This is a convoluted story of coincidences, schoolmates who find each other decades later, and Nova Scotia.
John MacPhee, Mary Anne Jamieson, Mike Salyzyn and Bob Ford all went to the same Catholic high school in the gritty coal mining town of Glace Bay, on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada. Mary Anne was John’s date for the senior prom in 1959. John and Mike and Bob all played sports together.
Then, they all went off into the world to pursue their lives.
John moved to the U.S. and went into the medical diagnostics field. Mary Anne eventually married an American. Mike played professional hockey for the Detroit Red Wings organization and earned degrees in administration and accounting.
John and Mary Anne, newly single 40 years later, met again and married. Their wedding photo is framed with their prom picture. Mary Anne’s sister, Elaine and her husband, Ernie, also live in The Villages.
It gets really complicated, now.
John, president of the Nova Scotia Club in The Villages, was at a meeting when he saw a person with a familiar walk. “Sonny,” he shouted. Mike (aka Sonny, from high school days) turned around and found his old classmate. Then Mike and a friend played golf with another twosome. One of the other golfers was Bob Ford, another former classmate from Glace Bay.
When they met again, Mary Anne said to Mike, “I know you. You’re on my brother’s wall.” Her brother, Chuck, was manager of the championship Glace Bay hockey team where Mike was a star player. Mike’s wife, Muriel, is also from Glace Bay.
So, some 47 years after graduating, the friends from the unlikely town of Glace Bay are all together again in The Villages. John and Mary Anne live in the Village of Mallory Square; Mike and Muriel live next door in the Village of Hadley, for part of the year, and in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia for part.
Their hometown, Glace Bay, was a coal mining center as far back as the early 1700s and supplied 40 percent of Canada’s coal by the middle of the 20th Century. Some of the coal seams extended deep below the Atlantic Ocean and out as far as a mile from the shoreline. Pneumoconiosis, sometimes called black lung disease, was almost endemic among the miners. Marconi, in 1907, set up the first transatlantic wireless telecommunications facility in Glace Bay.
“It was great growing up in Glace Bay,” John says wistfully. “I never realized how lucky I was. We were poor, but we had respect for working and saving and family.”
“Maybe on a Saturday night some person would go out to their front steps with a guitar and start to play. Then another neighbor would come over. Then someone would bring over a little rum. And before you knew it there’d be a neighborhood party with everyone enjoying themselves,” John recounted.
Mike’s father was a coal miner for 47 years. “He’d say that he worked five days a week in the mine and on the weekends he’d have to get outdoors, fishing or hunting, to try to get the silicosis washed off.” Mike estimated his father was paid about $30 a week for the dangerous work.
John’s father left the family when he was young, so his mother took a job in the laundry at the convent that ran the school. “She was probably one of the only mothers working in Glace Bay,” he says. “In school I was a prankster. If somebody was laughing at the back of the room, the sister would turn around right away and say, ‘John, did you have something to do with that?’”
“Then the sister would run down to the laundry,” he laughs. “Mrs. MacPhee, do you know what your son did today?”
While John and Mike both played pond hockey with the rest of the boys, Mike also played serious hockey and was scouted by Montreal, Toronto and Detroit. He was chosen by Detroit and was sent to senior league training camp, the feeder league for the NHL.
“I didn’t have any real gear,” he says. “Back in Glace Bay, a mining town, I had old skates that cost maybe 10 bucks. So, when I went to training camp, they said that if I made the team the first thing they would do is get me some decent skates.”
Hockey and baseball were big sports in Glace Bay in the 1950s. “We’d have a senior level hockey game on Saturday night, and 5,000 people would come,” John remembers. “They were filling the rink because that’s the only entertainment we had then.”
The town produced a number of good hockey players over the years. Florida Panther fans may remember Logan Shaw, a Glace Bay native, who played during the 2015-2016 season. Mike still plays senior hockey for a team in Michigan, traveling to tournaments in the U.S. and overseas.
Besides being an avid golfer, John’s sporting passion is the Blackhearts dragon boat team. He has paddled with them for nine years and is now captain. The very competitive team has traveled to international regattas in Italy, Puerto Rico and Ottawa, Canada where they won a gold and two silver medals last year.
“Your class is based on your speed. So, we’re 60 to 75 years old paddling against 30- to 45-year-old kids who are thinking we’re their grandfathers. And when we cross the finish line ahead of them, they’re asking, ‘How do you guys do it?’ We tell them it’s passion,” John says.
John is also president of the Nova Scotia Club, which has some 400 members, with 75 to 100 of them active. They meet on the third Monday of the month at Lake Miona Recreation Center for Nova Scotia pot luck and theme dinners, speakers, music, activities such as bocce ball, golf and cornhole tournaments, and a golf cart poker run coming up in April. Membership is open to anyone (you don’t have to be from Nova Scotia) and information is available by emailing MacPhee@gmail.com.
John W Prince is a writer and Villager. For more information visit www.GoMyStory.com.
