Nicole Parton
Nicole Parton never made the panel of the old CBC quiz show Front Page Challenge like Fotheringham, but she was one of The Sun’s fixtures in the ’ 70s and ’ 80s. Her consumer column was syndicated across Canada, and her books of household tips, Nicole Parton’s Answer Book and Nicole Parton’s Helpful Hints, became bestsellers.
Her Helpful Hints column was made up of reader tips, which she normally tested before putting them in print. But one day she got a household tip from a friend of her mother’s in Houston, Texas and put it straight in. The tip was to throw ammonia and bleach in with your laundry, to make it come out sparkling clean. This may be true, but it’s also a formula for creating mustard gas, a lethal weapon that killed thousands of soldiers in the First World War.
Luckily, her column didn’t kill anyone: a chemistry professor in Ottawa came across her ammonia/ bleach tip early the next morning.
“He read my column, and the moment he did his eyes popped out of his head,” Parton recalls. “He began frantically calling the Ottawa Citizen, finally got hold of someone and explained to them that I had basically created mustard gas. It wasn’t exactly mustard gas, but it was highly lethal.
“The Ottawa Citizen responded [ immediately]. You know that old term ‘ STOP THE PRESSES!!!’, they did. They ripped every newspaper off the press. It gets far worse. They went to every single door step, and removed every paper they could find.... They removed every paper from every box in the city and up- country.”
Ottawa then phoned the papers that carried her column across Canada. “I went to work that morning totally unsuspecting, and the first thing that happened was I was called into the editor’s office,” she recounts. “He was pretty darn mad.”