From CBC News – link to source story
Town council considering opening up eligibility
Garrett Barry · CBC News · Apr 13, 2021
Visitors and residents in Gander get a hit of history at just about every street corner: John Alcock, Arthur Brown, Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh.
Each one was a high flyer in the history of transatlantic flight — and each is commemorated in a street name in the Town of Gander.
With just a few exemptions, every street in Gander is named after a pilot or an aviator: There’s Hawker Crescent and Grieve Crescent, named after George Hawker and Kenneth Grieve and their attempt at a transatlantic flight in 1919.
There’s also Sacchi Avenue, named for Louise Sacchi, a pioneering female pilot who ferried planes across oceans hundreds of times.
Gander’s distinct naming policy means there’s a pilot on just about every street sign. Now, that might change — a little.
Gander’s town council is debating a move that would slightly loosen its naming policy and allow for a greater mix of community figures to be commemorated, as long as they still have some connection to the aviation industry.
“It’s not something that … there’s a consensus that we want to do,” Mayor Percy Farwell said Thursday. “It’s something that is under consideration, under discussion in council right now.”
The town’s development staff has suggested to council that it vote to expand the eligibility and include first responders, innovators, people who’ve had long and successful careers in aviation and people who’ve performed heroic acts.
Farwell said council is a bit “conflicted.”
“It does have sort of resonance in terms of the tourism and the branding and so on of the community to be able to say that all your streets are named after pilots,” he said.
“Now, having said that, I would suggest that if you looked at a list of names of streets here in Gander, the average person with the average level of knowledge about aviation would probably only recognize maybe 15 or 20 of those names.”
Jack Pinsent, an early Gander resident and a history buff, said the policy made more sense when the town was first being built in the 1950s — when it had fewer streets and when there were fewer pilots to honour.
“I think they are down to the point where they are starting to run out of names, aviators that people know,” he told CBC Thursday. “There are some guys, right now, where I look at the name and I say … I never heard tell of that fella before.
“They started naming streets after astronauts, which I was completely against!”
Pinsent said town councils have made exceptions in the past — most notably for royalty — and it’s time to formally broaden the criteria to celebrate more of Gander’s own residents.
He says he had four or five in mind already — such as John Murphy, who was a civilian secretary in the Royal Air Force and later left Newfoundland for New York in the 1960s where he became a manager with the Trans World Airlines operations in the state.
He also suggested James Dempsey, a longtime radio operator.
No existing streets will be renamed, and Farwell says if town council does bring in a change, it’s unlikely to be a big one. He says there’s a broad agreement that the town staff suggestion — to open the eligibility to those with some other attachment to aviation — is as far as anyone wants to go.
“I think there’s fairly good consensus on, you know, connecting the street names all throughout this community to aviation is a fitting tribute and recognition of the heritage of our community, which is unique in the Newfoundland context,” he said.
“Opening it wide open and, you know, I think would betray that and would diminish the the impact that having such a street-naming policy has in a positive way on tourism and so on.”