It all began in Kingston. I was a young graduate student, working on an M.A. in geography under the direction of Prof. Peter Goheen at Queen’s University. He urged me to write about this city’s small Ukrainian community. I resisted, convinced the topic was parochial, quite pedestrian. But I did as I was told. His advice proved prescient.
Another Queen’s professor, the History Department’s Richard Pierce, recommended I do oral histories since the archival record about Ukrainians in Kingston was very limited. So, over several months in 1977-1978, I went about with a tape-recorder, asking questions of the sort you might expect – all the while wondering how any of it would amount to anything deserving of an M.A. The professor’s plan panned out.