The Guy in the Green Truck
The Guy in the Green Truck
John St. Amand – A Biography
People like John St. Amand don’t exist anymore. Who would now turn his back on a good job that pays benefits to fight the good fight? Who would now put himself and his family in harm’s way to gird people less fortunate than himself? Specifically, who would abandon a teaching position at an Ontario community college to live in a trailer and organize Nova Scotia coal miners-all for free, all for nothing?
Not I. And , I reckon, not you.
But St. Amand, who died of cancer a t sixty-four in 2007, was nothing like me, and this fair tale of barely 140 pages does marvellous work to explain the difference. The Guy in the Green Truck by James N. McCrorie is a classic cue in the biography/memoir genre. It prompts us, never tediously, to appreciate its subject’s big, inexplicable heart. We expect a roiling story of radical fear; instead we get joy. We get this from the publisher Errol Sharpe:”Perhaps a measure of Johns’ humanity was his dedication to his friends and his life partner Marilyn Keddy. In the spring before he died I had asked him to participate in a political event in Halifax…A day before the event he called me to say that he would not able to come because Marilyn was sick…It was in this way that John always got his priorities straight.”
In fact, “getting priorities straight” was not always easy for St. Amand. As author McCrorie explains:”[He] was a man of many parts. Sociologist, teacher, lobster fisher, handyman, musician, football player and trade union organizer. He was irresistibly attracted to the sea…John was, at heart, a democrat, who believed that the building of socialism had to come about through education, persuasion, class struggle…John [believed] that an informed, united working class could transform society through democratic means.”
Indeed, he pursued his heart wherever it led him: from the classroom to the boardroom, from Bay Street to Main Street, from the trellises of power to the trailer parks of hopelessness-all for one purpose.
Recounts author McCrorie: “Some years before he died, John arose from his bed and announced to Marilyn, ‘I’m feeling ruthless today’. He proceeded to review his considerable collection of books and cull from his library books he no longer reread ro required… He studied human social problems.”
In other words, John St. Amand was a free man.
And free men and women don’t exist anymore.
Do they?
- Alec Bruce, Atlantic Books Today, Holiday 2009