ITALIANS HAVE SAINTS.
The Japanese have National Treasures.
We had June Callwood.
Every country is a mystery composed of the lives of men and women, bound loosely together in common citizenship and a “Republic of Dreams.” But each generation is fortunate enough to be blessed with the presence of a few unusual individuals who have the ability to move outside their own concerns and take up the plight of others, often strangers, and help one another in the agonizing proximity of poverty, disease and damnation.
June Callwood was one of those rare compassion dispensers, a woman for all seasons, who once advised a group of McMaster University social science students: “I wish that you suffer enough guilt to grow a conscience—but not so much as to sour your life.”
The last time I saw her, at a December 2006 reception for Stéphane Dion, the freshly minted Liberal leader, she seemed to be having a good day, and when she got up to leave, she danced a little jig and winked at me, not for a moment acknowledging that we both knew how fatally ill she was. We never met again. Looking back on that magic moment, I was reminded of Pablo Picasso, who once wisely observed that it takes a long time to feel young.
Her own youth was a drab endurance test, with an absent father, an aloof mother and no steady family income. Growing up, she existed on potatoes and water for days at a time. She began her journalism career at the Brantford Expositor in 1941, then joined the Globe and Mail, where she met the love of her life, sportswriter Trent Frayne, though she continued to use her own surname because the paper did not employ married women at the time.
Writing became her profession, but compassion remained her calling. She helped establish no fewer than fifty epicentres of social activism, including hostels for abused women and the first AIDS hospice in the country. She never let up in her struggle for justice and freedom, but she did it with such good humour that few could refute her causes. “She sees the good things people do, however small, instead of being consumed by the bad stuff that can be ragingly conspicuous,” wrote her biographer Anne Dublin. “By embracing the good, she found the passion she needs to fight for it.”
Callwood wrote more than two dozen books under her own name and was the ghost writer of many more. My favourite was her Portrait of Canada, a lively and evocative portrayal of her country at a time when its history was supposed to be so dull that only academics were fit write it. In her take, she mischievously pointed out that “Canadians are the third-largest ethnic group in America.”
Much of her best writing was published in magazines. During the 1950s I served with her at Maclean’s under the fabulous editorial duo of Ralph Allen and Pierre Berton. They never wasted a word. She had a favourite story about how abruptly stories were assigned in those days:
Berton: “We’d like a piece on the universe.”
Callwood: “The universe?”
Berton: “Yeah. The universe. Deadline in two weeks.”
Callwood: “Fine.”
Her home life was solid, but she was not immune to personal tragedies such as the accidental death of her youngest child, Casey, and her own cancer, which was diagnosed in November 2003. She spent sixty-six years in journalism and won every award going plus some created specifically for her. But her greatest concern was for the protection of civil rights. “Very often, our view of civil liberties … [is] shaped primarily by something in our Canadian bones,” she maintained. “That gut reaction, a conservative reaction, is what makes us a distinctive people. We are not Americans who happen to have drawn the worst climate and best geography; we are a different people, and this is nowhere more apparent than it is in the area of civil rights.”
That was the bedrock of her belief system, and she personalized it. “Each person is like a stone in a pond,” she observed near the end of her life. “Individual actions, good or bad, send out tiny ripples that change the surface of the public pond. People, by choice, can spread warm understanding or cold indifference.”
Her own choice was crystal clear.
— 2007