Jack Wasserman comes out After Dark
Sun columnist's night beat musings were must-reading in city for 25 years
The front page of the April 16, 1952 Vancouver Sun was a jumble of stories and photos that were probably forgotten the next day. But there was a historically important item on Page 15, crammed in beside several ads: the first Jack Wasserman column.
It was called After Dark, and started off with some lines from the song My Time of Day: “My time of day is the dark time/ When the street belongs to the cop/ And the janitor with the mop/ And the grocery clerks are all gone ... ”
Wasserman then went full Raymond Chandler, spinning vignettes of Vancouver nightlife in '50s hepster slang.
“The words belong to Guys and Dolls, a musical fable of the Big City, but the mood is the property of every place that flashes a neon sign,” he wrote.
“The mood is set by the people who live after dark, the lifter, the grifter, the chiseller, the holster, the gonnif, the thief, the taxi driver reading a comic strip by street lamp light, the tired waitress, the hat check girl, and the characters — like Murray.
“Murray was the last of the heavy spenders, in good times or bad, and the bad times were oftener.
“If the boys took him for a grand or two in the nightly crap game, he would touch a well-heeled friend with the plea:
“'Gimme a couple hunnert dollas, walkin' aroun' money.'
“Murray came to Vancouver from Brooklyn, and if he didn't tell you his accent did. He was short, fat and un-photogenic, but if clothes make the man he was nine feet tall.
“He owned 80 suits, give or take one in the hock shop, 224 neckties, 27 pairs of shoes and 25 hats. The Seymour Street crowd still talk about the time Murray sent a suit
to the cleaners because there was a heavy air of cigar smoke in the room where the game floated one night.
“Murray died last year in the same way he lived, big. He cashed his checks at a prairie level crossing
when a transcontinental locomotive filled his last inside straight.”
Wasserman started at The Sun in 1949 as a news reporter. He haunted night spots on his own after hours and wrote about it for the paper, which eventually led to the After Dark column.
But his column doesn't seem to have been a big hit out of the box: it initially ran once every two weeks on Wednesdays, buried deep inside the paper.
The breezy writing style and late-night subject matter of the column rubbed some people the wrong way.
“With all the grave troubles confronting the world today, surely The Sun can find better use for its space than devoting it to the low-life nonsense signed by Jack Wasserman in the `After Dark' column,” said a letter to the editor signed “DISGUSTED” on May 20, 1952.
“Why glorify the sleazy doings of semi-underworld characters? This of course doesn't apply to the professional entertainers Wasserman mentions.”
But he had his fans, as well. “Vancouver claims to be a big city, so it must have big city characteristics, which are well described in this column,” said another letter to the editor. “Don't listen to the polyannas who would have tried to strangle a Runyon or O'henry if he had appeared here. Cater to your grown-up readers with columns like this.”
For a couple of years Wasserman continued to write news features for the paper, but eventually he became a full-time columnist, one of the most popular in The Sun's history.
His specialty was the “saloon beat,” hitting the town at night to give the Sun's readers the lowdown on what happened while they were sleeping. He became so popular he had a radio and TV show, on top of his Sun column.
Unfortunately, the frantic pace and years of late nights smoking and drinking took a toll on his health.
On April 6, 1977, Wasserman had a heart attack and died at the Hotel Vancouver. In true Wasserman style, he died onstage, telling a joke at a roast for lumber baron Gordon Gibson Sr. Some audience members thought when he fell it was part of the joke.
He was only 50 years old.