Time to bid adieu
After writing this column for 45 years, it’s time to say so long.
This wild ride started back in 1972 at the National Post, or “Der Cornwall Handelsblatt,” as it was then called. I was seven and working the paper delivery wagon, a horse-drawn affair that stank of manure and whiskey. I toted newspaper bundles from 4:30 to 7:00 a.m. at which time my coworkers headed to the whiskey cart and I, “trente sous” in hand, hurried off to my day job schlepping bird seed at the Old Port.
Steadily, I worked my way up the ranks. From delivery boy to delivery lad to delivery man. There’s no Post job I haven’t filled, failed at, and then found my way in. Thimblerigger, lamplight tender, whiskey ice cutter, quill trimmer and finally: reporter.
I’ll never forget my first day on the job. I fell prey to the old “hot log” hazing ritual.
“Boy,” called a young Conrad Black. Not a lord yet, Black drew “Gobsworth,” a cartoon strip about an erudite owl with rage issues and an addiction to lasagna. “Have you signed into the log?” I shook my head “no.” “It’s of burning importance,” he said and then, with a wink to his inkstained cronies, deposited a burning wood log down my trousers, scalding my butter tarts and wounding my pride. Those days of hot logging were the hardest 17 months of my life. But in many ways, the most rewarding.
The first column I wrote was about quaalude sales at Gordon’s. For those of you too young to know, it was the Canadian equivalent of Studio 54. Long, sweaty, drug-fueled nights were spent boogying to the music of Ann Murray. The drugs were taken to endure the music.
Each subsequent column was better than the last. A bare knuckle fist- fight with Morley Callaghan. Cigarette chicken with Rene Levesque. Mordechai Richler teaching me “shots n’ punches,” a game in which I’d buy him single malt whiskey shots and he’d punch me in the butter tarts after each one. And of course, the column that won me my first Landsberg Award: a profile of the woman who taught Canadian aviator Punch Dickins to fly. I’ve been privileged to tell the stories of so many great Canadians: fathers of the confederation, James Cockburn and Robert B. Dickey, Nova Scotian politician Thomas Dixson, women’s rights activist Ella Cora Hind, and so many more.
Much has changed during my 45 year vigil – the demise of the steam operated stenotype, the six-martini brunch, the horse-drawn office coffee cart and the Monday edition. Until two years ago I didn’t even have an email address, preferring to write my column with a sharpened HB pencil and then dictating it into the phone to my editor, a hunched, bespectacled man rumoured not to have left his office since the October Crisis and said to bathe each morning with a bucket of Canadian Club and a balled up newspaper (Editor’s note: Only parts of this are true).
People ask what I’ll do in retirement. Should you give a good gosh darn, I hope to travel, improve my boudoir photography skills, learn computers and spend more time with my adult children.
45 years is a long time and even the best things come to an end. I’d like to thank each and every one of you for the hundreds of thousands of letters you’ve written over the years – the death threats and brownie recipes, the huzzahs and the oh-hell-nahzzahs. It’s been truly humbling. And I thank you. You’ve made the odd sober moment slightly less painful. I hope I’ve done the same for you.