Dizzy Gillespie Has a Strong Connection with Baha’i House in Iqaluit

There are so many delightful little facts I’m learning while living here.  For example, Beth McKenty (we need a book just about her time here and I sure hope she’s writing it) lived here more that a decade and was instrumental, if you’ll pardon the expression, in helping this famous trumpet player to become a Baha’i.  I would never have learned this and so many other little snippets of Baha’i history if I’d remained in my Erin home. 

Oddly, I’ve had two other encounters with Dizzy in my travels.  On one of my trips to Cuba when I visited the Baha’i Centre in Havana, the lovely Cuban Baha’is asked me to sign the Centre’s guest book.  Dizzy Gillespie had been there before me and so our names sit side-by-side in that record book.  I know, a very small claim to fame indeed.

I found the cutest photo of Dizzy on the internet.  Of course,

it would not allow me to copy it here.  It was from an episode

of The Cosby Show.  He was bulging out his famously puffy 

cheeks for the youngest Cosby child.  So cute and funny!   

I don’t know if Dizzy ever made it to Iqaluit to visit Beth but, I expect if he did I’ll find his name in one of the Guest Books here.  I’ll be going through those books and trying to make contact with any who have been fortunate enough to have passed through these welcoming doors.  I’ve agreed to help start compiling a time-line of visitors in order to obtain their Baha’i House memories and stories.  

Meanwhile back at my third encounter with Dizzy.  In January of 1993 I visited the Gardner family while they were living in Ljubljana, Slovenia.  Daddy, Dave was in Canada on business so Grandma Helen thought it a good idea for me to go to be with Sylvie to help herd the kids.  Daniel, my young friend who got me here, would have been five at the time and his sister Julie, our current housemate, was just two years old.  During my precious and all-too-short two weeks there, I picked up a newspaper.  I couldn’t read Slovene but I was able to understand enough to know that Dizzy Gillespie had died.  It was one of those ‘moments’ for me that I knew I’d remember for a very long time.  Dizzy was only seventy-five when he died.  I say only because I'll get there myself in just over three years.  Yikes, I'd better get cracking, I've got a lot I still want to write about and do.  

A lovely lady, also famous to Baha’is, is Dorothy Baker.  I have no idea how or if she has a connection with this house.  What I do know is she did make her presence or, perhaps I should say her absence here known.   

Knowing how she loved to travel why did it surprise me when Dorothy recently took the strangest little junket to Michigan?  I used an envelope I found in the over-stocked supply in the house to mail an Iqaluit Visitor’s Guide to my sister.  She and her husband are coming for a visit later in the summer.  When my sister thanked me for the brochure she asked, “Who’s the pretty lady in the picture?” 

“What pretty lady?” was my response.  I then received this photo via email.   

Dorothy’s photograph must have been in that envelope.  I did not know of my mistake and I can tell you it made my job of sorting through the huge supply of envelopes here very labour-intensive.  I held each one up to the light to make certain no other archival photos or since-departed Baha’is would accidentally be tripping off hither and yon. 

The photo of Dorothy will be making the return trip to Iqaluit along with my sister.  In the meantime if anyone knows how or why her photo came to this house, please let me know.  Would you look at that mischievous smile on Dorothy’s beautiful face?  Her eyes seem to twinkle.  

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