Dedication of Castle Theatre to Robert N. Hinitt August 23, 2008 TRIBUTE to MR. HINITT
by Robert (Bob) Young ('60) It was an honour to be asked to pay tribute this afternoon to my old (I mean former) Professeur du français and stage director. When I remind you that this is a man who has been awarded the Order of Canada as well as the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, and assure you that he has also had conferred upon him the admiration and affection of two generations of students, you will know what I mean when I say it is an “honour.” Today, I know that you, too, share my pleasure as participants in yet another act of recognition, namely the dedication of this theatre to its inspiration and original designer Robert N. Hinitt, (or, as we fondly refer to him, Monsieur.) I was a member of the first graduating class from Aden Bowman, and a cast member of a production called “The Axe and the Oak Tree” -- which I believe secured this school’s first provincial drama title. Almost fifty years later I myself am retiring from a forty year teaching career as a History Professor. Whether it was because I was once a student or because I was once a teacher that I was asked to say something today, I cannot be sure; but I do know that my sense of the critical link between student and teacher was first forged in the classrooms of this school.
Indeed, it was almost 50 years ago that our graduating class had its very first intimate glimpse into the teaching profession – by way of a toast to the graduands delivered by none other than today’s honoree. Attributing (quite falsely) his words to some unidentified and surely fictitious dictionary, Mr Hinitt claimed he had discovered that a teacher “was a harmless drudge who swore he would starve to death before teaching and who had been doing both ever since; while teaching,” he claimed, “was defined by what a person turns to when he is incapable of learning.” I’m fairly sure that, by then, he was convinced that this graduating class had learned the meaning of hyperbole, and that even the dullest among us would detect some traces of humour in his remarks. Oh yes, the humour! That was one of the qualities that made him an exceptional and, in my experience a unique, teacher. The less fortunate among you are simply too young to have experienced his inimitable techniques as a classroom teacher. But the lucky ones will never forget.
Saskatchewan in the late 1950s, for the most part not a comfortable haven for the French language, and certainly not among teenagers handicapped by – shall I say? – a rather limited sense of the world. Yet here was a man who had studied at the Sorbonne, was fluent in the language and who, against all the odds, got us to decline a good many of the er verbs and a fair number of those ending in ir. He did so, of course, by employing methods hitherto unknown to us: notably leading us in seemingly endless verses of “Napoléon avait cinq cents soldats” all the while standing on his desk, and brandishing a rubber sword high above a head topped off by a Napoleonic tricorne hat. Not that it was all fun and games. The man was a strict disciplinarian, as anyone who was smacked on the head with a sponge-rubber blackboard eraser would tell you, smacked playfully for their inattentiveness to the lilting notice of “Rendez-vous pour vous, Monsieur, Mademoiselle” -- as well as a thick cloud of chalk dust. (As a footnote, I should say that we tolerated these eccentricities and abuse because we knew that he knew what was really important in life – namely the day’s football or basketball game. Not every teacher stood outside their classroom door to wish the “Bears” good luck.) Beyond the classroom, there was the stage, that other venue for his imagination, creativity, aesthetic appreciation, and…..patience. I think of the latter because of one awkward moment prior to our graduation. While Joni (now Mitchell) worked on a stage-length mural of Mount Fujiyama, Mr. H was preparing to erect a twenty-foot high pagoda in the middle of the gym floor, a structure guarded by two large dragons -- two beasts of chicken-wire frame, covered in bright green aluminum foil. I was recruited – if only momentarily -- to dress one of the dragons until, after several heroic efforts to wrap foil around wire, with countless holes in the foil to attest to my determination if not my skill, I was rather summarily dismissed with the not-so lilting verdict: “You’re not very good with your hands, Bob.” He was right, of course, but what really hurt was the knowledge that this was less evidence of impatience on his part, and more of an artist’s expression of simple pity for a lesser creature.
To be fair, and candid, even on a day such as this, he certainly tested my patience on more than one occasion, particularly with respect to “The Axe and the Oak Tree.” For one, he didn’t want me to go to the barber shop prior to the production. Clearly his informed sense of aesthetics did not embrace the “short back and sides” cut which any guy my age knew was “in”, in 1960. For another, and speaking of hair, he insisted that mine be sprayed with silver paint. [For those who might know the play, he had cast me as “The Wind” – perhaps a lucky guess that my future would hold a professorship.] In any event, the paint was applied so liberally 48 years ago that…….. well, you can see for yourselves. Charge number three is the most difficult to recount, or explain, especially in a public forum. My original costume included a clinging tight body-suit – more stylish to be sure, but essentially a derivative of long underwear – and a short cape of some sort. [If the image offends, please remember that I was 17 and slim.] Well, after the first performance, and what I thought had been my graceful, unthreatening descent down a ramp toward the very shapely young woman who had been inexplicably miscast as an Oak Tree, Mr.H. said he wanted to modify my costume. To this day I do not know whether it was the look of alarm conveyed by that supposedly imperturbable oak tree, or whether it was something else; but in subsequent performances I was obliged to flatten my southern hemisphere with an under-tights, girl’s girdle. For years I have not been able to talk about this experience, and I do so today only to acknowledge if not this director’s aesthetics, at least his extraordinary persuasiveness. For it has never happened since.
Not until very recently did I detect any connection between that personal experience and the toast which Mr. H proposed to us only a few months later, for he claimed to have been inspired by remarks once offered to the Girdle and Corset Manufacturers of America by one Mr. J.G. “Stretch” Johnson. You can imagine that I was all ears. And inspiring the toast was……. the moment he left the subject of ladies’ upholstery. Since most of you had the misfortune not to have been there, let me recall a few of those remarks.
“I do not think,” he began, “that any of us [ie the first teachers at ABCI] will ever forget that bright morning of September 5, 1958 when you with your faces shining, yours necks washed, and high hopes … in your young hearts, entered these new and shining halls for the first time. Mr. Mair [the school’s first principal] … was proud of you, and he, along with all of us had given our desks an extra polish to receive you…. You, after all, were the first to tread these halls, singly, and in twosies, the first to sit in these pressed sawdust desks, the first to use the showers, the first to admire yourselves in the dressing room mirrors. … You were the first to whisper, the first to talk, the first to shout, the first to cheer…to hope, to fear, to cry, and to do all those things, in fact, which make the human being the marvelously complex creation that [we are] ”
“Where,” he continued, “could one match the beauty, the charm, the grace and sophistication of the girls of the class of 1960?” … “And speaking of the boys, where could one find such intelligent, handsome, manly, and gallant swains as those who honour us with their presence this evening? Where, in short, could one find such talent, such industry, such intelligence, such wit, such beauty, such charm and sophistication assembled together under one roof?” [We were starting to detect traces of hyperbole again.] Until, he did confess that there had been times “when I and my colleagues looked upon you all as a pack of little monsters for whom our dearest wish would be that you would individually and collectively turn into centipedes with ingrown toenails….”
He then proceeded to provide individual, two-line poetic stanzas for every individual in the graduating class, all 86 of us! Of the sort: “E is for Evans, so efficient, mature. Of a wonderful future for Jean we are sure.” [A sentiment which many of us still share today.]
His remarkable toast ended as follows: “one of the great joys of being a teacher [is] the opportunity it affords to share the joys and the sorrows, the hopes, the ambitions… of young people when they are in school, and when they graduate, to send one’s own hopes for the future with them. … May I wish each one of you,” he said, “Godspeed and may you go forward in the knowledge of our pride in you and our wish, as Wordsworth has said: ‘that something from our hands have power to live, and act, and serve the future hour.’ “
And so I end, as well.
H is for Hinitt, a teacher colossus.
That fine class of ’60 shouts Bravo! from all of us.
Cher Monsieur, may YOU continue to go forward, knowing with certainty of the pride we take in you, and the affection which everyone here gathered has for you.
~ Robert J. Young
University of Winnipeg *************************************************** |
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TRIBUTE to MONSIEUR
by Jacquie (Presley) Buchanan ('69) 43 years ago I entered Aden Bowman Collegiate as a freshie. My apologies to my peers, but it was my husband who did the math. 43 years. Along with the predictable excitement of Grade 9, there was an added bonus which has influenced many of my life-long decisions and continues to touch my life to this very day.
That bonus was Robert N. Hinitt. Monsieur. Monsieur and his theatre.
His desire to have a theatre at the school began with his teaching contract in 1958. He was a French teacher with a dramatic mission. Monsieur told me that he approached principal Mayer “right away” with the idea of building a theatre, but bureaucratic wheels moved sluggishly. A couple years later, another high school attempted to lure him onto its staff with the bonus of a theatre already in place. Monsieur, however, describes that theatre as no more than a “glorified lunchroom”.
When Mr. Mayer heard of this offer, momentum picked up to keep Monsieur at Bowman. He was asked to design the theatre. Having just returned from a sabbatical year in Stratford, Monsieur’s head was full of the ramps and pillars of the Shakespearean stage and he set off to make his dream a reality.
I don’t remember much of the inside of Castle Theatre the first time I saw it in 1964. There were a lot of open bits showing off a web of catwalks and other inner workings. I do remember the painful wait for construction to be completed so we could actually walk on the stage. And I remember the 590 cushions sewn by hand by Monsieur’s mother, complete with ties to hold them onto the seats.
All the excitement was transmitted directly through Monsieur who seemed to be involved in every aspect of this creation, culminating in the first magical production of Shakespeare’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM in January 1966.
Castle Theatre thrived under his artistic hand both with high school productions and with Gateway Players’ Community Theatre. Monsieur was involved in everything. If he wasn’t directing, he was designing the set or creating the props or all of the above.
The magic continued to his gardens and his flower clock - the only one in existence at a private home, and one of only five in Canada.
Beginning in 1947, and for the next 62 Christmases, regardless of the bitter temperatures or mountains of snow, his front lawn came alive with animated, singing, three-dimensional fairytale displays that charmed the entire city. Many of his students were involved in assisting with the massive undertaking over the years, whether they were covering something in tin foil or counting money down in his rumpus room with the hanging wicker chair.
The money he raised in his donation pot initially went to UNICEF giving Aden Bowman the title for the highest UNICEF contributions. Later, the SPCA benefited from his generosity, always in the thousands of dollars.
Graduation was a magnificent event, as the gym was transformed into an international square or piazza. Parents were invited for the afternoon tea, and if they had not witnessed Monsieur’s sleight-of-hand in the drama productions, they were particularly wowed at the splendor of their surroundings. The things that man could build with cardboard were awesome.
Monsieur’s talents expanded into the community, as well, with contributions like ALICE IN WONDERLAND greeting the little train in Kinsman Park for a dozen years, and his Saskatoon Exhibition displays.
After I graduated from high school and finished university – majoring in French and Drama, of course, I headed off to Toronto to begin my theatre career, but that was not the end of my relationship with Monsieur. We saw each other often over the years and he kept me posted on the comings and goings of my peers.
That is another remarkable thing about this man. His memory. More often than not, he would ask me, “Remember, Jacquie, when……” Of course I usually didn’t remember, but he could describe the incident he was referring to in technicolor detail, always with names and dates attached.
And so the year 2000 rolled around with the 30th year reunion of my class. One of the organizers sent Monsieur a list of those classmates who had slipped off the radar, knowing that he would probably be able to locate them. Beside the name of Malcolm Buchanan, Monsieur wrote, “Ask Jacquie”. When I received the inquiring phone call, I assured the organizer that I hadn’t seen Malcolm for over 20 years. Oh, to be sure, we had been high school sweethearts, and even kept in touch on and off for the first 15 years, but that was a lifetime ago.
2 years later, Malcolm and I were having our wedding photographs taken in Monsieur’s beautiful backyard garden. Needless to say, Malcolm had been found.
Last week, my sister Michele and I accompanied Monsieur to Stratford. It was his 56th visit. He hasn’t missed a season since the festival opened in 1953. I have been privileged to accompany him for more than 10 years and he never ceases to amaze me. His immense love for all that is theatrical continues to burn in his heart.
That is why renaming Castle Theatre to the Robert Hinitt Castle Theatre is such a special tribute. Robert Hinitt has given his passion, energy and commitment to this theatre from the ground up. His blood, sweat and tears, his theatrical triumphs and failures, live and breathe within these walls. No name could be more fitting.
Merci, Monsieur. Merci beaucoup.
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