I was down to Argentia last week. It’s completely different now and I had not been there since the naval base closed. In fact I have only been there a couple of times before. 

Memory is a funny thing. When I first went to Argentia it was by sea around 1960. I was “working” on the cargo vessel Blue Cloud. That was a Blue Peter Steamships ship hauling frozen cod blocks from Witless Bay to Gloucester, Massachusetts. Technically I was employed by Blue Peter, but really I was a guest of the company. 

Signed on as crew

They weren’t licensed to carry passengers, so I was signed on as crew with very light duties. We arrived at Argentia at night in the rain and awoke the next morning to the reality of being in a small American town with the Stars and Stripes flying overhead. We watched military types around our ship. They were all acting purposefully. I had to ask permission to get off the ship and dump garbage in the dockside bin. 

What sticks in my memory was how clean everything was at Argentia. You could eat off the roads and all the military personnel were dressed “neat as a pin.” It was the first time I had really been “somewhere else.” 

To this day I don’t know if we took on cargo or discharged it. We were gone on to Gloucester the next morning. 

There we discharged our cod blocks to a fish processing plant and picked up a mixed cargo to go back to Newfoundland. The cargo included bananas which are shipped “not quite ripe.”

On the way back some bananas were put out on deck in the sun. We had bananas for breakfast dinner and supper. We stopped again at Argentia and dropped off salt beef. I didn’t even know the military ate that stuff. 

Liquor & cigarettes

The next time I was at the base was decades later and I was there to play softball in a tournament mostly in the rain. The Americans were good ball players. I stayed overnight at the bachelors quarter which was Strain Memorial Hall, at one time the second highest building in Newfoundland. Hotel Newfoundland was higher.

The food on the base was great and there was lots of it. Liquor and cigarettes were almost free, and I had a great time. We didn’t win, but we had a nice barbecue. I didn’t set foot in Argentia again until last week.

There was still a familiarity to Argentia. The curved road and the little guard house were still there. A few buildings looked familiar and some bunkers remained, but the area was industrial now not military and it wasn’t nearly so clean.

It was raining last week. All three times I was in Argentia over sixty years it rained.  I remember that.    

NTV’s Jim Furlong can be reached by emailing: jfurlong@ntv.ca

Legendary guitarist and instrumental musician in Canada’s rock culture, Randy Bachman is animated in recounting the story of how he was reunited with his long-lost Gretsch guitar after 45 years.

“A guy emailed us from one of our YouTube (live streams) and said ‘I found your lost Gretsch.’ I’d been searching for it for 45 years.”

The icon behind The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive first bought his 1957 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins, in a gorgeous orange, when he was a 19-year-old upstart in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It would be stolen from a locked hotel room during a BTO performance in Toronto in 1977.

The Gretsch

Decades later, and a fan out of B.C., William Long, used facial recognition technology to track down the exact Gretsch, tracing it all the way to Japan, where it was now in possession of renowned guitarist Takeshi. 

With the help of his daughter-in-law Bachman would contact Takeshi, and over a zoom call would see his treasured instrument for the first time in four and a half decades.

“The guy brings my guitar on the zoom and I can’t breathe. I haven’t seen this guitar for four plus decades. He shows me the guitar and I say ‘that’s my guitar!” He says ‘I’m an honourable guy, I’ll give it back to you’. I said, ‘Well, I’ll give you a brand new Gretsch’, and he says ‘I don’t want a brand new Gretsch.’ ‘Well what do you want?’ ‘I want the same guitar. Can you find its sister?’

Easier said than done, but when you’re Randy Bachman, corners of the musical community are more easily reached. 

Through a vintage guitar dealer in Ohio, Bachman would procure a 1957 Gretsch with only two digits off from the serial number of his original. 

Takeshi, overjoyed, agreed to the trade, but with one caveat. Bachman would have to travel to Japan to collect. 

The swap would take place on Canada Day in the Canadian Embassy at Tokyo’s Oscar Peterson Theatre.

“They won’t let me see him until the day. And I say why not? They said ‘this must be like a wedding. The bride does not see the groom until she walks down the aisle with her father and he goes, Oh, man, is she rockin’ beautiful!’

“So they wanted that first reaction, so I don’t get to see this guy or my guitar. So on Canada Day (Takeshi) goes up and plays a couple of songs,” Bachman recalls, emotionally. “Then he plays Takin’ Care of Business a little bit and he stops. I walk out, meet him on stage. I look at him, he’s got my guitar. I’ve got the twin sister guitar. I get my guitar back. I can’t move, I can’t breathe. I’ve got it. It’s beautiful. He gets the twin sister. We both finished playing Takin’ Care of Business. We’re both in tears. We’re both pretty verklempt. This is like a really incredible moment.”

The entire situation – from the loss, to the long-awaited reclamation – has the noted storyteller nearly lost for words.

“I tried to find the guitar for 40 years and couldn’t. And then the guitar found me,” he shares with a smile.

Lost & Found

The incredible story will be the subject of an independent documentary, with Randy and his son, fellow rock-star success Tal Bachman, set to write songs for the proposed film, Lost and Found, with the famed guitar-god joking that his son contends that his father “lost his magic” when his guitar was stolen in 1977.

“Tal contends that when that guitar was stolen in ‘77, they stole my magic. With that guitar, I learned to play guitar. I learned my vocabulary, so to speak…

“And then every song I wrote and recorded; These Eyes, Laughing, is all on this guitar. So when it was stolen my son said to me, ‘You haven’t had a number one hit since American Woman and You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet. Your magic is gone, but when it gets back!’”

Overcoming COVID-19, whooping cough and double pneumonia in recent years, Bachman, at age 78, is as active now as he was in his heyday between reunion-esque tours alongside Burton Cummings, continued successes in radio (Vinyl Tap anyone?) and perhaps most notably, his father-son tandem Bachman & Bachman.

“We wrote basically a retrospective album as what has happened to me as the father, what’s happened to my son who’s followed kind of in my footsteps in and out of bands and up and down and good manager, bad manager, label signing, label dropping, all that stuff. What we went through with our family, with our domestic divorces, because all rock and roll leads to divorce. 

Bachman & Bachman

“You’re never with your wife or your family all the time. Unfortunately, that’s the big downside of it. And you look at these women you loved and they loved you, but you stopped the love because of the gigantic distance between you physically and in mileage, if you know what I mean, like not being there. And so we wrote what you call an Americana album with very touching lyrics.”

Pillars of our rock n roll history like Bachman continue to reap the rewards of a lifetime of entertaining adoring fans. Catching up with The Herald before his island return at the Churchill Park Music Festival (which he rocked!!!), the architect of American Woman and Let it Ride explained that, in the pandemic era, the world seems primed for a rock renaissance.

“I think the Roaring Twenties are coming back because if you look at the Roaring Twenties a century ago, it was after a war, it was after a pandemic. People were dying from the flu and everything, and they were all restricted. They couldn’t go out. They were all vaccinated. It’s happening again,” Bachman shared, impassioned.

As for the man who more than a few musicians can call mentor, role model and overall inspiration, there’s more than enough gas in the tank for a man who’s still Takin’ Care of Business. “I always said I don’t want people saying, ‘I wonder what he’s doing now?’ I want people saying ‘look at what he’s doing now!’”

For all things Randy Bachman visit randybachman.com. For part one of our interview visit our website at nfldherald.com

It was just past five in the morning of what promised to be another lovely summer day. I was out on the deck having coffee and looking at the paper in the half light of a new day. When you are older you have time for these things. Getting up early, coffee, the paper. Sitting around seeing things. Time is a real luxury.

Sounds of morning

The air was filled with the sounds of morning. From the lake was the sound of a loon. It’s a sad sound, second only to the haunting sound of the whistle of a far-away train that you no longer hear in Newfoundland. 

As I sat at the little table on the deck there was another sound I have not heard in a while. I did not recognize it at first. It was far away. Then it came to me. It was the sound of a rooster crowing. It might have been down in Topsail or ever further up the shore, but I knew the sound. Suddenly, I was transported back to another time. I was twelve-years-old then and the remembered sound was that of a rooster across the gardens in Witless Bay that told me the new day had arrived that would be filled with the adventure of an outport day to a twelve-year-old. 

The rooster was the start, but there would be other morning sounds. From the harbour would come the unmistakable sound of a 5 HP Acadia engine. It would power a trap skiff. In that world there were boats “on the collar.” There were boats going out to the traps and boats coming back low in the water.

‘Looks like a full skiff’

“It looks like a full skiff and dory load,” we would say trying to be older than we were.  We would guess from the look of the boat as she headed to the fish plant how many quintals were on board. The boat would be off-loaded by hand and pronged up to the stage head. Thne the fish would be cleaned and somewhere down the chain there would be a chance for little boys to make a few cents cutting out tongues. 

That world is long gone, and I do not even think about it very much except on summer mornings when the sound of a rooster drifts up from somewhere far away and reminds me of twine lofts and salt fish and flakes and a time past. Much has happened since then, but the sound of an early morning rooster brought it all back to me and reminded me of a mid- summer morning when I was a little boy.

NTV’s Jim Furlong can be reached by emailing: jfurlong@ntv.ca

It was an image that became iconic to a decade. But the story of how the picture happened is more bizarre than the photo itself

It was December of 1970, most Americans were in holiday mode, heading to malls and shops for presents. Comedian Red Skelton, variety host Ed Sullivan, TV impresario Jackie Gleason, and screen legend Doris Day, all had Christmas specials on TV.

Over 300 workers had been exposed to radiation at a Nevada nuclear test site. The father of NHL player, Brian Spencer, was killed in a shootout with RCMP in Prince George, after he held CBC-TV staff at gunpoint to protest the station not airing his son’s game with the Toronto Maple Leafs. The movie, Love Story, starring Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal debuted in cinemas.

Monday the 21st was eventful for two reasons. The Supreme Court lowered and set the voting age in the U.S. to 18. And staff at the White House had to scramble with an unscheduled visit from Elvis Presley.

Elvis’ journey to see then-President Richard Nixon followed a Presley family squabble. His wife, Priscilla and his parents scolded the King of Rock & Roll for spending over $100,000 on Christmas presents (32 handguns and 10 Mercedes-Benzes… as you do).

In a huff, Elvis took a plane out of Memphis, arriving at Los Angeles airport on Saturday, Dec 19. There, he called up an old friend and former employee, Jerry Schilling.

“He had some guns with him,“ Schilling remembered years later, “and a collection of his police badges.”

[It should be mentioned that when you happen to be Elvis Presley in 1970, airport security was a very different thing.]

“Elvis always travelled with an entourage,” Schilling told an audience at the National Archives in 2010. But this time, the music executive was surprised to hear that Elvis was travelling alone.

THE KING’S ROAD TRIP

“I don’t want anybody in the world to know where I am,” the music icon confided.

“He started giving me his flight numbers and what time he was coming in,” Schilling said. “Things that Elvis Presley never did. So on a Saturday night, about 1:30 in the morning, I picked him up at LAX. “We spent Sunday catching up and he told me, ‘I really got mad at Graceland. People were telling me how to spend my money.’

“I mean, [his father] Vernon and Priscilla were only looking out for him. But I think when the Colonel [Tom Parker, his manager] got involved, he got in his car and went to the airport. He just had an American Express credit card.”

Elvis was fixed on getting to Washington, intent on meeting President Nixon in order to get a badge from the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

Schilling and Presley caught a late-night flight from LAX destined for the nation’s capital. On the way, Elvis commandeered two pages of American Airlines letterhead. 

His handwritten letter laid out his reasons for why he wanted the president to give him a badge, citing his concern for the country’s “drug problem,” and how young people look up to him and trust him. Irony was not in short supply on this trip.

“Sir, I can and will be of any service that I can to help the country out,” Presley wrote.”I would love to meet you. I will be staying at the Washington Hotel under the alias Jon Burrows. I will be here for as long as it takes to get the credentials of a federal agent.”

Schilling remembers the night flight to Washington as special, not only for accompanying Elvis on his badge quest, but also that numerous American soldiers were also travelling, heading home for the holidays. 

Schilling remembers that Elvis struck up a conversation with one G.I. for 10 minutes then he came back to Schilling’s seat and said, “Where’s that money?”

Earlier in the day, Elvis cashed a personal cheque for $500 at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Schilling said, “That’s all the money we’ve got!” Elvis replied, “You don’t understand. This man’s been in Vietnam. He’s going back home for Christmas to see his family.”

MR. BURROWS GOES TO WASHINGTON

After landing in D.C., The King was insistent that he drop off his letter right away and so by 7:00am, Elvis and Jerry were standing outside the gates of the White House.

Inside, Bud Krogh, one of the president’s lawyers, was approached by another staffer who declared, “The King is outside!” Krogh was confused because after consulting the president’s diary for the day, saw no monarchs on the schedule.

“No!!” the staffer shouted. “Not any two-bit king. THE KING! The King of Rock. He’s here.”

Over the next three hours, President Nixon’s staff go into panic mode as they try to determine not only if Presley can meet Nixon, but should he, and when? Nixon’s chief of staff, Bob Haldeman got involved. Draft memos started circulating about how the meeting could bolster the president’s image.

The Secret Service got involved when it discovered that Elvis was carrying a gun, meant as a present for Nixon.

Eventually, it was decided that a meeting would be held, 11:45am in the Oval Office. Ali Atkins was the White House photographer and the job fell to him to capture the moments.

“Elvis was overwhelmed,” Krogh remembered. 

“He walked in the door and looked at the eagles engraved in the ceiling and engraved in the carpets. He’s a poor boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, and he’s here in the Oval Office of the President of the United States. So, it took a little effort to move him over to the desk. He’s wearing his cool glasses and his cape. And nobody ever dressed quite like that in the Oval Office.

“And the president had never seen anyone quite like that either.”

‘CAN YOU GET ME A BADGE?’

Two men, icons of the era in which they lived soon bonded as fathers, with Elvis showing off pictures of his daughter, Lisa Marie.

According to Bud Krogh’s notes of the meeting, after the back and forth, Elvis got to the point.  

“Mr. President, can you get me a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs?”

Nixon looked around at his staff to find out if such a gift was legal, and they gave their assurance to the president.

“Get him a badge,” Nixon orders. “I want him to have one.” 

Krogh reported that Elvis was overcome and grabbed the president to hug him. “That wasn’t the norm in that White House,” he added.

The whole meeting, the notes written, and the photos taken remained a secret from the public for a year. When it was written about in 1972, few showed much interest.

In 1977, the fates stepped in to claim the life of the King of Rock & Roll. The meeting between Nixon and Presley was largely a footnote. However, in 1988, a newspaper in Chicago reported that thousands of people had requested a copy of the photo taken during that 1970 meeting. It suddenly became big news and a big fundraiser for the National Archives, the repository of those images.

In a 2010 article for Smithsonian Magazine, Bud Krogh shared why he thinks the photo endured.

”It’s a jolt seeing them together. The leader of the western world and the king of rock ‘n’ roll in the same place, and they’re clearly enjoying each other. And you think, ‘How can this be?’”

But it was. It was another extraordinary moment in the extraordinary life of Elvis Presley.

In his new novel, author Bill Rowe imagines a former British PM fascinated with his First Nations roots and driven by time to share his story

“You found the place,” Bill Rowe exclaims as I pull up to the driveway.  

He greets me at the door of his writing retreat, an apartment in the shadow of Signal Hill. Rowe’s eyes are what you notice first, eager for the next exciting conversation. 

Despite a career going back to the 1960’s – broadly distributed between politics, radio host, commentator, writer, and when he had the time, law – he’s not in any way “talked out.”

“What motivated me in life was writing,” he confesses.

“While I was on the radio – and after – I succeeded in putting together 13 books. When I look back on it, it’s a rather phenomenal thing for someone who was also practicing law. It was a busy time, so I was glad to get time freed up to concentrate on writing. It doesn’t make me write faster, but more thoughtfully, more profoundly.”

Writing tends to be a one-way conversation: the writer communicating thoughts and ideas to a reader. Yet, knowing who you’re writing for is a valuable consideration and Rowe says his time as an open line host and politician gave him and appreciation for how people in the province talk and speak to each other.

Boyhood Dream

“Especially ‘around the bay,’ as we say in Newfoundland,” he adds.  

“To hear people expressing themselves, the words they choose, the cadence of their voices.  Especially women!

“It really is fascinating and I try to make sure that gets into my prose, brought in through the dialogue, incorporating a lot of Newfoundland and Labrador words and idioms, that kind of thing. That’s what I took from being on the radio.”

Like so many born during or around the time of the Second World War, Winston Churchill has loomed large in the life of Bill Rowe. He says writing about ‘the great man’ had been rumbling around his mind “since I was a boy.”

“He spent the first two years of the War, if not feeling alone, seeming alone against the German rampage over Europe. It took a couple of years – and some serendipity – to get the Americans involved.”

Churchill, the man, was nearly American by birth. His mother, Jennie, was born in Brooklyn and it’s those Yankee Doodle roots that provided Rowe with a rich playground to imagine a Churchill who spends his remaining months on Earth exploring those roots by reaching out to a young student, William Cull.

Rowe relies upon his own experiences as a student in London during the beginning of the Swinging Sixties to open his latest book, The Reincarnation of Winston Churchill. The story centers on William Cull, a student from Newfoundland, who encounters a world that seems like one great salon of British culture. Cull sees early shows from comic actors who would later become members of Monty Python. 

He befriends a pre-incarceration version of the novelist, Jeffrey Archer. Even a pre-fab Beatles get a cameo. So let there be no doubt of the setting.

Through circumstance and connections, Cull eventually comes under the gaze of Churchill. Rowe paints a portrait of a diminished political leader but still a man of fortitude and, as it turns out, gratitude for Newfoundland’s role in the War, both for England and America.

Soon, Cull becomes ever-present to Churchill as the young student can hardly say no to the man who has roped him into chronicling some of his final stories. Churchill has become besotted by his First Nations roots and wants Cull to record it for posterity. 

“Churchill was very proud of his indigenous ancestry,” Rowe says. “One time, [U.S. President] Roosevelt said to Churchill, ‘You know, Winston, my ancestors were amongst the first to settle on Manhattan Island.’ And Churchill replies, ‘And you know, Franklin, my ancestors welcomed them here when they came ashore.’”

The Churchill of history is remembered with a complicated legacy; resolute and tactical at war, racist and imperial with many cultures not British.

Still, Churchill fought for the statehood of Israel and it’s that side of the man which Rowe chooses to produce the former prime minister’s curiousity about his indigenous heritage. 

Yet, rather than have an affinity with their connection to the Earth and its precious eco-system, it should be no surprise a warlike lad like Churchill muses if his indigenous heritage has somehow made him the warrior he has been.  

“Churchill said he knew he was a man of destiny. He recovered from accidents and attempts to assassinate him. At one point, William Cull asks the PM’s secretary, Montague Brown, if he might die before he finishes telling this story.

“And Churchill predicted the day of his death, in January of 1965, 70 years to the day after his own father died.”

His Story Told

Perhaps impending demise creates the manner in which Rowe’s version of Churchill speaks throughout the book.  Less “we shall fight on the beaches…” and more a man manic to finish this business and get his story told.

By novel’s end, Bill Rowe may be asking readers who have descended from European settlers and colonists, if they can see that it’s still possible to reconcile our past and heritage. Despite the passing of decades, even centuries, it is not too late to tell the stories.  And for Rowe, this was a story he had to tell.

For more information  on Bill Rowe and The Reincarnation of Winston
Churchill and to purchase a copy, visit boulderbooks.ca or on their social medias.

Those of us of a certain age know what it’s like to have had a baby boomer father. Those dads were cool. Pack of smokes in pocket with one smouldering from the jaw. They all looked like James Dean with a baby in those old black and whites. In the 60s and 70s, parents had kids because that’s what you did. 

Back in dem days mother tended to the youngsters so pa could relax in front of the television after a hard day. Kids could be seen but not heard and if you stepped out of line you got a spanking. End of story.

Blood sport in the 70s

It wasn’t all that terrible. As much as daddy thought he knew best, he certainly didn’t know it all. Kids explored places they shouldn’t and got into real old-fashion mischief. We skated on too-thin ponds and rode our bikes downhill much too fast with nar helmet. We fought, fist-to-fist, if someone took one too many lemon-skip turns. Skipping was all about who you could whip the hardest with the rope when bored with Double Dutch. Heck, even Red Rover was a blood sport in the 70s. 

Dad never asked where the bruises came from, assuming that we took a knockin’ from the great outdoors the way kids were supposed to.

I got caught twice, that I remember, getting into shouldn’t-be-at-it shenanigans. Once I was part of the guilty crew that sent my brother and cousin out to sea in a blowup dingy built for one. They were four and we didn’t give them as much as a stick to paddle back with. 

Another time I nearly took a spanking for getting caught whipping a neighbourhood fella with a dog chain, though when dad found out my reasoning – the young lad had taken my bike and hid it in the pond – he frightened the kid so bad as he and the dog the chain belonged to chased buddy out of the yard. That kid never touched even so much as a stick of chalk belonging to me again.

Shared responsibility

By the time I became a parent, being a father had changed. Things were supposed to be equal by the gen-x days, and parenting became a shared responsibility. While most of us had kids because we screwed up our birth control, being a daddy was not a bad gig. Pa was no longer the one to be frightened of and ‘just wait until your father comes home,’ pretty much became a saying of the past. Dads could show affection without being considered soft, and cuddle time followed bath time each evening and daddy was just as likely to do bedtime duties as mommy was. 

Spankings were a thing of the past, replaced by the ‘bad boy/girl chair.’ Time outs replaced the chair of shame in that same generation because, goodness knows, by the 2000s you couldn’t make anyone feel badly about themselves – even a youngster who stuffed toaster strudel in the VCR on purpose was simply a good kid who made a bad choice.

Dads were cool because they could chill and no longer had to play the bad cop role. Now, it’s the millennials turn. Video cameras have taken over from old fashioned baby monitors that picked up the neighbour’s telephone calls more than the baby’s whimperings and these days parents know the timing and duration of every sleepy-time fart and flip-over and most baby antics are captured on a cell phone camera and posted to Facebook. 

And I don’t think youngsters get discipled anymore either. Instead, tantrum-throwing toddlers get reward stickers placed on a behaviour chart. Smiley face for a good day, and a rain cloud for a bad one. How curious.

While I can’t claim to comprehend it all, I do smile when I see new dads or meet new fathers-to-be because one thing about this generation – being a parent isn’t a must do or a whoopsie; for the most part, it’s a want, and there’s something about that that makes this generation of dads the coolest ever. Happy Father’s Day.

Pam Pardy, The Herald’s Managing Editor, can be reached by emailing pghent@nfldherald.com

The race does not always go to the swiftest or so we are told in Ecclesiastes. The cold reality is that it usually does and smart money bets it that way. 

Those words are a grim reminder that the bloody war in Ukraine continues to ooze across that smashed nation and there seems no sign in sight of the Russians even thinking about a cease fire.

Moral support for Ukraine fighters after the Russian invasion is all over the place but they, the Ukrainian fighters,  are essentially on their own. I know you do not like to hear that, in fact I don’t like writing it; but it is true. Also true is that as horrible as it is in Ukraine the lead story these days is from Texas and yet another attack by a gunman on children. Such is news.  

Uneven Struggle

Now the last two world wars were settled and won by the guys with the most men and the most bullets. You look back to history and it is but a rare conflict where that does not happen. The great exception was Vietnam where the Americas were beat up despite the fact they had every weapon on the face of the earth but lost anyway because they just were not sure where to point those guns. That tragic war was fought in jungles often and all solders were not in uniform. 

It was an uneven struggle in terms of weapons, but it was not at all like the Ukrainian situation. Russian invasion is more a conventional battle where raining firepower on towns and cities is not necessarily doomed to failure.

Fighting Alone

Moral condemnation of the Russians will not win the war. In the absence of a sea-change in how the war is going the Russians should win because the Ukrainians are fighting alone. Yes, generous nations like Canada are doing what they can to help with weapons and sheltering people forced from their homeland. It is admirable and they are doing remarkably well at saving people, but I am reminded of what Winston Churchill said after the Allies were squeezed and driven out of Europe by the Germans at Dunkirk. While England marvelled at how the English were able to get many soldiers out of harms way, he said, ‘’ Wars are not won by evacuations “ 

path of victory

I look at the situation and I watch the Russians and I watch the battles and I wonder where the path of victory lies without the current limited war becoming something else. How long does the informal coalition of forces against the Russians hold? Ukraine will continue to exist I expect but not with its present borders. That is not a popular position but in war the good guys do not always win. 

Badger’s Kellie Kerpan is the manager of culture and community outreach with Qalipu First Nation. When Kerpan spoke with The Herald, she was relaxing before things were about to get busy at Kilmory Resort in Swift Current. 

Situated in cabin number six, which looked ready for some celebration of sorts, we asked what was on the agenda for the weekend. 

“We have women from all across the traditional Mi’kmaq territory that are coming together. We have 26 in total that are coming together, coming from different parts of the province – from St. John’s, Glenwood, Gander, Badger, Buchans and then from the West Coast  – and it’s about bringing women together that have never connected before and just sharing,” she began.

People tend to sit in our silos in our own communities and don’t branch out a whole bunch, she continued thoughtfully.  

“Making connections and bringing women together just for a weekend is a way to start sharing,” she continued.

Leaders & Matriarchs  

In the past, in Mi’kmaq culture, the women were the matriarchs of the society, she said. “Society was run by the women. They made the decisions they were the ones responsible for putting up the camps. They were the hunters, the hunter/gatherers when they needed to, and they led the community.”

Some of that has been lost, she shared, so revisiting that sense of pride is key in order for future generations.  

But preserving culture starts with all generations, she added, including children.  “In the past, we’ve done a program here at Kilmory called Dancers and Drummers of the New Dawn and what that is was a focus on violence and anti-violence and anti-bullying in communities through the use of culture. So, a way to bring kids back to the culture to know the importance of the drumming, the importance of the dancing, to instill in them that those two things are at the core of us and those things help us along the way because the teachings that go with dancing are important,” she said. 

Like jingle dress dancing for example.  “A jingle dress dancer dances for other people … they dance for the healing of other people. There’s a story that goes, this man’s child was very sick so he made jingles and he got her to dance and as she danced, she got stronger … That’s the significance of our jingle dancers.”

As for the drummers? “The drum, that’s the heartbeat of the nation. That is the heartbeat of us. When you sit and watch that first beat on that drum, you feel it and everybody else in the room feels it as well. Everybody says how the drum just always draws them in.”

Teaching the dancing and the drumming to children “grounds them in culture,” she added.  “We were always taught. If we don’t know where we’ve come from, how do we know where we’re going?” 

Holding such events at Kilmory is important to Kerpan, she added. Besides being a central location, and a place that has enough room for their events, it’s also close to nature, she shared. Plus, there’s something else too. “It’s like coming home, and I said it to my mom yesterday, ‘Every time I drive in here, it’s just like coming home. We’re in a beautiful setting. We have the nature around us, we have the mountains and the water and things that are really important to me and my people, but what we have here are the gems of Mary and Roger (Jamieson, owners of the resort). That’s the draw.

Share what you have

“Mary is like family … The last time we had the event here with the kids, we walked in and she had dozens … of cupcakes all ready for the kids because she knew they were coming in and she just pops in and she doesn’t like to be intrusive, but she is there if we need her.”

Kerpan is a very active member of her community and sits on the executive of the cultural group, Na’taqamtug. She has coordinated and facilitated a number of cultural activities in her community, including this women’s retreat and the children’s drumming and dancing. 

“I am connected through the people, my crafting, and most importantly the land and water,” she shared. 

The land and the water are healing for her and she can often be found walking the shorelines or in the forest as she ponders the stories that have been passed down. “It’s in those times I know I am connected, and they can hear me and my prayers,” she said. 

She describes herself as a spiritual person, partaking in sweats when available, making offerings, smudging, sharing knowledge and yearning to be connected to others and to learn from them.

She lives her life in honour of her ancestors and she tries “to effect positive change and opportunities for all Indigenous people,” she said. “I live each day to try to be better for my child, to teach him things that were taught to me, to learn new things, to listen to the Elders, take the time to sit and appreciate them and all they have been through. Be kind, be thoughtful, be loving, to forgive and to share what you have.”

We ask what kinds of things should we be doing as a province or as individuals to help preserve our culture. Kerpan paused. “We’ve made strides in the last few years, especially with the resurgence of culture and people, let’s say the formation of Qalipu First Nation … People wanted to be connected, so they’re seeking that out, but we’re nowhere near where we should be. We’re in the infancy stages right now and we talk about reconciliation, and the province is big on reconciliation, but we’re not on the right path, but we’re at the beginning of the path peaking into where we need to get to.” 

Chief Mi’sel Joel and Sheila O’Neill penned My Indian. We ask if books like that help the cause. “The Chief, who is absolutely phenomenal and amazing, he can articulate in words how we need to take our stories back … I knew the story of Sylvester Joe and if you look at the time that story happened, the term ‘Indian’ was used. We weren’t classified as people. I love that (Chef Joe and O’Neill) had the courage to write the book and that they had the courageousness to title it what they did.”

This is a teaching moment, she said. “If the title My Indian upsets you, let’s read the book, and let’s get the context as to why it’s called My Indian. It’s because a proud indigenous man wasn’t shown enough respect.”

It’s powerful, she added. What’s next for Kerpan and her passion for people of all cultures?  There’s “a lot of irons in the fire,” she said. 

For more on Kerpan visit qalipu.ca  

Before the St. John’s Maple Leafs stepped on the ice at Memorial Stadium, a kind of semi-pro hockey was played here. The names of the players form a litany of very skilled hockey men, many just one skill short of making it to “the show” or perhaps kept from it by something so cruel as bad luck. 

That litany would include names like “Danky” Dorrington, Mort Verbiski, Jacques Allard, Toy Toy Gallant, Clobie Collins and scores more. They plied their trade in places like Buchans and Bell Island and Grand Falls and Gander and Harbour Grace and a bunch of other hockey towns.

These towns were able to compete in Newfoundland senior hockey by virtue of money. Teams from small centres could not match the skill gene pool of large centres like St. John’s, so they brought in players from the mainland and paid them or found them work. Not a whole team, but select “star” strengthening players. They worked in mines or mills, and they played hockey.

Hockey Mercenaries 

George Faulkner writes about how he came back to Newfoundland from pro hockey to run a hockey program in Harbour Grace and play for the much-loved CeeBees. He did it because he could make more from that than from the minor leagues of the Montreal Canadiens organization. 

George and brother Alex, who came back from the NHL and a stint with the Detroit Red Wings, became the stuff of legends in senior hockey and very much a part of the communities where they skated.  

It was not just for cash. Sometimes it was employment. If you could play hockey you might work at the Buchans mine or the iron ore mine on Bell Island and never spend a day underground. I cannot name names for the paper mills at Grand Falls or Corner Brook, but I am told there were situations there as well where handling a puck or being able to stop one might be a key skill in finding work. 

To me from St. John’s they were villains. They were foreigners who had an unfair advantage against us “townies.” That was not true, but it’s what we thought at Memorial Stadium.  

Those early hockey mercenaries are but memories now, but if you stand under the old Memorial Stadium scoreboard at what’s now a supermarket near the shores of Quidi Vidi you can hear the echoes of skates on ice in a building that once was home to senior hockey.   

NTV’s Jim Furlong can be reached by emailing: jfurlong@ntv.ca

By: Griffen Stuckless

My mother loves heirloom and antique items. She loves the stories behind them and what each piece tells. Naturally, this means she’s in possession of a few items passed down through the family – one of the newest being a washboard that, until recently, we had no idea how old it was.

While we know there are much older pieces in her collection, the washboard in question belonged to my great, great grandfather, Gordon Snow. He lived to almost 100, and was born in June of 1906 and died in March of 2005.

I say newest, but Mom has had the washboard since I was a young kid – until recently, though, she wasn’t really sure what to do with it. It isn’t fine china or similarly delicate like most of the other antiques we own, so it isn’t necessary to keep it behind display glass or tucked away for safe keeping. 

That is, until, a few weeks ago when she landed upon the idea to display it as a piece at our cabin. The only problem was, we didn’t really know much about the washboard. All we had were great, great grandfather Snow’s initials on the top of it and a company model name to go off of. 

Unknown history

Of course, being the collector she is, Mom wasn’t satisfied with that, and who can blame her? An unidentified washboard with an unknown history wouldn’t make for  an interesting piece, so she wanted more. 

She craved the history behind it, to know where it was made and how old it was and thankfully, we had a company name to go off; “Canadian Woodenware Co.” was laquered right across the top. Straight and to the point, the name proved useful in her search for its history. Within a few days, she was able to get in contact with Andy Sharpe, the person who handles the company’s email. 

He was elated to hear from Mom about the old piece, and was more than happy to fill in the gaps of our knowledge on the washboard.

The washboard, as the laquered info suggests, is part of the economy model of washboards and is made of a zinc alloy. But it’s certainly not a newer model  and he dates the washboard back to the late 1910’s to early 1920’s, making this piece nearly 100 years old or more! Manufactured by hand in a much different type of factory than the types we have today, there were only about 10,000 washboards being manufactured per year at that time.

Sharpe was more than happy to send us some photos, one of which being an excellent black-and-white photo of the factory it was made in. 

This was the information Mom had been missing and the photo is going to be an excellent addition to the display, visually showcasing some of the history about its creation and origin.

Every heirloom has a story to tell  but without the details, it’s easy for them to get lost as mere objects without a voice.  

With some work, it’s possible to really make them shine as the pieces they really are and showcase their history.