E-mail A Friend Tell a friend about the information found on this page by sending them an e-mail.   Your Name: Your E-mail:   Type an e-mail address, then click add: Add a Personal Message: (Optional)

January/February 1997 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Feature: Grizzly bears Write to Know Our Home and Native Tongue

SOME MONTHS AGO a subscriber in Surrey, England, dropped us a note asking if the editor of our Write to Know column, Dane Lanken, could help her answer a question that she has been pondering most of her life. One evening in the late 1920s, when our subscriber was a girl of eight or nine, a young man named Andrew McWhyte from Placentia, Nfld., spent the night at her father’s farm. McWhyte told his hosts he was walking around the world on a wager. She recalls he was a charming fellow who insisted that he work for his keep since one of the terms of the bet was that he pay his way. He helped with the dishes, toiled in the garden and left her a clever little drawing of himself before he departed. She still has the sketch and never forgot him. So she wrote to us and her query has been preoccupying Lanken ever since.

He began his research by calling Placentia. No McWhytes there, he was told, nor are there any in all of Newfoundland. At least none with a phone. Undaunted, he engaged a Toronto company to do a continent-wide sweep for McWhytes. They too advised they were unable to locate — incredibly — any McWhytes in North America. And so he placed the advertisement above in the St. John’s Evening Telegram and several weekly newspapers in Newfoundland. One of the first to contact him was CBC Radio in St. John’s. "What’s with the ad?" a producer asked. Lanken explained himself in an interview the next day on CBC’s province-wide afternoon radio program. That interview generated a few more leads and a letter from a childhood friend whom he hadn’t seen in 35 years. She told him that it is not uncommon for people to drop the Mc from their surnames. Perhaps he should be looking for the Whyte family.

At present, Lanken is regrouping. He’s not yet willing to admit defeat and it is just that persistence, as well as the clarity of his writing, that is making Write to Know an increasingly popular department in the magazine. Now, no one should take this as an invitation to test Lanken’s diligence. But readers should know, he’s tenacious.

FEATURED IN THIS ISSUE are the winners of our 12^th annual photo contest. This year’s categories — cultural celebrations, natural abstractions, seasons, and outdoor action — inspired photographers from across the country: close to 2,000 entries were submitted. Those who had the privilege of examining all of those photos were treated to a broad, complex and intimate portrait of the country and its people. Thank you to everyone who took the time to enter an image. The categories for next year’s contest will appear in our May/June issue.

TWENTY YEARS AGO when he was a warden in Banff National Park, Sid Marty spent a good deal of his time protecting people from grizzlies and vice versa. Last summer we sent him back to the park to report on a grizzly study examining the bear’s habitat, behaviour and numbers. Across their range, the grizzlies are being squeezed out of prime habitat, often fatally so, Marty discovered. In his story, he counts the grizzlies killed since 1971 and asks how it is that in Canada’s first and most famous national park, the one place where the big bears should have a chance to survive, their lives are so imperilled.

"The warden service didn’t have the staff or the resources in 1978 to mediate between the bears and people," Marty said after he completed his research, part of it on horseback and in a helicopter. "They still don’t have the staff." The prognosis? More development will mean more conflict, says Marty, and more bears the park service will be obliged to view as "four-legged lawsuits looking for plaintiffs."

— Rick Boychuk

top