You Can Take the Boy Out of the Bay: The Memoirs of Thomas Graham Morry of Ferryland

You Can Take the Boy Out of the Bay… is a collection of anecdotes recalling people and events in the life of Thomas Graham Morry. These mini short stories were written by him with the intention to amuse but, when examined carefully, they also contain underlying compassion, empathy and pathos. Tom Morry was born and raised in Ferryland, a tiny outport community on the Southern Shore of Newfoundland. The book focusses first and foremost on his experiences in that part of his life, and gives a bittersweet account of life in outport Newfoundland during the Depression Years, when poverty was an underlying theme in the lives of virtually everyone in the village - a theme they chose to ignore in order that they could live life to the fullest, despite the hardships.But the story goes well beyond that, recounting the experiences he had, and the odd selection of characters that he encountered, during his years that followed, in the United States in the Dirty Thirties, and back in Newfoundland, in St. John’s this time, during and after WWII, and before and after Confederation. The story finishes up with a brief exposure to life in Ottawa for an ex-patriate Newfoundlander in the early 1950s and 60s, where he found characters as delightfully eccentric as he had encountered during his earlier life experiences, proving, once again, that we humans are more alike than we are different.