Radio legend Garrett shares his stories
Legendary radio reporter, who was hard to beat for 40-plus years, shares his insights
For four-plus decades if there was something worth reporting on CKNW, George Garrett was there.
A kind of Zelig of B.C. news reporters, Garrett was on the ground level for pretty much all of the big stories from the mid-1950s until the end of the 1990s.
“It was a lot of luck, but I guess also I might have had an intuition on some things. Others were just pure serendipity that I happened to be there at the right time,” Garrett said recently about his habit of being there when the big stories broke.
During a recent conversation, Garrett talked about some of those right-place, right-time moments. One instance had Garrett flying in on a helicopter to cover an Indigenous blockade near Lillooet. Reporters from other news outlets had been there for a few days already, watching nothing happen. Garrett said no sooner had he landed then rows of RCMP officers marched in to enforce a court order.
“The other reporters were pretty upset .‘ Bloody Garrett, he’ s so lucky ,’” said Garrett, adding a laugh, but not too big of a laugh. That would be smug and that isn’t George Garrett. “I just seem to have a sense when things are going to happen, but of course I missed a lot, too.”
Now 20 years after his official retirement from CKNW Radio (he also worked for BCTV, now Global TV ), Garrett has released his memoir. George Garrett: Intrepid Reporter takes readers into some of B.C’s most memorable news stories while delivering a picture of the man behind the microphone and the wheel of the news cruiser.
“About 10 years ago I decided I should write something for my (four) grandchildren, who were then in their teens,” Garrett said.
However, once the Surrey resident sat down to write things down, he realized he had a lot to talk about.
“It was memory lane,” Garrett said. “My wife used to say I could remember who was murdered 30 or 40 years ago, but I didn’t know what I had for dinner last night.”
That has worked out well for readers, as this memoir is made up of story after interesting story. Besides, who cares what somebody had for dinner the night before?
“It was just came-to-mind,” said Garrett, explaining that his writing process was basically just stream-of-consciousness stuff. In fact, right at the start of the book he says: “This memoir is entirely from memory.”
Of course he Googled dates and spellings of names; he’s a reporter, after all.
Garrett, who had previously written the book The Life and Times of Lighthouse McNeil: An Adventure in the RCMP, decided the best way to approach the writing of his newest book is the way he knew best.
“I just tried to write them as I would have told them on the radio,” Garrett said.
“I tried to make it a conversational type of dialogue. If you notice they ’re short sentences, which is a little embarrassing. There are not too many big words. I’m not a university graduate. I just tried to write the same way I would tell it on the radio.”
Born in 1934 in Mortlach, Sask., Garrett grew up a curious farm boy with a deep love of radio. His first break in radio came when, as a 17-year-old, he hitchhiked 400 kilometres to interview for a job at a station in North Battleford, Sask.
“(CHAB program director Tommy) Nelson, a kindly man who wore his hair in a brush-cut style, told me later that he hadn’t hired me because of my voice but rather for my initiative in hitchhiking,” Garrett says in the book. “He knew I really wanted the job. It was the first of many breaks for me in a long satisfying career.”
The initiative thing is a theme in Garrett’s life. He knew early on nothing was going to be handed to him.
“If I wanted something I had to go and work for it. I have always had a good work ethic,” Garrett said.
A timeline of Garrett’s youth is well-documented in the book and doesn’t need a complete retelling here. The important thing is where he ended up and how he became a legend in the business and was respected (and sometimes cursed) by colleagues and peers.
A big part of 88-year-old Garrett’s success — he has a shelves of awards — is the relationships he cultivated, none as important as the connection he had with police.
“A big advantage for me was working the afternoon shift from four to midnight. I got to know the police guys, almost all men then, very few policewomen, and I gained their confidence by not revealing an investigation until it was complete and charges were laid. They got to trust me,” Garrett said.
He says his job required him to carefully evaluate the information he dug up or was tipped off to. Either way, he says he had to keep his cool and not rush to report.
“There were certain things that I thought would eventually become a story when the investigation was complete. It would have been harmful to the investigation and ultimately that would kill a good story, so I would wait for the right time,” Garrett said.
My wife used to say I could remember who was murdered 30 or 40 years ago, but I didn’t know what I had for dinner last night.
For years, getting info from the police was pretty standard. Reporters could approach detectives at the scene, but that all changed in the early 1980s. That sort of access, Garrett said, shrunk during the Clifford Olson investigation in the early ’80s. Olson confessed to murdering 11 children under age 18 in the early part of the decade.
“I think the Olson case was the biggest one. The RCMP was really panicking about the bodies being found and at that time no one was arrested. Finally they picked up Olson. They had been following him, of course,” Garrett said, looking back on the story that had gripped the Lower Mainland in fear.
“They were concerned about the coverage and the media, so they created a media relations officer and then gave him nothing to distribute. It was all ‘no comment’ and that kind of thing until Peter Montague got the job as a sergeant. He used to tell them, ‘Listen, we have to be open with the media, we can’t hide behind the cameras. Don’t put your hand up in front of a camera. It says you have something to hide.’ He told me he had more trouble inside the RCMP than he did with the media. People like superintendents that didn’t want him to reveal anything and so on.”
Throughout his 43 years with CKNW, listeners got to know Garrett. He was open about his life and the challenges he faced. Challenges that included losing a son in a canoeing accident and his wife to Alzheimer’s disease. He was beaten up badly while covering the riots after the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles.
“Listeners could relate to my life. They knew everything,” Garrett said. “They kind of relate to me. When I go places, I don’t want to make this sound like I’m bragging or anything, but when I go places sometimes people when they recognize my voice or my face because I have been on TV a bit they ’ll come over and say, ‘Oh we sure miss you on CKNW.’
“Oh, my God, that’s 20 years ago.” Knowing that you left such an impact is a wonderful thing, but in a well-lived life there has to be some regret and even a bit of self-reproach. Garrett agrees and is quick to call up one particular big regret he still thinks about to this day.
“I sure do have those regrets. The one that I really feel badly about and I was so close to it I should have known — the missing and murdered women, the Indigenous women,” Garrett says about what turned out to be the Robert Pickton murders.
“I did one or two isolated stories when people went missing or a body was found. I didn’t grasp what was happening. That so many women were missing, that was obvious, but what I didn’t grasp was that it might have been one serial killer. It should have clicked for the fact that bodies were not being found. What was happening to them?
“In retrospect I should have gone on the street and talked to the street people. I felt badly about that,” Garrett added. “I felt an obligation to those families. I was close to the police, I should have known about that. I didn’t do a good job on that one. That bothers me. It was on my watch for part of it.”
While reporters, cops and lawyers will be happily poring over these familiar on-the-job stories, Garrett hopes his book will reach a bit farther in the world.
“I hope they get a sense of the history of B.C. I’m not a historian, but I covered so many things,” said Garrett, who can count the collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge and the rapid rise of Bill Vander Zalm as stories he covered. “I want people to get a sense that this was British Columbia from the 1950s through the ’90s, and these are some of the important things that happened.
“I want people to consider it of interest generally, not just because of me personally.”
While the nights of sleeping with a police scanner nearby are long gone, Garrett is still very much a newshound at heart and it’s that reason that he sighs deeply when he’s asked his opinion about the state of journalism today and specifically the rise of the ridiculous notion of fake news.
“I worry about that because it causes some members of the public to think that it really is fake news. Of course it is an invention of Donald Trump and his followers. I think it is detrimental to news because we’re the last defence,” said Garrett, who has led a busy volunteer life providing rides for Alzheimer’s and cancer patients.
“The thing what bothers me is the way the media is treated. That’s not right.”
I should have gone on the street and talked to the street people. I felt badly about (missing the Robert Pickton clues).