Thank you very much.
My name is Harry Watts and I'm not a member of any of the Legions, not because I don't support them but because when I was working I never had time to be what I would call a good member and take part in things. When I retired I became involved with the Memory Project, so I've become a speaker taking the story to the young people in the schools about what the veterans did.
I try to do one school a day, but on Remembrance Day I always do two because they want to hear the stories and they want to know what it's all about. At one school in particular, there were 15-year-old and 16-year-old grade nine students who didn't want to go to school. They had truancy problems. I would go and take them to the cenotaph for 11 o'clock, and we would stand as a group to know what was going on and what it was all about. Then I would go back to the school and talk to the young people, have lunch with them, and they would know that it was a day of remembrance. It was a day when you took your two minutes of silence and remembered that way. There are so many things that I disagree with about having a national holiday. As they said, the first thing you have to do is have a parade, you have to get the fire trucks out, and maybe a few veterans riding on the trucks or something, but it's not the same. It's those few minutes of silence.
I had a job where I travelled through Ontario for several years and wherever I was, whatever small village, I could always find a spot where Remembrance Day was being observed and I would take my few minutes of remembrance for those who didn't come home. It's just such a special moment for people to observe and remember.
I think of the first Remembrance Day of 1919, which happened in Manchester in England. At 11 o'clock two old soldiers—well, they weren't too old, I guess, at that time—all of a sudden realized what time it was and they just came to attention on the sidewalk, and the next thing you knew, a truck stopped, and the teamsters stopped, and everybody stopped for just two minutes.
That's where it all comes from and that's the way it should be. If we could just get two minutes of silence even in the stores.... A few years ago I was in one of the big malls and it just happened to be that time of the day, and a few minutes before 11 o'clock there was some jazz music being played. I found the manager and suggested that maybe at 11 o'clock they could just shut it down. It's funny because that same year a chap wrote A Pittance of Time. It's funny that we were both on the same wavelength. He wrote a piece of music to go with that.
That's all it is. It's just a pittance of time but it's so important for our young people to remember a pittance of time because we're not going to be around forever. I was in two schools two weeks ago just answering questions from young people, so it isn't just on Remembrance Day that they want to know what we did, why we did it, and how we did it, but Remembrance Day is that special day. It's such an emotional day for me and for the young people. I wouldn't want to see it enacted as a holiday. It would lose the whole emotional meaning of what Remembrance Day is all about.
Thank you.