Queen Elizabeth II reviews a guard of honour in Toronto, 1959. - The Associated PressIn a moment of fabrication, I could - if so sinfully and irreverently inclined - claim, especially in keeping with the unrestrained, hyperbolic tributes to the Queen, that Elizabeth and I locked eyes momentarily as she and hubby Philip sped down Bishop Place in their limousine in Gander on a summer afternoon in 1959.
Nevertheless, it was, for the three eldest of the five Wakeham offspring, our first encounter with an actual celebrity, a star having descended onto our delightfully cloistered life, an environment devoid of television, and, thus, an existence near oblivious to the world of the rich and famous.
Carol says Mom was not pleased that she had to spend hard-earned money to apparently protect the Queen from the immodesty of Gander’s little colonialists.The point of this trip to the Gander of my past is to note that Queen Elizabeth’s status of fame, and the reason for that fame, was the same on that afternoon in 1959 as it was last week when she died at the ripe old age of 96, a passing incongruously described as a “shock” by some television types.
Queen Elizabeth was born with a silver spoon near her tonsils the size of a loader on a Pouch Cove backhoe, was surrounded by servants, flacks and speech writers her entire life, had an existence of unlimited comfort known only to a relatively few, and drew her fortune from ordinary taxpayers.
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