Former editor remembers friend and mentor
Imet George Maclaren in the summer of 1977. He and several partners had just purchased the Sherbrooke Record from Conrad Black, Peter White and David Radler who were ready to move on to bigger endeavours. George was looking for an editor looking for a challenge. A mutual friend, Gazette columnist Glen Allen, told George to give me a call. I was a former Gazette reporter and desker, now assistant city editor at the Montreal Star, looking for escape options. Everyone at the Star knew the pressmen were headed for a strike. What we didn’t know was the strike would kill Montreal’s largest newspaper.
Our initial conversation wasn’t auspicious. George, a parsimonious Townships Scot if ever there was one, proposed to pay me half of what I was making at the Star. But I’d be the editor of Quebec’s third-largest English daily newspaper, with a car and expenses — and I could sign my own editorials. “Jamie, come on down for a visit,” he drawled.
In 1977, the Record occupied a former fishing tackle factory in an industrial park. The Goss press occupied a quarter of the building. The production department took up another big whack of space. Sales had the front office. The newsroom was jammed into the southwest corner against a back wall. It was walled off from the rest of the building with sheets of plywood. The desks were ancient refugees from the Record’s posh Wellington Street home during the Bassett era. A bank of Teletype machines churned out wirecopy, most of which we reversed and wound into spools hung on clothes-hanger holders so we could use the blank side to hammer out our stories.
It was a low-cost operation. I’d heard stories about just how knife-edge from Record alumni Hugh Doherty, Paul Waters, Hubert Bauch and Scott Abbott. George knew how to get to me. “You decide what stories to chase, what photos to run — everything. It’s your newsroom.”
That was the clincher for me. George and I had three wonderful years running the Record. We broke national stories — Gerald Bull’s big guns, Charles Marion’s bogus kidnap, Saad Gabr’s attempted North Hatley buyout — with the same signed local editorials George vowed when he bought the Record. I’m sure some of the stories we broke cost us advertising, but to his eternal credit, George never brought it up. His only grumble was with John Mackay’s court reporting from Sweetsburg Ward. “Why must we run the names of people convicted of drunk driving,” he asked me. “If we did it everywhere we cover, it would be one thing. But we’re not. Therefore it’s not fair.” He could have ordered me to stop running the names. Instead he made his lawyer’s pitch for fairness and convinced me to stop.we shared the same reverence for what the Record represented — an essential component of the Townships English community. We both read the ‘bush notes,’ the dismissive term used by generations of apprentice journalists to refer to the files from correspondents in far-flung corners of what was once a vast English community stretching from Philipsburg on Mississquoi Bay to Inverness, a hamlet 70 miles from Quebec City. Correspondence editor Helen Evans oversaw and co-ordinated a dozen or more contributors and George would admonish me to find space. “Jamie, they’re important to people. Take the time to go see them.” So once a week, I’d head my fire engine red Record-issue Fort Pinto to one of these far-flung outposts and their eccentric scribes.
In 1980 CBC Television offered me a job and I headed back to Montreal. George hired Charles Bury to replace me. The CBC went on strike for what was to be a year. Instead of dumping one of us, George kept me on for the year as the editor-at-large while Charlie got comfortable with the daily routine. It’s a measure of the man.
In the Fall of ’87, Quebecor approached George with an offer. Pierre Péladeau had it in his head to launch an English-language version of the Journal de Montréal, heavy on police and court news, gossip and sports. Part of the motivation came from Gazette publisher Clark Davey’s try at an upscale Frenchlanguage tabloid. Le Matin lasted just 42 issues but Péladeau sought revenge. Quebecor would buy the Record in exchange for Maclaren agreeing to launch the new daily.