A NOSE FOR NEWS
The book isn’t closed on Randy Ray’s writing career
If 30 years seems like an unusually long time to spend some place you never had any intention of setting down roots, you might want to talk to Findlay Creek resident Randy Ray.
The 65-year-old freelance journalist, publicist and co-author of 10 books said he surprised even himself when, in 1989, three years after arriving in Ottawa as the Parliament Hill correspondent for the London Free Press, he cut ties with the organization that had given him his start in the writing business 13 years earlier.
Abandoning a weekly paycheque to gamble on an uncertain freelance speechwriting career in the nation’s capital was a risky move for the Toronto native, especially with a young family to support, but this was Ray’s style all over. Unhappy with the changes he saw coming to the London Free Press, he simply changed up his game plan and made Ottawa his home.
The vibrant father of three grown sons — his wife of 34 years, Janis, died of cancer in 2015 — went on to develop a successful freelance business writing speeches and penning advertorials, obituaries, high-tech articles, sports stories and other content for the Ottawa Citizen, the Financial Times, the Globe and Mail, and other major publications. As a publicist he has worked with such luminaries as The Red Green Show creator and star Steve Smith, and Canadian Olympic ski champion and Senator Nancy Greene Raine.
“The best part of freelancing is being your own boss, but you’ve got to be a real go-getter and an innovative thinker,” Ray said. “The bottom line is, if you don’t do anything you don’t get paid. I was always good at just looking out the window and seeing a story.”
Ray relied heavily on this type of story-finding-on-the-fly during his early years on the daily grind for the London Free Press. Fresh out of journalism school at Ryerson University in 1976, Ray was sent to the newspaper’s Woodstock bureau to cut his journalistic teeth on everything that was going on in Oxford County before joining the newsroom in London as a general reporter in 1978. Ray was game for anything.
“Fridays were always slow in the bureau,” he recalled. “If you wanted to get a couple of things done for the weekend paper, you would just go out sleuthing and find whatever you could. There was no Internet back then, so we had to dig for everything. Somehow, I found Larry the Horse — the oldest horse in Oxford County. It was great,” he laughed. “I learned so much working in the boonies for those two years. You couldn’t be lazy in the news business.”
On the evening of Tuesday, Aug. 7, 1979, Ray was working the evening shift on the rewrite desk in London when reports of a tornado touching down began pouring in from the Woodstock area, 50 kilometres to the east. With severe thunderstorms pelting the region with rain and hailstones the size of tennis balls, Ray coordinated the news coverage as at least three tornadoes swept a path of death and destruction through Oxford County, leaving two people dead and 142 people injured. More than 1000 were left homeless.
“That was a biggie,” Ray said with his usual understatement. “I knew all the cops around there, so I was able to get information to get our coverage going.” He would later help write the newspaper’s special edition insert booklet about the awful events of that day.
Back then, he said, the newsroom at the London Free Press was a busy hub, with about 40 reporters working together at long tables as they handled the phones and hammered away on their IBM Selectric typewriters.
“We had a great newsroom — a lot of good veterans, a lot of aggressive young people and a great photography staff,” he said. “We could take on anybody.”
Ray received a number of awards during his run with the Fourth Estate, but said he was most honoured to receive the Western Ontario Newspaper Award for Distinguished Achievement in Feature Writing in 1983. His intimate portrait of Karna Ivey, one of the longest-surviving cystic fibrosis sufferers in Canada when she died of the disease at the age of 29, told the story of a young woman who had bravely endured the rigorous daily procedures necessary to keep her alive. One look into Ray’s eyes as he detailed Ivey’s daily routine of tough physical therapy just about said it all.
“It was one of those challenging stories you live and breathe,” he said simply.
Today, Ray is busy marketing, promoting and signing copies of As the Years Go By… Conversations with Canada’s Folk, Pop & Rock Pioneers, his latest publishing effort with co-author and longtime writing partner Mark Kearney, a former reporter with the London Free Press. Best known for their series of popular Canadian trivia books produced as The Trivia Guys, the two decided for their new book to revisit the 30-year-old cassette tapes of the Canadian music industry icons they interviewed for a syndicated newspaper column in the mid-’80s.
“This book is keeping me very active,” Ray said. “It’s my retirement project, but there’s so much to do.”