February 2, 2009
THIS COUNTRY: THE DRYDEN CLAN SETS FORTH
ROY MacGREGOR
Somewhere amidst all the doom and gloom there has to be a silver lining.
There was last time - even if Murray Dryden didn't see it right away.
But the math is simple enough: no Great Depression, no epiphany, no coming trip to India for the heirs of Murray Dryden.
Two weeks from tomorrow, the Dryden clan - Murray's son and daughter, a daughter-in-law, a granddaughter, grandson-in-law, four great-grandchildren and a stepson, stepdaughter and step-grandson from a much later second marriage - will set out for Pune, India.
"We want to complete the circle," says Dave Dryden, Murray's older son.
His younger son, Ken - the Hall of Fame goaltender who now blocks shots on Parliament Hill - would be there, too, if he weren't recovering from hip-replacement surgery.
The Dryden "team" is headed for an orphanage where, 39 years ago, Murray Dryden handed the first child a small kit that contained just enough material - ground sheet, blanket, pyjamas, a few incidentals - to allow that child a fair night's sleep in a world that can be stunningly unfair to children.
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| Debbie Will-Dryden holds a child while working with the charity Sleeping Children Around the World during a trip to Uganda in 2008. |
He didn't quite make it, passing away three years ago at 92, but he came close enough that it will happen this year. Dave Dryden, himself a brilliant goaltender in the old days of the World Hockey Association, knows when and where but prefers not to say.
Instead, he likes to think, "Every child we give a bed kit to in 2009 is the millionth."
Sleeping Children Around the World is a unique charity. One hundred cents of every dollar raised ends up in a bed kit. Volunteers put the kits together and volunteers, entirely at their own expense, travel to the most destitute parts of the world to live up to Murray Dryden's belief that a safe and good night's sleep is a basic right of childhood.
Murray was the eldest of eight children raised on a farm near Domain, Man. He fared poorly at school, dropped out and tried to make his way as a salesman just as the Depression hit. He sold anything he could - silk stockings, can openers - and he kept a small diary that hints at how truly hard life can be in hard times.
"June 23-28: Put in terrible week. Made less than $10. Slept on the office floor the last couple of nights and ate only when in dire need ... but there is always a better day coming."
But there wasn't, not for the two years he wandered. He barely ate. He hopped freight trains. He once walked from Regina to Moose Jaw. He nearly froze to death. He slept, when he could, in parks and empty office buildings.
But every once in a while a phrase would sparkle in his diary: "Outlook brighter."
He had that epiphany in Northern Ontario, freezing on the roadside as cars refused to stop for him. Who could blame them? He began to weep and words to an old hymn came to him:
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.
A car stopped. He made it to a farmhouse and hoped for a haystack to sleep on, only to be invited in for food, tea and a real bed.
He never forgot what that meant.
Murray Dryden survived the Depression and emerged a superb salesman: a big, hearty man people instinctively trusted. He found success in construction and Christmas trees. He married kindergarten teacher Margaret, and they moved to 28 Pinehurst Cres., Islington, where the two boys and Judy were raised and where their eccentric father had the backyard paved so the kids could play hockey all year round.
Standing at Judy's bedroom door one evening watching the child sleep led to this crazy idea that you give small comfort to children who have none. Sleeping Children, to this day, is still run out of the home with the paved backyard.
He put millions of his own money into the charity - even donating his Christmas tree farms - but something about its simplicity attracted an endless line of volunteers. Ten years after Margaret died in 1985, he married Theda Burton, a woman he had once dated in his youth and whose name he came across in a contribution. After Theda's death, her children joined the Dryden children in carrying on the legacy.
They will go to India and pause in remembrance of a big, laughing man who sneezed too loudly, once tried out an ill-advised toupee and wore suits that Don Cherry would applaud. "He was the 1970s before the seventies ever happened," Ken said in the eulogy he delivered at his father's funeral, "and his clothes never left the seventies."
But they will also remember a man who also never left the Dirty Thirties, who came out of a long Depression determined to make the world a better place.
"If we want to know more about our father," says Dave Dryden, who now regularly travels for Sleeping Children, "we need to do this.
"It was such a big part of his life, but we didn't really know it.
"We knew he was doing it, of course - but until you go yourself, you can't really know what it means."
rmacgregor@globeandmail.com
