Newfoundlanders first - and that's not a bad thing

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Published on March 28, 2009

Bob Wakeham

Shortly after launching this columnist gig, I related a story that - given next week's 60th anniversary of the contentious, provocative and evocative marriage of Newfoundland and Canada - bears repeating (I agree I am devoid of objectivity in deciding the yarn is worthy of another read).

So here's my couple of lines of redundancy.

When my mother finally found the nerve in the spring of 1949 to tell her father Joe Judge - Beaumont Hamel survivor, grinder room foreman in the Grand Falls mill, son of a Point Verde fisherman - that she had voted for Confederation, my sometimes volcanic grandfather reacted in an uncharacteristically subdued, but nevertheless poignant, fashion: "Ah, Eileen," he told his daughter, "you gave her away."