Colin Parkinson
Army.ca Myth
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the guy with the T-55 lives a few blocks from me, it was cool seeing it there all of the time.
North Shore Outlook
Everybody must get Tanked
By Kelly McManus - North Shore Outlook
Published: August 06, 2008 4:00 PM
Updated: August 07, 2008 10:40 AM It’s a lazy, sunny afternoon in Chilliwack, but not from where I’m sitting. I’m deep in the bowels of a lurching tank – four decades old, Czech-issue, model T55-A, weighing in at about 40 tonnes.
Momentum pitches me around the cab as the machine thunders forward, the massive steel and rubber tracks groaning along the pavement.
I imagine that sitting here, hands under the seat, elbows locked, shoulders bearing down, head flopping side to side, I must look a little like a bobblehead-figurine.
Peering through the scope, I watch the incredulous families who stop and wave or even just point as the camo-painted tank – complete with a decommissioned 17 foot, 100 mm artillery cannon – trundles along the grounds at the old army base in Chilliwack.
That’s when North Vancouverite George Clark pops his head through the hatch and yells something I can’t quite make out.
From my view in the dim interior, Clark’s head over the hatch is haloed by the blue sky and cottony summer clouds.
“This your first time in a tank?” the lean 50-something shouts for about the third time, a wide smile stretched across his face.
A defining point about George Clark, father, husband, BC Hydro worker and historian collector of military antiques: nearly everyone in his life would answer no, this is not my first time in a tank.
“Don’t be shy!” he calls, “Stand up; look around!”
I do as I am told. My top half emerging from the hold, I prop my elbows on the lip of the hatch.
Clark is perched on the side of the lurching hull, loosely gripping a railing, soaking in the Sunday afternoon ride around the base. We trundle past a park, leaving a swath of open jaws.
Clark shouts over the racket: “You can have all the Ferraris you want. You can have all the Lamborghinis you want. Nothing beats a tank.”
We park the tank in front of a squat, unassuming building marked R.C.S.M.E. Quartermaster Stores. Officers on the base once came here to get their uniforms and gear.
Now, it’s the site of a new museum: The Canadian Military Education Centre, home to vehicles like this one, donated by tank aficionados and military collectors like George Clark and Mark Fleming, also from North Vancouver.
Fleming, a tall, broad-shouldered carpenter who looks like he could be anywhere between the ages of 30 and 45 (he’s 39), owns this Czech-issue beast. As it comes to a stop and the engine sputters quiet, he pops up from the cockpit, grinning.
His girlfriend, Michelle, walks alongside the tank, holding a giant Allen key. She tells Fleming about the loose tracks and how they struggled on the hills.
She’d be riding in the tank too, but she’s six months pregnant with their child.
“It’s not like a car,” Fleming explains of the do-it-himself repairs he’s administered since importing the tank in 2007. “When I bought it I didn’t have a manual for it. I just had to figure things out.”
Since he started collecting military vehicles, tinkering with wee trifles like cars and motorcycles doesn’t cut it, he says.
“There are always skeptics,” says Fleming. “People say, why did you buy a tank? And I say, well, why did you buy a Porsche?”
The history bunker
Clark and Fleming met at an antique swap show in 2003. They got to chatting about Clark’s half-track truck and Clark later let Fleming take it out for a spin. A friendship was born.
The men discovered they had something in common, more than just a curious hankering for military antiques: history gives them both the goosebumps.
For Fleming, it started when he was 13 years old, standing in the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Florence, Italy. He placed his hands on Galileo’s tomb. He knew that he stood where the greats had also been – Dante, Machiavelli, Michelangelo – and the hair stood up on the back of his neck.
“Knowing he’s right there,” says Fleming “I want to know the bigger story.”
Later in Greece, he stood at the Temple of Poseidon, where Napoleon had once scratched his name in a rock.
“I touched Napoleon’s signature.” He mimics placing his hands on the rock, eyes going wide. “I guess that’s a feeling I just instantly identified with.”
Clark was eight years old when he first discovered the thrill of military history. He started a helmet collection after a gift from his uncle, who fought with the Canadian forces in World War II.
Five years later, he visited the site of the Battle of Little Bighorn, the infamous 1876 battle between General Custer and the 7th Cavalry and Lakota-Northern Cheyenne forces.
“I stood where Custer had fallen,” Clark says, describing how, as a wide eyed youngster, he imagined the heat of the battle, the clap of pistols, the cries of dying soldiers and Native Americans alike in one of the most infamous battles of North American history.
“I just didn’t get over that. I’ll never forget that feeling... It’s an addiction; I live with it. I eat and breathe and love history.”
Clark and Fleming are what you might call “hands-on” collectors; they take a use-it-or-lose-it approach to their artifacts. A tank runs better when it’s all juiced up, not when it’s been sitting roped off in a museum for months or years, they both explain. But there’s more than just practicality at work when they hop on the vehicle for a Sunday afternoon ride. Just watch their gleeful, boyish expressions.
Replace Peter Pan’s treehouse with a Czech-issue tank circa 1969 and you might have shades of the lost boys here. You might, but not quite, because these two men are genuinely thrilled by interactive history lessons.
Even “interactive” is a paltry word for describing Clark’s collection of military and non-military artifacts at his home in North Vancouver. He’s immersed, awash, orbited by a cloud of stuff.
Upstairs: signed movie posters and autographs cover most surfaces: Harrison Ford and Sean Connery in Indiana Jones, Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, John Wayne caught in candid, the Beatles, Gary Oldman licking a razorblade in Dracula; strolling around, dogs in various sizes, from German Shepherd to Chihuahua named with military references, Poncho, Sherman and Wolfe; along the walls, movie props and military uniforms from movies like The Alamo or Desperate Journey.
“Sometimes you can see the fireplace and sometimes you can’t,” Clark grins, making his way through piles of stuff.
Downstairs he keeps the real gems.
“I call this my bunker,” he says of the tiny basement room that was once his childhood bedroom. Now it’s packed with about 300 military uniforms from World War II through to Vietnam, 200 or so helmets from those same eras, military figurines and autographs – several dozen binders’ worth.
In the 1980s, Clark formed the Military Autograph Collectors Club of Canada (MACCC), contacting generals and Commanding Officers from Allied and Axis forces, having them autograph photos and provide accounts and commentary about the war. With his self-directed archival work, he became a pretty well known and respected philologist (someone who studies signatures and handwriting). His autograph collection totals somewhere around 5,000.
Then he became fascinated with Victoria Cross and American Congressional Medal of Honor recipients (awarded for bravery) and he befriended a number of ace-pilots, taking down their stories through his MACCC.
Sifting through the trove of helmets, papers, knives, medals, toys, Clark races from one fantastic story to the next, pulling out item after item, shifting his collectables from pile to pile.
“You’ll notice that nothing’s in the same place twice,” he laughs. “That’s because I use this stuff... that’s history: you have to write on the back of pictures.”
It’s the same way that Clark wants his visitors to hold that knife from Little Bighorn. When he shows it to people, he wants them to run their fingertips over the pitted corrosion on the iron blade. He wants them to test the weight of the carved-bone handle.
Holding the knife, he explains, “Cooke, Napoleon – that was 200 years ago. That’s four generations of people. Well that’s just yesterday. But we look at it as forever... People just don’t realize history is now – history is right now. You’re making history. People think history is when you go far, far back.”
Hands-on learning
Get tanked. That’s the slogan on the T-shirts Fleming gives out, advertising for his side-business, Blueleader. When not busy with his carpentry business, or renovating the turn of the century character home he shares with Michelle Ross in Lynn Valley, he rents out novelty vehicles to movie studios or parties. Currently he’s outfitting a big, yellow 1980s fire truck for stagette bashes. His Czech tank has appeared in a number of local parades recently (he doesn’t charge for those community appearances).
Pulling up to his house, visitors might spot a 1952 Dodge M-37 Power Wagon – a restored Canadian military vehicle – parked out on the street. The fire truck he keeps at the neighbour’s. The tank now at the CMEC in Chilliwack once sat in the front yard.
All told, Fleming owns six military vehicles (even the fire truck qualifies as it once belonged to the army base in Esquimalt). Couple those wheels with the small zip-line and greenhouse he built for his step-daughter, Erica (Ross’s daughter from a previous relationship), a hot tub, and a sprawling porch where the couple likes to sit with their friends, Fleming’s house is a pretty cool place to hang out.
Although, according to Ross, when some people hear about Fleming’s military collection they ask, but why?
“They look at me like, why didn’t you stop him? But if he can get it (the tank), why not? It’s like telling someone, your dream, it’s not okay. You can’t do that.”
Fleming says he appreciates his girlfriend’s enthusiasm.
“But I know she’s tired of watching the History Channel,” he laughs.
There’s an important qualification to make here. For whatever reason, most people hear “military collector” and they think of hostile, obsessive-compulsive types who sit in a dark bomb shelter somewhere polishing a pile of weapons, muttering about neighbourhood gripes. These two men do not fit this stereotype.
For Fleming the collection enables him to do two things: one, interact directly with objects that shaped the world (there’s a difference between weapons and collectables, he says), and, two, fix up old things.
“I’m a sucker for anything that needs fixing,” he explains, citing weekends spent with his nose in a tank engine, or discerning the track braking system. “They don’t come with a manual,” he laughs, “so you have to be willing to just get in there and figure it out.”
For George Clark, what gets him excited is the story behind the objects, the interview process, the challenge of preserving the accounts for generations who come after.
But for all their fascination with the big vehicles of war, the stories of bravery and camaraderie, the fact remains that the stuff in these collections ended lives.
The two men discuss this one day in a North Vancouver Starbucks. Fleming wears his Blueleader T-shirt. They both strike me as pretty gentle guys who hope people won’t find their hobbies offensive.
Clark explains how one fellow military collector once said to him “you know, we do collect death... this is all geared to killing.”
Clark answered, “I don’t see it that way. To me this is history. It generates how we live.”
Fleming pauses thoughtfully for a moment before he says, “We also realize that what we collect has destroyed nations, and you’ve got to remember, he (Clark) and I have never been shot at.”
They’re not glorifying war or violence, they say. This is a hands-on history lesson.
Fleming recalls a Remembrance Day event the CMEC founders held in Abbotsford last year. They brought school kids together to see the tanks and hear veterans talk about their experiences in battle.
“It made it concrete,” says Fleming. “They could see it, touch it, sit on them (the tanks)... It’s like a time capsule (a tank, a knife, or a military uniform). You can envision events when you touch it.”
Now that’s creative education, says Fleming: “When (students) are just sitting in a classroom, they can’t wait to get out of there.”
If you ever get the chance, wrap your knuckles on a tank; it’s like punching a sidewalk.
Think of it as “kinetic history,” explains Clark.
But as Fleming’s and Clark’s collections developed over the years, their families could only exist in the midst of so much hands-on learning spilling into their living rooms and front yards.
Luckily, about five other guys from around the Lower Mainland had the same dream to start a military museum. They pooled their resources. Grant McAvoy, a retired teacher, had always dreamed of creating interactive exhibits to help kids understand the meaning of Remembrance Day. Together with Brooke Quam (a welder) and Dan Jahn (a vehicle expert), Clark and Fleming started to amass a collection that would be open to teachers, kids and the general public.
“It’s an amazing journey,” says Clark. “And we’re just the keepers, the custodians. We hope this goes on a lot longer.”
Get tanked
Sunday morning at the Canadian Military Education Centre in Chilliwack.
After closing Saturday afternoon, the museum became a site for military collectors from as far away as Seattle and Victoria. Members of the Western Command Club and the Puget Sound Club, mostly men between the ages of 40 and 60, roasted a pig and camped out on the grounds. Clark fired off the cannon (he’s a cannoneer) and the guys talked late into the night about their tanks and motorcycles.
This quiet summer morning, civilian men dressed in khaki colours wander about, sipping coffee and surveying the military vehicles parked out front: an armoured convoy, a jeep, Fleming’s Czech tank.
The collectors mingle with museum visitors, young families and veterans who wander through the grounds and the museum exhibits inside with looks of fascination.
David King packs up for the trip back to Seattle: government issue med-pack, canteen and T-blade shovel, demilitarized grenades and Thompson submachine gun. His oiled leather saddle bags are the real deal. His army-issue, 1942 Harley Davidson is just like the one his father rode as a mail orderly, serving with the American forces in Europe during World War II.
“I always respected what they did for us,” he says of veterans like his dad. “They did the whole world an honour by protecting us.”
He almost signed up to fight in Vietnam, but his father talked him out of it.
“He wanted me to become a carpenter like him.”
King winks and gives me an imitation grenade to remember him by before hopping into the wide, brown leather saddle, pulling figure eights in the parking lot and waving good-bye to his buddies. His foot pedal siren gives a very vintage holler into the cool morning air. In his World War II tanker helmet and navy flight jacket, King seems like he’s straight from a movie set.
That’s the appeal: this stuff looks utterly incredible. It’s why Fleming gets so many requests for his tank to make public appearances.
“I’ve taken my tank in parades,” says Fleming, “You get the odd person who hisses and boos at you. People say, that’s a war machine. That was used to kill people. Maybe it was at one time, but now it’s covered in children distributing candy. We’re lucky enough that we’ve never seen it in its original context.”
The CMEC volunteers have big plans for Remembrance Day, again bringing veterans, school kids, and vintage tanks together for a kinetic history lesson, this time at their new museum. Preparation will take months. Their weekends out at the museum will stay busy as volunteer collectors and enthusiasts give tours and the core group at the non-profit keeps the wheels in motion.
On one such Sunday, Clark bustles back and forth between chats with a mechanic (working on one of the convoys), trips to the back room to deal with leaky pipes, and giving tours including his artifacts about aviators and Aces.
He talks about the torn Nazi flag, possibly defaced by Canadian athletes after the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin and he tells stories about Stocky Edwards, Canada’s top living ace from World War Two. From one artifact to the next, the stories keep on coming.
I ask him if, during his lifetime of hobby and volunteer hours put into careful, original research, did he ever consider a career in academia?
“I didn’t like school very much,” he says. “But history, it’s the only A I ever got.”
Outside, Ian Fryatt, also a military collector from North Van, revs up the armoured convoy and hollers for me to come take a ride.
Grinning, he insists that I ride in the turret, the rotating, open section of the vehicle where the machine gun is perched.
I rest my elbows on the lip of the hatch, as I did the tank, and take in the sunny afternoon as we cruise around the base.
This isn’t how most soldiers would experience a turret, or a trip in a convoy, I think. They’d be holed up inside, escaping bullets and shells and pelting out the same; but with the wind in my hair and engine rumbling beneath me, I can see what keeps these guys out here week after week. I can understand why Fleming keeps a fire truck in front of his house and why Clark was so eager for me to ride in the tank.
This is one history lesson I’ll never forget.
http://www.bclocalnews.com/greater_vancouver/northshoreoutlook/news/26359784.html
North Shore Outlook
Everybody must get Tanked
By Kelly McManus - North Shore Outlook
Published: August 06, 2008 4:00 PM
Updated: August 07, 2008 10:40 AM It’s a lazy, sunny afternoon in Chilliwack, but not from where I’m sitting. I’m deep in the bowels of a lurching tank – four decades old, Czech-issue, model T55-A, weighing in at about 40 tonnes.
Momentum pitches me around the cab as the machine thunders forward, the massive steel and rubber tracks groaning along the pavement.
I imagine that sitting here, hands under the seat, elbows locked, shoulders bearing down, head flopping side to side, I must look a little like a bobblehead-figurine.
Peering through the scope, I watch the incredulous families who stop and wave or even just point as the camo-painted tank – complete with a decommissioned 17 foot, 100 mm artillery cannon – trundles along the grounds at the old army base in Chilliwack.
That’s when North Vancouverite George Clark pops his head through the hatch and yells something I can’t quite make out.
From my view in the dim interior, Clark’s head over the hatch is haloed by the blue sky and cottony summer clouds.
“This your first time in a tank?” the lean 50-something shouts for about the third time, a wide smile stretched across his face.
A defining point about George Clark, father, husband, BC Hydro worker and historian collector of military antiques: nearly everyone in his life would answer no, this is not my first time in a tank.
“Don’t be shy!” he calls, “Stand up; look around!”
I do as I am told. My top half emerging from the hold, I prop my elbows on the lip of the hatch.
Clark is perched on the side of the lurching hull, loosely gripping a railing, soaking in the Sunday afternoon ride around the base. We trundle past a park, leaving a swath of open jaws.
Clark shouts over the racket: “You can have all the Ferraris you want. You can have all the Lamborghinis you want. Nothing beats a tank.”
We park the tank in front of a squat, unassuming building marked R.C.S.M.E. Quartermaster Stores. Officers on the base once came here to get their uniforms and gear.
Now, it’s the site of a new museum: The Canadian Military Education Centre, home to vehicles like this one, donated by tank aficionados and military collectors like George Clark and Mark Fleming, also from North Vancouver.
Fleming, a tall, broad-shouldered carpenter who looks like he could be anywhere between the ages of 30 and 45 (he’s 39), owns this Czech-issue beast. As it comes to a stop and the engine sputters quiet, he pops up from the cockpit, grinning.
His girlfriend, Michelle, walks alongside the tank, holding a giant Allen key. She tells Fleming about the loose tracks and how they struggled on the hills.
She’d be riding in the tank too, but she’s six months pregnant with their child.
“It’s not like a car,” Fleming explains of the do-it-himself repairs he’s administered since importing the tank in 2007. “When I bought it I didn’t have a manual for it. I just had to figure things out.”
Since he started collecting military vehicles, tinkering with wee trifles like cars and motorcycles doesn’t cut it, he says.
“There are always skeptics,” says Fleming. “People say, why did you buy a tank? And I say, well, why did you buy a Porsche?”
The history bunker
Clark and Fleming met at an antique swap show in 2003. They got to chatting about Clark’s half-track truck and Clark later let Fleming take it out for a spin. A friendship was born.
The men discovered they had something in common, more than just a curious hankering for military antiques: history gives them both the goosebumps.
For Fleming, it started when he was 13 years old, standing in the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Florence, Italy. He placed his hands on Galileo’s tomb. He knew that he stood where the greats had also been – Dante, Machiavelli, Michelangelo – and the hair stood up on the back of his neck.
“Knowing he’s right there,” says Fleming “I want to know the bigger story.”
Later in Greece, he stood at the Temple of Poseidon, where Napoleon had once scratched his name in a rock.
“I touched Napoleon’s signature.” He mimics placing his hands on the rock, eyes going wide. “I guess that’s a feeling I just instantly identified with.”
Clark was eight years old when he first discovered the thrill of military history. He started a helmet collection after a gift from his uncle, who fought with the Canadian forces in World War II.
Five years later, he visited the site of the Battle of Little Bighorn, the infamous 1876 battle between General Custer and the 7th Cavalry and Lakota-Northern Cheyenne forces.
“I stood where Custer had fallen,” Clark says, describing how, as a wide eyed youngster, he imagined the heat of the battle, the clap of pistols, the cries of dying soldiers and Native Americans alike in one of the most infamous battles of North American history.
“I just didn’t get over that. I’ll never forget that feeling... It’s an addiction; I live with it. I eat and breathe and love history.”
Clark and Fleming are what you might call “hands-on” collectors; they take a use-it-or-lose-it approach to their artifacts. A tank runs better when it’s all juiced up, not when it’s been sitting roped off in a museum for months or years, they both explain. But there’s more than just practicality at work when they hop on the vehicle for a Sunday afternoon ride. Just watch their gleeful, boyish expressions.
Replace Peter Pan’s treehouse with a Czech-issue tank circa 1969 and you might have shades of the lost boys here. You might, but not quite, because these two men are genuinely thrilled by interactive history lessons.
Even “interactive” is a paltry word for describing Clark’s collection of military and non-military artifacts at his home in North Vancouver. He’s immersed, awash, orbited by a cloud of stuff.
Upstairs: signed movie posters and autographs cover most surfaces: Harrison Ford and Sean Connery in Indiana Jones, Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, John Wayne caught in candid, the Beatles, Gary Oldman licking a razorblade in Dracula; strolling around, dogs in various sizes, from German Shepherd to Chihuahua named with military references, Poncho, Sherman and Wolfe; along the walls, movie props and military uniforms from movies like The Alamo or Desperate Journey.
“Sometimes you can see the fireplace and sometimes you can’t,” Clark grins, making his way through piles of stuff.
Downstairs he keeps the real gems.
“I call this my bunker,” he says of the tiny basement room that was once his childhood bedroom. Now it’s packed with about 300 military uniforms from World War II through to Vietnam, 200 or so helmets from those same eras, military figurines and autographs – several dozen binders’ worth.
In the 1980s, Clark formed the Military Autograph Collectors Club of Canada (MACCC), contacting generals and Commanding Officers from Allied and Axis forces, having them autograph photos and provide accounts and commentary about the war. With his self-directed archival work, he became a pretty well known and respected philologist (someone who studies signatures and handwriting). His autograph collection totals somewhere around 5,000.
Then he became fascinated with Victoria Cross and American Congressional Medal of Honor recipients (awarded for bravery) and he befriended a number of ace-pilots, taking down their stories through his MACCC.
Sifting through the trove of helmets, papers, knives, medals, toys, Clark races from one fantastic story to the next, pulling out item after item, shifting his collectables from pile to pile.
“You’ll notice that nothing’s in the same place twice,” he laughs. “That’s because I use this stuff... that’s history: you have to write on the back of pictures.”
It’s the same way that Clark wants his visitors to hold that knife from Little Bighorn. When he shows it to people, he wants them to run their fingertips over the pitted corrosion on the iron blade. He wants them to test the weight of the carved-bone handle.
Holding the knife, he explains, “Cooke, Napoleon – that was 200 years ago. That’s four generations of people. Well that’s just yesterday. But we look at it as forever... People just don’t realize history is now – history is right now. You’re making history. People think history is when you go far, far back.”
Hands-on learning
Get tanked. That’s the slogan on the T-shirts Fleming gives out, advertising for his side-business, Blueleader. When not busy with his carpentry business, or renovating the turn of the century character home he shares with Michelle Ross in Lynn Valley, he rents out novelty vehicles to movie studios or parties. Currently he’s outfitting a big, yellow 1980s fire truck for stagette bashes. His Czech tank has appeared in a number of local parades recently (he doesn’t charge for those community appearances).
Pulling up to his house, visitors might spot a 1952 Dodge M-37 Power Wagon – a restored Canadian military vehicle – parked out on the street. The fire truck he keeps at the neighbour’s. The tank now at the CMEC in Chilliwack once sat in the front yard.
All told, Fleming owns six military vehicles (even the fire truck qualifies as it once belonged to the army base in Esquimalt). Couple those wheels with the small zip-line and greenhouse he built for his step-daughter, Erica (Ross’s daughter from a previous relationship), a hot tub, and a sprawling porch where the couple likes to sit with their friends, Fleming’s house is a pretty cool place to hang out.
Although, according to Ross, when some people hear about Fleming’s military collection they ask, but why?
“They look at me like, why didn’t you stop him? But if he can get it (the tank), why not? It’s like telling someone, your dream, it’s not okay. You can’t do that.”
Fleming says he appreciates his girlfriend’s enthusiasm.
“But I know she’s tired of watching the History Channel,” he laughs.
There’s an important qualification to make here. For whatever reason, most people hear “military collector” and they think of hostile, obsessive-compulsive types who sit in a dark bomb shelter somewhere polishing a pile of weapons, muttering about neighbourhood gripes. These two men do not fit this stereotype.
For Fleming the collection enables him to do two things: one, interact directly with objects that shaped the world (there’s a difference between weapons and collectables, he says), and, two, fix up old things.
“I’m a sucker for anything that needs fixing,” he explains, citing weekends spent with his nose in a tank engine, or discerning the track braking system. “They don’t come with a manual,” he laughs, “so you have to be willing to just get in there and figure it out.”
For George Clark, what gets him excited is the story behind the objects, the interview process, the challenge of preserving the accounts for generations who come after.
But for all their fascination with the big vehicles of war, the stories of bravery and camaraderie, the fact remains that the stuff in these collections ended lives.
The two men discuss this one day in a North Vancouver Starbucks. Fleming wears his Blueleader T-shirt. They both strike me as pretty gentle guys who hope people won’t find their hobbies offensive.
Clark explains how one fellow military collector once said to him “you know, we do collect death... this is all geared to killing.”
Clark answered, “I don’t see it that way. To me this is history. It generates how we live.”
Fleming pauses thoughtfully for a moment before he says, “We also realize that what we collect has destroyed nations, and you’ve got to remember, he (Clark) and I have never been shot at.”
They’re not glorifying war or violence, they say. This is a hands-on history lesson.
Fleming recalls a Remembrance Day event the CMEC founders held in Abbotsford last year. They brought school kids together to see the tanks and hear veterans talk about their experiences in battle.
“It made it concrete,” says Fleming. “They could see it, touch it, sit on them (the tanks)... It’s like a time capsule (a tank, a knife, or a military uniform). You can envision events when you touch it.”
Now that’s creative education, says Fleming: “When (students) are just sitting in a classroom, they can’t wait to get out of there.”
If you ever get the chance, wrap your knuckles on a tank; it’s like punching a sidewalk.
Think of it as “kinetic history,” explains Clark.
But as Fleming’s and Clark’s collections developed over the years, their families could only exist in the midst of so much hands-on learning spilling into their living rooms and front yards.
Luckily, about five other guys from around the Lower Mainland had the same dream to start a military museum. They pooled their resources. Grant McAvoy, a retired teacher, had always dreamed of creating interactive exhibits to help kids understand the meaning of Remembrance Day. Together with Brooke Quam (a welder) and Dan Jahn (a vehicle expert), Clark and Fleming started to amass a collection that would be open to teachers, kids and the general public.
“It’s an amazing journey,” says Clark. “And we’re just the keepers, the custodians. We hope this goes on a lot longer.”
Get tanked
Sunday morning at the Canadian Military Education Centre in Chilliwack.
After closing Saturday afternoon, the museum became a site for military collectors from as far away as Seattle and Victoria. Members of the Western Command Club and the Puget Sound Club, mostly men between the ages of 40 and 60, roasted a pig and camped out on the grounds. Clark fired off the cannon (he’s a cannoneer) and the guys talked late into the night about their tanks and motorcycles.
This quiet summer morning, civilian men dressed in khaki colours wander about, sipping coffee and surveying the military vehicles parked out front: an armoured convoy, a jeep, Fleming’s Czech tank.
The collectors mingle with museum visitors, young families and veterans who wander through the grounds and the museum exhibits inside with looks of fascination.
David King packs up for the trip back to Seattle: government issue med-pack, canteen and T-blade shovel, demilitarized grenades and Thompson submachine gun. His oiled leather saddle bags are the real deal. His army-issue, 1942 Harley Davidson is just like the one his father rode as a mail orderly, serving with the American forces in Europe during World War II.
“I always respected what they did for us,” he says of veterans like his dad. “They did the whole world an honour by protecting us.”
He almost signed up to fight in Vietnam, but his father talked him out of it.
“He wanted me to become a carpenter like him.”
King winks and gives me an imitation grenade to remember him by before hopping into the wide, brown leather saddle, pulling figure eights in the parking lot and waving good-bye to his buddies. His foot pedal siren gives a very vintage holler into the cool morning air. In his World War II tanker helmet and navy flight jacket, King seems like he’s straight from a movie set.
That’s the appeal: this stuff looks utterly incredible. It’s why Fleming gets so many requests for his tank to make public appearances.
“I’ve taken my tank in parades,” says Fleming, “You get the odd person who hisses and boos at you. People say, that’s a war machine. That was used to kill people. Maybe it was at one time, but now it’s covered in children distributing candy. We’re lucky enough that we’ve never seen it in its original context.”
The CMEC volunteers have big plans for Remembrance Day, again bringing veterans, school kids, and vintage tanks together for a kinetic history lesson, this time at their new museum. Preparation will take months. Their weekends out at the museum will stay busy as volunteer collectors and enthusiasts give tours and the core group at the non-profit keeps the wheels in motion.
On one such Sunday, Clark bustles back and forth between chats with a mechanic (working on one of the convoys), trips to the back room to deal with leaky pipes, and giving tours including his artifacts about aviators and Aces.
He talks about the torn Nazi flag, possibly defaced by Canadian athletes after the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin and he tells stories about Stocky Edwards, Canada’s top living ace from World War Two. From one artifact to the next, the stories keep on coming.
I ask him if, during his lifetime of hobby and volunteer hours put into careful, original research, did he ever consider a career in academia?
“I didn’t like school very much,” he says. “But history, it’s the only A I ever got.”
Outside, Ian Fryatt, also a military collector from North Van, revs up the armoured convoy and hollers for me to come take a ride.
Grinning, he insists that I ride in the turret, the rotating, open section of the vehicle where the machine gun is perched.
I rest my elbows on the lip of the hatch, as I did the tank, and take in the sunny afternoon as we cruise around the base.
This isn’t how most soldiers would experience a turret, or a trip in a convoy, I think. They’d be holed up inside, escaping bullets and shells and pelting out the same; but with the wind in my hair and engine rumbling beneath me, I can see what keeps these guys out here week after week. I can understand why Fleming keeps a fire truck in front of his house and why Clark was so eager for me to ride in the tank.
This is one history lesson I’ll never forget.
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