Icelander

Pat Burley and the temples of hope

She was so athletic, so fit, she could run, swim like a fish, and was the best body surfer anyone ever saw. She was so full of fun, how can you not fall in love with a girl like that? [2]

I don't want to criticise any officials, but the game needed and needs professional thinking and administration. It is only just getting it now. [11]

— Pat Burley.

East gate to golf course, Wheelus Air Base, Tripoli, c 1960.

THREE SIKORSKY JOLLY GREEN GIANTS rose over their quarters like banshees, rattling the incongruous white picket fences enclosing each small embattled grass lawn, and juddered out across the Mediterranean. A date-littered semicircle of palms and desert scrub slowly emerged from the settling dust and at its centre was an enormous branching tree twittering constantly with birds. Smashed dates were everywhere, their sickly sweet smell filling the air like an unwanted perfume.

During the Cold War, the United States of America was enjoying a generally warm relationship with Libya in the Maghreb. They held oil interests there along with the Wheelus Air Base. Sprawled across the eastern suburbs of Tripoli, it flanked Mediterranean shipping lines directly across from Russia, within bomber range of Moscow and the oilfields of Batum. [6] Relations with kindly King Idriss were still good, although some locals still vented their anger on the American outpost of the Strategic Air Command screwed down into the middle of their otherwise bucolic seaside reverie, jets thumping the ground beneath their feet at all hours to waggle a warning finger at the Soviets. [1]

Wheelus, a community of thousands of Americans in the mid-fifties, did not endear him to everyone there, and his pace increased at the thought before it evaporated in the morning heat and was gone. Razor wire and shards of jagged green glared down from atop the wall that cordoned off the base, circumscribing this uneasy truce in one unlovely architectural gesture. Morning prayers drifted across the base as usual, the haunting airborne singsong broadcast from a nearby mosque still a seriously freaky wake-up call to a twenty-eight year-old traveler recently of Melbourne and an altogether different continent.

Born in 1928, he grew up in Rosedale in Victoria's pastoral Gippsland, traveling thirty kilometres to school each day by push-bike and goods train, until his parents decided Sale was too far and switched him to Trinity Grammar at Kew in Melbourne. Then, after a short stint in the Navy, it was on to university and a Commerce degree. Now he was hurrying through the east gate of the base to the Souk, a cinematic open-air bazaar bustling with locals and tourists, with sulphurous public baths, with many robed figures manning their shaded stalls to peddle inventory or simply squatting on the ground.

He felt at home in the kaleidoscopic universe of the bazaar, perhaps because with no signs to follow he relied on his natural business senses. Fish or samak, bread, sayyaghin tailors, tanners, soap, coppersmiths and goldsmiths, carpenters, mattress makers, cloth. The butcher could be spotted by the row of fly covered camel heads hung from a beam by their leftover esophagi. Customers guessed the age of the animal and thus the toughness of its meat by inspecting its teeth; a kind of Bedouin product label. [1]

He met his driver and traveled off-base about twenty minutes to the golf course he was constructing from scratch in the middle of sand dunes. The discovery of brackish water, first noticed at a nearby Arab village, had made the 18-hole project a little less daunting. They found enough to irrigate the desert for the grass fairways. The greens were sand, but with the military at his disposal, he brought in truckloads of seaweed from the beach. Servicemen dug three feet under every green and filled them with seaweed so that golf balls would not just bounce off or disappear.

After just four months, sheep wandered among the palm trees that lined each fairway, grazing on the tufts of newborn grass an hour after sunset. However, his satisfaction was short-lived. He had run out of land at the seventeenth hole. A Bedouin who lived out in the desert sold him a piece and finally servicemen from all over Europe came to play eighteen holes in the lush desert oasis. Even General Patrick Timberlake flew in to play golf with him, commander-in-chief of NATO Forces in Europe. The US Senate later reprimanded the general for improper use of an air force jet.

After two years in Libya and the birth of his first child, Sharon, he and his young Australian wife had decided to return home. They had been out of the country for five years and lately their lives had been at risk in the unstable political situation that was Cold War Tripoli. Gaddafi's coup came later. The United States closed the air base in 1970, withdrew its ambassador in 1972, and all its American staff in 1979 when the embassy was torched.

Colonel Gaddafi did not like golf. In the years that followed, the course had ‘browns’ instead of greens, the putting surface was a very fine dark-brown dust and a robed local stoically dragged a welcome mat round it by two ropes to smooth out the grooves plowed by the putted balls. Golfers leaned patiently on their one-woods at the tee, waiting for pairs of unhurried camels to traverse the fairway.

Once a well-kept 18-hole course, Pat Burley's Sea Breeze Golf Club is now a muddy, nine-hole field of weeds. But back then it was a challenge from left-field, the first of a kind that came to define a career built on improvising solutions to unusual opportunities. Indeed, irrigating the North African desert may well have been less of a challenge than building an ice rink in the sunburnt country of his birth.

THE BAVARIAN ALPS in Germany in which the Casa Carioca nightclub was nestled had already begun to feel like four walls. Restless at another US Army base in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, he had pointed the MG toward Naples to catch the ferry to Tripoli, but arrived to discover the next crossing was three days hence. Instead of waiting, he drove back in one day to see his wife, Nancy. She had been offered a spot in an ice show there by the famous American dancer, Terry Rudolph. The Casa, where the US military forces holidayed, was the place to be for a pro skater, entertaining guests with a seventeen-piece orchestra on an ice floor thirty by forty feet. [9] Rudolph herself was very influential, courted as she was by some of the world's biggest ice show producers.

Bored with nothing to do while Nancy performed, he had asked around among the US service officers, hoping for work as a waiter or bartender. The only available job was assistant pro at the local golf club and, although he had played regularly in his teens, he had not held a club since he had fallen head over heels for this daughter of millinery importer, Clarence Hallam; married her in St Kilda in 1951; then fled to Europe in a spray of confetti and champagne, all the world at his feet.

Their first stop was London where Nancy, dissatisfied with second place to Gweneth Molony in the Nationals, trained at Richmond Ice Rink with the renowned Jacques Gershweiler OBE, coach of the reigning world champion. Then off to St Moritz in Switzerland to prepare for the 1952 Winter Olympic Games in Oslo. An inspiring series of sit-spins and flying tops in her freestyle performance placed her fourteenth overall, while Molony finished twenty-first. They were trailblazing women this pair, the first to represent Australia in the Winter Olympics.

Nancy then turned professional to partner her old coach, Kaspar, in an international ice show at the Carré Theatre in Amsterdam. From there she landed the starring role in Holiday on Ice, even though the audition was impromptu and the casting finalised. It was her huge moment and he supported her from the wings, touring Frankfurt and Berlin — still in rubble after the war — then Genoa and Rome, in preparation for the Far East. The Asia tour was the first major arena show to tour Japan after the second world war.

Nancy’s prowess on the ice was already known to Sonja Henie, the famous Norwegian skating legend, who was by then a Hollywood star. He remembered the excitement when his wife was offered a part in a new show in Europe in which the lead skaters were to be cast by Henie. It was the chance of a lifetime, a chance to impress Henie and land the lead role in Holiday On Ice in a Madrid bullring, but a back injury sustained in a car accident en route from France to Spain left her unable to execute even elementary routines. She was overlooked and so they toured their own ice show around European resorts. Rudolph's offer at the Casa Carioca had arrived soon after, lifting Nancy's spirits.

His job there was for the most part playing rounds of golf with visiting US servicemen, and he had landed it with a little white lie. "I said I had a university degree. I didn’t say it was commerce, not engineering. I said I had been an assistant at the Rosedale Country Golf Club. Assistant meant helping my brother pull onion weed out of the greens." Then one day a senior officer told him they were looking for a pro to build a golf course in Libya, home to the biggest foreign US air base in North Africa. Inseparable since leaving Australia, he now had to abandon Nancy in the Alps to take up the job offer.

So it was he had returned to her for just one day, before setting off to catch the ferry a second time. Overcome by this gallantry, she declared she would go with him to Libya. "What about your show?" he had asked. "I don’t care. There will be others. I want to be with you." She sent a message to her patron, Terry Rudolph, who was away in England, announcing she was leaving immediately. Rudolph and the producers were furious.



THE TREE-LINED STREETS of suburban Hawthorn in Melbourne contain as fine a collection of Victorian and Edwardian houses as any of the affluent suburbs of the world's most intact Victorian city outside London. They returned from the desert to this cool leafy greenness and set up home on the top floor of his wife's family mansion in Neave Street. His first invitation to this house had been to play tennis. Beach holidays and tennis parties had filled Nancy's childhood in-between reluctant attendances at school. Once during a French test her teacher did not even recognise her. "Who are you?" she asked. Nancy had never liked academic life, her father moving her from one school to another until Merton Hall in South Yarra, the senior school of Melbourne Girls’ Grammar.

He was hooked on her, but she was hooked on sport. She won the Victorian under-12 diving championship, and when it was time to graduate to the high board, she decided ice skating would be her future. Her coach at Melbourne Glaciarium was Austrian-born, Felix Kaspar, a former world champion who had been touring Australia when the war broke out and was interned as an enemy alien.

With the arrival of Robyn, Nancy was busy raising two girls while he was made a partner in his father-in-law's millinery business. He had already tasted the thrill of the opportunities awaiting in the wide, wide world when news of the biggest ice show in the world reached him in 1964. Ice Capades was considering an Australian tour and needed a sufficiently large and portable ice floor. He sent word he could build it and began without even having signed a contract. The show’s two top executives jetted in to convince themselves he could deliver, and he was nervous about blowing the deal, uncertain about how much to ask for at their meeting in Sydney's Sheraton Hotel. He did his sums, made an offer, and "they looked at me as if I had gone mad". "Pat, you can't do it for twice that figure," the executive replied. "So they paid me twice what I quoted!"

He scoured local businesses for second-hand refrigeration equipment and soon a forty by twenty metre ice floor replaced the lawn in the backyard of his father-in-law’s home. They had mortgaged just about everything they owned along the way. He then installed the rink in the Hall of Manufacturers at the Sydney Showground. It did not work at first, the water would not freeze, but with the cast and props on their way and panic setting in, they finally made ice. On May 24, a chartered Boeing 707 cargo jet laden with thirty tons of costumes, scenery, lights and other equipment left Honolulu bound for Sydney. At the same time, one-hundred-and-fifty skaters, musicians, and technicians flew in commercial jets for the first engagement of the ten-week Australian visit. [4]

The show was performed on blue-and-white dyed ice in Sydney, then in Melbourne at the Olympic Pool in today's Melbourne Park, and at the Tent Theatre in Adelaide. [3] It was the first time a show of that size had toured Australia. The producers were pleased. Burley Ice Rinks installed its first public ice floor in Albury New South Wales in 1965 and Ice Capades returned to Sydney again in May 1966. [5] He laid the ice floor a second time and when it was over, he moved its "tank" to an empty factory in the Melbourne suburb of Moorabbin and converted it into a public skating rink. It opened in 1966.

Nancy worked as a skating instructor at the St Moritz rink in St Kilda, training future national and international champions including olympians Mary Wilson, Aileen Shaw, and later her own daughters, Sharon and Robyn. For six years or so from 1957, she devised, choreographed and skated lead roles in a series of fourteen ice ballets for ABC television filmed at St Moritz. Themes such as Gaite Parisienne, Cinderella, Arabian Ice, The Enchanted Lake (1963) and a circus ballet (1963) with seventeen skaters, showcased the talents of many young Australian dancers.

A third daughter named Belinda arrived and the Moorabbin business thrived. The Burleys closed it in 1970 and opened a new purpose-built rink, the second custom-built ice skating rink in Australia after the original Glaciarium, formerly located where Melbourne's Southgate now stands.

Ringwood Iceland at 28 Whitehorse Road happened to coincide with a demographic tidal wave of post-war babies who grew into bored teens in dead-end suburbs. They swelled the numbers of Melbourne's youth tribes, giving them strength on the streets, in the clubs and, rather remarkably, at Iceland Ringwood. It was skins and sharps, the Melbourne youth culture of the seventies like no other, original, tough and at times controversial. They began creating their distinctive style about the time that Iceland Ringwood opened its doors. They designed their own tailor-made clothes and handmade shoes, then combined them with off-the-shelf clothing to create a unique look.

Coloured Balls, Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, Chain, Buster Brown, Buffalo, Skyhooks, Pirana, Blackfeather, Jon English — local music became a boom industry and played a big part in the skins and sharps lifestyle, and also in the life of Iceland Ringwood where many local rock bands performed. Peppers at Box Hill town hall, Springy Rock in Springvale town hall, there was no shortage of venues back then and they were all frequented by youth tribes such as the South-siders, Frankston Rockers and Dandy Rockers, at one time or another.

Sharps were heavy rockers who did their own style of dance in their "dress-up" clothes, got into a scuffle or two between drinks. The Ringwood centre became a part of the scene, a social hub beyond recreational skating with a restaurant and live music every Sunday night.

One day, a young assistant told him about a new rock band he had seen at a local high school. He asked their manager if they would come and play at the rink and they arrived one Sunday night after an appearance on the pop show, Countdown. AC-DC were so popular he signed them for two months. "They drew a big crowd; I paid them $250 a performance."

Back then, Australian music was an extreme sport sharing much in common with ice hockey. Road trips and puck bunnies. Hundreds of miles travelled in dodgy vans, rivers of beer and the ever present promise of romance or violence. Australians shrugged-off their cultural cringe in the very early seventies to pen songs about their own country. And for one glorious, golden moment, it looked like Australian ice hockey might follow suit.

Burly also had a brief career as a boxing promoter at Iceland Ringwood. In 1975, when former world champion Lionel Rose was making a comeback, he was approached by the boxer's manager, Jack Rennie, who was having trouble with the established boxing stadiums. He agreed to promote a bout with the popular fighter, putting on a fight at Iceland and later between Rose and South African, Blakeney Matthews, at the Melbourne Olympic Swimming Centre. Pat floated a boxing ring in the middle of the Olympic pool with colourful speed boats surrounding it. "We floated the ring on 44-gallon drums. During a preliminary fight one of the drums got a hole and the ring started tilting. I had to get a scuba diver to jack-up the sinking corner in preparation for Rose’s fight."

Meanwhile, under Nancy's guidance, the Ringwood Figure Skating Club became the most successful in Australia. It was home to seventy percent of Australian championship titles. Nancy guided Sharon and Robyn firmly in her footsteps and their youthful talent saw them frequently mentioned in the papers and magazines. Sharon’s photo was on the front page of the Melbourne Sun more often than any other athlete of her time.

Nancy took Sharon to the northern hemisphere every year to get her the best training and at the age of eighteen she was selected for the 1976 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck. Her natural ability was more artistic than athletic and the producers of the American show, Ice Follies, were there, scouting for grace and beauty over sheer athleticism. They signed two of the Olympic competitors: the winner, American Dorothy Hamill, and Sharon. This signalled the start of a new career for her in the US. She toured there for five years with Ice Capades, and was feted on an episode of This Is Your Life in recognition of her fame and popularity.

Robyn, Sharon’s younger sister, won three Australian championships in Sydney, qualifying for the Olympics, but a stress fracture in her foot never completely recovered. Nancy understood it would dampen her chances of amateur success and steered her towards the Professional World championships in Jaca, Spain. Robyn was an outsider, but her ability to lift her performance under pressure surprised everybody. She won the title of World Professional Champion, the first Australian figure skater to win an accredited individual world title.

With Iceland doing well, Pat now branched out with new rinks across Victoria, and later around the country. The demands of being a husband, father and running several ice rinks placed too great a strain on his marriage. In 1978, Nancy moved to the Gold Coast with their youngest daughter, Belinda. Sharon was already in the US and Robyn was forging her own career, establishing the Robyn Burley Ice Skating Academy.

He had already purchased the Dandenong Colosseum ice rink which had been set up in a converted factory on the South Gippsland Highway in Melbourne. In 1978 he converted a warehouse a few hundred metres from Footscray Town Hall into a public ice rink. "The ultimate would be for Footscray to produce an Olympic ice hockey team," said Olympic icon, Judy Patching, with a respectful glance at the hockey players lined-up, guard of honour style, glaring at each other across the ice. He was Honorary Secretary-General of the Australian Olympic Federation, and he was at the opening of the Burley family's latest venture on ice — Footscray Iceland — on October 18, 1978. [10]

The Rangers had won their second premiership and only two Goodall Cup victories separated Victoria and New South Wales that year when two hundred guests assembled inside the transformed Jones' fruit and vegetable warehouse at 109 Hyde Street. They heard the Mayor of Footscray, Cr Paul Holmes, officially open the first competition ice pad in Melbourne's west. It was the largest at 91.4m by 26m (300ft x 85ft) and when it opened in 1978 Melbourne reached an all-time peak of five rinks. Managed by Russell Poste from Belleville Ontario, it became home ice to the well-established Pirates ice hockey club and in less than a year there were one hundred under-14 boys involved in hockey and two hundred members in the figure skating club. [10]

A few years later in 1983, he converted a wool store at Ballarat in regional Victoria into a full-size ice skating rink. He then took over the lease of the Prince Alfred Park ice rink from the Sydney City Council and held it for eleven years, along with the adjoining swimming pool. Often asked why televised ice hockey had not taken off in the seventies, his reply was always a lack of promotional expertise and blinkered administration. "Naturally ice hockey is ideal for television and here it was being brought direct to thousands of homes. Tragically, the promotion couldn't attract public response and the whole thing lapsed". [11]

By the late-1970s, he had become the driving force of the Australian Rink Operators' Association and its regular newsletter "Australian Skating News". He was the architect of inter-rink hockey during these years, with one team competing from each rink under the name of their district, dressed in new uniforms designed by Australian ice hockey olympian, Vic Ekberg. Pat's State League series competed for the Burley Cup quite independent of the VIHA season. [11] Then came another idea, bolder than all the rest. With several rinks around the country, perhaps he could create a national ice hockey league.

First, he persuaded other rink owners to get on board and share the costs. Then, he arranged sponsorship from Coca- Cola and convinced the ABC to televise the league. In 1980 it seemed his State League series morphed into the National Ice Hockey League (NIHL), powered for a few seasons in several states by the commercial acumen of the rink operators. Although the venture never really took off, his appetite for growing his business knew no bounds. His aggressive media promotions and television appearances pursued new angles and a feverish pitch in search of a free-to-air television audience.

While promoting the new NIHL in 1980, he was asked to build an ice floor for two weeks of performances on the Mike Walsh Show on daytime TV in the Sydney Nine studios. He painted one black and later used it for the Moscow Circus on Ice. Nancy choreographed, Sharon and Robyn skated and well-known singers Colleen Hewitt and Simon Gallagher performed. The invitation came through the producer of the Mike Walsh Show, David Price, who skated and taught at Iceland Ringwood.

He sold the Ringwood rink in 1981, but he had run it for a decade and his reputation for building and running ice floors made him the go-to man for touring shows. One of the best-known was the Moscow Circus on Ice, brought out by Michael Edgley in the seventies and eighties. "At the time we had protestors and greenies complaining about the treatment of animals. One unbelievable act involved a bear and chimpanzee playing ice hockey, with nets at each end. If the chimp got the puck past the bear into the net, the handlers would punish the bear. That sort of show doesn’t exist these days," he says.

Even the Chinese government knew about the Burleys. In 1981 Nancy, Sharon, Robyn and he were invited to tour and coach in China. The visit culminated with Sharon and Robyn performing in Beijing for twenty thousand very excited Chinese spectators. Nancy also had an entrepreneurial streak. After the English skaters Torvill and Dean astonished the world at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, she convinced Michael Edgley to bring them out to Australia. She choreographed their Australian shows with Sharon and Robyn as principal skaters. Pat provided the ice floor for Torvill and Dean exclusively around the world for the next ten years. Later, when Disney On Ice made its first tour of Australia, he laid the ice arena for that too.

In the early 1990s, he stopped operating Prince Alfred Park to concentrate on touring ice shows, small local rinks, advertisements and special events. He created a floating rink on the Yarra River for the opening of Southbank, and also one outside the Opera House, and another at Luna Park in Sydney. His last job was for Disney On Ice when High School Musical came to Australia in 2008. He was eighty years-old. The company booked the Hisense Arena at Melbourne Park and the first night was a sell-out.

But their ice-making plant and equipment was aboard a ship which was delayed by bad weather. They had just three days to get a rink laid for opening night. The Disney on Ice manager had worked for the company for a long time and remembered Burley from the first Disney tour. Pat quoted a ridiculous amount of money to do the job, but with no other alternative, they agreed, and he laid the rink in three days. By the time the next show was scheduled, the ice-making equipment had arrived.

In 1996 his son-in-law, daughter and he constructed Iceland Bundall on the Gold Coast. The family-owned company lived on through his children and grandchildren with temporary installations at such places as Southbank in Melbourne and Fox Studios in Sydney. Nancy returned to Melbourne when youngest daughter Belinda had a child while she was still studying at university. She lived with Pat — at separate ends of the house — to help with babysitting. She died suddenly in 2013 from blood cancer. The couple never re-partnered, but remained companions, united until the end in their love for their family and their political and sporting allegiances.

AUSTRALIA'S FIRST figure skating olympian with Gweneth Molony. The first Australian figure skater to win an accredited individual world title. International ice show stars. Rink developers and promoters. The first national ice hockey league. The Burley dynasty was inducted to the Ice Skating Hall of Fame in 2008, and the honour might equally have included all eight ice skating rinks in three states — Albury, Moorabbin, Ringwood, Dandenong, Footscray, Ballarat, Sydney and Bundall — not to mention countless touring and temporary ice floors. For a time, Burley's temples of hope ended an era of neglect, a time of despair when most of those in a position to help Australian ice sports had either gone out of business or turned a blind eye.

Robyn, who has a degree in Sports Psychology and a Master of Arts, was recently included among Victoria’s Top-100 sports people. She is the High Performance director for the Australian figure skating association and coaches at O'Brien Group Arena in Melbourne. Sharon still lives on the Gold Coast and still operates the ice rink business with her husband and children. Belinda lives in Rutherglen near Wodonga. She holds a Master of Agribusiness and owns and operates Lake Moodemere Estate with her husband, the sixth-generation Rutherglen wine producer, Michael Chambers.

Pat Burley is eighty-eight and lives by himself in Melbourne. His eyesight has been deteriorating since about 2011 and today he is blind. He had hoped that someday someone in the family, children or grandchildren, would take over the touring side of the ice rink business. But Pat was the business and the equipment is now lying somewhere on the Rutherglen property. Son-in-law Michael Chambers, who owns the property and who helped Pat lay rinks over the years, has said "It was bloody hard work, and I can’t believe Pat did it for so long."

The enduring spectacle of the Burley rinks is stamped indelibly on the collective memory of many, many fans. Where else were skaters propelled over ice by the heavy rock assault of bands such as Dragon, Rose Tattoo and AC-DC, while a new wave of fans devoted their weekends to interstate hockey rivalry led by imported stars? Countless champions also got their start in these rinks, paving the way for many more to follow. Against the tide of opinion binding ice hockey to the status of a minor sport in Australia, Pat Burley's personal commitment to develop it into a top sport, shone like a beacon in the dark night of neglect.

The Burley family was the real deal, skating headlong into the fickleness of international ice sports, far from their centres of excellence. H Newman Reid, Jimmy Bendrodt, Harry Kleiner, Dick Groenteman, Molony and Gordon. The Burley's belong to Australia's grand tradition of pioneering ice entrepreneurs, although few before them had painted such a clear and far-reaching vision, let alone built it.




Pat Burley in recent times.

Citations and notes

1. "Life in Libya, Pre-Gaddafi — Santa Barbara Resident Recalls Life in North Africa Before Dictator Took Power", Jeff Wing, March 1, 2011. At the time of writing in 2017, Wheelus Air Base is the Mitiga International Airport, the only airport serving Tripoli at present due to the closure of Tripoli International Airport in July 2014 as a result of the ongoing Second Libyan Civil War.

2. Biographical outline of the Burley family history, Pat Burley, 2017.

3. "US ice show here in May", The Canberra Times, 7 Apr 1965, p 21.

4. "Invasion on ice", The Australian Women's Weekly, 12 May 1965, p 3.

5. "Doll's help plan show's lavish clothes", The Australian Women's Weekly, 25 May 1966 p 17

6. "America completes ring of air bases round USSR", The Sydney Morning Herald, 30 Oct 1951, p 2.

7. "TUGG the ultimate gig guide", Deakin University, Melbourne. Online

8. "Skins and Sharps", Sam Biondo, skinsnsharps.com, 2006.

9. "The Casa Carioca", Randy Gardner and Susan Austin, Pro Skating Historical Foundation, 2003.

10. "Australian Skating News", the official journal of the Australian Rink Operators' Association, December 1978.

11. "Ice Gladiator", unidentified Melbourne newspaper, July 30, 1979, courtesy John Heron. Original copy in image gallery above.