By Mark Squibb
If you grew up in Ferryland, it’s likely you had dealings with Bernard Kavanagh at one time or another.
The prominent Ferryland businessman and family man passed away on January 4 at the age of 87.
Kavanagh, born to parents Elizabeth and Alphonsus in 1936, was born and raised in Ferryland. He left home at the age of 17 to work abroad, and tried his hand at everything from hunting seals in the North Atlantic to peeling potatoes at a military base in Greenland. While abroad, he survived the Great Flood of 1953, which killed some 1,830 people in Holland and hundreds more in Great Britan. Upon his return home to Ferryland, he purchased his first delivery truck and met his soon-to be wife Clara Hanlon, whom he met at a restaurant in St. John’s. Bernard and Clara, who died in 2005, were married in 1958, and that same year started a business selling potatoes out of their home.
“Dad delivered the potatoes, and mom took care of the book work,” said daughter Carol Ann O’Neill, this week.
That business would grow into a wholesale delivery business, and in 1969 Kavanagh purchased the Southern Shore Trading Company, which he turned into a general store as well as a wholesale distribution centre. Shortly after, he bought the Irish Loop Drive Restaurant.
Kavanagh, now armed with a fleet of seven trucks, shipped Coca Cola, Blue Star, Jockey Club, and Labatt’s beers, Vachon Cakes, and more, all along the Southern Shore. At one point, he was running the wholesale business, a snack bar, gas station, and general store in Renews.
Even into his 80’s, Kavanagh never slowed down. He was actively involved in the daily operations of Bernard Kavanagh's Million Dollar View Restaurant in Ferryland, where he could be found most days.
He also had things outside of the restaurant that kept him busy.
“He was 87 years old this July past, and I got a call from him early November, and he asked me if I knew anybody I could call to get funding to put bathrooms all along the shore for the hikers,” said O'Neill.
O’Neill, who is the current chairperson of the Irish Loop Artisans Co-operative, said that the matter of how to draw more tourists to the Southern Shore had been raised at a recent tourism initiative round table. When she mentioned it to her father, he came up with the bathroom idea a few days later.
“I’ve always been proud of my dad,” said O’Neill. “He’s always had a good work ethic, and he always taught us that no matter what you get, you pay for. Even as little girls going to the store, we did not walk into the store and pick up bubble-gum, we had to pay for it. And he did the same at his own restaurant. If he ate at his restaurant, he went up to the cash and paid for it.”
O’Neill, the eldest of seven daughters, says she can remember peeling potatoes in her father’s restaurant as a 12-year-old girl. She maintains that her father always held his employees, many of whom worked for him for decades, in high esteem.
“He always said that he was successful because of the workers who he had with him,” said O’Neill. “And he never expected anything out of them that he didn’t do himself.”
And while Kavanagh was known as a consummate businessmen, O’Neill said he also knew how to play.
“In the summertime, we would take off and go to Nova Scotia or Terra Nova Park, and he didn’t work then, he knew how to have fun,” said O’Neill. “Every single Sunday growing up we went to Cape Broyle for an ice cream.”
A staunch Liberal, photos of Kavanagh meeting-and-greeting Liberal politicians adorn the walls of his restaurant.
O’Neill can recall the day she got a ride home from school in a limousine with her father and Premier Joey Smallwood.
“Smallwood told me if I got a good education, I would go far,” recalls O’Neill. "I remember him saying that.”
Kavanagh would later appear in Smallwood’s book, ‘Newfoundland in Colour.’
Ferryland Mayor Aidan Costello says Kavanagh was a gentleman who did what he could for the community while also providing many much-needed jobs.
“Bernard was a great community man. He sponsored softball teams, he sponsored hockey teams, he donated to causes and benefits throughout the community,” said Costello. “If you told someone you were from Ferryland, they would ask if you knew Bernard Kavanagh. So, he was well recognized not only on the Southern Shore, but throughout the province.”
Costello recalls that on Saturday mornings, Bernard would go throughout the community and gather up teenage boys to put to work for the day. The boys might find themselves picking potatoes or weighing apricots or loading a truck with groceries for delivery on Monday morning.
“At the end of the day, he would give us a Coke and a bun and perhaps a feed at the snack bar,” said Costello. “Fifty years ago, that was well-appreciated.”
Maxine Dunne worked for Kavanagh at his snack bar from 1983 to 1985.
The job interview was an unconventional one.
“Bernard pulled up in the Winnebago, and stuck his head out the window and said, ‘Maxine, do you want a job? And without thinking I said, ‘Sure,’” said Dunne. “I said, ‘Where do you want me to work and when do you want, me to start?’ And he said, ‘I need someone at the snack bar and I need you to start Friday night.’”
Dunne would work for Kavanagh until 1985, when she was offered a position at the Historic Ferryland Museum, a posting she holds to this day.
“He was good to work for,” said Dunne. “He was fair. He was a great person in the community. He helped a lot of people. He was kind to a lot of people.”
Besides working for Kavanagh, Dunne was a close friend of O’Neill’s, and knew Kavanagh as her friend’s father before she knew him as a boss.
“The first skidoo we ever saw as children, Bernard Kavanagh had it,” said Dunne. “Where the Shamrock Festival is held across from the Folk Arts building in Ferryland, down where the Colony of Avalon is, that field where the festival is held used to be called Flake Pond, and we would all go skating on Flake Pond when it would freeze in the winter… and Bernard arrived one evening with the skidoo and a big slide in tow, a big plastic dish, and the kids were absolutely delighted. We all got on the slide, and he towed us around and gave us rides on the skidoo. He was that kind of a fellow.”
Years later, Maxine and her husband would open a bed-and-breakfast, and would often promote other restaurants in the area, including Bernard Kavanagh’s Million Dollar View Restaurant. She said guests always enjoyed meeting Bernard, and Bernard always enjoyed meeting guests.
“One time he shows up in the driveway out here, because he had met a few people the evening before, and he showed up here with a bag full of hand knit dish cloths for the two couples, and a couple for me, that his partner Harriet had knit,” said Dunne. “He was that kind of a person.”
Kavanagh was awarded an Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Loop Chamber of Commerce in 2015 in recognition of his business achievements, and while most will remember him as a businessman, O’Neill, along with her sisters and a whole host of grand-children and great-grand children, remember him first and foremost as a father and a grand father.
“He was a dad before he was anything,” said O’Neill. “At the funeral Mass Kelsey Arsenault sang ‘My Daughter’s Father.’ And that song said everything. He was the best… In the past few years, I’ve heard so many stories of things that he’s done that I’ve never known about. People have come to me and told me how kind he was and what he did for them. So those stories are nice to hear, and I’d love to hear many more.”
Bernard Kavanagh back in the early 1970s when he was busy building a thriving wholesale distribution business based in Ferryland. The colourful entrepreneur died this month at age 87.
