I still have the scrapbook.
It is filled with newspaper clippings about Terry Fox that I cut out of the Vancouver Sun, among other newspapers and magazines, as he made his way across Canada in 1980. I was an elementary school student, and like so many Canadians of my generation, I became captivated by this young man with an unusual running stride who was somehow trying to run all the way across the country.
At the time, I certainly didn’t understand that I was documenting Canadian history. I just knew there was something about Terry and his Marathon of Hope that mattered. Forty-six years later, it still does.
Terry Fox has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest elementary school memories are of Terry Fox Runs. I also remember his cancer and, eventually, his death in a way that I don’t remember other news from that time. I think Terry’s death was the first death of someone I had never met that really landed. When you are a kid, even famous people somehow seem permanent. Terry wasn’t.
It was also probably my first real encounter with cancer. Now, of course, cancer has touched almost every family in one way or another. But as a child it was new to me. I knew Terry was sick. I knew the whole country wanted him to get better. And then he didn’t. That was difficult to understand, and maybe that is part of why his story stayed with me.
Years later, I had the privilege of serving as principal of Riverside Secondary in Port Coquitlam, Terry’s hometown, and his story was different there. It wasn’t abstract history. The Fox family was part of the community. The streets were the streets Terry trained on for his journey. I remember the 25th anniversary of the Marathon of Hope particularly fondly, with thousands of people gathering in Port Coquitlam, members of the Fox family there, and this sense that the run still belonged to all of us.
The moment I remember most from those years was Bob McGill speaking to our students on Terry Fox Run day. Bob was an Assistant Superintendent in Coquitlam by then, but long before that he had been Terry’s Grade 8 teacher and basketball coach at Mary Hill Junior High.
He didn’t talk about the Marathon of Hope. He talked about a kid who was five feet tall, usually last picked in PE, who barely got off the bench that season and would not quit. That kid went on to play junior varsity basketball at Simon Fraser.
You could feel the room change. Our students had heard about Terry their whole lives. They had never heard anyone say, I taught him.
There are fewer and fewer chances for students to sit in a room with someone who can say that.
I have kept running too. Every September I make a point of finding a Terry Fox Run. It has become one of those markers in my year that I don’t really question, and increasingly I also feel a responsibility to bring someone with me.
Last year that meant one of the most memorable runs I have ever done. I joined two of my kids and thousands of others crossing the Confederation Bridge from Prince Edward Island to New Brunswick as part of the 45th anniversary of the Marathon of Hope.
The best part was looking around. There were people who remembered watching Terry in 1980 and people born years after he died. There were parents with children, grandparents, serious runners and people walking it. Thousands of us were moving across that enormous piece of Canada because of something a 21-year-old from Port Coquitlam decided to do 45 years earlier.
There is also something very Canadian about Terry that is hard to separate from the story. Maybe it is the combination of extraordinary ambition and almost no pretension. He wasn’t trying to become a national hero. He simply thought something needed to be better and decided he was going to do something about it. Somewhere along the way, that very personal decision became part of how Canadians came to understand him, and perhaps a little of how we understand ourselves. Maybe that is why, all these years later, Terry still feels like he belongs to all of us.
For much of my life, Terry Fox was someone I remembered. Now he is someone I feel responsible for helping others remember. For my generation, Terry is memory. We remember adults debating whether he would make it. We remember the hop-step. Many Canadians remember exactly where they were when they learned he had been forced to stop outside Thunder Bay.
I still follow along every year. The Terry Fox Foundation retraces the route through the spring and summer, and I find myself tracking it as though the ending might come out differently this time. The dates are fixed in me: April 12, the morning he dipped his leg into the Atlantic at St. John’s; September 1, the day outside Thunder Bay; June 28, the day he died.
Every year, there are fewer of us who remember it firsthand. For today’s students, Terry Fox is a story, and that changes what happens in our schools every September.
Here is a number that surprised me. Every year, 3.5 million Canadian students take part in the Terry Fox School Run, and the Foundation’s most recent report has them raising close to $14 million. The School Run is now the single largest fundraising program the Terry Fox Foundation has.
Our schools are not a supporting act in this. They are one of the main places where Terry’s story continues.
So the question I keep turning over is not whether we run. We always run. It is what a student actually knows about Terry by the time they cross the line.
That answer looks different in every school, and there is always more any of us could do with it. That isn’t a knock on anyone. It is what happens to any tradition that repeats for decades. It can quietly become the thing we do rather than the thing we mean.
We have been generous with monuments. Terry has schools, fields, statues, a mountain and a highway. I just read that he will be celebrated on the next version of Canada’s 5 dollar bill. All of that matters. But a monument can’t tell a student that Terry was five feet tall and last picked. Bob McGill did. And when people like Bob tell those stories, the rest of us have a responsibility to remember them and tell them again.
Schools don’t only teach history. Schools help decide which stories a society carries forward, and stories need people willing to tell them.
What I want students to understand is fairly simple. Terry saw something he thought should be better and decided to do something about it.
He wasn’t famous when he started out. He wasn’t a professional athlete. There wasn’t a massive campaign waiting for him, and he had no guarantee any of it would work. He was a young person who had been through cancer, had watched others suffer through treatment, and decided that raising money for research was something he could do.
So he started running.
The theme for this year’s Terry Fox Run is Finish It. The obvious meaning is about research. Earlier this year, the Terry Fox Foundation passed $1 billion raised for cancer research. Terry’s dream was never simply that Canadians would remember him. He wanted a cure. The running and the remembering only matter if they continue to serve that.
But Finish It means something else to me this year too. Terry began a story that now belongs to another generation to carry.
This fall, a new feature-length documentary, Run Terry Run, will bring his story back to theatres. It is built around footage and audio from 1980, some of it unseen for decades. I plan to be there opening weekend. For some of us it will be revisiting our own history. For others it will be meeting Terry for the first time.
Bryan Adams has also written a song for the film called The Ballad of Terry Fox. What struck me was where Adams was in 1980. He was 20 years old, a year younger than Terry, touring Canada and playing small clubs. When Terry stopped outside Thunder Bay, Adams had just played a show in Ottawa. He was following the Marathon of Hope the way the rest of us were, through the news.
I was following it with my scissors and the newspaper.
Now Bryan Adams is one of the people passing the story on.
That is how stories survive. Someone tells them to someone else. A parent brings a child to a run. A teacher explains to a Grade 3 class why everyone is heading outside. A principal tells students about growing up watching Terry on the news. A father talks his kids into running across a bridge with him. Eventually, those young people become the ones telling the story.
I still have that scrapbook. Back then, I was clipping Terry’s story out of the newspaper because, for whatever reason, I didn’t want to lose it.
Forty-six years later, I think that instinct still makes sense. I will keep showing up for the run, and I will keep trying to bring someone with me. Not because Terry needs another monument, but because stories like his only last when one generation makes the effort to tell the next.
A Few Resources
- The Terry Fox School Run resource hub. Start here. Lesson plans from primary through secondary, assembly presentations, morning announcements, videos, playlists and classroom activities. If you only open one link, open this one.
- Terry’s Timeline. The Marathon of Hope day by day, with Terry’s journal entries and audio woven through it. It ends on September 1 with his final journal entry: “21 miles. 3,339 miles total.”
- Stories of Hope. First-hand memories from people who saw Terry run, heard him speak or encountered him along the way. For students who can no longer sit in a gym and hear someone say I was there, this may be the next best thing.
- CBC Archives: Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope. The primary-source video and audio are particularly useful for older students. Terry on television in 1980 is different from watching someone today explain Terry.
- Hear from Fred Fox or a Terry Fox Ambassador. The School Run program offers free virtual presentations, including opportunities to hear Fred share memories of growing up with Terry and of the Marathon of Hope.
- Two books worth having. Leslie Scrivener’s Terry Fox: His Story remains the essential biography. Scrivener was a journalist assigned to follow Terry during the Marathon of Hope and built the book from his diaries and interviews with Terry, his family and friends. Douglas Coupland’s Terry is something quite different, a collection of photographs, artifacts and family memorabilia assembled almost like a scrapbook.
- And two new ways into the story referenced in my post earlier. Sean Menard’s Run Terry Run draws on 96 reels of previously unseen footage and unheard audio from the Fox family archives. Bryan Adams’ The Ballad of Terry Fox, written for the film, offers another entry point from one of Canada’s most famous musicians.
Note: AI tools were used for editorial feedback while refining the piece and with collecting the list of resources at the bottom of the post. The arguments and conclusions are my own.
