Prologue: years of making magic
A Grade One teacher suggested we circle the words we could read in the newspaper. So I did. And I started looking forward to the Star, waiting for it anxiously. How did they do that? Every afternoon a thick sheaf of thin paper, as wide as my arms were long, full of pictures and small print and big print and ads for food and furniture and everything else. Every day, except, of course, for Sunday. Montrealers, perhaps still in the throes of its Catholic origins, felt the day of rest was best spent praying over the world’s tribulations, not reading about them.
My father was a working man and resented paying maybe 25 cents a week for the morning paper, too. It was old news by the time he came home to the Star, his afternoon paper, already an endangered species thanks to the nascent TV news at six.
But I nagged and nagged. I soon had the Gazette to wake up to and the Star to return from school to before sitting down on the floor for the daily salt-water TV adventures of Lloyd Bridges’ Sea Hunt.
I never asked anyone how a newspaper was possible. I didn’t know anyone privy to the magic. But I kept reading it. In a few years, I began to recognize bylines. Real people wrote this stuff, some of them from bureaus in places I found all over the globe in my bedroom – Paris, London, Washington, Moscow, Tokyo, mystical foreign worlds in my struggling imagination. I began to look forward to reading them, began to understand what they were talking about.
Wrestling with these huge broadsheets became compulsive. I started reading stories on games I had seen or listened to the night before. Later, I read stories on shows I had seen the night before. How did they get this pack of paper to my door with insights on something I had seen only a handful of hours after I had seen it?
So I wrote a letter to the Star. I was 13. It was pretty on point. “How does someone become a reporter? I’d like to do that.”
I pecked it out on my mother’s Underwood, a fine machine, mailed it and forgot about it. I have no memory of if or how they replied then. But, when I finished high school, the Star did call. They had kept my letter on file. Would I like to be a copy boy in the newsroom for the summer? Are you kidding? More magic.
The Star building was nearly a block long, its front windows filled with the monstrous Goss presses and the men who made them move. They enchanted me even as a child. But, my first day on the job, five floors above, when they began to roll and the building shook, I smiled. How appropriate. Newspapers made the ground tremble, concrete and mortar shake. This was the place to be.
I don’t remember a woman on the news desk. I recall only rows of white men in white shirts, bent over, scribbling and calling “Copy!” Not sure they ever looked at me. And, of course, they smoked, just to add to the noir of the grand white space bleached by fluorescents.
A managing editor died at his desk, they wheeled him out and the new managing editor’s name was painted on the door while his predecessor was still in rigor.
The mumbling police radio and its ramifications and the endless wire copy had convinced the men in the newsroom death stalked us all. Just one more obit and the question of how to play it.
I remember the composing room and hot type and hot men and sweat and fantasy. People worked like this. In the dark and noise and stink. This was how the paper was put together, in purgatory, a symphonic cacophony of regimented chaos.
I was at the wire machines when the first pictures from the moon came zipping through, line by line, in sets of three wet, coloured sheets and somehow they were going to be put together and printed downstairs and show up at everyone’s door next afternoon. In colour. They were in my hot little hands and came somehow via the moon. No way I could wrap my head around that. More magic.
When the summer was up they asked me to stay and work the police desk, become a reporter. But, in my family, quitting school would’ve been like dropping out of the priesthood. So I turned my back on getting paid for the best education I could’ve had and went to school. The closest journalism school – a curious notion – was 600 kilometres away. So I stayed in Montreal, fumbled my way through a year or more of McGill and came away cherishing only the fact Ernest Hemingway admitted rewriting a single paragraph 35 times. No magic there. It was work.
Later, at the Sherbrooke Record, writing editorials, taking pictures and working the darkroom, laying out pages and learning to write, drinking too much coffee with the indefatigable editor, Jim Duff, I made an appointment with a Gazette entertainment editor. I was desperate to work on the big city daily that, under Lindsay Chrysler, had broken big stories, many by the aforementioned Mr. Duff. Before the corporation moved in and Chrysler moved on. As did Duff.
I showed the entertainment editor my work, in her office in the back of the newsroom, the Promised Land, looking and sounding like it should, and she said I wasn’t ready. Maybe in another year, she said.
Despondent, I drove back to Sherbrooke and found a letter in my mailbox from the Gazette’s managing editor. Would I meet with their city editor?
I came into Claude Arpin’s office and he put his feet on his desk, big smile, short hair, healthy belly and a life-is-good attitude.
He asked only one question: “How much do you want, kid?”
I ran down St. Antoine St., a puppy off the leash. I called my girlfriend. I called my mother. I called my best friend and he took me out and got me drunk. Pretty easy cause I wasn’t a drinker. One of the happiest days of my life.
But, it was a rocky love affair. We didn’t always see eye to eye, this career and I. Or maybe it was the interests that controlled my career. Our ambitions differed.
But there are memories. Eating pancakes and drinking milk in an ugly Ste. Catherine St. diner between sets with Mose Allison. Walking through Old Montreal and Chinatown, eating barbecued pork, with playwright Israel Horowitz. In a huddle with hard-smoking René Lévesque. And, later, at the Paul Sauvé arena, as thousands wept at the loss of the sovereignty referendum, a stoic Lévesque assuaging their grief. A packed and mute dressing room where B.B. King demanded silence so I could ask him questions, hands trembling, sweat dropping onto my notebook. In hotel rooms with Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, and Canned Heat, who, when we were done, said: “You know where we can get some grass?” Moi?
Yes, the love affair was rocky. We split up and came back together a few times. I finally learned how it all worked, or most of it, at least. Some of it I would’ve been better off not knowing.
If raising a child takes a community, so does putting together a good paper.
That contract between a community and its paper has been shattered. The papers no longer come to my door. Worse than that, I get queasy and I get angry when I see the wasting disease they’re suffering.
But, when I spot a newspaper at a café or restaurant, I sometimes see what used to be, like looking at a faded picture of a young, long-ago lover.
In the pages that follow, some of the country’s esteemed journalists look back at their love affairs with the mystical process that brought together communities and newspapers.
As Liam Lacey points out, the Bogart film Deadline U.S.A. was bemoaning the drift to softer lifestyle pieces in the 50s. Television’s invasion had left papers bloodied but upright. Later, assaulted by the Internet, corporations and their hedge-fund overlords decided to slowly strangle the geese that had laid so many large, shiny eggs, alienating their communities and customers.
For the writers on the following pages, the not-so-gentle descent into irrelevancy was bitter and not excessively sweet.
Here are their eulogies to lives dedicated to the fish-wrap business, many of whom, to stretch a metaphor, ended up as obsolete and tossed aside as the fish wrap they churned out.