THIS PRODUCT WILL KILL YOU WARNINGS

TALK ABOUT SILLY WARNINGS!

Got my first heating pad the other day. No longer do I have to borrow antique varieties with electric cords as rigid as steel cables and the stiff pads with more edges than a toy box.
 I pulled it out of the gift package, savouring its suppleness and six settings including one that turns it off after two hours.
I beamed over this Sunbeam product ... and then I read the large enclosed sheet about "IMPORTANT SAFETY INSTRUCTIONS DO NOT DESTROY." There were 24 rules in large capital letters (anyone who has taken typography courses as I have is taught that 'all caps' reduces readability) but I suppose the lawyers who advise about how to reduce lawsuits over body harm from products have never studied print.
Rule #1 is to READ ALL INSTRUCTIONS. The last rule is SAVE THESE INSTRUCTIONS.
Wow! I can just imagine the lawyers having a victory dinner after billing HUGE SUMS  for these cautious rules which include, I imagine, since I lost interest after wading through the early warnings, what happens if you are hit by a dying satellite while using the pad or if you fall into a crack left by an earthquake.
Rule #2 is DO NOT USE WHILE SLEEPING.  Which certainly would eliminate much of my use over the years. I searched for an alarm in case I nodded off but there was none in the box.
Rule #4: Do not use on A PERSON WITH DIABETES, A PERSON WITH POOR BLOOD CIRCULATION...So that eliminates me and many of my friends and neighbours.
And on and on, from always unplugging the pad to doing a thorough examination of every last cm of pad and power cord before every use.
Just in case people really did throw away that sheet, the main rules were actually printed on the pad too so that diabetics would know that these pads were banned along with such chocolate joys as Turtles.
The reality is that anyone who has neuropathy(loss of nerve sensation in extremities) must be careful around all heat. But we don't slap warning labels on water tanks and many other devices to remind diabetics to take care they don't scorch or burn or even blister. Surely every one of us understands from childhood about the need to guard your skin from harm from excessive heat.
Ironically, one standard advice from doctors about discomfort or inflammation caused by neuropathy is to apply heat. But these lawyers say not with a Sunbeam pad. Find one that liability lawyers consider to be safe if used the sensible way, that is at a low setting unless you are monitoring alertly.
I realize the media are filled with stories about huge awards by juries for plaintiffs scalded by hot coffee in a restaurant, those who swallowed a foreign object in pop,  or were supposedly harmed physically by use of the product. There aren't as many stories about the many awards being quashed by higher courts, the judges there not as gullible as the juries in the courts beneath them who are quite willing to soak giant corporations.
Except enough settlements survive to spook the business world, particularly pharmaceutical giants, so that every ad in the media for the latest wonder drug comes with so many warnings about who shouldn't use the pill that there is hardly enough room to list the benefits.
The liability wars have certainly made their way to the main stages of politics. In the U.S., the Democrats are said to be  more supportive of plaintiffs and the liability lawyer industry than Republicans but no real reforms to limit excess awards have survived so this liability charade continues.
All the alarms, caveats, notifications and threats that now accompany even the simplest product, which range from the silly and obvious to the obscurely legalistic, mean that people like me don't even bother to read every word of the cover-your-ass language. So we might miss helpful suggestions.
Those medical ads on TV and in magazines have become more ludicrous than useful. You would think that only a 35-year-old person who has just passed a two-day physical at the Mayo Clinic should consider taking a new pill but they must be in an OR with a surgical team ready to spring into action if there is the slightest pause in breathing or heart beat.
Since I am kvetching about the child-like nature of these warnings, let me end with a child-like joke which is the oldest one I know about the legal profession. What do you call a group of lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start!

THE CHRISTMAS OF MY DREAMS

I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT THE SEASON

My sisters and I have many reasons to have dark thoughts in December but our nostalgia about the ghosts of Christmas past have always warmed our appreciation of Christmas present(s).
I was orphaned at 5 and the comfortable private school life as children of a prosperous doctor and future MP disappeared as we left the big city for a small town and religious grandparents who were Dutch stiff in their old age when they felt they had to look after us.
So we literally went to school in rags while the trust fund supported a missionary aunt in Nigeria since the watchdog over such money, Ontario's Official Guardian, was as incompetent as it was corrupt.
But the three Js, as we called ourselves, survived out of that mess because such is the power of the basic Christmas message that our humble family Christmas, where the turkey was actually the weakest Leghorn from the backyard pen, a very modest celebration aided by old-fashioned schooling and a tiny Baptist church on the hill, was something we remember with fondness mixed with only a little regret.
There have been many great Christmas days for me, even the one when I was an editor trapped in the office during a hostage taking and triple murder where I urged the police reporter on the scene to tell the police to hurry up and shoot the guy so I could get home to enjoy a little bit of the day with my sons.
Along the way, my evangelical roots vanished and I only darken a church door for carol sings, which I still love even as an unbeliever. Oh yes, I got trapped several Christmases ago when I took Mary to early mass and it was awkward to leave, even though I wanted to heckle the priest during his inept homily.
One of the joys of the early Sun was Doug Creighton's staff Christmas party because Doug was one of the great hosts (now a heavenly host) whether the guests were only few or 400.
John Cosway refers to this in a Facebook posting about his life in one of the great newsrooms of Canada.
(Cosway does a wonderful service for the Sunbeams who have moved on from that tabloid world in fertilizing our memories. I started work at a time when many jobs were for life and there were bowling and curling leagues to unite employees into a large and perhaps cantankerous family. There was no need for the Cosways to be the Boswells of the plants. That chapter in my life closed when the Telegram closed and 1,200 employees lost their jobs. Many never saw the guy at the next desk again. I went to the funeral of a critic who had been a Tely stalwart for 30 years and I was the only one there from that past.)
One of the features of Doug's Christmas parties was we all bellowed our carols as if our future at the paper depended on it. There was no excuse for atheists, drunks, Moslems or waiters. We all sang.
One afternoon at the Old Mill (yes Doug picked some great spots) we were singing Silent Night. Everybody knew the first verse, of course. But then only Bernie Gosevitz and me sang on with the other verses.
I said to Bernie that I knew the verses because I had sung in a choir but how did he, the respected Jewish doctor for the Sun, know the words? "I have a photographic memory," he said.
Ah, the joys of Christmas when even those from other religions, and great doubters like me, see nothing wrong or even remarkable about singing along in the queen of carols.
In an insightful piece in the Dec. 23 National Post, Robert Fulford writes about this nice social phenomena, that people like him, and he calls himself an unbeliever rather than card-carrying atheist, still can enjoy Christmas. He appreciates the value of Christianity even as he refuses to believe its dogma. "Our society has been given its moral principles by Christianity." He argues that Judeo-Christian traditions have provided the energy, intelligence and will to evolve democracy.
I have argued for years in many columns and blogs that I have no patience for any assault on Christmas because I realize it is Christ Mass, a religious celebration, but its basic message of peace on earth good will to all is one that surely every thinking person supports.
And if you don't, Merry Christmas anyway!

TORONTO MAYORS I HAVE SURVIVED

MORE COMPLEX THAN A BARREL OF MONKEYS

Because of my trade as a journalist, I have known 19 Toronto mayors, some almost too well.
I don't include the city's first, William Lyon Mackenzie, because the ghost of the Firebrand only appeared to a colleague the night he wouldn't let me come along with him to sit in vigil in the rebel's Bond St. home.
Only one refused to give me or anyone else such basic personal details as their age. That was June Rowlands, who just died at 93. She's noted as Toronto's first woman mayor and had other famous firsts as a very competent female politician. Yet she was very much an old-fashioned lady about concealing her age.
We argued about it, and she confessed the reason had nothing to do with feminine vanity. In her family, she said, members lived a long time. They suffered late in life because of the way the world treated old people. Why she had a relative still working who was 95.
I now realize in my anecdotage that she had a point. Yet then I really didn't care that much but she was being mentioned as a possible Metro chairman, a position much more important than the mayor of Toronto before the city amalgamated. Her competition was Dennis Flynn, the Etobicoke mayor, who won, and Fergy Brown, the future York mayor. So it was two suburban Tories with good experience and fine war records against a downtown Grit alderman.
Since I had to find 11 columns every two weeks and filled in occasionally with editorials, I ran around  City Hall and Queen's Park like a hamster on a wheel. I was not bashful about hunting for info and developed unlikely but fruitful sources.
One was a junior city clerk with an encyclopedia knowledge of who was doing what to whom. It was Bill Price who confided it was going to be fun to watch the new Toronto Blue Jays try to play their first Sunday game because that was still illegal. After my column appeared, council had to pass a new bylaw and brought the city closer to a Sabbath more open than when they even took in the sidewalks.
So I went to Price with my riddle of this day about how I could find out Rowland's age without having to buy lunch for a clerk in birth records. Price said that was absolutely no problem because Rowlands had been in his elementary school class and he knew she was 60.
So I wrote about how interesting it was that the three candidates for Metro chairman all happened to be the same age.
Rowlands didn't find that coincidence justified my column and said so in language that I didn't think nice blonde wives from Rosedale knew.
There was a further cooling of relationships when she banned Salvation Army soldiers with their kettles from soliciting at Christmas time on Nathan Phillips Square because of their position against homosexuality. That encouraged activists who didn't give a damn about actually helping people to mutter complaints to aldermen about what the Salvation Army believed. Then she vetoed the Bare Naked Ladies from a Square appearance because of their name.
Any experienced journalist reveres the work of the Sally Ann. But not only had I watched them help the helpless without flaunting their religion as a reporter covering courts and police, my mother's family had been able to flee religious persecution because of their help. So I went after Rowlands with a vengeance and the Sally Ann made it back to the Square. Now, unfortunately,  the bells of the world's best charity have been silenced and their kettles diminished even at sensible stores that should know better, like Costco.
Rowlands was stubborn with her many causes like animal rights but at least she didn't attack me on the floor of council asking her colleagues to censor me, like Leslie Saunders, the mayor who was once the world's top Orangeman. My father had been his family doctor, he said, so why would I lie about him in print about some of his Orange views?
I did more drinking than fibbing with our mayors then because there was a much closer relationship between mayors and journalists before the explosion in media numbers stirred with the 24-hour news cycle and social media into fundamental changes to change political coverage at all levels.
I remember the day I drank with a mayor all afternoon until he pleaded with me to come home so his wife wouldn't yell at him for being late for his own birthday party.
I remember the mayor who wanted me to be present for a meeting with the hospital CEO he hated because he was afraid they would get into a fist fight.
 When I got married in 1961, city council adjourned briefly to a committee room and Mayor Nathan Phillips presented me with a movie camera. Later I wrote his memoirs. Phil Givens, later the mayor, congratulated me and came to the wedding. Don Summerville, later the mayor, took me off to a steam at the central Y and then to the free seats the senior politicians got for Leaf games. We did that regularly.
I'm not boasting, just stating how it was. What kept everyone honest was that both politicians and journalists watched each other like circling hawks to see who succumbed and sold out and who played the game in the public's interest.
In the end, we publicized all the relevant information, even the age of a feminist who had concealed it for all her adult life even through several election campaigns.

DON HAWKES ON HIS OWN TERMS

ONE OF THE GREAT UNPUBLISHED CARTOONISTS

Don Hawkes stood out from the knots of young strangers gathered for the first time 62 years ago outside a barracks structure called the Graphic Arts Building in a battered complex titled the Ryerson Institute of Technology.
Hawkes looked and sounded like a seasoned reporter from Fleet Street who vacationed in Paree. I was stunned months later to find this Brit among the budding journalists was actually a guy from Parkdale with better tweeds than me.
 I would have never anticipated then that he would bob in and out of my life for six decades, that I would hire him twice and be filled many times that with bouts of friendship and frustration as he marched determinedly to his own drummer.
We talked in our last call about when it all began that September morning. And that chat could have lasted an eternity as both of us were in happy anecdotage when all the slings and arrows could no longer sting and the politics of life that bothered him more than me had receded to tiny importance.
The curious gamesmanship of upper management, whether he was at Ryerson or the CBC or the Suns, bugged him so much that he was a determined non-player and it was up to me, armoured from my years of describing the antics of elected politicians, to be his guide and some times his protector.
It could be stormy when the executive floor was making silly demands, as Hawkes didn't always support my in-fighting. He confessed in print when I retired that he often felt like killing me.
I replied on John Cosway's Toronto Sun family blog that I had felt the same about him.
Doug Creighton, the founder of the Suns and its soul, called us the Bookends because both of us were bearded and burly. But the Bookends did produce some great editorials. Only insiders knew that some began with Hawkes with his special feel of words producing 6.5 inches of reasonable comment and then shouting next door to me to stir in some venom and vitriol.
Hawkes was a gentle warrior surrounded by semantic battle-axes. He was just too nice to slit throats.
My heavens he could be subtle in his opposition. I was waiting to see a surgeon when the nurse complained about the Sun not using the u in words like humour. I said it was general Canadian newspaper "style" (which has now changed.)
I asked Hawkes to write a column because I thought readers would be interested to find that it all began when type was set by hand and it saved time to skip letters. Hawkes produced a meaty commentary, but then, typically, said in the last sentence that he didn't agree with dropping the u, that it was stupid.
I found out by reading the paper that my associate editor had just fired another broadside into his ample friend who quite approved of dropkicking the u out of our language.
Hawkes left me to run the comment of the Ottawa Sun but then yearned to return to his hometown.
Except the brass balked. Finally I figured out that he should write directly to Creighton and appeal to him as the paterfamilias of the chain. He pleaded for help with the letter, which I then wrote. I thought it would appeal more to Creighton if he took a shot at Paul Godfrey in it, and for good measure, me too, as people blocking his return.
The letter didn't go well. I accidentally sent a draft via the chain's computer system to the Edmonton Sun and then begged the  editors there to destroy it without reading it. (Fat chance!) When Creighton got the letter, he decided to show it to Godfrey, who was quite annoyed and complained to me about what my school friend had said. I then confessed that I had actually written the attack on him and me as a device to encourage Creighton to come to Hawkes' aid.
It worked, although Creighton and Godfrey didn't invite me to any events for a few weeks. Hawkes returned, although he at first was forbidden to work for me.
It was such games that bugged Hawkes almost as much as the shenanigans at City Hall or the Legislature. He was a fine writer but his greater talent as a clever cartoonist was stifled by office politics so that they were viewed mainly by a network of friends. (Several originals grace the wall behind this keyboard.)
So now we say farewell to another renaissance stalwart of Canadian journalism - a writer, educator, artist and friend, a lover of cigars, dining and life. I recall a lunch at the elite restaurant at the King Eddy where I let him order the port afterwards because it had been a rough time in the opinion world. And that is why I know what a $35 glass of Taylor Fladgate tastes like.
Ah yes, you never were too sure what was going to happen next with Don Hawkes. A grand 83 years for the happy wordsmith from Parkdale,






 . 

BAFFLED BY FACEBOOK

OLD FARTS AND THE INTERNET

I was baffled by algorithms long before the Internet came along to stupefy me again.
It wasn't enough for the maths of high school to curdle my brain to such an extent that I had to take all sorts of extra courses to limp into and then through two universities.
Now I am left to wonder just how Facebook works because some of my contributions are lionized, many more disappear into the ether,  and then there are those people whose every phrase haunts my queues for weeks and I know everything about them from the rug they're selling to how they cooked their roast to the latest operation on their bunions.
 I never get the same roll call of items when I want to, then the good stuff only seems to appear once. I never know quite what to expect when I come face to face with Facebook
My three sons view me with a mix of sympathy and disdain when it comes to computers and trying to cope with the Internet.
Since they're computer experts, all I have in response is to remind them who paid for their education. I also point out that 99% of those past 60 are often baffled by the latest wonders of the electronic world.
They inform me haughtily that algorithms, those calculation processes, rule Facebook and the Internet. Even the investment world.  BNN and the business pages inform me that due to mathematicians locked up in Bay St. basements, there are algorithms surfacing daily to give new advantages in a lightning-fast trading world where I am always left paying more and getting less after the big boys riding their superior algorithms have ravaged the stock.
All I know is that algorithms don't favour this Downing and that I will continue to lean on whatever son dares to answer the phone for help, like when the printer balks at my computer or the computer freezes or I can't even make a reply on Facebook without appearing to screw it up.
Like the other day.
An old friend told us on Facebook that she had just made a few mistakes in her mini-essay and maybe it was time for her because of age to hang up the keyboard. Then some time later she repeated an item about a preening anti-Semitic bumper sticker.
I wrote her that one shouldn't be worried about typos or spelling mistakes on Facebook or anywhere else because I had been taught as a kid that the person who corrects your spelling or usage or pronunciation is making a bigger social gaffe than you. It's the idea, the thought, that counts, not how it is dressed semantically.
Except due to the way Facebook works for amateurs like me, my contribution drifted under the listing about the awful bumper sticker, not the one about being worried about making mistakes in typing a contribution. So it became a weird justification for that foul message. And she replied snarkily.
Sylvia Sutherland, a regular on Facebook, just asked for friends not to send her chain letters or stuff that is supposed to be forwarded to others. For once I knew that, having been warned months ago by one of my sons that this is one of the tricks of the myriad computer fraudsters. I am scrupulous about what I open and what I forward because as I wrote on Facebook the other day, police and various authorities can't cope now with all the hacking and computer scams inflicted on us.
There is no need for anyone to send me an explanation of how Facebook works. My sons have tried. All I know is that, thank heavens, occasionally the good stuff like Dick Loek's pictures of his morning boardwalk saunter do last a few days, and not just the crap from people whom I have never heard of  and never wish to hear from again.
Oh yes, spare me those cardboard birthday greetings which are as loving as kissing a donkey. And supposed friends repeating ads about condos and shows. What's friendly about that?  You should ask yourself a question before you tell us on Facebook. Would it interest your spouse or even one of those superior young people who actually know how algorithms work? Or are you just showing off?

KOFFLER WAS A GRAND TORONTONIAN

HIS INFLUENCE IS ENDLESS

Thanks in part to Murray Koffler, the Toronto when he died is much nicer than the city when he started half a century ago making a difference in pharmacy, philanthropy, business and the arts.
I will leave it to others to detail his grand successes in business and the huge contributions of the Kofflers to a rainbow of causes from the University of Toronto to fighting drug abuse and helping the helpless.
Believe me, this man was a mensch, that lovely Yiddish word for integrity and honour and caring for others.
He had to be because the city in the 1950s, when as a kid he was running the two drugstores left to the family by the early death of his father, still considered religion as an important issue when they judged you.
Don't be fooled by the fact that Toronto elected its first Jewish mayor in 1955 and that Nathan Phillips went on to serve for eight years. (Only Art Eggleton has served longer.) The election of Phillips in the Orange Protestant stronghold of Toronto was front page news in every newspaper in Canada.
As the ghostwriter of his book, Mayor Of All The People, I know Phillips often was under attack for his religion. And there were some who whispered his wife really wasn't Jewish. But he had several decades of council experience and the stout backing of John Bassett and his Telegram newspaper, an important force in urban politics, so he beat back a challenger who just happened to be a major Orangeman.
(Ironically, despite all the Roman Catholic voters, the first Catholic mayor since the city was incorporated in 1834 was Fred Beavis, appointed briefly in 1979, and then Eggleton, elected in 1980.)
So the Establishment in the 1950s and 1960s hunkered down on Bay Street didn't exactly rush to help this Jewish entrepreneur build the empires of the Four Seasons Hotels and Shoppers Drug Mart.
I had a ringside seat watching Koffler transform the city's art world from a stuffy pecksniffian one preserved in Victorian pretensions to one where a nude painting could be displayed boldly in the front yard of City Hall without shock waves cascading through the media.
The Toronto Outdoor Art Show has produced a history book (I contributed to it) of how it was started by Koffler around his modest motel on Jarvis St., the first Four Seasons Motor Hotel, after the Kofflers returned in 1960 from an outdoor art show in Manhattan to find that artists had been arrested for displaying their art on hoardings around old City Hall.
Then Koffler dreamed bigger and decided to move the show in front of the new City Hall in 1967  (Ironically, the Square is named after Phillips who as mayor routined thundered out in news stories against nude paintings at Hart House or for censoring George Gobel in the CNE Grandstand Show.)
The second irony is that Koffler enlisted me to help him run interference with City Council. I was in charge of entertainment and culture coverage in the Tely but earlier I had been one of those City Hall reporters getting Phillips to express great indignation about any racy entertainment.
The outdoor art show has gone on to become the largest in Canada and one of the largest annual affairs in the world. And those first nervous days when Koffler and I and other committee members like Jack Pollock and Alan Jarvis paced around watching the councillors wander around peering suspiciously at the art are long gone. By some miracle, there never was a major complaint, just a continuing battle to keep mass-produced shlock out of the show.
Years later, I headed a city council committee choosing people to receive various civic honours, the most important being several Orders of Merit. At a presentation at the start of a council meeting, Eggleton invited me on the dais to help him make the presentations.
Much to my satisfaction, several decades after Koffler first made his mark on his birthplace, we had chosen him to get the city's top award. He shook our hands and then whispered to me that he had wondered why he had finally got this honour after all these years and then saw I  headed the advisory committee.
I wished I could have done much more sooner.  It is because of civic champions like the Kofflers that our city has matured from a municipal Nervous Nellie into such an urban joy. It is unfortunate that Mel Lastman as the first mayor of the amalgamated city felt that he had to do away with such civic honours because he feared the good burghers of the suburbs like his North York would not feel comfortable with the annual ceremony.
The Koffler name on a Toronto public building is a familiar sight. But for me, one of his greatest  contributions comes quietly each summer around the reflecting pool when you can ponder art from landscapes to pornographic wonders and then wander down the street and have a cold draft.
Once upon a time, that would have been a civic miracle, from the art to the drink to the cafe, and certainly never on Sunday.

TORONTO SUN GHOULIES AND GHOSTIES

NO ONE LIKES THE BUMPS IN THE NIGHT

The "last man standing" ordered another glass of the house red and talked passionately about some insult from four decades ago while I egged him on as an appreciative audience
The rest of the actors in the insult are dead, I think. So, some would say, is the newspaper we built from the wreckage of another great paper.
It was the annual anniversary dinner of one old cartoonist and one old editor/columnist to mark the birth of the Toronto Sun in the Eclipse Building on Nov. 1, 1971.
There are some who say the eclipse has been a long time coming to its most famous occupant, but that would never come from me since I treasure all newspapers and applaud all their staffs who have to be such adept survivors.
Of course the "last man standing" is Andy Donato, the noted golfer who occasionally has done editorial cartoons since the 1960s.
And the warm friend and occasional critical boss of the "last man standing" is me. Together we noshed contentedly at Ottimo's and contemplate survival at an age when the Bible estimated we would be dead.
We put together the first Toronto Sun during Halloween. That ancient Scottish prayer for heavenly help that often is recited on All Hallow's Eve when even the cemeteries are restless should have been carved on the antique building. "From ghoulies and ghosties And long-legged beasties And things that go bump in the night."
We certainly later endured ghoulies and ghosties as politicians, the Establishment and the snooty competition did their best to dismiss us as just another shopper's flyer on steroids backed by developers and knuckle-dragging conservatives.
But it turned out that Monday, to universal surprise as the newfangled tabloid was snapped up, that we few were an instant success. We sure didn't know it then as the trick-or-treaters flitted about and some of us felt like our hangovers from the Tely wakes were a flu fed by apprehension about how to feed our families.
There were only 59 of us following the Three Musketeers of Doug Creighton, Peter Worthington and Don Hunt from the ruins of the Toronto Telegram where 1,200 had worked as a giant family, including the "last man standing" and this creaky editor who put out the Tely's final edition.
And now Andy is the last of the 62 Day Oners still working for the Sun although they just tried to cut him from four to three cartoons a week. Many of the others have passed on to the great newsroom in the sky to argue style usage with Saint Peter and to suggest there is something strange about how some get through the Pearly Gates because they hint without proof they have a "real" relationship with the big guy.
Andy came to my attention as I was struggling up the Tely editorial ladder. He stood out as an irreverent prankster who had the inside track with the famous and powerful because they loved to call and get the original of his cartoons even when he skewered them. (I confess a conflict there since there are cartoons ridiculing me among the 30 lovely paintings and other creations on my walls from Andy and his wife Diane...who is much nicer.)
And now decades later, Andy is the great survivor of a golden time in the journalism history of Toronto. The famous bylines, the circulation wars, the stunts, the great pictures and the legendary columnists that were loved by readers and were part of the audacious fabric of the Telegram and the Sun are remembered by fewer and fewer people. Tumpane? Hicks? The Rimmer? Fisher?
Also shrinking with the nostalgia are the newspapers of 2017 as they wilt under the electronic competition and by being ignored by the ad buyers and fools who think social media and fake facts give readers a true picture of the reality around us.
Where in hell do they think the real news comes from? Certainly not from cranks trying to weave outrage from the lint in their belly buttons. Real journalism costs money and requires training and experience and talent and cannot be performed by amateurs who think anyone can write, that libel is a new street drug, and fiction is better than truth.
If there ever was a time in journalism for the plea in that old Scottish prayer, it is now.
"Good Lord, Deliver us."
And we should all say amen unless you want to live in an undemocratic world where Andy with that discerning eye and great talent would have obvious targets in every single meeting for anything more important than a pothole repair.
The world has become a shooting gallery, for cartoonists too, just as they have become an endangered species even if this one lasted 60 years.
.

NOT THE NORMAL RANT ON BIKES

CYCLISTS ARE A PAIN IN THE ASS, TWICE

I remember a nice friend, who generally rode her bike to work as a researcher at Sick Kids,  accusing me of waiting until my son Brett went on his honeymoon to write a diatribe in the Toronto Sun against bike lanes.
You see, Brett often rode his bike to work. And she figured I was trying to avoid a family fight since he and his two brothers often challenge me on my views. (And then there's Mary who doesn't agree with me on anything.)
I would point out the friend was in an accident with her bike, but I don't want to rub in the fact that people with a doctorate aren't necessarily smart on everything.
I 'm not going to recite again the entire case against giving cyclists costly space on all our roads all the time because the facts already are 90% against them, even though councillors have chosen to ignore them for strange reasons which eventually will be seen as bizarre.
You can sample my attacks on bike lanes in blog.johndowning.ca. There are even old Sun columns floating in the vast Internet memory. What makes what I have written pertinent to this major transportation issue is that it isn't the usual propaganda - fake news pickled with false facts - produced by activists and those who make a living off cyclists.
But today's point is that the frustrated worm that is the majority of Torontonians trying to get around in our awful traffic is beginning to turn.
The media, particularly the Star and to a lesser extent the Mop and Pail, are actually starting to run material that challenges the whole concept of giving unlicensed untrained uninsured cyclists access to costly roads provided by city and provincial taxes to move people and goods.
This crack in the fad may encourage more people to come out of the woodwork where they were driven by the politically correct who make attacking bikes equivalent to kicking babies.
The basic fact is that our major roads exist not as exercise paths but to move commuters, travellers, and commercial traffic. Unfortunately that's ignored by politicians, bureaucrats and police in their decisions and enforcement. And traffic is screwed.
 You would almost accept sensible adults biking their way without hassle. But drowning out their civility are the insolent snarls of in-your-face cyclists who have sublimated their failures and beefs into hostile assaults on anyone who gets in their way, be it car, bus or fellow cyclist.
I would argue to City Hall and Queen's Park that bike lanes and catering to cyclists, which is made out to be growing in popularity, is actually sinking in the polls as all those trying to get around this city look at the Mickey Mouse attempts at some bike lanes and all the cars and trucks hampered by them.
Oh, but they say, the city is for people, not for vehicles. Ever try delivering a fridge on a bike, or going from Eglinton and Islington to the Scarborough town centre in February....
Sorry, I'm returning to the arguments when today's theme is that the mood is growing against bike lanes. Any councillor or MPP or MP who doesn't realize how the people in their riding really think,  and not just the mouthy ones, is going to be out on the snarled roads looking for work.

CHANGING DIAPERS FOR A DEGREE

WHEN PRICES WERE LOWER BUT SO WAS PAY

Our numbers are shrinking but not our memories of being the children of those who survived the Great Depression.
Our children have muttered cheapskates behind our backs as we save string in a ball or soak uncancelled stamps off envelopes or without even thinking use all the other parsimonious tricks that those who were young in the 1940s and 1950s learned from the frugal adults who rode out the Depression. They invented new ways to use stale bread and squeezed nickels into quarters. Around our little house in Chesley, we grew all our vegetables, just like they did on front lawns in downtown Toronto.
 My grandfather hadn't worked for years in the furniture factories that dominated the town. To get a pound of butter for the home-baked bread, he had had to mow the grass in the town cemetery for a day. When he got work again, we lived as if the Depression could strike again next week. If a sealer jar of the preserves we put down in the fall turned just a bit, we still ate it. If it was really bad, we fed it to the Leghorns in the backyard pen and watched them stagger. No turkey on holidays, just whatever scrawny chicken was at the bottom of the pecking order.
I laugh with the other pensioners at this newfangled green movement about composting and recycling because we have done it all our lives, and not just at the cottage where jealous townies protect their dumps as if they were Fort Knoxes.
When I got an email from Dave McClure who I first met in Grade One, and he talked about Depression survivors, it brought back those days with bittersweet emotions. Dave's family ran a mill at the town edge. I spent most afternoons on a crude raft on their mill pond on the Rocky Saugeen and my cruises there produce more fond memories than ones on the Caribbean. I remember playing baseball in one of their fields using dry cow flaps for bases and running into a barbed electric fence.
Dave's theme was "economically I grew up in a blessed generation." But then his family produced the town mayor and school board chair and were successes, certainly to this runt who they teased endlessly.
Dave pointed out that in the 1950s, the low birth rate caused by the Depression, and the post-war rush of an expanding economy, plus the benefit of a low cost-of-living, produced a surplus of jobs. Why there were even, Dave points out as a retired high school teacher, two jobs for every teacher..... Here's his story:

I entered Western in 1954, registered in six courses...for my year's fees of $310, and entered Huron College residence where I paid my 30-week fee of $480 for complete room and meals.

To pay...I sold my five shares in Canadian Breweries and emptied my bank account which had been partially filled by my summer job at Canada Packers, a Chesley farm produce plant. To augment my university costs, I worked each year delivering the Christmas mail. The pay was 92 cents an hour.

Many of us were very blessed to be accepted into the University Naval Training Division which provided us with training, uniforms, accommodation and all our meals for the five-month summer recess. The pay was $185 a month. In the summer of 1955, I received a letter from Huron College that I would not be allowed to return. I was an immature 17-year-old and because of my behaviour I deserved that letter from the bursar.

Undaunted. my mother and I drove to London. I stopped at the Free Press and bought a paper for five cents, opened it and read this ad 'Free room and breakfast in exchange for babysitting.'

My mother and I drove to 70 Base Line Rd. and knocked on the door. It was answered by a little woman with a babe in her arms and four little children beside her. I protested that I didn't think that I could look after a little one-month-old baby but my mother and the baby's mother agreed that I could do the job just fine.

So I spent the next two years tending and babysitting those children and changing diapers on the infant. The mother was Joan Smith, later Ontario's Solicitor General, and the father was Donald Smith, then president of EllisDon, and that baby was Geoff Smith who is now EllisDon president.

A surprise ending right out of an O. Henry story. Turns out they really were the good old days for some of us aging wonders. Just days after being kicked out of his college residence, Dave was housed and fed by a woman who became a major politician, whose portfolio included all provincial first responders, and a self-made construction giant who among other buildings built Toronto's convention centre and SkyDome.
Obviously I should have learned how to change diapers instead of just trying to pass high school before I paid my $148 as my first year fees at Ryerson.

RYERSON UNIVERSITY IS NAMED PERFECTLY

EGERTON'S STATUE MAY BE TORONTO'S OLDEST

This silly argument that Ryerson University needs another name because Egerton Ryerson's has been ruined by his harm to indigenous Canadians demonstrates how activists can ignore history when they contrive indignation about flawed leaders.
The taint comes from those residential schools for what were then called Indians. (And that name still exists in our legislation governing indigenous peoples.) The schools were awful in every possible way.
Canada's federal bureaucrats who acted in such a cruel paternalistic fashion in operating the schools displayed stunning ignorance and callous contempt for decades as they ruined lives and ripped apart families.
But to blame Egerton Ryerson after whom the university is named, saying he was the creator and significant operator of these residential schools, is to flaunt an amazing illiteracy about the man and his writings and his morality and how governments work.
Then to have this slop over like pigs' feed to urgings that his statue be removed from where it has stood since 1889 - the oldest major public statue in the city built from pupils' pennies and even foreign donations - shows that the bellowing activists behind these demands deserve an F for their malicious lack of research.
The idea behind residential schools started in New France with various religions long before Egerton was even born in 1803.  Egerton did recommend them many years later in an important report and also in a supporting letter in 1847 as he became the top education official in what was then Upper Canada. Two such schools did start a year later but were not run by him, were judged failures and  closed quickly.
It was only as Egerton retired as the top provincial education official in 1876 that supporting legislation was passed federally. He died in 1882 as the residential system was getting underway in a major way, run by an Indian Affairs bureaucracy in Ottawa which brooked no interference from 1867 on from provincial officials like Egerton and his successors.
So student politicians at the university where I am a graduate and was once the student president are blaming the indignities of residential schools on a man admired throughout North America for his pioneering work to make education available to all, not just the rich.
Yet this leader didn't originate the idea or implement the concept but is guilty mainly for being a minister who as a young man had worked as a missionary among tribes in southern Ontario and believed with all his might that children and his many friends among the natives - who included a man who lived with him in the family home in the vicinity of Dundas Square - would benefit from a general practical education with a generous helping of Christianity.
Now I may be the son of a woman who graduated from Toronto Bible College on her way to the mission field, and my aunt was a prominent missionary in Nigeria long ago when it was still all mud huts and not filled with oil millionaires and con men, but I don't much like education laced with religion.
Egerton was very much the Methodist minister in his debates and sermons and voluminous writings in wanting to mix the two as the basic recipe to prepare everyone for a good life. Yet if he is to be trashed for that, then the same activists must denigrate a host of  Roman Catholic and Anglican priests, indeed all religious figures in the new country. They all believed that everyone, certainly the natives too, would benefit from education with regular religious instruction along with a good dose of cod liver oil every Friday night.
(Since U of T is infested with activists fighting free speech under the politically correct banner, I expect to hear about Victoria University also mounting an apologetic plaque, just like the one to be placed beside Egerton's statue, to explain Egerton's beliefs since he founded Vic before building his marvellous nursery for education at St. James Square where his statue stands.)
As I detail in my book Ryerson University - A Unicorn Among Horses, Egerton's name was considered apt as the name in 1948 for the old complex about to house a new form of education which featured hands-on training as well as liberal arts and coaching in whatever innovations technology developed. After all, Egerton in his personal life demonstrated that he could do everything from farming to panelling the living room to building a stout skiff  to sail Lake Ontario.
I went into this in detail with experts on Egerton, and they never mentioned, along with the Canadian Encyclopedia listing, anything to do with residential schools. It just wasn't a major part of his important career. I have read hundreds of pages of his writings, and he seemed to produce a thousand words before lunch every day, and maybe a sermon, and found lots of praise for the natives with whom he was working, but nothing much on residential schools.
I have talked to educators about my book as it was published in the spring. In it, Egerton's work with natives and tenuous involvement with residential schools was mentioned briefly because, after all, it was a footnote in his stunning list of accomplishments.
David Crombie, an important Ryerson administrator before he became Toronto's most popular mayor and finally Ryerson's first chancellor, loved how my "outstanding" book brought back "warm memories" in an "exciting, sometimes rollicking saga about how ordinary people were given the freedom and opportunity to invent a new education as a unique Ryerson played an extraordinary role in Ontario."
Sylvia Sutherland, a Ryersonian through and through before she married David, an important Ryerson official before they went off to Peterborough (he founded Sir Sandford Fleming and she became mayor) called my book a "must read" on Facebook.
They are veteran politicians. I am a veteran at covering politicians. And we know what verbal stunts politicians will pull, even student politicians, to get noticed. But it would be appropriate,  occasionally, if they actually did study all the information and just not try to create phoney outrage over what one of the giant figures in Canadian history did briefly in a long career.
Residential schools have a deserved odious reputation because of how they were inflicted on natives as if their family structure and tribal relationship didn't matter. Ironically, according to the elite of the world and even in literature, the concept can be wonderful if the pupils are not mistreated and ripped from their parents. Just look at all the books, all the lore, about Eton and Harrow and UCC and all the "public" schools in real life, and the Hogwarts of literature. Many of us in unhappy childhood, and I certainly include myself, dreamed about being a boarder in a residential school instead. Except the native version in Canada did everything wrong and was a perversion of education.
When Egerton died in 1882, the newspapers were filled with editorials lamenting the loss of such a great man because the baby country had so few of them. I still think he's great even if we are into an era when disembowelling the reputation of our historic greats is routine procedure for any publicity-hunting jerk who wants to claim Egerton was a racist and Sir John A. was a drunk and look at what what Pierre Trudeau did with that guitar player.
None of us, including the Biblical Jesus, are safe from ridicule and condemnation when the activist use fake facts to exaggerate faults.
It is fitting that Egerton Ryerson's statue faces away from the quadrangle heart of the university where dwell craven administrators and petty student pols. As a noted champion in education and religion who never shied from a fight, he would be embarrassed by what is happening there under his honourable name.

SAVAGE HUMOUR OF MAX, BONO, DUNF.

NEVER WASTE A FULL ASSAULT WHEN A QUIP WILL DO

I went from sharing a battered desk and ancient typewriter, if I was early to work, then to offices shared with assorted characters, finally to what was supposed to be elite space.
In my journalism career, my fellow workers were often more interesting than the people I covered. And the buildings never made the architecture magazines.
 Along the way, I shared closet cubicles with Max, Bono and Dunf. No need to use their full names for those who were with the Sun when it really shone, but for the rest of you: Max Haines, Mark Bonokoski and Gary Dunford.
They were as different as night and day and summer, but for me they had one grand redeeming feature besides being fascinating individuals with their quirks, history and charm.
They could be devastating with snippet observations on the paper,  our colleagues, the opposition and life in general.
Max has just died. So that gentle smile which concealed a mind churning with caustic comments is still. He wrote about murder so well, I wondered if I should be careful about my rum-and-coke in the countless parties that surrounded the Sun "personalities" in the sunny days. After all, he was a graceful gentleman but he really wasn't that crazy about authorities.
As a political columnist who realized that many people didn't really like the horse trading and backrooms of politics, I found it useful before writing to bounce my insider information off of Max or Dunf because their sarcastic reaction anchored me on the ground where politics was despised. (I exclude Bono  because exchanging insights with him was like pouring more gasoline on a flamethrower.)
One thing is clear from the reaction to Max's death from those who worked with him for so long. There is a friendly nostalgia about his columns and his life. You see, in the business of news, where the stars are often not stars to the lesser lights, Max was as popular with his colleagues as he was with the readers.
To think that it all happened because he fled the underwear business after he bought a batch of bad elastic and panties started falling down all over the country. That loss was a great gain for all of us who love murder stories even when the latest Murdoch mystery seems a trifle strained.
The irony about the strange space once used by Max, Dunf and me was that some computer experts took it over, actually shovelling my files into the garbage. That was when I knew my days were numbered as the Editor Emeritus writing the occasional column from retirement.
I told Bono that I was going to phone Dunf to tell him of the loss of our weird eyrie but he observed that Dunf may not have much humour about it since he had been called to Toronto for a meeting where they fired him. Couldn't they have done it by phone?
I savour those days. The funny lines of Dunf who hung the nickname of "tiny perfect worship" on the city's most popular mayor, David Crombie. The Sunday that appeared, a group of us were travelling with Premier William Davis, who was to get a transit award in Miami, and everyone, including the premier, was passing the column around and guffawing about the bit where the mayor got lost in the shag carpet.
Now Max has gone on to spin mysteries for Saint Peter, Dunf is living in the great piney woods near Hudson's Bay, and Bono has just entered the sacred precincts of the Canadian News Hall of Fame.
Good for him. He deserves it. And I know something about halls of fame, actually having run this one briefly but resigning when members kept trying to get their friends inducted. I've been on the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame, the Canadian Disability Hall of Fame and was head of city council's honours committee, all of which taught me that hall politics can be as weird as if the journalists were lawyers.
Yet the ultimate honour as every columnist knows is to have your fellow workers like your stuff and read your stuff and not indulge in the catty comments that surround pushy newcomers.
And I'm talking about real journalists, not the denizens of the world of fake news and trolls who pretend that anyone can write anything in social media and be as good as a real writer. Nope, folks, story tellers have been prized since caveman days, but to do it well takes skill and experience and talent, not just chutzpah.
The biggest fans of Max the story teller were the people who worked at the Toronto Sun. (Same with Bono and Dunf.) And there will be many sitting at his service who while they wait will recall their favourite piece.
There were many!
 The greatest accolade! Being liked by your peers!

NUDES, KNEELING AND PLAYBOY

ENDLESS OUTRAGE ABOUT PETTY ISSUES

I believe in standing at precise attention for O Canada.
I believe in kneeling.
I believe in nudes.
I believed in Playboy.
My beliefs have been jostled by a lot of jerks spouting off a lot of crap which demonstrates to everyone, as if there was any doubt, that they really don't give a damn about what anyone else thinks about anything, including the latest grabbag of minor issues.
Now I do. And if you want to kneel in protest or in prayer or to propose, go right ahead. There is an honourable foundation to that. And we don't need a mouthy jerk who rode outrage against the awful  politics of today into the White House to wrap himself in the flag as a shield against all those who  see that the Emperor wears no clothes.
I played a lot of football. I remember the game when the lineman beside me was hit so hard, the resulting concussion had him wear glasses for the rest of his life and we had trouble taking him to hospital because he couldn't remember the combination to get his street clothes out of his locker.
It is insulting to give publicity to some weakling who has dodged combat and contact sport only to criticize the penalties for high hits in football. He couldn't tackle a scarecrow. He doesn't even have enough guts to pay his debts and to stop cheating and lying.
I was already standing stiffly at attention before I was in the RCAF Reserve. A year ago at the CNE Air Show, I unloaded on three youths in the VIP section who slouched and talked during our anthem.
They looked shocked when I pointed out profanely that they could take their hands out of their pockets and shove them up their ass.
Let's move on to a pleasant topic, nudes, and particularly nice pictures of nude women, and particularly how they were displayed in Playboy.
Now when I was a teenager in the 1950s,  Playboy still had an illicit keep-it-under-the-mattress flavour. Yet I actually did read it for the articles too. It was an excellent magazine even if the publisher was sleazy.
I was astounded as the kid editor of The Whitehorse Star to find that the famous Marilyn Monroe nude picture in the first Playboy (she was clothed on the cover and nude inside, and was never paid) hung in full view over the desk on which I laid out the paper, a desk once used by a local bank accountant named Robert W. Service.
The publisher didn't really care what people thought of that. And he certainly proved that by having a luscious nude painting of his wife hang in his living room. Not everyone realized it was his wife. The United Church minister who roomed with them didn't until I pointed out the resemblance. Which meant that he blushed every time he saw her.
It was in the Yukon that I learned to be careful about how much I argued about something because one irate reader was inclined to come to the newspaper office to complain. He had very brittle bones and was very pugnacious so I was afraid of getting into a fatal scrap with him. He also occasionally came with a shotgun.
That was thousands of columns and editorials and blogs and commentaries ago. But after I make my point, I try to shut up, because I remember that it can be dangerous not to.
Not only is it safer, it's infuriatingly boring to have Trump or trolls or Fox anchors go on and on in their inept language without ever managing to say anything graceful or new.
The reality is that too many politicians and commentators worry at anthem protests like a dog with a bone. Yet it's all a diversion!  In the end these issues don't matter as much as more difficult topics like taxes, health care, education etc. And so we are stuck, like insects on pins in a collector's box, with a rebellion against politicians that elected Trump and Trudeau.
And so I return to playboys.

TORONTO'S INSANITY OVER BIKES

POLITICIANS NEED TRAINING WHEELS ON THEIR MINDS

It's just before 9 a.m. on Harbord west of Spadina when three tots teeter by my car in shaky control of their bikes.
All legal since they were using Toronto's octopus tangle of bike lanes. Also insane since many parents, including me, would not have let Grade Oners ride on any road without running alongside waving medieval shields.
My son Mark and I are fighting morning traffic to get to the hospital complex on University which might as well be surrounded by a moat due to construction, cyclists, and stupidity.
 I lecture Mark, who knows the speech well, that cyclists should not be allowed to use major streets during rushhour. For that matter, there are some major arteries where bikes should be banned all the time, like the major highways.
Mark has lived and worked in China for years, to the extent he can speak Mandarin and some Cantonese. He points out that some streets in Shanghai, that giant city, are closed to bikes, the Chinese not being nuts about what used to be their major transportation.
At this point, a father drifts by our traffic jam on a big bike with one hand holding the seat of a kid's bike being ridden by a girl who may still be in kindergarten. She is zigzagging along the bike lane.
I see a cruiser coming and vainly try to flag it down. Much as I believe in letting parents raise their own kids without interference by the state, I didn't feel like testifying at a coroner's inquest because the odds were high that she might skid into traffic despite the efforts of the beanpole father wearing farmer's suspenders.
I would have sicced the cop on father-and daughter without misgiving, but I also concede that many cyclists, who have just been reminded again by new cycling laws that they have to act in all ways like vehicles on our roads, routinely don't while cops ignore the scofflaws.
I end up 20 minutes late for a major medical matter involving my wife primarily because cyclists near the city core were buzzing around like demented bees.
I daydreamed recently about a sarcastic column where I complained that cyclists were not obeying the new law that they must stay a metre away from vehicles.
Then I looked at that law again and saw that while the driver has to keep a metre from the bike, the cyclist has no such obligation.
Anyone who spends time driving downtown - since the suburbs, thank heavens, are not infested with this problem - knows it's often close encounters with a berserk culture with cyclists feeling free to push off your car to get a good start at the light or to scream and spit and pound if they feel you've intruded on their politician-annointed space.
What the new rules mean is that in heavy traffic with congested bike lanes, drivers can not pass the cyclist if they are on the outside edge of the lane unless by some miracle he can use part of the opposite lane.
I know from personal experience that it's difficult to predict the future without looking foolish. Some writer fished out predictions I made about city life in a magazine 25 years ago and I didn't do that well. But I predict that in a decade or so, people will look back at this current boom in Toronto bike lanes and think our politicians were rather stupid.
The facts about cars and drivers and insurance and municipal costs don't lie. There are no real facts about cyclists and bikes because the supposed ones are created by activists and anti-car movements. They produce more alternative facts than Trump!
So we spend fortunes constructing roads that will carry heavy loads, and on those roads we move costly machines covered by expensive insurance driven by men and women after difficult tests. Each machine can carry one or two or many people quickly no matter what the weather.
Yet our politicians insist that little cheaper machines that move comparatively slowly as they carry one person without insurance or operator testing over the same expensive asphalt can interfere with commuting and commercial delivery so that all other movements are compromised.
It makes no sense to steal space from cars and trucks and buses and streetcars which carry 99.9 % of the transportation burden of the city. After all, bike paths cost a fraction of roads constructed to withstand traffic.
Then add the crushing fact beyond lousy personal fitness. For too much of the year (remember the joke we get 9 months of cold weather and three months of bad skiing) most of us don't chose to ride in the rain or the snow or the cold and certainly not after 9.
Oh yeah, cyclists will say, just another anti-bike rant.
I have a personal lexicon of bike truths. I've done my share of bike riding in this city beyond bike-a-thons. I remember being forced into a ditch but I caught the truck driver and challenged him to a fight. He went through the light to escape.  I have had a bike stolen and two bikes of sons vanished. One son rode a bike to work for years. Another son has competed in Iron Man races where cycling was part of the endurance.
I have even been in two bike collision as a pedestrian.  I was hit by a cyclist speeding on the sidewalk as I left a downtown King St. restaurant. Since he and his bike were injured and I was only bruised, it didn't leave me with the same bad feeling I get while driving downtown and looking at the uneconomic and silly accommodations our politicians are making for a minority who rip off the taxpayers in the guise of noble healthy transportation.
For 60 hours a week for six months a year, we screw up traffic for a giant majority 24-7. It doesn't compute. Let them stick to lanes, parks, councillors' streets and bikeways far from traffic.

RYERSON'S UNICORN AMONG HORSES REVIEWS

RYERSONIANS HAVE UNIQUE HISTORY

Often for a writer the subject wilts under examination. Back in the 1970s when I poked around in the history of Ryerson University, I was prepared for disappointment.
But I found more gold than brass.
I had come in 1955 to the crumbling complex on Gould St. After being a campus editor and student president, there had been lecturing and a decade of serving on boards and committees.
When I was commissioned to write its history, I knew nuggets about the past from the pioneers. Yet as I sifted myths, anecdotes, clippings and reports, like panning for gold in the Yukon where I had my first newspaper job, what I gleaned was a grand story about an old downtown square that had been the key nursery in education and culture.
So I produced Ryerson University - A Unicorn Among Horses. The book, for strange reasons, languished as a bowdlerized mess in the archives for years until I resuscitated it this spring.
What fills me with pleasure is not just readers who say they didn't know its rich past, but those who were at the early Ryerson too and savour again those days from reading my pages.
 David Crombie has a Ryerson history as rich as his municipal service as alderman and mayor and his federal service in several major portfolios before being waterfront royal commissioner and troubleshooter and mediator in countless disputes.
Crombie was a Ryerson lecturer, administrator and first chancellor. And he still loves to lunch with colleagues from the old days when it all began.
He wrote me about "your outstanding book. The people and events chronicled by you brought back so many warm memories that I found myself mentally and emotionally reliving those days.
"It also underscored for me the extraordinary role Ryerson has played and indeed continues to play in Ontario's history. Those of us who were lucky enough to be part of it owe a great debt of gratitude. "Your book needs to get around. It's an exciting sometimes rollicking saga about how some ordinary but unorthodox people were given the freedom and opportunity to invent solutions to emerging practical needs and problems in post-secondary education, and in the process created a unique institution dedicated to serving both the market place and the changing needs of community."
My book details how Crombie took over from David Sutherland as director of student services, a position they invented for Canada using an American booklet. Sutherland coined that felicitous term of "unicorn among horses."
He became founding president of Sir Sandford Fleming in Peterborough - Ryerson was the model for the colleges - and married a Ryerson grad, my colleague from the old Tely, Sylvia Sylvie, who went on to become Peterborough mayor and member of the important Ontario Municipal Board.
Sylvia Sutherland wrote on Facebook: "For all the old Ryersonians out there - and there are a lot of us - here is a 'must' read. It is John Downing's history of Ryerson."
After 50 years of writing, after thousands of columns, editorials, books, and articles, I feel comfortable declaring that Ryerson really is one of a kind and its history makes an interesting read.  . 

PRAISING.....ATTACKING.....TTC....BYFORD

TTC CONSTRUCTION LASTS LONGER THAN PYRAMIDS

There I was with my right arm and cane seized inside the subway door when the train left the Bloor/Yonge station with me still on the platform wondering what jerk was closing the doors and whether I would be able to write with my left hand. 

I ripped my arm out of the train's grasp. Only bruises while the cane was not dented, to my amazement. I tried revenge by shouting "asshole" in the open window of the train but I doubt that failure of a TTC employee heard me.
The crowd certainly did!

The little old lady standing beside me said we should complain about this. Which I thought was strange because she hadn't been the one grabbed by the door. She had just been part of the group who had dutifully waited for everyone to get off, only to see the first person trying to get aboard, me, seized immediately as if I had assaulted someone.
The TTC's technical excuse would have been that the train was packed, another one was right behind and it had space,  and despite my size, which means some call me Big John, I had been missed in the crowd by the employee failing to handle the doors.
Oh yes, it was 10.20 a.m. Which prompts me to wonder, again, why the hell the TTC loses so much money when the subway seems jammed no matter when I chose to ride it from Royal York Station because the vapidity of John Tory, 44 brainless councillors, and a clutch-and-grab of inept over-paid senior officials, means that downtown traffic is the worst in North America by every anecdotal or technical survey.
The TTC spends so much on labour costs, maybe three quarters of the budget because of the unions, that it can't afford to put real sensors into the rubber lips of their subway doors, like tens of thousands of elevator doors in this country have always had, so that they won't close on an arm holding a cane.
But back to the minority who ride the subway while being subsidized extravagantly by their fellow taxpayers.
Those of us who know something about transit after decades of observation beyond just riding the damn system think that Andy Byford, the Grand Pooh-Bah as CEO of the TTC, is a good transit man who must be undercut by the incompetents around him.
My belief stems from an incident where I fell on the stairs of the University/College subway station where for some bizarre reason the escalator was removed at the south-east corner of the intersection despite the hundreds who now have to labour up the stairs to the complex of five hospitals.
I was wearing tri-focals, which create a blur around your feet, so I thought I had reached the landing when I was still one step up. Not unusual for too many of us, but still painful. Then one year later, if you can believe it, I fell at exactly the same place, this time doing more damage.
I brooded about this and finally sent Byford an email at 8.30 in the evening, explaining what had happened and adding I had once been such a knowledgeable supporter of the TTC that I was offered a VP post. I received a reply 10 minutes later. Unbelievable! He had officials look into my suggestion that the last step before a landing or the platform have a special strip, like the yellow edge of the main station platform, to aid people who for some reason can't see very well and find the step and landing blur together.
He sent me their report two weeks later. They didn't agree with me and proposed no change, even though St. Michael's Hospital was said to be doing a similar study involving public buildings because of the many falls at curbs and on stairs.
Ironically, I have noticed since that all subway steps are not coloured the same. The stairs at Royal York  are two colours which form bands running the width, the dark one being the outer one, while at the TTC Davisville headquarters, the dark band is the inner one meaning the grey outer edge blends with the platform.
I still think the edge of the last step should be marked, but at least Byford had his people look into it. Council would still be trying to decide what official should be assigned not to do anything helpful, or maybe a change that would cost a few million after several months of study and advice from at least two consultants known to be friendly to important councillors.
In case you were wondering, I did not send an email to Byford complaining about how the subway car tried to make off with my right arm. I reasoned, ironically, that perhaps it was all my fault for trying to fight the crowds and get on the first train to come to an important station at 10.20 a.m.
You know, as far as the TTC is concerned,  rush hour is all the time.
But beware the alternative. If we're not careful, they will be hiring pushers to shove us in the doors like they do in Japan.

DUMP TRUMP AND REVIVE REAL NEWS

ALL TRUMP NEWS ALL THE TIME IS BORING

We will all remember these last months because of the media preoccupation with a liar who has always been a liar since he was in kindergarten.
I want Trump gone because then the newspapers and TV shows may talk about something else than the latest bald-faced lie from Donald Trump who has never told the truth about anything or passed up an opportunity to cheat, whether it was in a charity or a casino.
An astute columnist the other day lamented that the New York Times was writing so much about the U.S. president. The Times is prospering, despite Trump calling it the "failing" Times, but I do wish it could return to broad coverage instead of just shooting down the latest bloated utterings of a man who        has never had an honest thought.
I also blame the media for cheating on its incessant coverage because it's an easy and cheap way to fill pages or consume hours.
The decline in the public view of politics in general, which was never high, can be traced directly to newspapers and TV and radio stations going to 24-7 coverage. The easiest way to provide such coverage is with sports, politics and old movies.
Once upon a time, my duty as a young reporter was to do follows on all the political stories that appeared in the final edition so the first edition the next day would appear to have fresh updates on all the important political stories of the day.
So I do know all the tricks. And I do know, as any experienced journalist does, that most "new-s" stories are 95% old. So you try for a variety of stories instead of just one oldie that is often not a goodie.
We know that all-news radio and TV stations repeat their coverage several times an hour, so after a few hours any listener can practically repeat all the stories verbatim.
It makes me cringe when CNN, still far better than that awful Fox operation, keeps giving as breaking news something that was boring me the previous evening.
The future for real news is bleak because right now newspapers are cutting their staffs, and all the media that steal their stories, ideas and their talking heads from the newspapers become starved for real different news too.
This decline will continue until the newspapers, which are the foundation of all real news reporting, figure out a way to get more money for their content so they can afford to hire more real reporters to give more coverage.
There is this myth that bloggers and the various innovations in social movement actually give us the news. Horseshit! Most bloggers just sift the lint in their belly buttons or their ravings or they just make it up. As for the pretend reporters who are really disguised activists,  send Joe and Jane Canuck off the street to monitor a session of city council or the Legislature and you will watch baffled amateurs drown in confusion.
All you have to do is watch those inane TV interviews where bystanders are quizzed about a fire or an accident or a shooting and it is obvious that it takes experience to figure out what really happened at anything more complex than a parking ticket.
There never was more of a need for journalism schools. There never was more need for the public to realize that most of the stuff on the Internet is garbage - contrived mischievous malicious crap.
Because too many people accept what they read there, it  was possible for Donald Trump to get elected by dumb souls and those who know that sure he lies but maybe he may actually cut their taxes.
Facts no longer matter because Trump and much of the Internet just make up their own versions and try to shout down the legitimate critics who actually know what they are talking about.
But there, I have just fallen into the media trap by taking easy shots at a flatulent target. There are more important issues in Toronto and Ontario and Canada than Trump's latest fake promise.
When I wrote a daily column, it would have been so easy to stretch out the same topic over a few days.  I was ashamed whenever I did it because I was failing my readers. After all, they are quickly bored by politics. When you keep returning to the same topic, it's an easy excuse for them not to pay attention to what are often important and costly issues.
That's what has been happening for months now in the U.S. where the media are preoccupied with the latest nonsense in the White House while important issues are not given the in-depth background examinations that they need and deserve.
Even humour has been affected. The trouble with political jokes, they say, is that they kept getting elected. The trouble with jokes about Trump is that his failings have so infected late-night TV that you switch from Colbert to Fallon to Kimmel and you hear them reciting ad nauseam the latest gaffe to set up their punch line.
The American political system is broken. Trump is just another boil on its skin. Let's lance it and let the poison drain! I want to laugh at someone who can't blunder us into nuclear war!

GASSING TORONTONIANS

BIG SMOKE SUCKERS

There is a routine media announcement every night about the price of gasoline in Toronto. There should be an ad that runs with it that says "hello there suckers, gassing up your car in T.O is stupid."
On my weekly jaunt to the Kawarthas, to sit on my point on the Trent River and rejuvenate, I routinely pay a nickel or a dime per litre less than the standard price in the Big Smoke. A few days ago I paid .15 cents a litre less than was being charged at the Esso stations closest to my home in Etobicoke.
I mention Esso because I recall many complaints from Imperial Oil fatcat PR chiefs over the years as they explained to the "stupid" newspaper editor that just because the world price of oil had plummeted, our pump prices would stay high because that was the gas that they had bought months before.
I would point out that it was truly miraculous that the price at the pump would never fall months later because then the world price was back up and they could use that as their excuse.
Torontonians like to think that our retail prices are generally lower than out in cottage country because of all the competition and all the stores. Chain operations have kicked that smug argument in the slats but prices are higher in independent shops. But it certainly isn't true when it comes to gasoline.
So my question, dear reader, is why do our the big oil companies continue to steal from the residents of the biggest city in the country when routinely their identical product is sold from their identical gas stations for less whenever you drive outside our fair city?
The answer, of course, is because they can get away with it.
 So much for pretending to be good corporate citizens when they join the national jealousy that loves to screw Hawgtown.

ARCHAIC TORONTO BOOK AWARDS IGNORES PROGRESS

SUCKING UP TO  CANADIAN PUBLISHERS

I have been around so long in journalism that I was called a dinosaur by Peterborough Examiner editors who had asked a visiting British editor who he had been talking to here about newspapers.
He reported the snide comment apologetically. I just laughed, saying hatred of Torontonians is one of Canada's unifying forces.
The comment suggested I didn't know what was going on after five decades of working in every facet of the trade. Of course, if they had been literate, like the Examiner in the days of its editorship by the noted author Robertson Davies, they would have used the word troglodyte.
Please, a caveman, not a beast!
Fortunately for them, Paul Godfrey and the Post didn't get their mitts on the Examiner until after I left as Sun Editor because I had told him I wanted to run the Kawarthas newspapers because then I could live at the cottage instead of in the city being hampered by its council.
I confess that I did start only a few centuries after they suggested, but I did learn to set type and run a press and write a lede in the hot metal days when it was so much more difficult to put print on paper.
I did an ink-stained apprenticeship on a Yukon weekly and in the ancient rooms of the grand old lady of Melinda. I did everything from writing obits to proofreading wedding invitations.
Now the wondrous computer days have transformed printing even as bricks-and-mortar bookstores are disappearing. Amazon stepped out of a comic book and became the most potent marketer ever.
Not that everyone has noticed the self-publishing revolution where even your kid can produce a reasonable comic book as a Grade 5 project.
For example, the Toronto Book Awards is stuck in the past. It began in 1974 just as the innovations in printing and everything else allowed the Toronto Sun to flourish only three years after the death of its goliath godfather, the Telegram, poisoned by its hot metal roots.
The competition for the $17,500 in prizes has just closed for publishers and authors who do things the  old way which unfortunately often needs our taxes in order to subsist.
The new way of self-publishing, which exploded around 2010, is ignored by Toronto council even though books and their technical twins are pouring out from citizen author/publishers.
It is rare for a book not to have an ebook version. More importantly, there have never been more self-published books, and I'm talking about real books, not the vanity press where printers overcharge ego-drunk writers and also insist they buy mounds of their own product.
To add a bit to the Bard's wonderful lines. "All the world's a stage. And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits"...and many of them have stories they would like to tell you first without running a marathon of hurdles from publishers who crave only bestsellers from people who know the game of promotion.
The publishers are fighting the DIYers in cunning fashion, using every trick in their hard-cover book to cripple the self-publishing upstarts.
Their wet dream, I suppose, is of all the iPads and Kindles etc. going up in flames like a certain smart phone so they can go back to making more than the author on a book.

I admit that I have a conflict of interest because I just published a soft-cover book and ebook version. Even though it is filled with anecdotes, facts and observations about downtown Toronto for a century, I couldn't submit it to these awards even though it matches the criteria, that it be "evocative of Toronto."
Even though I have written  books and  countless columns, blogs, features and editorials, even though I have performed in every form of communication, I can't enter these old-fashioned awards because I am guilty of my latest effort being too modern in production and not sanctioned by a publisher.
Other book awards, all the way up to those given in the name of the Governor General, have contrived restrictions on behalf of publishers against self publishing. Why in the case of the G-G awards, only a publisher can enter.
There are other rules too. There's one blocking any ghost-written book . Oh really? Are we pretending all those famous Canadians dash off books in their spare time from trying to dazzle us.
Straight from the Heart was a bestseller for Jean Chretien before he became PM and he's listed as the author but his ghost writer was not a ghost for thousands.
Jack McClelland, the justifiably famous boss of McClelland and Stewart, hired me to ghost write two books. The one supposedly by Nathan Phillips - only Art Eggleton served longer as Toronto mayor -  was called Mayor Of All The People. It was published before the awards existed but would not have been eligible even though it was "evocative of Toronto."
McClelland had me and six others audition to write the memoirs of Kelso Roberts, who was almost premier three times. The others were famous names. I won, I suspect, because I charged less.
June Callwood, an icon in this country, made a healthy living as a ghost writer, as do many friends who are not famous.
My book has interesting details about how the Ryerson square was the incubator and nursery for much of the old city's culture as well as being the capital for education which spun off the university and the colleges - the CAATs as we used to call them.
Yet because I didn't persist in the tedious search for a publisher, because I just said to hell with it and brought out a book like hundreds of others are doing, I'm not eligible for book awards run as if computers never happened and we are still printing newspapers and books like we were decades ago.
I hired a book designer, David Moratto, to turn my revived manuscript into a form that could be  printed and distributed by an American company. I hired another specialist from Toronto, Peter L'Abbe, to produce the ebook. All of this through computers. I have never spoken to anyone at the printer/distributor but just filled out forms. Same with the nitty-gritty like copyright.
I had an old friend, Robert MacBain, as a great guide since he had used Moratto and L'Abbe for the latest of his two books, one of them the fascinating Their Home And Native Land. (It's about Ojibways and Mohawks and other natives who are great successes. We used to call them natives before indigenous became the in term. In our early days as troglodytes, the natives called themselves Indians when MacBain and I interviewed them.)
MacBain and I and the designers, all of us living in Toronto, are not just a tiny cottage industry because self-publishing has become city-sized in culture. The output of the collaborations of the authors, book designers and printers/distributor may be scorned by award bureaucrats but it has become "ubiquitous" in the words of a busy expert, L'Abbe.
The prize in the brawling is the printed book. It's never been easier and cheaper to produce them (and the ebook twins are a breeze to produce and distribute) so the panicked publishers goad the book judges into banning them even as they demand at least six copies of "real" book entries. (Every little bit helps the bottom line.)
It's symbolic of how unhelpful and hostile publishers can be when media veterans with myriad connections like MacBain and me - he has had national posts and his wife Maria Minna was a veteran Liberal MP and cabinet minister - feel we have to go the self publishing route.
The recent million-dollar donation of thousands of old books to Ryerson University is the latest vivid reminder of the fragility of publishers which don't move with the technological times.
The books were printed by Ryerson Press, named after its first editor in 1829, Egerton Ryerson, the founder of the Ontario system of education after whom the university, and my book, are also named.
There was controversy and consternation in 1970 when the United Church sold Ryerson Press to the damn Yankees. For once this social-movement church made the right move because in just a few years the dawn of the computer age started turning the conventional publishing houses into, well, dinosaurs.
Since it's so easy for everyone to produce books these days, stick-in-the-mud publishers never miss a chance to knee-cap the DIY collaborations.
If your industry can be transformed by technology, it will be, as executives of network TV and AM radio could tell  them. At least we will have self-publishers to produce the books about their deaths if publishers persist in the old ways.

THE FLIP SIDE OF DARWIN AWARD STUPIDITIES

THE ANECDOTES ARE GOOSED TRUTH

My cousin sends along the latest hilarious nominations for the Darwin Awards which are handed out in some mysterious way each year to celebrate the latest deaths by stupid people who cause their own destruction.
It supposedly all started around 1985. I am sure some rewrite man collected all the stupid death stories that trickle out like congealing blood during the year and then regurgitated them in some pretend contest where the winner gets nothing but a grave stone and the runner ups remain just an embarrassing story to be related in shocked whispers at family picnics.
There is now a web site, an annual book, and plenty of copycat versions where the truth is strained to the point of incredibility.
Some of the latest: the guy stealing a pop who pulled the machine over on top of him; the light plane that crashed into another because its occupants wanted to moon the  other plane; the chap who drank gasoline and milk in a weird attempt to get high cheaply, and then blew himself and his sister up when he vomited the concoction into a fireplace.
I love the stories in a cynical way because I know they generally have been embellished and one or two resemble vaguely some of the dumb things that I have done...fortunately with no witnesses.
What drains some of the humour out of the pretend awards is I know all about one of the famous winners from years ago. That victim was not only very nice and very smart but he was surrounded by very nice and very smart people.
He was the lawyer who used to run across the conference room and throw himself against the window 40 storeys or so above Bay St. to illustrate to the gawking articling students at his prestigious law firm that thanks to building codes and smart builders, this was not a dense thing to do.
Except one year during the annual stunt the window broke and he fell to his death.
Wow! Really stupid, right! And thanks to the Darwin Awards ritual, there isn't a nook in the Americas where they haven't heard the story.
Well, let me tell you the other side. The guy was so bright that he was a brilliant engineer as well as being a lawyer. He was so popular and clever that his law firm quickly put him in charge of all the kid lawyers that they hired, and his death occurred during a party that he held to welcome the newcomers.
Did you know his family sued the building and collected? So they had money to go with wonderful memories of a gentleman who stood out from the crowd.
Not that they were hurting for cash. His widow was one of the major municipal official in Canada and then chaired the faculty council of the largest university while presiding later over major municipal agencies.
Nope, not exactly the victim or the family you would associate with the weren't-they-stupid prize, are they?
In the ocean of deliberately false info and careless misinformation that floods the Internet, with the stupid elevating of a congenital liar to be U.S. president, with alternative facts being invented as a notorious expression and then actually invading our language where a fact should be a fact and not a political lie, the Darwin Awards have lost much of their chuckle because they can be as contrived as a standup comedian's monologue.
Next year one of the entries in this supposed competition should be a eulogy for truth, and fewer and fewer of us will laugh.

TRUMP BENEFITS 99% OF CANADIANS ON DAIRY

SUPPLY MANAGEMENT IS AN EVIL CON

Even a jackass can be right, as Donald Trump has just proved through his stupidity. When he goes after Canadian agricultural producers, showboating for dairy states, all Canadians who buy dairy products, eggs, chicken and other items protected by what the bureaucrats call supply management, which is just a fancy name for theft, should urge him on.
I have written about it for decades. So have many journalists not caught up by the careful reporting by the CBC on anything to do with the family farm and the callous disregard for the majority by Liberals and Conservatives.
I recall business writers like Mary Janigan winning major awards years ago when they detailed how much less the inhabitants of Buffalo had to pay for milk and eggs and chicken than we did on this side of the border.
Buffalo may be infamous as one of the major shrinking cities of the U.S. but one of the reasons their Anchor Bar chicken wings became so famous is not just because of the recipe but because they were so inexpensive.
I saw an estimate that supply management costs the typical Canadian around $275 annually because of the protection given our dairy farmers (significantly many of them in Quebec) forcing consumers like you and me to pay much more than if there was open price competition.
I think that guesstimate is far too low. As a family who loves cheese and buys several bags of milk and cartons of eggs on every grocery run, one who salivates at suggestion that milk would be halved in price if our gutless politicians finally kicked supply management in its diseased teeth, I am sure my savings would be several times that.
(And let's not even get into our bread and beer where the cost of ingredients is kept artificially high.)
The ironic crusher is that the whole foundation, the rationale for our politicians to side with farmers against consumers, is that it was said to benefit all the farmers.
Hardly!
Thanks to all the rules 'n' regs which force dairy farmers to pay more than $20,000 for the right to milk just one cow, the experts agree that maybe 10% at most of the dairy farmers benefit from supply management.
So these milk millionaires are happy as hell to lobby to keep their lucrative flow of dollars coming from the 35 million consumers and have conned so many politicians with their supposed voting power that only one major candidate in the current Tory leadership race, Maxime Bernier, is willing to say without qualification that supply management is political BS that was outdated decades ago....that is if it was ever in the consumer's interest.
I started school in Chesley, a furniture town in Bruce County so rooted in the farms around it that we took agriculture in high school and I knew how to do the Babcock test for butter fat in milk.
I have lived on a farm and had two brothers-in-law which were farmers. I have listened to my fellow directors from the farm lobbies at the Canadian National Exhibition. (The myth is that when the CNE started in 1879 that it was an agriculture fair. Nope, it was an industrial fair.)
So I have seen the inside of the propaganda from agriculture as the 100-acre mixed farm started to vanish and agribusiness took over. I have read the stories of all the expensive equipment that the  farmer needs and how they need to be protected and subsidized on their now giant operation.
No one ever did that for me.
Surely at some point most Canadians will rebel and insist that all this has to stop, this favouring of farmers so their votes are more important than urban voters because rural riding are always much smaller in population than city ridings.
Surely we should demand that agriculture not continue to get all these special government deals, whether in property and income tax or even the right to gamble.
The victory of Trump is seen as the revenge of blue-collar voters who felt ignored by fatcat establishments. They don't care that he's simplistic and out-of-his-depth and that he lies and blusters and doesn't understand that trade and tariffs are two-way streets where Canada has weapons too.
Yet wouldn't it be delicious if this inept boor blundered into a fight against Canadian supply management that if he won would reduce the price of every one of our meals.
After all, supply management has been supported for decades by both Grits and Tories pandering to the rural millionaires. Now it may be quashed by a developer who specialized in bankruptcies and reality TV and is looked down on by all the politicians for life.
At least now The Donald has trumped the Benjamin Disraeli quote that seemed to sum him up. "He was distinguished for his ignorance; for he had only one idea and that was wrong!"
For Canadians, this idea is right!