by Barry Stagg
August 1995
SANDY GILLIS
It has been a while since I wrote about the exploits of the fabled Port au Port Vikings Newfoundland baseball fame. However on Canada Day in Cambridge, Ontario I spoke with Sandy Gillis, one of the best Viking pitchers of all time, who made his mark on Newfoundland baseball by the time he was nineteen years old and before 1961 had entered the history books.
Sandy's baseball career and the saga of his leaving Port au Port and leaving Newfoundland as a nineteen year old carries with it the entire history of an era now gone by.It was a time when, even with prosperity at its zenith, the young people of Newfoundland still had to find their way across the Gulf to make a living.
Sandy was a baseball player at the same time that my older brother Fred was picking them up and laying them down at third base with the Vikings. Those kids of the late fifties and early sixties had been born during World War II and they had grown up in Port au Port and Stephenville during a time when the American air force base pushed the area from a small fishing and agricultural based set of villages to a prosperous military complex.
The 1950's on the West Coast of Newfoundland meant that you worked for Americans, played with and for Americans and lived in an economy that in many ways parallelled small town U.S.A. These were the times when teenage baseball players had the benefit of experienced American coaching from the ranks of the servicemen who put in their stretches of duty at Ernest Harmon Air Force Base in Stephenville. There was money around , so baseball teams could afford uniforms and a travel budget and a plentiful supply of bats and balls. Most of all this era enabled young men to develop their baseball skills in Newfoundland to a level far beyond anything that would have occurred without the American presence. In effect in the years from 1955 to 1965 there were baseball developed in Stephenville and Port au Port of a quality that has never been reached since that time. It is a truly ironic situation when the quality of a sport declines and goes against the perceived trend toward improvement of things in general.
The obvious reason for the decline of the sport after 1965 is that the Americans left a couple of years later. With them went the bonus of their economic input and their important secondary contribution of trained and experienced baseball coaching.
Little of this had much interest for nineteen year old Sandy Gillis when the onset of the 1960's saw him pulling up stakes and going off to make his career in banking. He did what he had to do and after thirty-five years Sandy is as permanent a resident of Brampton as you can find these days. Still the dreams live on and one of the things that still intrigues these "older" ball players from Port au Port is the prospect of what might have been if times had been just a little better and if some of these baseball players could have stayed around just a little longer to work their careers out to their logical maximums.
These were days of hope and vision and in some ways, innocence as people from Newfoundland like others all over North America felt that the world was growing bigger and better and improving with each day. In Stephenville it seemed that the good life could never end with an endless supply of work on the military base and the lifestyle that totally eclipsed the normal everyday rural routine that had come before. We all know now that it came to a sudden and unhappy end when the Americans closed down the Ernst Harmon complex in 1966 as part and parcel of their general consolidation of effort in the Vietnam War. Perhaps it was inevitable that this life would end, but for these superb, young athletes of 1960 it was an excruciating process to endure, knowing that they must choose rapidly whether to remain and enjoy their youthful sport or to pack a suitcase and head away for the career of a lifetime.
Sandy Gillis made the decision and packed his suitcase. His teammates like the House brothers, Jerome and Doug and the university-bound players like Fred Stagg, Max Snow and Mike O'Neil did the same thing. They knew that they simply had to move on as their parents had moved on as circumstances dictated in decades past. Still a strong sense of both nostalgia and athletic accomplishment is left behind as middle-aged men look back at myths and memories of a golden time in the fabulous fifties in a prosperous Newfoundland. Have a good summer Port au Port Vikings.
Until next month, be proud, be prosperous.