As a then councillor, the Hall of Fame was a pet project of mine.

It followed a visit several years earlier to my wife's parents' hometown of Milthorpe (population 1200, or thereabouts) where I had been very much impressed with its museum which celebrated the various accomplishments of the town's locals.

 What I particularly admired was the low key nature of the achievements being celebrated: basically a recognition of real people who had made genuine and important contributions to their community.

Returning home I noticed that Maitland, unusually for a city of its size, had no real equivalent. I undertook a fairly lengthy campaign (17 years...) aimed at creating a Maitland Hall of Fame.

Somewhat predictably I suppose, given my background, I initially perceived the Hall to be a Sporting Hall of Fame, a celebration of what I consider to be such an incredible number of champion sportspeople to have originated from such a relatively small locality. I particularly wanted to preserve the home-spun nature of what I had seen in Milthorpe.

One of my motivations was the Mick Hinman stand at Robins Oval. Maitland Park, one of the very few facilities I can think of to sport five turf wickets, has as its centrepiece Robins Oval, with that glorious old grandstand –  the Mick Hinman stand.

Nobody knew who Mick Hinman was.

Many top judges consider Hinman to be our best ever cricketer. Hinman, a Bradman era cricketer whose cricketing progress was curtailed by WWII, worked at South Maitland Railway where later in his life he lost his right thumb an industrial accident. As a teenager I had the pleasure of batting with him at the very end of his cricketing career. We were playing for Combined City against East Maitland and it was quite shortly after the railway incident. The bandaged Hinman scored a hundred, sans thumb.

Maitland City Hall of Fame inducts second round of people

Maitland City Hall of Fame opens online

And then there was somebody like Don McIlwain. Don ran the sports shop in High Street.

He'd won the Maitland A grade tennis singles championship for 22 years in a row. Surely that is Hall of Fame material.

The hall of fame concept eventually adopted by council became a recognition of achievement in not only the sporting arena but also a celebration of accomplishment in the disciplines of Arts, Business/Public Service and Academia.

There have been two rounds of inductions, in 2016 and 2017. I sincerely hope the lack of inductees in 2018 is a temporary lapse rather than a discontinuation of what I consider to be a worthy community institution.

Speaking of Mick Hinman and Don McIlwain, and an era when champion sportspeople worked and had small businesses, it got me thinking about some of the special people you would more than likely have run into just in the normal going about your business in the Maitland of those days.

As mentioned above you had McIlwain's Sports Shop. But if you went through McIlwain's and out the back you would have found yourself in the notorious den of iniquity in which legendary raconteur Leigh McIntyre plied his barbering trade, usually accompanied in the scissoring by a glamorous barberess who knew even filthier jokes than he did. It was gold for an audience made up of both those waiting for a haircut and the variety of colourful locals who'd be hanging around purely for the entertainment.

McIntyre was a winner of the Maitland A-grade golf Championship. I'd happily swap a premiership to have won one of those ...

Next door to McIlwain's was The Dutch Cake Shop where behind the counter you would more than likely have found Marguerite Ruygrok. Ruygrok was a swimmer, a Commonwealth Games gold medal winner who two months out from the Tokyo Olympics was involved in a horrendous car accident. As well as breaking several bones, she sustained injuries requiring 98 stitches and 2 blood transfusions.

In a showing of incredible courage and dedication Ruygrok managed to somehow recover in time and competed in the Tokyo Games.

A little further down High Street sat the Gum Leaf Bakery, an establishment which employed the racing car maestro Alan Grice as its pastry cook.

And three shops away from there was Johnston's Shoes: the Johnstons, headed by Col, were a veritable Maitland cricketing dynasty.

In the other direction, towards the East, you had Fred Brown working at the Police Boys' Club. Fred Brown captain-coached Maitland to three consecutive Rugby League premiership wins in '56,'57 and '58. Also in that vicinity was the chemist, run by a pharmacist/rally driver named Ken Tubman.

These all in the immediacy of High Street. All this started me thinking – for next week's column let’s look into the possible candidates for 'who is Maitland's greatest ever sportsperson? 

Now that will be tricky ...