Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 27/7/2017 (1153 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

Here’s the bottom line right at the top. I love my hometown and I love showing it off.

By that I mean offering personally-guided tours of the city to visiting friends and even to strangers from afar. I had no intention of doing that at noon Tuesday. There was no need to on an afternoon when Winnipeg was showing off itself, on a sumptuous summer day that reminded me why there is no better place to be — this time of year at least — than right here where we live.

And there’s no better location for Winnipeg to show itself off than the enchanting collection of turn-of-the-20th century architecture, in the National Historic Site that is The Exchange District.

Particularly, of course, during the fringe festival.

Which is where — after missing the start of a play that had been recommended — I randomly began asking a table of three front-door ticket-takers at the Pantages Playhouse Theatre where they take friends who are first-time visitors to Winnipeg.

Off the top of their heads, Cathy Phillipson, 68, Arlene Boivin, 49, and daughter, Amanda Boivin, 31, came up with some of the more typical tourist locations. "The zoo," of course, a river cruise floating by The Forks, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights.

Although Cathy also suggested a place less known; the early-years home in Point Douglas of "Interepid," the Second World War spymaster, Sir William Stephenson.

All of that inspired me to begin what amounted to an impromptu off-The Fringe play, which — with apologies to Guy Maddin — could have been called My Own Winnipeg. The performance, if you will, drew upon my personalized tours to places that may not be for everyone, but I like to think everyone should see to get a deeper sense of the city so many denigrate without ever visiting.

So it was, that I began telling Cathy, Arlene and Amanda one story of one tour in particular.

It happened several years ago when I happened to be in the Portage and Main concourse on a fall afternoon and noticed two young men who appeared to be lost. After offering them directions out of the underground maze — and then learning they were from Montreal — I offered to take them on a brief driving tour of the town. Something more personalized than a tour bus. You know, Friendly Manitoba and all that.

They said they didn’t have much time because they had to be somewhere soon, so I began where I always like to begin: downtown. At Louis Riel’s grave, across from The Forks, in front of St. Boniface Cathedral.

Being from Montreal, I thought the story of Riel, and visiting his final resting place in the largest Francophone community in the West, might have special, and lasting meaning.

BORIS.MINKEVICH / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES The Battle of Seven Oaks monument on the northeast corner of Main Street and Rupertsland Boulevard.

I also would have taken them through Wolseley to get a sense of what I consider to be a quintessential old Winnipeg neighbourhood, but there wasn’t much time so we drove down old-money, now new money Wellington Crescent and through Assiniboine Park, that grand gift of the city’s far-sighted founding fathers.

It was a short tour. And when I dropped them off back at Portage and Main, I learned why they were in such a hurry. They had to be at the old Winnipeg Stadium for the start of the Montreal Alouettes game with the Blue Bombers. That’s when they told me who they were; the out-of-costume mascots for the Alouettes.

But, as I was telling my captive audience Tuesday, every tour I give is different, depending on who it’s for and how much time they have. One of the places I’ve taken former McClelland & Stewart publisher and recent Order of Canada recipient Douglas Gibson is an off-the-beaten-tourist-track house of global historic significance in Fort Rouge. Marshall McLuhan, the famed media guru who envisioned the global village, grew up at 507 Gertrude Ave., where Gibson proudly posed for a sidewalk photo.

As most of us know there are many other famous homes of other famous Winnipeggers — most notably a visiting Bob Dylan, who searched out the house at 1123 Grosvenor, which is where Neil Young lived when he went to Kelvin High School.

I can’t recall for certain but probably I drove Gibson by Neil Young’s boyhood home myself on one of his visits here, but I do know I drove him to Fort Whyte Alive because he’s a big fan of birds.

Also naturally, I directed him to La Maison Gabrielle Roy, the St. Boniface girlhood home of the celebrated author. I know we also visited another of my favourites: the recently spruced up Battle of Seven Oaks monument at Main Street and Rupertsland Avenue.

The mention of the Seven Oaks monument to my nodding off audience of three in front of the Pantages awakened one of them. Arlene gleefully announced that her husband Paul Boivin is a direct descendent of Pierre Falcon, the fur-trader who celebrated the Metis victory at Seven Oaks by writing La Chanson de la Grenouillère, a song still sung today.

"So I know all about it," Arlene said.

But Arlene, who lives in Steinbach, confessed to never having visited the monument, even though she has wanted to. That speaks to how little many of us fail to fully appreciate what we have and is uniquely ours. There are lots of ways to remedy that.

The Winnipeg Public Library offers historic walks and garden tours through some city neighbourhoods, among them a Bruce Park walking tour near Douglas Park Road, the street where Susan Thompson, the city’s first woman mayor grew up.

There’s another way to take a tour, of course. Create your own tour. While you’re at it, venture out to Lockport for a hot dog and Gimli for some fish. And, if you can’t find anyone to show the town off to, show it off to yourself. Because as you might have heard before, we live in a country that, for most of us, is a comparative heaven on earth.

And Winnipeg is at the heart of it.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca