I was 40 when I got my first job on a big-city newspaper, the Montreal Gazette. I had started in Class D with the Coast Guard and South Shore Gazette of Shelburne, Nova Scotia, made it to Class A with the Moose Jaw Times-Herald before going north to hip Saskatoon, where I monitored the terrible Iran-Iraq war from the overnight news desk of the Star-Phoenix, which was Triple A.
I had broken into newspapers with the weekly Coast Guard, which served a large county in Nova Scotia with fewer than 20,000 people. I was there because I’d married a local woman, but I was also part of the influx into Canada of young Americans in the early 1970s.
In Nova Scotia, that meant “back to the land.” I had no skills for farming or fishing, but I could read, write and be a photographer. My newly wed, a daughter of a fisherman and a teacher, thought I was her ticket out of town, but much to her consternation, I fell in love with the salt air, piney woods and the poetry of spoken English in Shelburne. I wanted to stay.
I told my new boss that I’d worked on my college newspaper in Toronto. An exaggeration: The Campus Co-op newsletter was produced on a photocopier with one other guy. At the Coast Guard, I taught myself the basics of writing in newspaper style by studying the who-what- where-when-and-maybe-why constructions of a sports writer.
Years later, Annie Proulx’s novel of Newfoundland, The Shipping News, evoked Shelburne and its newspaper for me, but with a smaller staff. At the Coast Guard, it was just me and managing editor Clark Perry, who also ran the print shop in our shared space. He was a town councillor with oversight of the police and had the radio handle Uncle Joe. (Maybe also a father figure: my cousins called my father Uncle Joe.)
Before writing his weekly column, we’d hear him talking to people out at sea or in other parts of the county. Those radio calls were Clark’s final preparations before sitting down at his typewriter and banging out his column that he signed Uncle Joe. Everybody, including typists and printers, worked to put out the paper on Monday and Clark was no exception. He had already spent part of the day within the metal framework of a linotype machine to hammer out the small type, set in strips of lead.
Sandra, an office worker, typed stories on a Singer computer that produced a narrow strip of text on photographic paper. The rest of us spent the day producing headlines on a press and laying out ads and pages with local news and “bush notes” from correspondents who wrote about lobster suppers and visitors to their communities.
The letterpress newspaper disappeared one process at a time. Computers and layouts for offset printing co-existed with hot lead. We made our headlines and ad copy bigger than text by placing individual letters into a metal “stick” and plunging it into a pot of hot lead. The resulting lines of type, about two columns wide, were set into a large metal frame that you tightened by hand and inked. Too tight and lead type and wooden spacers would explode from the frame.
We cranked the big Miehle press by hand and printed two or three sheets of headlines. When the old press coughed its last, we were allowed to use the big gleaming black Heidelberg press.
The rest of the process was composing room work, waxing and cutting copy to stick onto the layout page. If we heard Clark doing his radio rounds, we knew the next step was hammering out his column on a typewriter. Not bad if he was doing this at 7 or 8 p.m. – we’d be finished by midnight because after he handed his column to Sandra he still had to check over the pages and we had to make changes.
So after 12 or more hours at work, we’d be waiting for Clark to sit down at the typewriter. We sometimes went to 3 a.m.; once we came out of the building to watch the sunrise and went to a beach.
The long hours made us punch drunk. After Clark had retired and I was the editor, I participated in a “fake news” incident that forced me to go to a man’s house and explain why his wife was in a photo of a giant meteorite.
The Coast Guard had a regular front-page feature for people to show off odd discoveries. Readers would come to the office with a strange insect in a bottle, a five-fingered carrot or a giant misshapen potato and I would photograph them with their prize.
One late Monday night, I had only a photo of a pebble mailed in by a woman who claimed it was a meteorite.
The woman had set the little stone on her mailbox to get a clear picture. Rick, my editorial staff of one, cut a tiny woman from the background of a photo of a ribbon-cutting ceremony and pasted it next to the meteorite. The pebble was now a boulder that towered over the woman standing before it.
Rick had slashed the photo with his X-Acto knife to make the subject unrecognizable. I wasn’t so sure but in our hollow-eyed state of hysteria, I went along with it.
Only one reader questioned the authenticity of the photo of a 10-foot wide meteorite that had apparently fallen out of the sky into a village – the husband of the woman in the photo.
“Why did you put my wife in that photo?” he asked me on the phone. “I want an explanation.”
The explanation had to be made in person at the man’s house.
Rick came with me. We approached the door of the house, half expecting to be greeted by a shotgun blast. No gun, but the husband just stood there, stammering, which alarmed us even more. Finally, he motioned into his house and asked why we had chosen a picture of his wife.
Fortunately, Rick was a local and good with his tongue. Soon we were drinking beer and exchanging stories. Then, the woman walked into the room. She had a big smile on her face. More apologies and slaps on the back.
I still had a job and a career in journalism. I could still write stories like the one about two brothers reunited after 50 years apart without seeing each other once. In the 1920s, one brother went to the “Boston states” to work and the other stayed home, working as a fisherman. I photographed the two of them, sitting in lawn chairs overlooking the harbour. The American brother looked healthy and successful. The brother who stayed home looked worn out.
I took a liking to the local man’s dog and he offered it to me because the hound was always running away. Well, Paho ran away from me, too. He started attacking a flock of sheep, forcing a frail old women to chase him off. I had to put him down.
We had a house and 10 acres on the ocean, but I had exhausted my interest in the Coast Guard and in my photography shop, which only paid its own bills. I was working on a federal work project with 20 other guys digging out a basement with shovels for the Lions Hall. But we stopped work when the foreman left to get drunk and it looked like money would run out before the concrete was poured.
I was laid off just before Christmas without having enough weeks to collect unemployment. I was 31 with a family and a weak résumé. It was time to reignite my career in journalism. The I Ching kept telling me to go west. At the Canada Manpower centre, I found a listing for a reporting job in Moose Jaw, SK. The name was strangely compelling, but later I couldn’t bear to tell colleagues at the Montreal Gazette that I’d worked in a city named Moose Jaw.
It was six months before my family joined me in Moose Jaw, where my pay was so low that I qualified for public housing. Canada Manpower paid moving expenses. Everything from our house in Shelburne arrived in Moose Jaw wrapped in paper, even beach rocks that had been sitting in the windowsills. But I never saw my extensive range of cheap tools again. Nobody thought to ship anything from the garage.
The Times-Herald was a pretty good newspaper, even if it was part of the Thomson chain, but it had been much better in the past, as I discovered when I spent a month combing the archives for a special section to celebrate the city’s 100th anniversary in 1985. Newspapers in the 1930s and ’40s overflowed with well-written local news. I also discovered that the city’s establishment was descended from the railway managers and land speculators who ran the city.
The managing editor was an iron-fisted woman. Her ham-fisted husband was city editor. His idea of a joke was to reward all the overtime I’d accumulated in my first two days on the job by giving me Wednesday afternoon off. That’s how I discovered that all the stores closed at noon on Wednesday.
I walked to work and noticed that most mornings I could get into the building through a back door that didn’t lock properly. I told the publisher but the lock wasn’t fixed. Then, one night, someone shot out the window in the managing editor’s office with a shotgun. The shooter had to have been inside the building, since the office window looked into the press room.
The suspect was the photographer. He was a voluble guy who often disagreed loudly with the images chosen, got red in the face and stomped off to the darkroom. As a sometime news photographer myself, I always sympathized with photographers whose most creative offerings were ignored by literal-minded editors.
Whether he was the culprit, or a previous photographer who did have a shotgun in the darkroom – he showed it to me once – I couldn’t say. But the managing editor apparently thought I could corroborate her suspicion, because a police detective interviewed me in her office.
I pointed out that the back door was usually unlocked. The detective and the managing editor looked at each other: Anybody could have done it.
I decided to give up reporting and news photography not only for the $6 raise, but because I’d concluded that my only chance to get to a bigger and better paper was to become an editor.
On the day I was promoted to city editor, the publisher called me into his office for a chat. I expected to at least learn the secret handshake, but all he said was: “If you hear any talk of a union, let me know.”
As city editor I got into a profit-sharing plan, paid in ever-rising company shares and dividends, but I wanted to work for a better paper and I’d heard that the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix was a good place to work.
It was a good place to work, but I eventually soured on the family newspaper. It was very conservative. My desk mate, John Fracassi, was handling the local news for the Saturday paper when our reporter filed a story about a judge being arrested for sitting drunk in his car. The top managers told John not to run the story, so he called Canadian Press and ran their story.
At the company Christmas party, the boss/owner revealed that cameras had been installed in the men’s bathroom to catch a graffiti artist, and lamented the vandalism as a blow against the family of employees.
Then I lucked into a job with the Gazette in Montreal, which was hiring people for its Sunday paper. I toiled on the city, business and arts desks for 24 years. It was only in the year before I retired that I found myself as the paper’s art columnist/critic, a freelance arrangement I would keep for seven years, until downsizing caught up to me and my beat.
But for seven years, I was once again out of the office and on the street, living the special life of a newspaper reporter.
JOHN POHL is a visual artist in Montreal. He has a website (johnpohl.net) and a Facebook page devoted to The Artist Currently Known as John Pohl.