Right, Left and Centre: The Poltics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe; Chapter 42. Part Three.

   A Second Soldier Who Came Home Alive. Chapter 42. Part Three.


      By the time he reached his 50's, Graham Stark had quite an aggressive personality. "It's hard to stop him talking once he's started a conversation," someone remarked after meeting Stark a few years before he passed away. "He doesn't always listen to you."
    One group of people Stark did listen to, were the powerful people in the federal Liberal Party and he knew many of them. They included the powerful Vancouver Member of Parliament Ron Basford, Margaret Trudeau's father and Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau's father-in-law, James Sinclair, and the father of former B.C. premier Christy Clark.
    In later life, Stark left his job in the lumber company he was working for, and tried his hand in private businesses. Here he failed once or twice. Yet he died a loyal federal Liberal, who  after wading through massive amounts of paper work, did get a decent veteran's pension for himself and his wife. Only once was he deeply disappointed when he went to the movies.
     In the mid-1990's, he went to see a film about D-Day called 'Saving Private Ryan'. It starred Tom Hanks and Matt Damon and was directed by Steven Spielberg. It was a great hit and packed in the crowds to local theatres. "Yet there was no mention of the Canadian armed forces," Stark complained. "We just weren't on the screen at all."
      The movie similarly ignored British soldiers (although they were mentioned), Polish troops and fighting men from some other nations too. 'Ryan' after all was a typical Hollywood production that was pro-American and nothing else.
     Graham Stark senior passed away in the early 21st century in Nanaimo, B.C. He was  survived by his wife Lillian and his son Graham Junior. Like many other Canadians who came of age in the 1930's and 1940's, he had helped defeat German Nazism, Italian Fascism and Japanese militarism.