Baseball fans from coast-to-coast know Jamie Campbell as the charismatic host of Blue Jays Central on Sportsnet, but few know about his formative connection with the city of Timmins.
In Game 5 of the 2015 American League Divisional Series against the Texas Rangers (The Bat Flip Game) Jays slugger Edwin Encarnacion hit a game tying home run in the 5th inning.
'I think the ball is still travelling to Timmins," said Campbell during the post-game show.
It didn't go unnoticed by locals, especially with half of Canada watching.
It wasn't the first time he had mentioned the city with the heart of gold on-air.
"I spent two of the best summers of my life up there, and I didn't work in the broadcast industry up there," he told TimminsToday.
Campbell was a 17-year-old kid from Oakville, and applied for a program run by the Ministry of Natural Resources called the Junior Forest Rangers Program.
He was shipped off on a train up to Timmins, and was then stationed at Lipsett Lake, a work camp about 40 minutes southeast of the city, way down Gibson Lake Road.
"I've been meaning to get up there some way, some how, because I haven't been to Timmins since 1985," he said. "It was the summer of '84 and summer of '85, and I just absolutely had the time of my life."
Sadly, the Junior Forest Rangers program no longer exists.
It ran from 1944 to 2012. Selection was random.
Through a postal code based lottery system, the lucky winners were delegated to a camp.
Northerners were sent south. Southerners were sent north.
"For $10 dollars a day, you basically submitted to hard labour. We cleared roads in and around that area," said Campbell.
He recalls working at nearby Kettle Lakes Provincial Park performing tedious tasks such as clearing log jams, which he says was quite dangerous at times.
"We were all getting paid, and we were all being outdoors, learning to cope on our own, away from home. Back then, they didn't have cell phones and stuff like that, so my parents put me on a train and I didn't see them again until I got home seven weeks later."
Despite the work camp being located 40 minutes outside of the city, each Saturday Campbell and his comrades would have the opportunity to soak up civilization, and other things.
Jamie Campbell (left, red shirt) and other members of the now defunct Junior Forest Rangers Program "This bus would take 24 17-year-old boys into town and basically drop us off for eight hours. That's when we had to do our laundry and do whatever shopping we wanted to do. The first thing we'd do, there's a ballpark right downtown (referring to Fred Salvador Field) and as I remember it wasn't far from the Northern Brewery. We'd walk over there and find whoever the oldest looking of the group was, to go in and get a case of beer. We'd all sit around the ball diamond downtown and get loaded," said Campbell.
He remembers the wooden grandstands as 'ancient but beautiful'.
The old relic has the current city council caught between a rock and a hard place.
Can an investment in a refurbishing project be justified, or will it become yet another jewel of the city's history erased from the landscape due to lack of money?
Campbell hopes it can be saved.
"It would be very sad to lose that park. Any old park should be preserved in some way," he said.
He recalls briefly visiting Cochrane to take the train up to Moosonee, while many of his times in Timmins are blurrier.
"On the off-days, we were beer-buzzed by 11:00 in the morning, just being stupid 17-year-old kids."
Campbell says he likely would have encouraged his kids to enter the program if it was still around, as it had a monumental impact on his adolescence.
"I have two photo albums full of my time at Lipsett Lake, working the roads, and the different assignments we had around Timmins. It's a very special place to me."
Campbell's love affair with sports, which he called a deep-rooted obsession, began at an early age. After school, he would often jump on a Go Train into Downtown Toronto and wait outside hotels where visiting teams would stay at.
"I'd ask players for tickets to the game, or broken bats. I was very polite about it, but I was one of those junkies who took it to the absolute extreme. I probably got to 30 games a year by the time I was 15, 16 years old. I'd spent almost my entire afternoon and evening in Toronto, and I almost never paid for a game. I knew Exhibition Stadium like the back of my hand. I could get about very easily, and it got to a point where I was going in for free because the ushers knew me so well, they just let me go in. A lot of times I'd actually get tickets from visiting players because they were American for the most part, and they didn't have anyone to leave their complimentary tickets to. I'd always ask politely, and half the time they would be kind enough to do that."
Campbell has not lost his fondness for the Timmins area, and hopes to visit the city again on an off-day "to see if its changed much and hang out for a night."
In his work covering the Toronto Blue Jays, despite the several decades since being up North, he still finds opportunities to give shout-outs.
"So any chance I get to use an expression like it landed 'somewhere' I kind of exclusively use the city of Timmins. It holds such a special place for me, I would probably never use Sault Ste. Marie, or Kapuskasing, or Kenora, or anything like that just because I don't have a connection with any of those places. I had some great times in that city."
He hasn't been able to mention Timmins thus far this season, mainly because the games haven't been as meaningful he says, but local baseball fans should keep tuning in.
"I'm sure I'm going to drop it on a post-game show sometime soon."
