folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)
A Memoir of Barry Benjamin McKinnon
There was this kid in band.
There was this kid in band. His overall appearance was that of a skinny, sort of beatnik type, who wore a V-neck sweater without a shirt under it. His nickname was Maynard after Maynard G. Krebs the beatnik sidekick to Dobie Gillis in a popular TV show that ran from 1959-1963. Coincidentally, these were the very same years that Barry Benjamin McKinnon went to our high school in Calgary, Alberta, Central Collegiate Institute.
Of course, I had known of him before he was in the school band in grade twelve. Everyone knew everyone in our school. There were only about five hundred students at Central…five classrooms in each of grades ten to twelve. CCI was built in 1908. Standing on the corner of eighth street and twelfth avenue southwest, the old school rises three stories high in a classic sandstone castle-like structure complete with turrets, flagpoles and cupolas.
The top academic high school in Alberta, CCI typically matriculated eighty five percent of its graduates who went on to universities in Canada and in the United States. Known among its student body as “Little Israel”, Central enrolled one of every six students from the Jewish community. Kids from the other high schools in Calgary often talked about their downtown rival as the school “where all the smart kids and Jews went”.
Barry Benjamin McKinnon was neither academically smart nor Jewish. But he was unique. Barry developed a latent talent for drumming, specifically jazz drumming. And, again in grade twelve, he began to write poetry. These two loves – music and poetry – were to be the driving forces of his creative life. Here is his grade twelve high school yearbook picture:
Barry came from an old farm family. The McKinnons on his father’s side came from Carsland east of Calgary along the Bow River and the Daltons on his mother’s side from Delia farther west. He grew up in the old Calgary neighborhood of Bankview, a few blocks southwest of CCI. His father was a master carpenter, and his mother ran a small lunch counter. All the family smoked including the dad, Benny; the mom, Viv; the sons Barry and his younger brother Bryan. Even the dog Pogo smoked. The McKinnon house was littered with big round ashtray full of Buckingham, Sportsman and Rothman butts. The doghouse outside had its own little ashtray full of half-smoked Black Cat cigarettes.
Barry began high school as a frat boy. His fraternity, QRA, or “Queen’s Royal Assholes” included some strange guys: the hood-like Tony Pike; the alcoholic Terry Dial; the intellectuals Gary Bird and Barry Thompson. But Maynard dropped out of frat activities by his third year. He started going out with Kelly van Raalte who was president of her sorority and of Y- Teen, the high school YWCA. Kelly wore wool skirts and tight black turtleneck sweaters with black tights and loafers, a perfect match for Maynard’s beatnik outfits. He started to chum around with another jazz drummer, Doug Harding, also a reformed frat boy, who was enthralled by the Jack Kerouac-Darma Bums-On the Road lifestyle then mimicked by many nonconformist youths in North America.
Barry in grade eleven (third row, fourth from the right)
Like many high schools, CCI was socially stratified. At the top were the frat boys and sorority sisters. Usually coming from well to do homes in the nearby neighborhoods of Mount Royal, Scarborough and Elbow Park, these kids had cars, money and good looks. They filled out the cheerleading squad, fashion shows, the star positions on the football and basketball teams.
Next came the brains. The highest mark gatherers were rarely in the frat/sorority group but were acknowledged academic leaders in a school that prided itself on being the best academic high school in the province. Segregated into the honour room, the brains studied hard but were often editors of the Analecta yearbook, the school paper The Weeper, and active in the French club, Hi Y, the student’s council and extra curricular organizations.
Below the frat/sorority and brains levels were the great middle ranks of just ordinary kids whose average marks were below seventy five percent and whose parents were not particularly rich. They often came from the less wealthy neighbourhoods, didn’t own cars, were active in sports and school clubs, and didn’t get into trouble or drink or smoke.
Under that strata were the bad boys. In the late fifties, there was a gang at Central called “The Terrible Twelve” which gained such notoriety that they made the Canadian edition of Time magazine. In our time in the late fifties and early sixties, the rogue elements tended to all be members of BITOA or “Booze is the Only Answer”, an actual American organization parodying Alcoholics Anonymous.
The chapter members at CCI were all in grade twelve, seventeen or eighteen years old, and came from middle- and high-income homes. They included the son of a Conservative MP, the son of a United Church minister, the son of the HBC store manager, the son of a lawyer and several others from respectable homes in Mount Royal and Scarborough. Greatest of all BITOA escapades was the desecration of the school during the 1962 graduation dance. But that is another story.
Under the BITOA level, existed the nerds or as they are known today, the geeks. Before personal computers, the nerds carried slide rules and leather briefcases. They all wore black horn-rimmed glasses (often held together by a band aid). They tended to have bad sets of facial zits, were invariably either real short or gangly tall, and never went out with girls. Even their surnames were nerdish……Piffer, Slunt, Bohannan and Drinkwater.
But the last social level was clearly exposed on a bulletin board outside the principal’s office after each set of major exams. All five hundred students had their percentage averages listed beside their names for all the world to see beginning with the brains who were at eighty percent or higher and separated from the rest by a thick blue line. These brilliant academics were placed on the “The Honour Roll”. An equally thick and tragic red line delineated the fifty per cent cut off. Those who fell below a fifty per cent average were officially on “The Laggard List”. Usually about ten percent of all students fell into this humiliating category which everyone in the school could see.
And there among the dummies was listed the name Barry McKinnon.
His wife Joy in later years used to say that “Barry was the dumbest kid in Central”. That was not true. There were a few other names below his, but not many. In grade twelve, Barry got the lowest mark in his latin class. He could not pass algebra or physics and had difficulty with biology. Why was this unique, nonconformist poet and jazz drummer so terrible at academic subjects?
In a nutshell, he couldn’t see the blackboard. He had poor long-distance vision. Barry usually sat in the last row in the classroom. He squinted at math equations, biology charts, latin verb conjugations and the solutions to physics problems. All to no avail. And though he tried to study at home, there was always the attractive magnet of a TV up stairs where Benny, Viv, Bryan (who went to a non-academic high school), sister Lina and the dog Poko sat night after night in a thick haze of cigarette smoke watching sit coms and westerns. Unfortunately, his parents never got his eyes tested until he flunked out of Central after having to repeat his grade twelve. He struggled just to get the High School Diploma let alone be granted the Senior Matriculation certificate which would have been his passport into a Canadian university.
Turning
away from his frat brothers, uninterested in sports, a non-participant in
school- sponsored extra- curricular activities, and publicly placed in the
academic stocks, Barry withdrew into his own world of jazz and poetry. He
became Central’s first beatnik. And that was both his academic downfall and his
triumphant entry into another world of music and writing.
Barry at age seventeen and eighteen weighed about one hundred and twenty pounds dripping wet. Like all Central boys, he wore his hair short and brushed forward. Small boned to begin with, he slouched along in a self-conscious stoop. There were several other boys who shared the same light weight and round-shouldered look. The school nurse in grade twelve gave all the students physical examinations. She commented that he was underweight and asked if it bothered him. He replied that several students had turned this around by forming “The Concave Chest and Underweight Club”. She thought that to be excellent therapy. A half dozen skinny boys and one girl had formed the CCUC which prided its members on having small wrists and ankles and a concave chest.
After repeating his grade twelve at CCI, and wearing his new prescription glasses, Barry did two years of an Arts program at Mount Royal College in Calgary and then went to Sir George Williams University for his BA. He received an MA in creative writing from UBC and taught communications for almost four decades at the College of New Caledonia in Prince George BC. He was awarded an honorary PhD from the University of Northern British Columbia.
Barry McKinnon turned seventy-nine on October 13, 2023. He passed away after a brief illness on October 30, 2023.
There was this kid in band.
Brian Hiram Coulter was born in Calgary in 1945 and attended Central Collegiate Institute from 1959 to 1962.
He received an Honours B.A. in economics and politics from the University of Alberta in 1966. He went on to graduate studies at the Pennsylvania State University and the University of Waterloo. He received his Masters degree from the University of Calgary.
He served as Special Assistant to the Premier of Saskatchewan from 1971 to 1975. Following several years with the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan, he taught business and economics for twenty-five years at the University of the Fraser Valley.
Retired, Brian returned to Calgary to be with his two daughters and five grandchildren.
He became a friend of Barry McKinnon in the early sixties in high school. Barry was the best man at Brian's wedding. Brian introduced Barry to Joy and they have all remained friends ever since.