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W.O. Trivia

  • There are several reasons why William Ormond - W.O. - Mitchell, (1914 to 1998) stands among the giants of Canadian literature.  
  • He enjoyed rightful and undisputed standing as the author of the bestselling novel in Canada, Who has seen the Wind, the one that wrapped the mysteries of life within a prairie boyhood  and gave him the status of successful author at 33-years of age thus providing him with the platform for a half century.
  • Its sales were approaching the million mark before his passing and had displaced the previous Canadian title holder, Maria Chapdelaine, a novel set in French Canada and written the year before Mitchell’s birth.
  •  Second, Mitchell is important for us all because he profoundly influenced a generation of other Canadian authors as a teacher and lecturer at many levels including as a Writer in Residence at Trent University, the University of Calgary, the University of Alberta,  the University of Toronto’s Massey College, the University of Windsor, and the Banff Centre.   He studied at the UofA and the University of Manitoba.
  • He also mentored others outside of formal settings as unofficial editor and mentor, encouraging many from his time as Literary Editor for MacLean’s magazine.  Mitchell has been credited with “discovering” internationally acclaimed writers like Ray Bradbury and fellow Leacock Medal winners Farley Mowat and Ernest Buckler
  •  “Farley could have been a lot greater than he is ... ,” Mitchell said in a 1980 interview. [i]
  • Finally, as reflected in his Leacock Medal Winning books, Jake and the Kid, and According to Jake and the Kid, Mitchell was an effective and widely appreciated performer communicator on radio, television and stage whose public persona was firmly intertwined with that of his characters, notably the wise old hired hand Jake Strumper.

  • Mitchell said the writer who had the greatest influence on him as a writer was Virginia Woolf.
  • He was not an unqualified admirer of Stephen Leacock, once calling him “a little slapstick ... broad and exaggerated,” following a formula of “all the New Yorker things.”  However, he did add “I’d rank him very high.”

  • Mitchell’s son Ormond and Ormond’s wife Barbara were both literary scholars who produced a well reviewed and uniquely intimate biography of W.O. in two volumes: The Life of W.O. Mitchell, Beginnings to Who has seen the Wind, 1914 to 1947, and The of W.O. Mitchell, The years of Fame, 1948-1998.

Review of Jake and the Kid








[i] Various Obits and Interview with David O’Rourke for Essays on Canadian Writing. 20 (Winter 1980): p149-59. Gale 2/27/2013

Pierre Berton Trivia



Link to Review - Just add Water and Stir by Pierre Berton
1960 Leacock Medal Winner

As one of Canada’s best known writers, journalists, historians, and media personalities, Pierre Berton had achieved the status of national icon long before his death on November 30, 2004, and the highlights of his life and career are consequently recorded in many publications and many formats online (see other reading below).
A comprehensive resource for those interested in the man and his literary example is the 2008 biography by historian A.B. McKillop, (Pierre Berton: A biography).  McKillop started work on the project while Berton was alive.   As noted by reviewers, the enterprise took some bravery given Berton’s status as a person who popularized Canadian history and challenged professional historians to be better communicators.


  • In addition to innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, radio and television editorials, Berton wrote a total of fifty published books. The following tidbits are relevant to the Leacock Medal winner, Just add Water and Stir.

  • The man who was christened Pierre Francis de Marigny Berton was born on 12 July 1920 in Whitehorse in the Yukon where his father had gone to try to make it rich in the Klondike Gold Rush.  By the time he was ready for university, his family had moved to British Columbia.  He attended UBC, and there at the energetic student newspaper, the Ubyssey, he cultivated his interest in journalism and writing. 
  • Berton was a senior editor at the student paper which he regarded as fundamental to his career.  The Ubyssey was also a training ground for two other early Leacock Medal winners, Eric Nicol and Earle Birney.  Given Nicol’s three medals, Berton’s win meant that more than a third of the Leacock awards had gone to Ubyssey alumni up to that point.

    Berton nominated his lifelong friend Nicol for membership in the Order of Canada, which was awarded in 2000.  Berton counted other Leacock medalists among his friends and was particularly close to W.O. Mitchell tearing up with great emotion when speaking at one of Mitchell's last public appearances.
  • Comparative Widths of two books
    After university, Berton worked as a reporter and editor on the Vancouver News-Herald, the Vancouver Sun, and Maclean's Magazine where he rose to Managing Editor before jumping to the Toronto Star where, from 1958 to 1962, he produced the popular, crusading, and lively columns that provided the raw material for Just add Water and Stir as well as three other collections published by McClelland and Stewart (M&S). 
  • Just add Water and Stir sold the most reaching a total of 26,000 over the next decade.  As a more lighthearted collection than the others, it perhaps had wider appeal and utility as a Christmas gift in late 1959.  It immediately hit the best-seller lists went into its sixth printing within a year selling enough to induce his publisher to start work on the follow-up collection, Adventures of a Columnist within months.
  • Although drawn from a Toronto newspaper, Just add Water and Stir proved comparatively popular in Western Canada.  Staff at M&S attributed it to the fact that Western Canadians had not had a chance to read Berton’s columns before.
  • He had a lot on his mind during the early 1960s, and while the Leacock Medal was a valued part of the vast assembly of awards and honours he would attract during his life, he was preoccupied with other career developments during the year that he received it.  Intertwined with the writing of the columns and the publishing of Just add Water and Stir, Berton was taking the first steps in his television and radio career, and he would devote himself full-time to this work from 1962 on when he began The Pierre Berton Show.
  • Berton was regarded as witty and persistently humorous as a person, but his writing, characterized by his best known works and his writing on Canadian history, rarely drifted into humour again.  One exception came, however, not long after he won the Leacock Medal.  This was a precocious children’s book, The Secret World of Og,which he initially wrote to entertain his own children.

  • Other reading

    InDepth: CBC Online accessed 31 March 2013




    Link to Review - Just add Water and Stir
    by Pierre Berton
    1960 Leacock Medal Winner

    Ojibway Memories - Tom Symons


    If not in humour writing, at least in the halls of academe and scholarly social sciences, Ojibway Melody author Harry Symons was surpassed by his son Thomas.  Tom Symons, born in 1929, has a long resumé that includes founding Trent University in Peterborough, which, reflecting the concerns of its first President, pioneered the discipline of Canadian Studies and became the first post-secondary institution in Canada to establish a department in Aboriginal Studies.  Trent continues to lead and advance the field. 
    Tom Symons was educated at the U of T, Oxford, and the Sorbonne and built a strong reputation as a scholar, but he also took his academic interests to other arenas including business and what is termed the practical application of policy and social research.   To many, he is best known as Chair of the Commission on Canadian Studies and author of its influential 1975 report To Know Ourselves.
    But he also served on many national policy boards as well as the chairman of the Ontario Human Rights Commission (1975-78), the founding Vice-President of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and chairman of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board.  He is credited with promoting Canadian letters internationally as a member of the Commonwealth Standing Committee on Student Mobility, as chair of the International Board of United World Colleges and chair of the Association of Commonwealth Universities.
    His life is celebrated by many leaders from academe, business, and politics in a book Tom Symons: a Canadian Life (2011 University of Ottawa Press. Ed. Ralph Heintzman)
     Professor Symons knew many of the early Leacock Medal winners personally.  W.O. Mitchell taught at Trent, and Symons helped recruit Robertson Davies to the post of Master of Massey College.  In fact, Symons and his wife still live in the Peterborough home, the Historic Marchbanks house, that the couple bought from Davies in 1963.


    Davies treasured the home (he wrote his Leacock Medal winning Leaven of Malice there) and had to ponder long and hard before he concluded that Symons “would do” as a new owner and someone to be trusted with its care. 

    (See this story in Robertson Davies: A Portrait in Mosaic by the late Val Ross)



    It was, to put it humbly, a distinct honour to be invited to Marchbanks this year (2013) to interview Professor Symons for this project.  He provided a lot of background and told me that the cottage and the Georgian Bay of the 1940s described in Ojibway Melody were big features of his life as a young boy. 

    He added, however, that the Leacock Medal book itself had an even more profound impact.

    Tom Symons comments on Ojibway Melody...

    "I love the book ... and it means a great deal to me.  I often think of
    it because it gives me answers when I am considering things - it helps
    as a compass when I have difficult chores from time to time.


    First of all, it reads the way my father talked and I enjoy that.
    I can hear his voice.


    But I also hear his respect for people and his concern for others.  The
    book is all about it - between the lines sometimes.


    Over three-quarters of a century ago, his empathy and concern for the
    aboriginal people was impressive.  That chapter is superb.


    I was raised with that concern, and I am sure that that is one of the
    reasons that Trent University was the first university in Canada
    to have a department of native studies.  It is shocking that as late as
    the founding of Trent and its program in the late sixties, no university
    in Canada had a formal program of that sort.


    So, as I said, that was something I grew up with.  My interests and
    concern for the rapport between French and English people and the
    history of Georgian Bay and Champlain's exploration.  These are strands
    that run through the book. 

    You sometimes don't recognize the deeper values of the author because
    it is written so amiably, but the book is a touchstone for me and the
    things I value and respect."