Joey Only came to Fort St. James on Saturday, March 17 for a St. Patrick’s Day shindig, but Joey wasn’t only interested in music and green beer.
The Canadiana folk musician, originally from Ontario, but now living in Wells, B.C., was in the Fort to kill two birds with one stone.
Currently researching a potential film project, Only met up with some local veterans as well as an active Canadian Forces member at the local Legion on March 17, before he put on a show later that night for local music enthusiasts.
The interview was part of a proposed idea to examine the role of Royal Canadian Legions in small communities and how they are changing.
The film idea was pitched to him by Jasper filmmaker Dave Baker about five years ago, and the pair have been percolating the idea ever since and are now just initiating the project.
“I don’t know if it will happen or not, but I hope it does,” he said.
While Only said many people speak to veterans and people returned from war about their experiences abroad, he was more interested in talking to them about the community.
“As a Canadiana folk singer, that’s my bread and butter,” said Only.
Where Only lives now, in Wells, there are a couple of options to go out and have a beer, with the Wells Hotel being perhaps the more popular or mainstream option, but Only said he has always been more comfortable sitting down and having a beer in the local Legion.
“That’s where you learn things,” he explains, while if you are only “chasing the party” by perhaps going to the more popular option you won’t learn as much.
In the Fort, he was interested in researching the recent “rebirth” of the local Legion, which had been shut down for months due to financial hardships.
The Legion has since been enjoying a bit of a surge in popularity after its reopening, also likely due in part to the closure of the Zoo Pub.
Only met up with a few of the older veterans in the area, including Al Gaernert and Mike Goodall, as well as a newly returned from Afghanistan younger member of the armed forces, Eric Goodall.
Only appreciated the generational representation in the meeting and said it gave him a wide range of opinion to draw from, and he made a ton of notes from their discussion.
“I’m not particularly ‘pro-war,’ but that’s sort of irrelevant to my when it comes to the Legion,” Only said of the interview.
While perhaps not “pro-war,” Only instead expressed his respect for those in the military’s choice to “take a stand” and said it is “very honourable to do something outside of yourself … to risk yourself.”
He sees legions in general as “the heart of the community” and appreciates that they are generally a “working class establishment.”
As a child, Only remembers when veterans from the world wars would come to the school on Remembrance Day and speak to the students about the horror and tragedy of war, and now most of these veterans have passed away.
Only is interested in how this is changing Royal Canadian Legions everywhere.
“The cultural identity of the Legion will change forever,” he said. “I think that most people don’t understand what the legion is.”
Only is particularly interested in hearing stories about things which happened in legions over the years and have become part of local legend.
Joey Only and his wife Leah Martin, who is three months pregnant with their first child, played their foot-stomping Canadiana to a sizeable crowd at the Legion on St. Patrick’s Day.
The event was also part of the Music on the Mountain shows being put on to raise money and awareness for this year’s August festival.
