Mascotmania: The faux fur was flying

A mania of mascots took to the diamond at Royal Athletic Park in Victoria recently to mark the birthday of cuddly Seamore the Seal. Frolicking on the field were (from left) Terry Trader, Seamore, Rocky the Raccoon, and Okee, a frozen dairy treat. Photograph by Geoff Howe.

By Tom Hawthorn
The Tyee
August 23, 2010

The mascots frolicked on the verdant lawn of a baseball diamond.

The field was flush with plush.

It was quite the cast of characters.

There was Marty the Marmot from the Victoria Salmon Kings hockey team.

There was Terry Trader from a sporting goods store. He wears a baseball cap backwards and has a missing front tooth and looks like one of the Hanson Brothers if the brothers were seven-foot tall and mute.

There was Rocky the Raccoon from the Shamrocks lacrosse team, who plays air guitar on a goalie stick. He sometimes holds a sign reading, “Chicks dig fur.” The flip side reads, “I’m with stupid.”

There was Okee, an ice-cream novelty from Okee Dokee.

The gathering of the anthropomorphic menagerie — and a faux frozen dairy treat — was held to honour Seamore the Seal, the mascot of the Victoria Seals baseball club.

Seamore wears Seals jersey No. 09, but, like Donald Duck, no pants. (Don’t ask.) On this day, instead of a baseball cap, he wore a large red birthday hat topped by a blue tassel.

“Hey, Seamore,” a fan in the stands yelled, “where’s the cake?”

The seal gave an exaggerated shrug before grabbing his amble belly as if to show he had blubber enough without gorging on more sweets.

It was another busy day for Seamore. He got down on one knee to hug little children, gave grown men the high five, embraced a bevy of beauties seeking a little cuddle time.

He signed a cap for 11-year-old Logan Wiersma and he signed the right arm of 12-year-old Brentyn Hill, both visiting from Lake Cowichan.

“Sweet,” Logan said, examing the scrawl. “Dude, it’s epic.”

“Epic,” repeated Brentyn.

Seamore gave knuckle bumps, exhorted the crowd to cheer, tussled the hair of 12-year-old Sam Sylven, whose duty it was to shout “Play ball!” to begin the game.

Seamore hugged an umpire. Sometimes, he massages the umps shoulders, even shines his shoes.

Behind the grandstand, Seamore taught the other mascots the choreography for “YMCA.” Giant plushies have difficulty dancing with their floppy feet. Either that, or spelling is not a strength.

Seamore urged his friends to behave after Marty the Marmot tried to shove a giant styrofoam subway sandwich into Okee’s non-existent pie hole.

Back among the crowd, the mascot never stopped working the crowd. When the opposing manager disputed a call, he wiped away mock tears with both flippers.

As Seamore passed a hot-dog stand, a wide-eyed little girl clutched her mother’s leg, while a twenty-something woman bent down to goose his fuzzy posterior.

It’s not easy being Seamore.

He has to keep an eye out for orcas and Newfoundland swilers, not to mention the perils of being a pinniped in a land where the Governor General has demonstrated an appetite for seal sushi.

It can be a risky business when a body part is considered a delicacy in some parts of the land.

Seamore was asked how he felt on his big day.

“ —,” he replied.

Mascots don’t talk.

In two summers, Seamore has become a hit with baseball fans, a cuddly, lovable figure whose goofy demeanor helps bring more customers to the ball park.

“If the kids are fans of the mascot,” said team president Darren Parker, “the parents have to come, too.”

Another Canadian entry in the Golden Baseball League has not had such success in developing a fan-friendly alter ego.

The mascot of the Calgary Vipers is named Slider, “your everyday, friendly, neighbourhood snake.” The baseball pants-wearing ophidian has a forked tongue and a big belly — it looks like Slider’s digesting a shortstop.

Nor is the serpent the only poisonous critter on the circuit. Stinger is the fuzzy green mascot of the Yuma (Ariz.) Scorpions.

The Edmonton Capitals’ mascot is Razzle, a roadrunner who had been created for a hockey team, only to be abandoned — or should that be mothballed? — when the skaters moved to Oklahoma City. The baseball team inherited the unwanted Geococcyx californianus.

Razzle’s natural arch-rival works for the Orange County (Calif.) Flyers, whose mascot is a railway engineer named Coal Train who happens to be a coyote.

Tomfoolery is a venerable tradition in baseball, tracing its roots back through such entertainers as Al Schacht, the original Clown Prince of Baseball, and Max Patkin, the successor to the throne. (Schacht pitched three seasons for the Washington Senators at the end of the First World War. He had 14 wins, 10 losses. he began clowning as a coach when he would mimic opposing players. He later owned a popular Manhattan eatery where the menus were round like oversized baseballs. Sometimes, he interrupted meals to launch into borscht-belt routines. “There is talk I may be Jewish,” he once said, “just because my father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I speak Yiddish and once studied to be a rabbi and cantor. Well, that’s how rumours get started.”)

Some barnstorming teams also married diamond skills to crowd-pleasing antics in a less sophisticated age, including Bloomer Girls (with cross-dressing men as ringers) and the House of David (bearded members of a religious colony). Doug Peden of Victoria, who had played basketball for Canada at the 1936 Olympics and later became sports editor for the Victoria Times, grew his whiskers long during a Depression summer to make his living with the free-swinging communards. Other touring troupes included teams of African-American teams billed as the Ethiopian Clowns and the Zulu Cannibal Giants, who wore grass skirts.

The cartoony mascot is a more recent phenomenon, one owing much to the energetic routines of The Famous Chicken (nee the San Diego Chicken, aka the Laurence Olivier of Mascots), the alter ego developed by a college student from London, Ont., named Ted Giannoulas.

A visit by the Chicken is becoming an annual highlight of the Vancouver Canadians’ season. (Check out Nardwuar the Human Serviette versus the Chicken at Nat Bailey Stadium in a duel of squeaky, frantic, orange-and-yellow-clad characters. Guess which one emceed a Ramones show and once interrupted an Elvis concert.)

It is the conceit of a mascot like Seamore that they never speak and always remain in character. They are never to be seen partially dressed.

While Seamore does all his speaking as a mime, sometimes you can find sitting in the stands at Royal Athletic Park a third-year law student named Alex Pomerant, who has made a study of the semi-aquatic marine mammal with the Looney Tunes antics.

“Seamore’s goofy,” he said. “He likes to help out and sometimes he likes to cause trouble. But mostly he’s cute and friendly.”

Pomerant, 25, is the son of lawyers from Toronto. He was in the stands at SkyDome when Joe Carter hit his famous World Series-winning home run in 1993. Moments earlier, Pomerant’s father said, “I’ll try to get tickets for tomorrow.” One summer, Alex attended games in all 30 major-league cities, traveling by Greyhound, a journey that included an unwise Atlanta-to-Denver jaunt.

In high school, he played tight end and safety for the Lawrence Park Panthers. Coincidentally, he wakes up mornings after Seamore performs feeling the same aches and bruises as after a football game.

Three hours in Seamore’s $8,000 costume is like working out in a sauna. Seamore drinks four litres of water per game.

He sometimes hangs out in a walk-in beer cooler, where the thermometer reads 20-below Celsius.

His brain is filled with the Criminal Code, yet he has a jester’s heart and a vaudevillian’s timing. He writes letters to his family signed by Seamore.

After the inaugural season last year, the seal thought himself deserving of a raise.

He sent a letter to the owner. It was signed by Stealmore Deals, the name of the the mascot’s purported agent.

Unlike many contract negotiations, this one ended swiftly with handshakes all around.

Seamore got a $10 boost to his salary. He now makes the grand sum of $60 per game — no overtime for extra innings.

For the Rat Lady of Nanaimo, an unwelcome celebrity

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 23, 2010

VICTORIA

At first, the Hounsome family puzzled over the odd bumps in the night.

A thump in the walls. Scratching in the ceiling.

It’s an old house, they noted. Maybe it’s haunted.

“We were hearing noises,” said 40-year-old Tamara Hounsome. “It got to the point where the kids didn’t want to sleep in their room upstairs because we were hearing so many noises at night.”

Over time, the nocturnal knocks became more frequent.

“We’d sit up at night and freak each other out. We were sure there was a ghost in here.”

A hint to the mystery was offered one night by Toby the tabby. The family cat stared at the base of the dishwasher as though watching a particularly riveting episode of “Garfield and Friends.”

Soon after, Ms. Housome was doing the dishes when a critter skittered across the floor, over her feet (!), and away. All she saw was a pink tail and a whole mess of trouble.

“I felt horror and I felt sick,” she said.

A ghost would have been a welcome intruder compared to the freeloaders she now knew were squatting in her rental home on 105th Street in Nanaimo, two blocks north of the Island Highway.

She set a snap trap, baiting it with a generous dollop of Kraft peanut butter. Thwack!

She set more traps. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

“We were getting two or three a day. That’s when I knew I really had a problem.”

She bought out all 35 rat traps in stock at the local hardware store.

She called an exterminator. The estimate was $1,500. Her husband is a construction labourer. She worked in retail, though now is on a disability pension after receiving a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. The cost was more than a month’s rent. She remembers breaking into tears.

The landlord was not answering calls.

“After many anxiety attacks and many dead rats, I thought I needed some help.”

At wit’s end, she called a local newspaper. They did a story. Then, a television news crew followed up.

She thinks of it now as “a plea for help with my rats.”

The exterminator saw her on television. He was touched by her plight, offered his services this time as a gift. He closed entry portals in the roof and elsewhere in the drafty old house. An expert in the culinary preferences of the black rat, he advised using chocolate frosting. Rattus rattus has a sweet tooth.

Intervention worked.

“To date we’ve caught 32 rats,” she said. She hushed as she contemplated the number. “That’s a lot of rats.”

The media attention has made the 40-year-old mother something of a celebrity around town, though not for the best of reasons.

“I go out and people are looking at me as if they know me,” she said.

After staring for a moment, it hits them.

“I’ve become known in the city as the Rat Lady.”

She’s heard a few nasty comments about the quality of her housework, but insists her home is clean for her three sons and two stepdaughters, a brood ranging in age from 11 to 17.

A film crew recently spent four hours in the house of the Rat Lady. They set up lights in the living room so bright as to seem part of an interrogation scene.

A producer from England had spotted her story on the Internet and arrived to tape an episode of “Extreme Infestations,” a new documentary series to air on the cable channel Animal Planet.

London-based Darlow Smithson Productions are on the hunt for real-life pest problems involving “bedbugs, mice, cockroaches, spiders, termites, ants, bats, moles, bees, wasps, frogs, woodworm, snakes, birds, racoons, skunks, etc.”

Last month, a crew filmed a house in Rexburg, Idaho, under which a den of garter snakes had made home.

Garter snakes are cuddly pets compared to the possibility of having some flinty-eyed rodent popping up from the drain during a shower.

Now, her rat race is almost over. She has found new quarters for her family in the top floor of a home in which renovations have recently been completed.

“Hardwood flooring. Jetted tub,” she marveled. “It’ll be like royalty compared to this.”

She has also acquired three kitten companions for Toby.

“I ain’t gonna have no more rats. No way. My rat days are done.”

The Nanaimo episode is expected to air next year.


Let me tell you how it will be

Totals released by Elections BC on Friday showed strong support for the anti-HST initiative in all 14 Vancouver Island ridings.

An astounding 11,512 eligible voters in Saanich North and the Islands signed the petition opposing the harmonized sales tax. That’s a sliver less than 26 per cent of all voters in the riding, which includes a suburb north of Victoria, as well as the southernmost Gulf Islands.

Murray Coell, the Liberal incumbent who has since been named labour minister, took the seat by just 258 votes over the NDP’s Gary Holman in last year’s general election.

The poorest Vancouver Island showing came in the Nanaimo riding held by the NDP’s Leonard Krog, where the petition was still signed by 17.32 per cent of eligible voters.

Richie Hayward saved his best feat for his last performance

Richie Hayward behind the kit during Little Feat's set at Island MusicFest in Courtenay last month. Kelly Nakatsuka photograph. BELOW: Hayward, circa 1975.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 16, 2010

VICTORIA

Richie Hayward wore a red fleece sweater with a hood. Sitting just offstage, he shivered beneath a blanket.

He huddled near a sound board, as though the heat it generated was a camp fire.

It was summer, but the sun had gone down and a wind had come up.

Mr. Hayward was sick. He had been diagnosed with liver cancer almost exactly a year earlier. He had played a final show in Montana with Little Feat, the band for which he had been drummer for four decades, before leaving the tour to recuperate at home in Courtenay.

A year before the diagnosis, he had married Shauna Drayson, a Comox Valley woman who can be found on weekends serving food to the homeless. Her business involves providing companion services for seniors. Now, her compassion and her skills were needed at home.

She stood beside her husband as Little Feat performed as the final, headlining act at Island MusicFest last month.

The plan was for the drummer to join in for a few songs.

No one was certain if he would have the strength.

Little Feat is one of those bands musicians appreciate, whose songs appear on lists of best-driving-tunes, whose fans wax rhapsodically about a never-ending rock, soul, blues, funk groove.

Critics love ’em and the English hail them as original American geniuses.

Hayward was born in 1946 in Clear Lake, Iowa, a resort town later to be infamous for a plane wreck. The great Buddy Holly, as well as Ritchie Valens and deejay the Big Bopper, died after performing at the Surf Ballroom, as their plane crashed into a snowy cornfield three days before Hayward’s 13th birthday.

In 1966, Hayward answered an advertisement in a Los Angeles underground newspaper: “Drummer wanted — must be freaky.” He eventually formed a band with Lowell George that came to be Little Feat, an outfit that took all the musical ingredients America had to offer before mixing it through a New Orleans blender. Mr. Hayward’s rhythm became a Little Feat signature.

The band split up after Mr. George died of a heart attack in 1979, before reforming several years later. Meanwhile, the drummer became a much-in-demand session player, as well as performer. His credits read like a who’s who list from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — from Dylan, Bob, to Zevon, Warren, including the likes of Eric Clapton, Ry Cooder, Robert Plant, Tom Waits, Buddy Guy, and James Cotton.

If you’ve listened to rock music sometime in the past 40 years, you’ve likely tapped your toe and bobbed your head to Richie Hayward.

More recently, you could find him attending jam sessions at Comox Valley pubs, grooving to the music and, on occasion, taking a turn on the drum stool. He hung out with Pacific Disturbance, a local five piece rocking blues band.

It was his misfortune to be an American without health insurance, and, though married to a Canadian and living in Canada, not yet qualified for our system.

His musician friends held a fundraiser in Courtenay last September that raised $53,439.63 for his medical bills.

Others made contributions through the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund.

Friends who called themselves the North Pole Allstars recorded a “funky labour of love” called “Santa Gotta Get Some,” proceeds from the exclusive download going to his fund.

When the drummer’s wife let it be known that his children and stepchildren had not seen him perform, Little Feat were enlisted for a concert on Vancouver Island.

They had performed the night before at a beer festival at Chico, Calif. They drove several hours to San Francisco airport, flew to Vancouver, then boarded a charter flight to Comox Valley Airport. It was a long haul and a quick turnaround in 24 hours and not all their equipment made the trip.

No one was certain if he would have the strength to perform.

At last, he joined the band onstage to sing along to “Don’t Bogart That Joint” (the Jamaican national anthem, his wife quipped online) before settling behind the drum kit onto a stool that bore his name.

“He went from freezing on the side of the stage and looking very fragile before turning into this monster drummer,” said Doug Cox, the festival’s artistic director.

He played three songs — “Spanish Moon,” “Skin It Back,” and “Fat Man in the Bathtub.”

Said Cox: “It was a naked, beautiful, private performance moment that was shared between guys who had made music together for 40 years — and an audience of 8,000 people.”

The moment was recorded by producer Derek Bird of CBC Radio. The corporation’s staff has a special connection to MusicFest, where one of the stages is named for the late David Grierson, an on-air host and festival emcee who died suddenly six years ago.

After his performance, Mr. Hayward exited stage left.

A cellphone photograph captured the moment as Hayward reached for his wife. Hayward’s eyes were closed, his mouth open in a smile. The look on his face can only be described as joyous.

“Richie was beaming,” his wife later wrote.

It was his final performance.

The drummer died of complications from pneumonia on Thursday morning at a hospital in Victoria. His wife held him as he passed. He was 64.

Clare Copeland, radio station owner (1924-2010)

The comedian Jack Benny (left) hams it up with Clare Copeland. Both were careful with a nickel.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 13, 2010

VICTORIA

Clare Copeland, who has died, aged 85, turned a struggling radio station into a regional powerhouse and later lent his name as well as his fertile imagination to an advertising agency.

An ideas man with a keen sense of promotion, Copeland found an outlet for his creativity as a car dealer, a radio advertising salesman, and as a communications specialist. He also played a pivotal role in reframing the political culture of British Columbia.

In 1963, he and Charles R. Smith purchased Victoria radio station CFAX, which had gained a license only four years earlier. Launched by radio equipment suppliers with limited broadcast experience, the 1,000-watt outlet (“your good music station”) aired programming only from sunrise to sunset. After dusk and until dawn, the 810 frequency on the AM dial was dominated by a more powerful station based in San Francisco.

Copeland and Smith were the third partnership to own the station, which they bought from businessmen Art Phillips and Charlie White. (The former later served as mayor of Vancouver, while the latter became a celebrated author and fishing guide. The pair had gone into business running coin-operated laundromats.) Mr. Smith died in 1966, aged 51.

The station became a force after Copeland gained a 24-hour license at 10,000 watts. CFAX moved on the AM dial to 1070, where it remains to this day. After transmission towers were erected on an islet near Victoria, the station could be heard in Duncan to the north and Port Angeles, Wash., to the south, as well as in parts of Vancouver to the northeast. Offering “more music, less talk” and featuring the sounds of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, the station also delivered news at the top of the hour. It eventually became the city’s top station.

Clare Gabriel Copeland was born on Sept. 2, 1924, in Calgary to Mary Aileen and George Franklin Copeland, a grain merchant. The boy moved to Winnipeg with his family at a young age. He attended St. John’s High School (now St. John’s-Ravenscourt) before volunteering for the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. The time spent at the Patricia Bay airfield, now the site of Victoria International Airport, convinced him that southern Vancouver Island would be a good place to settle.

He first became interested in radio operations while studying at the University of Manitoba after the war.

“To pay my way, I was working Saturdays, holidays and any other days they wanted me in the records section of the Eaton’s musical department, so I was pretty up to date on what was popular and what wasn’t,” he told the Victoria Times Colonist four years ago. “And I was fascinated with radio. Winnipeg had five stations, including CBC, and when I had a chance to join CKRC I didn’t hesitate.”

By 1949, he was the station’s promotion manager. Like many in the radio business, he lived a peripatetic life, working at stations in Edmonton, Toronto, and Montreal, where, in 1952, he married a nurse and Trans-Canada Airlines stewardess named Barbara Exelby.

The couple moved to Vancouver the following year, as Copeland became national sales manager for CKWX.

A decade later, the Copelands moved to Victoria after buying CFAX. The new owner lured to his station a freewheeling collection of personalities, both in front of the microphone and behind the scenes, including the likes of Barry Bowman, a Saskatchewan hire who would be dubbed the “morning mayor,” and music director Gord Cruse, who had been a broadcast buccaneer on a pirate radio ship off England before joining CFAX as a disc jockey in 1969.

Creative directive director Rich Mole credits Copeland with creating “Cinema Scene,” a twice daily review of what was playing at local cinemas, an aid to moviegoers before the thumbs-up, thumbs-down review became ubiquitous.

“I often say I never went to work in those days. I went to play,” Mole wrote in a letter to the editor after Copeland’s death. “Clare? He was right in the audio sandbox, having fun with the rest of us.”

Copeland hired an Anglican priest to produce weekly taped reports on the happenings of young people. The youth who contributed received a transistor radio and quantities of soda pop for their efforts.

Earlier, he established a working arrangement with the student radio station on the University of Victoria campus. He offered to train the staff and helped purchase equipment. He also offered the students a free telephone link to CFAX so they could broadcast his signal when they would otherwise be off the air.

In 1970, Victoria’s police chief issued a 30-day ban on his staff assisting the station in gathering news, a protest against what he feel had been a report derogatory to the police department. The week-long impasse ended with a meeting including the provincial attorney general.

Afterwards, Copeland said the chief “realizes now that he could have called me anytime ... if he’d had a disagreement.”

“I still think he was totally wrong in imposing the ban.”

Copeland sold his interest in 1974 to Mel Cooper, a Newfoundland-born entrepreneur for whom he had served as mentor. Cooper adopted a talk format that made the station dominant among commercial competitors.

During the reign of Premier Dave Barrett, Copeland became involved in a movement to defeat the NDP government. He was one of the players in a unite-the-right movement in which Liberals and Conservatives were to abandon their venerable parties to join a revamped Social Credit. The Socreds won the 1975 provincial election under the leadership of Bill Bennett in what was a two-way race.

Copeland and partner Ian Stewart, a lawyer, bought an automobile dealership. While many such businesses use the owner’s name, Copeland figured a potential customer seeking to buy one of his cars would look in the telephone directory for the manufacturer’s name. Thus was born Honda City.

He also was a founding principal with his daughter of Copeland Communications, which remains a prominent agency on Vancouver Island.

He was an active fundraiser in election campaigns, served as president of the local chamber of commerce from 1968 to 1970, and was so involved with St. Michael’s University School as a director and benefactor that the private institution named a lecture theatre on campus after him.

Clare Copeland was born on Sept. 2, 1924, at Calgary. He died on May 14 in Victoria. He was 85. He leaves a daughter, two sons, and two grandchildren. He was predeceased by his wife of 57 years, the former Barbara Exelby, who died on March 18.

Horseshoes not just a summer pastime for championship contenders

Buddy Dyrda lines up a pitch. The 23-year-old Calgary roofer is a top seed at the Canadian horseshoes championships being held in Victoria. Deddeda Stemler photograph for The Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 11, 2010

VICTORIA

A satisfying clang rang out as the horseshoe struck a metal stake, sliding down the post to nestle in the dirt.

Another shoe made a slow rotation through the languid morning air.

It landed with a clang.

A third shoe. Clang.

A fourth. Clang.

The pitcher wore a red sports shirt on the back of which his name was written in marker. Buddy Dyrda, a 23-year-old roofer from Calgary, has returned to the club in which he learned the venerable sport of horseshoe tossing.

He is the No. 4 seed in the Canadian championships, which open today with a parade of athletes following a Royal Canadian Legion honour guard. Some 170 pitchers from seven provinces will compete for bragging rights and modest cash purses. Top prize: about $400. Mostly, though, they will enjoy the camaraderie of others who appreciate the special delight of tossing equine footgear across a grassy expanse.

Mr. Dyrda is a notable contestant for his great youth. Back home, his next oldest competitor is more than twice his age. He is an uppity young man in a game unapologetically dominated by the grey-haired set.

He played team sports in high school, but prefers bowling and, especially, horseshoes.

“In basketball, your teammates let you down one night and you let them down the next,” he said. “This is a one-man sport. It’s all you. That’s how I like it.”

He won three national titles as a junior, scoring ringers on four of every five tosses. As an adult, he has had to move back 10 feet to toss from 40 feet. At first, he scored on only three of five tosses. Now, after four hours of daily practice and tens of thousands of tosses, he is slowly returning to his old average.

He learned the sport from his grandfather, Gordon Butts, at the Victoria Horseshoe Club, which opened in 1935, making it the continuously operated club in the land. His grandmother, Dorothy, was inducted into the British Columbia Horseshoe Association hall of fame last year. Rheumatoid arthritis has limited her pitching, but she remains active as an organizer.

The club runs a program for local high school students to pitch horseshoes as part of their physical education classes. Not surprisingly, the sport does not rank high on the list of grooviness.

What did Buddy’s teenaged buddies think of his avocation?

“They thought it was stupid,” he said, “until I finished second in the world.”

He thinks the sport needs to work on its image and become more attractive to his peers.

“What do I want to do with it? Turn it into a spectator sport. Get more recognition. There’s Game Boys and Xboxes. Hard to gets kids out here. Hard to get them into the fresh air.”

A pastoral hobby more befitting an agrarian 19th-century than a digital 21st has a marketing problem.

“Kind of boring,” he acknowledges. “Like watching paint dry.”

Not that the local club doesn’t try. A fine facility, with a clubhouse and both open-air and covered courts, the club charges just $50 annual membership, while children play for free. It is one of the best secrets in the capital district.

The club entered the Buccaneer Days parade in Esquimalt. To fit into the pirate theme, they slipped under their shirtsleeves the hooks players use to lift their horseshoes.

Back at the club on Tuesday, two old chums — Dale Squires, 61, a retired vending-machine operator from Saskatoon, and Scotty Miller, 67, a semiretired pipefitter from Calgary — whiled away the morning with a long, best-of-three showdown featuring good-natured ribbing.

They debated the merits of the 1 1/4 rotation toss versus the 1 3/4 rotation toss. They teased another player about having placed magnets within his shoes.

Talk turned to the late Elmer Hohl, a six-time world champion and 19-time Canadian champion who is widely thought to have been the greatest the sport has ever known. He is the Babe Ruth and Bobby Orr and Rocky Marciano of a sport dismissed by many as a summer pastime.

Hohl, who belonged to the fourth generation to farm the same plot of land at Wellesley, Ont., west of Kitchener. He only became a competitor at age 38, making up for the delay by winning title after title.

As impressive as was his resume, the admiring pitchers remembered best his trick shots. It was said he could pitch over an automobile to place a ringer on a stake he could not see. Once, he was asked to toss against a brown stubby beer bottle for a commercial. The brewer supplied a stack of two-fours, expecting the shoot to result in shattered glass and sprayed suds. Hohl’s first toss landed in such a fashion as to perfectly frame the label on the bottle. It is said he turned to the director to say, “What else would you like?”

Back on the warmup courts, Dyrda continued his late-morning practice.

Horseshoes spun and clanged against the stake.

“Four for four,” a spectator noted.

“Not quite,” Buddy answered. He kicked at a horseshoe in the dirt in the bottom of the pile. “Now it’s four for four.”

He smiled. If only it was that easy.

The Canadian horseshoe championships are being held at the Victoria horseshoe club, 620 Kenneth St., from Wednesday until Saturday. Admission is free. The clubhouse has light refreshments for sale.

In praise of a fighter jet that kept an eye on the Russkies

This Sabre jet once patrolled the skies along the Iron Curtain. It was on show in Victoria this weekend. Despite the 'Danger Intake' warning, many could not resist poking their head inside the fighter's shark snout. Deddeda Stemler photograph for The Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 9, 2010

VICTORIA

The retired air force pilot stood on grass slick with rain, the object of his admiration a snub-nosed fighter jet.

It was painted in the spectacular livery of the Golden Hawks, the defunct Canadian aerobatic flying team.

The warbird looked like it had been designed by George Jetson for use by the Thunderbirds, a swept-wing, single-seat futuristic vision whose shortened nose makes it appear as much lawn dart as jet.

The air intake hole in the cone, like a giant nostril, gives it a slightly comical appearance. In its day, it was about as whimsical as the shark snout it resembles.

The Sabre was the cutting-edge of a technology designed to deliver sudden and spectacular death to the enemy.

Don McBride spent three years of his life flying a Sabre along our side of the Iron Curtain. He patrolled possible hotspots on the most dangerous front of the Cold War.

He was stationed in West Germany a half-century ago, a young man out of Goderich, a pretty port town on the shores of Lake Huron. Despite living on an inland sea, he wanted to take to the sky. The shooting had stopped in the Korean War by the time he entered Royal Military College at Kingston. By age 23, he was part of Canada’s contribution in defending Western Europe from the Soviet Union, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization pilot facing down the Warsaw Pact.

“It was a wonderful thing to fly,” said Mr. McBride, a 74-year-old retired air force colonel. “A pilot’s aircraft. You could feel the controls. You felt part of the airplane.”

The other side had Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-17s and MiG-19s, “which were very good,” he acknowledged, but he was always happy to be piloting a Canadian-built fighter.

This Sabre, known as Hawk One, took a roundabout route to get to the annual open house held on Saturday by the B.C. Aviation Museum at Sidney.

Owned by Vintage Wings of Canada, it left its home at the Gatineau airport in Quebec with stops at an air show at Oshkosh, Wisc., then on to Winnipeg, Calgary, and Comox. Hawk One is scheduled to appear at the Abbotsford Airshow this weekend. [Aug. 13-15]

This jet was the 1,104th to roll off the assembly line at the Canadair plant at Cartierville, near Montreal. Built in 1954, it was restored last year to mark the centennial of flight in Canada.

The name painted beneath the cockpit honours Al Lilly, Canadair’s chief test pilot who, in 1950, flew the prototype beyond the sound barrier, the first Canadian to do so.

Telling visitors about the jet and its history was Dan Dempsey, 57, who wore a blue flight suit with his name stitched in cursive letters of golden thread. He also possesses a mustache that would not be out of place on a Spitfire pilot during the Battle of Britain.

Mr. Dempsey was a six-year-old boy in 1959 when he saw the Golden Hawks perform at an air show at RCAF Station Rockcliffe, near Ottawa. He determined then to become a pilot. He joined the Canadian Forces, spending 23 years as a jet instructor, a fighter pilot, and commanding officer of the Snowbirds demonstration team. After 15 years as a commercial pilot, he now works as a flyer for Top Aces, a subsidiary of Discovery Air, which provides combat support training to the Canadian Forces. (The Globe has called it “the fastest, fiercest company in Canada.”)

The retired lieutenant-colonel, who lives in Victoria, is the author of a history of Canada’s airshow teams, which trace their lineage to William George Barker performing demonstrations on German biplanes after the Great War.

Mr. Dempsey is one of only a handful who get to fly Hawk One, each hop adding to his more than 14,000 hours of flight time.

The only Sabre rattling on this day is in praise of a machine that is the last of its kind in Canada.

The museum also had on display a Chipmunk and a Bolingbroke, an Anson and a Norseman, as well as biplanes, gliders and helicopters. The museum’s volunteer restorers are at work on rebuilding a Harvard, known as a “Yellow Peril” by aircrew for its bright mustard colour, the terrible noise it made on takeoff, and its many deadly training accidents.

Others are working on a Vickers Viscount 757, a postwar turboprop originally delivered to Trans-Canada Airlines in 1957. When its flying days ended 23 years later, vocational students in Vancouver received maintenance training on it. The museum bought it for $1 five years ago and had it barged across Georgia Strait.

Weekend visitors toured the interior, peeking into the cockpit, checking the four ovens in the galley at the rear, giggling at the garish pink toilet. Mostly, though, they admired the wide seats with spacious legroom, a reminder of the days when air travel was classy.

The museum has wonders beyond flying machines. Weapons, uniforms and medals are all on display, as are silk maps designed for use by pilots trying to escape after parachuting over enemy territory.

Propeller heads can make a pilgrimage to a wall of propellers, while the meteorologically inclined will admire a Dines anemometer, used to measure wind speed.

My favourite is an ejection seat from an Avro CF-100 Canuck interceptor. It comes with a survival pack — oxygen bottle, sleeping bag, food pack, first aid kit, fish hooks, snare wire, a folding .22 Hornet rifle with ammunition, and a supply of Dexedrine to stay awake.

Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Victoria with all that stuff

A hockey trailblazer emerges from obscurity

Larry Kwong, the China Clipper, played for the New York Rovers before being called up to the parent New York Rangers. BELOW: Larry Kwong met former Vancouver Canucks captain Trevor Linden at a recent ceremony at Penticton, B.C. Photograph courtesy Zoe Soon.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 4, 2010

VICTORIA

After he retired from hockey, Larry Kwong raised a family and built a business in Calgary.

He rarely spoke about his exploits on the ice, in part because few ever asked.

He had played but a single game in the National Hockey League, his turn on the ice so brief as to seem more a dream with each passing year.

He did not make a fuss over being ignored.

Time passed. His children grew up, had children of their own. He mourned one wife, then a second, the seeming blessing of a long life cursed by the loss of those you love.

A fine athlete who played professional hockey for 12 seasons in four countries and later became a tennis instructor, he came to be betrayed by his own body.

Diabetes claimed his left leg. A year later, he lost his right. An athlete whose dipsy-doodles on the ice once caused grief for defencemen and goaltenders now wore artificial legs, needing crutches, or a wheelchair, to move from room to room in his own apartment.

He once confessed to me a wish to be done with the rigors of living. He did not seriously contemplate the end, though, as he felt a duty to his family, especially his grandchildren, to be a part of their lives.

Mr. Kwong is 87 now, slowed by damnable infirmity, but still sharp of mind and blessed with a dry sense of humour. He has needed it.


Chad Soon, a 38-year-old elementary school teacher in Vernon, is campaigning to gain for the old player long overdue recognition. Mr. Kwong broke the colour barrier in the NHL as the first player of Asian descent to skate in the league.

Why do so few know his story?

“Here’s a guy raised not to speak out. Not to draw attention to himself. To be seen and not be heard. Sort of the traditional Chinese upbringing,” Mr. Soon said.

Mr. Soon, a third-generation Canadian whose Chinese side of the family has been in this country longer than his British side, first learned of Mr. Kwong from his grandfather, a contemporary who had followed the exploits of a player known as the China Clipper.

When moving cross-Canada to take a job in Mr. Kwong’s hometown, Mr. Soon made a pilgrimage to the player’s home, where he heard his life story and examined his hockey memorabilia. It was a moment never to be forgotten.

“People have never heard of him,” he said. “Such a compelling story. So deserving of recognition.

“I became determined to do what I could to get him some attention,” he said.

Mr. Kwong was the 14th of 15 children born to an immigrant grocer with the venerable name Eng. The family became known as Kwong from their grocery store Kwong Hing Lung (Abundant Prosperity). He lost his father at age five. Like so many boys, he spent cold winter evenings during the Depression listening to Foster Hewitt broadcast hockey games on the radio.

He played the game himself on borrowed skates with makeshift equipment on the frozen ponds of the Okanagan. From so humble a beginning, his great skill as a skater and sharpshooter earned him a spot with the Smoke Eaters in Trail, where he was barred from taking a well-paying job at the smelter like his teammates because of his ethnic heritage. Instead, he worked as a bellboy, a servile job. He played more senior hockey in Nanaimo and Vancouver before enlisting in the army during the Second World War. In 1946, at age 23, the fleet forward joined the New York Rovers, an amateur team that played at Madison Square Garden.

The Manhattan sportswriters called him King Kwong, a teasing nickname for a man who stood just 5-foot-6, weighed just 150 pounds.

He finally got a call up by the parent New York Rangers for a game at the Montreal Forum. Near the end of the game, he was finally allowed on the ice for the briefest of shifts. His career was limited to a New York minute and he was never again to be given the opportunity.

After the snub, he signed with the Valleyfield Braves, where he was a top scorer and a most-valuable player in the senior Quebec league. He later played in England and Switzerland, where he also coached, before returning to Canada, where he built a grocery business in Calgary and lived in anonymity, his trailblazing forgotten, or ignored.

That anonymity is coming to a happy end.

Two years ago, Mr. Kwong and his daughter traveled to Vernon to speak to Mr. Soon’s Grades 5 and 6 class at Mission Hill Elementary. The walls of the classroom were lined by the pupils’ posters.

On the same visit, Mr. Kwong was pushed onto the ice before a Vernon Vipers junior hockey game to drop the puck for a ceremonial opening face-off. Mr. Soon remembers the crowd offering polite applause until the public-address announcer introduced him as the first player from the Okanagan to play in the NHL. Mr. Kwong received a standing ovation lasting more than two minutes.

More recently, the province’s hockey establishment, as well as local politicians, gathered in Penticton for an induction dinner for the new members of the B.C. Hockey Hall of Fame. A special pioneer award was presented to Mr. Kwong.

Afterwards, in a column for his constituents, Stockwell Day (C — Okanagan Coquihalla) confessed he joined many in attendance in never having heard of the player.

“He had truly blazed the way and taken the hits so that my grandkids and yours will never have to face the painful barriers that kept him from every young kid’s dream,” Mr. Day wrote.

Many came by to pay tribute, including former Vancouver Canucks captain Trevor Linden.

Now, Mr. Soon is preparing a submission to be presented to the selection board of the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame.

As well, the irrepressible Todd Wong, who, as Toddish McWong, marries Robbie Burns Day with Chinese New Year in a celebration he calls Gung Haggis Fat Choy, is seeking an Order of British Columbia for Mr. Kwong.

All these years later, Mr. Kwong is at last receiving his due.

He has also come to the realization that perhaps he was a hero, just like the schoolchildren insist. Not that you’ll ever hear him say that.