APRIL FOOLERY AND FARTS

YOU WOULD BE SURPRISED AT THE PLAYERS

My best April Fool's stunt was the day I wrote the Sun editorial recommending that all the extra  billions that had just been discovered as surplus should be returned by the provincial government to the taxpayers in surprise bonuses.
The NDP braintrust seized on this as their main chance in Question Period to roast the ministers. A researcher called looking for details because there were none in the rest of the media. Was it a scoop, he wondered?
I pointed out that he should read the final para again, where I had written that it was too bad that the editorial could only deal with billions that could be given back to the voters on April Fool's Day.
Oh, he said, it's a joke. Takes a bit longer with the socialists, apparently, but our readers figured out that it was a gag and no one else called the Editor.

Actually newspapers have a long tradition of elaborate April Fool stunts. Why even the Globe and Star have been known to play. The Sun had just acquired  a generalist from politics as rookie publisher and Paul Godfrey was antsy about allowing me to pull a stunt in the editorial. He was relieved when we sucked in the lefties.
The worst April Fool's for me came in 1961 when I was pried out of an elevator by paramedics and taken unconscious to the first of the four hospitals that I would be incarcerated in for three months.
By the time it was over, there had been no laughs  and I had to learn to walk again. Hell, I had to learn how to stand.
April Fool was big when I was a kid. Can't say my life then was filled with laughs because after my parents died, my two sisters and I lived with dour Dutch grandparents.
My life was ruled by Grandma who was a five-foot block of meanness. Yet for some bizarre reason, she liked April Fool's Day and a Whoopee Cushion.
She had a variety of gag stories but many Aprils she told me the schools had been closed for the day even when there was no snow. We three kids laughed gratefully because we appreciated even lame humour in that house.
Several times a year the Whoopee Cushion would be taken by one of us from its place of honour and slid surreptitiously underneath as someone sat down. A great fart sound that might crack the tiles in the average bathroom would echo around the little kitchen.
And we would all howl, especially Grandma, and then back it would go for another three months or so. It was understood that more constant use would make it, well, unChristian.
According to the Star, which gave the feature a place of honour on Page Two, where all its corrections usually go, the Cushion was invented in Toronto around 1930 and the basic rubber bladder was sold promising noises "that can be better imagined than described."
The writer quoted experts, including a "toy" historian, saying flatulence and fart joke in some ways transcend time, which is a complicated way to say they have come down through the ages as universal humour. You don't have to be an historian, toy or otherwise, or even an expert in rubber goods, to know that. Just survive an elementary school in Ontario and not just the lower grades where trick tooters are idolized.
I have always been intrigued by the broad cross section of people who find fart noises more amusing than embarrassing. This has even been studied in universities. One connoisseur of Whoopee Cushions was Leslie Nielsen, a great actor before his last clownish roles, and so Canadian that his father was a Mountie and his brother was a deputy prime minister.
Neilsen carried a Cushion most days even in his suit pocket, maybe one developed  by the first manufacturer,  JEM Rubber Co.,  which even at a quarter found sales "deflated," so other companies started to sell it, although one giant novelty outfit found it too "indelicate."
Nelsen would slip it under other diners or actors - probably once or twice on stage - and generally thought it the acme of humour.
Readers should remember the Cushion fondly because it's just another reason that Toronto, and indeed Canada, is superior to any American city.
After all, just look at all the Toronto inventions. Most of us knew about the creations from insulin and pablum to paint rollers and five-pin bowling that were born here in Hawgtown. Now add fake farters to the list and it is insurmountable.

R.I.P. ROB FORD, ROT IN HELL DONALD TRUMP

A PEOPLE PERSON VS. A  FRAUD

There are hurricanes of facts and fictions about the flawed former mayor of Toronto and the fraudulent leader in the U. S. presidential race.
For once there is no need to spend any time regurgitating biographies to point out the holes and lies in  their supposed public histories.
Which is a relief since one of the curses of social media today, and in the activist world of NGOs and loudmouths, is that so many rushing to their judgment really don't know the basics of the performers and the issues.
Even in the media.
I am embarrassed hourly by the columnists and commentators who lurch to their keyboards and microphones to repeat ad nauseam the same old stuff without ever sniffing out a new insight.
There were weeks in my decades of journalism when I had to perform so often I was tired and hoarse and stretched -  six columns, seven editorials, one CBC radio commentary and one CBC TV show was not an unusual week.
Yet I always tried to go beyond the flavour-of-the-day in news. (Once when I cheated, the Sun president complained to the publisher that my column, editorial, and commentary were the same, and I felt really guilty because, after all, he was blind.)
So I will spare you a recitation of what you should know already if you actually have been paying attention and unlike the great majority, shoot your mouth off without having any bullets.
I want to emphasize the similar reality of the success behind Ford and Trump - the anti-politicians  perceived as not being phoney crooks like all the other candidates.
 It worked for Ford because he really was frugal with public money. It works for Trump because he appears to be so rich that he won't line his pockets too much with public millions.
The street guys and gals liked Ford despite his bloat, and Trump despite that silly and bizarre hair because it was obvious from those appearances that they really didn't give a damn.
So there was a loyal Ford Nation despite huge flaws as large as his stomach. And Trump rides high while cheating and exaggerating and bluffing more than a drunk at closing time.
The huge difference is that Ford's success was rooted in shyness while Trump probably performs for the bathroom mirror.
Ford was the anti-bullshitter, while having some talent for BS. Trump oozes bullshit but since so much of his bluster is aimed at what the ordinary Joe perceives as the Establishment, he is excused because he says what his fans would love to bellow in the official ear.
 Ford felt most comfortable with ordinary folks who needed help. That's why he returned calls for aid or showed up towing uncomfortable officials. He couldn't get hurt there, not like on the floor of council where his ignorance on an issue could be exposed. It soothed his soul to have people crowd him on the street or at games and events because he could perform in a protective bubble of goodwill and good spirits.
I think his dysfunctional family, led by a father they idolized but I thought one of the dullest politicians I ever met, and a rough, rude mother, and his failures in school and sport, that his shyness and distrust meant he trusted only himself.
Trump feels most comfortable when he's yammering and everyone else has to listen. That's when he's controlling the agenda and can reduce the number of questions that will reveal this would-be emperor has no clothes and very bad hair. Criticism and challenges roll off his back of confident ego because he figures his zealots really don't remember or really understand the complicated stuff. .
It doesn't come as a surprise to any journalist who has spent a lot of time around public figures, whether they be actors or premiers or super jocks, that away from strutting on their stage, some can be almost painfully shy and withdrawn.
I was among the many critics of grandstanding Mel Lastman and called him Supermouth so often, it was repeated by colleagues. Yet we would chat often in quiet peace in the corner at public events where all he wanted to do was go home and put his feet up and perhaps watch himself in Bad Boy TV ads.
Of course he had an enormous ego, the craving for attention so that he would not be ignored, but there was also a driven side, that often he forced himself to this public persona. Same with Ford.
So Ford sought his escape in addiction, and in the blue-and-white world of sports, preferring kid football (he pretended there had been college football) to being "bamboozled" - or so he thought -  by the experts with their degrees and their boasted credentials.
Ford was stubborn because he was wary of change that came from the Establishment and not his gut. He wanted to fight his battles on his turf and on his terms without oratory.
He rode hobbyhorses like getting rid of deals for politicians because they were safe. As CNE president, I would huddle with him after his usual spiels about stopping freebies for councillors and it would be a gentle talk without the bombast. He had done his bit and let's talk about something else.
Since the family was wealthy, it was an easy hit for him to be a tight-fisted conservative in public policy and personal spending, BUT it was also comfortable, the way he really felt.
Obviously the devils didn't just claw at him in the wee hours and he sought refuge for years, like so many, in drugs and booze and marching to a populist drummer. I was told about his curses by police sources years before the Star's front page because they feared his stubborn independence.
Now we will never know if his attempts to put this behind him was bedevilled  by his system being compromised by the birth of that deadly cancer.
Canada has had spectacular redemption in its major politicians beginning with our first prime minister, Sir John A., who was an obvious drunk. Yet his notorious binges ended and he didn't drink in his last years.
There is the famous shout by opponents at his supporters that their Macdonald was drunk during a speech. The comfortable reply from the Tories was that their Sir John A. drunk was better than any of their guys sober.
That is the way the Ford Nation felt about their champion. Unfortunately for this province and city, too often it was and is true.

SIX DEGREES OF ANECDOTES

IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL

I was waiting out the final minutes before I was wheeled in to the little O.R. for my second eye surgery and listening idly to the nurse taking the medical history of the patient in the next bed.
I quickly learned a lot, including what he ate, when was his last asthma attack,  and that he really didn't know how heavy he was.
The fact amazed me that there were still people around who didn't worry about their weight as they grow older.
 I was also amused at how easily you can collect info on anyone even in an age when banks insist on checking your DNA before they return one of your dollars,  and a utility company will not discuss the  bill with you unless you're the person who opened the account.
The two of us ended up near each other afterwards as we waited to be cleared to go home. And I mischievously struck up a conversation and dropped in his personal tidbits.
He looked stunned. I explained I had been nearby when his history was being taken.
This didn't bug him as much as it would have some people, particularly women, when it came to age and weight, so we passed the time talking about life and the weather and inevitably, in Toronto,  the awful Leafs.
Turned out he was a sports fan, particularly of the Argos, and since I had briefly been a junior Argo and watched the Grey Cup several times from the sidelines, and once from the bench, we yarned and remembered the grand old days when the Double Blue won most games and the other city team then actually won the Stanley Cup.
Inevitably 1967 came up. The country remembers its centennial. Montreal remembers its Expo. And Toronto remembers the last time it won the Cup.
I told him of being in Montreal in charge of the Telegram coverage of Expo and getting a call from Tom (Windy O'Neill) who said would I like to come to the Forum for the Saturday afternoon game against the Canadiens in the Cup final..
You bet, I said.  The amiable lawyer was a great companion. He had been playing junior with St. Mikes and selling programs at the Gardens in 1943 and one year later, because of the war, was pressed into service as a small Leaf forward playing sort of defence. The joke was he was under orders never to venture over the other blue line or he would be fined.
Windy played two years for the Leafs and really got banged up. And bigger players were coming back from war. So he told the owner, the irascible Conn Smythe, that he was going to become a lawyer. And Smythe snarled that no one could go to school and play for the Leafs. Windy was just a no-talent slave and how dare he try to better himself.
So he quit, which was like parachuting out of Heaven for a hockey player. Off he went to Dalhousie, then played some senior hockey,  and then returned to practice law and Grit politics and continue to be, as Scott Young wrote, the best piano player in the NHL, especially when it was late at night in one of his haunts, the Toronto Press Club.
The Leafs won that afternoon, I reminded my new acquaintance. In the first period, one assistant captain, Bob Pulford, got into a fight with Terry Harper. So I stood in a hostile crowd and urged Pully on.  My excuses were that I had helped open the Jamaican rum display at Expo before the game and that I had played football with Pulford and gone to high school with him.
I didn't realize just how irritated the crowd had got until they started throwing stuff at me. A man behind tapped me on the shoulder.  He said he was Randy Ellis, father of Ron Ellis, the Leaf player, and he was sitting with Ron's wife, who was pregnant, "and you are starting a riot."
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, Windy was not sitting with me. He had scored free tickets, but not together, so he was not aware of why the north-west corner of the Forum was in ferment.
So I sat down and tried to keep quiet. The last hot dog covered with mustard sailed over my head and then no one threw anything but words. Besides, the Leafs went ahead and won. It was our last Cup as the Leafs became better at making money than playing hockey.
 I finished my story rather pleased that I didn't have to explain who all the actors were in my anecdote, for example, that Randy Ellis had been a good player on a national senior championship team.
Not only did my new acquaintance enjoy yarning about Hawgtown sports, he demonstrated again that Six Degrees of Separation is more a reality than a myth.
You know, the theory that any person connects to any other person in the world in just six relationships. There is even a charity based on that, headed by Kevin Bacon, who is often used as an example of how he relates quickly to any other actor, but there have also been plays, books and movies illustrating Six Degrees for more than half a century.
 My new acquaintance said that in two day's time he was having dinner with a close relative of Windy's.  He said there once had been a restaurant with Windy's name and that posted on the wall for years had been a letter from Conn Smythe, whom I had just described in cruel fashion.
The letter praised Windy for helping the Leafs win the Cup in 1945, his final NHL year. At the end, there was a P.S. that summed up Smythe's rude dictatorship over his team. It informed Windy that he had made a long-distance call costing $1.40 from the hotel in Detroit during the Cup series and he must pay this sum without delay.
I hope the best piano player in the NHL, nicknamed that by Neil Young's father, told Smythe to go whistle for his money. After all, the sand and gravel magnate with the expensive passion for horses may have been great at charity in raising money for crippled kids, but there was a bully side  -also displayed by the rest of the bosses in the old league - that is only equalled today by chumps like Trump.  Imagine going after a young guy virtually playing for peanuts when you're so rich you can pay to take your own battalion to war.
Yet my message today is not that but advice on how to pass the time when you're stuck in a medical system that cares nothing about how it wastes time for patients/prisoners.  Next time you're in a clinic and can't rescue yourself with a magazine or TV, strike up a conversation with the other inmates. Who knows what connections will follow?

REAGAN'S ALZHEIMER'S IN THE WHITE HOUSE

A REASSURING GREAT CONSPIRACY

The great conspiracy that concealed  that Ronald Reagan was struck by his Alzheimer's while he was still in the White House as U.S. president seems to have survived the accounts of the death of his loyal wife who shielded him from exposure.
It's hardly an earth-shattering scoop that Reagan was often fumbling for words and names in his final years. His stalwart champion, Nancy,  and key aides, could not conceal that from the public. But they certainly threw a cloak over the significance of the major extent of that so that the popular myth is that Alzheimer's did not cruelly ravage him until around 1994, five years after he left the presidency.
Not everyone co-operated. His son, Ron, who has always marched to his own drummer, defied and angered his mother and brother when he said a couple of months ago in a book about his father that he thought Reagan already was suffering towards the end of his first term.
When you sift the tides of information about Reagan over the decades, and connect the few but persistent mentions, the earlier reality of this form of dementia which robs the memory more each day cannot be dismissed as a nightmarish claim by his enemies.
In fact, I first found out about it in 1987 and have written about it several times. But I have never before made the point that actually I find it rather reassuring.
A few acerbic wits like Bill Maher couldn't let her funeral pass without pointing out that maybe Reagan was the final blow in winning the Cold War but Nancy really was running the presidency in the final two years, just like Woodrow Wilson's wife had taken over for him.
Yet despite all the Doomsday scenarios in books and all the movies with Armageddon twists, isn't it reassuring that it is quite likely that the most powerful leader in the world was mentally ill while he could blow up the world using the codes carried by an aide. Yet we all muddled through thanks to the steely wife and insiders like Colin Powell, the four-star general turned National Security Adviser who stayed close.
My peek inside the Oval Office at the president who carried file cards in his pocket even to comment on the weather came in 1987 through Bill Stevenson, the spy author who moved easily in the world of  world secrets, as I detailed in a column about his death that appeared Dec, 3, 2013, as a blog (blog.johndowning.ca) titled The Intrepid Bill Stevenson.
Bill, the author of best sellers that were turned into great movies, and his wife, Monica, an award-winning 60 Minutes producer, were great hosts at their Rosedale home. And their guests were  famous figures from the front pages of major newspapers.
So when he phoned on a Friday to invite me to a Sunday barbecue, it was a golden invitation. Except I was exhausted by playing Editor of the Toronto Sun while we were short-handed and just wanted to escape to my cottage on the Trent.
On Monday, Bill appeared in my office to deliver his latest column for me and related with great satisfaction that I had missed an affair that I would have remembered for the rest of my life.
"Ross Perot flew in to tell us that he had just met with Reagan in the Oval Office to tell him of what he had found out the last time he flew to Hanoi to insist to the North Vietnamese that they had to release all the American POWs and MIAs that they still had in their prisons despite their claims of ignorance," Stevenson told me.
"Why didn't you tell me Perot was coming," I yelled in frustration at not meeting the legendary billionaire
'"Because I think the CIA is tapping our phones because of the book that Monica and I are writing about the Prisoners Of War and the Missing In Action. Perot says they tap him," Stevenson said.
Then he dropped a bomb. He said Perot and Reagan had often met but that Perot said it was really strange this time. Only Powell was with them in the Oval. But Reagan fished a file card out of his pocket to read aloud: "Hello Ross, how are you? Isn't it nice out today, especially in the Rose Garden."
"You're telling me that the President of the United States is so ga ga that he needs a card to greet an acquaintance," I demanded of Stevenson. "Yes, Perot said there was no doubt that his mind is going," he replied.
Perot became controversial for his obsession to save the American soldiers left behind in the Vietnamese ruins after the war ended. He was always talking about plots and assassinations.
But he did make four billion selling companies to GM and Dell and had enough support in the country to run for president twice. And there were some news stories about his regular reporting back to the White House on his secret trips as a special envoy of the president on the POW issue.
Not exactly an observer to be ignored.
And Stevenson, who used to SCUBA dive with Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond,  and then go over to Noel Coward's cottage next door in Jamaica for martinis, was not exactly a dupe when it came to chronicling world figures.
So Stevenson and Downing believed what Perot told us. And we didn't write a damn thing. Who would have believed us then? Apparently most people don't even believe it now.

WAS BLIND, BUT NOW I SEE

MY BASIC LIFE HAS CHANGED

I woke today and automatically reached for my glasses. Just as I have done for a lifetime.
My hand groped around and found nothing, just as my mind groped to the new reality that I no longer need glasses just to navigate the bedroom.
My life has been stood on its head with a change to my body so fundamental that it will take months to adjust.
I don't mean to offend the blind and visually impaired who can never be blessed by the two cataract operations I had but I do mull that  "was blind, but now I see" line from the great hymn based on the Bible verse from John.
Now I wasn't blind but I was so myopic that without glasses my left eye really didn't work and the right couldn't handle even the top E on the chart.
With glasses, my vision was good, but as everyone knows who have to rely every second on them, the maintenance is a hassle before you even get involved with sun glasses, swim goggles, photogreys, etc.
And I'm trying to ignore the costs which thanks to the giants that dominate the business ensure that too many people routinely pay $500 for a  pair, or even up to $1,000, when everyone could make a nice profit at a fraction of that.
Believe me, I know. I have a large container filled with dozens of pairs that I have bought over the decades. There are even contacts from the years before they became soft and easy to handle.
It all started badly. The little school in Chesley didn't have much in resources, so no one noticed when I thought all the other boys and girls were bluffing when they read what had been printed on the blackboards because it was a blur to me.
 Even the big print in those kids' books was difficult. No wonder they worried about my reading.
 Finally in Grade 3, someone, probably not Miss MacLean, who gave me the strap 85 times in her final year before retirement, figured out that I really didn't see very well and old Dr. Morgan gave me an eye test.
I will never forget looking through my first pair of glasses, a flimsy affair with little gold metal rims designed for an old lady, not a rambunctious boy. I looked out the window of Morgan's office at a hedge and saw for the first time that a hedge wasn't just a green mass but was made of leaves and branches.
I walked home and some kids playing street hockey half a block away shouted at me and I could see who they were and didn't have to rely on their voices.
At supper, I could see the lines on my grandparents' face for the first time and read the time on the old wooden clock perched on a shelf.  I still have that clock and still remember the first time I actually saw its hands.
Life changed for the better that day. Maybe that was why I knocked out the bully who had made my life miserable for three grades.
By some regular miracle,  I didn't break my glasses that much. I learned what was important, that to sacrifice even the testicles rather than the spectacles, or else I was grounded.
I played sports without glasses -  special frames and contacts not being common  -  even in a  championship game at Varsity Stadium where I concentrated on trying to figure out the colour of the jersey before I tackled because of a few experiences of bringing down my own team mate.
It doesn't matter how much you avoid the doctor during life because it all changes when you sort of retire. You learn about cranky prostates and all the other balky problems that present themselves as the bad side of the coin that brings you on the flip side the wonderful gift of living longer than the three score years and ten promised in the Bible.
Your friends and relatives get the new knees and hips and there are thinners for hearts with flawed wiring, and then there are the tentacles of the assembly lines for cataract surgery that seem to clutch everyone you know.
 Mary wasn't quite the kindly wife because she grumbled when I wasn't having any problems about her  surgery on both eyes - once paying for the basic $500 intraocular lens that was installed, then OHIP got nicer and paid for the second one - which rejuvenated her weak vision.
My turn grew in a rush. My eyes clouded quicker than a summer storm.  One year there was nothing and then Dr. Robert Wagman looked at me with Harvard gravitas and said there was a problem.
And I discovered from personal experiences that all those rumours I had heard were true. It does take six months or so just to see an ophthalmologist and they are so swamped in some clinics that you may cool your heels for four or five hours past your appointment time. (Even other guilty specialists think that's excessive)
Since their work life seems to be divided into 20-minute bursts, I see no reason why they can't plan their schedules better. As I wrote in a blog "OHIP: LONG WAIT FOR WONDERS" on Dec. 1, 2015,  the health ministry should fine doctors or clinics for excessive waits if there is no emergency as an excuse.
The world has become accustomed to this salvation in sight as just another miracle of modern medicine. I also realize that just about everyone is doing it when it comes to cataract surgery.
 But after a lifetime of being yoked to glasses and all the little hassles, I am not blasé but feel like shouting from the rooftops about how great it is that my life has changed because of two three-hour sessions less than a month apart.
The agreeable surgeon was Dr. Sharif El-Defrawy who is the Pooh Bah of Eyes at U of T  as  head of the department of eye sciences there and at the Kensington Eye Institute. He wants to have the university as a major centre of excellence in eye care in North America. He has made a great start with a clinic staffed with pleasant, efficient men and women which must ease the experience for the paranoid worried about an experience that really is not to be feared.
I still have to figure out all my adjustments and retrain my memory. It's great that I can see perfectly for driving, TV and other distance tasks without glasses even though I have the comparatively minor problem of needing a weak pair for reading and work inside the length of my arms.
 I will have to get used to the fact that after a lifetime of pulling fine print and tiny tasks up close to the naked eye, that no longer works and I will need a magnifying glass.
But I willingly accept the trade-off. Nothing matches the improvement when the clouds in my eye lens vanished and in went two AMO ZXROO Symfony IOL lens costing $1,230 each.
 Now the colours are more vivid and everything is sharper than what I used to see with those damn glasses that always needed cleaning.
If only I had eyesight like this when I was a teenager chasing girls at the beach!

BITTERSWEET VALENTINE NOSTALGIA

I DID LIKE THE CHOCOLATE

I celebrated Valentine's Day, sort of, by chuckling through the Peanuts movie and trying to ignore the memories of my days as a skinny orphan when teachers announced who got the most Valentines in the class.
I am not a politically correct fan but it is nice that in the decades since my days of schools that the maiden teachers of the junior grades have smartened up enough to see how hurtful it is when they ask who got the most Valentines as they polled the class.
I can't remember my Grade One count when I imagine that my sisters Joyce and Joanne loyally found some battered Valentines for me and I recycled them.
Although Valentines really only cost pennies then - the greeting card industry hadn't yet the gouging tactics of banks - we three could only afford to erase the pencilled names and reuse them. Fortunately no one signed with the leaky fountain pens, and ballpoint pens hadn't yet been invented.
So all I needed on Feb. 14 was a good eraser and the tolerance of the other boys and girls who I am sure knew that the Downings were just giving back the cards we had received the previous years.

The Peanuts movie, just like the strip did in its days of glory, charmed me with its cute imagery and Walter Mitty daydreaming. For me there never was a red-haired girl like the one in real life that the cartoonist Charles Schultz never forgot, and made a fortune out of remembering, but there are so many skits that remind me of the perils,  frustrations, nervousness and surprise test nightmares of growing up shy that it is a glorious carpet ride of memories back to the days before I succeeded, sort of.
The Peanuts strip was so popular at the late and lamented Telegram that we put it in a special spot away from the comic page. When I noticed that some people at the outdoor newspaper stands (that have vanished thanks to the punitive policies of city council) just picked up the Tely, flipped to the strip and then put the paper back, I suggested we move it around each day. I was just a kid editor then, so I was ignored. Besides, the brass didn't want to tempt fate by doing anything different with Peanuts.
I am amazed that some people (like my wife) just don't appreciate  Peanuts. Just as there were some who didn't like Pogo which gave us the Sadie Hawkins tradition along with some wonderful satirical bits on American politics. And the great line peering into the mirror: "I have seen the enemy and he is us."
I only found out about Mary's indifference to the pearls among the comics after I married her a year and a week after I first saw her. It wouldn't have been a deal breaker because I do have a romantic side, although the family disagrees. Mary does too. For our first Valentine's Day, I gave her a bottle of  No 5 Chanel.  Took half of my pay as a cub reporter. All these decades later, I am still not sure whether Mary really likes that perfume but I suspect there's a chance she doesn't and won't say that so she won't hurt me.
One nice Valentine tradition for Toronto is the annual Valentine gala that raises money at $500-a-plate for the Canadian Foundation for Physically Disabled Persons.  There have been 32 of them and give people a chance to have a great evening and a chat with some leaders and athletes that the foundation has honoured.
For example, this year my son Mark and I sat with Chris Williamson, who has retired as a blind alpine skier after winning a gold, silver and two bronze in several paralympics, and a gold and two bronze in world competition.
It certainly is a humbling experience because it brings you back to reality with a crash. After all, the people honoured by the foundation, like my old friend David Onley - whom I first met as a political researcher 40 years ago  -  started life facing more hurdles and serious problems than whether they could find a clean enough Valentine to send to the quiet blonde in the corner.

TRUDEAU WOMEN AS SONGBIRDS

CAN'T THEY JUST SING KUMBAYA

When the wife of the prime minister burst into off-key song and startled a couple of hundred people the other day, I thought here we go again.
I have been through this before with the Trudeau women.
Sophie Gregoire-Trudeau appears to be prettier than her voice, and I am glad she brings some youthful exuberance to the scene, although the wife of the last PM was certainly an interesting biker.
But it's pretty clear from all the listeners that she can't sing and the verse she composed "during a difficult time of my life" isn't destined for the Hit Parade.
Just like her mother-in-law Margaret Sinclair Trudeau when she pulled the same stunt on more important occasions.
I never realized back as a kid reporter that I was destined to have some really different experiences with the Sinclairs over the decades.
It started with the patriarch, Jimmy, the fisheries minister in the 1950s and rated as a very nice very clever politician.
He came to the Yukon for the 1957 federal election which was a really big deal since no cabinet minister had ever campaigned in the territories. He sure impressed me as the editor of the only newspaper there, the Whitehorse Star.
We flew in a bush plane to Dawson City. During all the downtime in northern flights, there is a lot of yarning and digging and kidding. It emerged that Sinclair had been blessed with five daughters. The other five of us, all men, commiserated.
On the return flight, we ran into a blizzard and made two forced landings with wheels on the rotten ice of Lake Labarge. Finally we walked off, with me tolting Sinclair's luggage since he had broken his back in Russia when a speaker's platform collapsed. So I was the only one to fall through, which drew much rye-reinforced merriment because it was only five feet deep.
We walked three miles or so through thick muck to the Alaska Highway and were collected by a car whose driver figured out where we were despite our static-confused radio messages.
Sinclair spoke that night and flew out via TCA. And my story made the front page of every newspaper in the country, for the grand sum from the CP wire service of $15. How could it miss? It was the last week of May and we were flying from fabled Dawson City among the highest peaks in the Americas when we were forced down by a howling snow storm on the lake made legendary by Robert W. Service. Only the bush pilot's skill saved us, since the ice broke up only a few days later.
This thrilling experience certainly cemented Sinclair's name in my memory. When the whispers turned out to be true, that Peter Trudeau lusted after an 18-year-old who he first saw on a Tahitian beach and pursued even though he was 30 years older, I needed no backgrounding on that family of the nice minister with the five attractive daughters.
In the final days of the Toronto Telegram, we were presented through a strange source with a wonderful erotic picture of what was said to be Margaret in a bathing suit when Peter first saw her as the justice minister.

I think it would have cost me $600 to run it on Page 1 of the Saturday paper that I supervised as the assistant managing editor. Not a difficult sum, but the trouble was that it sure looked like Margaret but only the photographer knew for sure. Our Ottawa bureau were no help.
It was a wonderful erotic picture, almost in the same league as the famous Marilyn Monroe nude calendar. Every man, and some women, who I consulted certainly took their time with the examination.
It never did run in the Tely or anywhere else since my bosses and I were preoccupied with the agonies of the death of the Tely and the birth of the Sun. I wasn't about to go into history as the guy who got sued by the PM for running a lascivious picture of his wife in the second largest circulation issue in Canada.
I always intended to ask Margaret but when the opportunity presented itself, we were too busy yelling assorted swear words at each other in the lobby of a Caracas hotel. In my defence, I emphasize that she started it. (I have touched on this many times, including in a blog on Dec. 27, 2014, headlined Castro, Trudeau and Bartleman.)
After the mother of our sunny PM tangled with me because I rebuked her for profanely chastising her husband's private secretary in front of dozens of American tourists, I made her so mad that she stormed into the state dinner and refused to participate in the receiving line.

There were a number of bizarre incidents on that trip in 1976 involving Margaret but the media left her alone because she had just had her third son and it was known that she was having mental problems.
The self-imposed gag started to slip more and more because Margaret was slipping, ahem, more and more. (On a  visit to a ruin in Mexico, she gave her baby to a startled Canadian backpacker and then wandered away. )
Two days later on the flight home to Ottawa, Margaret invaded the press section of the Canadian plane and started chatting with me as if we had never cursed each other. I said we had been told that she had made up a song in honour of the wife of the Mexican president and had sung it from the head table of the formal state dinner. I said we had been told she had just done the same in Venezuela to the amazement of all.
When she confessed she had, I asked her to sing the songs to us. She waited until all the tape recorders were primed and then sang them into the little thicket of microphones.
A day later, she claimed she had been betrayed, that I had promised that it was all off the record. And I was on TV saying I had never said that and wasn't the whole point that the wife of our prime minister shouldn't be singing her little made-up songs a cappella at huge formal state dinners as if she was back in kindergarten as a precocious brat.
It's a short slip from enchanting to embarrassing.
I had several more encounters with her but no more  over her singing her little compositions.  There are many famous stories of her escapades but they involve the absence of panties and dubious escorts and funny cigarettes.
And then she settled down and emerged as a respected champion for those who like her suffer from bipolar disorder.
I never did feel guilty that I was one of those who ended the blackout on Margaret's exuberant behaviour because the normal dilemma for the media is shredded when the person is persistent as well as being famous.
 Besides, it's hard to call Canadians too careful and stuffy when the number one wife is warbling like a sick robin.