CANADA
The Telegram
Barb Sweet
Published on June 21, 2016
Several decades after a gesture of kindness to all Newfoundland orphans from an American serviceman, a former Mount Cashel orphanage resident’s eyes filled with tears Tuesday.
“He was just fantastic,” said the grieving man — not being named here because there is a publication ban on his identity due to the ongoing Mount Cashel civil trial.
The man was talking about Earl Chilton, who has nothing to do with the trial, but brought a bright spot to a dark time in the Avalon Peninsula man’s life back in the 1950s while he was a boy at the now infamous Mount Cashel orphanage and Chilton was stationed at the nearby American base Fort Pepperrell in Pleasantville.
The former orphanage resident received an email from Chilton’s family that the 89-year-old ex-serviceman had died Monday in Bowling Green, Va.
Chilton brightened the lives of hundreds of Newfoundland orphans through a fundraising effort to give them Christmas gifts — for some the only ones they ever had as children.
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