150 AND OUT
People presented in Capital Voices are our friends, neighbours, people we see everyday
“NEXT TIME I HAVE TO READ S--- LIKE THIS I WILL QUIT MY SUBSCRIPTION TO THE CITIZEN THAT I’VE HAD SINCE 1960 – ENOUGH ABOUT DEACHMAN AND HIS FREAKS.” — An anonymous Citizen reader
Performance evaluation reports, good and bad, come from all quarters in this business, and much more readily from readers since the advent of such conveniences as email and website comment boards. This particular plaudit, however, came the old-fashioned way, and you have to admire the mystery author’s tenacity.
He (an assumption, admittedly) first purposefully enabled the “caps lock” on his keyboard, wrote the full-bodied message, printed it, put it in an envelope — along with a clipping of the specific Capital Voices instalment that finally triggered his call to action — found a stamp, affixed it to the envelope, walked to a mailbox and sent it off.
And so arrived one of the many, many responses — ranging in tone from wonderfully enthusiastic to, well, much less so — I received over the last year regarding this Capital Voices series
Starting out on Parliament Hill on Canada Day 2016, I travelled throughout the region, asking people to tell me their stories, big and small, funny and sad — stories about matters for which they cared, whether it was a decadesold memory, a lifelong passion or occupation, or simply that day’s preoccupation.
I was not, it should be noted, looking for testimonials about how terrific Canada is, nor even necessarily stories you would call upbeat. Capital Voices was not intended to showcase inspirational leaders nor those who have been deemed to have measurably improved the lives of others.
What I did hope, was that it might serve as one of many possible representative crosssections of the people here in the Ottawa region, similar to how, say, 150 MRI images won’t tell you everything about a person’s body, but will certainly show you SOME things, and occasionally something significant.
The Voice the aforementioned angry reader found so contentious that day belonged to Maryam Majdi, a young woman whose doctoral degree from McGill University in neuropharmacology, I’m guessing, did little in his mind to offset her interest in tattoos. I met her at the Ottawa-Gatineau Tattoo Expo last November, and while I have no real interest in changing Mr. Angry Subscriber’s mind — it is, after all, the sheer breadth and variety of both stories and opinions in our city that prompted this series in the first place — it perhaps bears noting that the annual three-day convention at the Hilton Lac Leamy attracts thousands of ink enthusiasts, suggesting either that tattoos are no longer solely the domain of sailors, convicts and circus strongmen, or that this city is spilling over with just those very people. Either way, their stories deserve to be told; after all, I’ve always thought that if a newspaper fails to reflect the community that it purports to represent, you might as well pack up your notepads and go home.
Maryam’s story, published on March 29, was No. 56 in this series. A day earlier, Citizen readers were introduced to Gilbert Malboeuf, a retired plumbing and heating worker who, over a beer at the Carleton Tavern, talked about some of the Ottawa landmarks he’d helped build, including the National Arts Centre, and the asbestosis that had been his career’s reward.
On the day I broke beer with Gil, I also met Dan Brown, who was selling Christmas trees in a Canadian Tire parking lot in Barrhaven. He shared a yuletide memory from when he was eight years old, a story that first broke your heart, then mended it a bit simply through Dan’s optimism. “To me,” he said, “if you’re not happy, you’re not going to have a life that at the end you’ll say you liked.”
The day after Dan’s story ran in the paper, Alex Perrier’s was published. Alex, who organized a club at Algonquin College for enthusiasts of the very participatory Dance Dance Revolution video game, was demonstrating his considerable moves on the dance floor when I encountered him. And so on, the stories went.
The series evolved as it unfolded. Until we started publishing them, at the end of January, the effort had largely been a solitary one (with occasional input from some colleagues), and I had encountered nearly 90 stories. As they began to appear in print and online, however, readers started submitting their own suggestions — more, in fact, than I could get to, and in some cases more than I wanted. But readers’ input brought some amazing stories to the fore, such as Jack Calderwood’s recollection of a live hand grenade that he and two friends tragically encountered on Good Friday 1945, a story brought to my attention by his granddaughter, Kristi. (Jack had more than one tale to tell, including one about delivering the newspaper to both prime minister Louis St. Laurent and federal Conservative opposition leader George Drew, who lived in the same downtown apartment building. At Christmas, St. Laurent gave Calderwood a one-dollar tip, while the more frugal Drew gave him nothing. “To this day,” Calderwood joked, “I’ve always voted Liberal”).
Mildred Beechey, meanwhile, sent an email from Florida, describing how she and her sister spent their weekly allowance in the 1960s. Elana Patterson phoned out of the blue one day to talk about meeting the Queen Mother’s illegitimate sister. Gihane Abboud called the newsroom just to voice her frustration over essentially feeling she had no voice in matters about which she cared. And two people I profiled in this series, Ottawa Fury fan and noisemaker Stephane Brisson-Merrick and school bus driver Gwen Bellefeuille, each suggested another, bringing long-distance river swimmer David Merpaw and dairy farmer Janet Acres Smiley to these pages. Freaks, every one.
But something else in the angry subscriber’s letter caught my attention. His opening salvo — “NEXT TIME I HAVE TO READ S--- LIKE THIS…” (and I’ll admit he used no such euphemistic dashes in his note) — suggests that he somehow HAD to read the series. He didn’t, of course; he could just as easily have passed over it, similar to how I’ve skipped the comics ever since Calvin and Hobbes tobogganed off that page in 1995.
Hopefully, though, enough readers felt compelled to read Capital Voices, not for inspiration or news or any up-with people sentiment, but because the people it presented are our neighbours, our friends and the people we encounter every day. They make up this city, and every one of them had a story to tell.
bdeachman@postmedia.com (Editor’s note: Following its sesquicentennial run of 150 instalments, Capital Voices will continue in the Citizen as a recurring feature. Sorry about that.)