So, while he hadn't planned on doing a second book, Long rounded up his committee of his wife, Joyce, Doug Caverson and Boris Dimitroff and began once again the onerous task of trying to identify everyone in the photographs.

"It helps if you're an oldtimer," the 85-year-old Long said with a laugh about the job of trying to put names to faces.

"One of us would usually know someone in the picture and they would know someone else and so on. "I think we have 95 per cent of the people identified."

"Sometimes it would take as long as three weeks to get the names for one picture," said Joyce.

The finished product, A Century of Sports in Niagara Falls Book II, was launched last weekend at the Niagara Falls Public Library.

The book features more than 300 pictures and more than 3,000 names and dates as far back as the 1910 Niagara Falls Briton City Hockey League champs, complete with four-legged mascot to just a few months ago with a footnote under the picture of the 2002 A.N. Myer senior boy's OFSAA senior basketball championship team that mentions the team's connection to the Brock Badgers recent Canadian championship.

Long said the task was a labour of love.

"All the fellas are in the book and we would sit around the table and look at the pictures and tell stories. It was very nostalgic," said Long. "Finally, I said we've got to get away from all this."

A native of Niagara Falls, Long was an all-around athlete as a youngster, excelling at track and field and he can fondly remember spending two weeks at Lake Couchiching training with Olympic athletes before the Ontario games where he earned a third in the pole vault.

He excelled at hockey and played in the minors before returning to Niagara Falls where he played senior hockey and coached with the Niagara Falls Minor Hockey Association. Long taught high school in Fort Erie and Niagara Falls and became a technical director and later a consultant with the Niagara South Board of Education before retiring in 1985.

Despite looking at thousands of pictures over the past few years, there are a couple Long would like to see that he hasn't yet come across.

One is of the 1939 and 1940 Ontario finalists St. Ann's (Catholic church) baseball team he was a member of and another is Poplar Park, located where the hospital is today.

"We played all our games at Poplar Park," said Long. "I've been trying for five or six years now to find one photo of Poplar Park and not one person has one. It was lined with poplar trees and had a big playing field, down below there was a softball diamond and a running track for horses. It was a great place.

"All the oldtimers I know played there and no one has a picture. There has to be something, we even checked the archives at the church."A Century of Sports in Niagara Falls Book II is available at at any branch of the Niagara Falls library and sells for $25.