tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66847504795626460502024-03-18T20:19:00.661-07:00Downing's ViewsJohn Downing has been an author, reporter, editor and columnist . He has made regular appearances on radio and TV. His main field is politics but he has written about everything under (and in) the Sun.John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.comBlogger512125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-22619171887834932482024-03-09T15:41:00.000-08:002024-03-09T15:41:21.454-08:00WORKING THE PHONES<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_hRCeYOLeBI6JFLFfh-gYwmydmJ239CypA9m4cDX3MjUOpo80cwblatagiytlHripsJ016rQDyQsUJkJ7mGjgz83zv6qoJH78JuxVQavVuZoCbu-SzIe3M4YOfGjj-KFR0h1ySZGg8vYHw88q4_cGbSdKwwoUeqEstJBoEQP5zgzP7XuA8EuJUQsAHrP-/s1246/Toronto%20Sun%20Mulroney.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1246" data-original-width="1228" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_hRCeYOLeBI6JFLFfh-gYwmydmJ239CypA9m4cDX3MjUOpo80cwblatagiytlHripsJ016rQDyQsUJkJ7mGjgz83zv6qoJH78JuxVQavVuZoCbu-SzIe3M4YOfGjj-KFR0h1ySZGg8vYHw88q4_cGbSdKwwoUeqEstJBoEQP5zgzP7XuA8EuJUQsAHrP-/s320/Toronto%20Sun%20Mulroney.png" width="315" /></a></div>They knew how to work the phones. That was a theme in the flood of nostalgia after the death of Brian Mulroney, which was a nice repetition of what was said after John Turner. There was also nostalgia about the many kind things they did outside the spotlight of publicity.<p></p><p>I love both things about those giants. Now I have reached my anecdotage, to the chagrin of the family, I like stories about such history more than the formal accomplishment facts. I also confess that facts grow dimmer which is a curse to me who lasted through my cub days as a dumb reporter because I could remember exactly the trivia of history when it was only seconds to deadline.</p><p>There are those who grumble about the famous names that I can pepper in a blog but then there were four decades when I was trying to figure just wot-in-hell was going on in the stout silos of politics, business and sports while I worked for two great newspapers and dabbled in other media which treated me like a rube. But then that was life when work could be a premier's delusion or an actress that maybe would later date an Oscar winner or a fender bender on a back concession.. You covered whatever you were told to cover, and life could explode out of tedium in the next minute.</p><p>I did get to see the jerk side of famous people. And the flashes of decency.</p><p>I was confirmed as Editor of the Toronto Sun in 1985 with a headline that almost made me forget the months of doing the work in tedious addition to being a daily columnist. One thing I will never forget is the telephone call I got from Brian Mulroney to congratulate me. Sure I knew that he had probably been jogged into action by staff but when my secretary Rosemary Little said calmly that the prime minister was on the phone, I first went to the office door to make sure there was no gag going on in the newsroom. (Any denizen of a feisty newsroom will know that I mean.)</p><p>It was nice to have the butterscotch tones of the top politician in the country wash over me. Wouldn't you like it if the PM called to wish you well in a big promotion? It certainly knocked my cynicism about politicians for a loop.</p><p>If you read about Mulroney you know that he could use a personal phone call like he was granting you a Nobel. Read a great biography by Steve Paikin called John Turner: An Intimate Biography and you can see how Turner also weaponized Bell. There is something about a call from a famous man that makes you remember more good than bad. I must confess as a Tory I was inclined to like the Conservative ones more than the Liberal ones but then Mulroney to me was a gentle thoughtful man in his private musings and Turner wasn't. </p><p>It may have been that time at the Shaw Festival that his wife Geills complained loudly that Mary and I had better seats than they did, or at Roy Thomson Hall when Turner and I got front row seats at a John McDermott concert because John announced above us that the former PM had helped his success and that I as an old friend had written the liner notes for his album of war songs.</p><p>Turner ignored me sitting beside him and I smelled the reason was not my columns but that he was soused. Drinking had been a problem for both PMs (but I won't throw insults as a rum-and-coke media survivor. And Mulroney became such an avid counsellor for abstention that he would have fit right in with the old Sherlock TV series.)</p><p>The relationship between political leaders and old columnists has always wandered in a mine field. I wrote thousands of columns realizing that what I said was also being read by the target with whom I could share an elevator the next morning. And of course there were also those occasions when the pol would retaliate from his dais perch.</p><p>My introduction to the danger of public criticism came when John Diefenbaker asked my publisher to fire me, the same Dief who had been introduced years before around Ottawa by my father, a Toronto Tory power, as not a struggling prairie lawyer but a future Conservative leader.</p><p>I have had many encounters with the greats of Canadian politics but I will spare you, from the weird like singing a duet of "Oh yes I'm the great pretender," that hit by The Platters, with Kim Campbell when we were discussing puberty songs at an editorial board, to being ignored by PET when he and I were the only ones touring a medical lab in Mexico.</p><p>I am playing it safe by staying away from lengthy discussion about the wives. After all, the female of the species is more dangerous than the male. I was once driven from the front door of a new premier by the shouting wife attired only (I think) in a slip. It was just another evening in a Venezuela luxury hotel lobby before I came across Margaret Trudeau verbally lambasting an aide for some alleged error. I liked the aide and came to his defence to divert her. She cursed me. I was in no mood for that, having just battled to get my column sent from South America to a city the locals had never heard of. So I cursed back. She and I got quite inventive which startled many tourists. After she was retrieved by an embarrassed official, she faced the wall in the receiving line for an official banquet and gave a Nazi salute.</p><p>Naturally it made the news. The famous are aways under a cruel microscope which we must remember when we judge. So we should treasure those like Brian Mulroney who survive with honour.</p>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-480518288383170402024-03-09T13:57:00.000-08:002024-03-09T13:57:53.352-08:00Mayor, goalie, pilot,innovator<p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Donald Summerville was Toronto mayor for an urban twinkling. But generations are happy because of his response to a rookie reporter. Yet his name has vanished while contemporaries are remembered. Civic history is as strange as its myths</p><p>It was hot and sweaty in 1961 when it began. The urchin looked longingly over the fence at the pool in the brick yard that had been transformed to Greenwood Park. If only he had the admittance. Then he spotted empty pop bottles behind a house bordering the park. He grabbed them for the deposit money but the tenant unseen by the fence grabbed him.</p><p>Ordinarily there just would have been shaking and curses but the summer had been grinding so the man grumbled to police and they were short tempered too and so was the magistrate when the boy was dragged before him. It may have been trivial crime but not for the reporter looking for cute to get out of punishment in the court bureau of the old city hall.</p><p>The bureau was presided over by a Telegram editor who had seen greatness as a decorated war hero who the Orange Order had made Toronto mayor. Major Bert Wemp ran a rare and strict co-operation of Star and Tely fringe reporters and the papers shared stories that were sent via two pneumatic tubes six blocks under Bay St. to the newsrooms.</p><p>It was different across the hall in a cluttered room beside the council chamber shared by all the press who were not yet called media. The same tubes were used for political copy but the stories were guarded like gold as the papers competed fiercely through four editions. Every morning Star and Tely reporters combed politics with calls, goading the premier, mayor, councillors and MPPs with hints of their names in the home edition.</p><p> I noticed the story of the poor boy who stole empties just so he could swim. I was a cub Tely reporter living just up the hill from the pool in a house my father had built as a family doctor and stalwart in local politics. And I knew just who to milk for a story, the new champ of the east end. Donald Summerville was the son of a former alderman and MPP. He was elected alderman in 1955 but moved quickly to controller in 1959. Toronto and other Canadian cities had adopted an American reform where a Board of Control of four members was elected city wide along with the mayor to form an executive to control finances better. </p><p>Don was a strutting banty rooster in a hurry because he sensed his time was short. Stories swirled around him. He had been a goalie in 1940 with Kirkland Lake when the Blue Devils won the Allan Cup, a major trophy, and it was rumoured he had put on the pads for Maple Leaf practices. He had been a pilot in the war where he had accidentally bombed the CNE. He and his brother owned two movie theatres and it was said he kept rowdies down by patrolling with a club of a long flashlight fat with batteries.</p><p> Don erupted when I called about the boy who stole empties. Right there on Page One, he said the real crime was admittance to the pool when parents had already paid for pools with their taxes. No one dared argue against him, not in a hot summer. City changes usually take a year or two to percolate through reports but council freed all pools in weeks.</p><p>It launched Don on a tsunami questioning charges on city property. It was almost an anticlimax when he had free swimming extended to free skating on city rinks. The 18 part-time aldermen already were in thrall to the controllers who each got dreamy assistance in limousine, office, secretary and the clout that saw Maple Leaf Gardens give each of them two good tickets to every Leaf game. No wonder the board had become a breeding ground for power. Most mayors became controllers first. Then insiders had their way, and the media dropped its guard. Toronto and its 12 suburbs slimmed in several stages to amalgamation and one big city where full time councillors and their staffs fiddled with traffic and renaming the past and obsessed with woke trivia while the city limped to a costly clogged future.</p><p>There was no stopping Donald Dean Summerville after his triumphs for the kiddies. He lived the good life in 1963 when he became chief magistrate. When council ran late, it would break for a nice meal at Lichee Gardens tucked in behind the old stone pile. Then off to Central Y where he would get a massage and then the Gardens and a good seat near the Leaf bench. His wife Alice, later a councillor, didn't like hockey so I tagged along. Most evenings there were suites in downtown hotels where a floating group of promoters, prospectors and wise guys gambled and drank and yarned into the wee hours.</p><p> One night he said he had to leave to be goalie in a charity hockey game at George Bell Arena (named after a parks commissioner) and we tried to talk him out of it because of the nitro pills he took. Don laughed, shrugged and left. He died in goal near the end of the first period. Then a screw up with the ambulance which led to all of the emergency services being amalgamated into one. </p><p> Toronto's 53rd mayor laid in state in the old council chamber even though at 45 he had served for only 11 months. That had been done only once before. There we filed past, hour after hour, all shapes and ages mixed in with Don's colleagues whose names we remember on squares and roads, like Nathan Phillips, William Allen and Fred Gardiner. You have to go to his east end to where it all began to find his name. It's on a pool. Don would like that.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><p><br /></p>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-54923308387163375972024-03-03T15:20:00.000-08:002024-03-03T20:58:28.556-08:00A Fitting Home<p> They are honouring David Onley at the Withrow Common Gallery at the CNE for championing employment for the disabled. There could not have been a better place or subject.</p><p>They will talk about his fine work as an agreeable lieutenant governor and how he made you forget that he was not just a figurehead but had turned his wheelchair into a seat of power and inspiration. Forgotten by too many will be his years at CITY as a workhorse in a struggling TV station where he did everything from the weather to talking about space.</p><p>But I go back even further to his research for the provincial Liberals when the latest hot idea in transportation was maglev. It seemed so magical, this European scheme to move urbanites in small cabins running not on wheels but suspended thanks to powerful magnets forcing a gap of air between the car and the track.</p><p>There were many unknowns but the stout provincial Tory government calculated that the future lay in cancelling expressways like the Spadina and building a system with Krauss-Maffei that could solve the traffic hassles of Toronto and also produce technology that could be sold to the world. Oh yes, also win elections for Conservatives.</p><p>Exhibition Place was selected in 1974 as the location for a test track that the world would watch. And the digging began on construction of the elevated concrete track that would girdle the Ex for more than two miles. Onley was just a fresh U of T grad but he and other researchers for the Liberals leaked me details of what would be more massive and isolating than graceful and unobtrusive. Physics said it needed big supporting pillars, like the later Gardiner, some of which were built and lingered for years after Krauss Maffei cancelled the whole project because the first maglev train in Germany had trouble going around curves in the snow.</p><p>The pressure on any critic was enormous as the experiment turned into the Urban Transportation Development Corp before it flamed out. The wiz-kid boss, Kirk Foley, called on Sun publisher Doug Creighton asking that I be fired - and the chair of our board, a former Tory minister, thought that was a good idea. After the wreckage of crashed transit dreams, the Tories found other uses for UTDC plans, the Liberals offered me a job, and Onley went on to write about space and star on CITY which had just been known for racy movies.</p><p>But he also worked tirelessly for the disabled when just surviving an ordinary day could be a challenge. One noon, I bought him lunch at the Underground Railroad and we emerged to find that his car with his special hand controls had been towed from King St. despite the special disabled card in the windshield. I blasted the police chief, yet no effort was made to help him get to the pound. Still, David kept smiling.</p><p>I like the location of David being honoured by the Ontario Disability Employment Network because the Withrow Common is a modern celebration of a glorious CNE past when it helped art grow in a young city. The CNE art gallery was torn down because of the Gardiner but for decades before the Ex stimulated the artists of Toronto by buying and promoting their work.</p><p>When the gallery was demolished, the CNE gave 340 works of art to the Art Gallery of Ontario. Unfortunately, the AGO treated the donation with the same careless indifference it showed the art it got from the provincial gallery at Ryerson University (which has had that vanilla renaming triggered by woke jerks.) For example, it sold off an A.J. Casson.</p><p> A careless survey years ago for the Ex claimed that several paintings from the Ex ended up in the press gallery of old city hall (a fib because as a reporter there for several years I can testify there was no art at all) and that the mayor's office at the old hall, and the hall itself, got at least 20 paintings (which would be news to the people who worked there.) The Reference Library and Market Gallery also got some art but Group of Seven paintings, like from Frank Carmichael, have wandered in and out of accounts of their fate. Some just vanished into homes.</p><p>Now art from the community and not just exotic masters has returned to the Ex with the Withrow Gallery. So that is a plus. And the Common honours good guys. Another plus! Now if only we can promote the CNE past where there were province-wide contests for the essays, hand writing and art from elementary pupils.(I helped judge essays.) I have always had a warm feeling for the Ex my entire life because my Grade 5 charcoal sketch of McLure's millpond in tiny Chesley was displayed there nearly 80 years ago.</p><p>Just remembering makes me almost feel 60 again. The long summer afternoons of rafting there like Huckleberry Finn on the Rocky Saugeen with a chum who died years ago. Warm memories in an age where the woke say that Mark Twain and other treasures of the past were racist.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmfwfm7mQEYu91c5zLzHRxd7z9lg1JwDu-TZ8CwLxOH56nlXLGuqavgLz-DzWbqDfGeT_Yw7dQVDqlfZVpvZDxpyFfaO8pmPerzSWnDOlhAAJSEVv_J-brBfVvD2vYK_5NvPXPlaFFqSUXmbsWNAkLpwf8mA9egIXShaoy-wRahJFN9cVLCVeWQH4lmNoz/s1543/IMG_3889.HEIC" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1119" data-original-width="1543" height="232" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmfwfm7mQEYu91c5zLzHRxd7z9lg1JwDu-TZ8CwLxOH56nlXLGuqavgLz-DzWbqDfGeT_Yw7dQVDqlfZVpvZDxpyFfaO8pmPerzSWnDOlhAAJSEVv_J-brBfVvD2vYK_5NvPXPlaFFqSUXmbsWNAkLpwf8mA9egIXShaoy-wRahJFN9cVLCVeWQH4lmNoz/s320/IMG_3889.HEIC" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-7909988311502377552024-01-14T14:21:00.000-08:002024-01-19T14:40:48.693-08:00UNHEALTHY BUREAUCRACY<p> My visit to Toronto General Hospital, the marvellous anchor of the University Health Network, was going well. I felt almost comfortable. TGH may be a giant, but my two sisters once worked there, my parents died there, as a kid reporter I haunted its emergency, I have had procedures and operations there, three of my specialists work there, and I lived for a couple of years a block away.</p><p>Then I looked closely at my specialist and said our talk could have been done by phone. She shrugged and said the ministry demanded the patient be present in person at least once every two years no matter how well the phone calls were working and the absence of problems. So it was convenient for her and the system but not for me. Now I had only waited half an hour past the appointment time in a sprawling hospital flooded with patients. But just getting to TGH is running a gauntlet when you have a city council caring more about cyclists than cars and most major streets are plugged more than the arteries in a 100-year-old man.</p><p>The hospital zone might as well be an extension of the zoo. When you are an 87-year-old deaf diabetic in a wheelchair, the streets around TGH are as congested as the compassion in a council plotting a 10% hike in taxes with a woke agenda that would make a Palestinian terrorist blush.</p><p>Surely it is in everyone's interest, especially a swamped hospital and a patient whose trip is arduous to avoid any trips that aren't necessary but can be taken care of by phone and computer. It makes you wonder about the thinking in a ministry headed by a minister, Sylvia Jones, who is also the deputy premier. Her hometown of Orangeville is just an urban burp so the idea of forcing old farts to navigate downtown Toronto streets is a nightmare her locals don't have to endure.</p><p>Just another day in sand in the cog in a costly health care system that could have been avoided. My expedition from pleasant Etobicoke consumed half a day for me and my stalwart son. The cost does jump considerably when you consider that minor fact that some experts say is really major and is handicapping medicare, the price of hospital parking when you actually finish the marathon.</p><p>For just over two hours at TGH, after Mark pushed and shoved me through a construction maze to actually get inside, we paid $25.50 for TGH parking. I have lived and worked and played for many years in the heart of the city, which right now is having a heart attack, and I have never paid that much for a twinkling of time. </p><p>I would hope the premier would get off his chubby ass and suggest to his health minister that in 2024 when the world has come to accept virtual meetings that it is long overdue to have more virtual consultations when our hospitals are overflowing with more patients than excuses.</p><p>I have served on hospital boards, even as the chair raising money for new facilities. I have a taste for the problems for many years. I still hate the health bureaucracy for its indifference to simple solutions when a short phone call could have saved a specialist and an old geezer money and a huge slice of a day.</p><p>Surely specialists and sensible patients can make a decision on whether swamped hospitals can avoid visits better than health bureaucrats. And Ontario would save a lot of money and irritation.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-17677575467003209732023-12-23T12:02:00.000-08:002023-12-24T20:33:15.635-08:00O Little Town Of Chesley<p> Climb aboard the magic carpet of nostalgia and fly eight decades in time back to the town near Owen Sound which grew like so many where mills marked fords in the rivers that crisscrossed Ontario before the province staggered from depression into war. If there wasn't a mill, there was a CNR station all located where the locomotives needed to refuel. </p><p>A vanished time because the factories are gone along with the station. And the school burned down. The classes ended up all over town, Grade 8 in the council chamber with three pupils to each picnic table.</p><p>I was orphaned as a tot in the Big Smoke and came to the little house near the tracks heated by the wood stove (used for cooking all the bread) except on special occasions when a little round coal stove heated the parlour. The outhouse in the back kitchen was decorated with GE pictures of Niagara Falls generators. Some times the frost coated the inside of windows. It was not unusual for no plumbing or furnace in town and they were high faluting too expensive on the mixed use 100 acre farms on the circling concessions. We never did get a furnace before the house burned down. Fire was the big enemy The volunteer fire engine was kept behind the town office which also housed one cell. There was one policeman who had little to do with 1,800 residents who thought shop lifting was a major crime.</p><p>Life revolved around several furniture factories where time was marked by whistles and heat was provided by burning sawdust carted by a team of horses that plodded all day by our house from a sawmill on the Rocky Saugeen where I taught myself to swim.</p><p>The social life was dominated by the Protestant churches, although the Catholics had been allowed a small one. The farmers came to church by sleigh and left their steaming teams in big driving sheds. Evil was the little pool hall and the few men who snuck to drink in a hamlet. You knew about the little that was going on by reading the weekly and listening twice a day to Toronto newscaster Jim Hunter on the big mantel radio (which was only on for an hour of soap operas.) Most war news came from the Sun Times out of Owen Sound, which is where you went for major shopping if the item wasn't in the thick Eaton's catalogue which we used when they grew tattered for pads for the endless games of street hockey.</p><p>There was no milk delivery and you kept meat not in the ice box but at the dairy in rented boxes of mainly chicken wire. The dairy sold buttermilk, a nickel a pail. The little movie theatre was busiest on the Saturday afternoon matinee which was always a Western. Churches had a big picnic, which featured egg salad sandwiches, the ingredients for which came from the gardens that many had, along with chickens in back yard pens. Pigeon coops were common. Every church also had a Christmas concert, with a few faltering solos and girls in dyed cheese cloth swooping in coloured lights from an old projector.</p><p>Not a big sale of Christmas cards, not with the price of stamps and you had to rent a little windowed box at the post office because there was no delivery. Not many Christmas decorations either, and using the short form of Xmas was frowned on. Eaton's was said to have a magic Toyland on the fifth floor up rickety wooden escalators and Simpsons just across Queen St. had a carol sing for staff and customers every morning which was carried live on radio. Every class in the public school lined up in their smelly cloakrooms and sang along with a few big radios placed strategically in the hall. Then it was back inside to an atmosphere which would cause a woke agitator to suicide, and being sent to have the Grade Eight teacher, a mean tempered principal, strap your hands with a big leather belt was as common as the daily drills on grammar.</p><p>Winter was a problem. They dropped yeast by plane for the humble bakery when a big storm marooned the town when the big railway plow couldn't clear the track. The highways were growing like varicose veins but car trips were arduous. Living into your 70s was a big deal and if you did die in the town with no hospital they would wait to spring to bury you because the ground was too hard under the snow drifts.</p><p>Ah yes, all those years ago, all those decades that I have survived, even though I no longer send cards because I don't know who of my friends, relatives and colleagues did too. I still enjoy everything about Christmas even if TV seems to be endless crap about the jerk known as Trump and the joy of a rum eggnog at a party is blighted by the noise of people enjoying themselves who aren't deaf and in a wheelchair. I read the newspapers and curse their slimness and accounts of anti-Semitism and savour the legend of Santa and the literature of Dickens.</p><p>We have never known more about the world. We have just got to ignore the alleged populists among our pols and endure the feeling that we are going to hell in a hand basket. It is hard to do so considering the Trudeau Grits and woke infestations in our schools and councils and institutions. But after all these decades I have come to the belief that 2024 can't be worse although 2023 certainly tried. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-53346046086559399942023-12-21T12:13:00.000-08:002023-12-21T12:13:44.355-08:00Wonderful life on Elsfield<p>I had lived in 16 different houses, apartments, rooms, and rooming houses, and had at least 16 part-time jobs and two reporting ones, before I ended at 92 Elsfield Rd. and my work as a writer.</p><p>Somehow I had always drifted west even though I had been born in the east end where streetcars ground past my father's house on Gerrard. He died there, overworked as a family doctor and school trustee, launching me on a dizzy round of relatives, homes and empty holidays.</p><p>When I came to Sunnylea nearly 60 years ago, where once there had been an orchard with an underground creek reeking havoc with construction near Glenroy, it was a decent haven of solid families. I knew it would be when the alderman-realtor talked me into buying the house of the TD bank manager just up on Bloor St. Changes came, of course, and not just humble ones. One of three supermarkets became the world's first adventure in cable TV where we paid to watch first-run movies by putting coins into a gizmo on top of the TV.</p><p>I covered politics. So I gathered there would be a subway line and station at the big corner. And three Metro Toronto giants lived just blocks away, with the works commissioner to the north, the planing commissioner to the west and the parks commissioner to the south. Famous for innovations like Tommy Thompson with his sign Please Walk On The Grass. </p><p>Sunnylea was anchored by a school, and not just an ordinary one but one famous in architecture as the model for new elementary schools in the country with doors leading outside from every class. The architect, John Parkin, was a bit of a bon vivant who owned two big houses across from Royal York United Church and later designed unique buildings like the new city hall which was so different that the mayor gulped when the model was unveiled. The school had advancement classes where the brightest in the borough were bussed in but the rest of the kids walked while the parents worried about the lack of sidewalks.</p><p>The more ambitious parents played volleyball one evening a week at the school. Their children joined a legendary Scout pack that Audrey Jolley ran strictly in the church basement and fathers were dragooned into helping one weekend camp each fall. Once a year I would buy mounds of fireworks and fire them off in an orgy at the school yard, and the watchers would rate the rockets for a story I would write in the Tely. All the Sunnylea kids sang carols one noon at the church and there was a grand costume parade in the school yard every Halloween.</p><p>There are always blind spots when you slip into your anecdotage. Just what was the name of the minister at the church who became the moderator of the United Church? How many wives glazed creche figures at the church? Who was the woman who edited the major astronomy magazine? What number was the house of the sister of the director of education?</p><p>Some evenings when the street lights bounce off the wet pavement and the kids are long gone from their zig zag splash through the puddles, I listen to the mutter of the city beyond the Humber and am grateful that decades ago I had enough sense to buy into this bit of peace.</p>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-26995590465591067652023-10-31T15:42:00.003-07:002023-10-31T16:04:45.318-07:00HAUNTED HOUSES I HAVE KNOWN <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmldP2_KcZ_-9s2u5T7PWUYdY0tLkQHZrpZ6N8n_ojXXcyGsmz4XLHHzNotGjDgrmw0Y3A5ZaSjANuU3-U6ji20-MZESbcMsFgYK9Q4oAs2cC2utOIFxsMmIGkxtTICIEwkDDWcQZguOdL6-XcKWJfEjFDBa0O8Tm15jPdzjzrEZNUxlw-LLpbx6saUImx/s2016/IMG_2211.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a></div>We celebrate Halloween more and more each year. The average street in Etobicoke has more skeletons than the local graveyard. I think it is wonderful because it was also the night we <p></p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmldP2_KcZ_-9s2u5T7PWUYdY0tLkQHZrpZ6N8n_ojXXcyGsmz4XLHHzNotGjDgrmw0Y3A5ZaSjANuU3-U6ji20-MZESbcMsFgYK9Q4oAs2cC2utOIFxsMmIGkxtTICIEwkDDWcQZguOdL6-XcKWJfEjFDBa0O8Tm15jPdzjzrEZNUxlw-LLpbx6saUImx/s2016/IMG_2211.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2016" data-original-width="1512" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmldP2_KcZ_-9s2u5T7PWUYdY0tLkQHZrpZ6N8n_ojXXcyGsmz4XLHHzNotGjDgrmw0Y3A5ZaSjANuU3-U6ji20-MZESbcMsFgYK9Q4oAs2cC2utOIFxsMmIGkxtTICIEwkDDWcQZguOdL6-XcKWJfEjFDBa0O8Tm15jPdzjzrEZNUxlw-LLpbx6saUImx/s320/IMG_2211.jpg" width="240" /></a>started the Toronto Sun. And anything we can celebrate these days with the anti-Semites praising Hamas and Trudeau fopping his way to new disasters is welcome relief.</p><p>When I was a kid, an old sheet and some lamp black was my costume and my dour Dutch grandparents thought carving a pumpkin was something only devils did. So later I embraced all the weird elements of Halloween with a joy equal to my three sons. But of course that was hidden at the office where I was a cub just trying to stay afloat at the Toronto Telegram, the large newspaper that was better in a news sense than the pretentious Star and the sanctimonious Globe.</p><p>We were a tough newspaper town but the Tely had more flash and fun.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiImHYMPxx-k2AX2ZqJhB6pjfIrtRMl0b5XI0g-F-szCxbSRwKz9Gg3woEGMrIIgDBO3bz7TG_MKpORwK3wJlzeYbAH0U2E9-x8AMaUkdjv3ECRnk3UAA4729VhtQ_bdRIogAijygVb4BqsgEYb2keSqPKrhjK9vSi_3mlPn_36xldK2xjosQIY7l1gb67C/s2016/IMG_2210.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2016" data-original-width="1512" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiImHYMPxx-k2AX2ZqJhB6pjfIrtRMl0b5XI0g-F-szCxbSRwKz9Gg3woEGMrIIgDBO3bz7TG_MKpORwK3wJlzeYbAH0U2E9-x8AMaUkdjv3ECRnk3UAA4729VhtQ_bdRIogAijygVb4BqsgEYb2keSqPKrhjK9vSi_3mlPn_36xldK2xjosQIY7l1gb67C/s320/IMG_2210.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>Spiritualism and ghosts were routine fare for the media which still got chills with Dracula yarns in the 1950s and 1960s. But deep down you knew that it was all BS. Or was it? But then.....<p></p><p>There was the time in </p><p>Hamilton when I heard stomping upstairs in an empty house and the staid couple confessed it was a ghost that bothered them several times a week. And the time the Tely had a caller tell us about the CBC warehouse that security refused to enter at night. CBC officials spent days giving me the runaround. Then a Star reporter at City Hall, used to Page One bylines, confessed that he thought his basement was haunted by the woman who had hung herself there.</p><p>The big story early in the 1960s was when the respected Andrew Macfarlane, later Journalism dean at Western and son of a U of T dean of medicine, wrote about the haunting of Mackenzie House on Bond St. just south of Ryerson. At night the home of Toronto's first mayor had the printing press running and the caretaker getting slapped. It was a Tely sensation and Andy spent hours telling us of his investigation which was only printed because of his reputation.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZKXsAnBLKBy4l2XKeJixS2loPY3VFJH12EAIRS-iJ_Y_bhXn_DxGUNPGrJ9ci2VmxT5zfF8X80svaRQHFGVuHKh99S5WeacS0ZSG-yYbEEC3CN8Sk8jqQndEoTWwTVvCLSFuBPgl6q4rQj6B5PD_A6q8jyK3700u4cYWylqGKcKB72Z80RZXIoMw_D6ye/s2016/IMG_2185.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2016" data-original-width="1512" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZKXsAnBLKBy4l2XKeJixS2loPY3VFJH12EAIRS-iJ_Y_bhXn_DxGUNPGrJ9ci2VmxT5zfF8X80svaRQHFGVuHKh99S5WeacS0ZSG-yYbEEC3CN8Sk8jqQndEoTWwTVvCLSFuBPgl6q4rQj6B5PD_A6q8jyK3700u4cYWylqGKcKB72Z80RZXIoMw_D6ye/s320/IMG_2185.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br />I was headed home as a kid editor one day in 1968 when someone on the Rewrite Desk said there had been a tip about a haunted house. Since I lived just blocks away, I said I would check it out. Then a reporter, John Gault, who later wrote for Lorne Green on a Canadian TV series, said I had promised to take him along the next time I checked out a ghost story.<p></p><p>We spent several evenings and one night there, listening to footsteps circling overhead in the attic, driving the young jobless couple from the Maritimes crazy. After all, they believed you had to be nuts to believe in ghosts. But there were no branches hitting the house, no plumbing noises, no obvious cause. John and I moved into the attic and saw a light bouncing around at 3 a.m. The temperature would skid up and down without reason.</p><p>We were exhausted but didn't write until some neighbour phoned the dreaded rival, the Star, which ran a few paras in the final edition, and the terrible tempered City Editor demanded to know why I had been scooped. So we spent a final night and wrote two pages and the next day hundreds of people and the police stood around the house and oohed and aahed at any noise.</p><p>TV came calling, offered the couple money if they kicked us out and let them telecast from the attic with their premier Sunday show. So John and I left. For years there were broadcasts from the house on Halloween and people whispered when they saw me in the stores. But the family went away and a boarder in the basement scoffed at any haunting. And I got promoted where the publishers wanted me to concentrate on federal bogeymen. </p><p>I drove by the house the other day and wondered. Again.</p><p>Now it is my son Mark with the skeletons in the lawn and car and porch, and the kids come flocking down the street with parents as anxious shepherds. The Tely is gone and the news is as sour as a woke activist. It's time for a great Halloween yarn but I will settle for an answer as to what really happened those nights back in 1968 when I could see my breath and the ghost never bothered to stop pacing in the attic. </p><p><br /></p>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-18574146018924131032023-10-15T13:17:00.003-07:002023-10-15T13:17:51.819-07:00The Noble Disabled<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7vYLI6VWKddPIQ59Vz-nHDbh46lt-KN2S6THpS7gYF0ieE9HIvH9fBmUCbAC95y_mVmzd_QJDdvzle_NcmMKxqg2XMnVaku8MGiEVjYQAHzaQXeULSXizWgGNy01Sbh0Fy3zeDzj1SmtFzSnTdf_IB7CxmENjBBSyPTnZLgd4kHTuEWONq1BaFfr0Dfsx/s2016/IMG_2131.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2016" data-original-width="1512" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7vYLI6VWKddPIQ59Vz-nHDbh46lt-KN2S6THpS7gYF0ieE9HIvH9fBmUCbAC95y_mVmzd_QJDdvzle_NcmMKxqg2XMnVaku8MGiEVjYQAHzaQXeULSXizWgGNy01Sbh0Fy3zeDzj1SmtFzSnTdf_IB7CxmENjBBSyPTnZLgd4kHTuEWONq1BaFfr0Dfsx/w480-h640/IMG_2131.jpg" width="480" /></a></div>I just got my annual dose of why I should be humble by attending the 30th luncheon of the Canadian Disability Hall of Fame. I have been a member of the selection board since the start and have always been awed by the noble accomplishments of the 126 inductees.<p></p><p>Thanks to the hard work and adroit stewardship of a former senator, Vim Kochhar, and everyone's favourite former mayor, David Crombie the hall has flourished in a time that accessibility is still too often a promise rather than a reality. The people we have honoured have been stalwart warriors but the cause is slippery because too often the powerful just talk a good game.</p><p>I know because even though I often have been part of the inner circle, I now face the daily obstacle course as an old deaf fart in a wheelchair. The luncheon was held as usual at the Fairmont Royal York, the giant hotel where I have been attending luncheons starting as a cub Telegram reporter 65 years ago. Wonderful hotel that gives only lip service to accessibility. It's a wonder they spell it correctly in the trumpeting of the claim because when you search for how to get into the fortress, how to find the solitary elevator hidden near the eastern entrance guarded by hostile valet attendants when you try to park for a few seconds. there is no info. I was dropped off because I hadn't gone to the bank to get a second mortgage to pay for the parking of $13 an hour, or $39 for an event.</p><p>As my faithful son Mark reminded me, last year we had plenty of time waiting for that elevator with David Onley, the former lieutenant governor. (David has left us, probably having to argue about accessibility at the Pearly Gates.) He recalled during the wait our lunch where the police towed his car despite the handicapped sign in the windshield.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p></p></blockquote><p><br />The food, as usual, was great. And so were the three new inductees. Stephen Harper was a solid PM, considering the present dog's breakfast, but often forgotten are the changes he accomplished. He couldn't attend the ceremony but what he did for the disabled lives on in a country that is tired of his successors. Chantal Benoit, the wheelchair basketball megastar, and Michelle Stilwell, in athletics, wheelchair basketball and provincial politics, were world champions proudly wearing their international medals and honours. If only we were blessed with more such achievers.</p><p>The location of the luncheon reminded me again of how careless the world is when dealing with the disabled. Downtown is a mess. The streets around the Royal York are so bad, I was almost hit by a motorcycle roaring down the sidewalk to get around the stalled traffic where the cops and the lights seemed to be competing to make things worse. I am not a novice in dealing with the public or events. I have been president of national, provincial and municipal bodies, ranging from the CNE to university and hospital boards, and delegate to international assembles. And now, with dulled senses, I make the rounds of five hospitals and various health offices and the daily battle with traffic in a city where council can't seem to do the basics without costly posturing.</p><p>Let me warn you as your address book fills with the names of departed friends and your neighbours vanish, it is only going to get worse. Because Canada is aging, and the candidates for the Disabled Hall of Fame are going to multiply.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-32897773029907035462023-09-15T13:17:00.001-07:002023-09-15T16:11:04.224-07:00Remembering when......<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p></blockquote></blockquote><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEijmLWXbNJmhqcKdp3__A0Rs9CV_q7xq_Sj8H9o3-cO4z1ZLTNXgq2fgpdfqOaNZepjm1ryxSe9fvG1DBRqjzvxWH6RAhunZr7vRYi_9H_-fGJ4I-mQZQVFPCHSoxU4odt4fE_eIsqCdAiGnPaDpa23KitfbZaywrZPKJrnWbgreIxglMFhFDZHNTeqxNCA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="2016" data-original-width="1512" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEijmLWXbNJmhqcKdp3__A0Rs9CV_q7xq_Sj8H9o3-cO4z1ZLTNXgq2fgpdfqOaNZepjm1ryxSe9fvG1DBRqjzvxWH6RAhunZr7vRYi_9H_-fGJ4I-mQZQVFPCHSoxU4odt4fE_eIsqCdAiGnPaDpa23KitfbZaywrZPKJrnWbgreIxglMFhFDZHNTeqxNCA=w300-h400" width="300" /></a></div><br />It was time to visit the past. So my son Mark loaded my wheelchair and we headed for one of the queens of cemeteries, Mount Pleasant, and the celebration of the life of one of Toronto's great troubadours of civic history, Mike Filey.<p></p><p>(And then we scraped the ages off my father's gravestone.)</p><p>It was a suitable setting for Filey who had a quip and a smudge of history for every day of the decades he spent with us. After all, he led tours through the rolling expanses of the stones of the great and the humble for years. </p><p>His tours and his lectures, his championing of the CNE, transit, civility, and midways in speeches and stunts and columns and broadcasts, made him as familiar as a family friend as the city moaned and grew and stumbled and flourished.</p><p>So that is why a famous TV talking head emceed the gathering, and in the front rows were former mayors like Eggs and Tiny Perfect Worship. Paul Godfrey, who had been chairman of Metro Toronto and just about everything else, spoke, and a chap named John Tory who had been a young radio reporter when Mike and I started, listened to my urgings that for gawd's sake, you got to run again.</p><p>It was a bawdy exciting time when Mike, and his buddy, Dave Garrick, built CN Towers and Skydomes and ran centennials where the Queen would have come if PET didn't want her visiting English Canada. Garrick spoke and I wandered back in my mind to when councils actually worked, instead of woked, and traffic actually moved as well as one or two cyclists in a bike lane.</p><p>I was part of that past which lives now only in my nostalgia. When you partied into the night, and the nice lady in Filey's rec room turned out to be Marilyn Bell who had an exciting time when she was only 14.</p><p>Too often the good old days were only good because you forget the goofs. But they really were in the decades before the century turned over like a dead carp and the pedestrians darting between the idling cars were oblivious to danger because of cell phones stuck in their ears.</p><p>But then it was time to leave the clumps of people from Mike's past to seek the yesteryear for the Downings, when it all began with a lad from Cornwall, who had been a teacher, professor, school inspector and surgeon named Dr. John Henry Downing. Mark and I finally found the stone that was placed nearly a century ago. Dad bought it when his first wife died. And then he died in 1939. His patients scattered through the east end included several future mayors and Conservative leaders and they mourned a charismatic character but the kids cheered because he had been Toronto school board chair and they got a holiday for the funeral.</p><p>Mark scrubbed the grime from the stone of grandparents he had never known. But the lowest lettering is difficult to see. My father had been a powerful man, in manner and stature, and he had married again when he was 66. A bit of a scandal, or so they said, because my mother was a young nurse. Stoffelena Hoogstad died in 1941 two years after him, and my family descended into a turmoil, which is the reason her name was never on the stone until my sister Joyce found this on her return to Toronto from the small town of Chesley 17 years later.</p><p>But some people are remembered because they live in memory, not on stone memorials. And so it will be for Mike Filey.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-20640254988251365562023-04-07T13:03:00.000-07:002023-04-07T13:03:38.753-07:00TRAVELS ONLY IN MY MIND<p></p><h1 dir="rtl" style="text-align: right;"><ul style="text-align: right;"><li style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjlG60VsglUaMaok0bR2KmMrYuHZssbskOEdMYSRE-LiOWHRs_N4X8APV75UFOdx3mFY1rxAwEU8dP_FqFxNkR3HwcGl8MD8xwdI2IEtNC6agM3zL3-GF8M7HPnhELclyX5ApuSKxTTzKaRSKpW7gM-cdVQ6hHJzHmS1Fixbi15N65AFWEbaME5NORJPQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="3032" data-original-width="2048" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjlG60VsglUaMaok0bR2KmMrYuHZssbskOEdMYSRE-LiOWHRs_N4X8APV75UFOdx3mFY1rxAwEU8dP_FqFxNkR3HwcGl8MD8xwdI2IEtNC6agM3zL3-GF8M7HPnhELclyX5ApuSKxTTzKaRSKpW7gM-cdVQ6hHJzHmS1Fixbi15N65AFWEbaME5NORJPQ" width="162" /></a></li></ul></h1><p style="text-align: left;">Now that I am in my anecdotage, as my family remark rudely, my travels are limited by macular degeneration, diabetes, hearing aids, and a tendency to fall over. So a dependance on wheelchairs, walkers and other drivers now limit me so I can only dream of flying with the RCAF north of Canada as I once did</p><p style="text-align: left;">My old travelling companion is not hampered. My son John Henry celebrated turning 61 by traipsing around Europe and publishing on Facebook the photo trophies of visiting the birthplace of his grandmother in Holland. His wife Marie happily toured the France of her ancestors.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And I savoured every pixel. Once John Henry (JHDIII) and I gawked our way around the Caribbean and exotic sites from Easter Island to the Galapagos and the dangerous bits of South America. The memories meld now into a gazpacho of delight and splashing in the Trent substitutes for diving with hammerhead sharks. </p><p style="text-align: left;">JHDIII had a drink or two at Harry's. There are a few bars like that dotted in legendary cities. But the picture took me back to the one in Venice where I once roamed on glorious visits. Like that trip with Bill Davis where I saved the premier and Cathy from being arrested at the Trevi Fountain.</p><p style="text-align: left;">It was Sunday morning in Venice and the press corp were tired from journalism before the days of cell phones and computers and you had to find a telegraph office to file. So we decided to greet the day at Harry's just over from the famous hotel. I was dragged along because David Allen of the Star and Allan Dickie of CP (we called them the Giant and the Midget) insisted. We were huddled around a starched table cloth on a tiny table when the big doors banged open.</p><p style="text-align: left;">It was like a scene from a movie in the early 1970s. In swept Orson Welles dressed in black with blonde bimbos on each arm. He carried a cape and cigar box which he handed to the bartender. He enthroned himself imperiously on a banquette, looked disdainfully at the crowd and snapped his fingers. The bartender ran up, unwrapped a cigar, cut the end and then lit it. Welles blew a plume of smoke over the rabble as the girls giggled at being so close to a famous man.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I stood up and said let's go, we have seen everything now. </p><p style="text-align: left;">When JHDIII sent me that picture it all came back to the years when my only concerns were not falling into a canal while drunk and where in hell was a telegraph office. I have many tales (the family say too many) and often the stars in them have gone to death and legend. I crashed into Mandela in Kyoto, was teargassed in Seoul, crash-landed with Justin Trudeau's grandfather in the Yukon, posed with Clinton, badgered Netanyahu.......</p><p style="text-align: left;">But I remember that beer at that bar looking across at the swollen actor with all the other stories that now churn in a memory that has volcanoes of missing facts.</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><span><!--more--></span><p></p>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-80683042193946928912023-01-20T21:20:00.000-08:002023-01-20T21:20:09.862-08:00All the John Henrys After 1870<p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgLY3qv4HPPctIlEZuRhWJm7rJ9Q3JCCfjZNZwtkzCXUs9ON3i3SOyR_mkVJCIVpp2kuYWkz11QtCNvOJKizky8xcvFLJ5QTA2pgNisT7yIZFJADRTF62NGZeynBQfy6OVLXcN79qRmxy8p82V1CLfK67VznM_497oQGQKV7FF9GmJ2SCO6rq0dFddnbQ" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" height="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgLY3qv4HPPctIlEZuRhWJm7rJ9Q3JCCfjZNZwtkzCXUs9ON3i3SOyR_mkVJCIVpp2kuYWkz11QtCNvOJKizky8xcvFLJ5QTA2pgNisT7yIZFJADRTF62NGZeynBQfy6OVLXcN79qRmxy8p82V1CLfK67VznM_497oQGQKV7FF9GmJ2SCO6rq0dFddnbQ=w640-h336" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> <p></p>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-82459460829105556422023-01-18T12:05:00.001-08:002023-01-19T16:06:23.399-08:00David Onley's Triumphed In His Space<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEFWP6h4BR7WGQgOmj1Z3q4COKJH0fxwcBGp-sBVoBqrjrjZoPUzEmIt84Lb0bqAnpuaCs90pWHC2n3qa_-URaNQERFD24dlTyF8fLKQpRjEFNre1tb9e0XMVGqF3_nO6blMvXfJx_MbJqKRV3dK49RpJwIynEtRHmi_zlOXoe-SBx8zuQjepKEtQDOQ/s1000/His-Honour-David-Onley-1000x1000.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEFWP6h4BR7WGQgOmj1Z3q4COKJH0fxwcBGp-sBVoBqrjrjZoPUzEmIt84Lb0bqAnpuaCs90pWHC2n3qa_-URaNQERFD24dlTyF8fLKQpRjEFNre1tb9e0XMVGqF3_nO6blMvXfJx_MbJqKRV3dK49RpJwIynEtRHmi_zlOXoe-SBx8zuQjepKEtQDOQ/s320/His-Honour-David-Onley-1000x1000.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>It was just another municipal staff Christmas party that I poked into one evening on the hunt for anything that might interest a Sun reader. My daily marathon for 40 years and thousands of columns and editorials. Nodded to friendly aldermen and dodged the roasted. Mel Lastman glared and I retreated to a nook where Charles Onley waited to go home.<p></p><p>We chatted carefully about issues, because after all, he was one of the top municipal lawyers in the country and his fief of North York was a giant suburb even if Toronto did look down at it. Then popped a transportation subject even stranger than Santa's sleigh, magnetic levitation. I had been a leading critic of the Tory experiment to build a costly test track at the Ex, aided by info from Grit critics including an earnest crippled researcher named David Onley.</p><p>Then it all came together even for a tired journalist on the hunt for something, anything, for tomorrow's paper. This was the father, and he didn't want to talk about wheel-less streetcars floating on magnets but that researcher.</p><p>I had never really talked to this borough solicitor but it didn't matter because he went on and on about how happy he was that "his" boy had survived his rough start to marriage to a gospel singer and a family. Then he paused. And then he cried.</p><p>Just two men at the edge of a party that was limping along in a mandatory office-party way. Two crying men, because I was crying too. Any father would.</p><p>It had got better later for "his" boy. There had been braces, crutches, wheelchairs, but then from the seat of a motorized scooter David had soared into space. He loved to write about space. He loved to talk about space. And so he became a broadcaster and wrote a best seller and became a familiar role model and TV personality.</p><p>The last time I saw David after half a century of watching his cheerful diplomacy as a champion on accessible issues was at last fall's 29th induction luncheon for the Canadian Disability Hall of Fame. I have been on its selection committee since it began when former senator Vim Kochhar inspired its start as the Terry Fox Hall of Fame.</p><p> It has prospered with famous recipients but the title has changed since the Fox family created problems that we couldn't work out even when such populist giants as former mayor David Crombie and Onley were involved. Just another example that accessibility to all may appear a universal wish but its real achievements are a nuanced dance through mine fields of politics, pride, costs and stupidity.</p><p>I have never missed the annual presentation but that has become a challenge since the grand Royal York Hotel - where I have been in and out for 70 years - might as well be a fortress with drawbridges down when you are in a wheelchair as I have been for several years. My son Mark is a formidable help but even so Onley in his motorized scooter and I in my wheelchair were the stragglers later at the eastern entrance with its small special elevator.</p><p>Plenty of time to chat and smile at the hassles, but then David was 72 when he died, a lifetime of overcoming hurdles from legs that don't work like those on the people who flash by. I am just a newbie with canes, walkers and wheelchairs. But still, the casual insolence of the dumb who don't recognize the hurdles they so carelessly leave around is astounding.</p><p>I recall a lunch at the Underground Railroad when David and I chatted into the early afternoon with John Henry Jackson, the owner who had been an Argo quarterback. What a pleasant time. I walked happily back to the Sun, which had not yet been mangled. Onley left after me to find that his car with hand controls and the warning sign had been towed. It didn't matter that with no police offering to help, he had been marooned by a stupid cop. It was now up to him to get from Sherbourne and King to the foot of Yonge when he can't walk. I wrote about it later and yelled at the chief but to David it was just another day.</p><p>Ontario has been blessed with the men and women like David who have been our lieutenant-governors. (I would not say the same about the GGs) In Ontario, they may have often looked like kings and queens from the Establishment but most have never lacked the commoner touch.</p><p>For example, John Black Aird was as elegant as his name. A baron of Bay Street. Yet even when his back was killing him. he was playing floor hockey with the kids at Variety Village. He was whipsawed by a crisis in 1985 when the Tories and Grits were in a virtual tie after an election and it was up to him who was to rule. So he chose to go with David Peterson and his deal and the Tories' long reign ended. He gave me the scoop about that in a few common sense observations one noon at the Press Club when I hosted him as president.</p><p>As Sun Editor I lambasted him in the editorial about a Grit bagman coming through for the party. He laughed that off as "just politics," and kept a column I later wrote about him encased in plastic on his law office desk. Our lieutenant-governors have always had an understanding appreciation about how politics is played. </p><p> Lincoln Alexander was a prime example of that. He had started as the humble son of a railway porter but moved comfortably in the halls of power after he used his RCAF war pay to become a lawyer. As a Tory MP, he heckled Pierre Trudeau so savagely one day that PET yelled "fuck off" which Hansard after much soul-searching made "fuddle duddle."</p><p>Because you couldn't have the millionaire PM curse the only working class black in the Commons.</p><p>As CNE president, I stood with Linc reviewing the veterans march past on Warriors' Day at the great fair. An elderly woman, sagging in the heat, the sweat staining her uniform, marched determinedly past. Linc was so moved that he yelled encouragement and leaned out waving to her and would have fallen if I hadn't grabbed him by the belt of his RCAF uniform. There I was, once the lowest rank in the reserve, holding a very very senior officer so he didn't fall 10 feet off a reviewing stand.</p><p>I told Onley that anecdote one day and he gave the same gentle broad smile with which he greeted the good and the bad of life. If only all of us could take the bad hands that fate deals us and perservere too, no matter what the hurdles.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-73849928695246854232022-11-21T12:05:00.001-08:002022-11-21T12:05:43.588-08:00WHEN SANTA AND THE CUP WERE HUGE<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVs17Jqv31c_okE9n0YJvPXa5dRQxH9HWkoraAysCdwf6BPGfzfWrA2n0l7GFJZ3dztnLu174KlYyyz4JCOlcTOwqWQjz1LBY9EmpE_OqeDTjfDybjBohqBHxNObLVQ-6TGCgrlcQsZLRstzhChAXXtdmy3cDp-hCWnQn6fDgEiCW2dkbblyNSLar3Mg/s1200/EyFfMkcWgAQbKUl.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="725" data-original-width="1200" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVs17Jqv31c_okE9n0YJvPXa5dRQxH9HWkoraAysCdwf6BPGfzfWrA2n0l7GFJZ3dztnLu174KlYyyz4JCOlcTOwqWQjz1LBY9EmpE_OqeDTjfDybjBohqBHxNObLVQ-6TGCgrlcQsZLRstzhChAXXtdmy3cDp-hCWnQn6fDgEiCW2dkbblyNSLar3Mg/s320/EyFfMkcWgAQbKUl.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /> To swim through memories to high school and my career as a slow guard in football and then my anxious Telegram moments as a football scribe and editor is dangerous because my good old days were often not. But in 1955, just getting girls to smile at me and the coach not to suggest I was the slowest player on our team of future NHL, CFL, lacrosse and university stalwarts rated as A++.<div>The Santa Claus parade was key to boasting at Weston Collegiate, the second oldest high school in a city that had not yet exploded in every possible way to match a country that was busy growing up after stalling after the war. Eatons and Simpsons dominated retail and the giants cunningly had a couple of reps at each high school. They were the cream of the school. Eatons reached to their reps for the bulk of the Santa parade and they reached out to the inside crowd and you made sure everyone knew that you were one of the marchers. I remember little about the parade but the faces of the kids along the cold streets made it all worthwhile. It was a magical Saturday to match the radio broadcasts from Toyland in Eatons and standing in the halls to sing along with the carollers when Simpsons opened for the day. No wonder the two giant stores were our shopping destination and a cop had to control the pedestrians crossing between the two stores where Eatons was cheaper but Simpsons wrapped better.</div><div>The CFL, like the NHL, was smaller. But I noticed that despite all the references to Canadian players in the telecast on Sunday, the striking difference 67 years later was the absence of the names of Toronto high school athletes. I remember a halfback smashing over me for a TD at the high school final at Varsity who went on to star with the Tiger Cats and that our points were scored by Bob Pulford who was a solid Toronto Maple Leaf assistant captain. We had a tight end who played with the Parkdale Lions (longer than I did) which was the farm club of the Argos who used him on occasion.</div><div>At the Telegram, I was pressed into service as a fast typist who had played football for the special Grey Cup edition where I wrote the play by play of the entire game. I knew all about the special atmosphere at Exhibition Stadium, which was so adequate for football that they tore it down in hope of getting into the NFL, because one Cup afternoon I spent the entire afternoon sitting ignored on the bench of the losing team. The special Cup edition almost ended my journalism career because when I was in charge in the final Tely year, I didn't realize my news editor was so unconscious on vodka that he didn't know he was at work and screwed up our football stories. You didn't do that when your publisher owned the Argos.</div><div>Oh yes, my Sunday was more than a trip back 67 years. The good stuff shone like nuggets in a Klondike stream. The bad stuff, like my son getting so trapped in the jam downtown from the Santa Claus parade that my car exploded and had to be towed for expensive repairs, is deleted. After all, seven decades have passed while the city and sports have doubled along with the size of the defensive line.</div><div>We were called the Weston Ironman because the high school coach Mel Thompson believed that you played 60 minutes if you could still walk. I still have the leather football jacket and may even be able to get into it. Don't know but the memories fit just fine....no matter what the Downings say.</div><div><br /></div>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-5192323483702646382022-10-22T10:40:00.057-07:002022-10-25T10:04:08.614-07:00INACCESSIBLE TORONTO'S HASSLES<p> It seemed such a simple task. Getting Mark my loyal bullmoose son to take me to the grand old Royal York Hotel for the 29th induction luncheon of the Canadian Disability Hall of Fame. I have been on the selection committee from the start before I was hobbled into a wheelchair.</p><p>It took four hours and I missed the start thanks to a downtown so snarled with traffic that it might as well have been a Ukrainian city under Russian attack. Plenty of time to look at election signs for an assortment of anonymous candidates. Plenty of time to think that the city traffic is now run so stupidly that all 25 councillors and the mayor should be replaced. Fortunately some have quit and a few, like Stephen Holyday, Mike Colle and Michael Thompson, perhaps deserve to get another crack at saving a city from the woke activists and bureaucratic nincompoops who couldn't run a sandbox in a kindergarten.</p><p>Of course parking downtown now requires a second mortgage. Back in 1958 when I first covered luncheons at the Royal York as a hungry cub reporter, I strolled over from the Old Lady of Melinda St., the Tely, and made my way to the gilded caverns. It took a few minute. The Tely vanished in 1971 and the hotel has primped its way through many changes. It took us half an hour from downtown Etobicoke just to get to the western flank. And that was just the start of climbing Everest.</p><div style="text-align: left;">It was silly of us who thought with four degrees and a lifetime of experience downtown that it would be easy to access even a giant hotel. But no western entrance, and the south doors are not accessible supposedly to simple-minded dolts. We actually did get inside with the help of bemused hotel staff and I dragged myself up several flights of grand stairs while Mark lugged up the wheelchair and went off to find some nook that didn't cost a fortune to park.</div><p>I pushed my wheelchair towards the two banks of elevators and finally won the competition to get aboard one by shoving my wheelchair into some giddy thing. Best block I have thrown since my football days at high school and college. Of course the luncheon had started and it didn't matter much because the tables were too close together for a wheelchair and an 86-year-old fart to get through.</p><p>Mark finally returned and I found my corner and could concentrate on the heroes of the day. Josh Dueck, Greg Westlake and Lorin MacDonald, stars from the worlds of Paralympics, human rights and hockey who know all about not only being champions at what they do but how to handle the hassles and frustrations of dealing with a giant city and a giant hotel which make such feeble attempts to actually let people moved around.</p><p>This hall of fame started with Vim Kochhar, then a senator, who had the inspiration for what we called the Terry Fox Hall of Fame, that great Canadian who ran across the country and into our hearts as he persevered and became an icon for all disabled. Early recipients were Edwin Baker and Rick Hansen. We renamed the hall because of some difficulty with the Fox family and Vim, who can be very persuasive, has had the Tiny Perfect Worship chair it for a year....which has turned into 29 even though David Crombie, still smiling and deaf like me, has the city clamouring for his attention.</p><p>The selection committee has had such notables as Rev. Bob Rumball, the great football player, and Con Di Nino, the former senator, as we sift through the remarkable biographies from people who smash the odds as they achieve, and achieve, and achieve. I have served on several hall of fame selection committees in the political, journalism and sports worlds but this is the one where the nominations leave me thankful that there are so many of our neighbours who hurdle adversities as if they are just sidewalks cracks.</p><p>Too bad that so much still has to be done. As proof of that, we leave the grand hotel by heading to the eastern side. Along the way we encounter a hall of fame notable, David Onley, in a superior motorized wheelchair which makes mine look like a Model T compared to a Jag. But there is only one way out, a small elevator that takes David while we wait. Behind us are giant meeting rooms and hundreds of hotel rooms. And I use the small elevator and wait in the cold for Mark to negotiate a loan and pay for parking.</p><p>How nice the city has become so accessible....</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-32097609235563757812022-08-11T18:45:00.003-07:002022-08-11T19:26:44.337-07:00Shopping For Health<h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I have waded through oceans of bureaucratese, medical goofs, misinformation, lies, propaganda and just plain crap and concluded that I need as much protection against the virus and politicians as I can get.</span></h1><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">I have a bullseye stapled to my chest and most of the world seems poised to use me as target practise.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">So I went to get another shot. I already have two boosters but I seemed to match the most vulnerable among the old farts just floating along trying to avoid the latest stupidness of man. And doctors seemed to think it was a smart idea.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">Shoppers didn't. Despite a vacant office, and I mean space not their minds, I was turned away in my wheelchair and told to talk to my GP.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">Bernie Gosevitz may be the best family doctor in the world so now I will intrude into his incredible sked and waste a lot of my time, and his time, and family time just to try to stay alive for the next pandemic to come along.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">My medical profile is terrible. I do like waking up because it is such a surprise. And I certainly match the profile of someone reading obits for pleasure at all those I have survived... for now</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">I am 86 and have been a diabetic for a million needles. My pacemaker has been doing an admirable job with my atrial filibration. The five specialists who grunt at me regularly give me nine prescriptions and four vitamins and mysterious capsules to go with the two insulins.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">I walk like a drunk when I am not falling out of my wheelchair and breaking ribs and decorating my forehead with stitches.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">I came home in a medical plane from my last U.S. trip and the insurance refused to pay until my specialists grunted at them for a change.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">Thanks to Mark, my son, who thank heavens took some cooking courses at George Brown to go along with his two degrees, I have actually survived at home despite two stays in three hospitals over a decade.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">So I didn't expect any trouble when I showed up at the Shoppers at Six Points along with my 87-year-old wife also in a wheelchair pushed by another stalwart son Brett. She takes as much medicine as I do and Mark and Brett are the size of the Argo line and prob ably can play better than them too.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">We were greeted with the sort of reception that you get when the clerks don't know wotinhell they're doing.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">From above I heard a sympathetic groan from my old friend, Murray Koffler, the founder of Shoppers, and the wonderful renaissance guru that was such a magical force in culture, education and just about any nook in Toronto that mattered.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">Koffler and I were in at the start of the outdoor art show in Nathan Phillips Square and with his money and smarts and my civic bluster we managed to intimidate officials long enough to make the show a success.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">No wonder I had no trouble as head of the city advisory committe giving </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Koffler the top civic honour. He certainly knew how to deal with bureaucrats and heaven knows they certainly know how to screw up when given the slightest chance with our health and with our money. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">I am a big believer in shots. When I was on the Runnymede Health Centre board, I moved that any staffer who didn't get a shot during a flu epidemic not have a job. My father had a huge family practise in the east end and he moved my two sisters and I into the same bedroom during mumps and measles and other outbreaks to make sure we got sick before we became adults.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">He also was a big booster of doing things like that when he was chairman of the Toronto school board. He certainly didn't tolerate nonsense like ambulance staff and paramedics not getting protected by shots.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">When Dad died and my uncle took over the practise, he had the same approach.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">Thank heavens for the sensible approach of the old family doctor who didn't like populist renegades who thought BS equalled science. The anti-vaxxers were treated with the contempt they deserved.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">They decided in my first year of university that I had had TB the year before. My uncle considered my last year of high school when I played 60 minutes of football in the championship game at Varsity and was active in other activities like the school play, puffed on his pipe and said it was nonsense for me to go to the Weston sanitarium. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">He considered all the evidence and decided not to put my life on hold for a year.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">Common sense was what he used. If only there was more of that when we fight pandemics.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-4558022583043028302022-05-26T08:38:00.000-07:002022-05-26T08:38:01.323-07:00Sad Anniversary<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRnj8yI0tOyetrnbqD59tTxnnVErKs6ptu9vwfi88YNr2ACuMp96BZHKAut7ySwa8rDr55YcyYdYMTlB0xVDezyzl3yA6abmUT9LlEoCI3JNk1MjcNk3Bj5-bXrAyOiSptrqhu1TGhxTHsGznFw1ieVZpqstO8GGfg1qf0CwBHtv02rIEWNWofR2FuoA/s804/Ryersion_University_John_Downing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="804" data-original-width="536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRnj8yI0tOyetrnbqD59tTxnnVErKs6ptu9vwfi88YNr2ACuMp96BZHKAut7ySwa8rDr55YcyYdYMTlB0xVDezyzl3yA6abmUT9LlEoCI3JNk1MjcNk3Bj5-bXrAyOiSptrqhu1TGhxTHsGznFw1ieVZpqstO8GGfg1qf0CwBHtv02rIEWNWofR2FuoA/s320/Ryersion_University_John_Downing.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">We are lamenting the anniversary of an awful assault on our history, yet our awful leaders pretend it never happened. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;">Two lines echo from the past when I consider the disgraceful renaming of Ryerson University and destruction of the statue of Egerton Ryerson, our most famous educator and the obstetrician delivering many of our major institutions and ministries.</span><p></p><div dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web (West European)", "Segoe UI", -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div class="x_elementToProof elementToProof" style="border: 0px; font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down was the haunting melody from The Band in 1969, and FDR's A Day That Will Live In Infamy is one of the most famous presidential quotes.<span style="border: 0px; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Surely the toppling of this giant memento should have also stimulated haunting songs and soaring oratory.</span></div><div class="x_elementToProof elementToProof" style="border: 0px; font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> But a year has passed and with the honourable exception of the National Post, the media and our cowardly leaders stay muzzled by the fear of the Indigenous lobby. No lament! No broadsides of oratory! No inquiry! The police played Keystone Cops even though evidence was piled higher than the Scarborough Bluffs.</span></div><div class="x_elementToProof elementToProof" style="border: 0px; font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The vandals escape charges/fines/jail for blatant criminal acts. I cry out for the days of such Post/Sun crusaders as Christie Blatchford, a Ryerson grad who would have taken the incriminating facts from profs like Patrice Dutil and driven them like swords into the craven administrators and the Greek chorus chanting lies. Dutil warned in the Post on June 8, 2021, that many universities could face similar destructive mischief when activists launch pathetic BS barrages over names and past.</div><div class="x_elementToProof elementToProof" style="border: 0px; font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Another Ryerson warrior, Mark Bonokoski, wrote in despair in the Sun about the Ryerson debacle and said he would tear up his degree.</div><div class="x_elementToProof elementToProof" style="border: 0px; font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">There was no question when Ryerson hired me to write its history what would be the cover.</div><div class="x_elementToProof elementToProof" style="border: 0px; font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Since 1889 Egerton's statue had stared at Gould St., nearly 10 feet tall on a granite base of similar height that cost $8,300 from governments and pupils who loved him for innovating a Canadian first - free schooling for all. Behind him rose his incubator for education and culture that Cumberland designed in 1851. For decades they made their home of St. James Square a favourite attraction for all.</div><div class="x_elementToProof elementToProof" style="border: 0px; font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The man, the sculptor and the architect created so much that these were<span style="border: 0px; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">bizarre targets for a lawless mob using the incredible past mistreatment of the Indigenous to justify destroying a grand reputation and a statue worth $260,000 in modern funds and millions in historic value.</span></div><div class="x_elementToProof" style="border: 0px; font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">If the goal really was to punish Canadians for decades of their brutal handling by governments and churches, there are genuine targets for perverted activism in the Indigenous world, not that any sensible person would justify assaulting our past with distorted posturing.</span></div><div class="x_elementToProof elementToProof" style="border: 0px; font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Such as Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant whose history is not disputed. No need to cheat about his wars and dealings, unlike the lies about Ryerson. He kept and traded as slaves many Africans and captured warriors. Yet his statue hasn't been destroyed in his Brantford, and Brant County and a hospital haven't been renamed. His portraits are featured in great galleries.</span></div><div class="x_elementToProof" style="border: 0px; font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Apparently not a useful target but then the activists failed in most subjects, including history.</span></div><div class="x_elementToProof elementToProof" style="border: 0px; font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">His many critics scorned him as "Monster" Brant. The statue of Ryerson was dubbed affectionately as Eggie by many thousands.Yet it suited the twisted few to tear one man and statue down and ignore the other.</div></div>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-2445898733252885142022-05-01T10:06:00.000-07:002022-05-01T10:06:50.152-07:00NAMING THE IDIOTS<div style="text-align: left;"> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi60U03N18rpNfTFmn2NXtsq6sNQoaInB_YzaLQRMLsvyZ6kPO-9WQGSPzRdSC7QoCiq6xydBkJwxMMXULcRSn_CUxCUATXV5AYWz8UyOhDLgqTmx_aHRR9yKq9jIe9skra_EDURwY_sJ7f2PsCpWZU7AnkM2_57ZNpHmFdHnvlnxQ4N7SH479o4DonsQ/s804/Ryersion_University_John_Downing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="804" data-original-width="536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi60U03N18rpNfTFmn2NXtsq6sNQoaInB_YzaLQRMLsvyZ6kPO-9WQGSPzRdSC7QoCiq6xydBkJwxMMXULcRSn_CUxCUATXV5AYWz8UyOhDLgqTmx_aHRR9yKq9jIe9skra_EDURwY_sJ7f2PsCpWZU7AnkM2_57ZNpHmFdHnvlnxQ4N7SH479o4DonsQ/s320/Ryersion_University_John_Downing.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>Supposed friends used to say when an old fart like me retired that he or she was worn out. The reality is that in most cases we don't want to stand the BS a second longer.</div><div style="text-align: left;">It has always been the case that the good old days often weren't. They were "good" only in your nostalgia which has been edited by more holes in your memory than cheesecloth so that you have forgotten the crap of daily hassles.</div><div style="text-align: left;">But now the nonsense has multiplied to ruin what we hoped would be more sensible public life.</div><div style="text-align: left;">There are new hurdles the height of the mountains I once climbed in the Yukon all fed by an explosion of populism infected with tribalism and politically correct views where facts and logic don't mean a damn thing. The crazies have shot machine guns at history.</div><div style="text-align: left;">So even when they talk about the past without endless apologies, they don't mention what really happened because it doesn't suit the latest pandering to the latest clutch-and-grab of activists.</div><div style="text-align: left;">And so we trash the past and slander its leaders because a few mouthy jerks want to justify their income and existence and public rep rather than actually work for a living.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Ryerson University is being renamed because some educrats who know little about the history of influential Egerton Ryerson and the school's great six decades have been intimidated and seduced by a supposedly large movement which knows nothing about the man and the school. </div><div style="text-align: left;">I do! And I know the man and the school were great. The hell with those who disagree, and say Egerton Ryerson was the architect of the awful Indian residential schools that crushed indigenous kids after it ripped them away from their parents.</div><div style="text-align: left;">I will spare you a recitation of all my proof that I know more about the man and the university than the name-changers but just check my biography on blog.johndowning.ca. I will also refer you to my three blogs over recent years about the phony name crisis and the grand circus when the university was born out of post-war chaos.</div><div style="text-align: left;">But Ryerson did hire me to write the book about its early history. I did help write its first history plaques after I was student president and student newspaper editor. I did serve on several task forces, the board of governors, search committees, (my nominee, Walter Pitman, became president) advisory committees and I did teach there. I did turn down a request to head a course.</div><div style="text-align: left;">So I do know what I am talking about more than the current excuses of leaders. And when I argue the renaming was stupid, I am hardly alone. The National Post had an article April 28 by a Ryerson prof, Patrice Dutil, which began: "The renaming ... was driven by a systematic process of shaming Canadian history by outright distortions and gross misunderstandings."</div><div style="text-align: left;">The Post also had an April 6, 2021, article by Dutil and Ryerson prof Ron Stagg that outlined the wonderful background of Egerton Ryerson as one of the most significant fathers of education in Ontario and Canada. I blogged about it the next day titled <a href="https://blog.johndowning.ca/2021/04/only-ignorant-would-rename-ryerson.html">Only The Ignorant Would Rename Ryerson</a>.</div><div style="text-align: left;">It's just incredible there was not more of an uproar when Ryerson's statue, one of the most famous in the city, was destroyed. Paid for by public subscription including pupils throughout Canada and even the eastern U.S. because he brought free education to all elementary and high schools, as well as starting a museum, art gallery, art school, publishing house, and teacher's college which still exist in grander form. Strange if not shocking that I never heard any of the leaders at ROM and Victoria College and the many other offsprings of his countless endeavours defend the reputation of this giant being slaughtered by intellectual pygmies.</div><div style="text-align: left;">But then too many of our leaders are gutless when it comes to reasoning with those who say ALL our past is rooted in racism and hatred of minorities and there is nothing to do but apologize endlessly even when the indigenous claim is for land that was under water before the awful white men dumped fill. The claim has been made for areas where there was never an indigenous population according to various university studies. </div><div style="text-align: left;">And so we trash a man who did so much for his country that he should be a national treasure. But heck, he was one of those damn preachers who believed it was his duty to preach Christianity and serve others and actually live with the "natives" and teach them about farming and have one as his best friend. He even started agricultural experiments to test the climate.</div><div style="text-align: left;">The militant indigenous demands for more rights and money would be blessed if Egerton Ryerson were still alive because he would be a great leader for all their legitimate causes and have enough sense to caution them against their more ridiculous demands. </div><div style="text-align: left;">A friend is writing a book about the Ryerson debacle who is an expert in indigenous history. This means he is starting from a deep hole because he knows what he is talking about and the point I have been making is that facts no longer seem to matter, especially when it comes to kowtowing on indigenous mythology. But it really doesn't matter what he knows or says because it will be ridiculed because it doesn't help whatever cause the ignorant have dreamed up to milk us. The cause is more important than any fact.</div><div style="text-align: left;">This published author told me in an email:"It's kinda scary that the professors who teach at Ryerson know so precious little about Ryerson and the true history of the Indian residential schools."</div><div style="text-align: left;">I will spare you the bile from all my fellow grads who wish that Ryerson would concentrate on just teaching instead of running around frantically trying to be in front of every trendy issue.</div><div style="text-align: left;">The response to my blog last Dec. 10 titled <a href="https://blog.johndowning.ca/2021/12/the-scalping-of-ryersons-past.html">The Scalping of Ryerson's Past</a> reassured me wrongly then that the administration wouldn't be nuts enough to go ahead with renaming once the impact sunk in of all those who thought it a bizarre idea.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Once again I turned out to be as as wrong as I was when I thought as a veteran columnist and editor who had twice rejected offers from two parties to run for them that the public would finally see through Trudeau The Lesser as he excuses his gropings and muggings and continual conflicts of interest. You would have thought they would have been warned by the shenanigans of his dad, Pete The Diffident, and his mother Margaret, who was the strangest wife of a PM that this country will ever have.</div><div style="text-align: left;">I had thought in recent years it was finally going well at what used to be slurred as Rye High, as I wrote on Sept. 21, 2019 in a blog titled <a href="https://blog.johndowning.ca/2019/09/happy-birthday-ryerson-university.html">Happy Birthday Ryerson University</a>.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Ah, those were the days my friend, back when few knew much about Ryerson Institute of Technology and the grand accomplishments of Egerton Ryerson were buried in history, not hateful lies.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Our class was tiny but grads became editors and professors and columnists and publishers and even university publicists. We huddled in a glorified closet to gossip and gripe over lunch. And we made up a song and sang it in the annual student revue called RIOT (after the school initials.)</div><div style="text-align: left;">Ryerson all hail to thee</div><div style="text-align: left;">You're preferred to Ryerson</div><div style="text-align: left;">Other schools are tiresome</div><div style="text-align: left;">Cause they charge a higher sum</div><div style="text-align: left;">You are best cause you charge less</div><div style="text-align: left;">Hail to thee O Ryerson.</div><div style="text-align: left;">It did charge less, and it was also better than my time at U of T. However, now they have sawed off the horn of the unicorn, a useful title for my book that I stole from an early Ryerson pioneer before delusions warped education at 50 Gould.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> I will never forget that ditty or my school buddies or those early years in the 1950s.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> I will never not think that Egerton Ryerson was a Goliath of education. But his name has been trashed now even though the final stage of the name change, the Legislature, a confused and reluctant parent, still has to approve it.</div><div style="text-align: left;">That probably will happen but I know as the Canadian National Exhibition president who applied for a new act to cover changes at the big fair only to have the Legislature pass the wrong language that anything can happen when MPPs get involved. </div><div style="text-align: left;">It would be only fitting if they screwed it up. After all, everyone else has as they ignore all the facts.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-63668092580043341142021-12-23T17:26:00.002-08:002021-12-23T17:26:48.530-08:00MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM A CANADIAN SUCCESS<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWWMZ8hdlLd3E2zXUVPhpV3grBUs25nqGOByMttGSaE7B5ACf0jp_RERAbPLyd91KOWPfQim_ZCB-uY9zdaBO1zKbbY-Jplx1seWh7uKDxgMRI8yPWE6qvK7IbKGnotKT4_MS3Kqovskci/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="182" data-original-width="277" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWWMZ8hdlLd3E2zXUVPhpV3grBUs25nqGOByMttGSaE7B5ACf0jp_RERAbPLyd91KOWPfQim_ZCB-uY9zdaBO1zKbbY-Jplx1seWh7uKDxgMRI8yPWE6qvK7IbKGnotKT4_MS3Kqovskci/" width="320" /></a></div><br /> Every Christmas this card of thanks arrives, even as the numbers of cards I get dwindle because of e-mail, COVID and the circle of friends, family and former colleagues shrinks because of the relentless calendar.<p></p><p>M. Luong it says in neat letters, and I wonder again if this is how Manh learned to print in engineering school back in South Vietnam before he fled with his family as Canada welcomed the boat people in 1979.</p><p>It is not merely a Christmas card but a magic carpet ride to a time that Canada and Sun readers should celebrate because we put aside the bickering of life to reach across the seas to rescue tens of thousands in a jungle ruined by war.</p><p>Luong is 80 now, his wife is 75, and the daughter who talks for them from their Scarborough home and drives 10 minutes each week to do their shopping was only nine when I found them along with her brother in an old military camp in Hong Kong that had been abandoned by the army.</p><p>The 43 boat people that I found on a crowded island far out from Malaysia in the South China Sea and in Hong Kong are scattered through the country that was one of the world's leaders in response to their plight. Contacts with each other have faded with years, and also with the Edmonton and Toronto Sun readers who contributed $300,000 to my columns to support them for a year</p><p>I took the Luong children and seven other kids to Bowmore Rd. school and the principal pooh-poohed the fact that they had not even a scrap of credentials and said he and the teachers would cope. It was not necessary for me to arm myself with the presence of the school board's vice chairman, Mary Fraser.</p><p>The school introduced them to the magical stories of Christmas. When I arrived to their battered home to tell them of Santa, there already was a tree.</p><p>It didn't all go in storybook fashion. The city inspectors said I had jammed too many people into the home. I phoned Art Eggleton, my friend who was the mayor, to yell at him, but nothing happened. Then Sun publisher Doug Creighton, with kindness that matched his smarts, said the readers had sent in enough money, and if they hadn't, the business office could scrounge. So I rented another house.</p><p>I purposely kept a very loose vigil on their doings. They had left behind death so columnists should give them some slack, even though there were squabbles to be fought when bureaucracy overflowed.</p><p>So now the cards is my only memento of the country being nice, along with the staff of the Edmonton and Toronto Sun. Our good will was fuelled by our readers and their dollars.</p><p>There was one wonderful moment years ago when a lovely lady now cared for by the Edmonton Sun asked me to her wedding. I met her on the island of Pulau Bidong, reached by a UN-chartered fishing boat that had to run the gauntlet of Malaysian gun boats. She had been a very sick 16-year-old propped up in the corner of a hut made from branches and used plastic wrapping paper. I plodded through questions while the humid heat over 100F made me dizzy. Sun photographer Norm Betts, so tough he.usually chewed nails instead of gum, said he had to leave so he could rest on the beach and not faint. I promised the father I would take them to Canada but they had to let her lie down.</p><p>I was too busy to go to her wedding, damn it. But I have the gracious memory to go along with that card from M. Luong which comes each December even as my mail bag shrinks.</p><p><br /></p>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-43815563063349583312021-12-20T12:43:00.002-08:002021-12-20T12:43:32.476-08:00LET'S GET TOUGH ON ANTI-VAXXERS<p><br />I didn't expect to live this long. Now that I have, I wouldn't mind staying on the good side of the grass a bit longer. So I resent all the jerk anti-vaxxers who threaten that by poisoning the world around them, and more importantly me.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiKmSxfjufVlmRvB44RAaX9VdRvav6QC3MaH69OHmbQALdQ1-JHfOAjDLx66HRTc1xSF3LHZ6vPOc-7JTLomle3pqilyTORngikl3dde6UZ7PEO98hPzm2YlOBURm4bGpwtzo_vxiQUNdKqn7A3dj8KhSWGlvkrlF_x25yKVcz9BhihcrYOg1NWeWS45g=s1600" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiKmSxfjufVlmRvB44RAaX9VdRvav6QC3MaH69OHmbQALdQ1-JHfOAjDLx66HRTc1xSF3LHZ6vPOc-7JTLomle3pqilyTORngikl3dde6UZ7PEO98hPzm2YlOBURm4bGpwtzo_vxiQUNdKqn7A3dj8KhSWGlvkrlF_x25yKVcz9BhihcrYOg1NWeWS45g=s320" width="240" /></a></div><p></p><p>We fine drivers for tarrying on our streets. Try walking down the street nude or screaming inside a theatre, that is if you're lucky enough to get inside ones, and judges and magistrates and police don't hesitate to discipline you. </p><p>Murder someone or smash them in the face and the fist of the authorities will mash you into a prison cell. So why then do we allow people to spread serious injury and even death by spurning inoculations and masks and reasonable behaviour? Why then do we let them hide behind shields of free speech and media freedom when their lies and distortions endanger the majority of us who have enough sense to accept the wonders of modern medicine?</p><p>So I would make anti-vaxxers pariahs and deny them service and punish them financially and legally unless the adults refusing to protect themselves against the virus show gilt-edged proof that they really would be harmed by being vaccinated. I am told by doctors that most of their excuses are phonier than a three dollar bill.</p><p>Why am I so unforgiving about these stupid and dangerous people? Because I might as well wear a T-shirt with bull's eyes painted front and back when it comes to being a covid target. I am 85, a diabetic with a heart that likes to skip even when the music isn't catchy, and I have other problems which I would explain if you have an hour or two. I was twice in two hospitals for two months in the last decade. I only have a nice life these days because of medical geniuses like Bernie Gosevitz, Heather Ross and Diane Donat (and I apologize to other specialists for not mentioning them.)</p><p>I thought when I wrote a blog titled <a href="https://blog.johndowning.ca/2020/03/when-quaranties-were-just-cough-away.html">When Quarantines Were A Cough Away</a> on March 28, 2020, that the virus grip on us was going to go away. I'm not going to dwell on what I said on blog.johndowning.ca which will come as a relief to my family, friends and readers who say I am always repeating myself.</p><p>It is true that there has been a thread of support for accepting needles and medicines and other health salvations woven through the 6,000 columns and editorials with which I charmed or lambasted Sun readers. And then there was all those blogs after they finally brought me down. I even did it in the boardrooms when as a hospital board director I had a motion passed that if a staffer didn't get regular flu shots they couldn't work during an epidemic. I recall CBC commentaries where I campaigned against paramedics who didn't take such sensible precautions, even though I am a huge fan of paramedics.</p><p>It is not easy to get the bookings and the shots when you are older and use a cane and your computer skills are as bad as your eyesight. If it wasn't for two large and computer-literate sons, Mark and Brett, Mary and I would have found it a daunting marathon. I just got the booster shot by going to a cavernous room at Cloverdale Mall left behind by Target. Mary and I both used wheelchairs and Mark and Brett to run the maze like laboratory mice. Difficult to park even though we have a disabled parking permit. Had to line up behind younger people and kids despite being 85 and 86. Thought that if they had spent less time posting dozens of No Photographs signs they would have had more time to improve the process. And finally the needle from a young male nurse who was nice and efficient.</p><p>To summarize my three innoculations (and I confess needles don't bother me after 12 years of giving them to myself as a type 2 diabetic) there was no pain and no problems afterwards and if you clump together all the time consumed it took less time than the average funeral service.</p><p>Not that I limp into many funerals these days. And I fear not being able to do so in the future as viruses have become the Heinz 57 fear of life.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-15798251272113293422021-12-17T22:05:00.003-08:002021-12-17T22:05:47.302-08:00SUPERMOUTH LASTMAN WAS POPULIST GOLIATH<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ-2WsKuzfekqVPe-D0fhc6ryeb3KTOM9uBCRhUt9fITNsvWobKknSdXFGf7KFwprValTqD3sa8KsrawKVNfvKEZ33ArWBC1U8Dds7-IjyiVUH46upH0p2_-iHsnqXWf7j4bEgovLNfQHQ/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="439" data-original-width="780" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ-2WsKuzfekqVPe-D0fhc6ryeb3KTOM9uBCRhUt9fITNsvWobKknSdXFGf7KFwprValTqD3sa8KsrawKVNfvKEZ33ArWBC1U8Dds7-IjyiVUH46upH0p2_-iHsnqXWf7j4bEgovLNfQHQ/" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div> Mayor Mel used to speak with one eye on the audience and the other on the pen of reporters. After I realized he would say just about anything to get attention, whether he knew what he was talking about or not, I started calling him Supermouth in columns and in radio and TV commentary.<p></p><p>He hated it. But then his skin was as thin as his tongue was quick. Yet as a salesman of himself and whatever he was pushing at the time, he would take any media licking and just keep on ticking like a demented Timex.</p><p>Yet there were times over the 30 years I watched his antics and fact free outbursts when we would be alone in some quiet corner outside a banquet or formal occasion and we would chat pleasantly and I would listen to insightful and humble comments and feel again that inside that bombast there was a shy, smart gentleman who had woven a facade around him to drive to fame and fortune.</p><p>His few close friends like Paul Godfrey used to talk about how quiet and thoughtful he was in private but few outside of them and his family ever saw it. </p><p>I've had a close relationship with more than a dozen mayors and Metro chairmen in five decades of journalism. They didn't just leave their names behind in tens of thousands of faded newspaper clippings but on expressways, buildings, pools, arenas and other municipal bricabrac. Famous without being notorious! But Mayor Mel stands separate from them all when it comes to scandal and stunts that would have caused ordinary leaders to implode their popularity and suffer ignominious defeat and exile to the forgotten.</p><p>He died at 88 with much of the bad stuff left out of the obits. His accomplishments were listed as his North York and then the amagalmated city exploded. But they all really were overshadowed by him just surviving all those years at the top of the game. Some times when you search for feats by leaders, you should settle for just a few goofs in the countless day-to-day decisions that any mayor or president has to make that involve more than just a buck. </p><p>Mayor Mel should have been captured in a book like the famous "Power Broker" one that brought down Robert Moses after he dominated the Big Apple for decades. Yet no realistic book or movie on him would ever be believed because he was larger than life when he wasn't tripping over his tongue.</p><p>I have years of close encounters with our complicated municipal history. I saw my first city council meeting in 1957, back in the days when City Hall was a major beat in newsrooms and reporters and pols spent more time together than with our partners. When I got married, city council gave me a movie camera, Phil Givens, who brought the Archer to the Square, came to the wedding, and Ken Ostrander who left his name behind on the jewelry chain advised on the rings.</p><p>We have had flamboyant mayors like Lampy (I have his collection of lapel pins.) We have had enduring leaders like Nathan Phillips who served longer than any other mayor (as detailed in the book I wrote for him. ) There was a major goalie, Donald Summerville, who died in a charity hockey game (we went to the Downtown Y together and also to so many Leaf games that I felt guilty and wrote speeches as payment.) There was the civil servant, Dennis Flynn, who worked up to the dais and had been a war hero, shot while parachuting into battle. There was David Crombie, as charming as he was clever. and Art Eggleton, decent and dependable. A grand collection of interesting people!</p><p>There were also municipal leaders who sued me and got me drunk and one that became my publisher boss. I gave them advice they followed and advice they hated and even ideas that became policy like eliminating fees for children to swim and skate. There were ones who couldn't stand me, which was understandable for a daily columnist, and one, Leslie Saunders, once the world's top Orangeman when it was a powerful force, delivered a lengthy diatribe against me in a Metro council meeting because I attacked him when my father had been a friend and the family doctor. </p><p>When I write about the passing of leading politicians, I recall the advice from one of the best of those municipal leaders, Godfrey, when he became my Sun boss. After I used to write the editorial, I would send a copy to the publisher who 99.99% of the time would never respond. Now this could be interpreted as trust, but I also suspected it meant that if I wrote something that was considered really stupid or got us into trouble like the time city council stopped city ads in the Sun, Godfrey could say he hadn't read it first. I had written about William Allen after he died and said that the former Metro chairman had a reputation for being "too clever by half" earning him the justified nickname of Wily Willy. Godfrey sent the draft back and said for heaven's sakes couldn't we just stick to being nice after a major politician dies because it's rather late then to recommend changes.</p><p>So I will not go on at length about Mel's faults and colourful history, about how Marilyn, his wife and the love-of-his-life, was convicted of shoplifting, and then there was her phoney kidnapping, and then there was his mistress and two illegitimate children, and the time he called out the army in a panic to handle a snow storm, and the time he kind of favoured a motorcycle gang.....but I will now stop because under him there was the rebuilding and growth of the city into the largest and most important in the country, which is more important than some of the strange stuff he said about Africa etc.</p><p>Mayor Mel became a success as a furniture salesman and made famous the Bad Boy nickname he gave himself for his retail empire. He came from very little to become a millionaire. There are some who might compare him to a political huckster named Donald Trump who also played strange games with his hair, but Mayor Mel was sharp enough not to go broke. I recall Tony O'Donohue, who was once almost mayor, approaching him at a council meeting and asking if he could get a deal on some appliances. Tony was quite impressed with what he got until the salesman confessed that Mayor Mel actually made more money than usual on the deal because Mel hadn't had to pay him a commission.</p><p>I'm not sure because of the erosion of the killer news cycle that Supermouth today would last as long as he did. But he endured and became the first Supermayor when the suburbs merged with a central city which looked down on the 'burbs. So he must be honoured for all those years of mind-numbing meetings when he was a key participant. Just not sitting on the sidelines and yapping is what people do when they really care about life.</p><p> It was Teddy Roosevelt who pointed this out at the Sorbonne decades before this malaise in our politics where most of us dislike and distrust our politicians but just sit in the corner and sulk instead. "It is not the critic who counts: nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit goes to the man who is actually in the arena who strives mightily..." </p><p>Mayor Mel got into politics because his letter of complaint to the CNE was never answered. He hated being ignored and never grew to like the Ex even though it is the country's largest fair. He stayed in politics for 30 years and always said he was speaking for the little guy who too often was ignored. And the majority loved Bad Boy for it even when he was shooting off at the mouth. </p><p></p><br /><br /><br /><p></p>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-62708269280821580612021-12-12T11:56:00.001-08:002022-12-23T21:08:14.507-08:00ON BEING NAUGHTY AND NICE AS SANTA<p></p><br /> This picture shows a rare daytime appearance by an Editor filling in for the legend because I found it easier to hide in darkness to evade close scrutiny by tots who still might believe. So it is that I was departing my home years ago watched only by my wife and one of my four grandsons, John Henry Francis. <div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbLl-Orh_YEe0htEjSBcw0GHUvcdERuog3JWjkuYRZMaBZ0MPUP1XdLOjR-BPDcYN-ZKA768OXRrdQa7jme17nBkJjtB27lt_lnQsQz5e35tMegfglfDfWiE92Yagdls_FPsobt4ecz28j/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="938" height="514" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbLl-Orh_YEe0htEjSBcw0GHUvcdERuog3JWjkuYRZMaBZ0MPUP1XdLOjR-BPDcYN-ZKA768OXRrdQa7jme17nBkJjtB27lt_lnQsQz5e35tMegfglfDfWiE92Yagdls_FPsobt4ecz28j/w377-h514/thumbnail_JHD5+1991+Christmas+BK+PB+Grandpa+Santa+DEC91+%25289%2529.jpeg" width="377" /></a></div>I love everything about Christmas so you won't find me saying humbug about any tradition from Silent Night to Saint Nicholas. And I've filled in for Santa from Cuba to Gwilliambury dressed in assorted costumes - even one in blue to mock Tories who said they were the source of all good things.</div><div>My love of the season is rooted in my first memories of life when I rushed after school to a tiny house in Chesley to listen to a brief broadcast from a magical toy land which resided on the fifth floor of something called Eaton's in the city where my two sisters and I lived efore we were orphaned as kids. Life in the town near Owen Sound wasn't great but that daily broadcast and the fact that my Dutch grandparents allowed a few festive trappings such as Christmas stockings eased what I remember as mainly a frozen ordeal.</div><div>It was my size that determined that I was seen as a likely Santa repacement when I survived into a newspaper job and a family. I had started small but ended up over six feet and flirting with 300 pounds. It helped when from time to time I also had a beard, which was useful when brats tugged away at the artificial one. Over the years I developed a reasonable ho, ho, ho and the forbearance not to be too upset when the child started leaking. </div><div>I also learned it was best to operate briefly and at night to avoid older kids shouting out triumphantly that it is just Uncle John. There I was trudging in daylight in the snow outside my sister's farmhouse when one of the kids shouted out who I was because I hadn't bothered to change out of distinctive snow boots.</div><div>It went smoothly only about half the time no matter how careful I was. One terrible Christmas Eve I slipped out the side door so that my boys wouldn't see me in costume and found myself in the middle of an accident scene where a hit-and-run driver who was never caught had left a friend on his way to carols in a coma that finally ended in death.</div><div>When friends asked me to introduce their wisp of a daughter to the legend, I arranged to run through their dark backyard while ho ho hoing and ringing. Their older son wanted to see better so he switched on the floodlights. It startled me and I ran into a tree branch. I may have been quite ample and padded but it poked me in one eye, which turned ho ho ho's into yelps.</div><div>Unfortunately, it was only my first call that night . After sort of a recovery, I headed for another suburban street and was walking along it tolling a wreath of sleigh bells and shouting greetings when a cruiser stopped beside me and a young constable asked what I was doing.</div><div>I told him where to go in a lexicon of curses.The young girl in the home I was about to walk by shouted in dismay inside the picture window that the "cops were busting Santa Claus.'' Her father, dean of social work at U of T but also the son of a beat cop in Edmonton, observed quietly that there really seemed to be no problem because it was obvious that a shouting angry Santa was taking care of things.</div><div>I wrote about it in the Sun. The first call came from the Toronto police chief who said he wasn't sure that he believed my column because surely he didn't have men that stupid on his force that they would stop a Santa on Christmas Eve walking down the middle of a street.</div><div>The Sun, being a newspaper that appreciated the finer things about urban life like a grand celebration of the season, used me routinely as Santa on public and private occasions, like handing out the Christmas bonus. Afterwards, a picture would dutifully appear of me and the smart alec cutline would always have some put down line that I really wasn't that cuddly.</div><div>Once the promotion gee whizzers decided to splash by buying sacks of candy canes and arranging for a carol sing at the CNE carillon. They found someone to play the carillon and hired ponies and a tiny stage coach for my grand entrance since there weren't any rental reindeer around.</div><div>I didn't fit with the canvas sacks of canes in the coach so I arrived on top. I jumped off with a theatrical flourish, which was a mistake, because one of the big ornamental balls on the coach roof caught me in a very intimate part. It turned my hollering and ringing into something resembling screams. </div><div>As I limped through hundreds of people trying to smile rather than grimace, ace Sun photographer Norm Betts snatched up a little boy and thrust him into my arms. "They're holding Page One so let's get a quick shot and I can get the hell out of here," he said. I shoved the boy back. He was my youngest son Mark, who wasn't sure what was going on but sensed he was being rejected by someone that was supposed to be nice. But I didn't want any office hassle about getting my son on Page One and a young newspaper really doesn't build circulation that way either.</div><div>So I grabbed another boy, Betts took the picture which ran on Page One, we convinced Mark that Santa really wasn't that bad, and the Downings handed out sugar canes for weeks to anyone who came near us. (There was a strange echo years later when a man phoned asking for a favour because his son had appeared on Page One with Santa.)</div><div>I played Santa at press gallery parties at City Hall and Queen's Park and even in the underground garage of the Sun when it graced King St. And I tried to play it straight because if you slipped beyond the ordinary script kids got suspicious. I recall hoisting a child on my lap at the Sun and figuring out from the circle of parents that surely this was a Blizzard from the reaction of Christina and David Blizzard, two stalwarts from the early days. Except the child returned to them and said that surely Santa also worked at the Sun because "he knew my name."</div><div>The Santa gifts for the politicians were gags which were a little cruel so I wasn't supposed to write about them when we ran pictures later. I did get dragooned to wear that Tory blue Santa suit at the Legislature, where Conservatives reigned, rather than the Liberal red popularized in Coke ads. But I do recall giving the Lieutenant Governor a rubber dollar bill because under the Conservatives you really had to make your money stretch. And I gave hunting knives to the Premier and Opposition leader to protect themselves against their backbenchers.</div><div>Later over drinks when I had ditched the suit, a pipsqueak Tory MPP confided to a group of us that he was looking for Downing to kick his balls off because of the awful jokes about his party. "I'm from the north and we know how to handle jerks," he said. I said that I was Downing and I had been an editor in the Yukon and knew how to handle people who couldn't take a joke. He then saw that I was about twice his size and left.</div><div>I retired as a Santa imitation after I got a little tired of the routine and wanted to enjoy parties without having to change in some closet.</div><div> I recall one party thrown by Sun founder Doug Creighton for a retiring police chief when on my trip home I was stopped at the usual fishing hole by a spot check. I interrupted the constable in his explanation of RIDE spot checks by saying I was the godfather of RIDE because I had passed the original motion at the Metro Citizens Safety Council to buy the signs for the experiment which had started life as Reduce Impaired Driving In Etobicoke before it became Reduce Impaired Driving Everywhere.</div><div>The constable listened impatiently and said that I had passed the breathalyzer so I could stop boring him with my claim that I had started RIDE. The next day, a police commission member phoned to say that the breathalyzer must have been defective.</div><div>In the early days of RIDE, two other couples rented a limousine with Mary and me so that we didn't have to worry about driving home from a Herbie fundraiser. On the way, we were pulled over at a spot check at the edge of Etobicoke and a rather obnoxious constable started yammering about RIDE and breathalyzers. I argued, pointing out that we were passengers in a limousine so we didn't have to worry about breathalizers. When Riki Turofsky, the opera singer, joined in rather theatrically, the cop snapped out lines about it being up to him to determine who blew into what. There were deliberate double entendre elements of "blow jobs" in what he said. So I wrote about it.</div><div>This embarrassed the police chief so much that he quietly ordered an investigation. I got a call days later from a senior officer ordered by the chief to report to me that they could find no constable who would admit to being anywhere near Etobicoke that night. I said to drop it and forget about punishment because I was sure that the guilty constable was so worried he would never get mouthy again.</div><div>A rare blotch on my annual grand adventures. I look back with smiles about playing Santa and all those Christmas parties and concerts and singing carols in a Baptist choir. Everything used to turn out fine when dusted with the nostalgia of the season. </div><div> I remember thinking I had to indoctrinate the boat people in these joys after I was the official sponsor on behalf of federal immigration and Sun readers for the 43 Vietnamese we brought here in 1979. But their school and a church beat me to it. Before I even got talking about the season they had been given a Christmas tree for the humble living room I rented for them.</div><div>None of the refugees were Christian and they didn't known English and they depended on me for food and aid but it didn't really matter because the city was nicer than war and even the commercials talked about peace on earth good will to all. </div><div>Then the city inspector said I had stuffed too many people into one house. So I phoned the mayor and yelled at him but nothing happened. Publisher Doug Creighton came to my rescue and said there was enough money from readers for me to rent other houses. Largest gift I ever gave as Santa and I wasn't even wearing the suit.</div><div><br /><div><div><br /></div><p style="text-align: left;"> </p><div> </div><div> </div><div><br /></div></div></div>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-79259419597777040692021-12-10T05:57:00.000-08:002021-12-10T05:57:54.627-08:00THE SCALPING OF RYERSON'S PAST<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh3HUTN3KtXh9qfvZ2QuVKwo88kRY5m4MZLtKE0R558KvchGutLlkBpo2qRTUCrH5AQGwAb5_wQdSFF82oOnQbyptYjYMy7Dqh5tWF35ZrAq7iFbTq4HmU4o9roCztPRgunxEbDTpIAQzl/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="804" data-original-width="536" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh3HUTN3KtXh9qfvZ2QuVKwo88kRY5m4MZLtKE0R558KvchGutLlkBpo2qRTUCrH5AQGwAb5_wQdSFF82oOnQbyptYjYMy7Dqh5tWF35ZrAq7iFbTq4HmU4o9roCztPRgunxEbDTpIAQzl/" width="160" /></a></div>If our world hadn't been stampeded into stupid decisions where a few activists with a feeble grasp on real facts determine what is "appropriate" for the rest of us, it would be a source of great campus merriment that the name of Ryerson University is going to be changed by silly process.<div><br /><div>Once again academic bureaucracy has run amuck, listening to the shrill and not the sensible. The country has been seduced by the horrible tales of residential school abuses for the vulnerable Indigenous pupils and the far less legitimate land grabs and environmental claims by First Nations. And the title for the university has become victim to the extremists hungry for a lazy victory.</div><div><br /></div><div> Ryerson has been around in various forms since 1948 when it was born in the fallout of the war. Over the decades it has educated nearly 200,000 and has nearly 50,000 students. It is 10th in the country in size and growing, if it can survive the inane leadership of the current administrators and student leaders. <br /><p>So if you have any sense and are contemplating changing a name honoured by 70 years of use by hundreds of thousands of alumni, students and staff, you ask what they think of the abandonment of the name of a great educator and churchman. Of course you would if you really wanted to know. But they really don't.</p><p>Compared to Egerton Ryerson's record as a missionary and friend in what was then called Indian tribes and his creation of a free school system along with a university, museum, art school etc........, those making the decision today to trash his name are pygmies (which is cultural appropriation, I suppose, but everything you say now is wrong according to some group.)</p><p>Yet they have cooked the books, just to make sure. I have been asked, along with the hordes in the giant Ryerson family, for a new name for a major university. Just to make sure there is a change, the name of Ryerson is not included as a choice.</p><p>Now I do have credentials when it comes to choosing a name. After all, I am a graduate, with a diploma and a degree, and I did write a history of the university, and I did teach there, and I did serve as student president, campus editor and member of the board of governors and various advisory committees, presidential search committees and task forces. I helped word the first historic plaques and I did interview all the pioneers of staff, students, premiers, principals and presidents of the first three decades.</p><p>By golly, there was even a time when they asked me to run the journalism department or whatever they call it now. Fortunately for Ryerson, and me, I liked being Editor of the Toronto Sun.</p><p>Once upon a time, Egerton Ryerson was so revered that even poor students contributed a few coins when they raised a statue to him. The notables of the city and provinc flocked to the unveiling and the prime minister advised the sculptor on the face. Now the statue has been trashed and no one has done anything about doing the same to the vandals who ripped down one of the more famous statues in the city.</p><p>One cause is politicians who cater to the shouters and the ignorant in their costly seduction of voters. This has all unfolded under Indigenous war banners which supposedly make it OK to claim that many white immigrants have been an evil despoiler of a peaceful heaven of a country and that past mistreatment of the latest Indigenous peoples justify special consideration when it comes to treatment and taxation.</p><p>Just about any stunt is pretended to be legal when it comes to blockades, spoiling what society used to treasure and PR preening. Our various boards like the one running the CNE have been conned into starting their meetings by saying it is all taking place on the traditional lands of various Indigenous groups, which ignores that half of Exhibition Place is landfill and indeed the city has at least eight square miles of landfill, including half the Island which was subject to Indigenous claim even though it was under water a century ago.</p><p>So they are trying to rename a university and change the name of major streets because of the real or imagined sins of white leaders but ignore that history is dotted with atrocities by every race. You don't have to search hard in Canada's history to find examples, which have been ignored when it suits their purpose. So no one suggests renaming Brantford because Joseph Brant, the Mohawk leader, had 40 slaves and was involved in massacres. And there are other examples from when settlers feared the savages. </p><p>Where do you stop and start when it comes to paging through history? Archaeology, the magazine of the respected Archaeological Institute of America, in the last issue reminded readers that people were living in North America "up to 23,000 years ago." Why the petroglyphs north east of Peterborough are a mere thousand years old, which certainly beats a lot of First Nations claims. and it has been made a world heritage site. Tracing tribes from several hundred years ago to those that were here thousand of years ago becomes rather difficult, especially when it was common to try to kill their neighbours. Just try to ask the Hurons.</p><p>So there are hidden agendas when it comes to lifting the carpet of the past. to trumpet about real or imagined grievances. Which means rigorous scholarship is needed when the claims are to historic rights and wrongs to justify special deals. Just who really was first when the proof abounds in cave painting and glyphs that migration was an endless trek from country to country to island to continent for countless centuries.</p><p>My father came from England in 1879 and my mother from Holland in 1905. Isn't that long enough for me to think that I am the equal to any Canadian when it comes to how I am treated by the rest of the country? I was the official sponsor of 43 Vietnamese boat people who came here in 1979. Isn't that long enough or are they always supposed to put Indigenous claims first. </p><p>But back to the latest giant of history to be sacrificed on the altar of the few lazy activists looking for publicity rather than facts. The issue, they say, is that Egerton Ryerson created the infamous residential schools where children were ripped from their parents to be educated as proper cogs in a white society. A strange charge to make against a provincial educator who was dead before the federal residential schools really got going. But then the educator was also a church leader who believed that everyone was entitled to all the benefits of being saved again as a good Christian. All people were equal before his God. And of course he was terribly wrong when he talked approvingly of residential schools because just look at those evil institutions like Upper Canada College and Eton and Harrow.</p><p>It doesn't help with the shrill that Christian missionaries are out of favour these days. So my mother and my aunt as Toronto Bible College grads bringing medical help to our poor or to Africans just were manifestations of misguided white supremacists. And you know that awful Egerton Ryerson started as a missionary living with the natives on the Credit. And his closest friend was Indigenous. He's suspect because he was one of those stern Methodists who believed in the Golden Rule. Besides, what kind of a name is Egerton anyway. </p><p>Once upon a time, academia wrote approvingly that how fitting it was that Howard Kerr thought as the first principal that Ryerson was a great name for his makeshift school. After all, Ryerson believed in practical education and observation and struction on how to do real work. He even built his own skiff. What kind of a role model is that in an age where students have to be taught carefully to avoid any controversy that might lead them to thinking that it is all right not to think that the majority or the woke proponents are always right.</p><p>Ryerson is a great name for a school, that is if it still intends to educate women and men to cope with life in the real world and not just accept that there really is only one way to look at anything.</p><p><br /></p><p></p></div></div>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com31tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-91745615248078804332021-12-06T12:51:00.001-08:002021-12-06T12:51:32.477-08:00A LADY FOR ALL SEASONSThe cliche goes that behind every great man stands a great woman. A variation was that some times there was a surprised woman. It certainly wasn't true here.<div>Too many of us have forgotten in the nostalgia about the Toronto Sun celebrating its 50 years of battles in a tough newspaper town that the wonderful charming brilliance of its founder Doug Creighton was rooted in the smiling support of a wife who was often the smartest in the room. <div>Marilyn moved easily through the decades, from the 1950s and 1960s when the lanky police reporter was liable to show up at any hour with a bum or the Leaf captain to the heady years of PMs and movie stars courting the attention of a husband who rode his great personality to power.</div><div>Too often obituaries when an old friend dies are filled with personal anecdotes rather than how remarkable they were. I recall a funeral at Beth Tzedec when my neighbour said as yet another speaker droned on about their past that what he really wanted to hear was stories about the guy in the casket. Since he was Phil Roth, the billionaire developer, and the dearly departed was Phil Givens, who had come to my wedding before he was MP, MPP and mayor, I never try to forget to remember the accomplishments along with the anecdotes. And there were certainly many of those with 40 years of friendship between the Creighton and Downing families before the music died. </div><div>After all, Marilyn had a life filled with peaks that would startle a biographer and she rode its crests with the calm shrewdness of the VON nurse she had been before the three sons and the glamour. </div><div>Their marriage had humble roots and the early good stuff for their many parties came from a leading pawnbroker that was one of Doug's myriad contacts such as the police chief calling to chat and give him scoops that made the Star wince and had him climb the editorial ladder to the top positions.</div><div>We remember the chief calling to tell Doug to stick around for a good story and then he went out and shot himself.</div><div>Marilyn climbed each rung with him after the early years had prepared her for just about anything, which happened on a regular basis. The bungalow in central Etobicoke saw such strange sights as a hungover reporter wading though the snow in his long underwear to get the house number so the cab could take him to an early shift.</div><div>Doug let Marilyn explain that to the neighbours. As he did when Toby, the rambunctious family dog, grabbed a roast off the barbecue of a cottage neighbour who just happened to be a Supreme Court justice.</div><div>Things like that happened regularly to the Creightons because things like that happened routinely at the Telegram. Damon Runyonesque reporters populated the newsroom. It was like a set for Guys and Dolls but mixed in with the bizarre like a dusty diving suit sitting in a closet were reporters who had been the first into Hitler's bunker or had discovered the great Chubb impact crater in Quebec or watched Oswald get shot.</div><div>And then Doug took over in a blaze of setting sun which helped us birth the Sun with 62 survivors. But the 1,200 we left behind when the Tely died left their mark.</div><div>Some of our Tely stunts would shock the woke editors of today who think that this 24-hour news cycle is the cream of modern journalism. And Doug was the ringmaster in a style that later built the Sun.</div><div>I remember interviewing a Mafia snitch who cooked me lunch while he explained why they used a funeral home in Niagara Falls because they could bury victims under the deceased in big coffins. Then that "family" decided to sue Maclean's because they could probably make more money than the Tely would pay. Then Doug sent a reporter to dig up a backyard in Phoenix because we were told of a likely Mafia burial (but not Hoffa) And we plotted all this as Marilyn served up sandwiches as if we were discussing a soap opera.</div><div>It has been 60 years of marriage for Mary and me. Now too often we have to pause for golden memories of fast friends who have gone before. Marilyn could be tough with a keen view of all around her. But she had a gracious appreciation of the important things in life, like family and friends. It enriched us all. </div><div>And she set an example. Doug had several months of silent fury with me because I dared to go to Moscow when Mary was having a minor operation. You just didn't do that with your bride. It was Marilyn who helped sooth the peace, as she so often did in the hurly burly, the chaos of news in the big city.</div><div><br /></div><div> </div><div><br /><div><br /><strike></strike><div><br /></div></div></div></div>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-22033964486074890372021-08-22T13:12:00.008-07:002021-08-22T16:46:19.392-07:00BRAMPTON BILLY WAS A GREAT PREMIER<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7sEutPYs4HFL8LF-jRYzjzkFI86ILOLoLI4pB2SHENO2ln2RbWbNMAPzsFiuhHlwW2wn0PO8F4F_Ix01nVw4Z9Yd_LPNArOcFlfrOe_B7F4k75ZMVz07IyRD2pCw8Vqulq59RFezeWBdc/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="187" data-original-width="269" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7sEutPYs4HFL8LF-jRYzjzkFI86ILOLoLI4pB2SHENO2ln2RbWbNMAPzsFiuhHlwW2wn0PO8F4F_Ix01nVw4Z9Yd_LPNArOcFlfrOe_B7F4k75ZMVz07IyRD2pCw8Vqulq59RFezeWBdc/" width="320" /></a></div><br />He was so competent as Ontario's second longest serving premier that it didn't show under the supposed blandness that Bill Davis was a decent man. As I look back over the 11 premiers that I wrote about and talked about for 50 years, he is the guy who made the most impact on my province.<p></p><p>Boy did he ever do a lot. Although his faithful assistant, Clare Westcott, now in the faded twilight of a great career, told me that the boss had phoned and said that he saw from Downing that Clare had accomplished all these wonderful changes and he wondered just what the hell he had been doing all these years as a minister and premier.</p><p>In my beginning, there had been the Laird of Lindsay, Leslie Frost, who ruled as the friendly uncle from the small towns. He knew everyone, or so he said. One press gallery function he joined a circle of reporters and went around squeezing shoulders and asking about the health of their families. After the first circuit, he was massaging this man for the second time and asked how his father was. "Still dead," was the reply.</p><p>Frost's brother, a university professor, was a determined adviser and decided that Ryerson Institute of Technology was getting too big for its britches and should be cut back. As I detailed in my book Ryerson University - A Unicorn Among Horses, only brilliant stratagems saw Ryerson surviving until it was rescued by Davis and Westcott who made it into a university, that is if it is still a university and not destroyed by the present administration and jerk protesters who don't know their history.</p><p> Frost was followed by John Robarts who acted like chairman of the board while screwing madly anyone who looked at him twice. He was smart enough to let Davis be a good education minister while he himself concentrated on love nests. My relationship could be summed up by my trip to London after he won his convention. His wife, attired mainly in a half slip, drove me from their front door while shouting. Instead of a profile on the new premier, the Telegram ran my story about the teddy bear that they had brought home to their tot of a daughter.</p><p>I was a constant critic of anything that Davis & Co. & Westcott had to do with transit and roads. Their problem was they looked too far into the future of transportation while they got education just right. They created George Brown out of a trade school along with a network of community colleges. They saved and promoted Ryerson. Basically their administration was pleasant and decent.</p><p>I remember a trip to Italy with a plane load of Conservatives with Italian roots led by Davis and Roy McMurtry, who became a tough AG. Not everything went smoothly but boy did we survive.</p><p>There was a sunbaked hilltop cemetery for Canadian war dead in Sicily where the wreath didn't arrive. The humble caretaker's wife fashioned one out of twigs and tinfoil. Just after the premier put it in place, the real wreath arrived. A group of us persuaded the premier to stay with the makeshift one and that we would handle any reporter who dared to criticize that. At the bottom of the hill we had a rest stop where I kept assuring a nervous Davis, as we used wine to wash some grapes, that there would really be no problems. And there weren't.</p><p>Just getting a column back in those days was often a communications nightmare. And so it was before we left the island. It was 4 a.m. when I learned that there would be no chance for the tellex to work that day but Westcott said he had got the premier's faithful secretary on the phone. So I dictated my column to her, leaving out snide comments, and she sent it to the Sun by cab. Everyone seemed a little baffled by the process but it worked.</p><p>Then I got a chance to return the favour. Our first day in Rome was mainly a tour for pictures with Canadian Tories. So the Globe reporter, an unpopular man who thought as a foreign correspondent he was superior to mere legislative reporters, didn't go. Everything stopped at the famous Trevi Fountain because a pompous little policeman was guarding it against the movie crews who always wanted to film there. A special rare licence had to be purchased, and we didn't have one. He arrested Bill and Kathy Davis. I figured out from his histrionics what he was doing and started poking my pen into his swollen chest and called for support from reporter Eric Dowd who took some time to figure out what I was up to and then joined with enthusiasm. "Get the hell out of here," I said to the former Crown attorney, and the premier skedalled to our bus parked on a side street while I continued to divert the cop.</p><p>We returned to the hotel high with enthusiasm at our escape since we had left no one behind as hostage. But that was not the end. David Allen of the Star and Al Dickie of CP and the rest of the crew featured me in front page coverage as the saviour of an international incident to get back at the Globe guy. It baffed many a newsroom.</p><p>There were many glitches to overcome on our grand tour, but then there always are on these trips. We looked forward to a quiet Sunday and a grand seafood luncheon at Pescara. The local VIPs were out in force, their uniformed chauffeurs standing beside the limousines outside the hotel. Inside, the press corps had discovered that one Canadian flag pin was good for one bottle of wine from any waiter. So we were all quite refreshed when Davis said that the reason we were there was because his trusted key adviser came from there. So we all toasted his "adviser," Nick Lorito, and didn't tell anyone he was actually the premier's driver.</p><p>Then the next glitch popped. Turned out we were double booked. We were actually supposed to be up in the local hills where Johnny Lombardi was from, and Johnny was so important in the Ontario Italian community that he was called the mayor of little Italy. So off we went for the second ceremonial luncheon that noon. The mountains of food were trotted out and Bill and Kathy Davis blanched. So did everyone else. I was looking for a quiet nook when a waiter trotted up with a message from the Ontario "president." The message was "send up Downing." So I joined the head table and struggled manfully and finally consumed enough food so the premier was not embarrassed.</p><p>Perhaps I got along so well with Premier Davis because of the special relationship between Brampton and Weston where I went to high school. In the 1950s and 1960s, the two could have been twin communities. So I knew all the gossip. When the premier and I killed time in the lobby of the famous Excelsior Hotel in Rome, we talked about an Ontario legend, Perkins Bull, and how the Davis and Bull families intertwined. Bull was a genius in many areas, from law to agriculture. The premier talked about how as a young Crown, he was gavelled into silence by Bull in a courtroom who told him to go and talk to his father about his argument and come back with a better one. In the political arena that Davis dominated, everyone seemed to know everyone, and knew that, for example, that Bull had had a young researcher, and lover, True Davidson, who became East York mayor, and that his grandson (who I went to high school with) became the Team Canada doctor.</p><p>Once upon a time, premiers lasted longer. A decade was not uncommon. Now surviving for a couple of terms is a miracle. Is it the pressure of the endless news cycle? It is difficult to compare the quality of the leadership since nostalgia is the whitewash of history and when the woke activists charge into battle facts are left behind with common sense. Yet by most measures William Grenville Davis was as reassuring when he governed as the wreaths of smoke from his trusty pipe. But then, like too many things these days, pipes are out of fashion. And so are our politicians who don't just talk a great game. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6684750479562646050.post-38787769493015717222021-07-24T09:46:00.003-07:002021-07-24T09:46:40.375-07:00<p>AN ATTACK ON HISTORY </p><p>One galling and obvious fact about the stupid jerk activists who are renaming and demolishing our history, whether they be publicity hungry demonstrators or politicians, is they don't know diddley squat about the history.</p><p>So we have this nonsense about Egerton Ryerson and Henry Dundas. Ryerson's statue and name is attacked by the ignorant when only a few minutes of research would show he was a friend and helped what were then called Indians. And Dundas hated slavery and was hardly a supporter of what he called odious.</p><p>Both also were master strategist when dealing with the realities of the day. Not for them the stampeding of public opinion by absolute BS.</p><p>The other day, a thoughtful friend of mine, who used to be a neighbour, wrote a letter to the Globe which ignored it. Paul Corey says they didn't even tell me "my very short effort was too long."</p><p>Now Corey is not one of the cowards with concealed faces and dubious motives who seek refuge in hysteria and lies. He is a retired professor from the Dalla Lama School of Public Health at U of T and his PhD is from Johns Hopkins University in the racially torn city of Baltimore.</p><p>Now Paul and his wife, who also has a PhD and was a researcher at Sick Kids, know all about the problems of being young and poor and living where race was really an issue.</p><p>His letter to the Globe follows, one of the media outlets in Toronto that could have done a much better job of revealing how silly and shallow Toronto council was. Not all reporters and editors have to be as craven as the CBC when it covers such crap</p><p>Paul wrote: In 1776 Scottish lawyer Henry Dundas won a case to prevent Joseph Knight from selling his black slave. Dundas stated, "Human nature, my Lords, spurns at the thought of slavery among any part of our species.The Court declared that there could be no slaves on SCOTTISH soil. </p><p>In 1789 abolitionist William Wilberforce wished his ENGLISH colleagues understood the ugliness of slavery. Try reading his essay without crying. His motion to abolish slavery in the House of Commons in 1791 lost by the vote 163 to 88. He lost again in 1794 and 1795. </p><p>(Then) Dundas was on the team. In 1796 Dundas suggested the word “gradual” be added to the motion which won 230 to 85. In 1833 the Slavery Abolition Act was passed. Slavery began thousands of years ago ending in Scotland in 1776, 1793 in Ontario, 1833 in England and 1865 in the United States. Will those toppling Dundas be charged? Because I grew up in a poor part of the wonderful city of St. Catharine I hope that the estimated five-million dollar cost for eradicating the name Dundas would instead be used to give food and clothing to Toronto’s poor and books for the rioters. " </p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p>John Downinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15111417493265075055noreply@blogger.com1