by Barry Stagg
July 1997
BASEBALL DREAMS IN THE NEWFOUNDLAND NIGHT
Long ago, when the Americans patrolled Harmon Air Force Base in Stephenville and Newfoundland youngsters kicked Coca-Cola scoreboards on baseball fields in Port au Port, there were mystical baseball dreams afloat in the night. Mickey Mantle was winning a triple crown in a booming American economy in 1956. Dwight Eisenhower was dragging Richard Nixon along to a second Republican term as American President. Stephenville was a booming American military town on Newfoundland soil.
The boys of summer were playing baseball in Brooklyn and on Berry Head in Port au Port. Carl Furillo and Jerome House and Roy Campanella and Gerry Boland mixed together in sunlight, radio waves, green grass and curve balls.
This was the time of humming, seemingly endless prosperity as the great American industrial machine extended its prosperous reach to the northern farmland of Newfoundland's west coast. The children of the war veterans and the war time workers and the merchant marine of Newfoundland were gambolling in the sunny uplands of Berry Head.
Forty years race on by and the sunny uplands at Port au Port maintain and the children of the war veterans and Carl Furillo and the Brooklyn Dodgers are greying at the temples and some have gone into that good night forever. The saga and the myth of the neverending good times and the American military machine and the good and true Newfoundland workers who made an American air force base work on the shores of the Gulf of the St. Lawrenceare now part history, part local legend and partly still with us.
Another summer comes and another summer goes and the men and boys of Port au Port and Stephenville and Boswarlos and Aguathuna make the circuits of the base paths, some quickly, some laboring just a little and the seasons roll on. Harmon Air Force Base is thirty years gone and even the American children who grew up and went to school there are thinking in nostalgic reunion terms about their days on the shores of Bay St. George and the idyll that was Stephenville and Ernest Harmon Air Force Base in the days of Eisenhower and the military wealth of the Cold War.
Who will put together the reunion of the Harmon Huskies and the Port au Port Vikings and the Stephenville Spartans? Who will tackle the mountain of lost youth and fair-haired sunny days lying on the outfield grass waiting for evening? Who will tackle forty years of distance, time, growth, decay and the inevitable decline?
Stephenville had its own little Newfoundland-American world before Newfoundland embarked on its own Newfoundland-Canadian journey. This was a unique culture in every way with American military might and wealth mixing with an already exotic blend of west coast Newfoundlanders. Acadian French, Micmac, Scots, Irish and English populated the villages of the French Shore for centuries before the Americans came in 1941. This was a melting pot in every sense of the words.
The Americans came and the Americans went and while they did not bring baseball to Stephenville and Port au Port they certainly fostered the sport into a magnificent obsession for the youngsters of 1956. Now these are the times when we realize how important the mixing and rubbing together of all of our people was in those days. These were times that seemingly would never end but did end when Vietnam and the changing world order closed down Harmon Air Field in 1966.
This is the time for real nostalgia when the memories of things done well and done together and done in the high spirit of youth and energy and hope come flooding back on high sky summer days. These are times to bring back the memories and to write down thoughts of things done casually and forever on muggy summer days. These are the times to remember the muddy slide into second base and the wild times in the evening and the faces of servicemen from Alabama and New Jersey and the fresh-faced youngsters from The Quarry. Newfoundland has been around for five hundred years as far as we Europeans are concerned but the land itself is old and it grows on us as it has grown on others. We have carved rough baseball fields out of sandy fields and we have played ball and sweated and smiled and yelled and exalted in victory in the warm gloaming of the Newfoundland night.
Until next month, be proud, be prosperous.