Many times throughout my career I have had the opportunity to salute our armed forces. One of those came in 2001 while marking Remembrance Day as chancellor of the University of Guelph at the school’s beautiful War Memorial Hall. It was just two months after the devastating terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001. “Together, we will battle against narrow perspectives, ignorance, and racism,” I said in my address. “Despite history’s searing lessons, our world is still torn by strife and anguish. September’s tragic and horrific attacks in New York City have again brought the shadow of war to our doorsteps. Out of the horror of war can come peace, and it is for peace that we must strive. We shall not forget.”
I noted the “terrible toll of suffering and sacrifice” that two world wars had exacted, and said that veterans must not be forgotten. “Their blood and tears were the awful price for the peace, comfort, and democracy we enjoy. The bullets that scarred the Earth, that churned fields into muddy graves and hammered cities into rubble tombs, also forever scarred our collective soul.” I called the campus hall and its chapel “a lasting memorial to the generations of Guelph students, faculty, and staff who perished in the First and Second World Wars. They are also memorials to all Canadians caught up in these wars and the many conflicts since.”
During my tenure as lieutenant-governor, I attended Toronto’s old city hall for Remembrance Day services, and at those times I reflected on my days as a corporal in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War, remembering my comrades and those who had paid the ultimate price. I knew many who didn’t make it back. “Whether it’s one, or 101, that’s not the point,” I told the Toronto Star. “The fact is they went to serve, they went to do their best in order to try to preserve democracy and freedom, so that I, and so that you, could be free to worship, free to think, free to move. We should never forget. The torch of the past should be held high.”
This was taken at a reunion of my air force colleagues in Hamilton. Good friend Charlie Chartrand is on my right.
On VE-Day, I was in Vancouver. I had served 2 years and 302 days in the air force, and that time was certainly well spent. The air force experience taught me the value of self-respect, discipline, and confidence, and those are elements that have served me well throughout my life. They apply to all areas, whether the air force, the law, or politics.
After the war, those who were discharged were given grants to be used for housing or education. For me, that was a fairly easy decision, given the message my mother had been pounding into my head since I was a young child. As soon as I received my honourable discharge from the air force, I headed straight back to Hamilton and Yvonne. Aside from pursuing Yvonne, my main priority was to complete the courses I needed to go to university. I was going to go back to school, this little black boy.
CHAPTER 3
The Call of Higher Learning
After I settled into my university studies, I arranged for my mother to return to Canada from New York. She was quite a classy person, and one of the best examples of that is the fact that I can’t recall her ever putting down or insulting my father, despite the fact he had cheated on her in the worst way and was the cause of the disintegration of their marriage. I had experienced the impact of his indiscretion, too. I watched the pain and suffering and indignities my mother faced. I ended up having almost no connection to my kid brother. I swore that I would never let such a thing happen in my marriage. I could see how it could destroy a family.
There was a good deal of pain still ahead. My mom started suffering pre-senile dementia shortly after coming to Hamilton, and she slowly began losing track of everything, including the people around her. Once another patient in the hospital came to me and said, “Do you really want to know what your mother looks like?” She lifted the covers to reveal my mother was now barely skin and bones. It was shocking to see her wasting away and covered in bruises and bedsores. It was with so much optimism that my mom and I were originally reunited in Hamilton, but unfortunately there was little joy to share after her return.
On one occasion, I went to see her and she screamed at me, “Get away from me. You are not getting into my bed tonight. Get away from me. Get away.” I was shocked and for a moment couldn’t figure out what was going on. She had never talked to me like that. Then I realized she had confused me with my dad. The incident made me realize the depth her illness and her suffering and the hurt that she had endured and held inside all those years.
In time, the hospital contacted me to tell me she had died, and I was deeply hurt, but not surprised, at the news. I was relieved that her suffering had been eased. My mother died in the Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital on my twenty-sixth birthday, January 21, 1948. She was not yet fortynine years old.
My brother Hughie, along with my mother and Hughie’s first wife, Lil Allen. Hughie was married three times.
When I look back now and see what she had to go through, courageously leaving her marriage and setting out on her own, it amazes me. She’s been my source of strength, of confidence. In a 1988 research paper by Edsel Shreve and Darren Jack at the University of Western Ontario, when I was lieutenant-governor, I described my mother this way: “She was the one that encouraged me to go to school. She was the one that indicated to me that being black you had to excel and reach for excellence at all times; you had to be two or three times as good. I’ve never forgotten that trait, especially with respect to school. I accepted what she said and as a result of that I graduated from McMaster, I became a lawyer and all of that has helped me to reach this position. To try my best to play a role in the community in several ways … but basically it has been my mother who put the seed in my mind about education.”
My dad’s later years were equally grim. For the longest time, he remained bitter over the breakup of our family, actually blaming my mother for what he called “the Alexander family troubles.” While I was prepared to fight for him — as in the time I went after Wilfred the boxer with a switchblade — I can’t say my father and I were very close. He and I got on as well as could be expected, given the circumstances, and I know he was proud of me when I was in the air force. That source of pride was twofold — first, that I was in such a highly respected uniform, and second, that I advanced through the ranks to become a corporal. In my service of Queen and country, as far as he was concerned, I had done the Alexander name proud.
I paid a visit to my mother’s gravesite shortly after she passed away. We were very close.
His pride in the Alexander name was bolstered again when I headed off to McMaster, and when I graduated, he attended my convocation. He appreciated how rare it was for a young black man at that time to achieve a university education. Regardless of our difficulties in the past, I felt we had begun to make strides in rebuilding our relationship. Then, as happened with my mother, he didn’t stick around.
He had finally cut through his walls of denial and admitted he was to blame for his marriage ending. I think the realization of this, the coming to grips with that truth, was just too much for him to bear. He had kept a lot of his own suffering inside over the years after my mom’s departure, and it had left him mentally unstable. When he went to her funeral and realized she was dead — that was when, finally, like a slap in the face, he came to terms with his guilt. After that, he could never overcome it. In despair, he took his own life. He hanged himself with his belt in the old asylum at 999 Queen Street West in Toronto a week before Christmas 1951. He was fifty-nine years old.
Truth be told, I always realized in the back of my mind that suicide was a possibility for him. Once, I came home when he wasn’t expecting me and as I came up the stairs I saw him standing in front of the bathroom mirror with a razor blade in one hand and his penis