folio : Barry McKinnon(1944-2023)
AMemoir of Barry Benjamin McKinnon
Therewas this kid in band.
Therewas this kid in band. His overall appearance was that of a skinny, sort ofbeatnik type, who wore a V-neck sweater without a shirt under it. His nicknamewas Maynard after Maynard G. Krebs the beatnik sidekick to Dobie Gillis in apopular TV show that ran from 1959-1963. Coincidentally, these were the verysame years that Barry Benjamin McKinnon went to our high school in Calgary,Alberta, Central Collegiate Institute.
Ofcourse, I had known of him before hewas in the school band in grade twelve. Everyone knew everyone in our school.There were only about five hundred students at Central…five classrooms in eachof grades ten to twelve. CCI was built in 1908. Standing on the corner ofeighth street and twelfth avenue southwest, the old school rises three storieshigh in a classic sandstone castle-like structure complete with turrets,flagpoles and cupolas.
Thetop academic high school in Alberta, CCI typically matriculated eighty fivepercent of its graduates who went on to universities in Canada and in theUnited States. Known among its student body as “Little Israel”, Centralenrolled one of every six students from the Jewish community. Kids from theother high schools in Calgary often talked about their downtown rival as theschool “where all the smart kids and Jews went”.
BarryBenjamin McKinnon was neither academically smart nor Jewish. But he was unique.Barry developed a latent talent for drumming, specifically jazz drumming. And,again in grade twelve, he began to write poetry. These two loves – music andpoetry – were to be the driving forces of his creative life. Here is his gradetwelve high school yearbook picture:
Barrycame from an old farm family. The McKinnons on his father’s side came fromCarsland east of Calgary along the Bow River and the Daltons on his mother’sside from Delia farther west. He grew up in the old Calgary neighborhood ofBankview, a few blocks southwest of CCI. His father was a master carpenter, andhis mother ran a small lunch counter. All the family smoked including the dad,Benny; the mom, Viv; the sons Barry and his younger brother Bryan. Even the dogPogo smoked. The McKinnon house was littered with big round ashtray full ofBuckingham, Sportsman and Rothman butts. The doghouse outside had its ownlittle ashtray full of half-smoked Black Cat cigarettes.
Barrybegan high school as a frat boy. His fraternity, QRA, or “Queen’s RoyalAssholes” included some strange guys: the hood-like Tony Pike; the alcoholicTerry Dial; the intellectuals Gary Bird and Barry Thompson. But Maynard droppedout of frat activities by his third year. He started going out with Kelly vanRaalte who was president of her sorority and of Y- Teen, the high school YWCA.Kelly wore wool skirts and tight black turtleneck sweaters with black tightsand loafers, a perfect match for Maynard’s beatnik outfits. He started to chumaround with another jazz drummer, Doug Harding, also a reformed frat boy, whowas enthralled by the Jack Kerouac-Darma Bums-On the Road lifestyle thenmimicked by many nonconformist youths in North America.
Barryin grade eleven (third row, fourth from the right)
Likemany high schools, CCI was socially stratified. At the top were the frat boysand sorority sisters. Usually coming from well to do homes in the nearbyneighborhoods of Mount Royal, Scarborough and Elbow Park, these kids had cars,money and good looks. They filled out the cheerleading squad, fashion shows,the star positions on the football and basketball teams.
Nextcame the brains. The highest mark gatherers were rarely in the frat/sororitygroup but were acknowledged academic leaders in a school that prided itself onbeing the best academic high school in the province. Segregated into the honourroom, the brains studied hard but were often editors of the Analecta yearbook,the school paper The Weeper, and active in the French club, Hi Y, the student’scouncil and extra curricular organizations.
Belowthe frat/sorority and brains levels were the great middle ranks of justordinary kids whose average marks were below seventy five percent and whoseparents were not particularly rich. They often came from the less wealthyneighbourhoods, didn’t own cars, were active in sports and school clubs, anddidn’t get into trouble or drink or smoke.
Underthat strata were the bad boys. In the late fifties, there was a gang at Centralcalled “The Terrible Twelve” which gained such notoriety that they made theCanadian edition of Time magazine. In our time in the late fifties and earlysixties, the rogue elements tended to all be members of BITOA or “Booze is theOnly Answer”, an actual American organization parodying Alcoholics Anonymous.
Thechapter members at CCI were all in grade twelve, seventeen or eighteen yearsold, and came from middle- and high-income homes. They included the son of aConservative MP, the son of a United Church minister, the son of the HBC storemanager, the son of a lawyer and several others from respectable homes in MountRoyal and Scarborough. Greatest of all BITOA escapades was the desecration ofthe school during the 1962 graduation dance. But that is another story.
Underthe BITOA level, existed the nerds or as they are known today, the geeks.Before personal computers, the nerds carried slide rules and leatherbriefcases. They all wore black horn-rimmed glasses (often held together by aband aid). They tended to have bad sets of facial zits, were invariably eitherreal short or gangly tall, and never went out with girls. Even their surnameswere nerdish……Piffer, Slunt, Bohannan and Drinkwater.
Butthe last social level was clearly exposed on a bulletin board outside theprincipal’s office after each set of major exams. All five hundred students hadtheir percentage averages listed beside their names for all the world to seebeginning with the brains who were at eighty percent or higher and separatedfrom the rest by a thick blue line. These brilliant academics were placed onthe “The Honour Roll”. An equally thick and tragic red line delineated thefifty per cent cut off. Those who fell below a fifty per cent average wereofficially on “The Laggard List”. Usually about ten percent of all studentsfell into this humiliating category which everyone in the school could see.
Andthere among the dummies was listed the name Barry McKinnon.
Hiswife Joy in later years used to say that “Barry was the dumbest kid inCentral”. That was not true. There were a few other names below his, but notmany. In grade twelve, Barry got the lowest mark in his latin class. He couldnot pass algebra or physics and had difficulty with biology. Why was thisunique, nonconformist poet and jazz drummer so terrible at academic subjects?
Ina nutshell, he couldn’t see the blackboard. He had poor long-distance vision.Barry usually sat in the last row in the classroom. He squinted at mathequations, biology charts, latin verb conjugations and the solutions to physicsproblems. All to no avail. And though hetried to study at home, there was always the attractive magnet of a TV upstairs where Benny, Viv, Bryan (who went to a non-academic high school), sisterLina and the dog Poko sat night after night in a thick haze of cigarette smokewatching sit coms and westerns. Unfortunately, his parents never got his eyestested until he flunked out of Central after having to repeat his grade twelve.He struggled just to get the High School Diploma let alone be granted theSenior Matriculation certificate which would have been his passport into aCanadian university.
Turningaway from his frat brothers, uninterested in sports, a non-participant inschool- sponsored extra- curricular activities, and publicly placed in theacademic stocks, Barry withdrew into his own world of jazz and poetry. Hebecame Central’s first beatnik. And that was both his academic downfall and histriumphant entry into another world of music and writing.
Barryat age seventeen and eighteen weighed about one hundred and twenty poundsdripping wet. Like all Central boys, he wore his hair short and brushedforward. Small boned to begin with, he slouched along in a self-consciousstoop. There were several other boys who shared the same light weight andround-shouldered look. The school nursein grade twelve gave all the students physical examinations. She commented thathe was underweight and asked if it bothered him. He replied that severalstudents had turned this around by forming “The Concave Chest and UnderweightClub”. She thought that to be excellent therapy. A half dozen skinny boys andone girl had formed the CCUC which prided its members on having small wristsand ankles and a concave chest.
Afterrepeating his grade twelve at CCI, and wearing his new prescription glasses,Barry did two years of an Arts program at Mount Royal College in Calgary andthen went to Sir George Williams University for his BA. He received an MA increative writing from UBC and taught communications for almost four decades atthe College of New Caledonia in Prince George BC. He was awarded an honoraryPhD from the University of Northern British Columbia.
BarryMcKinnon turned seventy-nine on October 13, 2023. He passed away after a briefillness on October 30, 2023.
Therewas this kid in band.
Brian Hiram Coulter was born in Calgary in 1945and attended Central Collegiate Institute from 1959 to 1962.
He received an Honours B.A.in economics and politics fromthe University of Alberta in 1966. He went on to graduate studies at thePennsylvania State University and the University of Waterloo. He received hisMastersdegree from the University of Calgary.
He served as Special Assistant to the Premier of Saskatchewan from1971 to 1975. Following several years with the Potash Corporation ofSaskatchewan, he taught business and economics for twenty-five years atthe University of the Fraser Valley.
Retired, Brian returned to Calgary to be with his two daughtersand five grandchildren.
He became a friend of Barry McKinnon in the early sixties in highschool. Barry was the best man at Brian's wedding. Brian introduced Barry toJoyand they have all remained friends ever since.
