To put it simply, I don’t like the whole Atlantic Ocean story much and I never have. I have never bought into those modern romanticized views that have come into vogue since the closure of the cod fishery where we look back through a very dirty pane of glass at how wonderful everything was. I think it is a bogus memory rooted in chic bars and coffee houses more than in the brutal realities of life in Newfoundland over the centuries. To me there has always been to the Atlantic a sense of danger and foreboding and a terrible air of tragedy. You can write songs about sun on the water and boats gently at anchor until your ears bleed and they’ll love you on George St. but that is not the ocean I was raised up to understand. The Atlantic I know is grey, rough, cruel, and unforgiving. It has thus always been so. Since I was 12 years old, I have used the first notes from The Petty Harbour Bait Skiff to tune my guitar. It is the first “Newfoundland” song I knew, and it is a tale of the loss of young lives. Actually, if you look back at the music of Newfoundland that reflects our past you will perhaps be surprised to find that they are mostly songs of terrible hard work and loss. They are so because that is the way it was and that is the reality the music reflected. The Atlantic is not about tour boats or watching whales, puffins, or icebergs. It is certainly not about being ‘Screeched In’. 

    The people of Newfoundland understand that with loss of lives. I think really the older ones already understood the terrible truth. The Atlantic can turn mean and ugly in an instant and change families and communities forever. The Atlantic also forgives no mistakes. Brutally and deadly cold in winter it is but a few degrees warmer in July. When I was growing up, we spent summers in the community of Bay Bulls. We were a St. John’s family but had the opportunity to move out of town during July and August. Yes, I have been to “the traps” many times and I know about spreading fish on a flake and cutting out tongues and all of that but Bay Bulls to me is forever in my mind because a young boy on a warm summer day drowned off the main wharf. I don’t know his name, and I never did but his was a life taken so unfairly. To never grow up. To never have children. To never experience the larger world. To die 10 feet from the main wharf. That is the same Atlantic Ocean that took the Southern Cross, the Florizel, the Ocean Ranger and a thousand more. That is the Atlantic of the Titanic, the Pollux and the Truxton and the Atlantic of Cougar Helicopter flight 491.

   One of the first news stories I remember was of a vessel overdue on the Atlantic. It was 1959 and I was 12 years old. I listened to the stories on the radio. It was February. The vessel was the Blue Wave, and she was never seen again. She was lost about a hundred miles off Grand Bank with all hands. The ceremony of remembrance from Grand Bank was carried live on radio. In our archives are television images of the service. Seven years later in an eerily familiar situation in that same month of February the Blue Mist suffered a similar fate. All of this part of the collective memory of the south coast of Newfoundland. If I write the phrase “lost with all hands” everyone in every outport and every town in Newfoundland will know what I’m talking about.

    In hundreds of Newfoundland communities and perhaps in all of them, there are stories of smaller but nevertheless tragic losses. There are stories of trap skiffs that never made it back to port and stories of banking schooners that sailed but never returned. There are stories of small vessels cut down on the high seas by ocean going giants. That is the Atlantic that I will never forget. It is on some level the Atlantic we all know in our hearts.

    Never far from the surface of the travelogues with whales breeching and puffins and gulls wheeling overhead is a mean and violent ocean. It is an ocean made saltier by a million tears. People of the sea will understand that. As a matter of fact, most Newfoundlanders in their souls understand it. They just bury deeply that thought. It is easier that way. We deal with it but remains part of who we are.

    An oft cruel sea.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

It is that we have heard for the past eight decades the stories of war crimes by the Germans and the Japanese during World War 2. It is only in recent times that we have learned that our side wasn’t free of this either. It depends on who tells the story. The bombing in the closing days of that war by the allies of the militarily unimportant German city of Dresden is a case in point. If the Germans had won the Second World War, then the bombing of Dresden would have found a place in the history books as a war crime. Only recently has there been any real discussion of flattening that beautiful city.

In the early history of post-war France, the bulk of written history was of the resistance. You don’t need to be a very astute observer to know that everybody wasn’t in the resistance in France and that quite apart from the puppet government in Vichy, France there was a portion of the French population who, to varying degrees, just survived by getting along with the German occupiers. It wasn’t that they were active collaborators. It just meant that everybody wasn’t in the resistance even though in our souls we wish it to be true.

Here in Newfoundland an early examination of events had Joe Smallwood’s disgraced and arrested economic director Alfred Valdmanis billed as a “Latvian Quisling, a man who had collaborated with Hitler and the Reich and all it stands for. It is only a later examination that tells us that such an interpretation on Valdmanis was superficial and the work of self-serving Smallwood apologists who floated the story to distance Smallwood from the convicted man he had hired.

Here at home a recent popular history book dismissed seal hunt protesters as professional money raisers without ever allowing for the possibility that even some of them might be well motivated by a genuine well-founded opposition to a hunt for furs used in the fashion industry.

Now all of that takes me to Mr. Abraham Lincoln. He is forever remembered in American history for being on the moral high ground and issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and freeing the slaves. That proclamation was issued in September of 1862, but it was a full two months earlier that he told his cabinet he was going to do it. He waited because he wanted to do it after a major union victory. In the summer of 1862, the Civil War was going very badly for the Union armies. There was even a suggestion that several European nations would recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate country. Lincoln needed to make a big move. It was after the Union victory at the battle at Antietam that Lincoln sprung his surprise. He freed the slaves. Well, kind of. The Proclamation actually freed the slaves in all rebellious states effective Jan. 1, 1863. That was it, though. It didn’t address the issue in the so-called “border states”. What did Lincoln hope to accomplish? Well, he thought that the act would cause thousands of freed slaves to come fight with the North, and he also thought that the Emancipation would play well in Europe.

What history now tells us is that in August of that year Lincoln wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Tribune saying, “My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union and it is not either to save or destroy slavery.” They don’t sound like the words of Lincoln. Well, history is like that. Once you get beyond the accepted version there is much to learn. It is not always a straightforward matter.  

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

Anyway, back to the changing seasons and the signs that the snow will soon fly. First, the air turns cool as soon as the sun goes down. Then you notice the rain doesn’t fall straight down anymore. It isn’t a driving rain yet, but it isn’t a summer rain either. The leaves certainly haven’t all fallen from the trees but some of the apples have and the rest were picked by the tiny hands of our grandchildren. The blueberries are gone and the raspberries as well. It is the dog berries alone that stand out and that announce the season.

I am known to read the weekend Globe and Mail or The New York Times, our own The Shoreline in “high summer” in a little elementary gazebo my son and I constructed 35 years ago. In July I can still see the printed words of after about 5 a.m. Now, it’s long past 7:30 before the sun lights them up. I still bring out a coffee for that morning ritual, but I also bring a jacket these days of October. Sitting there with the paper and the cat in the silence of the morning in what is a spiritual ritual, I am reminded again at one and the same time of both the beauty of the land and the relentless idea of “time passages.”

Soon there will be the snap of higher winds. It is already the time of splitting wood and getting it stacked in the porch. It is mostly birch and black spruce now two years “off the stump” and it has moved from being trees to being logs, to being junks and to being split and moved first to the woodshed and then to the porch and finally to the wood box which used to belong to grandfather and is now across from the stove. Soon it will snow a little and then it will snow a lot. Soon the winds will whip up the valley and rattle around the roof of the house. There will be shovelling in my future and a snowblower and a roof rake and some bags of salt. This isn’t a complaint about coming winter it is instead just an observation. The cats will be indoors a lot, and I will know the direction of the rabbit runs in our garden only through their paw prints in fresh snow. There will be though a nice glow from the wood stove downstairs. Sitting by the fire there will come the ultimate questions. Will Spring come early and will we be here to receive it? It is the ultimate question. Then the eternal dance will start again. There is no answer to that other than the line from Ecclesiastes.

“There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens.”

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

That means, in the strange language of boxing, the former Canadian heavyweight champion died. He was 89. George was the best Canadian heavyweight of all-time. In his last days he suffered from dementia but for most of his life he was “sharp as a tack” and not many in his boxing profession can claim that. Through most of his retirement Chuvalo had been an articulate spokesperson for boxing and, through speaking engagements, spoke long and hard about the perils surrounding the world of drugs and what it had cost him and his family.

Boxing is a sport of tragedy and George Chuvalo had lots of that in his life. Out of the ring he lost three sons and a wife through drug addiction and suicide. He tried to help people. That is where I met him. He came to our NTV studios to talk about his work outside of boxing. I met him because I wanted to meet him. It was not me scheduled to interview him, but when I saw him in the studios I went up to him and introduced myself and shook hands with him. His hands were the size of 20 pound Easter hams. He was a big man.

I told George I had been a fan of his during his career and I told him I thought he had been a really good fighter. I meant it. George Chuvalo fought all the best in the heavyweight division. At one point he was ranked number two in the world and beat many of the best heavyweights.

Chuvalo was known as a “durable” fighter. He was never knocked off his feet in his career because he could take a punch. He was, however, much more than that. He fought Ali twice and Joe Frazier and George Foreman once. While he lost to them all they were actually the best of an entire generation. George did beat some good fighters like Jerry Quarry and Doug Jones. He also lost a decision to former champion Floyd Patterson, but I think George won that fight and politics gave the nod to Patterson.

I also think Chuvalo lost points on the scorecards of judges sometimes during his career because he wore his hair long. When he was hit with a punch hIs hair flew around. That didn’t happen with short haired boxers Foreman or Ali or even Marciano. George “looked” like he had been hit. I think that cost him.

Anyway, I liked Chuvalo as a fighter and I have been a boxing fan for some time. He was “ill done by” in fights on some scoring cards but this is boxing after all. It is sometimes called ‘the red-light district” of sports. If you look for justice and fairness in boxing, you look in vain. George Chuvalo survived there and he thrived. That is why when I told George Chuvalo in our studios that I thought he had been a very good fighter I meant it. When he looked at me and replied with a quiet smile and the words “thank you very much” I think he meant it. It was a moving reply.

George Chuvalo gave much to the sport and in the world of boxing George “always answered the bell.” I hope he rests in peace.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

We ended our status as a nation when, faced with economic ruin, we elected the British-born Frederick Alderdice and his government to lead us elsewhere. Lead us he did. In 1934 Alderdice took us to Commission of Government and we never did get back our status as a nation. It had been promised to us that we would return to Responsible Government. Instead, we were presented at the end with three choices: Responsible Government: Commission of Government; or Confederation with Canada. The rest, as they say, is history.

The more I learn about the events that surrounded the two referenda that took us to Confederation the less I like it. I have always been a staunch believer in Confederation, and I still am, but I see, as the years roll on, how we were directed. We went where Britain and Canada wanted us to go which is NOT to the United States which through its presence in World War Two was putting its “stamp” on us. It wasn’t illegal, but it was a conspiracy. On the other side of that ledger are the expressed thoughts of Joseph R. Smallwood who said words to the effect that conspiracies, openly arrived at, are the heart and soul of democracies.

You may remember that I wrote some years ago that sometimes there are events on which the course of history swings that we may not be much aware of. Sometimes these events do not even become public until long after they have happened. They leave behind them always the eternal question of history; what if? 

The event in question came to life through an article in the Vancouver Sun about the referendum that decided Newfoundland’s fate in 1948. It was the July referendum in which Confederation defeated Responsible Government by the narrowest of margins to carry us in the direction of Canada. It was the second referendum. The Sun reported that in 1948, BEFORE that deciding vote took place the British appointed Newfoundland Governor of the day, Gordon Macdonald, made a bold decision. MacDonald was very British and very much disliked. He represented “government from afar”. He represented the British Commission of Government. Here is the decision that MacDonald made that has only recently come to light. The governor asked then British Prime Minister Clement Atlee to send a naval contingent to Newfoundland to support the local constabulary in St. John’s in case of trouble if Confederation won the vote. The phrase that comes to mind is from the days of Canada’s FLQ crisis. It is “apprehended insurrection”.

His Honour, in 1948, was much concerned that a victory by the Confederate forces might bring violence to the streets of St. John’s. The city was of course a stronghold of support for Responsible Government. The Newfoundland “outports” were largely supportive of Confederation with Canada. Now, according to the documents uncovered in England British Prime Minister Clement Atlee, who had replaced Churchill just before the end of the Second World War, first felt inclined to grant the request from Governor Macdonald but Atlee changed his mind because his advisors told him the threat of violence in Newfoundland after a Confederate victory remained small at best and in fact in the months immediately after that deciding vote in the second referendum much of the bitterness of the once fearsome campaign had ebbed away. Violence never became a real consideration.

The uncovered documents go on to report that the request from Governor Macdonald to the British government was top secret because of the political implications of the matter becoming public. Now today is begged this intriguing question of history – What if?

Would discovery of a request by the ruling governor for a British military presence in Newfoundland to militarily back a Confederate win, PRIOR to the holding of that second referendum be ammunition enough for the forces backing Responsible Government to swing that most critical vote? Would the outrage of Newfoundlanders discovering, as the new found documents indicate, that the British had been asked specifically by the governor of the day to bring a warship to either Conception Bay or Placentia Bay with several hundred military people on board be enough to alter history? The plan was to keep them out of sight so to speak so as to not raise undue concern among the population; particularly the Responsible government supporters. Consider in 1948 that if, armed with the idea of a British warship in our waters, Responsible Government had been able to take advantage of that information and swing enough votes to carry the day.

This will always remain one of histories unanswered questions and was one of histories best kept secrets until now. The leaders of the Responsible Government movement went to their graves without knowing that in Newfoundland the nation the last governor Gordon Macdonald had asked the British government to consider backing up a possible Confederate win with military muscle. It was the “unseen hand “at work in public affairs.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

Our own first hurdle was to find a way get a microwave signal out of Gander. Gander was the town so central to telling the story of plane loads of people who had “come from away” to our province. By way of information, I can tell you that, although we had no television station in Gander, we could send a microwave signal from a tiny concrete building used for telecommunications by a private company that was not in the TV business. They helped us and it worked. We had two TV crews motoring to Gander and a place from which we could transmit their pictures to St. Johns. It is hard to explain but there is a sense that in being able to do that made us feel good although “good” is not the right word.

Within the television business there is a phrase that is called getting “lost in the lens”. What it means is that no matter how horrific a story is, there is an obligation to cover it to the best of our ability. NTV was not an exception in the “lost in the lens” phenomenon. In our newsroom we could see coverage from New York and Washington and everywhere else. Most of the channels were “program” feeds but there was one CBS off-air channel that was being used to co-ordinate that networks coverage. The talk on that channel wasn’t from anchors or news people. It was from producers of various levels directing coverage from ground zero and elsewhere. It was talk about camera availability and technical requirements and all of the thousand of little details that go along with that. It was busy but it was calm and very much under control. If you think I was surprised by that I was not. It is the way things go. It is not a reflection of being hard or not caring. It is just a matter of focus and not of emotion.

That brings me now to the 25th anniversary of 9/11. In Newfoundland we remembered the planes and people who had found shelter in Gander and St. John’s and other places. We have been for centuries a place of shelter. Good for us. It speaks well of us but the anniversary of 9/11 this year took me to my own television set and American networks and the awful images of the Twin Towers in New York falling and the aftermath of it all. Some pictures I had seen for the first time and some stories I had heard for the first time,

In the end some numbers confronted me from that day. Over 1,700 humans died in the collapse of the North Tower. Another 1,000 people died in subsequent collapse of the South Tower. From the fire department another 343 people were killed. The grim total was 2,996 people killed. That included those on planes that were hijacked and included the hijackers themselves.

The shots of the smoking rubble at ground zero had a great impact on me but so did some other shots. One of those was a long parking lot of cars. It was in New Jersey. It was cars parked while their owners went to work on Sept. 11th by commuter train to the World Trade Centre.  They were the cars of hundreds people who weren’t coming home that evening.  It was a another chilling image  from a day that changed our understanding of our flawed world.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

Now I want to share something with you and it may shock you. It is that there is an unreal quality to the archives here or elsewhere. That’s especially true in the early years, what I have presented is a television film archive and television in Newfoundland and Labrador only has a history that goes back to the mid-1950s. The early offerings, although preserved by CJON forever, are in black and white and we did not live in a black and white world.

A great portion of the archives the stories preserved in black and white are from the very early days of television. That is true of a lot of things but certainly is true about a subject of which much has been written. It is the oft-told story of the loss of our Newfoundland railway.  Now it is something of I know a lot about because I worked at the railway in several capacities over the years from office work, to loading trucks, to my proudest moments of working in the dining cars of the old cross island express, affectionately known as The Bullet. I know that story backwards and forwards because I was on one of the last runs of the cross- island passenger express. It was in July of 1969 and wasn’t actually the last run, but it was the second last. We went from St. John’s to Port aux Basques as a working crew in the dining car but ‘deadheaded’, as the expression goes, back to St John’s. That means the crew came back with the dining car and our sleeping car but there were no passengers on the train. It was over. When the train pulled into the station in St. John’s my work with CN was finished.

Now that brings me to how the story of the trains in Newfoundland, as presented to you, is something of an illusion. The railway was never a black and white world. It was a world of rich colour, both on board the trains and across the island. The trees were wonderful. The towns were wonderful. The rivers were great and our glimpses of the Atlantic Ocean were striking. When I wasn’t actually working, I would stand out on the “break” as it called between cars and watch the world go by.

The whole thing was filled with colour and with layered sounds and smells. There was a distinct sound to the rails and the brakes as the train ran over them. There was a sound to the dining car and a sound to the kitchen. The train itself ran on diesel in my time. Older people may remember the coal burners, but they were gone before I arrived. Wherever you went on the train in my day there were things to smell from within the train and from outside it.

At breakfast, dinner and supper our dining car was alive with  the rich smell of food and the food was good. There was bacon in the morning and fried eggs floating in fat and big roasts at dinner and soups all over the place. Apple pies were actually cooked at the CNR bakery in St. John’s and brought on board for the trip across the island. This was presented in a dining car that was neat as a pin. That is why I present to you now with this article a colour picture of the interior of a dining car where I sometimes plied my trade.

I was a summer relief worker as a waiter.  The men in the picture you see are all full-time employees. That picture is warm and inviting. The dress code called for neatly pressed black pants, a white shirt, a black necktie and a fresh white apron and of course black well shined shoes. If you were really cool you had a hand towel around your arm.

For those who might think the service in the end had deteriorated you are wrong. That was a story floated by those who said the railway was stolen from us. It wasn’t. People just stopped using it because buses were a quicker way across the island of Newfoundland. I always say that people liked everything about the cross-island train except actually buying tickets for it. I remember our dining car had six or seven waiters and a cook and a cook’s helper and, in the final days, a total of less than a dozen paying “sleeper” passengers. If you had a sleeping berth, then dining car meals were part of the cost. If you were just riding in the coach seats of another car the costs of meals in the dining car would keep you out. Sandwiches and soft drinks were sold “in coach”. 

Enjoy the picture from the interior of the dining car during the glory days. Look at it and then close your eyes. You can almost hear the echo of a far-off whistle and that clickety-clack sound from a part of our heritage now gone.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

It is challenging enough that we have provincial elections every four years where we get to choose who holds the reins of power. That concept of “one person one vote” is sometimes enough to frighten you spitless. It looks good on the surface but God almighty. The idea of everyone voting on important matters in a referendum should keep you up nights in despair.

In general elections you are voting on what a political party SAYS it will do if elected. They are called election promises and they do not have to be kept. The idea of promising to hold a referendum on any new Labrador power agreement falls into that category. There is no punishment for not doing what you said you would do. In politics, breaking a promise or an undertaking is not a crime.

Now let me step aside here for a moment to tell you a true story that will back up my notion on referenda. I had an associate in the media who held a decent job that paid him decent wages. He paid his taxes. He went to George Street on the weekend. He caused the society in which he operated no trouble. He voted in all elections. He was Joe Citizen, the heart and soul of our democracy.

Joe, however, held the honest belief that the Second World War lasted for seven days and somehow involved Israel and Egypt. I am not making this up. That was the level of my friend’s grip on current affairs. He had somehow, in his mind, conflated the Second World War and the Seven Days War in the Middle East. This man would get to vote in any referendum.

That is the problem with democracy when things wind up in a referendum. It is a hope at least that when we vote for a provincial government, we will elect a body of people whose general political leaning will reflect our thoughts and who will be judged not by one event but rather but the performance of government on a range of issues over four years or so. It is not perfect, but it does not hold the absolute dangers of rule by referendum or running things by what is most popular. I look into the great abyss and ask you to consider how a referendum on capital punishment would turn out if it were held today. Would we confirm our stand that where will be no capital punishment in Canada? I am not sure. I do know right from wrong, but I am not sure about that vote if it were held.

Consider the idea of abortion. How would a free ballot on abortion go in Canada? I do not know. I like our abortion laws, but I would not want the idea put into the hands of every voter for a “yes or no” vote. A wise person said to me once that every man or woman in Canada is against abortion until their daughter needs one.

Do you see my point? A referendum is something for exceedingly rare occasions. The last time I thought something was “referendum worthy” it was over denominational education where the cost of all the school boards was “driving us into the poor house” as mom used to say.

Am I saying the electorate is not smart enough or a ‘one person, one vote’ decision on a power agreement with Quebec? Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. The government of Premier Wakeham has a mandate to govern Newfoundland and Labrador. The government used that mandate. Yes, they broke an election promise but Holy God Almighty, if everyone who broke an election promise got kicked out of the House of Assembly you would not have enough members left for a game of cards.

Now this is an odd point of view for me to defend and there are those who will be angry in my speaking in favour of a broken promise on a referendum. I will leave you with a final word on democracy and voting. It is a thought often credited without proof to Winston Churchill. He did not actually say that. It is more correctly traced to the writings of Socrates. Apart from all the rhetoric on government it reads.          

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

Whoever said that you can file the idea away under ‘food for thought’.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

I was an only child for the first five years of my life. I had my parents’ undivided attention. Then my brother John came along and spoiled almost everything. I say almost because by then I knew how to read. It changed the rest of my life. The first book in Grade 1 I remember after I entered school was David and Ann. That was in a Catholic school. The Protestant schools had a different Grade 1 book but that is the way denominational schools worked. There were a Catholic way and a Protestant way. It made no sense, but our Catholic ‘reader’ book started like this. 

                   “David plays.

                    Ann plays.

                    Mother works.

                    Father works.”  

                    We changed that later in our playground games to read;                       

                    “David plays,

                    Ann plays.

                    Mother works.

                    Father is on Unemployment Insurance.”

My whole family were readers. I had an uncle who kept several books of the Encyclopedia Britannica in his bathroom. This is when Britannica still existed in print form. There were no computers then. There was no such thing as “online”. The “books in the bathroom” tradition says a lot. It continues in my home to this very day, much to the chagrin of my good wife. Britannica is not there but there are several biographies there and a couple of Ray Guy collections and a few issues of The Newfoundland Quarterly.

Beyond grade school the path of reading for me was further shaped at MUN where, in the English way, a student “reads” for his degree. I was lucky enough at MUN to take one English course from Dr. Paddy O’Flaherty and another from playwright Michael Cook. You talk about good fortune.

Eventually I went overseas to England to find adventure and found work in London. I worked for W.H. Smith and Sons. They were, among other things, newspaper, magazine and BOOKSELLERS. I came to understand books and newspapers and magazines and how they were sold. As an aside at my newspaper kiosk in Earls Court where I worked a regular customer for The Times each morning was comedian John Cleese. He always said, “Good morning, The Times please”. I always replied with “Good morning, sir”

You may be wondering where all this leads. When I eventually returned to St. John’s I needed work. I knew about fish plants and brewery work.  I also knew about pick and shovel. I knew about working in a lumber yard and I knew about general labour on a truck. I also knew about the real passion of my life. I knew about books.

I, along with my brother and another friend from university, opened AFTERWORDS Bookstore. Often people ask about the clever name AFTERWORDs. I can tell you the name came by way of the fact that the store we rented at 234 Duckworth Street had previously been occupied by WATERFORD NURSERIES. Their sign was made up of individual wooden letters. A few glasses of wine and a few beers later we came up with the name AFTERWORDS.

So, what is the great lesson? Well, it is simple. In the world of books, you meet many wonderful people. Readers are great. It doesn’t even really matter what they read. The medium is the message. Readers of Harlequin Romances or westerns (“dusters” they are called in the book trade), or sci-fi or biographies or history all seem to be decent people. At AFTERWORDS, in the early days we had a coal burning stove that heated the store. I would spend hours talking books with anybody and everybody. There was a city worker, a postman, a university professor and a whole load of people that were readers and loved talking books.

I loved it and I remember it fondly. I have an e-reader, but I still prefer books that are of PAPER. There is a smell to them and a sound of pages turning. In my home there is the faint smell of old books. I’m not even sorry about that. It is a very welcome background to my life.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

First of all, to establish my credentials, I have been a soccer fan my whole life. I didn’t just show up to this summer soccer spectacular with nothing other than ‘Go Canada Go’ on my lips. I have followed the game. One of the highlights of my broadcast career actually has been that I was part of the broadcast of the Canada -Honduras game in 1985 that sent Canada into its first World Cup. Carl Lake did play-by-play and I did colour as Canada defeated Honduras 2-1 at King George V field. It was great. We did nothing in the World Cup but getting there was a big deal.

Manchester United has been my team in English football since the days of the Munich air disaster in 1958 when a Man United charter crashed and tragically killed the heart of the Manchester team. That is when I started following Man U. I did briefly support Chelsea while I lived in London in the late 1960s and actually was at the Chelsea victory parade that wound its way down Earls Court Road after they defeated Leeds 2-1 and won the F A Cup in 1969-70.

I tell you all that now so you will know that I do know something about soccer. I do know enough to understand that Canada this year was never going to win this 2026 World Cup. They weren’t good enough. That doesn’t mean I didn’t support them and Canada did okay and “punched above their weight” as the expression goes in sport.

Canada didn’t finish first, second, third, or fourth. In fact, the team ended up in 14h place when all the points and goals for and goals against calculations were made. That may not sound great but do understand that in the world rankings Canada’s team is now ranked as the 30th best team so finishing 14th this summer wasn’t bad at all.

What did we learn this year? Well, all is never quite as it appears in soccer. Remember brave little Cape Verde was eventually eliminated by Argentina. That tiny island nation captured our hearts BUT of the 26 players on the Cape Verde squad, 15 aren’t from there. Six are from the Netherlands and another four are from Portugal. They have eligibility because of their parents’ birthplace. Not to worry, it is all legal. I cheered them on as they were still classic underdogs.

The good news this from the World Cup, despite all the bull surrounding it, is that the best team won out in the end. Spain had the best team; the best organized team and the deepest team. They also were one of only a half dozen teams or so that had total passion for the game. Spain played as if they had to win. Lionel Messi and Argentina notwithstanding – Spain was the best.

I loved the whole thing. I knew that England couldn’t win, and I knew Canada couldn’t win – and luckily the United States couldn’t win or I would have to endure that silly “USA. USA. USA” chant. The beautiful game of soccer won!

Where now? What is the future of soccer? If you ask me, it is in Africa and has been now for some time. It used to be South America and right now it is Europe. Despite giving Trump a trophy and having to drag him off the stage from the trophy presentation it was still great. The cream rose to the top and the World Cup, with all its flaws, still brings the world together.

Well, at least it takes it is a step in the right direction. The world does pause to watch it and that is a good thing.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca