Day 156 - Canada Day

Independence Day image by Watson
Media, via Flickr.com

This is Independnce Day week. Not only is Thursday Independence Day in the United States, but also today, July 1, is Canada Day, Canada's Independence Day. Where the U.S. gained independence from Great Britain through war, Canada was given its independence from Great Britain in 1867, nearly 100 years later. Some might say the colonies' actions were like those of a rebellious teenager, where Canada's actions were more like a young adult who has earned trust, and therefore independence, from parent England.

Canada was the only foreign country I had visited before my move to Iran. My grandfather had emigrated from Minnesota to Canada before Dad was born to homestead. Several of his brothers also emigrated to the area near Medicine Hat, Alberta. Grandpa Wenner returned to Minnesota but his brothers stayed in Canada. Grandpa's parents had also left Minnesota and settled in Montana and five of Grandpa's siblings also moved there. Three of Dad's siblings followed. So when Mom and Dad took us on trips to visit Dad's brothers, sister, aunt, and uncles, we usually took a side trip north, to Canada, to visit relatives there. Those were the days when citizens of Canada and the United States could cross the border without passports. Answering questions about birthplace and citizenship was all that was necessary.

A few years later, still during the time when most Americans and Canadians traveled across the border on showing a driver's license for identification, I saw the differences between the U.S. and Canada up close. One of those Canadian students of my April road trip, John, asked me to marry him, so I had a few opportunities to travel between the U.S. and Canada. I flew to Toronto several times. I drove to Canada with John after we had both attended the wedding of Gayle and Roger in Pennsylvania. And I drove into and out of Canada with John twice. The contrast between the immigration officers representing the U.S. and Canada on those trips was remarkable,

Canadian flag image by Matzuda, via Flickr.com

I never encountered problems when I flew or drove to Canada. Even my last trip by car, the week before Christmas, when I was bringing a number of presents for John, his parents, his grandparents, and his brothers with me, I was asked few questions, I answered them, and I was welcomed into Canada. But things were never quite so simple on the way back into the U.S.

The first time I flew out of Toronto was after John and I had driven from Pennsylvania to Toronto. Toronto was one of the few airports at the time where U.S. Immigration and Customs officials were stationed outside of the U.S. Passengers flying out of Toronto had to clear U.S. Customs and Immigration before even getting onto the plane. I had no problems with Customs, but when I got to the Immigration desk, I was surprised by the agent's questions and attitude. Perhaps what was suspicious was that I was traveling from Canada to the U.S. on a one-way ticket, not a round-trip ticket originating from the U.S. Or perhaps it was that since I had been living and traveling overseas for so many years it was automatic for me to hand over my passport when asked for identification. Most Americans would have handed the agent a driver's license.

After handing my passport to the agent, he asked me where I was born, where I lived, how I had gotten into Canada, and maybe a few other questions. Then he asked me to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Now I had no objections to reciting it then, and I have none now, but it had been many years since I had recited those words, and I don't think I had ever had to say them alone. In the past, I had had at least a classroom full of other students around me as I spoke those words.

So I started. "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Is that enough?" I asked.

"No," he replied.

"I can't remember how the next line goes," I said.

He said, "And to the Republic..." and he paused, looking at me with expectation in his eyes.

"...for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

He stamped my boarding pass, handed it and my passport back to me, and motioned for me to continue. No "Welcome to America." Just a head gesture to indicate I should move on.

The next time I went to Canada, I flew in, but John and I drove out. When we reached the border this time, one of the questions asked was where we were born. For me, that was not so troublesome. "Fargo, ND," I replied. But for John, it was complicated. "Yugoslavia," he said. The agent then asked us to pull John's car over to a covered area to one side of the border inspection station. Once there, other agents asked us to get out of the car and give them our identification. I hadn't learned my lesson yet, so again I handed the agent my passport.

This passport was a normal tourist passport with 24 pages in it, but all 24 pages had been filled with entry, exit, and residence permits for my two years in Iran, my year in Romania, and all my travels in between. As a result, I had had to have extension pages added. These pages were folded into the passport like an accordion. When the last extension page was tugged on, the full set of 24 extension pages pulled out, like a trick done by a sleight-of-hand card dealer. Once the agent did that, he walked away from me and to a desk, picked up the phone receiver and started dialing.

At that point, other agents had removed everything from the trunk of John's car and were about to begin removing the side panel of the passenger door. I walked to the desk where the agent with my passport was sitting and explained to him that I had so many stamps in my passport because I was a teacher of English as a Second Language and that I had just returned from Romania where I taught on a Fulbright fellowship at one of the Universities. I also explained that John and I had met there while he had been a graduate student of ethnomusicology in Romania.

I will never know if he had already gotten information from whoever was at the end of the phone or if my explanation was somehow so overwhelmingly helpful that he was convinced John and I were not illegal immigrants, drug smugglers, Serbian terrorists, or simple identity thieves. But he did hang up as I finished my explanation, and he shouted over at the guy with the tools ready to take John's car apart that he could stop now. The agents put our bags back into the car and let us drive away.

Again, I don't think there was any "Welcome home."

So to all my Canadian friends, Happy Canada Day. Your country always made me feel welcome. I hope mine has done the same for you.

Day 14 - Paperclips

Image by David Masters via Flickr                

One thing I have learned from Toastmasters is that even the most commonplace items can provide topics for interesting speeches. One of the earliest Table Topics questions I observed involved volunteers being handed a variety of common office items with instructions to describe how and why they came to invent the items.  The responses were inventive and creative, but they provided just a taste of the surprising, even fascinating facts, and some myths, that make up the story of the common paperclip.

The paperclip's history begins with the first patent being awarded to Samuel B. Fay in the United States in 1867.  That design was intended to attach labels to garments and fabric.  Just 10 years later, in 1877, Erlman J. Wright patented the first version explicitly intended to clip sheets of paper together.  But neither of these patents were for the design we know of as the Gem paperclip.  That design was never patented, which contributes to a long-standing myth that the first paperclip was invented and produced in Norway.  Norwegian Johan Vaaler patented his design in both Germany and the United States in 1901.  

Vaaler paperclip design from Wikipedia

The myth of the Norwegian origin of the paperclip really gained ground after World War II.   When the Germans prohibited wearing pins including the Norwegian flag or insignias or portraits of the king, the Norwegians began to wear paperclips on their lapels as a symbol of their solidarity against the Nazis.

Sandvika Norway paper clip via
Wikipedia

Never mind that Johan Vaaler’s design wasn’t very practical – it consisted of only one loop, not the double loop that we know.  The coincidence of the myth of the Norwegian origin and the fact of the Norwegians wearing paperclips during the war led to the Norwegians erecting a large model of the Gem clip in Sandvika, Norway several years after the end of World War II.

In 1998, the myth of the Norwegian origin of the paperclip was still prevalent, along with the embellishment which transformed the tale of the lapel paperclip from a symbol of resistance against the Nazis to a symbol of solidarity with the Jews.  When students at Whitwell Middle School in Whitwell, TN, asked their teacher if they could collect something as part of their unit on the Holocaust to get a concrete idea of just how big the number six million is, they discovered the paperclip’s myths and set the goal of collecting six million.

By 2001, the eighth graders had collected not six, but 30 million paper clips.  They had received and cataloged 30,000 letters about their project.  And they had received a donation of a box car that had been used to transport Jews, gypsies, and others considered undesirable by the Nazis, to concentration camps.  Transporting the box car included crossing the Atlantic on the chartered Norwegian freighter “MS Blue Sky,” continuing the myth of the Norwegian connection.  The box car now forms the centerpiece of the Children’s Holocaust Memorial.  The documentary “Paper Clips” retells the whole story.

A footnote, related to World War II but not included in the Whitwell Middle School Paper Clip Project, is that another post-World War II effort, code-named “Project Paperclip,” resulted in the immigration of more than 700 German scientists into the United States, including Werner von Braun and 125 rocket scientists who contributed significantly to the development of the NASA space program in the 1950s and 1960s.

Image by kylemac via Flickr

The final example of the fascination that can come with paperclips began in 2005 when Canadian Kyle MacDonald posted an offer on Craig’s list to trade a red paper clip for anything of greater value that he could continue to trade, with the goal of bartering his way to home ownership.  One year and one day later, after 14 trades, he had his house – in a small town in Saskatchewan.

The trade that propelled the bartering to a higher level for Kyle was the opportunity to spend half a day with Alice Cooper.  And the trivia highlight for me in all of this is that before moving to his next trade, Kyle was asked to join Cooper on tour in – of all places – Fargo, ND.

As I think back to that Table Topics exercise, I can’t recall a more imaginative response than the actual story I discovered through research about the humble paperclip.  I hope that I have provided you with some entertainment, along with the lesson that there is no subject is too humble to be considered as a topic of a Toastmasters speech.