I went through the usual stages:
imp, rascal, scalawag, whippersnapper.
— George Carlin, American comedian,
social critic, and actor, 1937–2008
Bishop’s Falls was a frontier town, hewn out of the forest at the turn of the twentieth century to accommodate a railway terminus and, soon after, a logging and pulp mill enterprise. It had grown to 3,000 people during my time there at mid-century.
This new industrial centre in the interior of the island was a magnet for underemployed fishermen from coastal communities. Outport20 Newfoundland had been settled, de facto, largely along religious lines. Whole stretches of settlements along one bay were Catholic, along another, Protestant (Methodist, Anglican). Notre Dame Bay, on the northeast coast, was predominantly Protestant but with a smattering of Catholic villages. It was from there that many of Bishop’s Falls burgeoning population migrated, bringing with them their legendary work ethic, their marketable skill sets, and their fierce religious loyalties. And so, unwittingly, the town became a field experiment in multi-denominational cohabitation.
The community’s industrial character also attracted an infusion of other influences as management personnel, trained specialists, and educators from across the island and abroad flocked in to run the railway, operate the mill, and staff the schools. The result was a diverse mix, more cosmopolitan than most other Newfoundland communities, save for urban enclaves such as St. John’s.
Making a lasting first impression
September 5, 1944: It was my first day in kindergarten. Six-year-old Ivan lived on my street not far from my house, but we hadn’t met. That would soon change in a manner he would not forget, as he often reminds me.
As one of the large Simmons clan, I had learned early the first law of the jungle. Survive. Protect yourself. Defend your territory. Ivan, with just one sibling and a doting parent who had obviously digested Emily Post’s Etiquette in Society, came to school that first day determined to be true to his mother’s dictates: “Make friends. Walk up to the first boy you see and say ‘Hello, my name is Ivan.’”
He did just that. I was the boy he approached, and I wasted no time responding to his gesture of friendship. I landed him a lightning right hook to the chin. You can’t blame a guy for defending his space, especially when there are mouthy, suspicious strangers on the loose. Lawmakers in Florida call it standing your ground. Our own once trusty Mounties now get their man by practising a whole new mantra: Taser first, ask questions later. It’s a devastating commentary that the knee-jerk reaction of a kindergartener has become, for some, the template for modern law enforcement.
Ironically, the bizarre impact of that first encounter with Ivan Seaward sprouted a cherished friendship which thrives more than seventy years later. I like to think that, on my very first day of formal education, I learned an important lesson. There’s no need to get nasty when responding to the innocent behaviour of others. Unless you don’t know any better. Which could mean you’re a trigger-happy police officer.
Ten Toronto pedestrians died and fourteen others were injured in late April 2018, when a crazed van driver mowed them down. Constable Ken Lam of the Toronto Police Service arrested the murderer without firing a shot. The takedown was a courageous, by-the-book, faith-restoring sequence that was uplifting to watch. Let’s hope the video footage becomes required viewing wherever law enforcement personnel carry weapons.
The three Rs
Formal education had its ups and downs for me. In high school, one of the subjects, civics, I especially liked, thanks to the teacher/principal, Dr. Hubert Kitchen, later to be Newfoundland’s Education minister and a long-time friend. Classmate Art Thomas and I became engrossed in journalist Harold Horwood’s “Political Notebook,” a daily newspaper column, and we mailed a question to the well-read scribe:
Would long-term civil defence preparations have adverse psychological effects on the mass of the population?
The year was 1954. The Cold War was upon us. Bomb shelters were all the talk. Horwood took three columns to respond to the “two learned gentlemen.” Art and I had just begun the tenth grade! I credit/blame Kitchen and Horwood for my lifelong addiction to politics. Kitchen also has the distinction of being the last, though not the only, teacher to motivate me with a strap.
Two solitudes
Initially, the Catholic-Protestant togetherness idea in Bishop’s Falls was a non-starter. The Micks, as we Protestants called them, kept to themselves, as did we. Catholics were not to be trusted, Mom decreed for the umpteenth time. Usually, her husband suffered in silence during her self-righteous rants. Not this time. “Ida, my dear, they don’t have horns!” He had reason to know. At the railway car shop, he spent his working days with the Hannons, Glavines, O’Reillys, and other good Irish Catholics and counted them among his friends.
Religious prejudice was rampant in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Newfoundland and can be traced back to the British Isles whence came the island’s early settlers, bringing their long-festering biases with them. Fortunately, the more macabre manifestations of that feuding, then a daily occurrence in Ireland, were not replicated on this side of the Atlantic, for the most part.
There were several tragic exceptions. In 1835, the good Catholic inhabitants of Carbonear and Harbour Grace took exception to the writings of Henry Winton, editor of a Protestant newspaper, ambushed him at Saddle Hill, the rise of land separating the two towns, and relieved him of his ears. Even more tragically, five Harbour Grace men were killed in 1883 when Orangemen clashed with Catholics. In more recent times, manifestations of religious bigotry were less tragic, though far from absent.
Because of the pattern of original settlement and the island’s small population, it is often easy, on hearing a person’s surname, to deduce his/her ancestral community and religious affiliation. I sat next to Austin Lake at a St. Lawrence seniors’ luncheon. “Austin, Lake is a Fortune name. How did the Lakes wind up in St. Lawrence?” He told me that, two generations earlier, three Lake brothers from Fortune went annually to Labrador to fish. One year, only two of them returned home and reported that John had drowned. Their widowed mother, a devout Protestant, went to her grave twenty years later, still mourning her son’s untimely death. The truth is that John didn’t drown. Rather, he met, fell in love with, and married a young lady from St. Lawrence. It was easier to tell Mother that John was dead than to let her know he had married a Catholic. “That’s how the Lakes wound up in St. Lawrence. John was my grandfather!”
Many hands make light work
Life in Bishop’s Falls was a daily smorgasbord of school and chores, pranks and pastimes. In a large family, chores were an inescapable given. During the school week, we took our turn washing dishes, sweeping and scrubbing floors, cleaving wood junks and keeping the woodbox behind the kitchen stove replenished, weeding the vegetable garden, toting drinking and washing water from the nearby well, feeding the hens and collecting the eggs, hanging out the laundry. We were an equal opportunity family!
Saturday evenings, shoes had to be polished, Sunday clothes pressed, and vegetables peeled. The approaching Sabbath precluded all forms of activity that could be done beforehand. In the summer, berry picking was a must. Blueberries, raspberries, and partridgeberries were jammed and bottled for later consumption.
During the winter, I went with Dad and my older brothers to get firewood, using four or five dogs and a sled. That’s where we were headed on February 6, 1952. While grabbing a mug of tea and a thick slice of bread—homemade, of course—generously smothered in molasses, we switched on the radio sharp at six o’clock, the beginning of the broadcast day. Fully expecting the standard sign-on music, the familiar strains of the “Ode to Newfoundland”21 with which the local CBC affiliate began the day’s programming, we heard instead strains of a solemn dirge, probably Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, interrupted soon after by the announcer:
The King is dead! Long live the Queen!
The King is dead! Long live the Queen!
King George VI had died in his sleep. His twenty-five-year-old daughter, travelling in Kenya, was the new monarch. In a radio address to the Commonwealth four years earlier, the then princess had pledged, “My whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service . . .” Seven decades later, Queen Elizabeth II continues to do justice to that commitment. Long live the Queen!
Mischief is my middle name
Growing up in Bishop’s Falls, there was no shortage of ways for a risk-taker to get into mischief, a circumstance in which I was not wanting. In those days, it seems, the whole town was crawling with daredevils and pranksters. Some of the stunts we pulled would probably land us in court nowadays.
Canadian troops were camped on the riverbank a few hundred yards from our house, guarding against wartime sabotage. The trestle spanning the Exploits River provided a vital link in the trans-island railway, critical to the movement of troops and fuel to Gander Airport and the Botwood seaplane base. I recall the blackouts. Homeowners and motor vehicle operators were required to cover windows and headlights, respectively, to minimize enemy detection of potential targets.
For conniving rascals, the presence of the soldiers served a more immediate purpose. Though scarcely more than a toddler at the time, I soon became as adept as older kids at removing clothespins from the camp’s outdoor laundry lines and being rewarded with cookies for returning the “lost” pins.
One of our more deadly summer pastimes was almost unique. It capitalized on the presence of an eighteen-inch-diameter, underground wooden pipe that stretched nine miles, from the town’s pulp mill to the Grand Falls paper mill, and transported warm pulp under pressure. The pipe, with its shallow earth cover, was easily located. Any sharp object—a pick, a crowbar—quickly punctured the pipe, sending its contents fifty feet into the air, an instant beige-coloured fountain.
The novelty of simply watching the spewing pulp had long since worn off. Like boys in snowy climes, we built snow forts and had snowball fights all winter long. Unlike these guys, we had pulp forts and pulp-ball fights all summer long. There’s a brutal difference. The former is a bit of harmless fun, the other is assault with a deadly weapon and, in today’s climate, probably an indictable offence. Snowballs disintegrate on impact. Pulp-balls, especially leftovers from yesterday’s fight, are like rocks and can do real damage on impact. Hurling these deadly projectiles provided daily confirmation of the law of impenetrability: Two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. If the intended target failed to duck in time, he ran the risk of having a part of his anatomy displaced. Scarcely a summer went by without one or more of us being carted off to the hospital or emergency clinic with a cracked skull or a somewhat rearranged face.
Bonfire Night was a bit of English tradition that we observed to the hilt. Celebrated on November 5 to mark Guy Fawkes’s 1605 doomed attempt to torch the parliament buildings at Westminster, our annual event was also incendiary, though lacking any political motive, other than to settle a few scores with local merchants, neighbours, and bullies.
Preparations began in late September when four to six of us would band together to amass the necessary materials for the bonfire. The aim was to have the biggest show in town, and we often succeeded. A heavily wooded forest stood within easy walking distance. We made almost daily excursions there to harvest boughs, which we stored in backyard sheds. We also had our sights on other inflammable items—pork barrels, molasses puncheons, wooden crates, and oily waste22. The problem was these items were the private property of others, the local merchant and the railway. But that was a temporary situation.
Barrels, puncheons, and crates were easy to get. All you needed was a well-crafted strategy, three guys to execute the plan, and darkness. One person scaled the high fence surrounding the merchant’s precious containers and, in a tricky manoeuvre rife with the potential for disaster, jumped onto the doghouse roof while simultaneously shutting and latching the doghouse door, thus immobilizing the ever-present, vicious guard dog. Split-second timing was called for.
Alerted by the yelping animal, the owner would appear in the doorway of his abode. But our plan included immobilizing him as well. The guy on the doghouse roof had a second assignment, namely to blind the owner with a bright flashlight beam. Not knowing whether the guard dog was loose and unable to see the intruders, the owner stayed put. The remaining two members of Operation Molasses Barrel moved into action, one passing the barrels and crates over the fence, the other taking possession on the far side.
Our annual oily waste capers followed a similar game plan. The railway used the material to lubricate the carriages (wheels) of rolling stock. Our three-man team, again under cover of darkness, arrived at a rail siding equipped with a wheelbarrow, a pitchfork, and, you got it, a flashlight. One of us forked the contents of the wheel boxes into the wheelbarrow, which a second had positioned. The third provided light for the illicit activity and, most importantly, kept an ear open for an approaching watchman, in which case our lighting specialist shone the flashlight backwards as we skedaddled, not to take a last fond look at where we’d been, but to blind our pursuer from seeing who we were or where he (and we) were going. It was a clean getaway, most of the time.
The bonfire itself was a full-fledged neighbourhood festival. Entire families showed up to roast potatoes, make molasses taffy, and watch the towering inferno. Every few minutes, one of us would throw a blassy bough23, an old rubber tire, or a wad of oily waste on the blaze, creating a momentary fireworks effect as flankers24 leapt into the sky, eliciting oohs and aahs from the appreciative crowd.
Nowadays, the bonfire is a much less frequent occurrence. Its near-total demise is a factor of changing times—increased urbanization, stringent fire regulations, the demise of insular, self-contained communities, and the emergence of other leisure-time options, including television, the Internet, and electronic games.
There was no shortage of the more commonplace pastimes. In winter, we frequented the local hillsides, skiing on suitably re-engineered pork-barrel staves and sliding on a piece of floor canvas, a doormat, or, in the case of the more affluent, a coaster. We skated and played football (soccer) on the river. There was almost daily pickup hockey using a three-quarter-inch-thick puck cut from a birch tree. The long winter evenings often found us around the kitchen table working on a giant jigsaw puzzle. We didn’t miss television—we didn’t know it existed.
Summer fun included trouting, boating, and swimming, both in the river and the Lily Pond, just across the rail trestle. Summer also meant it was time for the annual pilgrimage to Lewisporte for an extended stay with my paternal grandparents, Sam and Sarah (Cobb) Simmons. That was a mixed blessing, since the grandfather was a miserable character and did his daily best to ensure that everyone around him was equally miserable. He was a martinet of the first order. I recall having to sit silently for hours on a chair in the kitchen along with my siblings and cousins. His reasons were clear and non-negotiable. It was Sunday, not an occasion for frivolity, and children must he seen and not heard unless an exchange was initiated by an adult. The upside of the Lewisporte sojourn was the grandmother. She was as nice as her bedmate was nasty.
A coastal town, Lewisporte was a pleasant contrast to the bustle of Bishop’s Falls and offered a whole new range of opportunities for mischief and fun. Favourite pastimes included jigging for codfish from a rowboat and catching conners on the public wharf, using snails that clung to the stanchions for bait.
Lewisporte also provided a seasonal employment opportunity for boys eager to make a few bucks. The local fish merchant owned a derelict ship, the HMS Briton (formerly the British corvette HMS Calypso25), moored a few hundred feet from shore, where he kept a supply of salt for curing codfish. The salt had to be shovelled from the ship’s hold into containers and brought to shore in a smaller boat. The labour-intensive shovelling was tailor-made for preteen boys, and several of us would get hired for the job. It was a win-win. The fish processor got cheap labour. We got pocket money.
There were a couple of other less common diversions. During spring breakup on the Exploits River, we went copying, leaping from one piece of floating ice to another as the participants followed or copied the leader26, a bit of sport much frowned upon by parents and certain to afford you your first (involuntary) swim of the season.
In the summer, on those few days when the weather was just too hot for comfort, we retired to the ice house, a pre–refrigeration era shed owned by the railway to store huge cubes of ice cut from frozen lakes the previous winter, and insulated in sawdust until it was needed to service passenger trains. Here we had our very own jungle gym as we did chin-ups and otherwise took full advantage of the elevated horizontal steel bars which supported the structure. Needless to say, we were regularly chased out of there for hygienic reasons.
It is the misfortune of some to be born on the wrong side of the tracks. Others are hatched on the right side. And then there’s me and my clan. We were born or, rather, lived between the tracks.
The main trans-island line of the Newfoundland Railway27 ran within 500 feet of our front door. A second railway28 was just 400 feet from our back door. This convenient proximity afforded me frequent and free commuter service to the key towns impacting my diverse interests, whether sports (participant and spectator), movies, or dating.
The free transportation had nothing to do with railway generosity. Rather, like every other young fellow in Bishop’s Falls, I was skilled at riding the rails, open-air style. You simply positioned yourself near a bend in the railbed, and as the train slowed to navigate the curve, you grabbed a rung on the boxcar’s ladder and held on for dear life.
He shoots! He scores!
The radio was our link to the world. Every evening, we gathered around the battery-powered radio to hear Winston Churchill talk of “blood, sweat, and tears,” and England’s “finest hour,” and to share Vera Lynn’s29 optimism that “There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover,” as war raged in Europe and the Pacific. Radio dramas transported us to worlds of intrigue, cataclysm, and romance. A favourite was Amos ’n’ Andy.
None of the above, though, could quite deliver the thrill, the excitement, of Saturday-night hockey. “Hello Canada and hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland!” Foster Hewitt and NHL hockey were on the air, live from Chicago or Montreal, Boston or Detroit. For the next two or three hours, Hewitt’s screaming, lightning-speed falsetto would bring to our home the historic rivalry between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the New York Rangers or another of the six teams which comprised the NHL in those days, compared to today’s thirty-one teams. The famed play-by-play announcer’s trademark “He shoots! He scores!” set off more standing ovations in our kitchen than Carnegie Hall has ever seen.
The brilliant Newfoundland playwright Ted Russell, in his radio drama series, The Chronicles of Uncles Mose, immortalized the impact of sports radio on Newfoundland with his hilarious portrayal of a world hockey championship game between Canada and Russia. Like everyone else who could get near a radio, the fictitious Grandpa Walcott listened to the play-by-play. He was especially impressed by one of the players, “a fella with a strange Roosh-an name. Was it Boboff?” asked Uncle Mose. “Or Pushemoff? Or Shovemoff?”
Then, Grandpa remembers: “A spry fella he was. One minute he’d be in one end, the next in the other, and before you could blink, there’d be this fella smack in the middle!—Faceoff, yes! Faceoff, that was his name!” It is clear that neither hockey nor Russian surnames was Grandpa’s speciality.
Contriving bizarre episodes and spinning tall tales were author Russell’s vehicles for making social comment. In this episode, Grandpa had come to a very definite conclusion which he was not about to change nor reluctant to share, his dearth of knowledge of the subject notwithstanding. Bill O’Reilly30, take note.
Amateur hockey games were all the rage and one of the few sources of organized entertainment. Grand Falls, nine miles up the road, had an artificial ice arena and a competitive senior hockey squad, made all the more so by the presence of five brothers from Bishop’s Falls’s storied hockey family, the Faulkners. Three of the brothers, George, Alec, and Jack, later played professional hockey. Alec was the first Newfoundlander to play in the National Hockey League31. George was the top scorer on Canada’s national team that won the bronze medal in the 1966 world hockey championship in Yugoslavia.32
Grand Falls and teams from other centres across the island were each permitted to include in their rosters two or three paid “imports” or professional players. That’s how we came to see the home team’s Clobie Collins in action, nicknamed “Speedy” for a reason. His rink-length goal-scoring streaks, a fixture of nearly every game, dazzled us. Every boy wanted to skate and score just like Speedy. He was the first person of colour I had ever seen. And that’s when I formed a positive impression about black people, and I‘ve had it reinforced many times.
Two of the most delightful persons whom I came to know during my years in politics were Jean Augustine33, a Jamaican-Canadian Liberal MP from Mississauga, and Linc Alexander34, a Tory MP of West Indian ancestry born in Toronto, both of whom served in a federal cabinet. Among my fondest memories of the five years I lived in Seattle, until 2003, are the many wonderful hours I passed with African-American friends. Pastor Pat Wright. King County Executive Ron Simms. NAACP President Karl Mack and his wife, Jamiyo.
20 An outport is a small isolated coastal community in Newfoundland and Labrador.
21 When Newfoundland was an independent country, the “Ode” was its national anthem. It is still a frequent feature of public events, analogous to the regular use of “America the Beautiful” as an unofficial anthem in the US.
22 A shredded, oil-drenched fabric used to lubricate railcar wheels
23 A dry, red branch of a fir tree (Newfoundland Dictionary of English, 2nd ed, 1999, University of Toronto Press)
24 Live spark from a wood fire (Newfoundland Dictionary of English, 2nd ed, 1999, University of Toronto Press)
25 More Fighting Newfoundlanders, G. W. L. Nicholson, Government of Newfoundland & Labrador, 1969, p. 448
26 Newfoundland Dictionary of English, 2nd ed, 1999, University of Toronto Press
27 As of 1949, Canadian National Railways
28 The Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company (AND) railway’s total trackage was less than a hundred miles and carried ore products from the mines at Buchans and paper from the Grand Falls paper mill to the port at Botwood for shipment to US and European markets.
29 English singer and songwriter whose morale-boosting performances during World War II were very popular
30 O’Reilly is a conservative commentator on American TV. In his many rants about Canada, the former Fox News host has never let the facts get in the way, or as Britain’s Harold Macmillan noted, “I have never found, in long experience of politics, that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance.”
31 Alec Faulkner played just one game with the Toronto Maple Leafs during the 1961–62 season before being traded to the Detroit Red Wings, where he spent two seasons, scoring key goals in both regular season play and in the Stanley Cup playoffs.
32 Faulkner: A Hockey History, Tom Rossiter, St. John’s, NL: Breakwater Books, 2011
33 Grenadan-Canadian educator, first black MP and cabinet minister
34 Lincoln Alexander was Canada’s first black viceregal appointee, serving with great distinction and flair as Ontario’s lieutenant-governor from 1985 to 1991.