Powell River News - darkroom technician

The call from the Powell River News city editor to my Vancouver rooming house a few days after bending elbows at the Vancouver Press Club was welcomed, but somewhere along the way wires got crossed without being corrected.

During my five-hour drive to Powell River, with two ferry trips along the way, I wondered if the 10,000-plus community on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast would be a good news town.

It was a scenic and rejuvenate late-fall drive after the long trek west and the two weeks of employment uncertainty. My funds were low and there was still one $150 payment to go on my 1965 Chevy.

Well, Al Dawson's lesson at the Globe and Mail to never "assume" came back to bite me in the butt. The job at the News was darkroom technician, not reporter.

Told the city editor about my Thomson reporting experience in Ontario, but he said they didn't need more reporters in the small coastal community. The reporters were young locals who didn't look like they would be quitting any time soon.

My basic darkroom training in Ontario qualified me for the job, but the urge was to write, not mix chemicals and spend my working days in a darkroom. Two weeks later, quit the job and headed back to Vancouver where the odds of landing a reporting job were better.

On my return trip to Vancouver, police stopped me for a faulty muffler, which had to be repaired ASAP. That depleted my bankroll. In Vancouver, I was down to sleeping in the front seat of my car and eating once a day when a Help Wanted ad for a reporter in nearby Ladner caught my eye

The ad included a telephone number for The Optimist. Made a quick call and set up an interview the next day with the owners, Edgar Dunning and Ernest Bexley. The vibes were good and they hired me on the spot. It was an early Christmas gift and the start of an interesting job.

Next blog: The Ladner Optimist - reporter etc.

Sudbury Daily Star - reporter

In retrospect, joining the Sudbury Star news staff in the middle of winter was probably not the best move for this Toronto-born-and-raised southerner.

It was cold enough in this Northern Ontario city to freeze my beard, stall my car and make weekend escapes to Toronto quite hazardous.

But there was something different about this Thomson daily newspaper. It appeared to be autonomous, free from Thomson budget restraints and newspaper layout guidelines.

The Sudbury Star did not feel, look or act like any other Thomson newspaper and that was a bonus. Perhaps it was compensation for having to live and work in Sudbury.

George Grace, city editor, reporters Brian Gagnon, Don DeGurse and others helped me fit in quickly and within a couple of weeks, Grace assigned me to the court beat, which included a weekly Court Beat column.

On quiet court days, assignments would include police calls. Vividly remember standing in snow with a frozen camera waiting for a murder victim to be removed in a body bag. Frostbite was threatening my toes. Spring could not arrive fast enough.

Sudbury being a mining town, one story the Star wouldn't publish was a negative study that concluded Sudbury had a higher than average number of lost dogs because chemicals in the air dulled their sense of smell.

The place for news staff to be after working hours was the Nickel Range Hotel. It had a lounge, where the occasional Toronto band - Crowbar for one - would perform. And it had a beer room, where the father of Sudbury-born Alex Trebek often held court proudly talking about his son the TV star.

In the summer of 1968, Grace asked me if I would run the Espanola Standard while the sister-paper's publisher was on vacation. He didn't have to ask twice. Accommodations were in the Espanola Hotel and meals were included in my first-ever expense account.

Maybe it was my Thomson training, where you had to see daylight through carbon paper to get a new sheet, and paper clips were used sparingly, but I never abused the luxury of having an expense account. Was always as frugal as a Thomson-trained accountant.

My favourite story while in Espanola was the discovery a small cemetery for three, possibly four, German prisoners of war that had been abandoned and overgrown with weeds and bushes. The markers had been damaged by shotgun pellets. It was a pathetic sight.

J.R. Meakes, the Sudbury Star publisher, followed up on my story with a photograph atop a lengthy editorial and a headline reading "Is This a Measure Of Our Compassion?"

The editorial said, in part: "It is a disgraceful contrast to the carefully tended, neat plots of the Allied war cemeteries in Europe, including Germany. Even isolated graves of our servicemen who died in action or as prisoners are well care for through arrangements made by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission with the West German or other governments."

The story and editorial shamed Espanola officials into clearing the weeds and bushes and repairing damaged headstones. Always wondered if the upkeep continued. Probably not, but always felt good about the story, the editorial and the outcome.

One of the more exciting political assignments was covering a Pierre Trudeau election campaign speech in Sudbury in 1968. Turdeaumania was peaking and it appeared certain he was destined to become the next prime minister that fall.

As a sidebar to the campaign stop colour story, decided to test the security detail by running up eight flights of stairs at Trudeau's hotel after his speech and opening the door to his floor. Trudeau, flanked by two constables, were walking a few feet away with their backs toward me.

One constable turned around, looked startled, and then noticed the camera slung over my shoulder and my Sudbury Star press tag. The constable who approached me was not amused. Trudeau casually kept walking toward his room after glancing back briefly.

Speaking of Sudbury police, marijuana in the late 1960's wasn't tolerated in Northern Ontario and someone in our non-media circle of friends was arrested for possession of a small amount of pot. His sentence was 18 months in reformatory. He was devastated, as were family and friends.

The weather and isolation aside, working at the Sudbury Star was great experience, nine months well spent in personal and professional growth. But the time had come to follow another dream - working as a reporter in Vancouver.

In the two months before quitting the Sudbury Star, numerous letters were sent to British Columbia newspapers seeking employment. Most of the replies repeated a common thread: newspaper jobs in B.C. were going to local applicants.

So in the fall of 1968, with one payment to go on my 1965 Chevy, a few hundred dollars in my pocket, and no job, filled my car with belongings, said farewell to family and friends, and headed west full of anticipation and confidence.

The trans-Canada journey was eventful, with a job offer from the Winnipeg Free Press during a stop at the local press club, a near-collision with a huge moose, a minor car breakdown and a hair-raising first drive through the Rockies.

Reached Vancouver with enough money for a week's stay at a one-star hotel, where hookers came and went all hours of the day. Moved into a comfortable rooming house a week later.

Press clubs have all but vanished in Canada, but in the fall of 1968, the posh Vancouver Press Club in the Georgia Hotel was a prosperous watering hole for thirsty media types. It was a chance conversation at the press club that got me my first job in B.C.

Not at all what I expected, but it was a job.

Next blog: Powell River News - darkroom technician

Brampton Daily Times - reporter

My first positive reaction to the new Brampton Daily Times in the spring of 1965 was how the name rolled off the tongue much easier than the Brampton Times and Conservator.

Brampton, known as the Rose Capital of Canada, was a quiet place to live in the mid-1960's. The minimum security Ontario Training Centre was a mile or two down the road, but the offenders caused minimal disruption to daily life.

It felt like home and it was time to show the Globe and Mail's Robert Turnbull that his instincts about me having what it takes to be a reporter were accurate.

For the next two years, my mixed bag of duties at the Brampton Daily Times included reporter, photographer, sports editor and even one week as the women's page editor.

The long hours were welcomed and after working at four newspapers within a year, the confidence was finally there for me to try anything and everything. Covered the police beat, the courts, wrote a For Sports Sake column, did street interviews.

Even wore a mini-skirt for a photo story about dresses being proposed for men's fashions. Friends and readers pleaded with me to stick to pants. (Photo to the left: You be the judge. :-) Maybe it's the knees.)

It was strictly pants for a Young Liberal Association convention - as a card-carrying member and a reporter - in Ottawa in 1965. A memorable event that included a firm Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson handshake.

Didn't know a thing about lacrosse, which was a big draw in Brampton, but as sports editor had to cover the games. During the first or second night in the Brampton Arena press box, the local radio announcer suddenly told his audience I would be talking to him about the game after a commercial break. Bowed out of that one quickly by starting to cough a lot.

On Thursday, August 27, 1965, while sitting at the typewriter at about 6:30 p.m., fire trucks with their sirens wailing drove by the front of the newspaper. Got on the phone to the nearby Brampton fire department.

"Daily Times here, where's the fire?" I asked.

"At the Daily Times," said the dispatcher.

Hung up, sniffed around the editorial office but couldn't smell smoke. But pushing open a heavy fire door to the mailing room and press room at the back of the building revealed an inferno. Firefighters had driven to the back of the building off George Street and they quickly brought the fire under control. It took awhile for me to live that one down.

As a young, self-taught reporter, Brampton was a perfect fit. The paper was generous with bylines, always good for the ego. A lot of smaller newspapers refused to give staffers news story bylines or photo credits fearing they would lose them to larger newspapers.

With Little Stevie Wonder and Rompin' Ronnie Hawkins on my met a celebrity list, I thought it would be one-upmanship on the competing Brampton Guardian to catch some big name acts in Toronto on my nights off.

One call to Stan Obodiac, PR legend at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, cleared me for press coverage of the Beatles on August 17, 1966, and the Rolling Stones on June 29, 1966, and many other acts in between.

Snapped numerous photos during the Beatles press conference and concert and got backstage for photos of the Rolling Stones exiting a police van and relaxing during an intermission.

Both times, the same Daily Times city editor refused to publish my photos because they did not contain "local" content. What she was saying was push a local female fan into the shot of the Beatles or the Stones and it would be published. (Photo to right: Mick Jagger takes time out for a Coke and a smoke.)

To say the least, her extreme approach to "local" content was annoying, but for a 1967 Johnny Cash press conference at O'Keefe Centre and Sammy Davis Jr. and Donovan photo ops at the same venue, I got local young female fans in the photos. They got published.

Most of my Beatles and Stones photos, along with 1960's Mariposa Folk Festival concert photos, gathered dust and remained unpublished for years.

The Brampton Daily Times run from the spring of 1965 to the fall of 1967 was very productive and rewarding, but it was time to move on to a larger daily newspaper.

Doole again spoke up for me and got me a job at the Sudbury Star.

On the road again . . .

Next blog: Sudbury Daily Star - reporter

Oakville Journal Record - reporter

Another stop in the rocky road to a stable newspaper job.

But my three-month stay here, under the thumb of local news legend John Strimas, did give me the opportunity to write my first editorial, a cliched effort to be sure, and to run a news bureau, on my own, in nearby Milton.

Well, it wasn't a physical bureau. My office was a desk, chair and Underwood typewriter in the screened front porch of my second-floor farmhouse flat atop the Halton Hills mountain range. After the stories were written, I would leave them with a fellow staffer in Milton, who commuted to Oakville each day.

Milton, where the local weekly, the Milton Champion, was well-established, was a tough town for daily news. Nothing much happened day to day, so to justify the bureau, you had to be creative and productive day and night.


One of my favourite feature stories in Milton left me with an indelible appreciation of how the hearing impaired learn to cope. It was an afternoon spent at the Ontario School for the Deaf, now known as the Ernest C. Drury School.

(Years later, after befriending a deaf nightclub dancer, I knew from that memorable session with teachers and students in Milton that she could dance to the rhythm of the music by feeling the vibrations in the floor.)

My first and last experience with wakeup pills occurred one busy day in Milton. Exhausted from morning and afternoon stories, I popped a pill that was supposed to keep me awake for an evening assignment. It knocked me out for six hours. Fortunately, my day copy saved my butt.

Being responsible for covering Milton day and night took its toll after three months. The Journal Record was invaluable experience on my path to whatever. I quit, moved back home to Toronto and wondered about my future.

The tally was Chatham, Brampton, Woodstock and Oakville reporting jobs - all within a year. But what I didn't know a year earlier, I knew then. I would be a working reporter again.

In the months that followed, I did odd jobs, including waiter at Fran's restaurants in Toronto, which I had done off and on in the early 1960's, and selling family portraits door to door.

In the late summer of 1964, Sinnott News, a Scarborough company that delivered a wide variety of magazines to corner stores, hired me as an assistant driver/delivery rep.

I had no idea one of the Sinnott delivery routes would eventually take us to a variety store in Brampton, only steps from the Brampton Times and Conservator. A passing reporter stopped to say hello. I slipped him a Playboy magazine and asked him to say hello to Bill Doole for me.

Before leaving, the reporter, with the Playboy tucked under his arm, asked if I knew the paper was going to become a daily newspaper in the spring and they would be hiring. It was music to my ears. A letter and an anxious phone call to Doole had positive results.

I didn't say anything to Sinnott news about my new pending reporting job until weeks later when they asked if I wanted to be trained as a fulltime driver. To be fair, I mentioned my reporting goals and they kept me on as an assistant for a few more weeks.

And then it was the countdown to Day One at the Brampton daily.

Had very positive feelings about working for the new Brampton Daily Times, across from Perk's Family Kitchen and a few doors down from Murray's Bakery.

Next blog: Brampton Daily Times - reporter

Woodstock Sentinel Review - reporter

The big advantage of being groomed as a reporter in the 1960's was the abundance of newspapers in small towns willing to hire you on the spot. One phone call from Brampton's Bill Doole and I was on my way to this London-area town.

With a whole six months of daily and weekly experience under my belt, here I was at a larger daily newspaper, making slightly more money and with still so much to learn about reporting, photography and style.

While my lack of a high school or university degree was a drawback as a reporter, I discovered that asking numerous questions to gain the knowledge of a subject was more beneficial than thinking I knew it all and not asking as many questions.

Literally, almost every assignment was a classroom and all of the people being interviewed were my teachers. People who said I was a good listener did not know I wasn't talking much because I had little knowledge of the topic being discussed.

Faking my way through interviews was frustrating at times, especially when it came to politics. On my first day as a cub reporter in Chatham, I did not know the three levels of government. Picture not knowing that in daily discussions today.

Fellow reporters in Woodstock included Tim Foley, who would move on to the CBC and the Toronto Star before becoming an Anglican Church priest with a pulpit on Bloor St. W. He was helpful in getting me settled into the daily newspaper routine again.

One timely lesson learned in Woodstock was do not rely on a reel-to-reel tape recorder for a lengthy interview. It took forever to start, stop, rewind, start, stop, rewind to complete the feature story. It was back to scribbling notes and hoping for the best when it came to read them.

My sister, Carolyn, was a Pitman-trained legal secretary and she suggested taking a shorthand course. Just couldn't conquer it, so I developed my own shorthand, using phonetic spellings and abbreviations. It served me well, along with years of perfecting poke and hunt two-finger typing.


In February of 1964, the Sentinel Review introduced a Teen Time section and the boss said talk to folks about this new British rock band called the Beatles. Red Young, a local music store manager, said the demand for Beatles records was hot and heavy.

The lead of my story read something like "local teens are running, not walking to the music store to buy Beatles records." Young said it was the start of something big in the music business and how right he was.

When not partying into the wee hours after work, I was hunched over my typewriter writing and rewriting stories wanting them to be perfect. The late hours and missing the 9 a.m. starting time once too often brought out the Donald Trump in my boss.

"We have to let you go," he said, noting my tawdry starting times. That was less traumatic than "you're fired," but the end result was the same. I was jobless in Woodstock.

But Thomson newspapers being Thomson newspapers, it was only a matter of weeks before the Oakville Journal Record, another daily newspaper, hired me. Love those Thomson guys.

Next blog: Oakville Journal Record- reporter

Brampton Times & Conservator - reporter

In the fall of 1963, at age 21, it was welcome to Brampton, Rose Capital of Canada, a lacrosse fan's delight, Gage Park, the Thunderbird Inn and an easy-living population of under 30,000.

For the pre-job interview, William "Bill" Doole asked me to sit down at one of the Underwood typewriters and write an off-the-cuff news story about a house fire. My "Dog Saves Family" yarn got me the $32.50-a-week job.

The Brampton Times and Conservator was a Thomson weekly newspaper, located on Queen Street across from Perk's Family Restaurant and a few doors from Murray's, the town's favourite bakery. All departments shared the single-storey building.

Didn't know it at the time, but a distant cousin, William Albert "Bert" Roadhouse, had been a reporter at the Brampton Conservator in the late 1800's, before the merger of the Conservator and the Times. He later became Ontario's minister of agriculture.

Also didn't know that fellow reporter Michael Enright would move on to become a long-time, celebrated CBC Radio show host.

One of my first assignments in Brampton was a man-on-the-street feature and the first question was about birth control. What normally takes about 30 minutes to find, interview and photograph five people, took almost two hours. Few people wanted to talk about birth control. In a nutshell, Brampton was, indeed, conservative.

The camera of choice in 1963 must have been the Grafix because that was what we were using at the Brampton paper. On November 13, 1963, slung the Grafix over my shoulder and stuffed my pockets with bulbs and negative slides and headed to nearby Norval.

It was time to catch up to Rompin' Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, a young rock band I had watched frequently in downtown Toronto nightclubs for the price of a beer. This time, a camera and a press pass cleared the way for photographs and an interview.

Hawkins, then and now, is a reporter's dream when it comes to quotable quotes and going out of his way to pose for pictures with local fans. With him on a small stage that night, were Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Levon Helm. Still have negs from that gig.

embedded in my brain is the exact moment I heard that John Kennedy had been shot. I was at my desk typing a story when the paper's ad salesman walked in the front door and shouted the news. The city editor laughed and continued working on local news stories.

Never knew whether the city editor laughed because she thought the ad salesman was joking, or she thought it amusing that someone would shoot a U.S. president. But she was big on "local" news and Kennedy, on that Nov. 22, 1963, wasn't local news.

Returning home, the trauma of the day continued with hours of television coverage and recording the news on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, which I kept. The story of the decade and reporters at the Brampton Times and Conservator spent it writing local news.

Speaking of local news, while Kiwanis, Rotary and Lions club luncheon and dinner meetings were a good source of nutrition for bachelor reporters, the occasional guest speaker was memorable. Enter William Davis, Brampton's own provincial Tory minister of education and future Ontario premier.

As a guest speaker, Davis would approach local reporters before he spoke and hand them prepared "safe" speeches. Dry stuff, generally. Davis would then stray from the prepared speech and pepper his address with much more interesting commentary. Not knowing better, I went with the prepared speeches thinking that was the way it was done.

My introduction to the word "ecology" was at a public meeting to discuss expansion of Toronto International Airport and increased jet traffic. Tongue-tied, I stood up, fumbled the name of the newspaper, then asked about jet noise. One of the guest speakers thanked me for raising "ecology" issues and talked about airport noise research.

I also covered court cases in the grand old courthouse on Main Street, including juvenile court, with the permission of Judge H.T.G. Andrews. Reporters said the H.T.G. stood for Hard To Get because he was so elusive with the media, but in my books he was always approachable.

After several months of working at the weekly newspaper - and a verbal debate over whether the death of Toronto Mayor Donald Summerville should have been on the front page, instead of inside - Bill Doole thought I should be working for a daily newspaper.

In the spring of 1964, it was off the Woodstock Sentinel Review. But a return to Brampton was in the cards, thanks again to Doole.

Next blog: Woodstock Sentinel Review - reporter

Chatham Daily News - cub reporter

Three eventful and enlightening years as a Globe and Mail copy boy had come to an end, or so I thought. It was off to Chatham, Ontario, a small friendly town not far from the Windsor/Detroit border.

Within minutes of walking into the Chatham Daily News in the summer of 1963 for my first day as a cub reporter, the city editor handed me a heavy Grafix camera, a pile of negative plates and a pocketful of flash bulbs.

"Go take some photographs," he said, leaving what was to be photographed up to me.

In this age of palm-sized digital cameras, the Grafix was the opposite - a cumbersome challenge. Snap a 4x4 photo, pull out the plate, flip it over, slide it back in, put in a fresh flash bulb, take another photo, pocket that slide and used bulb and repeat the process.

For my first on-the-job photo experience, snapped the exterior of the Chatham Daily News (apparently it hasn't changed in 40 years), some street scenes etc. What followed was a crash course in developing the film in the newspaper's small darkroom. Still have those first negatives.

There is something about being in your early 20's and eager to learn. Money and hours on the job didn't matter when you worked for smalltown Thomson newspapers. No unions to dictate what reporters could or couldn't do, so we did it all and appreciated the training.

The important thing for Chatham Daily News reporters was the tavern next door, where we wound down after our 10 to 12-hour days. Plus the Rotary and Lions Club dinner meetings we covered to get a decent meal at least once a week.

One of my first assignments was to interview a local minister about his work in the community. He was quite liberal. In fact, within minutes he was talking about pornographic films and how he endorsed screening them for young people to illustrate how Satan works.

Holy Hearst, I thought, this is going to be a fascinating job. Within the year, the talkative reverend was involved in a widely-reported sex scandal and was all but banished from the community.

Chatham officials were very youth-oriented but in a more positive direction than the wayward minister. There were several arenas, an outdoor community swimming pool and an activity centre to keep teens in the small community occupied.

And there was rock and roll, at pool parties and at Chatham Memorial Community Centre.

The young, blind black performer sitting next to me on a small bench inside the arena for an interview had just turned 11. Many of the 1,200 excited young fans surrounded us and expressed their love for his music and took pictures. He was talkative and agreeable to posing with fans for photos.

That was how Little Stevie Wonder, a wonder boy from Motown Detroit, spent the 20-minute intermission at his soldout Canadian debut. It was the launch of a Canadian tour and more than 40 years later, he is a music icon. My first celebrity encounter, but not the last.

For a small town, this green cub reporter was loving the assignments and the community, but I felt a need to learn more about newspaper style and gain some more confidence. Fortunately, after three months in Chatham, the Globe and Mail allowed me to return to my copy boy job.

In a touch of irony, the reporter who replaced me at the Chatham Daily News was killed in a train crash while driving to a house fire.

In the fall of 1963, after much more guidance from helpful Globe staffers and a couple of news assignments that got published, Robert Turnbull again got me a job at a Thomson newspaper - the weekly Brampton Times and Conservator, with William "Bill" Doole at the helm.

Brampton would be an education for me on many fronts, one involving "local" news guidelines and The Beatles.

Next blog: Brampton Times and Conservator