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John Craig
John Craig, writer (b at Peterborough, ON 1921; d at same, 1982). John Craig began and ended his life in PETERBOROUGH, Ontario. The son of a newspaperman, he knew the grim realities of the DEPRESSION, but as an adventurous boy he was free to explore the nearby WATERWAYS. Eventually he ventured outward, riding the rails during the late 1930s, fighting in the SECOND WORLD WAR, earning degrees at MANITOBA and TORONTO (a Master's in Canadian HISTORY), and taking up a career in marketing with Canadian Facts Limited. He married and raised 4 children in Toronto's Don Mills. Craig wrote some 20 books over his career. His finest achievement was Chappie and Me (1979), a compelling Canadian coming of age and BASEBALL novel.
Despite his day job, writing was John Craig's passion. His first novel, The Long Return, was published in 1959. In addition to scriptwriting for the CBC, he wrote thrillers and books aimed at CHILDREN and the emerging market for sports coverage. He also wrote local histories and targeted an adult readership. In his best work he adopted an autobiographical mode, celebrating what he knew from personal experience - the Peterborough and Stoney Lake region. By the Sound of Her Whistle (1966), How Far Back Can You Get? (1974), The Clearing (1975), Chappie and Me, and The Last Canoe (1979) together make an impressive library.
Acutely conscious of his craft, he rooted his writing in Canadian literary history. "The relationship between the place I've written about in How Far Back Can You Get? and my home town is approximately the same as that between Stephen LEACOCK's Mariposa and the real-life ORILLIA, Ontario." That collection is a treasure trove of sketches of 1930s Peterborough. By the Sound of Her Whistle looks back on the era of STEAM boating in the KAWARTHAS and Some of My Best Friends are Fishermen (1976) commemorates a favourite pastime. Though he left Peterborough to make his living, he never left his home place in his imagination.
The best of John Craig's fiction also examines issues of social taboo and racial PREJUDICE. The Last Canoe dramatizes the dilemmas faced by the dispossessed OJIBWA of the Peterborough area and The Clearing captures the struggles of a young couple who in the 1930s abandoned their respective marriages and attempted to make a separate peace for themselves in the Ontario wilderness.
Chappie and Me presents a vivid and amusing look at the lives of itinerant black baseball players who lived out a weary road-bound existence at a time when they were banned from baseball's Major Leagues. The story draws on Craig's personal experiences when he was asked to fill in as first baseman for (George) Chappie Johnson's "Colored All Stars" in 1939. Joe Giffen happens upon Chappie's team as they prepared to play the Alcona Wheat Kings one summer evening. Disguised with shoe polish by Chappie, he did well enough to play with the team all summer. The narrative vividly recounts many instances of RACISM even as it celebrates the antics of players like Sweetcorn Tatum, many of whom would have made fine major-league players. Chappie and Me had a modest success when it first appeared in 1979. Two years later it gained new momentum when George Luscombe and Craig adapted it into an award-winning play entitled Ain't Lookin'.
