Terrier Town: Summer of ’49

Introduction

Family 1 Introduction There are legends born of the Canadian spring… L ONG YEARS AND MANY SEASONS AGO I GREW UP IN A GOD-FEARING Presbyterian baseball family, in the small southern Ontario town of Galt, a picturesque valley town which had been hewn out of the bush a century earlier. We lived beside an old Mohawk river called the Grand, in the southern part of Waterloo County. I was a churchgoer back then, as were a lot of kids, and I learned early on that of my father’s two great passions in life—religion and baseball —baseball was the more important and that if I wanted to please him I would strive to be a better-than-average player. My dad was an elder at our church, served on city council, and, as more than one person told me when I was growing up, had been a natural ballplayer in his day. But dad gave up on a promising ball career to run the family haberdashery on Main Street, and although he was a good provider and we lived in a large house, he confided in me once that he often wondered just how far he might have gone had he stuck with the game. On our bookshelf was the collected Ring Lardner, right beside the Holy Bible. Both were used often—the Bible by the women, Lardner by the men. The war had just ended four years earlier, and my older brother, whom I emulated and idolized, had been caught up in the maelstrom. 2 Terrier Town—Summer of ’49 He left town one bright, fresh Saturday in the spring of 1942 as the magnolia trees and trilliums were blooming, parading in his uniform, lanky and confident of himself and his country, full of the invincibility of youth. It was a coming-of-age morning. Mom kissed him and embraced him a little too tightly, if Jimmy’s face was any indication, but mothers know no other way. Besides, that hug would have to last him across the Atlantic and see him into war. She cried at his leaving. Dad shook his hand solidly, gripping it longer than was usual. The touching of their hands was really a coming together of leather baseball mitts, one man’s weathered old hand reaching out to another, more supple one; a father communing with his first-born son who had been a boy only yesterday and was now somehow a man, the pride of his family. That image has haunted me all these years. It was the last time I saw him. I never cried over his death because it wasn’t until the war was finished that I realized he was gone from me forever and that he would never come loping over the hill into the town valley, or play another inning of ball on the river flats at Dickson Park. I have spoken to him many times since those years just after the war, in prayer, in silence, and sometimes aloud when I hear myself sighing, “Oh Jimmy, if only you were here….” But I catch myself in midstream, fearful of I don’t know what, so that I don’t talk to him long. I am haunted by his departure. He never knew the summer of ’49. That it was the summer Tom Padden came to town. Over the years, as my children grew up, I would tell them about their uncle, about how he was awarded a Victoria Cross by Montgomery for acts of bravery in the field, and about that summer of ’49 when Padden came to play for Gus Murray’s Terriers. The stories became family legend, and several times I was encouraged to write a book about that baseball season, that summer just four years after my brother died. But each time something else came up and the project was put on the back burner. Living in a university town, and being an academic, I was asked by our local newspaper to write on a topic other than what I would normally publish. They were interested in the Terrier stories and requested several over the span of two years, and each of these had been so well received that they tried to encourage me to write a full-length book. But my life was busy and there were other writing projects. And then, one spring day when my children were grown and had families of their own, a carbon copy...