Granddad’s Olympic legend
I know that I met my grandfather, because I have the sepia-tinted colour photograph to prove it: me in some sort of infant’s jumper, cradled in the arms of a plaid-shirted Clarie Demont — for some unknown reason he and I spell our surnames differently — who stands somewhere around the Mira River, where the clan tended to summer, even though the ancestral home was Glace Bay.
But since I have no actual memory of him, I have to go with what I’ve been told and managed to piece together over the years: that he was a steelworker’s son, born in Sydney in 1883. And that, after moving to Glace Bay, he became a pressman and later the production supervisor for the Glace Bay Gazette, then owned by the United Mine Workers, in the days of the great labour wars in the province’s colliery towns.
I understand that he was a figure of note in this rockem-sock-em coal town, where he and his wife Mabel (nee MacKeigan), a miner’s daughter who at one point worked for the UMW and their fabled leader J.B. McLachlan, lived on York Street.
There Clarie kept time during road races, officiated at wrestling matches and ran a weekly bingo game, from which the profits were split between the local YMCA and a Catholic parish.
Mostly what I know about my grandfather — and the reason that I’m bringing him up in the first full week of the 2018 Olympics — is his athletic prowess.
Some of the facts about this man, who was known as Flash Demont because of his speed on the track and in the baseball outfield, are from credible sources like the Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame, and his obituary in the Toronto Star noting that, in 1913, he ran the 100-yard dash in 9.6 seconds which, had it been verified with the proper timing device and occurred on a regulation track, would have tied the world record at the time.
I even have a black-andwhite photograph somewhere of a long-ago road race on the streets of Glace Bay that shows my grandfather so far ahead of the rest of the pack that he is barely in the picture.
Most of the information came from the mouths of my father and uncles, or extended family on the Demont or McKeigan sides, and is burnished with the kind of detail that I tend to associate with an oral culture like Cape Breton’s, where mythmaking does occur.
My grandfather outran race horses. Once, because of his foot speed, he recorded 17 put-outs in the outfield for the Glace Bay Miners in the old colliery baseball league. (To put this in context, a team gets 27 outs in a regular nine-inning ball game.)
His legs, on full display in the photograph accompanying this story, were so strong that when the wrestling champion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force came to Glace Bay to do some exhibition bouts, Flash clamped him in a leg hold.
The champ tried to extricate himself, but couldn’t for the length of the bout, that ended in a draw.
But that’s not the best story
about Flash Demont.
The best story that I was ever told about him was that he was fast enough to qualify for the 1916 Summer Olympics, which
were cancelled due to the Great War.
My brother and I were brought up to believe that our grandfather would surely have run the 100-yard dash for Canada in the next summer Olympics, the one immortalized in the movie Chariots of Fire.
It is our understanding that there, running against the likes of Eric Liddell, Harold Abrahams and Charley Paddock — who won the gold medal with a time that was 1.2 seconds slower than our grandfather’s — he would have acquitted himself well.
Didn’t matter to us that Flash would have been a creaky 33 at the time.
The way the family story goes, the only reason we never saw our grandfather’s namesake slow-motioning across the screen as Vangelis’ music soared is that in 1920 the colliery towns were riven by clashes between the miners and the strikebreakers.
Glace Bay, like most everywhere else in Cape Breton, was poor and threadbare in the between-the-war years. The newspaper business was even dicier then than it is today.
So the story was that Flash didn’t lace up the spikes and show the rest of the country what was what because he couldn’t risk losing his job in a town where employment of any kind was dear.
I don’t know if he ever told it himself — the story was that he was modest man — or it was just one of those tales that arose around him.
Every family has stories like that, yarns that only get looked into up to a point, tales that you just dearly want to be true.
It’s like the line from the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which came out three years after my grandfather died in 1959: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Now I have.