Spelling important; truth not so much
In the spring of 1957 I hired on with the Toronto Telegram as a cub reporter. I was on a six-month trial basis. I had a brand new Bachelor of Journalism degree from Carleton College in Ottawa. I was Brian Doyle, BJ. I was 22.
My first assignment on the morning of my first day at the Tely, before I had a chance to get my coat off, was to follow up on an item that had just come over the police radio about a downtown traffic accident. A wild-looking man with a hoarse throat, a photographer, grabbed me and rushed me down to a garage where his motorcycle was parked and put me in his sidecar. After a short, hair-raising ride through traffic, we arrived at the scene; a delivery van was pushed against a telephone pole on the driver’s side and was sandwiched on the other side by a cement truck.
There didn’t seem to be any damage to speak of and nobody looked injured. The cement truck driver was lounging on the sidewalk joking around and having a smoke and chatting with the van driver who was still inside his vehicle sitting behind the wheel. There were sirens in the distance. We had arrived before the police. While I was taking names, my motorcycle man (his name was “Madd” Sale) produced a large flashbulb camera that I’d only ever seen in movies and instructed the driver of the van to lean over from his position behind the wheel and wind open the passenger window.
While he was awkwardly half prone doing that, Madd flashed several photos of him. “Okay, let’s go,” he said to me and away we went, cutting off street cars and zipping in and out of traffic back to the office to meet a deadline, me in the sidecar clutching my pencil and notepad and my first ever news story.
Around ten o’clock the morning edition of the Tely hit the street. On the front page, below the fold, was an alarming photo of a man, semiprone inside a van, looking back at the camera with an expression of twisted confusion and, perhaps, terror. The text of the traffic accident story was all of two sentences about a perhaps seriously injured delivery van man nearly crushed and possibly trapped by a cement truck. And the man’s name. Apart from the man’s (victim’s) name, not a word of the four paragraphs I had written appeared in the story.
The 72 pt headline contained the words “cement truck,” “crushed,” “trapped” and “victim.” In the original story I’d handed in to the city editor I gave the location of the scene as the corner of Young and Wellesley. The city editor, a frightening, overworked man, called in my direction from his raised desk across the Tely’s vast, noisy, crowded and disreputable newsroom.
“Hey, BeeJay!” He uttered the name, BeeJay, with the kind of tone and emphasis that suggests “so-called.” A bit of a sneer combined with a touch of sarcasm and a dash of disdain.
“BeeJay,” he said. “Here’s what you’re gonna do. You see that sliding door over there, the one you see people going in and out of all the time? That’s called an elevator. You go in there and take that elevator down to the ground floor and go out into the street and turn to your right and walk about twenty paces to the corner. At the corner, you’re going to see a post. Look up on the post and you’ll see a sign, BeeJay. It’ll say Yonge Street. Yonge Street, BeeJay. Write it down. Y-O-N-G-E Street.”
By the time I’d learned to spell Toronto’s main street, the noon edition of the Tely was out. The front page had a whole new look. And it smelled suspiciously like lilacs. I was told that they had perfumed the ink for this edition. My story about the awful traffic accident had vanished. A day or so later, while I was labouring over the wording of somebody’s obituary, Ted Reeve, the legendary sports columnist, came over to my desk with some advice. He was a big, shambling man who moved slowly, as if he’d had a hangover every morning most of his life. He carried his body like it had suffered many broken bones in its day.
“Spelling is important around here, BeeJay,” he said to me. “The truth, not so much. But the spelling, you’ve got to get that right.” By the way he said my new name, BeeJay, I knew he didn’t know what it meant. There was no sarcasm in his tone. I was just BeeJay to him, a young guy with a nickname of some kind. Billy Joe or something. I was just BeeJay, the rookie, in need of guidance.
And so it came to be that I was BeeJay to everybody. The copy boys, the reporters, the photographers, the editors, and, even once, to the owner, John Bassett, who came through glad-handing everybody in sight, knowing everybody’s name, even mine. The moniker stuck to me like a tattoo until my six months were up. Before I left I found out all about Ted Reeve and what a great athlete he’d been (first love, lacrosse) and what a good writer he was and what a lovely man he was. And how kind he was to me. When I told him that BeeJay was actually B.J., which stood for “Bachelor of Journalism,” a college degree, he looked thoughtfully across the smoke filled cavern that was the Tely newsroom. He looked at the dozens of people hunched over their desks or striding about waving copy amid the cacophony of police and fire radios crackling and teletypes pounding and phones ringing and doors slamming and people shouting and typewriters clattering and he laughed and said: “You know, I bet you there’s not one son-of-a-bitch in this whole goddamn place with one of those!”
Then he gave me a reassuring pat on the shoulder with his huge, broken-fingered hand, as if to say that I needn’t worry, I’d get over it.
BRIAN DOYLE worked as a farm hand, a taxi driver, a door-to-door watch salesman, a valet, a mailman, a driving instructor, a playwright, a swing-band vocalist – specializing in “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “That Ol’ Black Magic” – a vat scrubber in a brewery, a laneway paver, a ditch digger, a caddie, a gymnastic coach, an award-winning author of young-adult novels, a lab assistant in the toilet paper testing unit at E.B.Eddy’s paper mill, a parking lot attendant, a bricklayer, a roofer’s apprentice and, oh yes, a newspaper reporter.