Return To Summer Camp In Bay Bulls

In the early 1960s, Dickie and I, along with Tommy Dodd, joined the Catholic Boys Club. That was a great move on our part. It made us appreciate what we had in life—we weren’t the richest kids on the block. The positive influence of the club can be attributed to four wonderful men. Bill Power was the club manager, Cecil Joy the fitness instructor, Tom “Pussyfoot” Benson was a former pro fighter and boxer, and Tom Mason was another great instructor who, I was told, had been a great hockey player who played with many teams in the St. John’s area.

The club was located where the Knights of Columbus now stands, on St. Clare Avenue. It was an old wooden building that could have gone up in flames if a match had been put to it. The club catered to young men all over St. John’s who wanted to put their energy to constructive use instead of using it to cause trouble. We were taught to do something valuable with our lives.

The top part of the building was reserved for boys who would eventually become Knights of Columbus members. The Knights were located in the lower part of the building. I’ve been a member since 1976.

It had everything. My friends and I loved anything to do with the NHL and street hockey, and we played some of the roughest floor hockey one could play. We used five-foot-long wooden sticks and, for a puck, a black circular ring that was taken off a bowling pin. There were also aerobics instructions, floor mat exercises, boxing, and many more games that taught sportsmanship and healthy competitiveness.

A school friend at Holy Cross told me about the club, and in turn I told Dickie and Tommy. Tommy was a great floor hockey player who could outmanoeuvre anyone else who played. He was a great stickhandler, too.

We joined the club around 1963. Our first year in camp was not as enjoyable as the second—it took us a while to feel comfortable. Our second year in the club, the call came out again to go to summer camp. Tom Mason put up a notice on the bulletin board that all were invited to attend summer camp in Bay Bulls, about twenty miles away. The cost was three dollars, and it promised two weeks of fun for all involved. We immediately rushed home to get permission from our moms and dads.

We had only left the city of St. John’s twice: to go to the same camp the year before, and on a trip to Holyrood the year before that. We had been bused to Holyrood, and after spending our money on treats, we had to walk the thirty kilometres back, which we fully regretted.

Our parents, knowing that they would have us out of their hair for those weeks, readily agreed to let us go. The cost was a bit of a problem—we hadn’t saved any of the money we made from our trips down to Water Street doing chores—but we had a month or so to put it together. Our parents wanted to contribute a small amount they had saved, but we wanted to earn it ourselves. For the next few weeks, we scoured St. John’s for employment opportunities. Finally, after many hours of hard work, we had enough to cover the cost and to give ourselves some spending money on the trip. We rushed back to the club and paid in full, and we were told that we would be leaving in the middle of June, the day after summer holidays began.

We could hardly wait! When the magic day came and we took out our duffle bags—Christmas gifts from our parents—Dickie and I packed our toothbrushes, face cloths, and soap before heading out on our new adventure. We met at the club and boarded a school bus. Tommy couldn’t go with us this year either. I think he went on vacation with his family instead.

We rode the bus for what seemed like an eternity, but it was really only an hour or so. The camp looked like the shape of an egg had been cut out of the woods. Flags flew in the centre of the field, and two open firepits and a woodpile as high as one could imagine sat beside the flagpoles. At the edge of the oval-shaped field were the headquarters and sleeping compound of the instructors in charge: Bill Power, Cecil Joy, and Tom Mason. A building adjoining theirs was the place where we would all eat. The quarters where we slept four to a hut were arranged in a circle around the area. There were other instructors, too, but they were older boys in the club whom we didn’t know. Most were from a Boy Scout troop and would help the instructors during our three-week stay.

Our time at camp was a lot different than how we usually spent our summers. It was one of structure and teamwork. We used the time to show everyone that we were the best—however you want to look at the word “best”—campers that one could be. Now that Dickie and I were old hands at this camp business, as this was year two for us, it was now our turn to have some fun with the new campers.

We took under our wing a few guys who had never been away from home before. One such guy was Ronnie, a kid we nicknamed Batman because he had a Batman knapsack and lunch tin. He was nuts about the superhero, always talking about the Caped Crusader every time we got together. We sent Batman on some of the same wild goose chases we had been sent on in our first year at camp.

One time, we sent Batman for a “bucket of steam,” and he searched high and low. Someone got to him, though, and told him it was a gag. He turned the trick on us by returning with an empty bucket. When Dickie and I asked him what had happened to the steam, his reply was so funny that we instantly made him our friend.

“Sorry, boys, but I had the bucket with the steam in it. I walked all the way to Bay Bulls to get it at Crane’s Store, but on the way back to camp, some Protestant guys stopped me and took the steam right out of the bucket!”

We laughed for days at that one. Ronnie spent the rest of our camp time with Dickie and me.

Another time, we asked Sam—whom we called Shirley, but not to his face, as he was even bigger than Dickie—to go get us a “thumb puller,” as I wanted to lengthen my thumb by a few inches. Shirley spent several days looking for the imaginary item. We told him he had to find it on his own without anyone’s help. On the second-last day of the week, we told him there was no such thing as a thumb puller, but he said we weren’t telling the truth. His grandfather had one, and he swore that he would show us when we got back to St. John’s! But of course we never saw him again after camp.

One of the instructors played a good joke on us. Cecil Joy and three others ran the camp from start to finish. Cecil was always a great person who lived for a bit of fun. For some reason he took to Dickie and me, and one day he convinced us that he had a look-alike brother living in Bay Bulls. He asked us to see if we could find him when we went down there on the weekend.

Cecil said he couldn’t go, because his brother hadn’t spoken to him in years and he would feel funny talking to him, so he asked us to do him this favour by finding him and saying hello. He asked us to tell no one of this little mission, because he wanted it kept secret from the other instructors, who didn’t know that he had a brother. We assured him we wouldn’t tell a soul.

We went to Crane’s several times that weekend, and people must have thought we were nuts: we kept asking everyone we met if they knew a man called “Knuckles” Joy who lived in the area. No luck. We gave up and reported back to Cecil. Cecil, being a gentleman, thanked us profusely. But it didn’t end there.

Every Sunday, when visitors came to camp, Cecil introduced us to a person he claimed was “Knuckles” Joy, who told Cecil that he had met us several times at Crane’s store. The guy went on to say that he had told us he was Cecil’s brother and that we hadn’t believed him! Cecil and his buddy kept it up, even though we swore up and down that we had never seen the guy before. Finally, Cecil gave in and told us that “Knuckles” was a friend of his and not his brother. He laughed at that many times over the course of the following week.

Cecil Joy was an outstanding fellow. As I look at pictures of that old building, I think of Cecil Joy and the instructors who were instrumental in changing the way we looked at the world. God love them all. They were all good men.

Looking at that picture, I remember walking through the huge front doors that deposited me at the foot of a mountain of steps that I had to climb before I even got to the main floor. I counted them the first night, and I continued to do so every time I went through those doors. The steps, all wooden, had to be at least twelve feet wide, and it certainly felt like climbing a mountain. Sixteen steps to climb before you got to the first landing, and then eighteen more before you arrived on the top level. Thirty-four in total. I must have counted those steps a thousands times over the years I went there.

I’ll always remember the smell of that old building. It had a scent like a dusty room or an old locker room. But to us, a group of kids who didn’t have a lot of things in life, it was refreshing like a country breeze. The old wooden building, having outlived its usefulness, was finally torn down in 1972. The new Knights of Columbus Building #1452 now stands in its place.