Gift for teaching, passion for the stage, and energy to spare

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This article was published 03/04/2020 (1476 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was the 1960s and Loa Henry’s husband had just walked out the door.

She had four children, the youngest little more than a year old. She didn’t have a high school diploma and she needed to get a job with enough income to support her family.

Who could blame her if she had cracked under this pressure?

But if you thought that, you didn’t know Henry.

Henry, who became a labour activist and feminist, died of pancreatic cancer on Jan. 26 at age 82.

After she was left to raise her kids without their father, she went back to high school for a year and graduated. Then she earned a teaching certificate from the University of Manitoba.

“She figured she couldn’t support her family without her Grade 12 so she went back to high school,” her husband of 35 years, Jim Silver, said recently.

“It was a tough year. Getting kids to school, then she would go to school all day. She’d go home, make supper and play with the kids and put them to bed, and then she would do her homework — and she had been out of school for a decade.

“But she ended up having the second-highest average in Grade 12.”

Meanwhile, a couple of teachers asked her to teach a class and they were impressed.

“They said, ‘You have a gift,’” Silver said.

“So she went into the one-year education program at the University of Manitoba. At the time (she went back to high school) her youngest was one and a half and her oldest was eight. It was quite remarkable what she did during those two years.

“It says a lot about her determination and character.”

Silver said Henry, who taught mostly at Voyageur School during her 25-year career, was a natural teacher.

“She just had a wonderful way with kids,” he said. “Her principal would bring the kids creating problems to her room because she had a way with people.

“She was calm and quiet. She was very mature.”

Her daughter, Paula, said her mother gave her and her siblings “a magical childhood.”

“She made sure I stayed at home. She would get young women from Villa Rosa to be with us when they were pregnant — and they would always do my hair. I would have a great beehive hairdo when I was six.”

But Henry was also aided by her mother and her eldest brother — you may have heard of them.

Her mother was Ann Henry, who not only was a Winnipeg Tribune reporter and columnist, and the first female reporter to cover the Winnipeg Police Court and the Manitoba legislature, but also a playwright whose play, Lulu Street, was the first by a Manitoba writer to be mounted by the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre.

Her eldest brother, Donnelly Rhodes, was an actor who played a police officer on Da Vinci’s Inquest, an escaped con on Soap, and a doctor on Battlestar Galactica. Her other brother, Tim, is an actor who was in the movie Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem.

Paula said her mother “had tons of energy and she was a strong woman.”

That energy went onto the stage, but not any stage. She wanted to be a part of theatre that was dedicated to creating social change. Henry joined the Nellie McClung Theatre — at one time the longest-lasting feminist theatre group in the country — in the 1970s and soon became its artistic director. She also became a founding member and artistic director of the Winnipeg Labour Choir in 1996.

In 2006, Henry made her debut as a playwright with Mouseland. She set to music the 1944 Tommy Douglas story, using members of the choir to sing and act. The play is about Douglas’s message that Canadians hadn’t realized the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives weren’t interested in what mattered to ordinary people.

Walter McDowell, a member of the choir, said they sang for years until they disbanded, only to be resurrected by Henry for one stirring show last year to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Winnipeg General Strike.

“She had a very passionate view that art can teach and entertain at the same time,” McDowell said. “She made everybody feel welcome and she was very patient.

“She was an amazing woman and I miss her as a friend.”

Brenda Austin-Smith, a Nellie McClung Theatre member and now head of the University of Manitoba’s English, theatre, film/media department and current president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, said she remembers rehearsing many times in the living room of Henry’s house.

“Loa was the keeper of the scripts,” Austin-Smith said.

“It was agitprop theatre — agitation and propaganda. It’s not fine theatre — it was political theatre based on the concerns of the community. It was an amazing thing to do.”

Another member, Paula Fletcher, said Henry “was a great leader… and she’d had a lot of adversity and knew how to overcome it — nothing fazed her.”

For her accomplishments, Henry was honoured with several awards: the YWCA’s Woman of Distinction award for arts in 2004, Canadian Dimension’s Person Who Changed the World Award in 2005, and the Grassroots Women Award on International Women’s Day in 2008.

Fletcher, now a Toronto city councillor, was responsible for getting Henry and Silver together at a social followed by a party.

“I was the bridge,” she said laughing. “I knew both of them.

“I think Loa said he was cute and I should invite him to the party, so I did. They were never apart after that.”

Silver said the couple got married two years later in the living room of their house on Ruby Street.

“It was all in front of a bunch of our friends. We thought getting married is a commitment and we wanted to share it with our friends in our house — we loved that house on Ruby Street,” he said.

Their daughter, Paula, put it this way. “The cliche of two becoming one — that’s definitely them. And he bought her flowers every week for 37 years.

“He loved her passionately and they loved each other passionately.”

In December, they decided they had to move because of Henry’s increasing problems with scoliosis. On Jan. 10, she was diagnosed with cancer.

“We were in the process of moving when she got severe stomach pains,” he said. “Two weeks and two days (later), she died.”

Besides her husband and brother, Henry is survived by four daughters, a son, seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca