It was early days for home movies when Newfoundland businessman Gerald S. Doyle bought a Ciné-Kodak camera at Macy’s in New York City in 1938. Film for the camera was expensive and had to be sent to Kodak for processing, and there was no sound. But early home movies had one thing going for them: Kodachrome. Twenty years before colour snapshots became common, amateurs could shoot movies in Kodachrome’s soft tones.

The new movie camera became Doyle’s constant companion on his travels around Newfoundland. With a keen, observant eye and the immediacy of a focused lens, he recorded a way of life in Newfoundland outports over a period of more than 20 years. The 300+ photographs in this book are individual frames extracted from those colour films, laser-scanned for high resolution.

Together, the images invite readers to accompany Doyle as he sailed into small Newfoundland communities and captured what lay before him. It is a bygone place and time—of lives centred on the sea—and they unfold across the pages for the reader in vivid colour.

In creating this pictorial narrative, he preserved an earlier Newfoundland. Individually and collectively, the pictures chronicle a people in the last days of Newfoundland as an independent nation through the early days of being a Canadian province, from 1937 to 1955. This era encompasses the early years of Confederation, after 1949, when Newfoundland joined Canada.

Walk into the Sunny Long Ago with a patriot who loved his country. Gerald S. Doyle’s photographs will intrigue those with a curiousity for Newfoundlander life as they explore one man’s remembrance of things past.

John W. Doyle is a screenwriter and director with a long involvement in the Newfoundland and Labrador film and television industry. Along with his sister Marjorie, John wrote and directed About Our Father, a documentary about Gerald S. Doyle, who was a well-known businessman and radio broadcaster. John’s previous print publications include Riddle Me This One: A Treasury of Newfoundland Trivia. He was born and brought up in St. John’s, where he lives today.

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Marjorie Doyle has published four books of non-fiction. Her columns and essays have appeared across Canada in the Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen, National Post, Fiddlehead, Geist, Calgary Herald, Queen’s Quarterly, Antigonish Review. Her broadcast career included hosting the national CBC radio show That Time of the Night. Marjorie has been awarded a National Magazine Award and (with her brother John W. Doyle) two CBC Radio Awards for Programming Excellence and a Golden Sheaf nomination for the documentary Regarding Our Father. A former Chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada, she’s read across Canada and was writer in residence at Haig Brown House on Vancouver Island.

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