The parallels are uncanny, bordering on the surreal, and strike right to the heart of bred-in-the-bone Ticat fans and how far they will go to exercise their commitment.
The one thing that differentiates them — Linda Whitehouse is 45 years old, Lyla Wilkins is 61 — pales beside their similarities.
Both women grew up in local Ticat households raised in the franchise’s magnetic orbit, both have travelled the country and the world yet managed to keep attending home games, both have significant connections to HMCS Star and have spent their adult working lives in the Navy, after first signing up for that service branch in this non-oceanic region, much better known for its sprawling Army presence. Both have homes on Vancouver Island and will be at Hamilton Stadium, Saturday, for the Ticats’ first home East Final in six years and wouldn’t miss it for the world.
And both are extremely proud, and grateful, that the Ticats will pay tribute to Remembrance Day at the East Final.
“I think it’s great that they’re doing that,” Wilkins said. “The CFL has done a great job of trying to recognize service members. I’ve been retired a year now and it’s nice to see the recognition of the people who served before and those who are still serving. It’s pretty special to see them down on the field.”
Whitehouse agrees: “Before I joined the military I never thought of the National Anthem as a tear-jerker … but I do now.”
Wilkins and Whitehouse don’t know each other, which might seem a little odd considering that both of them have spent years living on Vancouver Island, although in different towns, and both are attached to CFB Esquimalt on the island. But, as Wilkins explained, sometimes paths don’t cross if you’re in different Navy trades, which the two women have been.
Wilkins, who is known by her military nickname “Willy,” spent her early years in Hamilton’s east end. Then her family moved to Burlington where she went to elementary school at Mountain Gardens and Rolling Meadows, high school at Lester B. Pearson and then studied Phys Ed at McMaster.
While at Mac she joined the naval reserve at HMCS Star on Hamilton’s waterfront and also bought her first set of season tickets to old Ivor Wynne Stadium.
When she was young she and her father went to games together, including the 1989 Grey Cup thriller which the Ticats lost on the last play to Saskatchewan. And she and her mother Carolyn Wilkins have accompanied each other to a couple of Grey Cups.
“I just hope so bad that in my lifetime I see them win the Grey Cup because my dad died before that could happen,” Wilkins said. “I just feel sad that he never experienced it.”
She eventually became an intelligence officer, rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Commander and spent much of her 40-year career in the operations room at Esquimalt.
She lives south of Victoria and has run into former Ticat centre Tim O’Neill who lives there too and noticed her in her Ticat regalia. She also gets a lot of attention for her yellow Ticat jeep.
“People will be stopped at an intersection, roll down their window and shout.”
Because of work commitments she travelled frequently and would often buy a Ticat flex pack so she could fly to the city for games whenever she could. But when she was transferred to Regina the year (2014) Tim Hortons Field opened, she bought full season tickets again and made every game that year — “I burned through 200,000 air miles that season” — and has held her subscription ever since. When she flies east she uses air miles for one leg of the trip and pays for the other leg.
When she returned to Vancouver Island she also bought BC Lions season tickets and would often cross over to the mainland for a Lions game, then sometimes grab a red-eye to Toronto to make it in time for the Ticats’ game that same weekend. In 2024, she got to all but two of the Cats’ home games, and she only missed two this year… although, regrettably, one was the night they clinched first place.
“There was one time when both teams played on the same night,” she told Ticats.ca at last year’s Grey Cup in Vancouver.
“I chose the Ticats.”
The year she was in Regina she got to every Ticats home game “because it was only a three-hour flight so it was easy to get to.”
All things, we guess, are relative.
But travelling here for Saturday’s Blackout Game will be an ordeal, because she has to leave Thursday at 6:30 a.m. and with transfers, doesn’t arrive in Toronto until about 6 p.m. Then she’ll head to Burlington to stay with a friend. The trips are getting longer and more expensive, Wilkins said, and she almost didn’t come for this weekend but couldn’t stand missing an opportunity to see the Cats in the division final. She’s already booked her flight and tickets for the Grey Cup.
Whitehouse grew up on Norway Street, only a few blocks from the stadium, and attended Cathedral High School and would “always make it to the games at Ivor Wynne when Cathedral would be playing Barton for the city championship.”
Her father Bill Whitehouse is a Ticat devotee and loved to sit in the end zone in old Ivor Wynne. In contrast to Wilkins she and her family have never been season ticket holders, although they’ve regularly purchased seats for individual games. And, like Wilkins, she’s often travelled from Vancouver Island to catch Lions games at BC Place, especially if the Cats are in town.
After working in a factory for a few years, at the age of 23 Whitehouse joined the Regular Force Navy as a weapons technician at Esquimalt for the first 11 years of her military career. She was employed on a warship as a weapons technician and spent between six to 10 months every year at sea: up and down the West Coast of North America as far south as Chile and Peru, through the Panama Canal, and along various other waterways.
She reached the class of Master Sailor and was posted to train other weapons technicians. Then she took university training, got her business administration degree and her career path changed to become a logistics officer.
When her father got sick a couple of years ago she and her husband David O’Connell, who retired from the Navy last summer and like his wife is a die-hard Ticats supporter, moved east to assist him. She wasn’t “due to go back to sea for a few years yet” so the Navy agreed to her request for the move and she has been posted to the HMCS Star — which is a reserve unit — as one of three Regular Force members supporting the Star.
“My husband and I are true Ticat fans,” she says. “We used to go to the games on the west coast and we’d be two of maybe half a dozen people wearing Ticat gear when the Cats were in town.
“I think the team itself really represents this community, the steel-working industry; they’ve got the grit, they’ve got the drive. They don’t give up. It’s been a while since they won the Grey Cup but they’re still crowd-pleasers; they come out hard, fighting every game. The energy in the stadium is like no other. I’ve been to different games pretty much across the country and what we have here is unmatched. It’s always a good time regardless of whether we win or not; it’s always a good drive from the players so it’s really easy to be a Ticats fan.”
She and David were about to buy season tickets this year for the first time but he became quite ill this summer, so they held off. He’s recovered — and the couple were humbled and thankful for the support shown them by the vast network of veterans in the area — and while they’ll be at Saturday’s game “rain or shine,” they’ll postpone their next Grey Cup trip until 2026 because they “don’t want to spend a week in November in Winnipeg.”
She says her favourite players have been Speedy Banks, then Simoni Lawrence and now Bo Levi Mitchell: “I never thought we’d see him here, I thought he’d always be a Stampeder, but I’m really impressed by how he’s played.”
Wilkins thinks that “We (the Cats) have the right makeup of people. I know they’ve struggled at times — it seems one game they do absolutely fantastic and the next game it can be ‘well, what happened?’ — but I think they have the desire and have a good chance of getting there, which is one of the reasons I decided to go to the Cup. I was almost not going to go but as soon as they started winning again I thought, ‘Well maybe this is the team that is going to do it and I’d have felt absolutely sick if I didn’t go to Grey Cup and they were in it again.’”
And although Wilkins and Whitehouse don’t formally know each other, perhaps they’ll serendipitously interact at the stadium on Saturday.
“Actually, it’s amazing,” Whitehouse says. “To take the exact same path: be lifelong Ticats fans and join the Navy ‘inland’ in Hamilton; I’m finishing on the Star, and she started on the Star. Maybe, if I see her, we’ll recognize each other.”
