The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2008, Side 32

30
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #1
Pastor Ingthor Isfeld edited the Icelandic
text and I provided an introduction. The
master of this recording now resides, I
believe, in the Icelandic Collection at the
University of Manitoba . The poems
included Sandy Bar in Icelandic (5:02) and
English (5:21), Dettifoss (2:20),
Halftanarskeit (3:02), Heima (1:16),
Winnipeg Icelander (2:26), and Grimur fra
Grund (3:41), or about 23 minutes in total.
Magnus did make mistakes on each poem
and pastor Isfeld conscientiously corrected
him; the Pastor had copies of the poems in
hand, but Magnus worked entirely from
memory, and these poems had likely been
committed to memory decades earlier.
Magnus depended on his memory dur-
ing his early political days as an organizer
for the CCF and NDP. He routinely mem-
orized train schedules and the phone num-
bers of important contact people in a city
or town he would visit, thus he could jump
off the train and go immediately to the tele-
phone with no wasting of time. He also
largely memorized significant details about
the ridings in provincial elections, so he
could get all the left-wing voters out in
time in the close ridings.
Magnus spoke of having a sense of pol-
itics in his bones, and a key example of this
occurs in his book. In 1965, Ed Schreyer
won the election in the federal constituen-
cy of Springfield . Already Magnus envi-
sioned Ed as a future Premier of Manitoba,
a vision further into the future than Mr.
Schreyer could see. By 1968, the federal
constituency of Selkirk received totally
new boundaries. Ed Schreyer ran in Selkirk
defeating Eric Stefanson in the 1968 federal
election. Only ten days before the
Manitoba NDP convention, Magnus had
to resign as Party organizer to take a seat in
October on the Winnipeg City Council.
The following telephone conversation
occurs on page 131 of Magnus Eliason: A
Life on the Left
Ed usually went straight to the point.
He said, “Magnus, why are you insisting
that I become the leader?”
“It is very simple, Ed,” I replied. “With
Sid Green we’ll take 17 seats; with you we
will take 26, and I don’t know anything
about The Pas and Rupertsland.”
“I can take them both,” Ed added.
“Well, it’s 28,” I said, “if you are the
leader.”
Ed Schreyer left Ottawa and took the
leadership of the NDP, becoming the
Premier by winning 28 seats as predicted!
Magnus Eliason had a remarkable
mind, perhaps with elements of a savant,
but the memory, like any muscle, grows
with exercise and atrophies with neglect,
and Magnus exercised his mind rigorously
all his life, bringing his leadership, insight
and dynamic personality to bear in many
matters, great and small. Magnus succeeded
in fulfilling the purpose he saw in life: it is
not enough merely to live, but one must
add to the quality of life for our contempo-
raries and for future generations in some
measure.