February 20, 1959
It was a somewhat cloudy, cold Friday. By mid-afternoon, temperatures in Toronto were hovering around -12 C. I remember the quality of light that afternoon, but not the temperature. I remember the confused worry on my mother's face when my father drove up in the family car - a green 1958 Mercury Meteor with foul-smelling vinyl upholstery that gave me headaches on hot summer days - hours before he was normally expected. I remember his downcast expression as he came up the front steps, a load of reference books under his arm.
For some reason, my memory flips the scene around, has the driveway on the wrong side of the house, has him walking in from the wrong side. But it's still clear in my mind, and I think this mirror-image memory of this particular scene is the result of the traumatic jarring of what took place on February 20, 1959.
I remember clearly the smell of that Meteor in the summer. But this was winter, and this was a particular day in winter that changed not only the lives of my father, my mother, my sister, my brother and myself, but the lives of close to 30,000 other families who were all connected, one way or the other, with A. V. Roe Canada Limited: Avro Aircraft.
Aviation historians and Avro Arrow enthusiasts will tell you about the flight characteristics of this completely made-in-Canada 1950s supersonic high-altitude interceptor. They will tell you about the post-war Cold War politics and Soviet threat that lead to the proposal, in 1953 for a Canadian solution, about the RCAF's requirements for such a machine, about the Liberal government's funding for the program, and about the world's changing geopolitics when the Soviet Union tested its H-bomb.
They'll tell you about the creation of NORAD, and how a combined Canada-US defense strategy made for a fiscally responsible one.
But from the perspective of a five year old, none of that mattered. I was home from school that afternoon because I was in the morning kindergarten session, so I was there when my father came home. My brother and sister were still in school. I can't quite describe the look on his face - a combination of relief and disgust. My mother's expression was one I've seen many times: worry, pure and simple.
I can't pretend, either, to know what was really going through my father's mind. The stresses at work leading up to Black Friday must have been enormous. He has said, in the years since, that he was just glad to be done with it. That must be at least partially true. But only partially. We were an aircraft family. We watched with awe and wonderment and pride as the culmination of the work of my father and the thousands like him flew in test flights overhead. I remember once my brother, an enthusiastic ten or eleven year old, running in to summon me outside as the Arrow flew in a slow loop on a test flight, the sun glinting off its sleek body. You could hear the dull roar of the engines. There, he said, pointing up. There's the Arrow.
There it was: Canada's crowning technological achievement. There it was: a personalized accomplishment. There it was: a concrete representation of how all of us, heart and soul, were involved in a creative endeavor that was at once a national emblem and validation that we, Canada, were important.
The cancellation of the Arrow program and subsequent hacking to pieces of all the aircraft was nothing less that a cultural trauma. The impact was as great as if we had discovered a murderer living on our street. We felt violated, abused, and marginalized. Our identities were in question. As a nation, we suffered an existential crisis.
And as a nation, we lost thousands of brilliant minds to the US defense program. Most of my father's close friends and workers moved to California. We moved to Georgia, where my father found work for Lockheed, working on the Titan II missile program.
We were second-class citizens, strangers in an alien land. We lost all confidence. We struggled to find hope where hopelessness seemed the daily condition of our lives. We were exposed suddenly to a Twilight Zone cultural shift. We saw first-hand issues of race that as middle-class suburbanites we had never seen before.
Entering into Grade 1 at St. Joseph's School, I felt as if I might as well have been speaking a foreign language. I connected in no way with any of the kids in that class, let alone the nuns teaching us. I remember none of their names. We Canadians, pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, forced to learn the words and posture - hand on heart, standing at attention. We practiced nuclear bomb drills, ducking under desks and covering heads with interlocked fingers. I became severely ill, and missed two full months of class.
We were, all of us, outcasts.
My father detested work at Lockheed probably more than he had at Avro. Separated from his own brothers, sisters and mother, he experienced a terrible sense of fracture when his mother was hospitalized, and died, back in Canada.
We returned to the Toronto area in 1960. Everything had changed for all of us affected by February 20, 1959. As the youngest in the family, I was probably affected least. As the youngest, you have little power to change things around you, so you are forced to accept them simply because you have no other choice. But you also watch, sometimes in a detached observer kind of way, how things affect the people around you. We knew the upshot of Diefenbaker's decisions. We knew that we had been betrayed by our own government - something that in the 1950s seemed unthinkable.
In a sense, Canada was also the youngest - certainly a very young nation. The cultural trauma suffered by the nation informs its self-concept even today. Yet we have come to accept, almost dispassionately, the failures and self-inflicted wounds of the narrow-minded governments we choose to lead us.
For more information on the Arrow, check out the following:
http://www.vancouversun.com/health/This+history+February+1959/6180553/story.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_arrow
http://archives.cbc.ca/science_technology/aeronautics/topics/275/
"Arrows to the Moon" discusses the contributions of Canada's engineers to the US space program.
"Requiem for a Giant" details the story of Avro's demise, and dispels the myth that the Arrow program was too expensive for Canada.
"Avro Arrow: The story of the Avro Arrow from its evolution to its extinction" is an excellent history of the aircraft.
For some reason, my memory flips the scene around, has the driveway on the wrong side of the house, has him walking in from the wrong side. But it's still clear in my mind, and I think this mirror-image memory of this particular scene is the result of the traumatic jarring of what took place on February 20, 1959.
I remember clearly the smell of that Meteor in the summer. But this was winter, and this was a particular day in winter that changed not only the lives of my father, my mother, my sister, my brother and myself, but the lives of close to 30,000 other families who were all connected, one way or the other, with A. V. Roe Canada Limited: Avro Aircraft.
Aviation historians and Avro Arrow enthusiasts will tell you about the flight characteristics of this completely made-in-Canada 1950s supersonic high-altitude interceptor. They will tell you about the post-war Cold War politics and Soviet threat that lead to the proposal, in 1953 for a Canadian solution, about the RCAF's requirements for such a machine, about the Liberal government's funding for the program, and about the world's changing geopolitics when the Soviet Union tested its H-bomb.
They'll tell you about the creation of NORAD, and how a combined Canada-US defense strategy made for a fiscally responsible one.
But from the perspective of a five year old, none of that mattered. I was home from school that afternoon because I was in the morning kindergarten session, so I was there when my father came home. My brother and sister were still in school. I can't quite describe the look on his face - a combination of relief and disgust. My mother's expression was one I've seen many times: worry, pure and simple.
I can't pretend, either, to know what was really going through my father's mind. The stresses at work leading up to Black Friday must have been enormous. He has said, in the years since, that he was just glad to be done with it. That must be at least partially true. But only partially. We were an aircraft family. We watched with awe and wonderment and pride as the culmination of the work of my father and the thousands like him flew in test flights overhead. I remember once my brother, an enthusiastic ten or eleven year old, running in to summon me outside as the Arrow flew in a slow loop on a test flight, the sun glinting off its sleek body. You could hear the dull roar of the engines. There, he said, pointing up. There's the Arrow.
There it was: Canada's crowning technological achievement. There it was: a personalized accomplishment. There it was: a concrete representation of how all of us, heart and soul, were involved in a creative endeavor that was at once a national emblem and validation that we, Canada, were important.
The cancellation of the Arrow program and subsequent hacking to pieces of all the aircraft was nothing less that a cultural trauma. The impact was as great as if we had discovered a murderer living on our street. We felt violated, abused, and marginalized. Our identities were in question. As a nation, we suffered an existential crisis.
And as a nation, we lost thousands of brilliant minds to the US defense program. Most of my father's close friends and workers moved to California. We moved to Georgia, where my father found work for Lockheed, working on the Titan II missile program.
We were second-class citizens, strangers in an alien land. We lost all confidence. We struggled to find hope where hopelessness seemed the daily condition of our lives. We were exposed suddenly to a Twilight Zone cultural shift. We saw first-hand issues of race that as middle-class suburbanites we had never seen before.
Entering into Grade 1 at St. Joseph's School, I felt as if I might as well have been speaking a foreign language. I connected in no way with any of the kids in that class, let alone the nuns teaching us. I remember none of their names. We Canadians, pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, forced to learn the words and posture - hand on heart, standing at attention. We practiced nuclear bomb drills, ducking under desks and covering heads with interlocked fingers. I became severely ill, and missed two full months of class.
We were, all of us, outcasts.
My father detested work at Lockheed probably more than he had at Avro. Separated from his own brothers, sisters and mother, he experienced a terrible sense of fracture when his mother was hospitalized, and died, back in Canada.
We returned to the Toronto area in 1960. Everything had changed for all of us affected by February 20, 1959. As the youngest in the family, I was probably affected least. As the youngest, you have little power to change things around you, so you are forced to accept them simply because you have no other choice. But you also watch, sometimes in a detached observer kind of way, how things affect the people around you. We knew the upshot of Diefenbaker's decisions. We knew that we had been betrayed by our own government - something that in the 1950s seemed unthinkable.
In a sense, Canada was also the youngest - certainly a very young nation. The cultural trauma suffered by the nation informs its self-concept even today. Yet we have come to accept, almost dispassionately, the failures and self-inflicted wounds of the narrow-minded governments we choose to lead us.
For more information on the Arrow, check out the following:
http://www.vancouversun.com/health/This+history+February+1959/6180553/story.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_arrow
http://archives.cbc.ca/science_technology/aeronautics/topics/275/
"Arrows to the Moon" discusses the contributions of Canada's engineers to the US space program.
"Requiem for a Giant" details the story of Avro's demise, and dispels the myth that the Arrow program was too expensive for Canada.
"Avro Arrow: The story of the Avro Arrow from its evolution to its extinction" is an excellent history of the aircraft.
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