Heart Full Of Soul

william shatner elvis stojko  great canadians

Hello there and wel­come to the March 22nd, 2013 edi­tion of Hangin’ in the Ham­mer; where we take a quick daily look at some of the inter­est­ing peo­ple and events from Cana­dian his­tory, sports and enter­tain­ment asso­ci­ated with the day’s date and sin­gle out one (or more) spe­cial Canuck for our Great Cana­dian of the Day honours.

It’s great to see you all here as we get ready to do another of our quick daily treks through the Cana­dian past look­ing at some cool Canucks you should know. With us as has become the cus­tom now, is the one and only Gordie Corn­for­sale, who has been fully advised and instructed in the daily details and will relate them to you now.

We shall work our way back to this day in 1849, when groups of young Tories went ram­pag­ing through the streets over the Rebel­lion Losses Bill. The group firmly objected to money being paid to those who were in their eyes, the cause of the rebel­lion trou­ble in the first place. Burn­ing effi­gies of Robert Bald­win, William Blake and William Lyon Macken­zie, the group ter­ror­ized the cit­i­zens of Toronto for some hours. Sim­i­lar protests would later erupt in Que­bec as well, where they would even set the Par­lia­ment build­ings in Mon­treal ablaze.  The bill even had par­lia­ment mem­bers out­raged to the point where future Cana­dian PM John A. Mac­don­ald and William Blake agreed to step out­side to set­tle their differences.

On this day in 1867, Queen Vic­to­ria gave her Royal Assent to the British North Amer­ica Act or Con­sti­tu­tion Act. The leg­is­la­ture had eas­ily man­aged to pass through par­lia­ment just a few weeks ear­lier. It is a credit to those who worked to lay the ground work for the act in the years before it was intro­duced to the British House, that the law­mak­ers saw lit­tle need to make changes to it from how it had been orig­i­nally writ­ten. A week later, as was the cus­tom for Vic­to­ria, the act was pub­licly pro­claimed and gazetted in Lon­don. Canada had been given the Royal thumbs up for launch in July.

On this day in 1885, the Win­nipeg Mili­tia received an order to make them­selves ready and Major-General Fred­er­ick Dod­son Mid­dle­ton was given com­mand of the troops to assist in deal­ing with the Pro­vi­sional Saskatchewan Gov­ern­ment. This group would be sent to even­tu­ally deal with the rebels at Batoche and would fight a major clash in April at Fish Creek. Mid­dle­ton, who had pre­vi­ously been nom­i­nated for but, did not receive, a Vic­to­ria Cross, would later be granted a knight­hood from her majesty Queen Vic­to­ria, for his ser­vice to the crown dur­ing the North West Rebellion.

On this day in 1929, a U.S. Coast Guard ves­sel sank the Cana­dian schooner ‘I’m Alone’ car­ry­ing some 2,800 cases of liquor, in the Gulf of Mex­ico, off the coast of Louisiana. Its cap­tain (John Thomas Ran­dell) and crew were taken to New Orleans as pris­on­ers for hav­ing vio­lat­ed Amer­i­can pro­hi­bi­tion laws. At the time, the man­u­fac­tur­ing of liquor was still legal in Canada and par­tic­u­larly in Que­bec, where they never seri­ously con­sid­ered a ban on the demon drink. The inci­dent would prove to be a bit of a rough spot in rela­tions between the coun­tries for a while, but worse things were still to come in 1929.

From the world of sports, it was on this day in 1894, that the Mon­treal Ama­teur Ath­letic Asso­ci­a­tion won the very first Stan­ley Cup cham­pi­onship series played by defeat­ing the Ottawa Cap­i­tals 3–1 in the sec­ond game. The pre­vi­ous year, the Mon­treal shinny stars had been awarded the cup as the cham­pi­ons of the league but, no extra games were played once the sea­son ended. As a result, Billy Bar­low of Mon­treal would became the first player to score a Stan­ley Cup win­ning goal.

It was on this day in 1979, that the Hockey War finally ended, when the WHA and the NHL agreed to a merge for the com­ing 1979/1980 sea­son. The new union meant that three new Cana­dian teams would be join­ing the league for play and the CBC TV deal, much to the cha­grin of the Leafs. The Que­bec Nordiques, Win­nipeg Jets and Hart­ford Whalers, the only new Amer­i­can entry, would all end up relo­cat­ing to new homes; while the fourth team, the Edmon­ton Oil­ers, who had a secret weapon the oth­ers didn’t, man­aged to not only stay in place but, also cap­ture 5 titles along the way.

Born on this day in 1931, in Mon­treal, QC, the cap­tain of the star­ship Enter­prise and the cur­rent star of Weird or What?, William Shat­ner. Bill has been quite the ambas­sador for our nation over the years and there was once some talk of mak­ing him our Gov­er­nor Gen­eral. (Is that a step down from Star Fleet Admi­ral?) We have selected Bill Shat­ner as today first Great Cana­dian of the Day.

Some notable Cana­di­ans born on March 22nd include; a for­mer Leaf cap­tain and HHoF mem­ber since 1986; Dave Keon; a three-time win­ner of the Gov­er­nor General’s Lit­er­ary award, Gabrielle Roy; Eliz­a­beth Smellie, who was the first woman to make the rank of colonel in the Cana­dian Army; Aubert Cote, who grap­pled his way to an Olympic bronze in 1908; Maxwell Arnold Dea­con, who helped the Cana­dian Olympic hockey team claim a sil­ver medal at the 1936 games; Darcy Mar­quardt, who was a mem­ber of the 2012 Olympic row­ing crew that claimed a sil­ver medal in Lon­don; Vic­tor Carl Lindquist, whose visit to the 1932 Olympics in Lake Placid to play some hockey for Canada resulted in a gold medal and a win­ner of three world fig­ure skat­ing cham­pi­onships and two Olympic sil­ver medals, Elvis Sto­jko. Elvis is another great ambas­sador of our nation, who man­aged to be at the very top of the skat­ing world for a num­ber of years. We were happy to select him as today’s sec­ond and the 500th over­all Great Cana­dian of the Day.

On this day in 1998, the Juno Awards were held in Van­cou­ver where Sara McLach­lan was the night’s run­away star and David Fos­ter was inducted into the Cana­dian Music Hall of Fame. Also col­lect­ing some Juno hard­ware that evening was Michael Phillip Woje­w­oda as Best Record­ing Engi­neer, for his work with Spirit Of The West. Today’s Juno Moldy Oldy is Home For A Rest.

Born on this day in 1936, Mr Roger Whitaker, who helped to inspire our daily musi­cal ques­tion; when was the last time that you heard, The Last Farewell?

Today’s musi­cal title, Heart Full Of Soul, took some inspi­ra­tion for the fact that Keith Relf, the guy who lost his job to Robert Plant when the Yard­birds became The New Yard­birds (and even­tu­ally Led Zep­pelin), was also born on this day in 1943. We ded­i­cate that song to the final two Great Cana­di­ans of the Day, Elvis Sto­jko and William Shat­ner, who brought the nation a great deal of joy in their life’s journeys.

That con­cludes my con­tri­bu­tions and now Puck will fin­ish things off. So long.

Well, I was once more out voted and forced to add that on this day in 238 AD, Gor­dian and his son Gor­dian II were pro­claimed Empor­ers of Rome.   Oddly enough there were in total three Gordians.,(but I refuse to say, Hail Gordo.)

Accord­ing to the his­tor­i­cal records, the first printed book went into pub­lish­ing on this day in 1454. The Guten­berg Bible had been due for release on the first day of Spring but, the world’s first paper jam caused a delay, which was also made even longer when tech sup­port didn’t answer their page.

It was on this day in 1816, that our city (Hamil­ton) was named the dis­trict seat for Nas­sau. The dis­tinc­tion came with the pro­vi­sion that the vil­lage erect a cour­t­house and a jail, which George Hamil­ton went about doing at what is now the south­west cor­ner of John and Main Streets. The main cour­t­house in Hamil­ton sits directly across the street from the old site, in the old Post Office building.

One last note for this date, Richard William Dun­can Pound was born on this day in St Catharines, ON and went on to com­pete in swim­ming at the Olympics. Later he became the head Dick of the World Anti-Doping Agency, keep­ing steroids out of ama­teur sport.

Way back when in late June of 2010, I started writ­ing, took the time to fix on a topic I felt I could write about every day and set about try­ing to improve my writ­ing skills and hope­fully have a lit­tle fun along the way. Since then, its pretty clear that I have learned a great deal about our coun­try and its his­tory as well as how the his­tory of the world fits into what hap­pened here. It was not with­out its tri­als, like try­ing to fin­ish a blog in the mid­dle of the night after work­ing all day in Los Ange­les and then get­ting the worst case of Montezuma’s Revenge I ever had to make the chal­lenge even harder. I want to thank all those peo­ple who actu­ally stopped by to see what I was doing these last 1,000 days. Your sup­port was appre­ci­ated. As a final trib­ute to the Ham­mer we will spin one last bonus song, here is Junkhouse, who were nom­i­nated for two Junos on this day in 1998, with Shine.

Thanks for stop­ping by and check­ing out what was going on over here and have your­self a safe and fun day.

William_Shatner

I’ve got a heart full of soul…

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