“Oh the places you’ll go!” --- Dr. Seuss
This story begins with a snippet of conversation overheard at the 2015 Alumni Night. Unfortunately, it was nothing scandalous. Two attendees were simply talking about where graduates of Port Credit Secondary School are now living. In itself this might have been just mildly interesting until it became clear that PC grads are living and working all over the world. With the assistance and kind co-operation of Gary Branning, the Alumni Association’s database manager I was able to get my hands on a rather impressive list.
But to put things into perspective we first need to flash back briefly to 1919 and the founding of the school. World War I was just over and the Spanish Flu had gone round the globe killing more people than the war. In Canada only 1 in 20 adults owned a car and there was one telephone for every twenty-four families. With so few cars the road system was rather primitive and commercial air service was still in the future. Most people lived, worked and died within a relatively small travel radius, except for special events like World War I. It is interesting to ponder if the founders of the school ever thought some of Port Credit’s graduates would spread out around the world. Did they ever dream that what they set in motion would have such far reaching effects? What of those sons and daughters of P.C.S.S. who have wandered so far; do they ever think of their time at 70 Mineola Road East and how it helped them get a start in life?
Flash forward to the present day, almost a century later. According to the information I received most PC grads registered with the Alumni data base reside in Canada. That’s as to be expected. Moving south though there are a number of grads living in the USA and Mexico. In the Caribbean there are grads living in the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands. Crossing the Atlantic there are PC grads in Ireland, England, France, Germany and the Czech Republic. Continuing east into Asia we have PC alumni in Hong Kong, Korea, Thailand and Japan. Our list is rounded out with alumni in Australia, New Zealand and Saudi Arabia. Who knew? I expect a similar list compiled for Port Credit’s second centenary will contain inter-planetary addresses.
To finish up on a lighter note I’d like to ask readers of this PC Story – where is the most unusual place you’ve ever run into another PC grad? I’m not talking about massage parlours or opium dens. Let’s save those stories for another day.
Although I never lived or worked outside of Canada I did spend thirteen years teaching above the Arctic Circle. The first three years were in Cambridge Bay (Ilihakvik) on Victoria Island. You can look that up in your atlas. I know I had to in order to find out where I was going. The standing joke in Cambridge Bay was we weren’t quite at the end of the world but we could see it from there. At times in January when the sun had not re-appeared, the temperature hovered at -40 degrees and the wind chill made things feel much worse it really did seem like we were at the end of the world.
After three years of good behaviour I was able to transfer to Coppermine (Kugluktuk) on the northern coast of mainland Canada. There is no mine of any sort here. The town takes its name from its location at the mouth of the Coppermine River. It is best known for being located near the site of a massacre which took place in the eighteenth century. It was in Coppermine that I had one of those encounters of the surreal kind. The Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, in its infinite wisdom, had sent a travelling company of puppeteers on a tour of Arctic communities to entertain the Inuit with their puppet wizardry. It turned out one of the troop was named Peter Hall. This was a name that resonated with me. Peter Hall had been a student at PCSS a couple of years ahead of me and for one year had been president of the student council. This was my Stanley-Livingstone moment. I don’t actually remember much about the encounter and in a day or two he had packed up his puppets and moved on to the next community (by plane not by dog sled).
To those of you who are reading this on some foreign shore, bravo. I applaud your independence, self-reliance and sense of adventure. Wherever you are I hope your life has become everything you wished it would be. If the founders of the school could look through time I’m sure they would be your biggest supporters. You have validated everything they hoped for and everything they could possibly have imagined.
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