60th Anniversary Homecoming!!

[Garry Shipton (RIP)]

On this date,today,May 21st.1945,William James(Jamie)Shipton.our old CMP/motorcycle driiving/ D-Day Dosger stepped off a Canadian Pacific troop train at Windsor Station on Peel Street here in Montreal,after five years and five months away from home.The boys stepped off the ocean liner"Ile de France"in the wee hours of May 20/45 in New York harbour and entrained overnight to Montreal without even seeing the Lights of the Big Apple.There to meet him at the station were my mother and brother(later Captain-RCAF-426 Squadron-Korea).They boarded the local streetcar,no parade,no fanfare,kit bag over his shoulder and stood for the 45 minute ride to Verdun,a suburb of Montreal.The next day he had to return to the station,still in uniform(they weren't charged fares for public transport at the time)to fetch his foot locker,which I am staring at not ten feet away from me today.The one thing he still remembered from that train ride was the blacked out windows of the hospital rail cars bringing home the wounded,who were unloaded out of public view.God bless them all.