Many of the draft and military resisters came here, to a city that accepted them without question, and offered them shelter in neighborhoods such as the one that came to be known, affectionately, as the ''American ghetto.''

After the war, as amnesty (both personal and political) took root, about half returned to the United States and resumed their old lives. But the other half stayed, forging successful lives in Canada, while maintaining strong connections to their homeland.

Today the durability of those connections is clearer than ever. So, too, is the extent to which these draft resisters, and the women who came with them, have prospered, not just personally but within the community they chose. Their civic contribution has shaped Toronto in myriad ways.

A few examples: Peter Milligan played a prominent part in imposing a height limit on new buildings, which helped preserve older neighborhoods in the city core. Mary Anderson, Sarah Miller, and Penny Lawler, who were among the many women who joined men in this migration, guided the development of a land trust that preserved the residential community on the Toronto Islands in the city's harbor. Bill King, a resister who played in Janis Joplin's band, became the artistic director who made the Toronto Beaches Jazz Festival into one of the city's most joyful celebrations.

The list goes on: Andy Barrie has given an articulate new voice to public radio; Eric Nagler became one of Canada's best-known writers and performers of children's songs; Laura Jones became an influential school board trustee; Denise Bukowski established her own agency for immigrant writers; and John Thompson contributed to the design of the recent streetcar corridor that connects the Bloor Street subway line with the new Harbourfront and historic Union Station.

''When you look at what happened in education, child welfare, the arts ... in the downtown core of Toronto, not the office towers, but in the neighborhoods, all those kinds of things, we were a piece of that, in a quiet, blended sort of way,'' says Lee Vittetow, adding, ''Well, not always so quiet!''

The American expatriots say that their career choices, as with almost everything else about their lives in Canada, were changed by their decision to leave the United States. And those choices are easily defined: the US transplants have, more than most, devoted themselves to social and political activism, working in health care, cultural, and human services fields.

One of them is Sandra Foster, who has pursued a successful career in politics that is both mainstream and progressive, a combination that she believes would have been unlikely in the United States. ''My political involvements were extreme in the States, and I just don't know if I would have moved to more mainstream politics in the way that I did here,'' says Foster.

''The opportunities for me were here and they were closed in the States. ... The appreciation of the role of public-sector intervention to make life better for people, the leavening, I think it is pretty strongly established here, and certainly very strong when I came to Canada, and unheard of in the States.''

Ann Pohl found that a better health care system and a more progressive tax structure for many years made Canada a place where she could better afford to be a political activist. ''I know that I wouldn't have been able to live the life I've lived in Canada in the States. Basically I've been a social justice advocate and political activist my whole life.''

As a group, all but a handful of the resisters today have stable jobs and incomes - although on average, they earn about $5,000 a year less than siblings who remained in the United States. Job choice largely explains the difference.

Despite their common career pursuits, most of these American immigrants have lost contact with one another, becoming more a part of the life of the larger city than a part of one another's personal lives. Nonetheless, each day many of their paths unknowingly cross in numerous and unnoticed ways in this city that is among the most diverse in the world.

Yet for all the integration, and for all the fondness that resisters feel for their adopted country, there is still an American side to their story - for they maintain deep connections to the United States, in ways that might surprise outsiders.

In a series of interviews with 100 resisters, almost all said they had traveled in the United States in the previous year, and still communicate - by phone, e-mail, letter, or through friends - with family members and friends there. A majority said they would consider moving back to the United States in the future.

Nearly half of the resisters who have stayed maintain dual Canadian-US citizenship, and nearly a quarter of them have lived in the United States since first leaving and have subsequently returned to Toronto. When they travel to countries outside North America, a majority report that they do so on a US passport.

Of those who have children, more than half have obtained US identity cards for their children and nearly two-thirds would consider sending their children to college in the United States - if they could afford it.

Robert Johnson uses the apt analogy of adoption, and the ties that an adopted child feels to birth and adoptive parents. ''I feel a very strong allegiance to this country that took me in and made me welcome,'' he says. ''I also feel an identity coming out of my youth, my childhood, of the country where I grew up.''

Says Laura Jones simply: ''I've been here all these years ... thinking I was Canadian, and I find myself married to an American.''

Tom Needham, who left Boston in 1968 to avoid his impending induction into the US Army, is typical. Today he routinely returns to Boston to nurture his nostalgia for, as he puts it, ''baseball, bourbon, and the blues'' while seeing his friends and family.

Like the overwhelming majority of the resisters interviewed in Toronto, Needham feels very Canadian now. He says his decision to move to Canada was ''the best thing I ever did, I'm sure of it. I can't imagine now that my life could have been better if I had lived in the States. I don't think that's possible.''

Needham is still in touch with about a half-dozen of the large network of resisters he knew from his early days in Toronto and, as the proprietor of a trucking company he started, he is known for providing work to those who need a job.

Needham expresses the mixed sense of identity that many resisters living in Canada still feel today. On the one hand he notes that ''I became a Canadian quite easily and willingly, almost the same way my father became an American instead of an Irishman. ... Gradually I knew more and more people. ... I was hanging around with Canadians and my wife is a Canadian.''

On the other hand, there is still also a sense of residual Americanness that neither Needham nor his wife would wish him to lose: ''I have lots of things I still like about the USA,'' he says, ''I was in Boston recently and just the ethnic food in ordinary places. ... Baseball, bourbon, and the blues are still my favorites.''

Many resisters have forged a kind of blended identity; they feel no need to declare total allegiance to old country or new, and are happy maintaining permanent ties to both.

For Rob Winslow, the idea of rejecting his American identity would be like rejecting his family. ''It would be silly to say that I am anti-American, because then I would be anti my family, anti my culture, anti my roots,'' he says.

''I see myself as transplanted. I'm a Canadian, but I see myself as American and Canadian - I don't see myself as one or the other.''

© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company

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