While digging through old folders and filing cabinets, Western Canada High School teacher Geneviève Dale happened across an 81-year-old letter mailed by a Canadian Navy sailor during the Second World War.
The letter was signed by Cecil Richard Moss, who attended Western Canada High, according to Dale, and addressed to Rosalie Cummings, a former schoolmate.
Dale found the letter in the school’s underground storage area. She was searching for old, missing yearbooks for a digitization project with some colleagues.
“There’s a lot of weird little nooks and crannies here at Western. And so at one point, there was a discussion about going down into, kind of the bowels of the school,” she said.
“We all went down into one of the basement storage rooms and just started rifling through drawers and boxes.”
“I found this little letter kind of tucked into a file folder, just sort of sitting there.”
In the letter, Moss offered advice on classes, listed his favourite teachers, and reflected back on high school track and field competitions.
“Betty Mitchell, old lady McKinnon and Johnny Souter were my favourite teachers. The trouble is I didn’t know it until I’d left there,” he wrote.
(Mitchell, who taught drama, would go on to become a legend in Calgary’s theatre community, with two venues and an annual awards event named in her honour.)
Moss also wrote about his family, saying he was the youngest of eight children but insisting he didn’t grow up spoiled.
“I’m glad to say I’m the youngest of a family of seven boys and one girl. I’ve got two brothers overseas in Italy, one in the Air Force in Edmonton,” he wrote. “I guess the rest of the family had to look after me but I’m glad I had nobody to look after. Don’t get the idea I was spoiled either as everybody does, just because I’m the youngest.”
Dale said Moss left school after Grade 11 to enlist.
“As I started reading it, I was really struck by how much he sounded like our students that we have in school. Like this is the most teenage boy thing I’ve read in a long time,” she said. “It almost felt like if I’d picked it up off the floor of my classroom.”
Toward the end of his letter, Moss talks about wanting to get home.
“I’ve given up the idea of having anything to do with women until I get home and then just look out. I can just see myself going howling down Eighth Avenue at 12 o’clock Saturday noon. (Day dreaming again),” he wrote.
“It would be nice if all us kids could get home together. Let’s just keep hoping, it’s sure something to look forward to, in fact it’s the thing that keeps me going.”
The letter is dated May 1, 1944 — about seven months before Moss was killed in late November during the Battle of the St. Lawrence.
He was aboard the HMCS Shawinigan, which sank off the Newfoundland coast after it was attacked by a German submarine, according to the Canadian War Museum.
The 91 crew members aboard were all lost at sea. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s records say Moss was just 18 at the time.
“That’s a baby. That’s not even a 19-year-old. That’s a really young person,” said Dale. “Finding out that he and all of his crewmates passed away, I was touched more by it than I thought I would be.”
Dale poured through yearbooks in hopes of finding more information about Rosalie Cummings but said she didn’t turn up much, other than that she had planned to become a nurse after graduation.
“This school, even within its bones, has so much to teach us,” she said, adding that she plans to continue looking for more details about Moss and Cummings’ lives.
Dale said she’s still deciding what to do with the letter, but she’s not planning to keep it and would like to donate the document to a local museum.
“I think it goes beyond the school, honestly, and that it might be a really interesting little nugget of history, tying Calgary to the rest of world history.”
