A Memorial Tribute To Father Bernard Heffernan

FROM THE ARCHIVES

A MEMORIAL TRIBUTE TO FATHER BERNARD HEFFERNAN

What Father taught me about hometown values - it only hurt a bit

I didn’t have a clue what a "hometown" was until after our family moved to Bracebridge, Ontario, in the spring of 1966. On that first morning, full of fear and trembling, amidst gangly strangers and glaring eyes everywhere, my new teacher at Bracebridge Public School, asked me to stand up and tell her, and my fellow classmates, from what hometown I had haled. In a sputtering, tongue-tied half panic-stricken, dry throated response, I honked out something like.... "I don’t know what the hometown was called but I used to live in Burlington,... Mam," then looking quickly all around before sitting down again, to see who was laughing or angry. No one laughed. Not the teacher. Not a peep from the classroom. No visible anger anywhere They just looked at me, the teacher, and back at me as if waiting for some profound reaction. Maybe I had sounded sarcastic. "Great, the new kid’s a smart ass," I surmised they were thinking.

"You mean Burlington was your hometown, Teddy," she asked, looking down at a piece of lined paper sitting askew on the corner of her desk, which I’m pretty sure was my unflattering biography up to Grade Five. I nodded to Miss McCracken that Burlington had indeed been my home but I was pretty confident it was a city.....so I wasn’t really sure a city could ever be a hometown. "Well," she said with a wink and smile, "I’m sure a city-boy is going to like his new hometown,..... won’t he class?"

Well, for a few moments at least, I felt,... quite at home. Until I got beat-up at lunch by both the girls and the guys, the ones who had smiled at me earlier. I was told the shellacking was a pretty ordinary, nothing special initiation to the "home" school. When I didn’t cry or make any attempt to run away from my adversaries, even after a whole week of fun-for-them initiation, I must admit the "home-town" thing was a little disconcerting. Was this the way hometown life was going to be.....forever? By comparison, Burlington had been a less "giving" hometown because I never once found it necessary to wrestle for acceptance before and after class.

On that second Monday of my new hometown adjustment period, the recess began just about the same as all the others. Only moments in the schoolyard, I was back on the bottom of a nasty little dust-up, and between hooks, jabs and hoofs to the nether region, all of a sudden, as if heaven-sent, there was an aggressive parting of the mob.....a hand clenching my shoulder, pulling me up out of the tumbling humanity of half bullies-half buddies. "Hey guys, let’s play some football," said the tall handsome stranger in the bulky knit sweater, who had spared me another round of "hey, let’s make Teddy feel welcome!"

From the quagmire of feet and fists, this chap they all called "Father," had already picked sides by the time I had brushed the imbedded schoolyard stones from my arms and knees. "Come on son....you’re going to play on this side," he yelled at me over the din on the grid-iron. "One hand touch okay," he asked us, while clearing a little patch in the stones with his shoe, to set the football down for the opening kick-off. "Okay Father......we’re ready," the other team yelled out to the trim and athletic father of some kid. Or at least that’s what I presumed of the guy they called "Father."

Well, he could run like the wind, do pirouettes around us all, leap to make impossible catches, and hand-off to us running backs while making two or three bootlegs to confuse the attackers. If he told you to button-hook at twelve yards, he wasn’t off the mark by an inch. When he flipped out a lateral to an innocent bystander, he knew the receiver would learn by immersion that one hand touch was the protocol not the reality. It was tackle. A big one. But valuable experience about the significance of Father choosing you to be the lead man on a huge march up field.

Every recess and lunch this nimble sportsman showed up to run another game. Even if you weren’t interested in playing, Father wouldn’t take no for an answer, and pretty soon there was a football in your rib cage and a dozen drooling opponents ready to drive your face into the gravel. You had little to no chance of survival unless your knees hit your chest in a pumping zig-zag down-field to the goal-line.

I can remember a large fight breaking out one day on the sidelines, between several of the more aggressive inmates I had learned to stay away from, and in a ballet of leaps and bounds, Father had jumped in between and wrestled the combatants apart. He had a powerful influence on the young and vigorous because by the very next down, the same still-growling gents were playing on the same team, and very much contributing to the pass and pass and pass offence he employed to keep the came exciting. He had a curious way of bringing the pacifists, the boastful, aggressors, thugs and bashful into a fun game of Canadian football suited to the school yard.

On my own first run against Father, I had a huge head start off a nice twenty yard pass from the quarterback, and the goal-line was a modest footfall away. And then I heard the train coming behind. Feet pounding that rocky turf like a racing locomotive over the ribbon rails. I made the near fatal mistake of looking back.....glancing to see what on earth was coming behind....and it was Father, awfully determined the rookie running back wasn’t going to score. Out of amazement at the unfurling rage of humanity coming behind, I lost my grip on the ball, tried to recover at the expense of knowing where my feet were headed, and the grand arse over tea-kettle spill had commenced. What I didn’t see through the dust and stones flying up, was the Cadillac bumper bullets of the parked car immediately in my future. Somehow Father had grabbed the back of my shirt just as I lost my footing, and I’m telling you honestly, by the grace of God, he stopped my head from hitting the metal. We wound up in a twisted ball of football good humor with my head still stuck awkwardly on my neck. Father also had to pick a few stones out of his elbows and knees but two lives were spared a head-on crash with a Caddy..

Miss McCracken had seen the whole ugly tumble. On the way into the school after that recess, she took me aside, dusted off my shoulders, patted down my hair and said, "so, how do you like your new hometown?" "Ah, it’s okay, I guess, Miss McCracken," I answered. "Don’t be afraid to toss the ball to one of your team-mates," she said about my down-field run. "It’s what he wants you to do." Undoubtedly with a bewildered second glance at my teacher, while passing into the school, she added, "Father Heffernan wants you to play as a team.....remember that the next time." "Father Heffernan?" I asked. I looked at one of my team-mates, who added, "Pretty fast for a Priest aint he?"

What Miss McCracken meant was that Father wasn’t interested in the heroics of the downfield romp but rather the unselfish passing back and forth between team-mates to make the touchdown. Just as he wanted to occupy bored kids with sport, he wanted us to appreciate each others strengths and capabilities. It worked. The guys who had been beating me up ten minutes earlier were now passing and then blocking for me on the grid iron.

There was a moral to the story of my introduction to this new hometown. I had met our own Father O’Malley.....he was a dear man by the name of Father Bernard Heffernan, of St. Joseph’s Church next door. He had been coming over for recess and lunch games for years, and he had very much instilled a prosperous sense of goodwill each time he arrived.

One morning about fifteen years later, I was playing shinny at the Bracebridge arena, and on a down-ice rush I could hear what sounded like a train coming behind, the blades hitting the ice like two axe blades strapped to my opponent’s feet. I got just past the opposition blue-line when, against Don Cherry’s sage advice, I looked back......it wasn’t just a train. In a hook right out of Peter Pan, a gnash of teeth, and a chin on my shoulder, we were both icing our way like a curling rock into the boards. I pulled up onto my knees and started to scream at this jerk who tripped me up.....and well, it came down to this.... "Good morning Father......I thought that was you! Nice to have you back in town.....staying long?" "What gave me away Mr. Currie?" he quipped. "Oh, I don’t know, maybe the crashing to the ice thing," I retorted, wiping the ice out of my eyes. "You should have passed the puck.....your winger was all alone in front of the net," he advised with a wee Irish grin. Talk about the Flying Father. He was a much a hometown icon as anything I ever experienced growing up in Bracebridge....the town straddling the 45th parallel of latitude.

I thought back to when I believed he was someone’s kindly father who just happened to have some free time. Well, he was everybody’s Father, and we loved him.