The torch helps, but you really don't need any extra light to see the difference.

If the Joey Smallwood who stands forever staring into his bookcase at the interpretive centre that sits on the banks of the Gambo River could only turn around and stare, instead, out the park that also bears the Smallwood name, the life-size model would be grinning from ear to ear.

It turns out he was right - only out by half a century or more.

On a day when the Olympic Torch journeys up the Avalon Peninsula to the birthplace of Joseph R. Smallwood and beyond, it is clear that much has changed in recent times. One who is here on his first visit remarks on the fine roads; the other who has been coming here off and on for more than 30 years, can recall when driving the Trans-Canada Highway was like being in a slot car, the wheels caught in the deep ruts and potholes left by truck traffic.

To the one who goes back to the 70s - indeed all the way back to interviewing Joey Smallwood when the then "Only Living Father of Confederation" was still capable of packing more words into a mouth than a sentence can hold - the differences are astonishing.

There are new houses going up where once old were being left to fall down on their own. There is fresh paint, new enterprise, new trucks. Even the clothes are brighter - Smallwood Park a flame of red itself as the torch whips through town on its way to Gander and Grand Falls/Windsor.

Though the conversation would still have you believe Cod is King, it is other royalties that count for so much these days: the provincial take on the oil and gas being developed offshore, the personal take on oil and gas produced out West.

"We call it ‘The Long Commute,'" says Dennis Flynn as the torch passes through the remarkable tunnel through the rock at Brigus. "There's a long culture in Newfoundland of the men going away to work and the money coming back."

It would be naïve to say there is only prosperity where once there was so much poverty, but not at all wrong to say that the difference between Newfoundland being an "have-not" province in the past and a "have" today is reflected in the growing confidence of a people more used to growing disappointed.

"There's a very strong sense of place here," says Flynn. "A very strong identity. We tend to feel life's too short for a mediocre response."

Joe Maynard, who has come to Gambo from his home in Flatrock to watch his 15-year-old daughter, Miranda Walsh, run with the torch, says he isn't seeing much "mediocre" in his line of work: insurance.

"A few years ago, we were insuring houses for $100 - $150,000. Now it's more like $300,000. And we got houses going up all around for $400,000, $500,000, even more. Now that might not seem like much where you're from, but it's a huge difference here."

Credit for such relative prosperity and rising confidence invariably goes straight to Danny Williams, the irrepressible premier who has taken on everything from the prime minister to the big oil companies.

"Danny does a lot for Newfoundland," says Gary Whelan, an information technology worker who lives in nearby Colliers. "He's a Newfoundlander through and through."

Joey Smallwood often said that about himself. He was the one who, back in the early 1950s, told Newfoundlanders they must "develop of perish." He was the one who believed that the fish and minerals and timber of Newfoundland and Labrador - he never even mentioned oil or gas - would turn his province into "the new Alaska of North America."

But the talk fizzled. He took on a special economic adviser, Dr. Alfred Valdmanis, who had once been Latvia's finance minister, and turned him loose on new development ideas. Valdmanis, who lacked for nothing in confidence himself, proudly pronounced that as of the spring of 1952, "there won't be further unemployment in Newfoundland."

The ideas were legion - a glove factory, a battery plant, a leather goods factory, a boot factory, a chocolate factory - and fizzled one by one until, over time, the province became a symbol for unemployment. And when the fishery failed, a symbol for disaster, it seemed.

But it didn't happen. Some say Danny Williams made the difference. Some say world energy prices made the difference. Some say a bit of Irish luck finally reached the shores here. Likely all three and more can take whatever credit is due.

Not long ago they talked of the population - roughly a half million on a land mass nearly the size of Japan - shrinking to a point where only the old and helpless would remain. And after that maybe no one at all.

But no more.

"I had a doctor in just last week," says Joe Maynard, the insurer. "He's building a new place here. He's moving here from Saudi Arabia, he says, because he thinks Newfoundland is ‘a place of opportunity.'"

Perhaps not the "new Alaska."

But certainly not the old Newfoundland.