We were ripped away from mummies apron strings when we were seven years old. No play groups or such. We were brought to the door of the big concrete school glowering down on Bonaventure Avenue and thrown inside. 

We were greeted by the Irish Christian Brothers, a black robed group of men that were given power over us and power was the right word. There visited upon us smacks across the head, smacks across the face and later punishment by the wail of the strap.

It did not start right away. Seven year-olds were not beaten to be honest. It would be later. I was terrified from day one, but I did good. I didn’t cry. I can still remember the parents gathered outside of the Grade One classroom looking in. I could see my mom. It must have been hard on her too.   She told me later it broke her heart. There were eighty-two children in class. That’s a student teacher ratio for you! 

Some little boys were sobbing. Others were screeching. The Christian Brother in charge then moved to the front of the classroom and closed the door and it shut us out from the outside world. The noise grew.  Weeping and gnashing of teeth. I will bet it was like that when the Titanic went under. 

You must remember this was 1953. The family unit was strong. I do not think I was ever in the care of someone other than my parents till then.  This was the first time I had been away from mom and dad and there I was all alone!  It was all so different and horrible. The décor in the classroom was grim with a twelve-foot ceiling and walls dominated by statues and a giant grey dark painting of an angel with wings watching over two little children crossing a bridge. 

No neighbourhood watch or anything; just dark images to frighten children. Statues all over the place. There were crucifixes and crowns of thorns and things like that to make you afraid. That is the way the whole thing worked, instill the “fear of God” into you.   

I survived. I did well in class. A few beatings both deserved and undeserved. So you will know, the Irish Christian Brother who greeted us did a little time in jail some years later for “interfering” with boys. He is dead now. He was my favourite teacher and always kind to me. I will never figure all this out but at the beginning of the school year I remember the path from there to here and I still think about it.

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

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

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

There was a sadness about Pope Francis when he arrived in Canada on his tour of “penance” last week. He’s a decent fellow and genuinely has offered apologies and sought forgiveness for the sins of the Roman Catholic Church against Indigenous children in church-run schools. 

Sins of the fathers

As the years roll on, I have learned more about “the sins of the fathers.” Somewhere between my teens and here I wish I were less forgiving. I wish there had been a Christian Brother or a priest who might have offered some form of explanation as to what went on. There were some exceptionally good men among the Brothers and the priests, but something went horribly off the rails and not enough people spoke up. I was not sexually abused, but I was certainly physically abused and emotionally abused. What’s startling is that even into adulthood we spoke of the wonderful education we received. 

It’s not that we did not know what was going on. Everyone knew. The activities of Father Jim Hickey were well known to us. There were others we knew about. You knew where you had to keep your distance. I was never a “teachers’ pet.”

 I lived in the west end, so after school I mostly went home and did not have time to hang around, but I knew somehow school was an odd place and there was something dark about it. Looking back, I scratch my head. There were friends at school and there were teachers that I liked, but I was afraid in a way. Afraid to go to school. That’s how the place worked. Fear was all over the place. 

‘Merry Monks of Cashel’

Here’s a strange one. My favourite Christian Brother did some time in jail for “interfering” with young boys. None of it had anything to do with me. I liked that teacher. He was truly kind to me. He was sent away from St. Bon’s and went into therapy at a place called Mono Mills in Ontario. 

When he was sent back to Newfoundland he was assigned to Mount Cashel Orphanage to be with, as Ray Guy called them, “The Merry Monks of Cashel.” 

Brother Smith (not his real name) must have thought he hit the jackpot in the lottery. Why wouldn’t I use his real name? I do not know. There were no girls at St. Bon’s, so in the Spring Concert the female leads were played by boys in dresses. The school even had its own wardrobe of dresses. I wore one at a concert. In retrospect it was all weird. There was one Brother on staff who taught us boys baton twirling. What a notion! 

How does all this link to Pope Francis? I do not know. I wish someone would explain it to me. 

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

In that peculiar liturgy of the city Regatta Day is surely our Christmas. 

Now you might be surprised at the number of times I have been down to “pondside” to enjoy myself. Why? Well because I was working, calling the races.

Bill Williamson at VOCM got me started. He told me to meet him on Regatta Day for the first race of the morning back in 1973. I watched him do the first race. It was the Labour Race and then he passed me the mic to do the second. I did it and he went home. 

For the rest of that Regatta Day, and for the next four decades, I was broadcasting from the “bottom of the pond.” 

At the risk of patting my own back, I thought I was pretty good.

I did the turning of the buoys and tried to make it interesting. I did that for decades with VOCM and CJON Radio and NTV. Finally, I retired from the booth and the next summer our family went down to Quid Vidi on the first Wednesday in August as spectators.

We met lots of people we knew, and I came to understand what the Regatta was all about. It’s like a promenade from an earlier century. A chance to see and be seen. It was, as one book about St. John’s put it; “A day when Jack was as good as his master.” Well, there you go.

A day at the races

I never rowed in the Regatta, but my dad did for Parker and Monroe (The Friendly Shoe Men”). Dad talked about it much and Parkers were Mercantile Champs for a few years. 

I wanted to see what it was like to row so after I retired, I got Tony and John Barrington to kindly arrange for me and brother John to take a spin. As dad had promised me it was the hardest ten minutes of my life. The Regatta is still there without me, and it remains an important symbol of life in this old port city.  

Now time marches on. I will be there this year again. I will buy some food somewhere and I will have “a few spins on the wheel.” I will walk around and go to the beer tent and see old friends and look at people and they will look at me. I will be part of  “a day at the races.”

It has been like that in St. John’s for a couple of hundred years. I like it because I am a corner boy.  

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

You know I am privileged to live in a major centre (all things are relative) and to have a family doctor. The corridors of the Health Sciences are familiar to me because I have been there many times with the assorted afflictions that come down upon a man in his mid-seventies. 

I have known the operating room. I have been in emergency. Been to x-ray and all kinds of diagnostic imaging procedures and tests. Spent time in the chapel. I am privileged and it is hard to even imagine not being able to see a doctor. Unfortunately, many people in our province don’t have that same access. 

 Honestly, there is going to be no quick solution to our health care crisis. Is there a crisis? Absolutely!  As most of you know emergency rooms have been forced to temporarily close in several communities recently Why? Because there aren’t doctors to staff them. Everybody knows that but the question is Who is the bad guy? 

Apple pie & motherhood

It is okay for opposition parties or labour groups to say government needs to do more to attract and retain doctors. That is apple pie and motherhood. I can tell you who the bad guy is. It is geography. You must ask the question about how you can get someone to practise medicine in tiny rural communities. Communities by the way that are smaller than they used to be. 

 What are you going to offer a med-school graduate to come here and to Newfoundland and Labrador and set up a practise? Money? That won’t do it. A doctor is going to have money wherever he or she hangs out their shingle. Lifestyle? The doctor shortage is such that all you can offer is incredibly long hours and hard work. Doctors are going to be run off their medical feet.

Now it isn’t easy to write this without offending anyone but if you want me to practise in a community you must ask the question as to why I should move there. I have never been there. And it is not even on the road to any where. My guess is that someone from that community or nearby would be an excellent choice. 

That would be true for Bonavista or Ferryland or Buchans and a whole bunch of places like it. I am from inner city St. John’s so you can take a stab at where I might like to practise.  It is most unfortunate but that is the reality of the situation. Newfoundland, in many sections anyway, is “emptying out” for economic reasons. There is a price attached to that and it is unfortunately the way things are. I wish it wasn’t that way.      

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

I am older now and things have changed. I noticed that on the back deck of our home a couple of evenings ago. It was nice and warm, and the sun was dipping below the tree line. 

Not a cloud in the sky. I had a Jameson Whiskey (note the spelling) on the go. Everything should have been wonderful and right with the world because we are back to normal, aren’t we?

Do I feel safe? 

Somewhere in my soul though was the gnawing feeling that everything was not quite right. We have been through much during the past couple of years with COVID and we want things to be the same as before all this started, but I know that saying it does not make it so. 

Two people who are close to me have tested positive for COVID in the last week alone. I myself now have had no less than four vaccinations. Do I feel safe? No, I do not.

Given my advanced years I must be careful and I surely am. Now I know that things are opening again, but I also know that in the decision to go back to normal there are political and economic considerations. There are those considerations in everything in the universe. 

What have I learned in the past couple of years? Well for one thing COVID and the crisis has changed my life fundamentally. For instance, social contact has changed. There are people I have not seen in years, and they have not seen me.

Altered time-line?

There has been a time warp. The normal processes of a life lived have been altered. My contact with other people has absolutely changed. I go to shops and restaurants much less. The floor of my car might provide a clue. There are old take-out boxes and wrappers. Subway, Mickey Dees, The Colonel and all the rest.  

I ran into someone I know well the other day. It was on the street walking.  I had my mask on and my friend had hers on. We did lower the masks to speak. We did still recognize each other.

Do you know what struck me? She had aged. She was older than I remember her. Well of course she was!!!!! By a couple of years. Then came the realization that I guess that I have aged as well. 

My friend sees me as older than I was. I hope she was not too disappointed. Unfortunately, not being out in society is not a free pass for anyone against aging. 

There’s a phrase from the far east that appears appropriate; “The dogs bark and the caravans roll on.” 

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

Just as I thought the damage was done and the much-repudiated Donald Trump had exited the stage we find his ghost still haunts the halls, at least for a little while longer.  

The democratic process in the United States said a resounding “NO” to Donald of the orange hair in the ballot box for control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, yet we are not out from under his dark shadow.

The United States and the world really were shocked last week by the Supreme Court striking down a court decision half a century old. It was the court decision that had recognized the right of a woman to access an abortion, that decision was the monumental decision that’s known commonly as Roe V. Wade, and it has prevailed as law in the U.S. since 1973. Now, an ultra conservative panel of mostly Trump appointed Supreme Court judges has changed the law. That’s despite the fact 70 per cent of Americans favoured retaining it.  

Roe V. Wade

The decision by the Supreme Court had not been printed before the protests started. Overturning Roe V. Wade was seen around the world as a backward step since it’s completely at odds with how most of the world is thinking and reflected, not the will of the people, but the will of the ultra right Trump wing of the Republican Party. What’s truly frightening is that Roe V. Wade and what it already has done to the social fabric of society may well be the thin edge of the wedge. 

Who knows what’s next? The target might be sexual orientations or the legality of some activities between consenting adults. 

In Canada we have some protection and I am forever grateful to Pierre Elliott Trudeau who changed our lives in Canada when he said, “the State has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.” That was Canada, but who knows what might be on the horizon in the United States. 

The political coffin

You know the real irony in this is that it might be a final nail in the political coffin of Donald Trump. He still is a major influence on who wins Republican nominations, but that influence is within the party. The Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe V. Wade will not help them at the polls. I expect that realization will roll across the Republicans. Trump himself has referenced it. I find comfort in the fact that “the people” will speak and the will of those people will prevail. 

A look at the polls in the United States show a ten-point swing toward the Democrats in the past four months. 

A woman will still be able to have options in the U.S., but only if she has access to resources. Not everybody does. That is an aspect of the Roe V. Wade decision that’s so sad.      

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

Part of the reality of writing “op-ed” as opposed to straight journalism is you can’t just take popular positions and write to the crowd. 

Why is that? Well, it won’t be any good for one thing. That’s the caution and opening paragraph of this piece for Canada Day/Beaumont Hamel. 

“The first casualty in war is the truth.” The quote is from ancient Greek senator Aeschylus. When I was a young man things like the First World War and battles like the Somme and Beaumont Hamel were taught to us in story and song and history in a form that had little to do with what really happened.

‘The Big Push’

At grandmother’s knee she talked to me of “The Big Push” which was the Allied offensive of July 1st, 1914. She referred to the Newfoundland Regiment as “The Boys” and she told a tale of gallantry and victory. There was no casualty list or any mention of the effect it had on us for generations.

Now there was lots of gallantry at Beaumont Hamel, but little victory. It was a slaughter.  I personally knew and had spoken with and interviewed two members of the Newfoundland Regiment. I had drinks with both of those brave men. 

They were Walter Tucker and Abe Mollett. They both knew July 1st, 1916 was a defeat and really a debacle. That didn’t keep it from becoming an important part of our history. It became a holy day marked on July 1st each year as Memorial Day. Even as the rest of the nation celebrated Canada Day, we in Newfoundland looked back to 1916 and a field in France for our focus on July 1st. That was so for many years and still is to a certain extent.  

That began to change gradually as our time within the Canadian Confederation grew longer.

Celebrating Canada Day!

Now July 1st is a time of great celebration. It’s Canada Day and it has actively moved into prominence in Newfoundland with a large helping hand from Ottawa. There’s nothing wrong with that. 

It took a long while, but now our houses sport Canadian flags and our cars mark the day with the Maple Leaf. In the background remains 1916 and the echoes of war that shaped us will never go away completely, but it’s fading. That was pushed along by our nation’s government. Celebration is an easier role than remembrance and it was promoted by Ottawa. Let me know the next time you hear the Ode to Newfoundland played at a Canadian government event at Beaumont Hamel.  

So here we are on this mid-summer day. Bands will play and flags will wave, but we in this province will still take a backward glance. Our focus has shifted, but we pre-Confederation people will celebrate but still mourn.

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

That’s because, despite being an old St. Bon’s boy and a member of the Catholic Church in more or less good standing,  whatever was visited upon the Church these days was somehow a case of the chickens coming home to roost. 

It was a form of belated delayed justice. Now the actual perpetrators of hideous crimes against children at Mount Cashel have mostly gone to judgment and some of them are shoveling coal in Hell, but it is right and fitting that compensation to their victims has been ordered and there’s a piper that’s to be finally paid. 

Now I did watch with interest as some people in other parishes complained their properties were in danger of being sold when they, the parishioners, had done so much fundraising to keep their parishes going and now might have their churches sold out from under them to pay for crimes in which they had absolutely no part or knowledge.

Now I tell you any attempts by people associated with a liquidation of assets, while decent and honourable, have their pleas fall on my deaf ears when they see themselves as somehow “victims.”

I know a victim when I see one and there’s the haunting image of little boys crying in a dorm at places like Mount Cashel that haunt my thoughts; not church buildings going on sale.  

All of that’s prelude now to the news that a Catholic consortium has successfully purchased the Basilica, St. Bonaventure’s private school and the St. Bon’s Forum. The purchasing group raised millions of dollars, although it’s yet to be approved by a judge. I was approached for a donation by the fundraising appeal. 

A suggested donation was ten thousand dollars or a smaller amount. I did not donate ten thousand dollars because I do not have it and I can tell you here I did not give a smaller amount because I did not want to. 

 Now here’s what’s interesting is that despite my intellectual disinterest in saving the Basilica from turning into a condominium and the other properties falling into secular hands, when the decision was announced I felt an emotional sigh of relief. That’s the hold the Church has on me. On some level I want St. Bon’s to be there. I want the Basilica to be there glowering out over the harbour of St. John’s. I find solace in the fact that at least I did not give them any money.      

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