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Page 4, Terrace Bay-Schreiber News, Wednesday, July 3, 1985 The Terrace Bay-Schreiber News is published every Wednesday by: : Laurentian Publishing Co. Ltd., Box 579, Terrace Bay, Ontario, POT 2W0. . Telephone: (807) 825-3747. : nce Ba Souter 4 GENERAL/ADVERTISING MANAGER ................. Vivian Ludington Reni. a se ee ae ee. 5 eek Irene Folz f PRODUCTION MANAGER................. pe ec ees Mary Melo Letters irs. Ollie Champman Dear Mrs. Chapman: By now, you will have received a letter from the Honourable Walter McLean, Secretary of State for Canada, advising you of funding for activities that you are organizing to celebrate Canada's 118th birthday. Enclosed please find a cheque in the amount of $3,500 for your program and, on behalf of the On- tario Canada Day Committee, may I congratulate you and your fellow organizers for planning an excellent project and wish you every success with your event. The Ontario Committee received well over 300 application this year from all across the province. This coupled with the fact that there are many communities celebrating July 1 without support from the Canada Day grants program indicates that Canada Day has been in the past and will be an important day for many again this year. I am happy to enclose some camera-ready artwork which you can incorporate into any publicity material for your event, 'as well as a list of some suppliers of promotional material (e.g., hand flags, lapel pins, balloons and large flags). The Commit- tee has received many requests for material and sincerely regrets that, with the very limited quantities it has to distribute, it can- not fully meet every demand. One further note - We would be very interested in receiving photographs or articles of your community's festivities and ask that you send them on to us after July, perhaps with your finan- cial statement and evaluation report which must be returned by July 31 to the above address. 'Once again, good luck and happy Canada Day to you, your committee and your community: Did You Know The Schooner, Mary E. McLachlan, built in 1898, sank in 35 feet of water off the bay at Gravel River in i 9 Sincerely, November 1921? J.B. Agnew Chairman Ontario Canada Day Committee All-American hero (kind of!) I read in the newspaper last week ber McGee and Molly... The for the rest of his radio audience, but strip to the U.S. Air Force? Well, that Jack Armstrong passed away. That was a bit of a jolt for me. It had never occurred to me that Jack Armstrong might actually be alive. For real, I mean. Many years ago when I was in kneepants, I used to listen faithfully to the adventures of Jack Armstrong every Saturday night on the old Philco stand-up radio. (For all readers under thirty, I should explain that there was a time in the history of the human race when the television set was unknown. Dur- ing the Boobtubeless Era, as it's now called, one popular tribal ritual in- volved a weekly gathering of the clan around huge, ungainly, primitive forerunners of the Sony Walkman. These structures were called "wireless sets" and later "radios". Most family units had one of these icons enshrined in the living room or parlour. The structures looked somewhat like ornate, carved Pac- Man video games without the screen.) There were many programs we'd Shadow... The hilarious Fred Allen show... Foster Hewitt with Hockey Night in Canada of course... and another one -- one that should have had Foster Hewitt to announce it. It was called: "Jack Armstrong -- All- American Boy!" You didn't have to be American to enjoy the show -- just childlike. It was a show about a blonde-haired, blue- eyed, clean-minded lad with a heart of gold, whose adventure-clogged life cascaded out of the radio in half hour snippets every Saturday night. Corny? Unquestionably. Unbelievable? Absolutely. Hokey? You betcha. And every North American kid with earholes ate it up. Jack Armstrong was just so dog- gone good you see. In addition to looking right and sounding right, he was right. Always. Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy outsmarted evil geniuses, disarmed crazed killers, saved hapless maidens from earth- anakec and nrntectead emall childran I loved Jack Armstrong, All- American Boy. I'd have been proud to carry his lunchbox to school. Ah, sweet birdbrain of youth. There came a day when the awful truth hit me that there was no Jack Armstrong, just as there was no Shadow or Lone Ranger or Zorro. Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy was merely the product of some hack script writer with a peptic ulcer and a fifth of Wild Turkey in the bottom desk drawer. Just another cruel joke perpetrated by cynical adults on gulli- ble youth. Except that the Obits page of last weeks paper proves me wrong. There was a Jack Armstrong. He died last week in Laguna Miguel, California. He was a 74-year old retired U.S. Air Force colonel. He served in Pearl Harbour, was a member of The Atomic Energy Commission and was instrumental in launching the first U.S. nuclear-powered satellite. Jack Armstrong, All-American Raw indeed back when he was in college, Jack Armstrong had a roommate by the name of Samuel Gale. While Jack went into the Armed Forces, Gale signed up as a stock salesman with General Mills company. Twenty years later, Gale was a top GM ex- ecutive with the task of developing some kind of radio hero who would embody "All-American virtues" -- and hopefully, sell several tons of Wheaties. When it came time to choose a name for the new company hero, Samuel Gale cast his mind back to the quiet, straight-shooting square-jawed lad he'd shared a room with back at college. "'We'll call him 'Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy', Gale announced. And so they did -- and captured the imaginations of the youth of the nation. And not just the nation. Canadian boys were just as enthralled with Jack and his globe-trotting, adventures. As Qa matter of fact hic '*'American- more exotic to our ears. Reading about Jack Armstrong's -- I mean the real Jack Armstrong's -- death last week got me to musing about why it is Americans can serve up larger-than-life heroes out of the most unlikely batter -- and make us believe them. The real Wyatt Earp was a pimp, a cardsharp and an all- round thug. Jim Bowie was a thief and a murderer. Yet somehow America made them glamourous enough to rate their own television shows. We don't do that in Canada, of course. Our history is full of heroes and heroines but Canadians prefer to ignore them and watch The Adven- tures of Davy Crockett instead. I was reminded of that when I got to the last line of the obituary for "Jack Armstrong -- all-American boy."' The line reads: "'Mister Armstrong was born in Winnipeg. Manitoba in