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J. W. Chafe: Winnipeg's renaissance man.

Article Excerpt
James Warren Chafe went by many names. To his team mates on Winnipeg's Shamrock Baseball Club in the 1920s, he was "Chick" Chafe--a pitcher with an astonishing "roundhouse" curve. To young CJRC radio listeners from 1942 until 1947, he was "Uncle Jim" who read the funnies. To CBC listeners of the Canadian and International Services through the 1940s and 1950s he was "J. W. Chafe" the broadcaster; he was also J. W. Chafe, the educator, to his colleagues in the Winnipeg public school system. As an actor with traveling companies, he was "Jas. Chafe", "Chick Chafe", "Mr. Warren Chafe", or "James Chafe." He was "Duck" to his grandchildren and to me, he was "Dad."

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His parents were Newfoundlanders who arrived in Manitoba by train in 1892. He was born in the Rural Municipality of Springfield in 1900 where his father had begun to farm. By 1903 the family had moved into Winnipeg, where Dad attended school. He was left-handed but teachers in those days forced him to change to the other hand. Being forced to write right-handed was traumatic and he believed that it put him at great disadvantage at school and at times throughout his life. Also notable in those years was the imposition of his parents' fundamentalist religion. His Pentecostal mother, sometimes-Pentecostal father, and their strange "holy-roller" comrades infused his mind with a skepticism of religion that lasted throughout his life.

In high school Dad began to be involved with school plays as an actor and musician. This evolved into a life-long love affair with acting, drama and playing musical instruments. In November 1919 he was a member of the cast for Macbeth staged at the Winnipeg Collegiate Institute. Graduating from high school (the only one of his family to do so), he launched into a varied career. He became, often at the same time and spanning several decades, an actor, athlete, author, broadcaster, educator, musician, and playwright. These categories broadly describe his avocations and help to focus on the depth and range of his achievements.

Chafe the Athlete

Dad often spoke and wrote of his love for the type of hockey that was played when Winnipeg and he were young. His hockey rink--an outdoor one, of course--was just west of the Winnipeg General Hospital near his home on Bannatyne Avenue. He spent many fun-filled hours there--his stories of early Winnipeg are full of names of local hockey greats and their accomplishments. (1) He revered their talents because, as a skinny teenager himself, he admired athletic skill over brawn. Later in life he developed strong views about the loss of skill in hockey as a result, he felt, of decades of dominance by the NHL. Lacrosse was also a favourite sport in his early years as was speed skating. One of his feats was jumping over wooden barrels on speed skates at Sherbourne Rink. Dad said he was "pretty fair" at it but not as good as the fellow who set a record by jumping over thirty-five barrels. Dad also played competitive tennis and badminton in his thirties and both became social sports later in his life.

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During his late teens Dad became a pitcher for several teams around Winnipeg and in June 1921 he pitched in the Winnipeg Senior Men's Amateur baseball league. His team was the "Granites" with whom he set a pitching record that would stand for decades. Most batters were right-handed and were uncomfortable facing a southpaw pitcher who could float a slow ball with a massive breaking inside curve just before the plate. The Free Press reported, after a 1921 game, that:

The chief attraction proved a young pitcher, with a freak ball. Chick Chafe is the name of this young phenom, and in breaking into senior company the youngster had the honor of creating a new strikeout record for the league, when he whiffed nineteen ... batters in nine rounds of play and incidentally helped defeat the "Freighters" 12 to 3 in a long drawn-out amateur baseball contest. This boy Chafe ... shot up a slow curve ball, which was so slow and broke so wide...

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