By Jay Robb (he / him), communications manager
With his first-year anatomy course, Frederick Moyes changed Wynne-Ann Huinink’s life.
Huinink returned the favour 31 years later with a Facebook message.
That message summed up everything Huinink had told her elementary school students, friends and family about Moyes. She’d spent decades saying nice things behind his back.
“Fred taught me how to teach,” Huinink says. “I learned from the best.”
She was one of thousands of kinesiology students who’d taken Moyes’s legendary anatomy course during its quarter-century run from 1969 until 1994.
With its weekly multiple-choice quizzes (Moyes had pioneered the use of computers to administer the quizzes in 1976) and mind-boggling exam questions, the course was far from easy. But Huinink says Moyes made every lecture memorable with his jokes, anecdotes, stories and demos, including doing a cartwheel during class – something Huinink has yet to attempt in front of her own students.
And then there were his textbook-quality anatomy illustrations. He drew them on chalkboards an hour before the start of his 8:30 a.m. Monday classes. “Works of art,” says Huinink who pilfered a piece of coloured chalk as a memento.
The course was her favourite and Moyes remained her favourite professor through her four years at McMaster. After graduating with a kinesiology degree, Huinink earned a teaching certificate and degree and taught at elementary and secondary schools. Today, she’s a full-time physical education teacher and still draws on what she learned in Moyes’s course.
Huinink had always wondered what happened to her favourite professor. In February 2022, she decided to find out. “My mental math put him at around 90 years old. Knowing Fred, I figured he might have joined Facebook. And, sure enough, there he was.”
She sent Moyes her message. Moyes sent a message back, thanking his former student for the kind words. They struck up a conversation and a friendship followed.
Moyes was a year shy of 90 and as mentally sharp and witty as ever. Huinink thought Moyes seemed lonely. She invited Moyes to meet her husband and four kids – a reunion more than three decades in the making.
He made the 90-minute drive from London to Stoney Creek in a car that he may have bought long before he retired from Mac. “Fred drove that boxy car into the ground,” says Huinink.
Moyes stayed for lunch. Dozens more lunches and dinners followed and he’d stay overnight in the guest bedroom – Huinink didn’t want him driving home late at night in the dark. She’d also visit Moyes in London.
When they were together in Hamilton, Moyes went to Sunday church services and Wednesday night bible classes with Huinink and her family. “Our church community welcomed Fred with open arms.”
It was during these visits that Huinink started piecing together Moyes’s life story.
“A pretty amazing and wonderful life,” says Huinink.
Moyes was born in 1933 in Aberfeldey, Scotland – a small town famous for its big waterfall, whisky heritage and connection to poet Robert Burns. Moyes was 10 years old when he bought his first accordion with money saved from picking potatoes.
He dropped out of high school when he was 15 and joined the Royal Air Force three years later. He played his accordion and sang for his fellow airmen and regulars at a local pub. Moyes left the RAF, went back to high school as “the oldest schoolboy in Scotland” and landed a spot at Jordanhill College, a teaching-training institution in Glasgow.
He taught anatomy at colleges in Nigeria, Scotland and England before joining Mac in 1969. He received the McMaster Students Union Teaching Award in 1981 and 1989. He was nominated again in 1990 but wasn’t allowed to win the award two years in a row.
When he wasn’t teaching, Moyes was on the road performing Scottish dance music across North America, Scotland, Japan, England and Germany. Those earlier pub performances paid dividends.
In 1976, he wrote and recorded a song about a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game that had turned into a bloody brawl with the Philadelphia Flyers. He sent the song to CBC Metro Morning and scored a weekly gig writing, composing and performing social satire songs.
Many of those songs wound up on two records – Fred Moyes Sings Satire and The Very (Ir)Reverend Fred Moyes – with tracks including The Cabinet Shuffle, The TTC Lament, Go Metric, The RCMP Salute, I Am the Very Model of a Solicitor General, If the PCBs Don’t Get You, the Mercury Poisoning Will and Pierre, Oh! Pierre How I Love You. “Anatomy of a Satirist: Professor Fred Keeps His Senses – And Tongue, Wagging” was the headline in a magazine profile.
Moyes would later record three albums of Scottish dance music and be awarded the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society’s Scroll of Honour.
And in the early 1980s, then McMaster President Alvin Lee commissioned Moyes to compose a new University song. “It seems to me that any of the universities that have really good spirit, that get their kids really keen and fond of the university, they all have – and they all sing – the school song,” said Nancy MacPherson who was serving as the Alumni Association’s second vice president. Moyes debuted his song – My Mac – during a basketball tournament. Copies of the song were sold in the Campus Bookstore as a fundraiser.
All of this left Huinink thinking Moyes was overdue for recognition. She reached out to other former students and retired faculty and pulled together a nomination package for an honorary doctorate from McMaster. “Fred has had an illustrious career, has impacted so many people, is a multi-talented yet humble man, and has had an incredible impact both at home and abroad,” Huinink wrote in her letter of support.
Moyes received his Honorary Doctor of Science degree in the Spring of 2023. No one at the Convocation ceremony knew Moyes was going through a round of chemotherapy. He’d just been diagnosed with leukemia and was told he had only months to live. “Fred faced it with tremendous courage,” says Huinink. Months would turn into years and Moyes made the most of every moment.
While the visits dropped away, their phone calls and emails continued into 2026.
On Thursday, July 16th, Moyes called Huinink and left a message. She played it as soon as she got home the next day. She called back but got no answer. She called a few more times. She then called Moyes’s daughter who broke the news of his passing that morning.
The news wasn’t unexpected but still came as a shock to Huinink and her family.
“I feel enormously fortunate that life brought us back together and gave me those precious final years with him. Fred was once my teacher but in the end he became my dear friend. I’ll always be grateful for the impact he had on my life and for the privilege of having been part of his.”
So what would Huinink think if a former student unexpectedly reaches out with kind words when she’s 89 years old and long retired?
“That would be wonderful.”
And yes, Huinink would send back an invitation to meet her family and enjoy a lunch together.
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