HOSPITAL HELL (PART FOUR)

SURVIVING HOSPITAL FOOD

For 50 years, the health fortunes of the Downings have revolved around St. Joseph's hospital. However, it didn't prepare me for 34 days there.
After Mary had three sons at St. Joe's, we routinely visited its emergency to have those active sons stitched and patched. They had cuts, burns, bumps, and then John Henry found "white candy" and dutifully, like a big brother, reached up into the crib to share the moth crystals with his brother Brett.
I used to feel strange that as a back-sliding Baptist, I was so often in a Catholic hospital where it was obvious the nuns who lived in a roof-top residence ran things. I remember the calls from Sister Mary Louise.  She would phone me as the Tely's city editor and tell me it was time to give St. Joe's more coverage.
And I obliged. She terrified me, just as she did nurses and doctors. I was afraid God would cast me into outer darkness if I didn't listen to one of his representatives on earth.
Yet times have changed. The good nuns are gone. So are the days when most staff were registered nurses who had survived the solid three-year course when they lived in residence attached to a hospital.
And the food has gone to hell too.
Not that I had the greatest appetite. A staple was sandwiches made by a Mississauga company and served in impenetrable containers. I couldn't open them with hospital utensils but found, after son Mark fetched my trusty Swiss army knife, it wasn't worth the trouble.
I was placed on a calorie watch because my muscles were shrinking. Staff tracked what I ate. I hid dubious bits in the milk carton and mashed the rest of the alleged food into a mound.
I had to be in a private room in acute care (($260 daily) but I was moved to semi-private ( $210.)  I agreed out of mercy for my insurance company although I was the one to suffer.  I had "interesting" companions, the first of whom mooed every minute. There was the man who screamed at his wife who was even louder. St. Joe's doesn't believe in separating sexes, apparently, so for too long, I shared with two ugly elderly ladies who talked Polish and Ukrainian non-stop, even at night.
Since the staff often forgot to pull curtains, I found them, and visiting girls, regarding me with interest during bed baths.
While they tried to figure out where to dump me, I was in an area that had an exotic flavour. Families surrounded each bed and seemed to be doing the nursing.  I yelled at a kid who wandered through the curtain to stare, and I was admonished by an attendant who said he needed the teenager to move me.
Mary hired a nice old woman who worked in a nursing home to sit with me some nights and  tend my adult diaper because pushing the buzzer at 3 a.m. never got a quick response and I would wait and wait in my filth.
I wondered if St. Joe's got by at night with only one RN and a handful of worn women who had taken eight month at a college. All I know is that I had an alarm triggered whenever one of the lines running into my arm wasn't working and it went off regularly with slow response. Once it rang for two hours.
I could hear other alarms too, because some "nurses" didn't know how to correct them. The quiet of the hospital was just a myth because there was some poor guy who screamed for a friend to come back and did so for hours every evening. You could just tell from the racket that fellow patients included too many mental patients who should never have been in an acute care hospital. Nurses tending them were true saints in the finest tradition of an old Catholic hospital.
One night I woke in the dark to stare at a mass beside the bed. Turned out to be a woman asking if I knew her son Bob. She left when one roommate screamed she would call police. Another night I woke to find a confused lady sitting on my legs.
I used to plot feverishly about how I would get rid of the paraphernalia chaining me to my bed and get to a toilet even if I had to crawl.  I wasn't ashamed of my diaper, just damn uncomfortable, and my bed sores blossomed evilly.
Even Premier Dalton McGuinty, who once worked in a nursing home turning patients and tending to bed sores, knows the rule that patients are turned every two hours. I never was. At the start there were tubes anchoring me, but the main reason was simple.  Even after shrinking, I was still 6'2" and 220 pounds. One nurse told another as I listened that she wasn't touching me because she would hurt her back. Another, confronting me in the wee hours,  never came back.  The first time I tried to stand, I was supported by two small nurses, one of whom confided that if I fell, there was nothing she could do.
The staff tried, because of my family's prodding, to fight the hospital curse of ulcers where bones come close to the skin with an "air" bed that shifted like a stripper's hips.  So I was "saved" from being covered by sores and just got three evil ones around my tail bone. (I'm trying to be positive. )
If I had to put a name to those who cared for me, I couldn't.  I seldom got the same nurse and it was a bewildering assortment of doctors who would ask a few questions and disappear.
The tests seemed endless. I would be uprooted and flipped to a gurney. I would be wheeled through endless corridors to be left waiting there for at least an hour before I was examined by experts and the machines they tended tersely as if they were feeding threshing machines.
And the costs mounted. Our "free" medicare isn't. We may be spending around 43% of the provincial budget on health but there are charges for anything more than scratching your nose. That's on top of "incidentals" where hospitals gouge for extra cash: $2.50 each half hour in parking, $75 a month for a phone, $60 a month for laundry (even if you don't use it) and so on through renting a crippled TV.
There was no breakdown on the St. Joe's bill as to what was paid by OHIP and what by my private insurance but the hospital wasn't bashful. It charged like a dentist. There was the "chemoshunt" ($168) that was taken out, and two weeks later put back ($168).  They did CTs of my thorax ($79.85), my abdomen ($102.65) and my pelvis ($102.65).  Then for something  called "perc abo drain super" they charged $288.30. (For that I would hope it was super.) They repeated the abdomen scan $102.65) and that "super" drain ($288.30) and many other tests and tubes.
Yet the Charleston hospital charged my travel insurance $275 for the CT scan of my thorax. It was $412 for the CT of my abdomen and similar higher charges for other tests.
St. Joe's was as good, and less costly. Yet I see from grumbling on the Internet that it's been called the worst hospital in Canada. That's going too far, and slurs all the decent staffers. But, upon reflection, it certainly is a candidate.

HOSPITAL HELL (PART THREE)

THE FOG OF INTENSIVE CARE

To put it kindly, my family regard my memories of my hospitalization just after I knocked on death's door, indeed tried to kick it down, with the tolerance usually shown toddlers.
Of course this is the same wife and three sons who consider my thousands of columns and store of anecdotes as being the fruit of an active imagination that may just, on occasion, give a story a little help.
Actually, if the truth will out, my memories of nine days in West Virginia in hospitals at Princeton and Charleston, my air ambulance trip home, and the early days of my St. Joseph's ordeal, are crippled.
When you drift in and out of fevered sleep, or cling to a contorted consciousness, you can't exactly give an accurate description of anything, let alone disagnoses, treatments and probes. Most of the time I had no idea of such fundamentals as what room I was in, or even what city.
And Mary, John Henry, Brett and Mark, loyally and with compassion, shielded me from any decision.
 Yet I was aware, when I wasn't asking questions of shadows at 3 a.m., that there was a great fight to get me airlifted. The family said I wanted to get home more than the insurance company did.
I wasn't sure what was going on except I heard there were no empty hospital beds in Toronto that could be found (if you can believe such nonsense) and no air ambulance was going anywhere until there was some hospital that would accept me.
I couldn't figure out whether my sons were threatening, cajoling or bribing to get me into Canada, indeed even whether the $12,000 cost was coming off my VISA card. When I tried to ask, the family told me to let them worry about it. For once, it was nice to leave major decisions to the family. And I knew I wasn't capable of adding two plus two, let alone negotiate a better lunch.
Finally, after endless delays over several days, I was loaded into yet another ambulance and bounced to an airport atop a hill, which makes it interesting for landing and takeoffs.
My sons drove my car back to Etobicoke, enjoying the rare opportunity to spend time together.  On this "road trip', they bought souvenir T-shirts and hit the historic sites, even visiting Punxsutawny Phil, the world's most famous groundhog.
And I was wooshed, as if strapped in a jet fighter, to Pearson. It was the second flight of the day for the air ambulance crew. I was anchored on a narrow stretcher, but still told my attendant I felt like I was falling out and after the three falls at the start of my misadventure, I feared that.
To reassure me, he tightened my belts and then shoved his forehead against my shoulder. It smelled to me as if he was fortified by a quart of rye but Mary insists I was smelling his antiseptic mask.
A fast trip and even faster trip through customs and immigration, considering I was almost nude and devoid of any identification like a passport. And then Toronto paramedics, the air ambulance crew, Mary and me made our way through late evening traffic to....surprise surprise...not to my expected destinations of Toronto General or Western but to St. Joseph's Medical Centre, which greeted us with hostility.
It was a scene that I will never forget even if my view was rather fevered. I seemed to be in the hospital lobby with a rude doctor on one side, the air crew on the other, and embarrassed paramedics at my feet. The doctor declared the hospital hadn't said it would accept me. The air ambulance crew hung tough since I represented a hefty pay day. And the paramedics shuffled. Finally the doctor agreed to admit me, saying with angry petulance this was always happening and he was fed up.

I was trying to say to him that I had three sons and two grandsons born at the hospital and that I was a scarred survivor of its emerg, beginning in the 1950s when an intern on his first morning trimmed too much flesh off a jagged cut, leaving me with a big scar for life.
Yet no one seemed interested in my ravings on anything. I was placed in lonely isolation in a room that looked like it was used for meetings. Isolation is policy for all patients flown in from the States. Ironically, I had been struck by the hospital infection known as MRSA, meaning a warning sign would be placed on the door of every room I was in for months.
The gowns and masks worn by everyone made me feel like an extra in a ghost movie. But at least I was near home, thanks to the expensive magic carpet of an air ambulance.

HOSPITAL HELL (PART TWO)

A COCOON OF UNREALITY

When I stepped laboriously into my driveway the other day, it was the first time I had been home in five months. Absence really does make the heart grow fonder.
I felt like a great chunk of life had passed me by. The seasons had changed without me. Inside the remoteness of intensive care, the real world doesn't penetrate.
Mary and I departed for a Florida condo the last week of January. We had a grand time since the weather was superb after the chilly winters there in previous years.
Then came a pain on the right of my belly. A mystery pain! For decades I have travelled the world without a medical problem, but I do recall limping around Cairo and Jerusalem because of a savage attack of gout. (Before I knew of allopurinol.) Lately, I have felt crummy in Cuba for two days, and then the year before in Florida I hadn't felt great for a week.  But I returned home and had doctors inspect me from stem to stern.  So I felt cleared to go just about anywhere. Indeed, in January I had fished on a remote stretch of the Amazon in Brazil where the nearest doctor and hospital were hundreds of kilometres away.
Fortunately, my heart, which has been a bit of a problem for five years because of wonky electronics, beat away steadily and only a few times decided to goose in some extra beats.
I described all this to my Toronto doctor over the phone. He said I should find a doctor in the St. Petes Beach area where we rent the condo. But I felt better within a day. Indeed I swam lengths regularly in the medium-sized condo pool. Just days before I knocked on death's door, I swam 150 lengths with two breaks.
But my appetite disappeared along with my entire evacuation system, if you catch my drift.
So Mary and I left a few days early so it would be an easier drive to home and the inevitable round of medical probing.
We took the scenic route north, not I -75 to the west, because it is prettier and a bit shorter. Which is why we were going to spend the second night in a motel in a town in West Virginia. I had never heard of Princeton but now I will never forget.
I felt crummy so I thought a hot bath would help. Big mistake! It took Mary and me about half an hour to lever me out of the tub. Then I decided that even though I had only spent one night in a hospital in my entire life, I should go to the nearest one now.
I saw the white expanse of the bed behind me in a mirror so I backed up to have a rest before we went in search of a hospital. Another big mistake! There really was no bed so I fell flat on my back. Mary then dressed me in a nice track suit (which was cut off in the hospital) and we hobbled into the hall. There I folded up like I was in a Disney cartoon.
Mary went running and returned with two enormous black gentlemen - you would normally avoid such giants at midnight in a small-town hotel - and they awkwardly picked me up and carried me into the elevator. Since the Good Samaritans didn't know what they were doing, I fell face down.
I came to with two sets of paramedics prying at the elevator trying to get me out. Since I was wedged in a corner face-down and there was a chance I had broken my back, they moved with extreme care.
They took me to a small hospital where doctors said I needed a specialist...actually plenty of specialists. So in the morning I was taken by ambulance to the Charleston community hospital while some nice nurse volunteered to drive my car there so Mary could ride with me in the ambulance.(She laughed off our thanks, saying it was southern hospitality.)
That was the first of my many bumpy transfers from stretchers to a big board to beds where the staff sling you like a sack of flour and you pray you don't bounce off to the floor.
The experts determined that I was deathly sick from a variety of ailments. Countless guesstimates rather than real diagnosis! They guessed about gall bladder and even threw in typhoid because of my fishing in Brazil.  Perhaps cancer of the liver. I argued weakly that since I had fallen three times just getting to hospital,  it was possible the gouges on my liver were from that.
So they did a biopsy, or something, since so many tubes were stuck in me over the weeks, I lost track and felt like a glorified pin cushion. No cancer! I then was slid in and out of expensive tube scanners, after being tossed around going to and from the probing. At least they were sure I had pneumonia and  evil liquids sloshing around my gut.
Mary and my three sons had to cope with this since I was so out of it, I talked to machines in the middle of the night, thinking they were nurses.
Meanwhile, the Canadian travel insurance company wanted me to be evacuated by air ambulance to Toronto, far away from those incredible U.S. medical bills.
And that was only the start of the worst experience of my life.

HOSPITAL HELL (PART ONE)

AN ENDLESS SEA OF MISERY

I was carried into the first of four hospitals on, appropriately, April Fool's Day. The joke was on me. From health to death's door in two days. And for the first time since May, 1957, I haven't written anything for 106 days since they don't allow computers in intensive care.
My descent into the hell of several months of hospital left me unable to walk until a day ago, and holes over my tail bone which may take more months to heal. I never guessed that my leg muscles would turn into jelly after all those weeks imprisoned in a hospital bed, the first part in isolation and intensive care.
It left me with a profound respect for many nurses, and a hatred for some. I also think hospitals trying to go without registered nurses where possible, and playing games to keep them off permanent staff where they would get benefits, is a costly disgrace.
I think if  St. Joseph's had sufficient staff at night so I didn't have to lie in my own filth for 20 to 30 minutes, I wouldn't have ended up with three enormous bedsores which still are burrowing in my bum despite a range of enough medicine to kill a bull.
Turns out that everything you've heard about American hospital bills is absolutely true. The bills are still flying but it looks like they averaged $8,000 a day. Never leave home without travel insurance.
It also turns out that the "free" medicare of Ontario has cost me thousands of dollars despite my Canadian health plan covering enormous amounts.
Not exactly the way to lose 40 pounds. Unfortunately most of that came out of my muscles -  I still have a bit of a belly - which meant that up to several weeks ago, not only was I tethered by tubes to a bed, it took at least two nurses to get me out of that bed.
A hellish experience. One that almost killed me but was harder on my wife, Mary, and my three sons, John Henry, Brett and Mark. They came to West Virginia from their homes in China, California and Toronto because it looked like I was about to die due to enough poisons sloshing around my innards to keep a chest drain working overtime. There were other things wrong but no need to list them because you should already get the idea that I might have expired for several reasons.
 I'm going to tell you all about it in some blogs. I confided to a doctor at St. Joseph's Health Centre in Toronto's westend that I wondered if I was going to write about it all because I didn't want to hurt good hospital staffs by relating bad experiences, even a couple where I could have died because of stupidity.
The doctor said I should write about it because there were so many problems with the health system today that any publicity would help.
Since my experiences included my family not being able to find a hospital in Toronto willing to accept me, saying they had no beds, I have plenty of indignation burning inside me where the gut pain used to be.
What's the use of having well-connected doctors and serving since 1988 on the board of a Toronto hospital when you spend extra costly days in a Charleston medical centre because all of the incredible medical facilities of Toronto are closed to you.
Something I will never forget or forgive.

LARRY ZOLF: A GIFTED OBSERVER OF CANADA

HE HAD A NOSE FOR GOSSIP

As Larry Zolf never forgot, I was the first to write about him. And he loved it. He hungered for publicity because he was never happier than when he was telling you, or anyone, even the waiter, what he thought about just about any topic.
And now his voice and his intellect have been stilled. But not the memories.
He and some college chums had dreamed up some wacky political skit which was being performed somewhere so they phoned the old Toronto Telegram looking for publicity. It was early on a pleasant evening and nothing was going on so the night editor, Doug Stuebing, sent me off to U of T in case the students had some good lines.
They did. Wonderful biting political commentary, the kind that tumbled out of Zolf if the CBC or some editor didn't panic and resort to the libel lawyer. So a small story appeared, and Zolf was grateful. He ignored that the Tely was CONSERVATIVE and I was a conservative and he was a labour-loving refugee from the Jewish-Polish community of Winnipeg.
For  decades, Zolf called me regularly to find out what was going on. And I returned the favour. Often he was feeling lonely and just wanted to talk. In a hurry, on deadline, we would use each other as a resource on what had happened in Toronto politics decades before. I could Google Zolf's memory. He worked at it, talking, gossiping, drinking, reading, pontificating electronically, skewering, writing books and columns and an early blog, often driving those close to him to frustration because he was untidy about everything even to his  clothes.
Before an election, Zolf would call columnists like me and political insiders like Senator David Smith and get seat projections. It was a useful call for me and for him because you traded what you really knew for ridings where you had no idea.
When I was Editor of the Toronto Sun, in the days when the suits didn't insist who the columnists were, I had Zolf write some columns. He wasn't popular with our right-wing readers, even though he would slash away at all parties and philosophies. Doug Creighton, the ultimate reader of Sun columns, recognized Zolf's wit but not necessarily his wisdom.
 Creighton regularly urged me to fire Walter Stewart, whose parents had been CCF/NDP leaders, but understood when I didn't on the grounds that any real newspaper needs a range of views.  So I knew that adding Zolf weekly to the editorial mix was really tilting at the windmills, since Zolf was occasionally like Stewart on speed.
Zolf was used as a resource by his main employer, the CBC, because he had a wealth of home phone numbers. He also was a trusted insider for the anchors. The secret for all this was that Zolf never tried to get major politicians to speak only to him, to lock up his sources. And he talked to everyone, even if he would hoot incredulously - you could recognize his laugh even in the turmoil of Question Period - if the ideas got really strained.
He was a guru in his beloved Beaches.  Tom Jakobek when he was just a trustee trying to step up appealed to me to help end the rumour he was a Scientologist. Zolf was spreading it, he said. So I told him to have the family church minister be photographed with him for campaign literature and to phone Zolf and tell him that I said to knock it off. He descended on Zolf's house and delivered the message at the door. Zolf phoned me and said he almost had a heart attack when this tall "spooky" guy loomed over him at the door. But Zolf stopped the assault and Jakobek won. (I can just hear Larry saying that the line really should be that the city lost. )
I've seen PMs, premiers and ministers spar with Zolf, some times with exasperation tinged with affection. Yet what the politicians and his colleagues all recognized is that Zolf liked nothing better than yarning about what was making politics tick in Canada, and that he really cared.
He was, he said, the ugliest Jew around. Ah yes, that was a nose that even Cyrano would have envied. But what a passion for politics.

MEMORIES OF SAUL ALINSKY AND SIT-INS

THE SMOKE FROM ANCIENT BATTLES

Was it really forty years ago when campus guerillas like Mark Bonokoski fed the student unrest of the budding university of Ryerson, and the giant of community organizings, Saul Alinsky, could see as his  life ended that the sit-in technique that had blossomed under his inspired leadership was already dated as a weapon.
My musings are prompted by a question from John Cosway, the diligent steward of the Toronto Sun family blog. He was quoting from an Internet item about Bono, the veteran Sun columnist, who when he was a student at Ryerson and helped run a renegade student newspaper, was involved in sit-in confrontations with the university president.
Cosway wondered when was the last good Toronto student sit-in. I bet there are aged radicals who have their favourite but they all started to blur together for me. We had the angry brawling between supposed students and rough Toronto cops at the U of T education experiment known as Rochdale. Not a sit-in but more a drug party during a raid. The cops went too far but it could be said that the whole situation baffled them.
 Hardly the often brutal stuff of the anti-war protests on American campuses. The famous sit-in at the Columbia president's office, the senseless deaths at Kent State, the awful Chicago cop assaults on convention demonstrators, the nation-wide bonfires of flower power, draft cards and flags, it seemed every day brought another campus confrontation that filled jails. Sit-ins were everywhere.
Bono and the grouchy protesters at Ryerson mirrored what was happening on the streets just outside.  The community organizing that had become a major political force in the U.S. under Alinsky had a Toronto version with John Sewell and Karl Jaffary, both lawyers who had had all the advantages, fighting developers with sit-ins in condemned houses or in front of the bulldozers. Both became aldermen and could fight evil from inside the system, and Sewell even became a dismal one-term mayor and then a voice calling endlessly from the wilderness.
Alinsky was the most famous community organizer in the modern world as he tackled every ghetto. (Some argue that Jesus was really the first.)  Typically, Hilary Clinton quoted him in her university thesis. William F. Buckley Jr., the articulate conservative, praised him. There were Toronto councillors like Gordon Cressy who could quote from Alinsky's manual for fighting the system.
But now we have a community organizer from Chicago who turned his back on an impeccable legal background and became president of the United States. I'm sure that Barack Obama also quotes from Alinsky even though he died in 1972, just as Bono graduated and Ryerson settled down.
There are many who want to pin everything bad about Alinsky on Obama, but they can't ignore that Alinsky called himself a non-socialist left winger.
It was Alinsky, quoted in a Playboy interview (I did read it for the articles,) who warned activists that sit-ins would no longer work because North America had adjusted. Alinsky was being shown the executive suite of a new corporate headquarters. There were two lobbies for the CEO's office, and it was explained to him that the one for the sit-ins came complete with a washroom and change tables in case any of the demonstrators brought along babies.
It was Alinsky who devised the technique (publicized by Toronto's own Arthur Hailey in the bestseller Wheels) that forced a Detroit bank to stop discriminating against black customers. Blacks lined up at every window and started a new account with a small sum. Then they went to the back of the line and withdrew the money.  Again and again. This went on until bank officials begged for mercy.
Alinsky also forced one of the world's largest airports, O'Hare, to end its discrimination against blacks by working out a scheme to place a black bum on every public toilet in every terminal. For the entire day. A black standing in front of every urinal. He was working out the logistics such as how many buses and how many volunteers were needed for what really was to be a shit-in when he had a brilliant idea. He told the airport managers what he was planning to do and they caved. He got everything he wanted without having to block one of the thousands of conveniences.
Occasionally today, you have a handful of protesters occupying some politician's office for  hours, hoping for  publicity. There is no bonanza for them because the politician stays away, and the protesters are what the media call the "usual suspects." (The term comes from the movie Casablanca.) There is also the reality that's it all rather silly. After all, the typical leader, whether of politics or industry, moves around with a cell phone and often a laptop. In the age of texting, occupying an office is just a waste of time.
Today's campus radicals are given seats on the university boards and can tell the president across the big polished table what they think about any subject under the sun. And they do. And do. I suspect that some days the president thinks the sit-in was easier.

CANADA'S NNAs ARE GOLDEN OSCARS

BOB REGULY'S AWFUL END TO GREAT CAREER

If I were to tell you that there was an actor who just died who won three Oscars, you would and should be mightily impressed.
In the tough world of Canadian journalism, the National Newspaper Awards for more than half a century have been our cherished Oscars. And since Canadian newspapers are among the best in the world, and Canadian journalists, like our comics, routinely star on the world stage, to win more than one NNA is an honourable accomplishment.
  Well, Bob Reguly, who just died at 80, won three NNAs in four years for himself and the Toronto Star. Stunning!  Now the great columnist Peter Worthington and the superb photographer Boris Spremo have doubled that accomplishment, but then they are from another planet where they work 30 hours a day.
The farewells, which tragically have to mention Reguly's terrible exit from his illustrious career, all concentrate on his finding of the tart Gerda Munsinger in Europe and her revelations about her scandalous romp through the federal Tories which match any seamy stories of the round-robin sex of England.
It really was a tale from between stained sheets that made us all feel like we needed a shower.
But I remember his NNA for the finding of the unionist/thug Hal Banks on a ship in the Brooklyn harbour when Canadian authorities were mystified as to his location. They  hadn't looked hard, which was the point of Reguly's scoop.
Reguly told me a twist to the story that is not well-known. Itt shows the cheap accountants of the Star to be as miserable about expense accounts as the Devil counting heads in Hades.
Reguly saw Banks on the deck and told the cabbie to take him to the nearest drugstore where he bought a Kodak disposeable camera for around $55 to prove to the world, and the Star, that he had found Banks.
He returned and was spotted when he was snapping away at Banks with the cheap camera. Banks' bodyguards chased him. The taxi was cornered but Reguly persuaded the cabbie to drive through the thugs and risk a dangerous collision..
They got away. Reguly was grateful and didn't have much money for a huge tip. So he emptied the camera and gave it to the cabbie in thanks. The accountants wouldn't reimburse Reguly for the camera's purchase because he couldn't produce the camera.
That's not the end to the picture tale. The Telegram, locked for years in bitter competition with the Star, was rocked by the Reguly scoop. I was ordered to dispatch to New York a reporter/photographer who had just returned to the Tely from his native Australia.
Peter Geddes phoned to say he had spotted Banks on the deck and got one good shot with his long lense before the thugs started chasing him. He wirephotoed the picture while I alerted my bosses that at least we had a picture. A darkroom technician emerged in the  middle of the night staring dubiously at the result. I phoned Geddes and demanded to know why Banks was slightly out of focus when some chap in a suit was sharp. He replied that he didn't know what Banks looked like - having been in Australia when this scandal blew up - and had photographed the best dressed guy on the deck. I said Banks was in the background, in a sports shirt.
So the technician, Wasyl Kowalishen, worked diligently with an enlarger in the darkroom, spotting and dodging and using all the tricks that you could do with black-and-white pictures in the darkroom, before the days of digital and photo shop. And the result on Page One the next day won Geddes an NNA. Not quite as worthwhile as Reguly's, to put it mildly.
I remember Geddes for another reason. He was very talented but the strain led to his drinking and that ruined his family life. So he left the business.
I talked to him once more. We learned that Pierre Trudeau had taken Margaret skiing on their honeymoon at Whistler. The Tely figured that it could scoop the world, or at least the Star and Globe, by having a picture in the next edition. This was far more difficult then than it would be now because it  would mean getting a photographer to the slope, taking the picture, processing the picture and then finding a wirephoto machine to send it across Canada. All in a few hours!
A rewriteman yelled at me that he was talking to the guy running the ski lift at the bottom and he thought it was Peter Geddes. Our Peter Geddes! So I got on the phone and didn't get the warm reception that you would expect when I helped him win a major award. I told him to get the picture and we would pay handsomely. Peter said he didn't own a camera. I told him to do the Reguly thing, to go buy a Kodak disposeable. He refused, saying he never intended to touch a camera again. And that was that. He hung up on me, and possibly another NNA.
Reguly had a devil-may-care attitude to reporting. It's no surprise to find he parachuted for bucks at the start. He was a reporter, not a columnist, and distrusted politicians almost as much as he did editors.  He started dropping in to see Worthington at the Sun and when Peter was busy playing editor, he would tell me all the dirt he had collected or suspected about major politicians. They were marvelous tales.
One main target for him was John Munro, a federal politician of many jobs in cabinet, and many more suspicions. Munro sweated routinely, which made him look guilty even if he was talking to a kindergarten class. And he got involved in strange business, like the day he emerged with a shiner and said he had fallen in the tub. It was widely believed his wife hit him during a quarrel. (She was a remarkable woman who started as a Stelco secretary and ended with a doctorate and a provincial cabinet post.)
So Worthington got Reguly hired at the Sun and he was teamed with a young reporter who had the goods on Munro, or so he told Reguly and the Sun. I knew a little of the story, which was tame compared to other stuff that Reguly had told me. I won't go into details because this story was horrendously wrong, created by the reporter, Don Ramsay, because of ambition, chemicals and stupidity.
The Sun settled an embarrassing libel suit (even though newspapers generally win) because Lorrie Goldstein, now the Sun associate editor, and John Paton, a major star today in American and Canadian publishing, couldn't find support for the story.
Reguly left, bitter. He used to complain to young journalists that he had been betrayed by the Sun and it showed that newspapers wouldn't support investigative journalists. A journalism tragedy where I felt he had betrayed instead the Sun and his craft. We ran into each other long ago in Cottage Country where he was still saying he had been the victim and cursing every boss at the Sun.
I preferred to remember him as the reporter who with great gusto dominated Canadian journalism from 1964 to 1968 and then like a meteorite crashed into the Sun.