Springhill, Nova Scotia

I was playing some old records the other day, listening to some folk music from the late fifties and early sixties. One of the songs on the record was an ‘a cappella’ arrangement of “The Ballad of Springhill”. It’s one of the finest versions of the song I’ve ever heard; which is not really surprising. The song was both written and performed by Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl.

Bono and U2 are among the many who recorded the song. They did a version as recently as 1987. OK. So it wasn’t all that recent.

Anyway, back in the winter of 58/59, I was going to SMH (Sydney Mines High School). I believe I was sitting through an early morning latin class when we heard the whistle from Princess Colliery signaling trouble in the pits. It was a long eerie blast, frightening actually, that sent shivers down your spine.

Most of the class, myself included, just looked around with raised eyebrows wondering just what the hell was going on. Some of the kids knew, either briefed by their parents or perhaps having listened to the radio that morning before coming to school. And, it didn’t take a lot of explanation for the rest of us to understand.

“They’ll be going to Springhill.”

When you live in a mining town, within a quarter mile of the pit head, you don’t need any more explanation. You just start wondering; how bad and how many?

The October 23, 1958 “bump” at Number 2 coal mine in Springhill was the worst in North American mining history. You’ll need a geologist to explain what a bump actually is or what causes them. But, you can imagine the death and destruction wreaked by a small underground earthquake, especially to miners labouring deep in the bowels of the earth. There were three distinct shock waves from the bump in Springhill, shaking the entire region.

Draegermen and teams of barefaced miners immediately began the rescue effort. Teams began to arrive from other coal mines on Cape Breton Island and Pictou County, to help with the rescue of trapped miners. The first of the rescue teams encountered survivors at about 13,000 feet down the slope, walking or limping toward the surface. Rescuers were forced to work down shafts either in a partial state of collapse or blocked completely by debris.

The last of the survivors were brought to the surface on Sunday, November 1, 1958. There would be no more in the days that followed. Bodies of the dead were placed in airtight aluminum coffins before being brought to the surface due to the advanced state of decomposition.

Of the 174 miners in Number 2 colliery at the time of the bump, 74 were killed. The remaining 100 were rescued, with some spending as many as eight days trapped underground.

We had just gotten our first television set and CBC affiliate CJCB-TV usually started broadcasting around one o’clock in the afternoon. However, when I got home for lunch that day, Dad was already glued to the black and white “portable” in the living room. If I recall right, some of the men he’d served with in the North Novies were working in the Cumberland mine.

The disaster became something of a milestone in television history as the first major international news event to appear in live television broadcasts. That kind of stuff is “old hat” these days, but in the fifties it was high drama.

A week or so later, when the last of the survivors were being brought to the surface, a reporter rushed to ask one of them “what he wanted most” after having been trapped underground for eight days. Without hesitation, and with the whole world watching, he replied "A cold 7-Up."

I remember the old man laughing and saying “That bugger just got himself a job for life.” I don’t know how long the job lasted, but the 7-Up company did hire the guy as a spokesman.

Following the disaster, the Springhill mines, once the town’s economic lifeblood, were closed, never to reopen.

The Ballad of Springhill
In the town of Springhill, Nova Scotia
Down in the dark of the Cumberland Mine
There's blood on the coal and the miners lie
In roads that never saw sun nor sky
Roads that never saw sun nor sky.
by Peggy Seeger & Ewan MacColl

No skates - no hockey

It was in the fall of 1958 that my name appeared in the sports section of the Cape Breton Post. I’d gone three for five with three RBI’s against a team from Glace Bay in the Babe Ruth League semi-finals. Our manager, Joe Scott, who worked at the government store, was an hour late for the game. Must have been payday. And, he forgot to have someone bring the gear and the team from the Bay was insisting that the umpire award the game to them by default. They refused to let us use pretend balls or bats.

Roddy Tobin saved our ass. He ran home and came back with enough equipment to let us start the game. I played the first three innings with Roddy’s left-handed catchers mitt (I was right-handed) and a 40 pound catcher’s mask last used by Roddy’s grandfather sometime in the 1800’s.

We taped the bat handle up real good so the umpire couldn’t see the cracks and some old guy (he must have been at least thirty) in the stands went to the co-op and bought us a brand new Rawlings baseball.

We lost. That was the last year I’d play any organized baseball. In ’59, I joined the Bras D’Or West End Arrows in the men’s softball league.

No. No. I’m taking about baseball here, dumb-ass.

In hockey, you score goals, get assists, bruised shins, black eyes and learn to swear. Besides, I never played hockey because I never learned to skate. Yes, the bog which served as the local hockey rink was right at my back door, but we couldn’t afford new CCM’s and I had no older brother to pass his down to me. Neither did my younger brother, Tom. Well, of course he had an older brother; what he didn’t have was an older brother with a pair of skates to pass down.

I almost had a pair of skates once. My buddy’s older sister, Dorothy, gave me a pair of CCM’s that actually fit pretty good. (My God. I just had a belated revelation. Her feet must have been big; perhaps even in direct proportion to her bra size. Strange; I never paid any attention to the size of her feet back then.)

Anyway, she was kind enough to offer her old skates. She had no younger sisters to pass them on to; her sisters Ethel and Mary both being older. They were white figure skates with a furry fringe on the top of the boot. Embarrassing!

So, I scuffed the leather up, applied several layers of boot black and used an old straight razor of the old mans to shave the furry white stuff off. But I was always too embarrassed to wear them to the bog until after dark. By then, everyone had gone home, so I never did learn to skate.

But, there were times when I was just as happy that I hadn’t learned to skate. For example, the winter of ’58-’59, the year we almost lost the Crow.

A bunch of the guys were playing hockey on that part of the bog just behind Mikey LeBlancs. Jimmy “Crow” Walsh had just broken up a play and the guys had turned to skate back in the other direction. Somebody turned around to wait for a pass from the Crow . . . but he was nowhere in sight. While everyone was focused on the bull rushes thinking he might have taken a header, Crow’s head bobbed up out of the ice, er . . . water, with Crow stammering, “Ge . . . ge . . . get me outta here, it’s fu . . . fu . . . freezing.

Did I mention that Crow stuttered.

To be sure, it was not a funny state of affairs. But, yes, some of us began to laugh before we realized the gravity of the situation. “Heh-heh. What the fu . . . Oh, shit.”

Some of the older guys had already started a line to form a human chain, but someone (I think it might have been Ricky Vickers) remembered the ladder behind LeBlanc’s barn and raced to get it. He damn near took a tumble himself when, skating like a madman, he ran out of ice. But, they had the ladder on the ice, and Crow out of the water, in a matter of minutes.

Just as well too; we needed him at third base in the summer of ’59.

Childhood hero

I think the first time I ever heard the name Mickey Mantle was while sitting on a pop crate in the back of Frankie Legatto’s convenience store/ ice cream parlour. That was back when Frankie still used his back room as a storage area. Later on in the fifties, he would clear out his storage area and put in a juke box to give the older kids a place to hang out and listen to rock’n’roll. But you still had to sit on pop crates.

Frankie was a friend of the old man’s; one of the “originals” who served in the North Novies with Dad during WW2. I was sitting with Francis, Frankie’s oldest son, and Bobby Gordon listening to the Yankees and Dodgers duke it out in that annual ritual known as the World Series.

We didn’t get to actually see a game back then; TV was still a few years off, at least in our neck of the woods. Of course, you could pick up some of the highlights on the (really) big screen at the Saturday morning matinee at the Odeon . . . if you paid attention during the newsreels.

I was still a kid and Francis and Bobby were both older than I was, maybe twelve or thirteen.. But I often got to hang out with them, maybe because I was big for my age, or, maybe because, even as a kid I was a decent little ball player. I was usually one of the first to be picked in local pick-up games in the schoolyard behind the catholic middle school (St. Joseph’s), often ahead of some of the older guys.

I really didn’t know much about “major league” baseball back then; I could name more players on the Glasgow Celtic football club than I could on the New York Yankees. But, the name itself fired my imagination, and Mickey Mantle became one of my first childhood heroes.

The Yankees won the series that year, 1953 if my fast failing memory serves me right; a year or so before we moved from Guy St. to Bog Row. Mantle would go on to pick up seven World Series rings in his eighteen year career, all played with the Yankees.

In 1956, Mantle won the Hickok Belt as top professional athlete of the year. These days, sportswriters and baseball pundits might refer to it as his “career year.” It was the year he won baseball’s “Triple Crown”, leading the majors with a .353 batting average, 52 homeruns and 130 runs-batted-in, on the way to his first of three MVP awards.

In 1961, Mantle became the highest-paid active player of his time by signing a $75,000 contract with the Yankees. Joe DiMaggio, Hank Greenberg and Ted Williams, who had just retired, had been paid over $100,000 in a season, and Babe Ruth had a peak salary of $80,000. That salary pales in comparison to the multi-million dollar contracts awarded to many of to-days overpaid, under-productive ball players.

One of the most fascinating things about Mantle was that he played his entire career in pain.

Following an injury during a high school football game, Mantle's leg became infected with osteomyelitis, a crippling disease that would have been incurable just a few years earlier. Fortunately, Mantle was able to be treated with a newly available wonder drug, called penicillin, saving his leg from amputation. He suffered from the effects of the disease for the rest of his life, and, according to some, it probably led to many other injuries that hampered his accomplishments.

In 1974, as soon as he was eligible, he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame; his uniform number “7” was retired by the Yankees. In 1999, "The Sporting News" placed Mantle at 17th on its list of "The 100 Greatest Baseball Players."

His stats might have suffered as a result of his injuries; but, I don’t believe they hampered his accomplishments. And, the only drug he abused was beer. No steroids, folks.

From Christmas Past

Charles Dickens wrote a “Christmas Carol” a century or two ago; a story that is told, and retold, on television every year around this time. Watching Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Past traipse through the portals of time got me to thinking about Christmas back in the early fifties, when I was still a kid. Yes, it was a long time ago; I’ve celebrated Christmas in each of the last seven decades.

Maybe it’s just that, as someone once said: "There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child." Or, maybe I’m just turning into a sentimental old fool but I think Christmas has changed a lot since then.

Except for my youth, and the good health which accompanied it, I’m not really nostalgic for anything about the fifties. I don’t miss the outhouse, for example, especially in the middle of winter where shaking it more than once caused the formation of icicles making it difficult to stuff “the wee thing” back into your britches. And, I don’t miss crowding around the coal stove in the living room with “the old man” yelling from his big chair by the door to “Sit back and let the heat get out.”

And, I certainly don’t miss dragging the coal scuttles up the ladder from the cellar to keep both stoves glowing red (the other stove was the cooking stove in the kitchen).

No. It’s not nostalgia. But, nowadays I sometimes look at the wealth of gifts under a Christmas tree and wonder if kids today wouldn’t feel a little short-changed if they had to celebrate Christmas the way we did over half a century ago?

Back then, you weren’t likely to find a whole lot in the way of “store bought” goods under the tree. Each of the kids would get a gift from Santa (via Eaton’s or Simpson’s catalogue), but, mostly, it was knitted or other hand made goods; sweaters, scarves, mitts, etc. The kids of today would likely have a few nasty words for Santa if they were treated to the same kind of gift giving. There were no X-boxes, MP3 players, video games, etc, etc. Hell, they hadn’t even invented the transistor radio back then.

But, there were always Christmas treasures to which people looked forward. For me, it was the annual Christmas box from “Granny” Gordon, or, as my mother called it, “th’ parcel frae hame”. It wasn’t that the parcel contained anything of great significance, but rather the thought behind it. It had traveled thousands of miles across a very big ocean just to say, “We love you.”

There was usually an array of knitted goods, a bottle or two of ginger wine for Ma and a carton or two of Wild Woodbine cigarettes for Da. There was an assortment of candy for the kids and six months of comics from the Sunday Post (the other six months of comics came in the summer parcel), as well as copies of “Topper” and later on, “Beezer”. My favourite strips were “The Broons” and “Oor Wullie”.

I suspect the kids of today might find such gifts a trifle tame. I hope they still grow up with some appreciation for both the reason we celebrate Christmas and the thought behind the gifts.

Maybe I really am turning into a sentimental old fool

Note: My father didn’t always get his full complement of Wild Woodbine. Granny Gordon passed on sometime around 1952, if I recall correctly, but my mother’s sisters continued the tradition of sending parcels for many years after her death. It was from one of those summer parcels which my brother Tom and I confiscated a pack of smokes for our first taste of cigarette tobacco.

It was a year or two after we moved to Bog Row in 1954. We took the cigarettes and a fistful of wooden matches and sat on the side of the “red hill” until they were gone. I didn’t have another cigarette until I was about to board the plane for my first job in Montreal in 1962.

The Torching of Todd's Outhouse

It’s Gone, Boys. It’s Gone
By Matt Todd

The night was cold,
The moon was full,
Snow lay on the ground
Some drunken bum came stumbling home
And burned our shithouse down.
We didn’t mind
His going in
We never locked the door
But he never put out his cigarette
He just dropped it on the floor

Chorus:
It’s gone, boys, it’s gone
The news is going round
Some tobacco smoking, drunken fiend
Has burned Todd’s shithouse down.

I’ll bet I know
Who did the deed
My brother Tom did shout
‘Twas that drunken weasel down the road
Let’s burn the bastard out
But Da said no,
Here’s what we’ll do
While the snow’s still on the ground
Dump the porcelain pot at Willie’s
‘Cause our shithouse has burned down
Repeat Chorus:

When the frost unfroze
We built a hut,
Dug a new hole in the ground
Still cussin’ that miserable son-of-a-bitch
Who burned our shithouse down
Repeat Chorus:

There she was; up in flames

Since the music industry shut down OLGA (On Line Guitar Archives) with threats of legal action, free tab and song lyrics are a little harder to find. I’ve found a couple of sources who appear to have reached some sort of compromise with the blood sucking legal beagles of the record companies and the music publishers. Not that I’m taking sides, you understand. The money grubbing bastards have a perfectly legal right to squeeze poor, old guitar pickers like myself for every last dime. Morally, of course, it’s another issue.

One of the better sites still active, is Roughstock.com; check them out if you’re looking for country tabs or lyrics. Recently, I was on this site looking for the words to an old Bobby Bare tune. I spotted a song called “The Little Brown Building”, recorded by Bare in the early sixties .

The little brown building he sang about was, of course, an outhouse. An outhouse? You know, the little house out behind the big house where you went to relieve yourself. What do you mean, ”Relieve yourself of what?” Where you went to take a shit, dammit. Yes, that too. But, you could do that behind any bush in the yard as long as the neighbours couldn’t see you. Anyway, the first verse of the song goes;
They passed an ordinance in the town
They said we’d have to tear it down
That little old shack, out back
So dear to me
Though the Health Department said
It’s day was over and dead
It will live forever in my memory

It was intended, I recall, as a novelty song. But I also recall thinking at the time “What’s so funny about an outhouse?” You see, at the time the song debuted on radio, we still had ours. No, not the radio, the outhouse. Well, yes, we still had the old Marconi, but we’d stopped using it in favour of getting bleary-eyed watching Cheyenne and Sugarfoot on the big, new radio with the pictures on it. Anyway, another line from the song goes:
It wasn’t fancy built at all,
It had newspapers on the wall
It was air-conditioned in the winter time

Except for the newspaper on the wall bit, that line pretty much describes our outhouse. (We used our old newspapers to start the fire in the coal stove.) Our humble hut was made of barn board; the sizable cracks between boards letting those cold winter winds come whistling through.

Do not laugh. It was not funny. Have you ever had to deal with frost-bite on the ass?

Anyway, as I sat there humming the tune to myself, it brought back memories (as any good country song should) of a time long ago and far away. I think I was in grade eight, which would make it some time around 1957 or 1958.

It happened in the wee hours of the morning, while we were all snug in our beds. The coal stove in the kitchen was banked, the new oil-fired floor furnace turned up just enough to keep the ice off your ass and I was having sweet dreams about my buddy’s older sister Dorothy. That’s when the racket started.

Visions of Dorothy vanished as quickly as if someone had pressed the delete button on some extraterrestrial computer keyboard.

As I blinked my eyes open, wondering why the bedroom light was flickering, I could hear an engine revving up just outside the bedroom wall. It sounded like someone was getting ready to drive a big Sherman tank through the side of the house. It wasn’t a tank, of course, but rather the pumper truck from the local fire hall.

That’s when I noticed the bedroom light wasn’t on, and the light illuminating the room had an eerie red glow. It’s also when I heard my younger brother, Tom, exclaim from the lower bunk: “Holy shit! The shitter’s on fire.”

Even back then, he had a way with words.

I jumped off the top bunk, retrieved my chinos and ran towards the window. (Not much running to do in a small, 9 x 9 room.) I was busy watching the local volunteer fire department put out the raging inferno that was our outhouse when I realized I’d forgotten to check the floor for bodies. No. No. Not dead bodies. My siblings.

Although that may sound silly, when there’s two parents and five kids in a two bedroom house with no basement, you never know where you’ll find one. And a couple of them were very small bodies which created a trip hazard.

Anyway, they put the fire out and we all got back to bed. Unfortunately, I was unable to revive my dream of Dorothy. In the morning, we woke with the dawn to the smoldering remains of our beloved outhouse. Alas. This story has no happy ending.

We’ll ignore the snickers of the other kids at school when the details of the Todd’s terrible tragedy started making the rounds. “Oh, my God. They still have one of them?” Some were more sympathetic. “That’s a sin. They’ll have to walk all the way to town and use the one in the co-op.”

To appreciate the full gravity of the situation, run this scenario in your mind. Your toilet won’t flush. The plumber can’t make it until next spring. You’ve got a spouse and five kids. What are you going to do? No. No. Besides tear your hair out.

Exactly. Run to the neighbours.

Several years ago, I tried to put the incident to music, thinking it might make a good country song. It didn’t work out. I had a title and a verse, but I realized I’d need several verses just to explain to the uninitiated what an outhouse was and how it was used.

Think about it. What is an outhouse, after all? It’s a little hut that sits over a big hole in the ground. And the seat inside has a small hole in it that you sit on after dropping your drawers. There’s usually flies a buzzing and you can find the thing in the dark by following your nose.

Anyway, I’ll tell the tale of the torching of Todd’s outhouse, in verse, in my next post.