Shaking the Feather Boa by E. C. (Ted) Burton
Saturday, August 14th, 2010I had tea with an old friend the other day, Erica Burton, who informed me that her late husband’s book had just been published. It’s been in the works for years.
I grew up knowing the Burton family. It’s a third generation friendship; Ted’s father and my grandfather were schoolmates at boarding school in England a century ago or more, then coincidentally found themselves homesteading in the same township in Saskatchewan years later, and it was Ed Burton who signed my grandfather up for the RAF when WWI broke out. My parents were nudged together by Ted’s parents. And Ted and Erica’s three children and my brother and I often found ourselves playing or getting into mischief of some sort together throughout our childhood.
So, I had been eagerly anticipating the conclusion of Ted’s memoirs, begun in Journal of a Country Lawyer.
The Burtons moved away from Kenora to live in Thunder Bay while I was in university. The only time I got together with Ted as an adult was when I hosted the Kenora launch his first collection of memoirs. As I read Shaking the Feather Boa, I found myself wishing he was still around, wishing that I’d got to know him better while I was an adult. I would have enjoyed talking to him more about some of the experiences he had and some of the philosophical points of view he brings out in this new collection.
Where his first book was full of stories about interesting events in his career as a defense lawyer, crown attorney and later district attorney, Shaking the Feather Boa is more general in scope, full of anecdotes from his childhood through to his retirement. It is a collection of memories of events that manufactured a life, of happenings that pushed him to the edge of change. Through these reminisces, readers can see the influence of circumstance on a life, how people, places, and events conspire to provide one with the tools and experience to make the decisions (or form the circumstances) that create an individual.
It’s interesting to read what Ted thinks those events were in his life and how he feels they conspired to change or strengthen him. And from another point of view, it is interesting to see how some of those stories he tells may have helped him do the job he ended up doing in a far more effective manner.
Even if you didn’t know Ted Burton, you will find his memoirs engaging. His was a life lived on the threshold of many opening and shutting doors – aviation history, the Great Depression, the old lumber camps, First Nation/White relations, and the lives of those caught up in crime as both victims and offenders. Here was a man who believed in experiencing the fullness of what life had to offer, and in using that experience to help improve the lives of those he met!
