Tommy Douglas. Dave Margoshes

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go and have this service, close them off formally, and bury the dead.” He thought it was a shame, though, that differences about biblical interpretation should deprive the youngsters of the community of religious education. “At twenty years of age, you’re brash and ready to hand out advice to people three times your age with complete equanimity. So I proceeded to preach a sermon saying it was disgraceful that they were closing this church.”

      Afterwards, the congregation met and the deacon came sheepishly to Tommy “and admitted they had been a little foolish.” If he would agree to come every Sunday, they’d try to make a go of their church for another year.

      Brandon College officials took a dim view of a first-year student having such a heavy load, but they agreed to allow him to preach every other Sunday, with his friend Mark Talney sharing the position, at fifteen dollars for each Sunday.

      Tommy also spent two summers in Austin. “The first summer, I got around to all the farms on a bicycle,” he remembered. “The next year they got me an old Ford car; it took me halfway and I pushed it the rest.”

      After two years, Tommy was assigned to a Presbyterian church in Carberry, just a short train ride east of Brandon. Although the Knox Church wasn’t Baptist, it was desperate for a minister and appealed to the college. Ecumenicalism worked to Tommy’s advantage in another way at Carberry as well. His reputation as a preacher attracted the attentions of a pretty girl named Irma Dempsey, a petite, brown-haired Methodist with shining eyes who came to hear him one Sunday and quickly changed churches. It was the start of a romance that would blossom into marriage.

      Tommy was in Carberry for two years, then was reassigned to Baptist churches in the Shoal Lake and Strathclair area, a couple of hours northwest of Brandon. He would take a Saturday afternoon train to Minnedosa, where he’d change to a train to Strathclair. He’d spend the night with an elderly farm family named Kippen, two brothers and two sisters who would make sure to get him to the church on time – Shoal Lake in the afternoon, Strathclair in the evening – by old Model T Ford in good weather, a team and cutter in the winter.

      Finally, in his last year at Brandon, Tommy was sent for a tryout to Weyburn, Saskatchewan, where the Calvary Baptist Church was looking for a permanent minister.

      Tommy was extremely popular as a student minister, especially among children. He organized drama and sports clubs, showed them the manly art of boxing, and regaled them with tales of big-city Winnipeg. At Sunday school, he always had stories and jokes, and one of his favourites involved a bit of sleight of hand. He would flash a shining red heart, cut out of construction paper, and caution the children what might happen if they lied, stole, or were disrespectful to their parents. He would say some magic words and – presto! – the red heart would be replaced with a coal black one.

      On September 29, 1929, he wrote a message in the autograph book of a young parishioner in Shoal Lake:

       Dear Wilma,

       If instead of giving gems or flowers, we could drop a beautiful thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give.

       T.C. Douglas.

      Demanding as this practice preaching was, Tommy also was taking a full load at Brandon. He excelled in his studies, which included Greek and Hebrew, and he won top marks in the latter, in a class that included several Jews studying to be rabbis. He was head of his class for the first three years. Then he met his match in the form of Stanley Knowles, another printer newly arrived at the college. The careers of Knowles and Douglas would have many parallels – both became Baptist ministers and both became distinguished left-wing politicians, with Knowles reigning as “the dean of Parliament” until his retirement in 1984. For the moment, though, they were the friendliest of rivals, dividing academic honours between them, though Knowles scored more gold medals in their graduation year.

      “I tried to take the gold medals but they made me put them back,” Tommy quipped.

      To which Knowles retorted: “Tommy was smarter, but I was better at writing exams.”

      Brandon College was an affiliate of McMaster University in Windsor, Ontario, another Baptist-founded school. At the time, the Baptist Church was polarized by radical and fundamental views on a wide range of theological issues, and many Baptists would have been scandalized to learn what was taught in the hallowed halls at Brandon that they helped to support. The notorious Scopes “monkey” trial, which had pitted the theory of Darwinism against religious fundamentalism in the United States, had played itself out only a couple of years before Tommy enrolled at Brandon, and many Baptists were on the fundamentalist side. But at the college, liberal ideas were given full rein (ironically, Brandon College was noted for its geology program, which taught a theory of an earth millions of years old that was diametrically opposed to the biblical view), and a charge of heresy had been levied against several Brandon professors. Tommy sarcastically described the position of the fundamentalists this way: “I want complete freedom of thought unless your point of view is different from mine, in which case you’ll believe what I believe.”

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