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.

Kids fight & so do grown-ups

Fighting back

Fighting comes quite naturally to kids, although fighting well may take a little instruction.

My “old man” did a little boxing while serving with the North Nova Scotia Highlanders. He was normally an easy going type of guy, who could usually see the humour in situations that really weren’t all that funny.

Like the night I went with a couple of friends to a dance at the Odd Fellows Hall. Before heading out, we’d pooled our financial resources to invest in a bottle of port wine, 999 or some such, from the local bootleggers. Inexperienced drinkers, we consumed the contents of our acqiusition down by the towm dump. Quickly. I was still drunk when I got home.

With Dad sitting beside the front door, the mission was to get past him without staggering or giving him any indication that I’d been drinking. I was smiling as I walked into the kitchen, having said hello to my parents; pleased that I had made my way through the living room without giving them any hint that I was slightly inebriated.

That’s when I ran into the rinky-dink little refridgerator that had replaced our rinky-dink little ice box, and went ass over tea-kettle. I expected a somewhat more violent reaction than the suppressed giggles coming from the front room.

I should note that my father was not normally a violent person. Ma was the one who usually got upset when one or another of us came home with a black eye or a split lip. Dad was usually unperturbed by such things, as long as you were still mobile. That is to say, if you walked through the door under your own steam rather than having someone carry you in on a stretcher, he figured everything was alright.

He didn’t seem to care who had won or lost. He wanted to know if you were hurt (bloody noses, black eyes and bruises didn’t count), if you had stood your ground and whether or not you got a few licks in. Unfortunately, standing your ground often led to black eyes, bloody noses and a considerable amount of bruising.

My old man saw no percentage in talking to a bully’s parents and maybe getting into an altercation of his own. So he chose to handle matters more indirectly.

Like the time I came home with a black eye, a dented nose and no bruised knuckles. The old man came home from his job at the Naval Base, a few days later, with two pairs of boxing gloves. Not those compact little eight ounce jobs used by Marciano and Joe Louis. No. No. These were the big 16 ounce “training” models. Extra padding so you didn’t get hurt. Yeah. Like you could use a mattress to cushion the fall from a ten storey building.

But I learned to box a little, although it was a matter of survival just surviving the boxing lessons.

You’ve got to learn to defend yourself. Thump. Keep your hands up and your elbows tight to the chest. Thump. Da, I’m getting a headache. Thump. It’s for your own good. Thump. Thump. Hey Da, how about we skip the boxing lesson to-day and I go take on the grade seven class from the catholic school. Thump.

All kinds of bullies

The school yard isn’t the only place you’ll find bullies. Bullying is a fact of life; and you’ll have to be prepared to fight back. One of the new bullies on the block is the non-smokers rights groups and the tobacco prohibitionists. These clowns have declared open season on smokers.

They are not content, nor will they ever be, with simple public smoking bans. Recently, they have advocated firing smokers from their jobs, denying smokers rental accomodation, declaring smoking parents “child abusers”, and a host of other initiatives designed to force smokers to butt out and kiss their collective ass.

Learning to box won’t help you.

The way to fight back is to arm yourself with information. Challenge the bullies to prove their outrageous claims about secondhand smoke with honest scientific evidence. Don’t ignore the discrimination and intolerance directed at smokers. You might be the next target on the bullies list.

Check out my new blog: Fight Anti Smoker Tyranny

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.

I came back

I’m still here
I suspect no one out there in cyber space has noticed, but I’ve been away for a while. Last month I broke a promise to myself and accepted a position on the Board of Directors at the co-op in which I live.

The last bunch apparently thought they were running a Sunday morning social club instead of a 21 million dollar corporation with a 2.5 million dollar annual budget. Anyway, it will be my responsibility, as Chairman of the Board, to help stop the financial bleeding and put things back on track. Hopefully, after a flurry of activity over the past month, I’ll be able to get back to writing my web log.

It’s my choice
I’m not much of a joiner, on the web or off, but I recently joined an on-line club called MyChoice. It points out that smoking, no matter how despicable you may find the habit, is a matter of choice. The anti-smoker crowd is whipping the public into a frenzy which is reaching near hysterical proportions. People are now permitted to discriminate against smokers in a way that would not be tolerated against any other minority. And, to do it, they are using bullshit, bafflegab and outright lies.

Enough already. It’s time to fight back

WHO study withheld
This article is based on a story printed in the London Telegraph, and other newspapers including the Ottawa Citizen, back in 1998. So why are anti-smoking groups and politicians permitted to claim that a link exists between lung cancer and secondhand smoke? The evidence points in the other direction. And why does the national press, in both Canada and the US, allow the deception to continue? What, or who, are they afraid of?

The World Health Organization apparently tried to withhold from publication a study which showed that not only might there be no link between passive smoking and lung cancer but that it could even have a protective effect. The British press announced that the largest statistical study on Environmental Tobacco Smoke and lung cancer ever conducted did not generate the expected results. It was buried by WHO until a request for the study was made by the British press under freedom of information legislation.

The WHO was forced to make the report public, although some of their personnel at the time were denying the very existence of the study. The WHO study was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in l998.

The WHO and its supporters continue to insist that statistically insignificant relative risk factors were significant.

A complaint was filed with the U.K. Press Complaints Commission against the Telegraph (London), who broke the story, alleging it had misrepresented the results of the WHO study. The Telegraph stuck by its story and by October l998 the Commission found for the Telegraph and rejected the complaint vindicating the newspaper.

For a synopsis of this disturbing episode in the history of the WHO, and more information on the study, visit davehitt.com