Townies

By Robert Hunt

Townies is the sequel to Robert Hunt’s memoir Corner Boys and takes us back to the mean streets – and schools – of St. John’s in the 1950s and 1960s. This is a coming-of-age story about the friendships between young Robert and his fellow students of Holy Cross School, who often lived in fear of punishment from the Irish Christian Brothers who taught them. Poverty and iron-fisted authority ruled supreme in the lives of the boys from Brazil Street, and the pleasures they knew were simple and fleeting. With a complement of interviews with his former Holy Cross schoolmates, Robert Hunt paints a picture of days gone by that are funny and nostalgic for some, while painful and haunting for others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flanker Press
• Release date: Jan 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781771173780

Book preview

By Robert Hunt

Townies

Corner Boys

Christmas Treasures

(with Lisa J. Ivany)

At Heart

(with Lisa J. Ivany)

Townies

Robert Hunt

Flanker Press Limited

St. John’s

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Hunt, Robert J., 1949-, author

Townies / Robert Hunt.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77117-377-3 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-77117-378-0 (epub).--

ISBN 978-1-77117-379-7 (kindle).--ISBN 978-1-77117-380-3 (pdf)

1. Hunt, Robert J., 1949- --Childhood and youth. 2. Hunt, Robert

J., 1949- --Friends and associates. 3. Students--Newfoundland and

Labrador--St. John’s--Biography. 4. Students--Abuse of--Newfoundland

and Labrador--St. John’s--History. 5. Abused children--Newfoundland

and Labrador--St. John’s--Biography. 6. Holy Cross School (St. John’s,

N.L.)--Biography. 7. St. John’s (N.L.)--Biography. I. Title.

FC2196.25.H86 2015 971.8’1040922 C2014-908325-4

C2014-908326-2

———————————————————————————————————— —————————————

© 2015 by Robert Hunt

all rights reserved. No part of the work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed to Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5. This applies to classroom use as well.

Printed in Canada

Cover Design by Graham Blair Edited by Susan Rendell

Flanker Press Ltd.

PO Box 2522, Station C

St. John’s, NL

Canada

Telephone: [phone] Fax: [phone] Toll-free: 1-866-739-4420

www.flankerpress.com

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 157 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

This book is dedicated to and inspired by the many young men and women whom I had the pleasure of growing up with in the much smaller and younger St. John’s of the 1950s and 1960s. Some are the corner boys and girls of my neighbourhood while others are school friends who suffered mental, physical, and sexual abuse at the hands of some of the Christian Brothers at Holy Cross School in St. John’s. It is my hope that the latter will take some comfort from seeing their stories in print. We were much more naive and powerless than today’s youth and lived in a different era: it is unlikely that the province’s children will ever suffer again from such systemic violence to their bodies and souls.

The names of students and Irish Christian Brothers have been changed to protect the innocent. Everything else is true.

This book is also dedicated to my brother Hubert, who passed away on Boxing Day, 2013. He was a wonderful person with a truly happy character and one of the funniest people I have ever known. He is sadly missed by his wife, Gladys, and his family, and by me and my three brothers, Edward, Calvin, and Angus. Hubert loved everything that flew, especially eagles. Now he is soaring free, too.

Contents

Preface

The Inner City

Colin’s Story

First Day at School

So It Begins

It Was His Fault, Brother

Poor Old Charlie

The Leather Strap Kidnapping

The Firecracker Discovery

Miss Playboy Comes to Holy Cross

Other Bullies

First Real Job

Ronnie’s Story

The Crazy Twins

The Americans

Paul

Ray, Amelia, and Tony

A Kind Cop

Nate

Epilogue

Mount Cashel, the Hughes Inquiry, the Vatican

Acknowledgements

Preface

Holy Cross School was destroyed by fire on December 11, 1969. I was twenty years old when I saw it burn to the ground. I remember that night so very clearly. I was at home when my next-door neighbour and good friend Malcolm Dickie White came running into our house at 40 Brazil Street saying that our school was on fire. We ran the few blocks to Patrick Street where, along with hundreds of people from the surrounding area, including Holy Cross students, we watched as a raging inferno destroyed the once beautiful building. As quickly as the fire started it was over. In a matter of hours Holy Cross School was reduced to ashes and so was a part of our young lives. Both Dickie and I had mixed emotions that evening.

After the fire there were many rumours, including one that said some of Holy Cross’s former students had started the blaze. This rumour still survives. Some of the students standing there watching the school burn that night were crying while others seemed to be smiling as flames tore through the school’s core. I thought at the time that some of the things that had occurred within the walls of Holy Cross had disappeared with those walls, but approximately twenty years later the Hughes Inquiry brought them to life again. When I started to write this book, I spoke to former students from that era about what had happened to them during their school years at Holy Cross. I always knew that I would write about those sometimes dark days. Some people have advised me to let it rest; others told me that it was a good thing to write about it, for many have not forgotten.

I have written this book to release some of the feelings of senselessness and frustration—and worse—that I and others harboured from those years, from the beatings, the hair pulling, the kneeing in the groin, the lashing of the leather strap, and other acts of cruelty and violent abuse that we sometimes endured. We were no angels, but we knew the extent and viciousness of what we went through was not warranted. We were punished for the simplest things. Some blame it on the era in which we were bought up, others call it an abuse of power, some call it fitting. Myself, I think a misplaced trust in authority on many levels led to what happened.

None of it should have been allowed. It should have been stopped, not tolerated, by those who held power but weren’t directly involved. We students were products of the times, having no power at all and no one to turn to but one another. Our parents were also products of the times: they did not question the authority that led to the abuse of their children, because that same authority also ruled them with an iron fist. The church, the law, and the government were in bed together in those days. They were the establishment. Very few parents came to our defence. Most parents believed that if we didn’t behave in school the nuns, Brothers, and priests had the right to discipline us. In fact, some parents believed that punishment helped to mould their children into respectable men and women.

Many of the stories in this book are those of former students of Holy Cross, men who trusted me to tell the stories of what happened to them as schoolboys. What they have suffered over the years is unfathomable. Listening to them was hard. I was beaten several times by Christian Brothers, once severely, so I thought I had some idea of what they had gone through. But not entirely. Some were abused beyond imagining, and hearing about it shook my faith in human nature. Most of them have held their stories inside for many, many years. I hope that publishing them here will somehow help these former Holy Cross students find some inner peace in their souls and their minds. I know that it has done me a world of good to get it down on paper.

The Inner City

Most of the houses in downtown St. John’s are two- or three-storey row houses attached on one or both sides to their neighbours. They were death traps in my day. If a fire started, usually two or three homes burned together before it was contained. Most of these houses were built around the turn of the last century. Our house on Brazil Street was no exception. I find it amazing there weren’t many fires when I was growing up, even though most of our houses were heated by wood and coal, and later oil. There was little insulation, mostly newspapers or even horsehair. The only comfortable room in each house was the kitchen. During the winter my parents and my brothers and I slept under four or five blankets during the night to avoid freezing to death. It took us forever to get warm. The bed would be freezing when we got under its covers. Temperatures dipped into the double minuses on many winter nights. I often thought about what would happen if a fire started in our house. Two of my brothers and I had two adjoining bedrooms on the third floor. My room had the only window that would open properly and it was a long drop to the ground.

But the summers were wonderfully hot and we spent many of our nights outside on our corner at the intersection of Casey and Brazil streets. We got more education there than we ever got in school. It was on that corner that we evaluated who was who and what was what. It was where we saw the world, the people in it, and how things worked. Nothing was sacred. Everything was talked about, from the local characters of the day, the drunks and people who roamed the streets, to our parents and families and friends. We thought we had it all in our little part of the world. We explored the good and the bad happenings of the day through our talk.

We didn’t have the things that today’s children have. Our parents made us leave the house on weekends. We weren’t allowed to sit in front of the television. School nights were spent at our school books. There were no cellphones, computers, iPods, and hardly any toys to play with. When the weekends came we had to make our own fun. If we weren’t talking on the corner of Brazil and Casey we were roaming downtown St. John’s, at a movie at the Capitol or Paramount theatres or heading down to Memorial Stadium for ice or roller skating. We were never bored.

During those times St. John’s was divided into sections or territories. You didn’t go outside your territory unless you were with friends who could watch your back. A trip to Mundy Pond, for instance, could land you in a racket with someone trying to claim his territory or preserve his honour as a tough guy. Other areas where we feared to tread were The Brow (Shea Heights), Rabbittown (the area between Merrymeeting Road and Empire Avenue), and the Gut (Quidi Vidi). Buckmaster’s Circle was also a place we did not go.

Tommy Dodd, Dickie, and I had many close calls trying to avoid a fight with some hero or other trying to be a tough guy. It was hard to avoid them; they were all over the city. To be safe, we mostly stayed around our area or went to Water Street and Bowring Park for fun and adventure. We went to other places outside our domain only if we were in a group and if we had business there.

The old Memorial Stadium by Quidi Vidi Lake, now a Dominion store, was where we went skating when we had the money to get inside. As we got older we practically lived there. Many summer nights were spent walking down to Memorial Stadium with friends for a night on the wheels. Skating with that special girl was an extra bonus. In those days the roller skates were clipped on to our shoes. We couldn’t afford to buy the leather skates a few people wore.

The music alone was worth the price of admission. It was the early days of rock and roll. Elvis Presley hit the airwaves with his shake-baby-shake style of dance. The world would never be the same again. Elvis and the Beatles, Roy Orbison, the Supremes, the Rolling Stones, and many other great singers and bands changed the way young people lived. The music has lasted: young people are listening to it today. I would return to that time in my life for the music alone.

I started working part-time at F. W. Woolworth Company on Water Street when I was still going to school and I loved listening to the music being played over the sound system in the store. It was the first time that I had ever heard music played that loud. We didn’t even have a record player at home until the late 1960s.

The Catholic Boys’ Club was located on St. Clare Avenue where the Knights of Columbus building is situated today. It was a two-storey wooden building that would have gone up in a fireball if a match had ever been put to it. You went up two flights of old wooden stairs to the second floor, where there were three adjoining rooms. I don’t remember it having a fire escape. All the rooms were about a hundred feet by thirty feet. The first one was the recreation room, where Cecil Joy whipped the boys into shape with aerobics and exercise on floor mats and springboards. The next room was used for playing floor hockey and handball. The third room was for storage and displays.

The club was a saviour for me and other boys. It was a haven for young men with problems in the home and for those who were abused but never talked about it with anyone. It offered us an alternative to the street and put our exploding, growing energy into sport. It helped us develop friendships that would last a lifetime.

The Catholic Boys’ Club was run by Bill Power. Volunteers included Cecil Joy, Bill Mason, former boxer Tom Pussyfoot Benson, and Tom Mason. I’m sure there were many others, but these were the ones who have stuck in my mind. A nicer group of men would be hard to find. I especially remember Cecil Joy, the physical fitness instructor, taking time with the young boys under his tutelage. He had a special gift for making young men feel that he was on their level. Always soft-spoken and easygoing, he made going to the club fun. He understood that we were poor and didn’t have much in our lives and he made us feel we were always wanted. He joked with us about growing up and made life about what we did have rather than what we didn’t. He was a good, honest man.

Pussyfoot Benson and Tom Mason showed us how