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A fine choice for COY
?If you attended the Canada Day festivities in Elgin Park July 1, you may already know that one of the Cosmos’ finest, Ted Barris, was chosen as Uxbridge’s Citizen of the Year. He was named to that honour by our competitor, the Uxbridge Times-Journal, and we’ll say more about that in a moment. You can see a photo of Ted with the dignitaries who paid tribute to him on that day on page 6 (a photo taken by his own proud daughter Quenby), and adjoining this column, you can see our cartoonist John Wood’s own take on the happy event.
We’d like to extend a tip of the hat to the men and women of the Uxbridge Lions Club, who nominated Ted for the title. They could not possibly have made a finer choice. Anyone who has lived in Uxbridge for even the briefest time knows that whenever any charitable organization needs an MC for an event, they usually make the silky-voiced Theodore Barris their first choice, and unless he’s off somewhere else in the country speaking to a veteran’s organization or group of young journalists. he’s almost certain to say yes to that request.
What you may not know is that Ted takes these MCing gigs very seriously. He just doesn’t show up on the night and speak from crib notes handed to him by the sponsoring group. If he spends two hours at the event, he’ll easily spend three times that long in research and preparation. And of course, he charges nothing for his time.
As much as he is the embodiment of community spirit at home, Ted is a giant Uxbridge booster when he travels. He loves this town, and tells everybody why. And as much as he’s a great citizen of Uxbridge, he would be an equally fine Citizen of the Year for Canada. His raising of the awareness of Canada’s military history, and the untold stories of veterans, makes him a legendary figure in Legions from sea to sea.
We at this newspaper have many special reasons for loving Mr. Barris, not the least because very probably the Cosmos would not have been born, and would not have survived, without him. He is the only writer to have contributed to every single one of our 245 issues (how about that, eh?), but before that, he was one of the very first to come on board with our dream of a community-owned newspaper, and his participation gave us an instant legitimacy in the eyes of our readers. Many other excellent writers have joined us since, including journalists of some repute, and we suspect that one of the reasons they share their words with us, is because they share these pages with Ted.
In the article in the Times-Journal reporting on Ted’s choice as Citizen of the Year, there is no mention of his connection with the Cosmos or of the Barris Beat, which Ted has written for more than two decades, including several years in their own paper. That’s fine, but we would like to thank the powers-that-be at the TJ for their community spirit in recognizing Ted’s contribution in spite of his status with their competitor. It would have been easy for them to silently file away the Lions’ nomination, and we suspect Ted himself might have been a little surprised that they didn’t. But they put aside the business rivalry in favour of recognizing Ted’s truly amazing contributions to life in Uxbridge, their home as much as ours.
So we applaud them for that, and we applaud Ted Barris for being just about the best example of a good citizen that any lucky community could possibly have.
