Frankly Ahead of His Time

Posted on July 8, 2015 under Storytelling with 2 comments

Frank and Colin Patrick MacDonald ( circa 1970 )

( Buckley photo )

 

 

When we get older we become more reflective.  We review the ups and downs, the joys and sorrows and the trials and tribulations of our lives.  It’s all a part of who we are.  We look at the events that shaped our future and the people who crossed our paths.  And there are those who leave an indelible mark.

Frank McGibbon was one of those people whose influence has not faded with the passage of time.

Frank was a fixture in many places: the track at Columbus Field, the old Memorial rink, St. Ninian’s Cathedral, the rear booth in Wong’s restaurant (another Cathedral of sorts!) and the McGibbon home on St. Mary’s Street.  And he was known to prowl Main Street, sending home miscreant young athletes the night before an important hockey game or track meet.

When you ask people on the street what stands out most about Frank, it was his dedication to young people.  If you ask his family, it was his profound commitment to the McGibbon children.  Most of us knew Frank as a coach of many sports, a man who was, in many ways, ahead of his time.  But overall he was a family man who loved his family, his community and his church.

It would take volumes to write the story of Frank’s athletic prowess.  He was a superb goaltender but could also play forward.  In one memorable hockey game in which he was between the pipes, the offense had sputtered badly and the team trailed heading into the third period.  Frank was grumbling during the intermission about the dearth of goal scoring.  The somewhat frustrated coach declared that if Frank thought he could do better than the forwards he should just doff his goalie equipment and play forward.  He did just that and scored a hat trick in the third period.

Frank was one of the first official recreation directors for the Town of Antigonish but he was much, much more than that.  Today, every sport has its own own coach and in many sports, multiple coaches and specialists.  Frank knew just about every sport on the go and he was a one man operation.  He cared deeply about the youth in the area and dedicated his life to their development as athletes and good citizens.  And he didn’t have all the modern training equipment.  He was an incredible improviser and could fashion devices out of nothing more than old rope and used tires.

Frank was particularly concerned about the young men he mentored.  His mantra was well known: “We gotta get these young fellas into sports before it’s too late.  First it’s the smoking and then it’s the drinking, then it’s the other thing.”   Frank never elaborated on “the other thing” but I think he might have been talking about chasing girls!  He had a strong sense of Christian values and morals and was scrupulously honest.  On many a road trip, it was not uncommon for one of the young boys to help himself at one of the roadside fruit stands.  Frank would wait until everyone was back in the cars before going back to pay the owner for the “slippage”.

Frank spent the winters in the rink and summers at Columbus Field but the track was really his pride and joy.  He treated it like it was his own, carefully tending to it as if it were the Garden of Eden.  In its heyday it was reputed to be the best track of its type in Eastern Canada and would attract elite athletes to the Highland Games track and field meet.  You could often see Frank out in the wee hours of the morning, rolling the track and even picking dandelions from the field.  He mowed the grass with a manual push mower.  Long before irrigation was in vogue, Frank had a method of keeping the field and track in pristine condition even when the worst of weather would blow in before a meet.

His “office” was the equipment shed that stood precariously off to the side of the field.  If you happened to be close by when Frank opened the shed in the morning, you would witness something hard to describe, including the smell.

When asked about the charms of the shed, one former athlete wrote: “Are you too young to remember the leaning shack at Columbus Field, with the musty, pancake catcher’s gloves, twisted masks, assorted baseball bats, pole vaults for Brian McVicar, rusted shot puts for Cat Thompson and Supermarket to toss around, the unmatched assortment of rakes, shovels and an open bag of lime or two?  And the newspapers.  My God, the newspapers.  Clearly without their counterbalance, the shack would have succumbed to gravity long before it did.”

As most locals know, Columbus Field was and is prone to flooding.  In addition to the aforementioned smells, the shed also housed some of the finest silt, left behind as the raging waters of the Brierly Brook and West River met and spilled over onto the grounds time and time again.

Despite the apparent chaos of the shed, Frank knew where everything was.  Like any good store manager worth his salt, Frank knew his inventory.

Back to the magazines and newspapers.  Frank was a voracious reader when it came to sports and he was constantly looking for the newest trends, especially when it came to training techniques.  The good folks at the Diana Sweets restaurant in New Glasgow collected reading material for Frank, as he often stopped there during his travels over the years.  He was one of the early adherents to year round training in sports and almost single handily introduced the notion of dry-land training to local athletes.  It was not uncommon to see a hockey player stick handling a golf ball in the middle of summer or an aspiring ball player throwing a ball off the back of a barn with one hand and catching it with the other to improve hand/eye coordination.  And many a young person could be seen wandering the town squeezing a rubber ball for strength training.

In 1968, Frank enjoyed the thrill of a lifetime with a trip to the Summer Olympics in Mexico City.  When he returned home, he couldn’t wait to impart new techniques that he had witnessed by the best in the world.  One sport in particular was revolutionized at these games: shot putting.  When Frank arrived back in Antigonish, he had already mastered the technique and began to pass it along to the youth of the area.

And he returned home with reels and reels of 8mm film from a brand new camera that he took on the trip.  According to one of his track stars, he and a fellow runner “sat through hours and hours (and hours!) of grainy black and white video demonstrating what we needed to learn from these Olympic athletes.  As painful as it was at the time, Frank apparently was at the forefront of modern day tape video, now used in every sport to learn from the best and model our training to be the best that we can be.”

Decades later, athletes still talk about Frank.  One of his star runners back in the 60’s still thinks of Frank every time he laces them up for a 5K run.  It’s not hard to remember the people who helped mould you.

Frank was known to grumble and to be gruff but this was a classic case of “the bark is worse than the bite”.  He was a good man and a kind man.  He marched up to church almost every day of his life and could be seen doing the Stations of the Cross.  He lived with his brother Irving’s family until they ran out of space.  He was often thrust into the role of babysitter (once again, ahead of his time) and it wasn’t uncommon to see several McGibbon children in tow as he marched them off to Columbus Field to look after them while tending to the track.  As if it wasn’t reward enough to spend time with Uncle Frank, he often slipped them five cents to pick up some candy at Veronica’s store on the way home.

The extended community was family as well.  He spent many an evening having dinner with Blaise and Olga Cameron and often travelled with them on road trips, with a horde of kids in the back seat.  Frank sat in the front on a bench seat beside Olga.  Often Frank would nod off and awaken to find his head resting on Olga’s shoulder.  He awoke surprised and a tad flustered every time this happened.

Old habits die hard.  St. Ninian’s Cathedral welcomed Frank home for the last time in 1998 to celebrate a life well lived.  At the conclusion of the Mass, the congregation filed respectfully from the church.  A former baseball teammate lit up a smoke just as the pallbearers were about to put Frank’s mortal remains into the hearse.  Instinctively, he butted the cigarette fearing that Frank might rise from the coffin to chastise him.

Frank never married nor had children of his own.  But he helped to raise every child who ever tied on a pair of skates, swung a bat or ran a lap of his beloved Columbus Field.

Frank’s family was very large indeed.