The power of the principled storyteller
Robin V. Sears reflects on the legacy of his father, longtime Star journalist Val Sears, a man who devoted his life to, and never lost faith in, important journalism
It hit me the day after his passing, after sheepishly pointing my newsagent to the picture of Val on the front page of the Star. “My dad,” I said. I knew Zubar would understand my pride. He is one of those indefatigable new Canadians, always a smile greeting you at his store from 7:30 a.m. every day. “A writer. Important, ” he said.
He had been embarrassed when I had come in early one morning years ago and found him deeply engrossed in a full-page story in the Sunday Times. It was as if it were a secret pleasure, but a foolish thing to be caught wasting time on. Since then, we would often share thoughts about dumb politicians and sad events.
The epiphany hit me as I was leaving, musing once again about the meaning of Val’s life: What mattered deeply to him was the power of print. Newspapers that shared knowledge, created tolerance and uncovered the bad guys. Sure, you had to entertain, grab the reader with a great lede and a powerful story. But a good newspaperman was always clear about the cowards and the courageous, the corrupt and the conmen.
Val was an agnostic — “Atheists are just know-it-alls, and they don’t,” he’d snort. He was deeply skeptical about human progress, having witnessed too much blood. Bloody bank robberies in his early 20s, brutal public hangings in Baghdad, piles of bodies of abandoned Biafran children.
But he believed in the power of words and powerful stories. He wore the dirty raincoat and scars of a “bruised romantic,” common to “most of us journalists” as one former colleague put it. Beneath the cynical ennui, though, he remained deeply curious and fascinated by the world — reading, watching, travelling all his life.
It is hard to fathom the chasm between the world that liberated him — Vancouver’s UBC in the 1940s and his gang at the school’s newspaper, the Ubyssey — and the world that filled his last days. Theirs was a world of possibility, prosperity, the unparalleled power of the West and the simple joys of peace in postwar Canada. John Turner was sports editor. Allan Fotheringham, Ron Haggart and many others went on to become the leaders of their generation of journalists.
He died in a greyer world, one roiled by ruptured economies, wearied by terror — a world divided by a media too often devoted to stoking division and hustling celebrity, all while claiming to be baffled by their declining relevance.
His romantic optimism blossomed on the arrival of a new Trudeau. He had been a huge fan of both Pearson and Trudeau père, seeing them each as men of conviction, courage and grace. He was an early fan of Trudeau Two, and brushed off criticism of his gravitas.
“You guys always make it too complicated,” he declaimed with his famous certitude and contempt for those who failed to understand. “It was about sex with the old man. It’s about sex with the kid!” This was even before Trudeau’s leadership sweep. By this summer, he added the fillip, “Look, it’s simple: on one side, you’ve got fear for sale, and on the other side, sex. How do you think it’s gonna turn out, for Chrissake?!”
For him “sex” was shorthand for cool, charismatic, confident, visionary — all the things he loved about Pierre Trudeau, came to believe secretly about Brian Mulroney and mostly bewailed the absence of in every other prime minister he had known. He had no patience for the “small” leader with the thin agenda. Stephen Harper was just another small leader — a meaner Joe Clark, armed with a meat cleaver.
Another colleague recalled when Clark had greeted Val on his campaign plane in ’79. He inquired mildly how long Val intended to be with the Conservative campaign. Val looked up slowly, responding drily, “As long as it takes, sir, as long as it takes.” It was a knowing, clever coda to his famous war cry in the effort to unseat John Diefenbaker, “To work, gentlemen, we have a government to defeat!” It was a jest . . . sort of.
Val never despaired about the survival of important journalism. He probably shared the late New York Times media guru David Carr’s vision of today’s newspaper people. They are in the midst of struggling down a long dark corridor, scattered blazes blocking their path, but fixed on the light flickering at the distant end. Carr said nobody knew how far it was or exactly how to avoid getting scorched getting there — but he was sure that they would. So was Val.
For him, my friend Zubar pouring slowly over a long piece of superb foreign reporting would have been proof of his life’s work, his convictions and his confidence in the power of good writers and great stories.