From boss jock to Bundolo to beer pitchman

Bill Reiter's memorable voice has provided the soundtrack for a generation.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
April 14, 2010

VICTORIA

Bill Reiter’s delivery runs the gamut from antic to zany.

He has provided a madcap soundtrack to life in British Columbia for more than 40 years as a disc jockey, comic performer, and product pitchman.

His voice, immediately recognizable to so many of us, is as familiar as the Nine O’Clock Gun.

It impelled us to drive Mazdas, drink Kokanee beer, and scoff A&W Teenburgers.

It made us laugh until our bellies hurt while listening to Dr. Bundolo’s Pandemonium Medicine Show.


It turned us on to the best of what he now describes as “New World African music,” a Reiter passion that continues to this day as he hosts a show on an Internet radio station.

Mr. Reiter has been around so long he’s receiving honours and accolades one could assume he’d been given a decade earlier.

The Union of BC Performers presented him with a lifetime achievement award the other day, following last year’s ascension into the B.C. Entertainment Hall of Fame.

He’s touched by the recognition, though he remains the class cut-up. On being inducted, he thanks the audience for the indictment.

His buffoonery is delivered in a vaguely nasal voice capable of frenzied patter, or a devastating deadpan.

“It’s a voice that borrows from all of the different people that I have heard,” he said.

Mr. Reiter is not so much a mimic as someone who picks up on oddities of speech.

He was taping a beer commercial as a henpecked Sasquatch — admittedly not a physical stretch for the stout and hirsute actor — when he ad-libbed a line. “Yo, my little mugwump!” became a catchphrase.

Reiter is so natural a performer, so obvious a choice as a commercial producer, you’d think being an actor was his life’s ambition, that he spent long hours in small productions waiting for his talent to be recognized.

You’d be wrong.

“It’s always been happenstance,” he said.

Mr. Reiter, 67, was born in Verdun, a working-class suburb of Montreal. His paternal grandfather, a German, wound up in Quebec after fleeing from he kaiser’s army. His maternal grandfather was decorated for bravery at Gallipoli. His father worked for the railroad as a pipefitter’s helper.

One of his strongest memories as a boy was getting the autograph of Louis Armstrong at a restaurant across the street from the Montreal Forum. (He was also outside the arena, dressed as a sea cadet, on the night when the building was evacuated following the ignition of a tear-gas canister. The smart-aleck kid yelled “Down with Rocket Richard!,” and, for his impudence, got punched in the shoulder by a grown man. That would have been one of the early blows in what is remembered as the Richard Riot.)

The Reiter family moved to Vancouver in the mid-1950s in search of a climate easier on the boy’s asthma. He attended school in eastside Vancouver, indulging a great passion for the soul, jazz, rock, R&B and blues sounds coming from the United States.

At 16, he hopped on a southbound Greyhound bus to catch shows in Seattle by the likes of James Brown and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, whose ribald stage show remains a strong memory more than half-century later.

He dropped out of school, got a job driving a fork lift (until the day he punctured a container of liquid soap), and eventually opened a record shop in a building so narrow it made both Ripley’s and Guinness. Asked to become a sponsor for a new radio show, he so impressed the station manager of CKLG-FM that he was invited to become a host.

In October, 1967, he launched “Groovin’ Blue,” featuring black music and interviews with the likes of Joe Tex, John Lee Hooker, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. He played whatever he liked by whomever he liked, a freedom unknown in today’s formatted world and one he continues to this day as DJZigZag on the Internet radio station WAGR 180.2 FM (1802 AM).

He became a “boss jock” on AM radio and worked as “Bill Reiter, the All-Niter.” His television debut came as co-host with Terry David Mulligan of “A Second Look,” a half-hour comedy series that debuted in 1969.

Soon after, he was performing with the brilliant ensemble performing “Dr. Bondolo” before raucous audiences at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Bundolo’s lone long-playing album was titled “Volume 3,” a typically simple, clever and perplexing bit of wit.

By the mid-1970s, he was a familiar presence on television, once appearing on an episode of the Rene Simard Show with Playboy centrefold and country singer Barbi Benton, as well as hockey stars Phil Esposito and Rogie Vachon.

Mr. Reiter also released a 45-r.p.m. record of his own, called “Injun Jim’s Blues,” which was a tribute to the Jim Thorpe, the great aboriginal athlete who lost an Olympic gold medal for having played semiprofessional baseball. Billboard Magazine noted the single was “receiving strong regional play.”

He’s been the sombre host of Nightfall, a horror series, as well as the voice of “Harold, the Planetarium Star Projector” at the planetarium in Vancouver. Mr. Reiter also subverted the minds of a generation of children who watched Zig Zag, for which he played Biff of “Biff and Bart” (described as a Bob and Doug McKenzie for kids), as well as such characters as Bill E. Glitter of K-Smell Records.

Millions know his voice from more than 4,500 commercial productions, some of which are comedic masterpieces.

He opens a record shop and becomes a disc jockey. The DJ then became a comedy performer. The comedy performer became a commercial spokesman. None of it planned.

The distinctiveness of his voice, the vaguely nasal quality? Well, that, too, was an accident.

He got smacked in the nose by a baseball as a kid. Lucky guy.

Bill Reiter operated a record shop when offered a chance to host a new radio show in 1967. His "Groovin' Blue" established him as a boss jock. He's shown here with a chart from radio station CKVN 1410.

From lemons to loquats: A surprisingly fruitful B.C. orchard

Bob Duncan checks out his lemon harvest in the orchard beside his North Saanich home. Deddeda Stemler photograph.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
April 12, 2010

VICTORIA

The winds howled and the thermometer dipped last week, as Victorians shivered through a late-season cold snap.

At a home a short drive north of Victoria, the chill weather helped Bob Duncan enjoy all the more his daily repasts.

He slurps mandarins and savors tangelos. Grapefruit appears regularly on the menu. “Kumquats? I just eat ‘em whole,” he said. Pretty soon, the navel oranges will be sweet.

He’s looking forward to the harvest.

He maintains an extensive outdoor fruit orchard on the property, growing subtropical fruits usually seen only in supermarkets in these parts.

The fruits of his labour are fruits.

“The foliage is beautiful, the fruits are colourful, and the blossoms are fragrant,” he said.

Sometimes, the intoxicating, fruity aroma envelops your senses before orange polka dots can be spotted among the greenery.

He has turned a small parcel of North Saanich into South Florida.

When winter refuses to make way for spring, shivering visitors make a pilgrimage to an unlikely grove.

The orchardist is accustomed to the shock expressed by guests.

“Most people are in disbelief. They’re not expecting to see anything like this. It’s not on their radar screen.”

Mr. Duncan’s crop includes more than 80 varieties of fruit trees — figs, grapes, cherries, and apricots, as well as such pleasing produce as pears, plums, peaches. Not to mention persimmons and pomegranates.

He’s got kiwi, quince and medlar.

He’s got hardy subtropicals that look like clever Scrabble plays — feijoa, jujubes, and loquats.

He’s got olives.

He’s got more than 200 varieties of apples.

He even has a lemon tree growing against a back fence.

When life hands you lemons, make lemon pie.

You can say this.

There’s no threat of scurvy in the Duncan household.

It is no great distinction to be a lemon grower in, say, California, where they have joined with their Arizona brethren to create an association with a logo and a marketing strategy. The fraternity of outdoor lemon growers in Canada is a small one.

Like Johnny Appleseed before him, Mr. Duncan is a fruit evangelist. He encourages other Canadians to try growing lemons outdoors, appearing in YouTube videos with simple instructions. Eat Magazine described him earlier this year as a local hero. After all, he tempted his chronicler with a tasty apricot, ripe from the tree.

“I’m pleased to help Canadians grow their own lemons. That’s a fruit all of us need and use. It’s a universal fruit.”

Once, he fished for coho in the Saanich Inlet from nearby Deep Cove. The salmon are harder to find these days, but the lemons with which he served them — so simple a recipe, so magnificent a flavour — are plentiful.

He squeezes a lot of fruit from his .313-hectare (.77-acre) lot.

An unheated greenhouse has been built at the front of his home. In winter, he drapes a row cover of polyester fabric over his fruit to protect it from frost. He has also rigged strings of Christmas lights around his plants. These are connected to a thermostat. Whenever the thermometer dips to minus-2 C., the lights turn on, generating enough heat beneath the wrap to prevent the fruit from freezing. It’s a simple, ingenious system using little power. A single string of lights protects an eight-foot-tall lemon tree with a 14-foot spread.

Mr. Duncan is a good farmer for an entomologist. Recently retired, he spent his working life handling insect diagnostics for the Canadian Forest Service. He’s your man if you’re wanting to put a genus and species to bug bits.

The botany degree earned from the University of Victoria is coming into service later in life than anticipated, as he turns mossy messes into Mediterranean marvels.

His challenge is not so much cold winters as temperate summers. This southern slice of Vancouver Island does not boast the scorching heat of summer adored by subtropical fruits.

Not yet, anyway.

“When you’re growing crops that are marginal in the area in which you live and which have no history, you definitely become a climate watcher.”

He has noted increasingly warmer temperatures every year, save one, in the past decade.

Not everything he’s planted has borne fruit.

Mr. Duncan remains thwarted in attempts to grow the cherimoya (pronounced cheer-a-MOY-uh), whose white flesh was described by Mark Twain as “deliciousness itself.” Alas, the so-called jewel of the Incas has a terrible sensitivity to frost (and who amongst us doesn’t?), making the equatorial plant resistant to moving north to the 49th Parallel.

He also has yet to sustain a mango, a plant at home in subtropical India and, closer to home, Mexico. Tis a pity. Not only is the mango delicious, but a tree can flourish for 300 years. That would be a suitably long-lasting and sustainable tribute to a lemon man.

Gord Ritchie, decorated gunner (1923-2010)

George VI presents Gordon Ritchie with a Distinguished Flying Medal for his bravery in trying to save his critically wounded pilot.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
April 12, 2010

VICTORIA

On the night of June 7, 1944, Gord Ritchie climbed into the gun turret at the rear of Halifax bomber LW128.

His Canadian crew faced another harrowing mission over occupied Europe, this one coming hours after the D-Day invasion of Normandy. The assignment for this evening was an attack on the railway marshaling yards at Acheres, outside Paris, to hinder the enemy’s ability to bring reinforcements to the landing sites.

Mr. Ritchie, aged 20, had already survived several harrowing bombing runs, including one near-miss when his pilot was struck in the face by flak. Despite the dangers, he had returned from all missions safely aboard his aircraft.

He would not have so happy an outcome on this night.

The same pilot, Squadron Leader William Brodie Anderson, was at the controls, having recovered from his earlier injury, when flying splinters left him temporarily blinded.

The Royal Canadian Air Force crew from No. 429 Squadron, popularly known as the Bison Squadron, lifted off the runway at Leeming air force base about 45 minutes before midnight. In the skies above Dieppe, the French coastal resort that had earlier been the site of a failed commando raid, the Halifax got hit by flak.

The pilot suffered grievous injuries, slumping over the controls, sending the large bomber into a nose dive.

At his rear post, the force of the dive pressed Mr. Ritchie into his seat. He struggled to free himself.

What happened in the following hour would become part of squadron lore.

Gordon John McDowell Ritchie was born in Montreal to Agnes and William Ritchie, both of whom hailed from Scotland. An older brother, also named William, enlisted in the RCAF at age 18 in 1941. Gordon followed him into the air force 10 days after his own 19th birthday in December, 1942. He graduated from No. 9 bombing and gunnery school at Mont Joli, Que., eight months later.

His first mission was the mass bombing raid on Leipzig, Germany, on the night of Feb. 19, 1944. The raid was a disaster for the Allies, as unhelpful weather and German fighters wreaked havoc. Bomber Command lost 78 aircraft, almost 10 per cent of the raiding force, in what was to that point the most costly single night of the war.

Most of his other missions also involved deep penetration into the skies over Germany, including attacks on Essen, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Dusseldorf.

While returning from an attack on Karlsruhe, anti-aircraft fire struck the cockpit, sending splinters into the pilot’s eyes. He fulfilled his duties as captain on the flight back to base, though a second pilot handled the controls.

As the Halifax crossed the French coastline that June night, the bomber once again attracted enemy fire. The aircraft was flying at 18,000 feet.

“All hell broke loose,” Mr. Ritchie once said, “as the flak guns opened up on us.”

The pilot “caught a rather large fragment — and gave us the order to bail out.”

The navigator, bomb aimer and wireless operator all exited through the front escape hatch, jumping with parachutes over occupied France.

The airplane went into a steep vertical dive.

In the cockpit, Sgt. Gilbert Steere, the flight engineer, ignored the order, instead tending to the semi-conscious pilot, who was bleeding heavily. S/L Anderson was eased from his position, as Steere pulled the bomber out of its dive. His flying experience consisted of just 10 minutes in a light trainer. The pilot offered as much instruction as he could before passing out.

With the plane leveled and the bomb load jettisoned, the two gunners crowded into the cockpit.

“We administered morphine to our pilot,” Mr. Ritchie said in an interview conducted for The Dominion Institute’s Memory Project, “and began the ordeal of carrying him back to the escape hatch at the rear of the aircraft.”

It took nearly an hour to haul the 200-pound (90.7-kilogram) pilot through the fuselage.

The injured man passed in an out of consciousness, in his alert moments urging his crew to jump, patting their parachutes as encouragement.

The flight engineer had to squat to handle the controls, forcing him to rely on the altimeter and airspeed indicator, as he could not see over the instrument panel.

He coaxed the damaged bomber back over England, where their mayday call received many responses, though no station could pinpoint their location. Lacking a crew member with experience in landing, the decision was made to abandon the Halifax.

The gunners took care of the pilot.

Mr. Ritchie said, “We attached his parachute D-ring to the static line — that’s a length of strapping approximately 30- or 40-feet long — to the aircraft. And then we attached the other end to his D-ring, as he was not able to pull his own ripcord on the parachute.

“And we slid him out the end. Out of the rear exit.”

The unconscious pilot’s parachute deployed when the static line reached its length.

Then, Mr. Ritchie, the mid-upper gunner, and the heroic flight engineer jumped into the dark night above the Oxfordshire countryside.

The unoccupied bomber crashed about a half-mile (800 metres) north of the airfield at Benson.

By the time he was found, the pilot had succumbed to his grievous wounds. A piece of shrapnel had entered his left side, exiting through his chest.

All the other jumpers survived.

Back in France, the navigator and the wireless operator were both taken prisoner by the Germans. The pair were sent to Stalag Luft 7 near Bankau, Poland. Meanwhile, the bomb aimer evaded capture. With the help of the underground, he eventually made his way overland to Gibraltar, from where he returned to England.

The dramatic events aboard the Halifax led to the awarding of the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal to the flight engineer, the sole Royal Air Force member of the crew.

The two gunners, Mr. Ritchie and John Mangione, of Ottawa, received the Distinguished Flying Medal.

Mr. Ritchie received his medal from King George VI during an investiture ceremony at his air base two months later.

The pilot received a posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross for his leadership in the earlier incident during which he had been wounded in the face.

After the war, Mr. Ritchie had a 26-year career as an accountant with the Montreal Pipe Line Company and another decade with Imperial Oil Limited. He later worked as a manager of sales for the Montreal Board of Trade.

Number crunching was his vocation, though he far preferred to count strokes on the golf course. He made several expeditions to play the famous links courses of Scotland, his ancestral home.

Gordon John McDowell Ritchie was born on Dec. 6, 1923, at Montreal. He died on Jan. 15 at Abbotsford, B.C. He was 86. He leaves his second wife, Sally Ann Maher, as well as a son and two daughters from his first marriage. He also leaves three grandsons and a sister. He was predeceased by his brother, who had been a Hurricane pilot during the war.

A lost novel by 'voice of a friendly ghost' finds its way to the bookstore

Norma Macmillan performed the voices of Gumby, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and Sweet Polly Purebred.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
April 7, 2010

VICTORIA

Norma Macmillan’s voice in Saturday morning cartoons provided the soundtrack for a generation of children.

Her substantial acting skills made real the vulnerability of such animated characters as Gumby, Casper the Ghost, and Sweet Polly Purebred. She also provided the voices of Caroline and baby John-John on a hit comedy album about the Kennedy family.

A slight pixie with an upturned nose, the Vancouver-born stage actress appeared in Hollywood movies and once worked with Katharine Hepburn in a made-for-television movie. Less memorably, she was axed to death in “Nightmare on the 13th Floor.” She was stopped on the street by people who recognized her from television commercials for the Yellow Pages and Kraft Mayonnaise.

Much less well known was her work as a playwright. Her “A Crowded Affair,” a witty expose of social mores in a privileged Vancouver milieu written in the style of Noel Coward, might well have been the first play written by a woman with a British Columbia setting. She also wrote “Free As a Bird,” a screwball, Cold War comedy in which starred the Tony Award-winning comedienne Edie Adams.

Norma Macmillan has been gone now nine years.

She left a husband, the producer Thor Arngrim, and a son and a daughter, both of whom had been successful child actors.

She also left a box filled with a typescript on sheaves of the cheapest newsprint pulp in pink, green, and beige, a literary spumoni. Some sections were held by paperclips, while others were loose.

The widower vowed to get the novel published.

The work was long in the creation.

Alison Arngrim remembers her mother leaving their West Hollywood home on a moment’s notice with a hearty cry of, “I’m going up Island now.” Norma would fly to Vancouver, hop over to Vancouver Island, and eventually wind up aboard a converted minesweeper hauling freight and passengers. MV Uchuck III, named for “healing waters,” plied the waters of Nootka Sound.

Her novel, a multigenerational saga in the style of The Thorn Birds, or the Jalna series, opens at the moment of contact between the indigenous peoples and the Europeans. She’d visit the area for inspiration, staying in isolated cabins, a glass of Scotch beside her trusted Olivetti portable typewriter. (At home, she preferred a large bag of popcorn.)

“She sent the most fabulous postcards and letters,” the daughter said. “She was mucking about the wilderness.”

The novel, set on Vancouver Island from the 19th-century to the end of the Second World War, described five families wrestling with secrets and changing sexual mores.

She got a literary agent, had a mockup of the book constructed, shipped it around. The British television host David Frost found it cinematic in structure, and there was some interest expressed in turning it into a movie, or television series. But, as is so often the nature of these things, nothing happened.

The author continued editing her work, even after she and her husband returned to Vancouver. They had been a celebrated Hollywood couple, as he had been personal manager to the likes of Liberace and Debbie Reynolds, while also handling the careers of their children, Stefan Arngrim (Barry Lockridge in “Land of the Giants”) and Alison Arngrim (Nellie Oleson on “Little House on the Prairies”). They showed no airs being back home in British Columbia, where both are honoured on the Starwalk in downtown Vancouver. Ms. Macmillan became the host of a program for seniors airing on Co-op Radio.

Her sudden death in 2001 left her husband feeling responsible for completing his late wife’s project.

He asked a friend, Charles Campbell, a journalist and former editor of the Georgia Straight, whether the work could be published.

“I looked at it without reading it thoroughly,” Mr. Campbell said. “I found some interesting writing and interesting themes. I told Thor, ‘Maybe I can help.’ ”

The first step involved turning the typescript into an electronic form. Barbara-Anne Eddy, a researcher who once gained local fame by winning $52,000 US as a contestant on the “Jeopardy!” television game show, began retyping the work on a computer. She alerted Mr. Campbell to the unfinished state of the second half of the novel, offering helpful guidance to unreconciled narrative.

He approached a publisher. The instruction was to cut it by half.

He did so, an arduous and time-consuming process. “Where I did axe great chunks of material,” he said, “I found myself having to find the voice of a 65-year-old woman writing a novel in 1984. That was an interesting exercise.”

The effort paid off.

Norma Macmillan’s lost novel, “The Maquinna Line: A Family Saga,” is being released this month by TouchWood Editions of Victoria.

By coincidence, Alison Arngrim also has a book being published this year, as HarperCollins is releasing “Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated.” The memoir is about “a Hollywood child actress’s kooky upbringing.”

Meanwhile, her older brother, Stefan, an actor and musician who wrote songs with Warren Zevon, continues to perform and compose. He lives in Vancouver.

The widower was in the intensive-care unit at St. Paul’s Hospital, battling Parkinson’s disease, when presented a colour copy of the cover for his late wife’s novel.

It was at his bedside when Mr. Campbell visited late last year.

“I’m happy,” Mr. Arngrim told him.

After what Mr. Campbell regarded as an actor’s dramatic pause, he added, “I don’t know why.”

He did not live long enough to see the finished product, but died knowing he had fulfilled a duty.

Thor Arngrim and Norma Macmillan were important figures in the Vancouver theatre scene in the post-war years.

Bob Attersley, hockey player and politician (1933-2010)

Bob Attersley captained the Whitby Dunlops hockey team. He won a world championship in 1958 and a silver medal at the 1960 Olympics.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
April 7, 2010

The final match of the 1958 world hockey championship pitted the Soviet Union’s best players against an amateur team from small-town Ontario.

A game to determine global hockey supremacy carried even greater burdens.

For one below-freezing afternoon, the frontline of the Cold War could be found on an outdoor rink at Oslo, Norway.

The Soviet athletes competed for the glory of their motherland, as well the superiority of their leadership’s Communist ideology, while the Whitby Dunlops carried the weight of a nation’s fear it might no longer dominate the sport it bequeathed the world.

All the skaters faced extraordinary pressure.

In the postwar years, the Soviets and Canadians became hockey arch-rivals, the world championship pitting a nuclear power against a club bearing the name of a tire manufacturer on their sweaters.

The outcome was 60 minutes of what the Toronto Telegram described as “a brutal, rugged, at times vicious game.”

It was in this circumstance that Bob Attersley, at age 24, delivered one of the greatest performances by a Canadian player on the international stage. Mr. Attersley belongs in the pantheon of hockey heroes with the likes of Paul Henderson, Darryl Sittler, Mario Lemieux and, most recently, Sidney Crosby, all of whom scored dramatic goals.

He had success on the ice as an amateur, later proved himself in business before enjoying a long political career, eventually serving as the longtime mayor of the city whose name he helped make familiar to hockey fans around the globe.

If his feats were not readily remembered at home, it was perhaps because the stylish centre never played in the National Hockey League.

Robert Alan Attersley carried a lean 165 pounds on a 5-foot-10 frame. A broad nose, full lips, and swept-back hair, as well as a confident air, gave him a pugnacious appearance, though he mostly kept his play within the confines of the hockey rule book. He had good hands around the net and was not averse to passing the puck to a teammate in better position.

Born in Oshawa, Ont., he was a product of the automotive city’s minor hockey system. He played two seasons of midget and two more of bantam before lacing up with the junior-B team. He qualified for the Oshawa Generals as a 17-year-old junior-A rookie in 1950-51. His point totals increased each season and, by his third campaign, he recorded 45 goals and 43 assists to lead his team and finish fourth in the league in scoring.

The young centre received the Tilson Memorial Trophy, awarded by sportswriters to the league’s outstanding player. The trophy, sponsored by the Globe and Mail, honoured the memory of Albert (Red) Tilson, a former junior player killed in action at age 20 in 1944 while serving with the Canadian Army in Europe.

The Oshawa arena burned down, so the Generals were dispersed throughout the league. The Guelph Biltmores plucked the centre’s name from a hat and he went on to record 116 points in 59 games.

Mr. Attersley joined the senior Dunlops in 1954 for the first of six high-scoring campaigns. The centre worked at the tire factory when not on the ice.

The Dunnies, as they were also known, won the league title in his first three seasons, then unexpectedly claimed the Allan Cup as amateur champions in 1957 by sweeping the Spokane (Wash.) Flyers in four straight games. Mr. Attersley scored one of the goals in a 5-2 victory in the final game, as the home team delighted 6,259 delirious fans.

The Dunlops, managed by Wren Blair, were selected to represent Canada at the world championship. One of the early announcements from the team was that wives would not be accompanying the players.

“We’re not going overseas on a sightseeing tour,” Mr. Blair said, “but to play hockey with the sole aim of bringing back to Canada the world hockey title.”

Sweden was the defending champ, in a tournament Canadian officials chose to skip, while the Soviets had claimed gold at the Olympics in 1956.

Joan Attersley told a reporter the wives were disappointed, but were resigned to the fact of being hockey widows for two months.

The Dunnies swept a pre-tournament, 14-game exhibition series with games in England, Germany, Norway and Sweden. Whitby outscored the opposition 162-18.

Led by captain Harry Sinden, a defenceman, the Dunlops wore yellow sweaters with black stripes with a touch of red in the logo. Four veined maple leaves formed a half-moon below the neck of the front of the sweater, while five more could be found on the back, which included the word CANADA instead of a player’s name across the shoulders.

The team received a giant telegram signed by hundreds of Canadians back home. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker sent a message. Foster Hewitt arrived to broadcast the game over the radio.

For the deciding game, 11,000 spectators shoehorned into Jordal Amfi Stadium in Oslo, the site of the Winter Olympic tournament six years earlier. The outdoor rink was surrounded by a horseshoe-shaped grandstand. The fans were joined by King Olav, as well as by 120 reporters, a large turnout in those days.

“The tension built and built,” Mr. Attersley told the Globe’s Trent Frayne in 1983. “It was the way they ran the tournament; we played every day. We kept winning and so did the Russians. I don’t know how much sleep the guys got the night before the final. I know I tossed and turned and fretted.”

The Soviets scored in the game’s opening minutes, as the Canadians struggled with penalties. They trailed into almost the final minute of the second period when, at 18:42, Mr. Attersley pushed the puck past Nikolai Puchkov in the Soviet goal.

The teams exchanged goals in the third period. With less than four minutes to play, Attersley scored what would be the game winner. Just 25 seconds later, he fired a shot tipped in for an insurance goal by Bus Gagnon.

The Dunlops celebated at the final whistle by hoisting playing coach Sid Smith onto their shoulders.

The Dunlops had won seven consecutive games in the tournament, scoring 78 goals while goalie Roy Edwards surrendered eight while recording three shutouts.

George Dulmage, sports editor of the Toronto Telegram, admitted to crying as Mr. Sinden stood atop the podium for the playing of “O Canada.” The editor had high praise for the game’s top scorer.

“There was Bob Attersley, the centre, who suddenly you saw skate into the Russian end to combat a still fresh and eager Russian player,” he wrote. “He was bumped but he wouldn’t go down. His legs were like rubber but he was staying with the Russian and fighting him for the puck. Bobby Attersley had already scored two goals to bear out what you had written about him, that here was a player who would be there when all the blue chips were piled on the table.”

The victory was hailed back home as the only acceptable outcome.

“We Canadians are a modest folk, with a due awareness of our own limitations,”opined the Toronto Star. “We do not expect to beat the French at cooking, the Persians at rug-making or the Australians at tennis. But we do, by golly, expect to handle all comers when the game is hockey.”

The Dunlops repeated as Allan Cup champions in 1959, defeating the Vernon (B.C.) Canadians. Whitby declined the opportunity to represent Canada at the 1960 Winter Olympics, to be hosted at Squaw Valley, Calif. Instead, the Kitchener-Waterloo (Ont.) Dutchmen got the nod, bolstering their lineup with Mr. Sinden and the Dunnies top scoring line featuring Mr. Attersley with Fred Etcher and George Samolenko.

The Dutchies’ only loss in the seven-game tournament came at the hands of the host Americans, who won 2-1. Mr. Attersley’s line had a poor game, owing perhaps to his being hobbled by a knee injury.

On the last day, the Canadians once again faced the Soviets, prevailing again, this time by 8-5. Mr. Attersley scored the final goal, having already contributed four assists, his victim once again the unlucky Mr. Puchkov.

The Americans claimed the gold medal, the Canadians taking silver. Mr. Attersley scored six goals and 12 assists in seven games, the second best total on the team.

His rights belonged to the NHL’s Boston Bruins. He tried out twice in camp, but failed to make the Hershey Bears farm team, perhaps owing to his slight stature. At times, his weight dropped as a low as a reported 153 pounds.

The centre spent two productive seasons in the Eastern Professional Hockey League with the Kingston (Ont.) Frontenacs, a Bruins affiliate.

His hockey career ended in 1963 after a season split between the Johnstown (Penn.) Jets and Clinton (N.Y.) Comets. He chose instead to open an eponymous tire shop in Whitby.

He began political career in 1964 with election to county council. A longtime councillor, he served as Whitby mayor from 1980 to 1991.

Five years ago, his No. 15 Dunlops sweater was put on permanent display in the lobby of the Iroquois Park Sports Centre in Whitby.

He was inducted into the Whitby Sports Hall of Fame in 1998.

As the Olympics were held in Vancouver, Mr. Attersley visited schools to show off his Olympic silver and world championship gold medals. He was still sore about losing to the Americans a half-century earlier.

“We should have bloody well won the gold medal,” he told the columnist Brian McNair. “You never forget it. Losing to the Americans really hurt.”

Robert Alan Attersley was born on Aug. 13, 1933, at Oshawa, Ont. He died on March 12 at the Rouge Valley Hospital at Ajax, Ont. He was 76. He leaves his wife, the former Joan Evans; a daughter; a son; three grandchildren; and, a sister. He was predeceased by a brother.

The 1958 Whitby Dunlops represented Canada at the world hockey championship at Oslo, Norway.

A ballplayer's roving lifestyle on and off the field

Marty Krug Sr. returned to professional baseball after a 21-year hiatus to manage the Victoria Athletics in 1950. The first baseman was his namesake son, who now is an orange grower in California. This image is taken from a program. BELOW: A cartoon featuring fan favourite Lou (The Mad Russian) Novikoff. Both courtesy of the David Eskenazi Collection.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
April 5, 2010

VICTORIA

Marty Krug farms an orange grove at Sanger, Calif., where he retired after a career as an ironworker and, before that, a professional baseball player.

He is 86 now, in good health, which is a surprise as it was once reported he had suffered a heart attack in the middle of a ball game.

He bears the name of a father, who, as a young man, had been a benchwarmer with the Boston Red Sox when they won the World Series. In 1912. Two seasons before Babe Ruth entered the big leagues.

Like most ball players, the Krugs lived itinerant summers, traveling the byways of small-town America where baseball provided cheap entertainment and passionate civic identity.

For one fortunate season, the Krugs even wore the same uniform.

Sixty years ago, father and son arrived in Victoria to play for the Athletics of the Western International League. The elder Krug was manager, the younger a slugging first baseman.

They played at Royal Athletic Park, a modest stadium in which baseball’s diamond was shoehorned into a rectangular city block.

“It was a strange ball park,” Mr. Krug recalled. “The outfield fence did not curve. Down the left-field line was probably 340 feet, centre-field was about 300 feet, and right-field was 406-feet.”

Unfortunately for him, Mr. Krug batted left and right-field was where his long drives went to die.

“The best ball I could hit would never even reach the fence,” he said.

The Athletics were not a good team in 1950, though the roster boasted its share of characters.

The pitching staff included Bullet Bob Jensen, a stocky, 6-foot-2 hurler whose reputation for throwing fast was made all the more effective by his lack of control.

“He looked like Li’l Abner on the mound,” Mr. Krug said. “He was a huge guy who could throw hard. He was just wild enough to scare everybody half to death.”

Another pitcher was Aldon (Lefty) Wilkie, the pride of Zealandia, Sask., who had a couple of cups of coffee with the Pittsburgh Pirates bookending overseas combat duty in the Second World War. He eventually gave up baseball to become a chicken farmer.

The fiery Edo Vanni feuded with manager Krug, nearly causing a player revolt and leading to the levying of $100 fines on two players. To promote ticket sales, the irrepressible Vanni wrestled pigs and bears before games. He sold tickets in winter by trudging door to door in snowshoes. Once, he borrowed a friend’s seeing-eye dog to guide him to home plate to deliver the lineup to the umpires, an unsubtle comment on the acumen of their judgments the previous day.

Joining him in the outfield was Byron Chorlton, who eschewed his first name — suitable, perhaps, for a poet — in favour of the single letter K, which he insisted be spelled without a period.

All were pikers in the oddity sweepstakes when compared to a mid-season acquisition.

By the time Lou Novikoff arrived on Vancouver Island, his antics were familiar to a generation. The madcap eccentric’s resume included stints as a carnival strongman and harmonica player. He complained the foul lines were crooked. At Chicago’s Wrigley Field, he refused to retrieve balls lost in the ivy growing along the outfield wall for fear of spiders. It is said he once attempted a steal of third with the bases loaded, explaining his boneheaded attempt at larceny by insisting he had too good a jump on the pitcher not to do so. Not for nothing was he known as the Mad Russian.

Mr. Krug even spares a few kind words for an umpire, usually no friend of anybody, as he sings the praises of the colourful Amby Moran, a former National Hockey League player from Winnipeg who became a prominent arbiter on the West Coast.

“He was such a swell fellow to have behind the plate. He would never get into an argument. ‘Marty, that ball caught just a hair of the outside corner.’ He left you speechless.”

(Moran, a wartime shipyard worker, enjoyed gambling and drinking. He missed most of a season as a player after being arrested for assaulting a police officer in Manitoba.)

The senior Krug was a stern taskmaster. He had played against Ty Cobb, carried on his thighs permanent scars inflicted by the metal cleats of the great Rogers Hornsby. Having his father as manager was not a happy circumstance for the younger Krug.

He asked after some old teammates.

Alas, almost all are gone, though their time on the diamond is permanently etched in baseball’s immutable record keeping.

One of the tribulations of living to a grand age is bidding adieu to old comrades.

Four years ago, he lost ones of his best friends with the death of Robert (Buzz) Knudson, who played briefly for baseball’s Hollywood Stars but had greater success in Hollywood’s editing suites, where the sound engineer won three Oscars for his work on “Cabaret,” “The Exorcist,” and “ET: The Extra-Terrestrial.”)

After his season in Victoria, Mr. Krug soon after left baseball after having suffered an angina attack in the middle of a game. He did some coaching, then became an ironworker.

He worked on dams, bridges, skyscrapers.

In 1958, he was sent to the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where he built superstructures on Johnston island to hold atomic bombs as part of the American nuclear testing program.

Once, he had to climb 20 metres up a structure to pour dry ice inside an overheating panel of an armed and fully-fueled missile.

He even met Wernher von Braun when the rocket scientist needed a decoy to avoid a visiting Congressional delegation.

He witnessed two detonations on Johnston Island that August.

“When the bomb went off you could go out at night and read a newspaper until dawn,” he said. “The skies just rolled with colour.”

He remembers gooney birds falling dead from the sky, like so many fly balls coming to earth, victims of the shock wave.

What did he think of the awesome power of the nukes?

“They’ll get the job done.”

He said it as though speaking of a pitcher with good control.

Van Fletcher, pitcher (1924-2010)

Van Fletcher joined the Vancouver Capilanos in 1952. He's shown here in a rare card distributed in boxes of popcorn sold at Capilano Stadium. Courtesy the David Eskenazi Collection. BELOW: After baseball, Fletcher became a building contractor and tobacco farmer in his native North Carolina.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
April 5, 2010

Van Fletcher pitched a no-hit, no-run game for the Vancouver Capilanos baseball team in 1953.

The no-no, as such displays of excellence are known in baseball parlance, came just three days afternoon teammate Clarence Marshall achieved the same feat. The August no-hitters were the first in the entire Western International League that season.

Mr. Fletcher came close to throwing a perfect game, as he issued no walks. The only Yakima (Wash.) Bears baserunner came in the first inning when the pitcher bobbled a ground ball. Yakima batters managed to hit only five balls to the outfield.

The 6-foot-2, 185-pound right-hander had two strong seasons with the Capilanos, recording 12 wins against 10 losses in 1952. He went 17-13 in the following campaign.

In 1955, the Detroit Tigers of the American League used the North Carolina product in nine games in relief. He gave up four earned runs in 12 innings.

Mr. Fletcher began his professional career in his home state with the Elkin Blanketeers of the Blue Ridge League. (The Class-D team took its name from a local textile mill known for its blanket making.) In nine pro seasons, he also threw for the Tyler (Tex.) Trojans, the Amarillo (Tex.) Gold Sox, the Little Rock (Ark.) Travelers, the Charleston (W.V.) Senators, the Birmingham (Ala.) Barons, the Buffalo Bisons, and the Seattle Rainiers.

An older brother, Guy, whose nickname was Grumpy, pitched in the minors for 21 seasons.

Van Fletcher retired from baseball to become a building contractor. He also farmed tobacco.

Alfred Vanoide Fletcher was born on Aug. 6, 1924, at East Bend, N.C. He died on March 17 at Yadkinville, N.C. He was 85. He leaves his wife, Rilla; two sons; and, four grandchildren. He was predeceased by a sister and three brothers.