For St. John’s Schools the past two years have been a time of escalating publicity, some bad, most good, but plentiful enough to send a story a about the schools into scores of Canadian and American newspapers, one national TV program and, most recently, towards the international edition of the Reader’s Digest.

What began the boom was the publication by St. John’s two years ago of a 40 page teacher recruiting booklet called “Men Wanted” that was sent to a dozen Canadian newspapers. Two of them, the Victoria times and the Ottawa Journal, did stories on the place.

The story in the Journal was spotted by Weekend Magazine which then sent a reporter and photographer west for a few days on a visit.

To the photographer, Britisher Bruce Moss, St. John’s brought on nostalgia, taking him back to his own school days in England. Nearly all the pictures he took showed lively, happy youngsters, all smiles, all intensely occupied, all warmly recommending St. John’s.

To reporter James Quigg, St. John’s was Buchenwald of the Prairies, a sinister reassertion of medieval authoritarianism, hidden in the remote reaches of the West and ruled by a cold, Squeers-type despot named Wiens who kept “a large brown dog” in his office.** It was apparently a reference to Ivor, the school’s pet mongrel.

Frank & Ivor

In Quigg’s concoction of innuendoes, half truths and no truths at all, presented to 2.25 million readers of Weekend Magazine and accompanied, bewilderingly, by Moss’s grinning photographs (as if all the inmates of Buchenwald were advertising Quest toothpaste), St. John’s concluded that it had met its doom. Not at all. The story set off such a demand for admissions as the school had never seen. More than 200 parents applied within 48 hours of the story’s appearance. When the professionally indignant masters of the nation’s hottest radio shows took hold of it and tried furthering the expose, the same backfiring occurred. For every person horrified by the place, ten tried to send sons to it. As the Quigg story moved through its circuit of American Sunday supplements, the same reaction spread southward. The Alberta finance campaign, recently launched, demonstrated an immediate lift in interest. Donations to the Selkirk school picked up.

Only once was the school at all threatened. A lady faculty member from the University of Toronto wrote to Archbishop H.H Clark demanding the place be closed. The “academic community” was disturbed, she said. The school offered to pay her way west to see the school for herself and thereby provide the academic community with information more unimpeachable than that of a rotogravure supplement. She said she was too busy. That ended that.

Meanwhile the Ugly Canadian himself was flown to New York by the CBS to appear on a show called, To Tell the Truth, and let a panel of experts decide whether it was he or one of two other men that was the real Frank Wiens. They picked the wrong man, choosing instead one of the alternates, a New York cab driver, and Mr. Wiens’s $500 went to the school’s capital fund.

Then too, the Quigg story had not gone unobserved by the CTV network and its Private Eye show. It was faced as usual, with the task of finding seven or eight scandals to expose as Sunday entertainment for Canadians. In an otherwise disturbingly barren week, St. John’s appeared as manna from the heavens. This, however, the school refused to buy. As a provender for the national appetite for righteous indignation St. John’s had done its share.

Meanwhile, at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation the thought occurred that the Quigg expose might not only be exaggerated but might even have concealed a genuinely positive contribution to Canadian education. The producers of the show, This Land of Ours, made further inquiries, and sent a research man, Pat Patterson, who lived at St. John’s for a week, spent hours talking to the boys, and came to like the place. Several weeks later the entire This Land of Ours crew arrived and John Lackie and John Foster produced a half hour documentary on St. John’s. Their show, which depicted much more of St. John’s than had Weekend, has been on the network four times, and brought much support for the school.

All these developments had been watched carefully by Dave MacDonald, Canadian correspondent for the international edition of Reader’s Digest, who then spent a week a St. John’s last fall. His story is scheduled to appear quite soon.

Withal, Selkirk’s cold despot remains wary of newspapermen. “Whenever one of them shows up,” says Frank Wiens, “I tell Ivor to get out of my office and go sleep somewhere else.”

** Reminiscent of Roosevelt’s famous defense of Falla, Wiens later commented: “I didn’t care so much what he said about me, and the school, and the parents, and the boys. But when he started in on Ivor, who has few teeth left and has never so much as snared at anybody, that was going too far.” However, Ivor, it is true has an unfortunate smile in which he bares his teeth and wags his tail. He doesn’t mean any harm by this. He’s only trying to be hospitable. Quigg reacted badly to Ivor.

Warner Bridge on the Clearwater

An alumni canoe trip, along the Clearwater River and up the Methye Portage, is being planned for August 2010. The trip is scheduled to begin on August 21st at the Warner Bridge (highway #955 -  65km north of La Loche) on the Clearwater River, and finish in La Loche on August 28th. This will be a tandem canoe trip.

The schedule is as follows:

Meet @ the school on August 20th between 1 – 3 pm. Travel to Meadowlake, SK & overnight.

August 21st – Travel to Warner Bridge. The trip will take seven days and finish on August 28th in La Loche. There will be a travel day back to Edmonton.

Methye Portage

If you are interested in participating in this trip contact Blaine Thauberger at the school number – extension 104 or dynevor@sjsa.ab.ca

Please note: The sign up deadline is March 31st. There is a required deposit of $100 (non-refundable). As well, by June 30th another $300 will be required. Be prepared to

Ah, the drying of wet socks!

bring cash to cover travel expenses. Also, if the water levels are low, tracking and lining will be required.

If you are feeling nostalgic – this is the opportunity for you. The Methye Portage awaits!

Battle of Maldon the Year 991

We have had many requests for copies of the Green Literature Book. Plans are in the works for a limited reproduction – but here is one of the favourite poems from the book.

Battle of Maldon001.pdf – Google Docs.

SJSA Alumni with Heath

On February 14, 2010 Heath Foster (A85) married Lisa Sorokan  in Calgary. Present were many alumni to share in this very special day; best man Leon Perrier (AG’86), groomsman Floyd Houle (AG’86), groomsman Michael Jaskiw (AG’98) and groomsman Keith McKay (MG’69,AS forever).

Other alumni in attendance were,  Michael Corra (AG’86), Jay Berg (AG’98) and all the way from Mexico Rodrigo Anaya (A’95). The officiating minister was our former school chaplain Rev. Keith Marsh.

There was a definite Saint John’s flare throughout the wedding, with the hymn I Feel the Winds of God Today sung during the ceremony. As well, the bride was given an honorary laundry number (#860A) and was asked to make the three promises of the homme du nord – along with the customary dram of rum.

It was a wonderful wedding and an honour to have shared this special day with Lisa and Heath.

(article from the 1970-1971 Annual Report for Saint John’s School of Alberta)

Honey Production in 1971

Apris Mellifera in its uncounted thousands has provided the base for a program at St. John’s of Alberta which enabled students to gain some special knowledge and experience and also returned a cash profit to the school.

For those who wonder, that means bees. They produced 52,000 pounds of honey which students processed, packaged, promoted and sold door-to-door at a net profit of about $5,000 last year.

The boys started the year with 100 hives, but the process of extracting the honey from the combs proved both time-consuming and wasteful. Therefore the honey is now bought in bulk from neighbouring farmer Don Scheideman and others filtered, bottled and labeled by the boys. Mr. Scheideman bought the school’s hives and extracting equipment.

In the first part of the 1970-71 year, sales were made by small groups of students in Edmonton each day, and by Christmas had reached 20,000 pound for $10,000. After the holiday the program of one-day sales blitzes in Edmonton, Calgary, Re Deer and Saskatoon sold 32,000 pounds for $16,000.

All students took part in these and for some reason the Grade 8 classes regularly outsold the higher grades. Salesman of the year was Robert Fogg, 14, of Winnipeg, far outstripping everyone else. He romped ahead with a record $144.50 in sales in a single day.

1980 Graduating Class

Two of our anniversary classes are planning re-unions for this summer. The Class of 1980 is expecting to attend the 100th Anniversary celebrations for our chapel on June 5th. (They are only a little younger than the chapel they helped to reconstruct!)

Also, the class of 2000 is making plans for their ten year anniversary to take place  some time in the summer.

2000 Graduating Class

Details for these are not available at this time. However, if you are one of the grads from these two years – get in touch with your classmates – plans are in the works and they are looking for you.

Grads from the classes of 1970 and 1990 where are you? Any plans to get together? Let us know if we can be of any help.

Recruiting Pamphet

In 1956, as a result of a frustration with the way society was moving toward more secular attitudes, Ted Byfield and Frank Wiens began a Sunday school program for boys who sang in the choir at St. John’s Cathedral church in Winnipeg. The Sunday school program did not work – irregular attendance, amateurs teaching a subject that would tax professionals, teachers constantly changing, facilities bad – but beneath all this was what they felt was the true reason for the failure – children were not being taught to think. The habit of reasoning from premise to conclusion had played little part in their education. Also, the new generation lacked some old instincts; to Christians, life is a pilgrimage, an adventure, a voyage into distant lands with great dangers, arduous difficulties and indescribable rewards. But their students had been somehow trained to believe that the good life consisted of social security, physical comfort and physio-psychological thrill.

Part-time School 1961

What was required to remedy this was a new kind of school, a residential school, a school that in the present environment would appear as a very strange place. Boys would not so much attend it, as live it. They must begin with the feeling of belonging to it, and they must end with the feeling that it belongs to them.

It must restore the traditional values – the value of truth, the value of work, the value of individual freedom, the value of laughter and the value of sacrifice. To do this it must not only have rules and back them up. It must also have a sense of proportion too. It must teach men to think – not the canned, pre-digested “answers that get the marks”, but the genuine premise-to-conclusion reasoning that secures conviction and nerves decision.

They believed that to accomplish this they must resume the task of teaching history, the students must once more know the rigours and the poetry of life outdoors, and they must begin the long journey towards knowing God. All these things they must take with them when they leave the school.

St. John's Cathedral Choir

They began a part-time school and eventually moved to a full time residential school (1962). All this required money – using the model of church run schools they quickly realized that while in church schools the priests and nuns were paid only living costs, these men had families, so this set up would not work. Or would it? The five original staff members agreed that perhaps it could work – why couldn’t married and single people, laymen and clergy, form a partnership, something like a religious order, provide homes for families and pay one another only essential living expenses and an income of $1 a day for spending money? Thus was formed the “Dynevor Society” – later re-named the Company of the Cross.

The Company was originally formed to address a financial problem, how could the group run a Christian school, teach boys the values they saw missing in society and share in a life together in community? The Company of the Cross addressed these problems.

SJSA Early Years003.pdf – Google Docs.

Stephen King (SJCBS ‘71?) has been accepted into the Centurion 2010 Program. Here is a link to the program

Neil Rabjohn (SJSA ‘03) is taking on a project that surely reflects the Saint John’s spirit. He will be joining 3 other riders in a journey from London, UK to Turkey on a homemade bikecar!  Check on the site for videos, to join or to donate

Chris Petrie (SJSA ‘01) will be continuing his journey by canoe from Edmonton to Churchill, Manitoba. Last summer Chris and a friend set out on this journey, but were not able to complete the trip. They are planning to finish this summer. For pictures and information on the trip check out their website.