A LIFE OF TELLING STORIES
Longtime Star journalist Val Sears dies at 88,
When the American journalist H.L. Mencken called newspapering “the life of kings,” Val Sears took him at his word.
Sears, a veteran of the fabled Toronto newspaper wars of the 1950s between the Star and Telegram, and author of one of the more enduring quotes in Canadian politics, died peacefully around midnight Thursday in Almonte, Ont., at age 88.
Sears, born in Vancouver, plied his trade during the golden age of newspapers, when it was expected that globetrotting swashbucklers with notable bylines would live beyond their means.
His 1988 memoir illustrated as well as anything the ethos of his times. The title was, Hello, Sweetheart . . . Get Me Rewrite: Remembering the Great Newspaper Wars. The cover featured a jaunty fedora, press card stuffed in its band. The opening paragraph went like this:
“One summer in 1950, I was lying on a bench just inside the door of the Children’s Aid Shelter in Vancouver, dealing with a hangover by moving as little as possible.”
It was the sort of opener that launched a thousand press club yarns. It recounted an assignment that kicked off Sears’ career.
At the time, he was working for The Canadian Press in Vancouver for $30 a week. He stumbled, somewhat the worse for wear from his revels, into “a scoop. A wonderful thing.”
A journalism career that would take Sears to first the Tely, then the Star — to places as exotic and remote as Durban and Londonderry, Copenhagen, Tokyo and Dildo, N.L. — was up and running.
“I have been a newspaperman all my life,” he wrote. “A reporter in emergencies, but mostly a feature writer. A storyteller.”
He was famously droll — an attribute overlooked, his son Robin once recalled, by those who literally took over Sears’ most frequently cited quote. That was his observation to colleagues, while boarding a Diefenbaker campaign plane in the early ’60s, “To work, gentlemen, we have a government to bring down.”
Scholars might well trace the beginnings of toxic press gallery-PMO relations to that time.
Robin Sears said in a Facebook message the stories about his father that poured in to the family would have had him “smiling from above” (and muttering corrections, of course).
“One of the surprises of recent years about my often gruff and sometimes dismissive old man is how many times folks come up to me in airports and say something like, “Please thank Val for helping me out when I was a terrified greenie. I would not have made it without his quiet nudges.’ ”
Sears told the Star his father might suggest that a young reporter temper his hairstyle or observe that a particular “lead was about twice as long as it should have been. But he’d do it in a way that would sort of point people in the right direction.”
Veteran Star reporter Linda Diebel, who worked with Sears in Ottawa in the 1980s, said: “He was an overpowering presence — through wit, charm and a sardonic disdain for everything. I loved him.
“He even dominated at a party at my place once when he was some 20 years older than anyone else and he was still the life of the party.”
There are few journalists whose voice on the page can be identified before a reader checks the byline. Sears was one of them, as delegates to a founding convention of the Reform Party learned in his Star report on their efforts in the late ’80s. “WINNIPEG—A broomstick load of revolutionary ghosts rode Winnipeg’s Halloween sky last night . . . .”
Sears said he knew from childhood that he wanted to be a storyteller. In high school he wrote a column. At the University of British Columbia, he edited The Ubyssey, a newspaper that produced a number of the nation’s star journalists.
There he met Allan Fotheringham, Jack Scott, Ron Haggart and Marjorie Nichols. One of his best writers was the sports editor — and future prime minister — John Turner.
In time, Sears became a big enough star in the realm of Canadian media that our greatest literary figures spun yarns about him.
Author Mordecai Richler was assigned by a magazine to write about the NDP leadership convention of 1989 in Winnipeg. Soon after Sears’ arrival, the two repaired with other media luminaries to an Italian restaurant for a late dinner. There, another diner spotted Richler and sent a bottle of champagne to the table.
“I had the rare pleasure,” Richler would say, “of seeing Val Sears impressed.”
In 1991, after retiring, Sears was a visiting professor of journalism at the University of Regina. In 1999, he was made a life member of the parliamentary press gallery. In 2011, he moved to Almonte, near Ottawa, and became editor and publisher of the online Millstone.
Sears was, by various accounts, sardonic, pithy, tart-tongued — which meant he could blister ears and scorch egos. But he could also make a young reporter’s day with praise.
He once wrote, in lauding another journalist’s stylish lead, that a “feature writer can die happily with that on his record.” Through long labours in the vineyard of ink and newsprint, Val Sears wrote enough gems himself to have died content.
He is survived by wife Edith Cody-Rice, children Kelly, Kit and Robin, five grandchildren and first wife Margaret Cameron Sears.