta started with the least horrific wartime experience and ended with what she felt was the most horrific.

“The last one,” Ruth says, “was Vera’s story.”

Decades later, Latta was honoured to play a role in “getting an important story on paper and into book form.”

At first she thought Vera should have chosen someone Jewish to help her tell her story. “I am not Jewish so she had to explain a great many aspects of her religion to me,” says Latta. “But, since her intended audience includes people from all religious and cultural backgrounds, she knew she would have to explain, so my lack of knowledge was actually an asset.”
For years, Vera’s relatives had listened to her stories and told her, “You have to write them down.”
And so she has, with the purpose of paying tribute to the ordinary people who tried to help her and her family. These “unexpected heroes” include Josef and Theresia Lagler, now deceased, and their daughter Maria (Mitzl), an Austrian farm family in Loitzendorf near the forestry camp, with whom she is still friends and speaks to regularly. Mitzl’s daughter Margit is planning to come to Ottawa for her book launch.
“Today at 79, Mitzl is still milking the cows morning and evening, and feeding the animals,” says Vera, who speaks Hungarian, German and English.
As Vera writes in her book:

Life on a farm requires an appreciation of the natural world, and a lot of hard work. The Laglers have struggled for many years to make a living on the land and I think that created in them sympathy for others struggling to survive. It was probably second nature for Mitzl and her family to help us back in 1944.
When I thanked her again for what she, her mother, and grandmother did for us, she said, “Oh, we just did what anybody else would have done.”
I said, “Pardon me, but not everybody else would have. Not everybody was decent back then. At age 12, maybe you didn’t understand what was going on. I didn’t. But I know that most people would just have gone along with the crowd.”

Vera’s positive outlook has touched many who have read advanced copies of her book. “This book blew me away with the beauty of the soul of its writer,” says Sherrill Wark of Crowe Creations who designed the book.

Part of the book chronicles Vera’s efforts over the past 30 years, going from school to school across the region to talk about her experiences. She prefers the higher grades, because their questions and better understanding. “I don’t want to scare them.”

She has had thousands of questions from hundreds of schools, including Carambeck Public School in Carleton Place where she has gone for the past 10 years.
Questions like that of a grade seven boy who asked her “what kind of facilities did you use in the cattle car when you had to go?”
She answered, “We took our little bit of food out of our bowls and used the bowls.”
On another occasion, one of the high school girls gave her a candy; “I wanted you to have something sweet.”
“I’m not emotional in the class,” says Vera. “I feel the kids don’t need more than they can take. When I go in and look at the group, I can make up my mind what I should tell them.”

In the ghetto in Szeged, Hungary, in 1944, there were 17 people in three rooms; women, men and families, she says. “It is very difficult for the kids here to understand when now we have separate bathrooms and bedrooms for everyone. They can’t imagine it, rightly so.”

There were 4,000 Jews in her town, and less than half of them came back. “In the small cities, nobody came back.”

To purchase a copy of the book, which is $15, you can e-mail Vera at vgara33@gmail.com.