LEST WE FORGET
The heartbreaking legend of Bill Barilko endures in Toronto Maple Leafs lore thanks in part to one fan's poignant collection,
Bill Barilko was missing for 11 years.
Now, Mark Fera wants to make sure his story is never forgotten.
With Wednesday marking the 70th anniversary of Barilko’s Stanley Cup overtime winner, prior to his disappearance on a fishing trip, the push is on for a permanent exhibition, tangible proof of the Maple Leafs defenceman’s lore.
With nearly 300 Barilko items among 3,000 Leafs artifacts in his customized suburban Toronto basement, Fera has secured the startling centrepiece for such a display. It’s the partial wreckage of the Fairchild 24 that took Barilko and pilot Dr. Henry Hudson on their fatal flight from Timmins, Ont., on Aug. 26, 1951.
Despite a massive air search, the downed plane lay in the bush, with the bodies still strapped in, until a chance discovery just a few weeks after the Leafs won the 1962 Cup, hauntingly their first since Barilko went missing.
“It’s the Canadian Buddy Holly story,” said Fera. “Hometown hero, good-looking guy, the tough hockey player everyone loves, then gone at age 24. How many athletes died so suddenly in their prime?
“I know he wasn’t a Hall of Famer — in his last year, he was almost sent down at the start — but he won four Cups in five years and had the biggest goal in team history. As much good as the Leafs do, because they’re a business, I think we really struggle with maintaining the history of this team.
“When they opened the Air Canada Centre (in 1999), they had a room you could walk in and all the memorabilia was there. They took it away, but the reason that I loved it was the story behind every single piece. When I go around to different sports buildings such as Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium, I see how they hold on to their history and how they really value it.”
Fera, a 47-year-old who works for a fire and life safety company in Mississauga, can rattle off the most minute details as he shows off his Barilko collection. But of course, a visitor’s eye gravitates to the crumpled and faded yellow fuselage, a pontoon, exhaust and the rusted passenger seat frames. Mindful of the terrible end the two men met, Fera put care and thought into the layout, ceiling to floor, ringing it with a shrine of items essential to the saga. They include the first memorial sign from the crash site, a small-scale highway billboard that Fera helped raise funds for that boasts Timmins as Barilko’s hometown, the Tragically Hip’s handwritten lyrics to Fifty Mission Cap, aerial photos, Bill’s early hockey equipment, and the puck he backhanded past Montreal goalie Gerry Mcneil on April 21, 1951, at the Gardens.
That disc has its own amazing backstory. As the Leafs mobbed Barilko, 16-year-old fan Harry Donohue saw the puck sitting in the Habs’ net, and with approval from his father, Jeremiah, ventured onto the ice to retrieve it. While the Hall of Fame had what it believed was Barilko’s puck for decades, the real one sat on the Donohue mantle in Hamilton, Ont., where Harry’s sons later took it down to shoot around their basement, once nearly losing it down a drainpipe.
Fera also has a copy of Barilko’s contract, which called for an $8,000 base salary, as well as programs signed by Bill and brother Alex from the minor league Hollywood Wolves, his ’51 Cup ring given posthumously to his mother, the only known ticket stub from the game, and promo mini-sticks from the brothers’ electronics store on The Danforth in Toronto.
Fera credits the late, great Teeder Kennedy for inspiring his Barilko quest. In his earliest collecting days around age 13, Fera secured a sheet of autographs of the late 1940s Cup dynasty Leafs. Kennedy’s name was missing, but young Fera showed his smarts in a series of phone calls to find Teeder in his office at the Fort Erie racetrack.
“We talked about an hour about the players on the sheet and he said ‘Mark, pay special attention to one signature — Bill Barilko. He has a unique story and was well-liked by his teammates.’”
Fast forward to 2020, with Fera pulling into Timmins for his first look at the plane’s remains. He had become a recognized
Leaf antiquarian, who had hosted many NHL celebrities at his home, including Frank Mahovlich, Bob Baun and Ron Ellis, and had spoken to school groups about the team and Barilko.
He’d been directed to local resident/author Kevin Vincent, who had led the 2011 recovery of the wreckage to a storage facility outside of town.
That same day, a hardy group of 16 had flown via helicopter as close as they could to the crash site, 80 kilometres north of Cochrane, then slogged for two hours through dense foliage and muskeg. The group included Vincent, Barilko’s cousin Sandra Cattarello, and John Shaw, the dentist who took over Hudson’s practice and one of Hudson’s old fishing pals. The bodies were removed in ’62, and Barilko was buried in a Timmins cemetery where fans often leave pucks and other hockey trinkets.
The guess was the Fairchild had mechanical issues or ran out of gas. Despite the massive search at the time, not until
June 6, 1962, did chopper pilot Ron Boyd notice the sun reflecting on a metal object deep in the bush. He circled back, and thinking quickly, dropped a roll of toilet paper to mark it.
“Barilko found,” Boyd jotted in his logbook, now part of Fera’s collection.
At the site, a tearful Cattarello led a prayer, Shaw read from A.E. Housman’s poem, To An Athlete Dying Young, and another chopper hoisted the parts out. Vincent’s fear was imminent development of a nearby mining project would eventually lure souvenir hunters to desecrate the site.
For the symbolic completion of Barilko’s flight, the recovery team wanted to dip one battered pontoon in nearby Porcupine Lake, where its journey began 60 years earlier. But the day of its recovery was getting too dark, so they went to the shore and filled some Tim Hortons coffee cups, an unscripted tribute as Horton replaced Barilko on the Leafs blue line.
Plans for a Barilko museum in Timmins, or a joint project with the Hall, fell through, while the pieces lay in a stand-alone storage facility for the next decade.
“It came to a point where people up there felt the story was dying,” Fera said. “The parts were protected from snow and
rain, but not the cold, and they were corroding. They all talked and Vincent said: ‘We’ve decided you’re the guy to carry this forward. We’ll give it to you to decide what’s best’”
The coincidences surrounding Barilko never cease to amaze hockey historians, as Fera would soon realize.
“The first day I went out to see it with Kevin, Brandon Marsh from MLSE and the Mayor of Timmins (George Pirie), the weather called for big snow and it was uncertain we would even get to the shed. But Kevin phoned to say, ‘You won’t believe it. There’s snow on either side of the city, but not at the site.’ So, Bashin’ Bill must have been giving us a path to the net.
“When we arrived, there was no one around and (it was) about three football fields to the nearest house. But just lying on the ground was a brand new $100 bill. I said, ‘Boys, Bill is buying us lunch’ ... Then leaving town with the fuselage in my pickup, there was the biggest rainbow, right in front of me, even though it was minus 17. It was like symbolic approval for what I was doing.
“Is it all myth? All I know is, after I got the plane home, then the puck, the gloves, the pictures, skates and logbook all found me the next seven months.”
Immersing himself in the project has been cathartic for Fera, a survivor of the Gardens pedophile scandal that came to light in the 1990s.
“I’m open to questions about it — that’s the only way we can raise awareness,” Fera said. “It took many years of therapy and unfortunately, I grew up a little later than everyone else. John Paul Roby was my abuser (the usher died in prison in 2001). I kept the phone number he wrote me as a reminder of where you’ve been and where you’re trying to get to.
“Some of my worst memories were what took place under the stands, but some of my greatest were in the stands watching the team with my dad. This has been a great chance for me to celebrate the history of the team on a positive side.”
Fera has had conversations with the Leafs about a Barilko memorial in or around Scotiabank Arena. But his best idea might be a sponsored travelling exhibit to take the plane and the treasured smaller items around the country.
“Walking in the Gardens, seeing all those old pictures and old signs come to life ... I would love to think we can bring the Barilko story out to people. I’d like to use that to raise money, for awareness for abuse, for cancer care as my dad is a survivor, or another good cause.
“Eventually, I’d like to see a Canadian-made movie on this. Kevin Shea’s done an outstanding job (movie rights to Shea’s book ‘Without A Trace’ remain in limbo), but I think this needs to be cemented in our team’s history.”