Thursday, May 2, 2013, 7:30 PM

WTJHS ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

and our excellent program:

Ben McPeek and Canadian Music

Ben McPeek Jr. will bring a lifetime of memories of the Canadian music industry to our May meeting. His father, Ben McPeek Sr. was a composer, arranger, conductor, and pianist.  He arranged the song “Ca-na-da” for Expo 67 and created a unique sound library for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.  Later, he founded the Canadian record company  Nimbus 9 one of whose clients was The Guess Who. Ben Senior and Junior often travelled through the Junction.  Today, Ben Jr, a music composer himself, lives in the Junction Triangle.

Thursday, April 4, 2013, 7:30 PM

The West Toronto Junction Historical Society salutes Raymond Souster

Remembered by his friends and admirers, reading his work including his classic, Last Sad Day for Our West Toronto Station.  Poet Robert Priest recently quoted John Robert Colombo on Souster’s lasting impact: “Ray served as the still centre of poetry in Toronto. He established a north pole to complement the south pole of the academics. He single-handedly introduced Modernism in poetry to the city. He also corresponded with many of the movers and shakers of American poetry — notably Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, Robert Creeley, LeRoi Jones — and brought them to Toronto to read at a series of fabled readings at the old Greenwich Gallery and the later Isaacs Gallery. Not for nothing was he known as the Dean of Toronto Poets.”

Thursday, March 7, 2013, 7:30 PM

 David Wilson on the Life and Death of D’arcy McGee

Professor David Wilson heads the Celtic Studies program at the University of Toronto, and he’s written two volumes about the life and death of McGee, and his role in creating Canada. Once a revolutionary republican, ultimately a liberal-conservative father of Confederation, D’arcy McGee was the victim of the first assassination in Canadian history, a martyr to his remarkably modern vision of Canada as a place where different minorities could co-exist harmoniously without losing a sense of Candianism. Professor Wilson’s books are called D’arcy McGee: Passion, Reason and Politics, and D’arcy McGee: The Extreme Moderate.