Submitted to YFile by Glendon communications officer Marika Kemeny.
The Glendon community gathered under cloudy skies around the campus flagpole for a ceremony of remembrance on Nov. 11 at the eleventh hour.
A large crowd of students, faculty and staff assembled to hear Acting Principal Françoise Boudreau’s deeply touching reflections on the meaning of the day, and to participate in a program of poetry, music and readings from eyewitness accounts by veterans of the First and Second World Wars.
Glendon student Kevin Friedberg (computer studies & drama) read in English and French the winning composition essay from the National Remembrance Day Veterans’ Affairs Competition. Ed Ciantar and Rashid Ennaffati from York’s Security Services were on hand to lower the flag, followed by the minute of silence. The Glendon Musical Ensemble Singers, under the direction of Paulo Bittencourt, interpreted Canadian composer Eleanor Daley’s haunting In Remembrance. Manager of research support & special projects, Guy Larocque, who conceptualized and organized the event, then read from the diaries of William Pecover, who was at Vimy Ridge in 1917, in English and Jean-Paul Gagnon, who fought in Normandy in 1944, in French.
The playing of the national anthem brought the ceremony to a close in an atmosphere that reaffirmed that those who sacrificed for us and who continue to do so are not forgotten at Glendon.