In the late 1950s and 1960s, I would often accompany my father Ed Gallagher on his daily jaunts across the fields from our farmhouse outside Douglas, Ontario when he would head to the nearby Canadian National Railway passenger station.
It was at this station where he would purchase either the Ottawa Journal or Ottawa Citizen. It was the same railway outlet Daddy used to transport cattle to Canada Packers in Montreal.
It was through my father and his love for newspapers that I learned to acquire a tremendous love for baseball — and writing.
In those newspapers we got from the railway station, my father, myself and my brothers Lawrence, Jim, Bernard (Bo) and Pat would devour the boxscores from major-league games and read any stories related to the game. Daddy would often regale us of stories he read about Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and the like before we were born.
Daddy grew up loving baseball himself and was a good friend of Hugh Livingstone of Douglas, who was considered a big-league calibre pitcher, who never did get much of a chance to go anywhere in the game.
Daddy was a cattleman and a father, most of all. When his father Thomas died of pneumonia in 1924, he elected to quit school and stay at home and be a farmer to provide for his mother and siblings instead of acquiring another occupation.
Daddy was instrumental in my early career in baseball. He was the coach of the peewee team in Douglas in 1961-62. It was my honour to be recruited both years by the Royal Canadian Legion team in nearby Renfrew to play in tournaments and Ontario Baseball Association playdowns.
As I got older, I played on the combined bantam-midget team in Douglas which played against two teams from Renfrew. Daddy and his brother Harold were the coaches for Douglas.
When I was 17, I played my first season of senior baseball when I recruited to play for Eganville in the South Renfrew Baseball League. In 1969-70, I played for Douglas in that league before our team folded due to lack of players form our small town.
At all those games, Daddy and my mother Catherine were there to cheer us on all the time. Nervous as hell when we played, Daddy would grab the barbed-wire fence behind the backstop and clench his fists.
When I played for the Renfrew Red Sox in the North Renfrew Senior Baseball League from 1971-75, dad was an avid supporter in the stands behind home plate.
In the ensuing years, I was a newspaper reporter in other cities in Canada where I played baseball.
As Father's Day approaches and the publication of my new Expos book by Dundurn Press already in progress, I think of my father, who worked so hard to provide for us when we were younger.
A few days before he died in 2004, I saw him at Victoria Hospital in Renfrew and bawled my head off, knowing him he would be dying soon at age 96.
He was such an inspiration to me. God bless his soul.
