Nancy's Notes

My readers come from everywhere. Different countries, different political views, different walks of life. But I come from Atlantic Canada, from a place where people understood something very simple about survival. You needed each other. Friendship mattered. Loyalty mattered. Respect mattered. Relationships mattered.

Following the Second World War, my father took over a bankrupt flight school in Moncton, New Brunswick. On paper it was not a promising venture. The region was economically depressed and the weather was notoriously difficult for aviation. By most conventional measures it was exactly the kind of business people would advise you not to buy. But my father understood something that does not appear on balance sheets. He understood relationships.

He did not think small and he did not think locally. While many aviation businesses of the time focused only on their immediate region, my father believed the world itself was the market. He built relationships across the aviation world with instructors, pilots, mechanics, suppliers, and operators who became part of something larger than a single company. Over time those relationships became the backbone of the business. It was a model that many aviation training schools in Canada would later follow, but at the time it was not the traditional way of thinking. My father believed that if you treated people well and built trust over time, opportunity would travel much farther than geography.

Then one day the business burned to the ground.

At the time the school operated out of a repurposed Second World War wooden hangar, the kind that might as well have been a tinderbox. When the fire came it destroyed everything.

On July 12, 1965. I was five years old, but I remember it like yesterday. What the photographs show is the massive smoke rising into the sky. What I remember are the flames that could be seen above the roofline before that smoke took over the sky. Everything was gone. Everything except the relationships.

Within twenty-four hours, the operation was open again, running out of a rented trailer. The phone company installed a line almost immediately. The aircraft that happened to be out flying that day, the only ones that survived simply because they were not in the hangar, were already back in the air. People stepped in. Not because they were obligated. Because they believed in the work and they believed in each other. Those relationships had been built over years, long before the fire ever came.

I have been thinking about that story a lot the last few days as I watch the tension building between countries that have long called themselves allies.

Following the Second World War, the world was rebuilding as well. Nations were forming partnerships and institutions designed to prevent another global catastrophe. NATO would soon emerge from that moment. It was not simply a military agreement. It was built on the belief that relationships between countries mattered. Countries that trusted each other and respected each other would be stronger together than they would ever be standing alone.

Those relationships helped shape the stability of the modern world. But relationships, whether between people or between nations, are fragile things. They depend on trust. They depend on respect. They depend on the understanding that partners matter not only when you need them, but all the time.

Watching events unfold now, I find myself thinking about the generation that built those systems in the first place. Tom Brokaw called them the Greatest Generation. Many of them came home from the war determined to build something better. Businesses. Communities. Partnerships between nations that might prevent the world from falling apart again.

That generation is almost gone now, and perhaps that is part of why this moment feels emotional to me.

Because when I think about what they built, I do not think first about power or dominance. I think about relationships. I think about the quiet understanding that trust and respect were not optional pieces of the system. They were the foundation that made the whole thing work.

My father never assumed anyone would come running to help him. He spent years building the kind of relationships that made people want to. And the lesson from that day in July of 1965 has never really left me. You do not build relationships the day the hangar burns down. You build them quietly over years. And you protect them with respect long before the fire ever comes.