Letter from a school friend during his time at Regina Mundi

From Jim's school friend during his Regina Mundi days.

Thanks for this information and the excerpt from your book. It certainly fills in most of the blanks. Your memoir reminds me of a book I read years ago entitled The Heart of a Man, which was the journal of a A-4 pilot stationed on a carrier off the coast of Viet Nam. He didn’t survive the war and his wife Marilyn Elkins saw to the publication of his journal. His words deeply affected me as did your memoir.

I remember standing in Jim’s room at Regina Mundi College looking at these model jets that he had put together though I can’t ever remember him stating that he wanted to become a pilot. I have attached the page (the type is rather faded) from the school newsletter in which our classmate John Bourdreau describes Jim’s reason for joining the Marines. He also talks about Jim’s success as a wrestler both in high school and in university.

He was also naturally gifted in mathematics and the sciences, usually the top student in those subjects in our class. Fearless too, as I guess he needed to be to become a jet pilot.  There’s a picture of him in the yearbook, suspended in the air, his hands on one wall, his feet on the other, walking the hallway in kind of sideways upside motion. He also performed on the high bar in gymnastics.

I can still hear his laughter and his voice. Just a twang of a ‘Yankee’ accent. I think he had dual citizenship, living for a period in Detroit then moving to Ridgetown Ontario. He never got into arguments, never fought with anyone except on a wrestling mat. Though he sometimes liked to play the devil’s  advocate  in arguments. Well-liked but very much his own person, and I think he spent a lot of time by himself, taking and developing photographs for the school yearbook. The majority of pictures in the various yearbooks were taken by Jim.

He also had this amazing ability to fall asleep almost anywhere so in my first year at Regina Mundi, I’d often find him napping right by the radio (a loud radio) in the student rec room.

He had an easy casualness, a little like Steve McQueen,  his eyes always very attentive and watchful and kind. In our last year of high school there was Jim, myself and a student from Hong Kong in Mr. Sharma’s physics class. That was it, just the three students. And because Jim had worked summers on the GM assembly line, installing car windshields, it was somehow arranged that we’d travel to Detroit for a GM tour. Jim went home, got his big lumbering auto, drove back to the school and then drove us to Detroit, with at least three of us sitting together on the front bench seat.

He got into mischief too. To help pay for his tuition to the school he worked in the chemistry lab. Well in Grade XII, he and another student started messing around with the creation of gun powder and there was an accident. Both of them ended up in a London hospital with their eyebrows and hair completely singed off. I remember visiting him and he was like this bubble boy behind this wall of glass.

Two of his brothers also went to Regina Mundi College, Richard and Ralph. Though each brother only lasted a year. Jim came from a big family. In the realm of small worlds, people from Jim’s home town of Ridgetown ended up living on my street. They knew the Bassetts. Claire Bassett, Jim’s father, would stage an annual Halloween haunted house event in the town and when he died, his son took over that duty.(Actually ti was the Easter Bunny) I asked my neighbour to talk to the Bassett brother, Patrick, about Jim and the events surrounding his death but apparently that even after all these years, he’s unwilling to discuss it. I hadn’t realized at the time that Jim’s body had not been recovered.

 I wish I had all these great stories to tell you about Jim so that the boy I knew a long time ago would come alive for you.  But my stories are short and rather mundane. My first real memory of Jim was at this summer camp that the school took us to at the start of the year as a kind of breaking of the ice for the new students.  The priest who ran the camp organized a boxing match, pitting classmates against each other. Jim squared off against John Faulds, who was about three inches taller and 40 lbs. heavier. But Jim was game and didn’t quit. Not out of a macho thing either but just that persistence that was so characteristic of him.

I’d like to read the rest of your memoir. Jim’s crash in the F-4, only re-enforced an already existing fascination with fighter planes. After Jim’s death I read everything I could about the Phantom jet.

I wrote about it as well, blending Jim’s crash, and the Kennedy assassination into this horrible sense of loss that I felt. For me at the time, learning about his death  was like reading a Houseman poem, in that I felt it as a kind of death of youth, my youth as well as his. I know for you and Marilyn it was much more real and concrete. I’m sorry for the loss of your good friend Captain Willie Duncan and I hope that these little bits about Jim give you and Marilyn some sense that her husband left this world in the company of a very good soul.  I had only known  ‘Donut’ as the navigator in that somewhat tersely worded paragraph in a high school newsletter. But your memoir now allows me to mourn his loss as well. I’m sure that you and Marilyn would have liked Jim if you had had a chance to get to know him. Thank you again for all the information you sent me.