The following article was published in the Fort Campbell Courrier  and reprinted on our website with their permission. A big thanks to Bob Pelley for bringing this to our attention

Living the history of Gander

By JENNIFER P. BROWN jpbrown@kentuckynewera.com (originally published Dec. 8, 2005)

Published: Friday, December 16, 2005 2:38 PM CST

The soothing tick of an old mantel clock marks time inside Eileen Elms' comfortable den in Gander, Newfoundland. It seems a fitting resonance to the life of a woman who arrived in this place 65 years ago.

No one else has lived in Gander longer than Eileen Elms, and no one has her perspective on the town and its history.

In the early days, Gander wasn't even a town -- just a cluster of homes forming at the edge of an airport that had been carved from a wilderness.

It was a rugged world. Moose roamed among spruce and birch trees. Lakes and rocky terrain dotted the landscape. There were no roads connecting Gander to the rest of the world, so people came and went by train or plane.

When Eileen's family arrived in 1940, she was 6 years old and the second child in the community. Her father, a Canadian veteran of World War I, was an electrician and came to help install the runway lights at the airport.

"We had a wonderful life, we really did, but it wasn't your typical Newfoundland child's life," Eileen says. Europe was at war, and Gander, the largest airport in the world at that time, became a key site for British and later American and Canadian forces.

American bush pilots hired to ferry planes from the United States to Great Britain passed through Gander. Often called the lifeboat of the Atlantic, the airport was a critical refueling site for transatlantic flights. It was the easternmost airport on the North American continent.

As the population grew, military barracks lined the runways. And civilian families like Eileen's became close friends of soldiers from around the world.

The rest of Newfoundland, an island that had yet to become a province of Canada, was in many ways still a remote land. Villages ringed the coast; much of the interior was unsettled. Men generally earned a living fishing for cod or cutting timber.

But Gander was different.

Although the airport and its mission was shrouded in secrecy in the early years of World War II, the people who lived there were exposed to the outside world in a way that most Newfoundlanders had never experienced. Every day, the world was passing through Gander.

And Eileen, who attended school with 13 other children in her first year of school, had a series of interesting brushes with history. Her connections to important world events are reminiscent of a Forrest Gump experience.

First, there was her friendship with the son of an American president.

Lt. Col. Elliott Roosevelt of the Army Air Corps was a frequent visitor in her parents' home.

On Sept. 27, 1942, he wrote this in Eileen's autograph book: "I hope when you grow up and go out into the world on your own you will find a world at peace -- that is what I wish for my daughter, who is your age."

Many American service members spent time with Eileen and her family. They knew her mother would give them a meal and a safe place away from home, Eileen recalls.

Another brush with history dates back 1940, when Eileen, then 6, and two boys had their photograph taken in a wooden sled pulled by a huge Newfoundland dog named Pal.

The dog grew so large he resembled a small black bear, and his raucous behavior with children became a problem. One playful paw to the chest, and a child could be injured.

The Royal Rifles, a regiment of the 1st Canadian Battalion, were preparing to deploy to Hong Kong and offered to take Pal along as their mascot.

Legend says that Pal was renamed Gander as a military dog and saved several men from death on Christmas Eve, 1941, when the Royal Rifles were engaged in a battle with the Japanese Army. The dog saw a hand grenade hurled at the men, grabbed it and ran. The grenade exploded in the dog's mouth, killing him instantly and securing his story for history.

Nearly 60 years later, the dog was honored during a ceremony at Ottawa, where a Dickens Medal was awarded in his memory. The medal, known as the Victoria Cross for animals, was presented by a British group and remains today at the Canadian War Museum.

Eileen was a special guest for the ceremony and the only person present who knew the dog before he went off to war.

Hanging on the wall of her den is the photograph that was taken of Pal pulling her sled in 1940.

Eileen and her husband, Lorne, a retired dentist, raised four sons in their house on Cotton Street, which is named for Australian aviator Major Sidney Cotton, who introduced airmail service to Newfoundland.

From a large picture window in the den, Eileen and Lorne can see planes leaving the airport.

Eileen would play another role in Gander's history on Sept. 11, 2001. Transatlantic flights were grounded as a result of the terror attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., and 39 commercial flights headed for Gander.

For five days, some 6,500 passengers found refuge in Gander. Several came to Eileen's house for a meal, a bath and a warm bed.

It was similar to the role her mother had played 60 years earlier, when her kitchen was open to strangers who became friends.

But Eileen doesn't take herself too seriously. After all, she was running back and forth to Wal-Mart to buy clean underwear for the stranded travelers in the days after Sept. 11.

History was being made, and she had her role.

webster note:

Jennifer Brown, a reporter from the Fort Campbell Courier visited Gander to do a series of articles on the 20th anniversary of the Arrow Air disaster in which so many lives of the 101st Airborne Division  were lost.  Fort Campbell, Kentucky, is the home base for the 101st Airborne Division. This is one of the articles she wrote about the town of Gander. We are attempting to  publish the remaining two articles in the future.