This mom really rolls ’em

Jennifer Park's parents ran a bowling alley in Nanaimo. Now she competes for Canada on the world stage, including at the Pan American Games. Chad Hipolito photographs for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 3, 2011

VICTORIA

Jennifer Park recently returned from Mexico with a souvenir made of silver.

The 37-year-old mother of three, who is on maternity leave from her job as an office manager for a chartered accountant, spent a few days in sunny Guadalajara, a city known for its colonial architecture and its mariachi bands in wide-brimmed hats and silver-studded charro outfits.

She saw none of it.

Ms. Park spent her nights in a hotel room and her days on the lanes at the Tapatio Bowling Alley.

As she set pins flying, her older sister, Catherine, walked behind bleachers filled with cheering, screaming, chanting fans. In her arms she held her niece, Katelyn, delivered by C-section on July 27.

After each game, win or lose, though it was mostly win, Ms. Park retreated from the lanes to join her sister amid the tumult. If needed, she fed her infant daughter, who is still breast feeding.

“I want my kids to know that anything is possible,” she said from her home in Nanaimo on Tuesday. “That there aren’t limitations, especially for my daughters.”

Working mothers, here is your sporting hero.

The juggling act will be familiar to many parents, who balance the demands of family with those of work. A further demand is made on her time by her desire to compete at a world-class level in a sport that in this country offers little financial reward.

She won a silver medal last week while representing Canada at the Pan American Games in Mexico, her first tournament since giving birth this summer.

Over the years, her achievements have been recounted in short newspaper articles. A junior title here, a Canadian championship there. Even when she was named Canada’s female junior bowler of the millennium back in 2000, the news barely received a mention in her hometown.

The lack of profile does not bother her — “I’m not one to seek attention,” she said — though she wishes she could train every day.

It is her burden to be a blue-ribbon champion in a blue-collar sport whose heyday passed well before her birth in Duncan on Vancouver Island in 1973.

You might say her family lived in the gutter. Her parents, Bob and Annie Willis, owned Evergreen Lanes in Nanaimo. The parents had a rule for their three daughters: No playing on the lanes until old enough to attend kindergarten. At age four, she sulked as her older sister got to play. By age five, young Jennifer was playing ten pin.

The three Willis sisters — Catherine, Jennifer and Kimberley — have all competed on the international stage. The trio has each bowled a perfect game — that’s 12 consecutive strikes, never missing a pin — at Evergreen. (The family sold the alley five years ago and it is now known as Splitsville.) Ms. Park has bowled a perfect 300 six times.

A left-hander, Ms. Park’s skill has taken her as far afield to complete as Chile, Hong Kong, Japan, Argentina, Australia, United Arab Emirates, and the Dominican Republic.

“It’s taken me around the world,” she said. “I’ve got to see many places. I’ve been lucky.”

She qualified for the gold-medal match in Mexico, facing arch-rival Liz Johnson of Cheektowaga, N.Y., a professional bowler who was named the female bowler of the decade in a 2010 issue of U.S. Bowler magazine.

“Liz Johnson is a phenomenal bowler,” Ms. Park said. “I know I can beat her. But I have to be 110 per cent.”

Instead, she entered the finals exhausted by her schedule. Worse, she developed a blister on her thumb, as the callous had softened during her postpartum sabbatical. She even bled on her ball.

The American beat her 232-196 and 235-190.

Ms. Park returned home with a sore thumb and a silver medal on Friday night via Guadalajara to Phoenix to Vancouver to Nanaimo.

On Monday night, she went trick-or-treating door-to-door with Jasmine, 5, dressed as a witch, and Brody, 3, a dragon. Her husband, Cameron Park, a vice-principal at Stu”ate Lelum Secondary, a independent school for First Nations students at Ladysmith, stayed home with Katelyn to hand out candies.

Ms. Park bowls with a 15-pound ball.

Her infant daughter now weighs about 13 pounds.

As it turns out, “carrying bowling balls is good practice for carrying babies,” she said.

At the end of the month, mother and youngest daughter will once again board an airplane. Next stop: Johannesburg, South Africa, site of the 2011 World Cup, where she will compete against the top women from 70 countries. That’s just how this mother rolls.

Baby Katelyn reaches for her mother's silver medal from the 10-pin competition at the Pan American Games in Mexico.

Former Irish Rover puts down the penny whistle to pick up the paintbrush

Will Millar (far left) and the Irish Rovers in 1966, a few months before they hit No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 with "The Unicorn."

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
May 9, 2011

VICTORIA

The voice is immediately recognizable, delivered in a lilt familiar from hit records and eight seasons on television variety shows.

Will Millar’s tongue betrays his County Antrim roots more than a half-century after his family left Northern Ireland to seek opportunity in Canada.

Back when the Beatles and psychedelia dominated the music charts, Mr. Millar and his fellow Irish Rovers cracked the Billboard Hot 100 with a whimsical song about the building of Noah’s Ark.

“The Unicorn” rose to No. 7, as the folk quintet, including his brother, George, sold more than a million copies of a song referencing “humpty-back camels and chimpanzees.”

The hit was followed by other successful albums, resulting in the launch, in 1971, of a popular eponymous show on CBC TV, a format revived a decade later for international syndication. The exposure made famous the face and voice of Mr. Millar, familiar for his red beard, workingman’s cap, and 5-foot-1 stature. A puckish stage presence was made more pronounced when he occasionally dressed in green to perform as a leprechaun.

Mr. Millar left the band in 1995, retiring to a bucolic setting near Duncan, where he has, for the most part, put down the penny whistle and picked up the paint brush.

His paintings offer a romantic and nostalgic view of an Ireland he acknowledges exists now mostly in memory.

Will Millar in concert.

“The Ireland I paint and the ireland I sung about are one and the same,” he said. “We sang about fine whiskey and beautiful colleens and great Irish thoroughbred racehorses.

“I paint the old pubs. I paint the old characters drinking pints of Guinness. And now I’m one of the old characters. I’ve got to go back to keep the culture alive!”

On his last journey home to Ballymena, about 35 kilometres northwest of Belfast, he discovered to his dismay that the mill that employed four generations of Millars had been replaced by a shopping mall. His old local not only had a name change but the woman pulling pints hailed from a land beyond.

“All the old Irish tinkers that I’ve painted and sang about all my life are now Romanian gypsies,” he noted. It was not a complaint.

Mr. Millar left Sunday for the old country, where a gallery in the nearby town of Ballymoney will soon begin selling his works.

The irrepressible artist takes great pride in his hometown, explaining the name Ballymena is Irish for “town in the middle.” (And what of Ballymoney? “I’m not quite sure. I’m hoping it means town of money.”) Ballymena is the ancestral home of Timothy Eaton, who left Ireland to build a retail empire in his own name in his adopted Canadian homeland. It is also the birthplace of the actor Liam Neeson, whose father operated a public house a short stagger from the Millar home.

“Many a time my da’ played the button accordion in Neeson’s pub,” he said.

The old man’s instrument now rests in a corner of the house in Duncan. He regrets not knowing how to play it.

The family, save for an older sister, emigrated to Canada when Will was 15. They settled in Toronto, where they were mentored by the family of Alan Eagleson, who later became a prominent figure in the hockey world before suffering the disgrace of pleading guilty to fraud.

As a young man, Mr. Millar rejected the music of his homeland in favour of a sound he found more exotic and exciting. It is a tale he has told to Boon Collins, a writer and film director with whom he has written a script.

“The Banana Boat Song” is an “Irish Billy Elliot story — the misadventures of one young boy who was mad for calypso playing steel pan band.” The freckled and red-haired Will joined West Indian musicians in the Tropitones, Toronto’s only steel pan band, which had a regular gig at the Calypso Club on Yonge Street. He even performed in Trinidad and Tobago.

Only after his unlikely Caribbean adventures did Mr. Millar get invited to join the fledgling Irish Rovers. He was hosting a children’s television show in Calgary at the time. The band played the Depression coffeehouse, where Joni Mitchell also got her start, before heading to California. They performed at The Purple Onion in San Francisco, got signed by Decca Records and appeared in three episodes of television’s The Virginian as musical bankrobbers. The release of “The Unicorn” made them famous.

At 71, he was returned to his first passion, as his mother had saved shillings to by him his first paint set as a young boy. In those days, he’d thin his oil paints by dipping his brush into the oil lamp that lit the house. Sometimes, he’d chew the end of long wooden matchstick for use as a modified paintbrush.

He now lives in a century-old cottage from which he sells art cards, paintings, books, talking books, and compact discs of his recent recordings. He is literally a one-man cottage industry.