Keeping was the ‘bringer of news’ to the Max
Max Keeping longed to be accepted, and he was — by the entire community
The people on television are not real. At our first encounter, Max Keeping taught me so.
In 1986, the Citizen did a “town hall” project with CJOH about the current state of the city, a set of newspaper and television stories that would culminate in a community summit about the future.
The first planning meeting was held at CJOH on Merivale Road. Max was already a big wheel. I was just a punk scribbler, dragged along by my boss. Max came into the boardroom, late, smoking a cigarette, smaller than I expected. He proceeded to crack open a can of Coke, about 10 a.m., and, pushing his chair back, began to pretty much cough a lung out. He looked like hell — unshaven, no TV makeup, necktie all screwy — like a busted-up newsman should. I liked him straight away.
I’d grown up with him. He told me about the day Elvis died, in 1977. He told me about a terrible shooting at the high school I’d just left, in 1975. And lots more.
He was, in a phrase of John Updike’s, “the bringer of news.” And people who regularly bring news are valued, whether on bar stools, around the dinner table, at parties, on street corners. It was ever thus, back to cavemen telling stories around a fire; and, for a long time, supper-hour news was where everyone stared into the same flames.
And Max was smart enough to know it can’t all be death and misery. No one loves a downer. So the newscast, mocking aside, was leavened with Happiness Files and birthday wishes, upbeat chitchat between personalities and shout-outs to good people, worthy causes. Of course it worked.
I spent time with him in 1998 when he was 55 and celebrating 25 years as anchor and news director. Off-camera, his appearance was a little weird. By then, his hair was very grey and he kept a foot-long rat-tail. He was wearing six rings on his fingers and a funny track suit.
He talked about being a Disney freak, how he liked Metallica and had plans to see the Backstreet Boys. He had his own driver and they tooted around in a car plated CJOH 1, impaired driving having its perks.
In many ways, he was an open book. “I trust you with this quote,” he said, “but there was a time when there wasn’t enough rum in the world for me.”
It is literally true that, in his heyday, Max Keeping could not go anywhere in Ottawa without being recognized. He might have retreated from celebrity; instead, he used it as a weapon for good: 200 to 300 events per year, charitable boards galore, millions in fundraising, the journo as white knight.
It had to take its toll. He talked about how he barely slept; you knew this was not a lie. And he knew that “real” reporters were skeptical about his hometown boosterism. Charlie Greenwell, the station muckraker, once spoke about legendary screaming matches with Max over stories that would rock the establishment.
So, he didn’t just bring the news, he weighed the wreckage.
The transition off the air after nearly 40 years — an eternity in his medium — was not an easy one. But the timing was right: Television news was changing; people lit their own campfires, any time of day; the common flame was gone.
His late-life cancer, of course, would not be fought in secret. The battle would give him purpose.
At a charity event three years ago, my mother, a shy woman, was tickled to meet the likes of Jim Watson and Dave Smith, until she spotted Max sitting in an overstuffed chair.
“Oh, there’s Max,” she said, beetling over to say hello, as though the Pope had just offered an audience.
Since his death, he has been lauded as a “pillar” of this or a “champion” of that, descriptions that are not false but only serve to obscure the real story of his enormous humanity — his search, anyone’s search really, for acceptance.
From Grand Banks, Nfld., he lost his mother when he was only nine, left to be raised by an older sister.
He didn’t go to the “right schools,” lacked polish, wasn’t even a great newsreader. But, from his first newspaper story, at age 16, he used the platform as a form of social work.
Later in life, he knew depression and loneliness. And yet, under all that daily pressure of “bringing” the 6 p.m. news, the demands from the high-andmighty and down-and-out, I think of this today:
He wasn’t the man on TV. He was better; he was real, one of us.