Canadian history placemats

The Canadian history placemats are a self-designed educational project by Yolandi and Elfrieda's father, an elementary-school teacher who hoped to put Canadian history before diners at truck-stop restaurants. Thousands were printed, but his attempt to sell them from one stop to another ended without a sale. The placemats are both a concrete record of his conviction that the country’s past deserved attention and the means by which the novel recalls a small, intimate experience of his discouragement, witnessed differently by each of his daughters.

Design and purpose

The placemats combined historical facts with cartoon drawings, speech bubbles, jokes, and riddles. Their format was meant to engage children and adults while they ate, turning a meal into an occasion for learning. The project was not simply commercial: the father wanted to educate what he regarded as an ignorant and indifferent public. He was pained when people drove past historical plaques, dismissed Canadian-content rules, failed citizenship tests, or got the national anthem wrong at hockey games. His exasperation gives the placemats their animating premise: that Canadian history was worth noticing, and that ordinary people ought to take an interest in it.

That conviction also appears in the family’s memory of his trip to Ottawa when he was thirty-seven. He travelled by train to research in government archives and attend Lester B. Pearson’s funeral. Standing outside the legislative building among thousands of mourners, he began talking with a stranger, who later invited him to a New Year’s Eve party in the Glebe. At home, the story of the state funeral and the unfamiliar party moved his family; Yolandi remembers sensing that her father wanted to cry, though he did not. His attachment to the country’s history was bound up with personal feeling and a desire for connection. The placemats made that attachment into something he could carry to other people, though they did not guarantee that anyone would receive it.

The sales journey

When Yolandi was about nine, her father invited her to accompany him as he travelled from truck stop to truck stop across Manitoba and Ontario to sell the placemats. She accepted. For about a week, she wore the same orange terry-towel T-shirt, cut-offs, and North Star runners, and brought a stack of Famous Five books. She did not brush her teeth; she ate pancakes and Oh Henry! bars for every meal. In cheap motels, she filled the ice bucket, sucked on pieces of ice, watched television while her father slept and snored, and tested the chain lock by opening and closing the door.

The child’s practical details give the sales effort a modest, makeshift scale. The placemats themselves travelled with them: when Yolandi grew bored in the car, her father gave her some to draw on. The object intended to teach Canadian history thus became, during the journey, a surface for a child’s drawings as well as a product her father was trying to sell. Its use shifted without ceremony from public educational tool to companion on the road.

At the restaurants and gas stations, however, the campaign repeatedly stalled. Her father could not make a sale. He was friendly and sincere, and at first asked for very little money for a box; eventually, he was willing to give the placemats away. Managers and owners would look at them briefly and refuse. Their rejection made the gap between his purpose and the response tangible: he wanted people to learn about Canada, while the people he approached did not want the boxes, even when they cost nothing.

Failure and its witnesses

Yolandi grew embarrassed and no longer wanted to accompany her father into the restaurants. She tried to cheer him with goofy songs, including Pop Goes the Weasel and Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall, but the singing could not alter the outcome. By the time they returned, her shirt was filthy, her teeth felt fuzzy, and her father was defeated. The journey had lasted about a week; the placemats remained unsold.

At home, Lottie was in the kitchen laughing with friends, while Elfrieda Von Riesen practised piano. Yolandi recalls that this seemed to be the familiar arrangement. Her father explained what had happened with few words, communicating more through his eyes and shoulders, then went to his bedroom. Yolandi joined the conversation in the kitchen and told a colourful version of the trip that made Lottie and her friends laugh. Elfrieda stopped playing and came to find out what was happening. When Yolandi told her about the failed effort, Elfrieda did not laugh; she was concerned about whether their father was all right. Yolandi’s response, asking who she meant, registers the emotional mismatch in the scene: the father’s defeat was easy to turn into an entertaining story, but Elfrieda recognized the hurt beneath it.

Significance in the family story

The placemats are remembered not as a successful publication but as the centre of an unsuccessful venture shared by father and daughter. Their cartoons and jokes carried an earnest civic purpose; the refusal of restaurant managers and gas-station owners turned that purpose into a repeated experience of rejection. Yolandi’s account preserves both the comic texture of the trip—the motel ice, the songs, the books, the food—and the less comic ending, when her father withdraws to his bedroom.

The project also sharpens the contrast between the sisters’ responses to his disappointment. Yolandi could make the road trip entertaining for the adults in the kitchen, while Elfrieda asked whether their father was okay. The placemats therefore connect a public ambition to a private family memory: his effort to make people attend to Canadian history becomes a story about whether the people closest to him notice his discouragement. They remain an emblem of his sincere persistence, but also of how little that persistence could control the response it met.