2025 Hall of Fame Inductee – Jack MacIsaac

More than 70 years ago, a youthful Jack MacIsaac set his sights on competing as a piper at the Antigonish Highland Games, and he is now about to be inducted into its Hall of Fame.   

The trek from New Victoria, 20 kilometres outside Sydney, to Antigonish was especially long for a teenaged piper with no money or transportation back in 1953. But MacIsaac made it and went on to attend every Antigonish Highland Games for the next 65 years.

A former instructor for numerous Cape Breton and Pictou County bands, MacIsaac, who turned 86 this month, was also the MLA for Pictou Centre from 1977 to 1993, holding a variety of ministries, including tourism.  

“Piping and pipe bands, along with all Celtic music and Celtic history, have been my life. I hope I’ve given enough back to warrant the honour being given to me. I can only say it has been a labour of love from the beginning,” said MacIsaac, noting his ancestors came to Nova Scotia from the Isle of Eigg off the west coast of Scotland in 1801 aboard the immigrant ship, The Dove, landing in Southside Harbour near Antigonish.   

The son of a coal miner, he was born in Inverness but his parents packed up and literally moved their home to New Victoria.   

“The Inverness mines were shutting down and my father went into the mines in New Victoria. I suppose my parents thought the move would give them more security.”

 At age 12, the same year his father was killed in the mines, he began taking piping lessons at the Gaelic College in St. Ann’s.   

“By the time I was 14, I knew the Antigonish Highland Games was Mecca for pipers, so I had to get there. When my father died, my mother was left, at age 31, to raise four of us and we didn’t have too much. Hitchhiking was my only option.”  

With his piping regalia, he shouldered his pipes and headed out early in the morning on Games day.  

“The very first car to come along was the parish priest and I had just played at his 50th anniversary. He asked where I was going and told me he didn’t want me hitchhiking, but he drove me to the Isle Royal Hotel in Sydney. He went in and found me a drive with a couple from New Jersey who took me all the way to the Games.”  

Awed by the crowd and pageantry of the Games, MacIsaac was determined to play his best in the open amateur category, classifications then being different to now.   

“A lance-corporal in the Canadian Guards and I were called back by the judge and asked to play again because it was too close to call. In the end, the lance-corporal finished first and I got second.”  

MacIsaac had the good fortune to encounter his father’s cousin who took him along to, the Francis Willie Hectors (MacDonalds) who took Jack in and gave him a place to sleep. 

“I’d gone to Antigonish with no spare cash and certainly no credit card like a young person might have today, but people were very good to me. Perhaps it was my family circumstances, but I just knew from an early age if I was going to get anywhere, I had to take the bull by the horns.” 

He returned the next year and finished first. 

Spurred on by his early experiences at the Games, MacIsaac took advantage of every opportunity that came along. He was two years underage when he accepted an invitation to join the Cape Breton Highlanders regiment.  

‘I showed up and was asked my birth date by a very gruff, official fellow. I truthfully told him 1939, but he told me I was born in 1937 and directed me to agree with him. They needed a piper so I was born in 1937 and that was that.” 

He was 16 years old and in the second rank of the Cape Breton Highlanders as they piped their way across the newly opened Canso Causeway in 1953.   

“We led the parade that hooked the rest of the world onto Cape Breton,” MacIsaac joked.  

Early on, MacIsaac competed as a solo piper in Antigonish, but he soon appeared at the Games leading pipe bands and, in later years, he was a piping judge and an M.C. for concerts. As an MLA, he was often the province’s representative at the Games.   

“I was always happy to represent the province, but I think I had more fun coming as a piper. The connections and friendships made have been a joy and having the opportunity to watch young pipers develop – some of them into world-class pipers – has been an honour.”  

By the time MacIsaac moved to New Glasgow, where he would be in the insurance business for decades, he had already instructed bands in Cape Breton. He quickly got involved with Pictou County girls pipe bands  

Years later, when his son Ian was taking piping lessons and his daughter was learning drumming, New Glasgow’s Ceilidh Pipe Band was losing its instructor.  

“I agreed to take over the band, but I had a condition. Up to then, it had been a girls-only pipe band, as were many at the time, but I told the mothers’ group they had to drop the girls-only business. If I was going to instruct the band, I wanted to be able to play with them. Within a few years, we had as many boys as girls or close to it.” 

Jack remembers taking the Ceilidh band to the Antigonish Highland Games for the first time.  

“It may have been just down the highway but it was still the place to be and the place where memories were made.”

(article adapted from one written by Rosalie MacEachren for The News)