(Not mentioned on Norway's Roll of Honour, but is commemorated on Eastern Commerce's.)

 

Bill Raper's grandfather Charles Raper was the head bookkeeper at a large hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1901 at the age of 43, he died of a sudden heart attack leaving behind his wife Sarah and eight children, aged 19 to 2. Fortunately he left the family comfortably off. Charles' son, Charles Jr was 12 at the time. Young Charles eventually worked in domestic service as a footman but he, two sisters and a brother left for Canada in 1911 to live with their eldest sister and her husband who had arrived in Toronto the previous year. Ultimately Sarah and all of her children immigrated to Toronto by the time the war began in 1914. They lived in a newly built house at 61 Rainsford Road.

 

Charles met Florence Henrietta Davis (b, 1891), an English girl who was born in Walsall and had come to Canada with her family a few years earlier. They married on April 5, 1917 at the St. John's Norway rectory which was on Kingston Road. Charles worked for an appliance store on Yonge Street. The couple had a son in 1921 who died in infancy, but they soon adopted a little girl, Marjorie, who would have been the same age as the boy. Bill was born March 1, 1923 and started school at Norway in 1928. That same year he and Marjorie were members of The Globe newspaper's Just Kids Safety Club which was based on a comic that ran in the paper. Over 300,000 Ontario children joined, pledging “always to look up and down before crossing the street” in exchange for a button with one of the strip's characters on it. Bill spent a year in the Cub Scouts and a year in the Boy Scouts, which was held either at St. John's Norway church or at Norway school.

 

Bill was a boy who liked Math and when he left Norway in 1936, he attended Eastern Commerce. He played basketball at school. He took an interest in photography, swimming, softball and riding, but bowling was the one thing he did extensively. In 1933 and 1937, two more sisters were born, Barbara and Rita, respectively.

 

When he graduated from Eastern Commerce in 1940, Bill got a job in the office of a drug store on Broadview Avenue. When there was no advancement, he soon found a job in the office of Rogers Radio Tubes and became a junior production control clerk. His father worked for another arm of the Rogers company.

 

Bill enlisted in the RCAF on September 25, 1942. The recruiting officer noted that Bill seemed to lack self-confidence. Bill didn't believe he was good enough to be a pilot, but he was interested in being a navigator. He told the officer that he had wanted to be in the RCAF for about a year, but had to work up confidence in himself before he could enlist.

 

His basic training included RCAF courses at the University of Toronto and he spent most of his training career in Toronto at Malton Airport (now Pearson), where he learned to be a navigator. He was able to see his family and friends often and was given leave for Christmas 1942 and also for Christmas 1943, just after he received his navigator's badge on December 22. In the New Year he was sent to Dorval (now Trudeau) airport near Montreal and assigned to Ferry Command. Military aircraft which were built in North America had a huge team of flyers that transported the planes to Britain and the various theatres of war.

 

Bill trained in North Bay, Ontario in February 1944 at the school where crews were taught to fly over the Atlantic Ocean. The crews flew night practice over the vast expanse of Northern Ontario and at the end of the month-long course they were sent to Dorval to write their final exam.