Coal Black Heart (25 page)

The house teemed with life: the MacKeigans and Demonts, Claries buddies from the paper, Boss Wilson, the athletic director at the YMCA, who showed up every Saturday night for beans, the bank managers and ballplayers who boarded upstairs. You can see my father and uncles sitting there in the low buzz of kitchen-table talk, inhaling the smells of food, tobacco, liniment and coal dust. My father, until I pointedly asked him, never once mentioned the
fact that he had grown up during the Great Depression. Nor did he make much of the fact that he and his brother Eric both caught tuberculosis and had to spend eighteen months in a sanatorium receiving pneumothorax treatment—essentially collapsing part or the entire damaged lung, then allowing it to sit unused and heal inside the chest cavity. (Although my father did once concede that it took a long time for his self-confidence to recover from this affliction with a disease that was usually associated with abject poverty.)

What he mostly talked about were the simple, goofy joys of small-town life in a happy home: getting a milkshake at Medical Hall, the pharmacy favoured by the Protestants; browsing through the comic books at Charlie MacLeod’s bookstore as their father shot the breeze about politics and current events with the philosophical proprietor. After supper they huddled around the big Westinghouse radio with the trio of dials, listening to
Myrt & Marge
and
One Man’s Family.
Saturday meant a movie matinee and a practised ritual that began at the kitchen table with the boys saying how much they wanted to see the latest Tom Mix or Hopalong Cassidy offering. Clarie or Mabel would say it wasn’t really a good time, or maybe baldly state that they didn’t have the money. The boys would beseech, the parents would equivocate. But invariably, when they went to clear away the dishes from the table, Russ, Eric and Earl would find a nickel—the price of admission in the 1930s—under each of their plates. During summer vacations they’d jump off a bridge on the Mira River with their buddy Dougie Holmes, who was blind, and float down the river with the current as blithely happy as dogs cooling off on a hot day. When my dad got older, sometimes they’d go to a dance at Spain’s Pavilion, out on the Mira. Then a bunch of them would walk back at one or two a.m., laughing and yakking in the dark, Holmes lightly touching someone’s elbow for directions.

Usually what they did when they weren’t in school was play sports. They were, after all, Clarie Demont’s boys. Though his playing days were over, Flash still kept time during road races and officiated at some of the local wrestling matches. (He also ran the local bingo game at a hall diagonally across from Knox Church, where he and Father Nash would split the profits—half to the YMCA and the other half to the parish up the hill.) In colliery towns, playing or watching sports was like going to the movies, the dance or the tavern—a way to while away the leisure hours, which seemed to grow immeasurably during the Depression thirties. Having your own hockey, baseball or rugby team provided a sense of separateness between those cookie-cutter towns. My father and uncles crowded into bone-snapping-cold rinks to watch their dad’s old team, the Glace Bay Miners, take on their nearby rivals the Sydney Millionaires. They sat in the wooden bleachers as Sandy McMullin, dead a few years later from electrocution, and Alex MacDonald and “Coot” Maclean, who both died while serving in Italy during the Second World War, led the magnificent Caledonia Rugby Club to victory after victory.

The Demont boys were no slouches. As they got older they played basketball, hockey, and rugby, boxed, wrestled and ran track. If they saw a ball, they just had to kick, bounce or throw it. Some days my father would rush home from school, drop his books, then grab a worn leather baseball glove with no more padding than an oven mitt and go out on the front lawn to play catch with his idol, Roy Moore, star of the Glace Bay Miners, who boarded at 31 York Street. The Cape Breton colliery league wasn’t just a bunch of pick-and-shovel men tossing around the horsehide. In 1935 the league allowed each team to sign three imports. A year later, as Colin Howell recounts in his book
Northern Sandlots: A Social History of Maritime Baseball,
the Cape Breton Colliery
League broke with the Nova Scotia Amateur Baseball Association and began signing on unlimited numbers of paid imports.

Sydney Mines added Bob Ayotte, slugging outfielder George Foster, Elliot and Charley Small from Maine; New Waterford had a young club led by shortstop Lennie Merullo, who later played seven years with the Chicago Cubs; the Dominion Hawks leaned heavily upon George Michaels (formerly of the Boston Royal Giants) and Gene Lumianski, who had pitched for Toronto in the International League; Sydney signed Rube Wilson, a big left-hander from South Carolina, and Guido Panciera, who had taken the field for the New York Yankees, the Boston Braves and the Boston Red Sox. The Glace Bay Miners had their own trio of stars: Billy Hunnefield, a switch-hitting infielder who had once finished second in the National League in stolen bases; first basemen Adolphial (Del) Bissonette, who one year hit .320 and dinged twenty-five home runs for the precursor to the Brooklyn Dodgers; Roy Moore, a left-handed pitcher who did a couple of seasons in the Big Show with Philadelphia and Detroit.

I’ve heard descriptions of their getting off the train that first time, arriving from dusty little American Midwest towns and broad-shouldered east coast cities, some of them has-beens looking for another paycheque, others younger, maybe college-educated, still hoping to get a shot at the big time. None of them, probably, knew quite what to expect when they learned about this new league up in Canada. But they would have understood that, though the slow recovery had begun, not a corner of this continent was untouched by the Great Depression. The down-at-the-heels dress of the people at the railway station must have seemed mighty familiar. Same with the lean faces—Englishmen, Scots, Irish, Lebanese, with a smattering of Italians, Slovaks and other Europeans thrown in—of men and women who never forgot the work camps and soup kitchens along with the hunger, cold and damp of that fretful time.

The ballplayers’ very presence whipped the surrounding towns into a frenzied state. Games began with balls falling from airplanes, marching bands and speechifying politicians. Seasons ended like the one in 1938, when the members of the league-winning Glace Bay Miners were honoured by a parade that went through downtown Sydney and included a pipe band and over two hundred decorated cars. In between, hundreds of fans would slap down the forty cents to watch a game. Entire shifts at the colliery had to be cancelled because too many men had skipped work to attend a critical playoff contest—which might have been broadcast live over the radio.

Baseball, with its bracing combination of beauty, skill and joy, helped people rise above the hardscrabble reality of their everyday lives. As Jim Myers—who played on those same fields decades later—points out in his Saint Mary’s University master’s thesis on the colliery leagues, even those who didn’t actually like the sport were touched by it. Townspeople held “theatre parties,” dances, socials and bingo games to raise money for the community-owned teams. With the Depression still on, miners set aside money from each paycheque to help their team stay in operation. When one team faced financial trouble, the others in the league helped pay their costs.

The locals honoured their heroes. The players were introduced to the community at receptions at the start of the season, and feted with banquets and parades when it closed. Their willingness to sign every autograph and visit every sick child in the hospital cemented their celebrity status. So did a fastball between the shoulder blades, or arriving cleats-first trying to steal second base. A winning ball team helped shore up a community’s self-esteem in troubled times. Which meant that there was more at stake than a
Win
the win column whenever two teams took the field.

Sometimes, players climbed into the stands to get at a fan who had been pelting them with rocks or throwing mud into their water buckets. Then all hell would break loose, as it did on July 30, 1939, at New Waterford’s Dodger Field. By the seventh inning the Sydney manager was asking for protection from bleachers full of threatening, cussing fans. The umpire called two policemen to act as a buffer between the Sydney bench and the unruly crowd. When a pair of Sydney players lost it and took to the stands, the fans responded by ripping down the wire fence and storming the ball field. A full-scale riot ensued.

Umpires often took the brunt of the abuse. At one game in Sydney Mines, Umpire-in-Chief Stewart MacDonald was knocked down and kicked by fans. Somehow he made it to his car, where the beating continued and his driver was also attacked, until the police finally arrived. Another time, police protection had to be summoned in New Waterford after an umpire named Flemming was attacked during a game and a disgruntled fan threw a rock through his windshield. One day in the same town, a Glace Bay umpire named Gordon MacInnis made two successive bad calls against the home club. The president and manager of the New Waterford club tried right then and there to have him removed from the field. MacInnis refused. With the game tied in the ninth inning, the fans could restrain themselves no longer. It took the chief of police, a contingent of his constables, and ballplayers from both teams to escort MacInnis to a waiting truck as fans pelted him with sticks and stones. In the melee that followed, his father was beaten and five men were arrested.

On the other hand, the hapless Hugh Beshore did such a terrible job at a July 20, 1936, game that the managers for both the Reserve Mines and Glace Bay teams refused to play another out until he was replaced. Johnny Lafford, a pro boxer, was enlisted to
finish the game behind the plate, while Beshore was relegated to the bases. “His calls on the bases were no better than his ability to call balls and strikes,” recounts Myers, “upsetting the Reserve team who had to be restrained by the R.C.M.P.”

In the mind an image starts to form: half-in-the-bag miners and steelworkers taking pulls on their barely hidden bottles of ’shine and store-bought hooch; fans openly gambling in the stands; as they baited umps and opposing players; local kids so pesky and cantankerous that they had to be penned in cordoned-off areas in some parks. And yet I bet the ballplayers, used to the nomadic life of the Depression-era athlete, hardly noticed. I’m not one of those who think that the baseball diamond offers a metaphor for life. But the essence of the game—blue sky, newly cut grass, a white ash bat colliding with a seamed horsehide orb—does seem to transcend time and place. I imagine that’s why, whenever a sportswriter later caught up with some leather-faced colliery league vet—by then selling cars on commission or rocking away the hours in a retirement home—they always spoke kindly about their Cape Breton days.

If an interview with Roy Moore exists in some archive, I failed to turn it up. He was thirty-eight when he signed on with the Miners, a husky Texan at the tail end of a career that had peaked with three years with the Philadelphia Athletics, a two-year stint with the Detroit Tigers and an overall big-league record of thirteen wins and twenty-six losses. From then on it was the journeyman’s life. Eventually he ended up playing for the minor-league Toledo Mud Hens. In 1935 he was barnstorming with the House of David, a Jewish touring team that had started signing players not of the faith.

I found a picture of the championship Glace Bay Miners squad of 1938. Moore was forty by then—living in a house where the only way he could guarantee a quiet afternoon nap was by bribing my father and uncles to stay quiet with a small purple bag of chocolates left dangling from the doorknob outside his room. With his raccoon eyes and old-guy slouch, he might have peered at himself in the mirror on a bad day and seen a middling athletic career that had just about run its course. Or he may have said, I’m a grown man who still gets to play a child’s game for a living—even if it isn’t a good living—and been happy with that. It’s anybody’s guess. I just like to picture him and my father lobbing the ball back and forth on the small front lawn: Moore moving with that fluid, exaggerated motion that natural athletes use when they’re warming up; my dad, sixteen, nervous at first, then relaxing as time seemed to slow down.

Years later, when I was younger than he was in 1938, my father and I used to go out in our driveway in Halifax and play catch. One day he seemed to feel I was ready to learn how to throw a curveball. I didn’t know much about Roy Moore then. I just understood that a long time ago he had shown my father how to grip the seams of the ball with index and middle finger and give it a clockwise spin. One minute the ball is going straight; then, with no warning, it twists and dips as if it’s fallen off the edge of a table. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent that summer trying to make a tennis ball break even a little as I chucked it against a school wall. It deviated not one inch from its prescribed path. I kept at it anyway, even after the street lights went on and the ball’s echo dissolved like a thought in night air as thick and salty as ocean brine.