A few of us greying souls, bought out, bought off, laid off, retired, quit, exasperated, frustrated and fed up, gather now and then for lunch. Inevitably the talk around the table turns to our days on the desk or the beat. War stories. You remember …?
It occurred to me one lunch, after my second or third glass of ice water, that maybe these memories of great characters and times funny and hard, could be collected, a eulogy to an era before Twitter and Instagram and Facebook when newspapers were still not only relevant, but anxiously awaited, often compulsively.
So, with the support of Michael Mirolla and Guernica Editions, I sent a flurry of emails to many I had worked with and admired on newspapers and magazines over the years, asking for their thoughts and memories and prose. And they, in turn, reached out to people they had worked with, and almost all agreed to contribute for the sheer love of writing and remembering what used to be.
One sportswriter, though, asked to recall the hard-drinking days of the beat, replied he had drank too much to remember anything.
Soon, my inbox was inundated with eulogies to a time passed. No one balked at rewriting. No one complained about questions. A more congenial, graceful pursuit it could not have been. Certainly, an extraordinary pleasure to work with all of the admired professionals included in these pages, all of whom relished the opportunity to turn back the pages of their lives and chronicle bygone days.
A special thanks has to go to these war horses: Jim Withers, a former deskman and reporter, who, when on the job, was as cool as Carey Price until an hour before deadline, when he would suddenly slip it into overdrive. Jim contributed stories, headlines, ideas, artwork and editing. Without him, there probably wouldn’t be a book.
Earl Fowler, a former slot guy and nite ed at the Gazette who now calls Victoria home, was not only the frostiest at work, he also was the archetypical copyeditor. He knows almost everything about almost everything. He is also the smartest and funniest man I know. He was never too busy to read or edit or give a valued opinion.
Charlie Gordon, quintessential humourist, who I read and envied and admired as a young man, met only once but jumped onboard after a single phone call. The same for Michael Cooke, my first boss several decades ago, who threw his recollections into the mix as he prepared to exit the business and TorStar.
And a big hug to Peter Howell, Jay Stone, Liz Braun and Jim Slotek who are not only colleagues going back years and years, but friends who graciously agreed to make this a better book.