NEWS Jun 21, 2017 Northumberland Today
From left, Gord Ley was one of the Rotary Club of Cobourg members who presented Ross Quigley with a $10,000 cheque that will serve as seed money for the Cobourg and District Sports Hall of Fame, along with president Elaine McDermott and fellow Rotarians Don Conway and Steve Bradford.CECILIA NASMITH/Northumberland Today
The $10,000 grant the Rotary Club of Cobourg awarded Ross Quigley will be seed money for the new Cobourg and District Sports Hall of Fame.
A previous group many years ago had the idea of a sports hall of fame to recognize builders and athletes, Quigley said, but it never got off the ground.
Now that he’s retired, he’s already had some experience with memorializing local sports at the 2016 exhibit at the Sifton-Cook Heritage Centre.
He’s also had time to talk up the idea with different athletes and sporting groups.
“I never had a negative comment,” he said.
“Everyone said, ‘Long overdue,’ and, ‘We should be doing this.’”
Quigley’s next step was to engage some community-minded people who could provide both enthusiasm and the skill set to make it happen. His board includes Mike Irwin, John Ovens, Liz Basinger, John Hayden, Peter Harrison, Gil Brocanier and Don Conway. With the assistance of Richard Irvine, they have received their articles of incorporation.
Like Quigley, Hayden was born and raised in Cobourg.
“I have also had the privilege of being involved in the sports community all my life, from a young kid, and benefited from it,” he said.
“Probably the biggest thing is connections and the sense of community. For me, that is the reason I am here. The other is the huge respect I have for Ross and his knowledge and deep connection to the sports community.
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“The history of sports in this area has really been prominent, connecting the community together. Various organizations or teams, people from a lot of different walks of life, made significant contributions to the community — not just achievements in sports but the social aspect,” Hayden said.
The work the group has been doing has included trips to the Peterborough Sports Hall of Fame, which organized from the ground up in a grass-roots fashion. Talking with the organizers allowed them to see what their bylaws and constitution should look like, and receive tips on what kind of things work and which things only lead to roadblocks.
They also applied for a Rotary grant, stating another reason they want to move on this now.
“If we do not take up this project, there may be a whole generation of history that is thrown out when a younger generation cleans out collections of their parents when they pass on,” it said.
The grant was another piece of the puzzle falling into place, Conway said, providing badly needed seed money when they had no other funding. Now they can set up an office and get the equipment they need to scan and digitize memorabilia coming in.
‘This will get us on a real good footing,” he said.
Once they sat down to examine it, Quigley said, “we identified 71 different sporting events, organizations, happenings that have had a significant impact through sports and, depending how you define that, on our community, and their stories should be told.
“At this point, I think we are up to 27 stories completed.”
Examples of stories that should be told are events like the old Cobourg Horse Show and generic sports like tennis, golf, soccer, hockey, baseball and football.
Cobourg Collegiate Institute principal Jeff Kawzenuk and St. Mary Secondary School principal Rob Majdell are contributing to the stories of high-school sports.
Quigley is grateful to the Sifton-Cook centre for their help early on. Through the work of himself and volunteers like Anne Burnham, he already has things like the history of the Cobourg Angels as well as some hockey players.
And he is grateful they have allowed him to use some of those panels (probably almost half of the 50 they put together, Quigley estimated) as a sort of teaser exhibit in the Cobourg Community Centre, mounted in the Bowl behind the Layton Dodge Press Box (and on view for the big national and provincial sporting events the CCC has hosted the first half of this year).
They got a good price from two local businesses for some display cabinets, and anticipate getting a showcase exhibit up at the CCC (to whom they’re also grateful for the exhibition space).
They are also thankful for the storage space for their memorabilia that the town has provided.
They have not made any public appeals for memorabilia, Quigley said. People who know about their project have taken it upon themselves to entrust their treasured items to the project — like two jackets from the old Galloping Ghosts football team.
The Ghosts ran from about 1935 to 1953, with time out during the war years. But despite only playing those few years, they won eight provincial and three Canadian championships.
And the prodigious work Layton Dodge did for the Cobourg Daily Star for more than 40 years is represented in their collection by boxes of photos and piles of clippings.
Quigley has been proactively searching the local archives for information, and has turned up a few surprises (like a medal from 1864 declaring Father of Confederation James Cockburn a curling champion).
In the future, the group expects to set up memorabilia-donation days. Given the role sports has played in so many people’s lives, they will target each day to mementoes of two or three specific topics in the fabled 71 Stories That Should Be Told, like the old Cobourg Church Hockey League or the Cobourg Lawn Bowling Club.
“If we just had a day for everything, we would be overwhelmed,” Quigley stated.
“We believe there’s more of this kind of memorabilia out there waiting in people’s basements. We would hope we can preserve that for future generations,” he added.
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The Cobourg Galloping Ghosts are the most famous team in Cobourg sports history. Managed by Fred Dufton, the Ghosts won eight Ontario championships, five after World War II. They were Canadian Dominion champions in 1946, 1948 and 1950. They were the first team in Canada to wear aluminum cleats and the second to wear white uniforms.
