Are You Game?: A Mini Exhibit
The Panama Canal Museum Collection team will be coming to the Panama Canal Society Reunion in July in Orlando and we hope to see you there! We will be presenting the mini exhibit, Are You Game? on sports and recreation in the Canal Zone. Photographs from the digital collection (ufdc.ufl.edu/pcm) will be accompanied by quotes from the Zonian community. These firsthand accounts were obtained from the Panama and the Canal Oral History Project (ufdc.ufl.edu/ohpcm) as well as from this blog. The UF team is pumped to attend the reunion and hear your sports related stories. Look forward to seeing the 1938 Paramount Pictures short film Red, White and Blue Champions which captures the mind-boggling dives performed by the Canal Zone youth. Did any of you participate in this troupe or take a dip in the Canal? We would love to hear about it!
3 Comments
BOB ZUMBADO
The Administration building and steps can be seen in the upper center of the photograph. The archery lesson is on the beautiful grounds below the admin building on the side near the Balboa Fire Station. This was an area near where students from the Balboa School elementary grades often held recess periods before the Goethals Memorial was installed on the grounds. This surely is that area circa 1949-51. Fourth standing kid from the left might be Jimmy Lovelady. Can you imagine in this day and age where Dodge Ball is considered too dangerous for kids and many people are looking for a law suit to file about something, that kids would be allowed to practice archery with long bows? Not a chance!!
Carl N. Berg of Cocoli
Somewhere here on this site and some time in the last couple of weeks, I saw the back of this 1950 photograph, and it listed the names of all the youngsters. Now I can’t find it. But I was delighted to find that my BHS 1960 classmate, Pat Dempsey of Balboa, is the cherubic cutie pie close to the ground in a half-squat position on the far right in the second row, with short dark wavy hair, dark shorts, white t-shirt, her right hand on her right cheek, a paper in her left hand, and looking kind of glum…..Pat was an ROTC sponsor in our senior year and, in my humble opinion, best looking of all the senior girls…..She helped me (Creator and Editor) beginning in March 2015 as co-author (Special Assistant) of our 59-page THE NEW COCOLI DICTIONARY (dated May 31, 2017), to be put on line sometime later this year by the Panama Canal Museum at the University of Florida in Gainesville…..This turned out to be a 26 month word project for us. Without Pat Dempsey’s exceptional knowledge of Panama and the Canal Zone, our not to be forgotten home in the tropics, I would have struggled alone with this dictionary for much longer, and it wouldn’t have turned out as well as it did….The Museum has promised us that readers of the dictionary will be able to leave comments, just as I have done here.
ufpcmcollection
We are very excited to post it soon!