ONLY THE IGNORANT WOULD RENAME RYERSON

 AN APT NAME AND A GREAT STATUE

A mouthy minority of activists in love with indigenous posturing has been blathering for several years about renaming Ryerson University and demolishing the statue on Gould of the great educator after which it was named. 

We know that those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it but in this case those trying to scrub the past have  no clue as to what went on.

They say Egerton Ryerson was responsible for the odious residential schools that were a blight on native families as callous bureaucrats snatched away their kids. But there are problems blaming Ryerson as the major figure in the dismal operation of indigenous residential schools since he was the creator and boss of the ONTARIO school system until 1876 and died in 1882 just as the FEDS began them.

If the no-nothings actually cared about facts rather than a fictional nonsensical cause they would have had to search verbal mountains for proof. After all Ryerson was a prodigious writer. An endless flow of words in letters, reports, sermons, speeches and even a lengthy biography poured out and as a proud stubborn Methodist there was no mistaking his meaning. But in a real life of real facts critics would find nothing but respect and even love for the Mississaugas as he worked around the Credit as a missionary.

In his monumental report and speeches of the mid-1840s that built the school system of Upper Canada and then the entire country as it was born, Ryerson did recommend residential schools for what everyone called Indians because he felt they needed lessons in agriculture instead of relying on hunting and fishing. 

Yet his main thrust was for free education for all, not just schools for the more prosperous families, and for Normal schools for budding teachers, the first public museum, textbook publisher, and art gallery. His role when some chiefs and officials wanted to start two indigenous schools was as the expert adviser to produce a curriculum to help if Indians were to settle and not roam. Those schools failed because the government didn't help enough but were better than what the feds later forced without Ryerson's tolerance for minorities and other religions.

When the first assaults on the Ryerson name began because supposedly he had been integral to the shameful residential schools, I was perplexed. Where in heck did that come from? A great PROVINCIAL educator was blamed for a FEDERAL operation that festered AFTER he died.

I also worried about what I might have missed when I ransacked the archives of the university, city and province for my book Ryerson University - A Unicorn Among Horses. I read a wealth of his writings, even the original letters he sent home from his many inspection trips to England and Europe. I read yellowed newspaper clippings about his death as a "great" Canadian, and how there had been a subscription where the government and pupils from as far away as the New England States had contributed $8,000 for his statue. (Even politicians gave their dollar.) 

Almost nothing in all that about residential schools.

I read his entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia and books of admiration by historians, one of whom wrote Ryerson's first head, H.H. Kerr, to say that he could not imagine a more suitable name for a university than Ryerson's.  Nothing about indigenous residential schools.

So when I wrote about him and how what he left behind grew into a university, I mentioned residential schools in only one sentence. 

Not that I hated the idea of residential schools, not when I grew up reading about legendary Eton and Harrow. Then there was the Ontario equivalents like prestigious Upper Canada College, and the fictional ones like Hogwarts. After I was orphaned, I was almost shipped off to Ridley.

In all my experiences at Ryerson, I never heard a peep that the international giant was a racist who considered the indigenous to be inferior. I have a certificate, diploma and degree from Ryerson. I was student president and editor of the campus newspaper. I lectured there, and served on board of governors committees and task forces doing everything from searching for a new president and journalism chair, revising the Ryerson act, overhauling the photography courses, advising the journalism department and writing the history plaques.

Never a word against the great Canadian!

This anti-name campaign resembles a stunt by drunken freshmen in an academic pub to replace the historic name on a school that was supposed to be different. Of course the university now wallows in correctness, with education pushed to one side, if there is time left over from flagellation, and the symbol of a statue almost 10 feet high on a granite base of similar size, one of the better and more meaningful statues of the city, is to be cast aside into a swamp of indifference and ignorance.

Two Ryerson profs, Ron Stagg and Patrick Dutil, in a fine piece in the National Post on April 6, detail the indigenous history of the church leader. How the tribe so honoured him they made him a chief,  and how he had as a lifelong friend a chief known in English as Peter Jones. He even made a secret appeal to Queen Victoria when the Mississaugas had land confiscated by bureaucrats.  (Such was the power and clout of Ryerson that he started a college named after Victoria which of course became part of U of T, the best university in the country according to my three sons and me who all went there.)

The Ryerson academics concluded their Post article, which is filled with facts, unlike those making silly accusations, with this appeal. I would urge that Ryerson grads listen because it is time they rebel at the waves of nonsense coming out of the university and the committees considering the name dump.

They finished: "Torontonians today must recognize that Egerton Ryerson has been falsely accused and restore their pride in celebrating one of the best minds of their past."

The critics should at the very least be sentenced to scrubbing his statue with toothbrushes, as we once did with frosh. But that might hurt their feelings, and heavens we never ever should do that, especially in the modern classroom as universities wilt from actually teaching.

 

THE SUN ALSO RISES

 THE WEEK THAT WAS

We didn't want to mar the final edition of  The Toronto Telegram. After all the glories, innovations and goofs of the newspaper since it began in 1876, we wanted it to enter history as error free as possible in journalism.

So the disintegrating Tely family nitpicked and agonized through the night on October 30, 1971, while nursing headaches of doubts and hopes. It had been a long funeral since John Bassett kept it alive for weeks after he announced the murder because of a Tory leadership convention.

I settled gloomily at the news desk as the first edition flopped in front of me. "THIS IS IT" was the headline, and a big 30, the traditional way for journalists to write the end.
As the Assistant Managing Editor I was lowering the paper into the grave. The only bounce around me was in people not worried about what came next. Such as Clyde Gilmour who telephoned insisting I read his review to him so he could check for mistakes. But then he would start Monday at the Star as one of Canada's leading movie critics who also had a radio show for his records.

The copy boy who scooped the first copies from the Star presses arrived and the daily search of comparisons began. Ray Biggart running the city desk wondered about what we didn't have, mainly the big headline about another pronouncement by Walter Gordon, the Grit guru the Star idolized.

Did we want to scalp the story, the daily copycat exercise as the two giants compared editions?

It didn't task my judgment. The Tely would go into oblivion ignoring the Star's pet. Even though Gordon had a farm outside Schomberg and allowed his neighbour, my brother-in-law Gordon Long, to run a trapline. As the famous economic nationalist, he loved the idea that beaver were trapped there, an echo of the fur business that started the country.

 But then there was the time as a young reporter, also working on the census to get enough money to get married, that I asked his wife in their lovely Rosedale home whether the future federal treasurer from the prestigious accounting firm made more annually than the top census figure of $35,000. She said she certainly hoped so. In 1961, that was seven times more than I made. 

Biggart didn't argue. He was looking forward to being City Editor on Monday of a different kind of  newspaper that was being born out of the mess, the Toronto Sun tabloid.  Like many of the 62 Sun "day oners" he went on to an illustrious career as the influential assistant to Paul Godfey, the rookie Metro chairman, (after I turned the job down) and then as Metro parks and property commissioner.

Nothing much happened that day. So I gradually let the staff trickle away. I went into the sound-proofed room, basically a large closet, that housed the many teletype machines that tethered the Tely to the wire services and the world of news and checked for one last time for crashes, sinking and revolts. Nothing! So I turned them off, one by one by one.

Then I went to the composing room and told everyone to go to the wakes. I stood by the "turtle" that held the front page form and ripped up the Telegram name, the metal flag at the top. A sad trophy for my study wall, along with the matte from which the front page was made.

From there to the thunder of the press room.  How were they running? The foreman cursed and said the damn things had never run better.  I asked what the run call was from circulation and advertising. He said for 328,000 copies. I said people were stopping the delivery trucks and offering dollars for the final copy. How about if we run the presses out of paper? They can't fire both of us because we're ALL gone. Besides he had a job Monday with the Star. So he shrugged, turned the counters off and ran perhaps 345,000 copies before the newsprint storage room was empty.

I returned to an empty newsroom. Alone in silence. I made a sad circuit of all the empty desks and offices, grabbed the big wheel of contact phone numbers from the rewrite desk and carried it and the front-page metal by a startled security guard to a vacant parking lot. 

It was a Saturday of anxious farewells for 1,200 Tely employees, many of whom never worked for a newspaper again. But for the 62 gamblers, there was anxious hope up a rickety elevator to the fourth floor of an old building and rudimentary quarters spotted with equipment left behind by a bankrupt company.

I didn't sleep or party. On Sunday I felt like I had the flu as I sat at home at my portable typewriter picking at my first Sun column on the dangers of spending a lot on a new stadium. It didn't help that John Henry and Brett were oblivious and rambunctious and my third son, Mark, was demonstrating that three-month-old babies can be cranky. 

Had I chosen wisely for my family when Doug Creighton offered a daily column as the only one covering politics in a small paper? The Star had turned me down when Borden Spears said hiring me would upset their newsroom structure. The Globe hadn't replied. And I had turned down more secure but also probably more boring jobs with the federal fisheries ministry, Toronto Harbour Commission and Etobicoke school board to wade into the unknown.

Creighton greeted me cheerily as I arrived at the strange new home in the afternoon and when I confessed to my Tely mentor about my worries swept me off for lunch in typical style to the Walker House. Nothing like fine food and a few drinks with an old friend to try to make me think this may work out. So I had my first of many grand meals before I even set foot in the Sun, In the future many would say the same as Doug built the paper with his charm. 

The "day oners" worked too hard to pay attention to that All Hallow's eve and the trick-or-treaters roaming  the dark. There were no resources but experience. But then Monday morning dawned with the sale of all 60,000 copies - except for souvenirs squirreled by "day oners"- leading to the glimmer of success.

I arrived at City Hall to find the Globe had taken over the better Tely office overlooking the Archer sculpture and city property commissioner Harry Rogers (father of Bruce of radio fame) had no intention of giving city space to some unknown little newspaper even if he did know me.

So I descended on Mayor Bill Dennison who had known me since he had started as a trustee when my father, an east-end doctor, had been chairman of the Toronto school board. And Denison ordered Rogers to give me the Globe's old office.

I checked with the office to find that Don Hunt, the third member of the founding triumvirate who looked after promotion, had arranged the first contest. He had hired Bert Petlock, a former Tely police reporter before the PR world, to get a client to donate a big net, tanks of gas and balloons. The idea was to launch the balloons from Nathan Phillips Square. One would have a slip inside awarding an exotic trip from some company that had been conned by Hunt and Creighton into an exchange for future ads. 

I found Petlock and limp balloons but no ceremony. So I went back inside and persuaded the mayor to officiate. Petlock inflated the balloons watched carefully by a growing circle of urchins on their battered bikes. The mayor muttered a few words prompted by me. There was no one else there. The mayor tugged the net off but the balloons just rolled around and didn't fly. A few boys didn't wait but rushed in, grabbed a balloon off the ground, and hightailed it for the Sun. No one seemed to know how they knew about the contest or the Sun's strange new address.

I phoned Hunt and we decided to ignore the first boys on the grounds they had cheated. I left him to sort the rest out and walked up University to the Legislature, the first of many such trips since at the start there was no one else covering politics.

Of course the old Tely office there had been captured before I got there. I sat at the big table that dominated the press gallery and appealed to the reporters having the first drink of the day. Since a few sat on the executive of the Toronto Men's Press Club, and I was the future president, I managed to extract a promise of some form of space and a seat in the press galley perched over the Speaker's dais.

It was a hectic day. I walked back to City Hall and managed to stay long enough at a transportation committee meeting to cobble enough for my second column.

The Sun office was organized confusion when I arrived searching for a desk and a typewriter. By the second day Paul Rimstead and I worked out a deal by which we shared an old typewriter and battered desk shoved up against some mysterious and dirty machine. It seemed a suitable arrangement since my column ran across the bottom of Page 4 and he was across the way.

Both Paul and I ached to escape the confusion. He was clutching a package of six assorted mickey-sized liqueurs delivered by one of his many fans and offered me the cherry one if he could write first. He wrote his first take. Then he drank the Creme de menthe while I wrote the start of my column. Then we switched. He composed a second page while I drank. Then we switched. Much was consumed by the time we finished and decided heartily that the Sun may well prosper even if it was in the old Eclipse building. I went to work the next day to find out how my column ended. 

And so the Sun began for my 40 years there while 60,000 newspapers grew to more than 300,000 daily and 500,000 on Sunday. We deserved that too since we pioneered Sunday newspapers for the country. Then the little paper that grew shrank along with the entire news trade. My life downtown, my 50 years in journalism, have become memories without structure since the two Tely homes have vanished, and the Sun has moved from the building designed by John Parkin, the architect who worked on City Hall. 

And I went from a cub that a prime minister wanted fired to a PM phoning to congratulate me on becoming Editor. Decades of typing and perspiration and inspiration for 6,000 columns and 3,000 editorials. The highs of being quoted even in the House of Lords at Westminster to the lows of libel suits. The peaks of chatting with Netanyahu, arguing with Fidel, lunching with Mandela, and kidding Clinton to the goofs like forgetting the name of the politician I was interviewing on TV.

The Sun's golden anniversary this fall celebrates 50 years even as newspapers die by the thousands. But not my memories!

 

 

JOAN SUTTON'S GRAND APPETITE FOR LIVING

There Is Nothing Like A Dame

 The announcement that Joan Sutton Straus is one of 22 receiving the Order of Ontario said she was "one of Canada's best known journalists." She almost wasn't, but she would have been "best known" in her beloved country no matter what she did in a life overflowing with love and ideas stirred with passion and insight.

Once upon a time, she was fed up with the pressures of the fashion world and contemplated a change that would allow her to use her special knowledge of that and high society in her city. So she applied to the Tely who needed a fashion writer.
As the Sixties ended, it was a rowdy time in the newspaper wars where the holy Star and the far-more readable Telegram slugged it out edition by edition. But the Tely kept slipping. So John Bassett, the arrogant man-about-town who ran the Tely for his three sons and the four Eaton department store boys,  turned his paper over to Doug Creighton.

Creighton ended up using charm and an intimate knowledge of the city and his paper acquired as a police reporter and editor to centralize control of the second largest paper in the country. He ran everything with two deputies, Ed Monteith as the assistant managing editor running news and the Monday-to Friday editions, and me as the AME running everything else and the larger Saturday paper.

For me, I was thrown into a world filled with famous and credentialed people often twice my age with thin skins and decades more experience. My mistakes often appeared before hundreds of thousands of readers.

My search for a new fashion writer was a mine field since the Lifestyle (women's) department was populated with the kind of women who didn't even look at you when you asked them for a dance.

So I arrived for what I thought was just another interview at a famous Italian restaurant frequented by Queen's Park insiders, The fare was great yet so was my trepidation as I thought of the resting sharks back in the newsroom because this was turning into a make-or-shatter-me hiring. But Joan Sutton was great as she outlined a background richer than I anticipated. I returned to the office with no doubt that this hurdle had been cleared.

Creighton greeted me with happy news. He had hired me a writer. I spluttered that I had a new writer starting in a week. Creighton and his supposed boss Arnold Agnew (who was married into the Eaton family) told me that was impossible. The woman they had hired was one of the best friends of Doug Bassett's wife, one of the owners. 

A miserable afternoon followed with me arguing sporadically that I had given my word  to Joan Sutton and her career had included such positives as "dressing" performers for CFTO, which was Bassett/Tely owned. I refused to cancel my job offer. I ended up telephoning Mary to say that my success after only 10 years out of university had just crashed and burned over an Italian lunch. 

By some miracle, Creighton and Agnew finally conceded. Any joy I felt was tempered by a phone call from Doug Bassett demanding whether I knew when I hired this Sutton that the person promised the job was his wife's best friend.

I said I did, figuring I might as well go down with all guns blazing. There was a long pause, and Bassett sighed that I would get away with it "this time."

For some reason. I was running the City Desk when Joan came in on the Sunday night before she started work and gave me her first feature, about the great difficulty women had because clothing sizes were not uniform. You had to know that this company's sizes were all larger than that company's sizes.

I read it through with Joan waiting anxiously. I said it was fine. Indeed we used it as a spread three days later. 

So I should have known right then Joan Sutton Straus was going to become one of Canada's best-known journalists because she was so driven to excellence that she wrote her first printed article before she even was on the payroll.

Ironically, considering her hiring, Creighton finally made her a key insider and she was one of the 62 known as Day Oners who started the Sun when the Bassetts finally sold the Tely out from underneath us. 

An account of Joan's life would be a good book (maybe even a bodice ripper) because she has been a beauty queen finalist, model, columnist and government insider. She knew all about the city and province and the secrets of famous people were familiar to her. She organized an intimate memorial service in a Beth Tzedec chapel one afternoon and I sat with a former veteran premier and flamboyant attorney general listening to an eulogy from one of our most famous diplomats.

This honour is just another recognition for a grand lady who has had a great life. The tales she could still tell.

DAVID PRESCOTT DID EVERYTHING WELL

RENAISSANCE MAN IS AN APT DESCRIPTION

On a recent Sunday, sons Michael and Neil rented an ambulance and took their frail father to sit beside lock 25 on the Otonabee where he had fished so often. David sipped his favourite drink, an extra dry martini - to hell with all the medication - gazed with contentment over the river that flows through the heart of Peterborough, and tried to forget the hospital where his wife had died weeks before in the room they shared.
And then he returned from his last birthday party to that hospital to die a few days later. Fortunately Michael and Neil were with him, thanks to some compassionate nurses.
The pandemic robs us all of peaceful passings when even loved ones can't visit or are hampered at the end by the emergency rules, when David was blocked from moving to gentler surroundings by a decree announced even as the transfer stretcher was in the hall.
I wrote in blog.johndowning.ca when his Margaret died, the gentle matriarch of Plewesville, about how families at such artificial times, when virtual reality services of knots of mourners strain to replace funerals, when we deal with doctors by email and telephone and hope and frustration, that we all must share the love woven through our nostalgia.
When the world stumbles along this path to the unknown, we must spend more time savouring the past before the shroud drops on the future.
There is much to discuss about men like David Prescott who did everything so well that those around him, whether at CIBC or the golf club, recognized his graceful skill. So he would be bank manager and then assistant general manager for the country, or a steward ready to defend the rules during the Canadian Open.
You and I might decide to catch carp one morning but David had the special rods and knowledge and knew about web sites and shops that dealt only with carp. No trout or pickerel was safe when David scanned the water with an expert's eye.
He loved wood turning and became so good that he gave his bowls as gifts (thank heavens) and sold them at shows and became president of the Peterborough wood turners. He drove hours to buy special woods, but was great at scavenging. We were driving a country road and he shouted stop. He went to the farmhouse and asked if he could have the twisted stump he had spotted in a woodpile. The surprised response was yes.
I could barely see the woodpile, let alone the lovely gnarled knot, but he had a keen hunter's eye. He would identify the hawk swooping above the point when I could only see a dot, but he loved to label birds and fish and trees and wild flowers and when I challenged him with a guide book, he was right.
He had an affair with Mother Nature because he understood her right down to the roots.
The list is endless of what he enjoyed doing. And he was good at it, from bluffing with two deuces to dropping the fly just behind the rock where the trout had hunkered against the current.
 Most of us are content in retirement to take it easy many evenings, but David was always on the go, from theatre to lacrosse to all music, especially opera and choirs, so of course he was a leader in the choral activities of his adopted city.
He was willing to play cards until the cows came up for milking. He would search endlessly in the markets for the right tomato or sausage. He would ....but let's just leave it at that. Name some activity, whether urban culture or hunting, and David had done it with finesse and passion.
He was a man to be envied because he had come from a humble background and education to milk the joy out of life and then to sip it like that extra dry martini that Sunday afternoon with his beloved boys around him.

MEMORIES OF PLEWESVILLE

TREASURE THE FAMILY STORIES

And so another of the family dies without dear ones close.
It is a time then to treasure the past, to remember the joys and gaffes of growing up and flying away from the urban nest that was Weston before it was ruined by progress.
A time to cling to tidbits of nostalgia to comfort us in the sterile artificiality of a virtual world that tries to substitute even for our funerals.
In the day when Hollywood was still golden, there were popular movies like Cheaper By The Dozen that cast a romantic humour over large families. Magazines like Reader's Digest dominated the media. It loved big families and boasted a regular feature on the most unforgettable character the writer had ever met.
I think often these days of the decades after the second world war to end all wars because more of those familiar faces around the big table at mealtime long ago are gone now or cloaked with age.
Plewesville is located in dozens of memories and was a modest home on Weston Rd. in the south of what was a pleasant old mill town.
It used to burst with people. There were Aunt Jennie and Uncle Dave, my guardians after my grandmother decided an orphan boy was too much trouble. And my uncle's mother (and perhaps for a time her boyfriend.) And 11 Plewes children.
Then came the additions and subtractions of life.
The oldest girl, Verna, died in a car crash from the head injuries when she bent over to protect the baby on her lap. So the family adopted Margy because the father was a scoundrel.
Then I came along from Chesley, the sleepy furniture factory town of 1,800 near Owen Sound, to the city just stretching its muscles.
It was not that big of a house. Four of us lived in the attic which may not have had height but at least there were stairs. There was only one bathroom but the tub was in the basement. We managed because no one tarried. Once when Margaret did with some chums, Uncle Dave quietly removed the bathroom door to teach her a lesson and looked in with horror at strange girls.
Margaret just died after a long fight. Because of the pandemic we haven't been able to gather and remember stories like that about the warm lady who became the matriarch.
And now Robert with his wry smile has gone too, suddenly, without even a corporal's guard.  And I wonder if his sons know about the Saturday night we were playing hide-go-seek at twilight and he found the perfect hideyhole behind the water heater. Unfortunately he stuck there and then started to scorch and we were trying to dismantle the heater when we pulled him out, removing some skin.
It was only possible because it was one of those rare occasions when Aunt Jennie had fled for some peace.
On another occasion when the fiery and wiry lady who dominated the home was away, Paul who sat on my left for meals got into a heated argument with Dave who sat on my right and they started wrestling. When Paul decided to stab Dave with a table knife, I appealed to Bill to help me break it up and Bill refused, observing that it looked like a very dull knife.
Bill has been dead for years. The charismatic imp who was the student president at Weston Collegiate and art college who tapped the phone to listen to sisters talk to their boyfriends and squeezed .22 bullets in a vise just to watch them ricochet off the walls.
Oh yes, there was an element of danger running through the agreeable chaos of Plewesville. And innovation too because Uncle Dave was a brilliant engineer who designed unique machines and the boys learned his ingenuity when they weren't crashing on ramps in the driveway.
Uncle Dave had grown in London where the Lombardo family lived just behind. Chicken thieves, he called them, even after Guy became one of the most famous band leaders in the world and employed his brothers, one of whom had a crooked nose that my uncle had broken.
Uncle Dave acted every day like he was auditioning for that unforgettable Digest section. He broke every rule of family, society and indeed life as he drank too much and flummoxed his family by starting construction on bits of the house and never finishing. He bought food and milk by the case and had to bargain to do it because stores were baffled by his demands.
We figured his oldest son, naturally named after him, would follow him to the engineering firm he ran in what is now Liberty Village but David rebelled at the natural fit despite his talent around machines.
David died a few years ago, so we no longer remember when he, Bill and I owned a 1930 Model A Ford. Like the evening we put a set of rear end gears in the wrong way and ended up with three speeds in reverse. So we drove it late at night in the summer quiet of Weston Rd. to see how fast we could go in reverse.
The annual family picnic will be missing more faces when we are finally allowed to have one in a Lindsay park. It has been shrinking from a hundred or so as many of us have passed the Biblical promise of three score years and ten.
With Margaret and Bob, there are now five deaths from the core, since Margy died a few years ago in the Maritimes where she worked teaching deaf/blind children. They made a movie when Helen Keller did it but Margy laboured for decades in anonymity except for grateful parents.
Big families aren't fashionable now, and some of my cousins, who are like brothers and sisters, remember when they dared to gossip about us in Weston (but not to our face.)
Before the huge advances in medicine that ended childbirth and childhood being more of a gauntlet to  endure than a celebration of life, it was common to have big families. You needed spares.
Like when this family began in 1899 when a 22-year-old distillers' hand, Willem Hoogstad, married 23-year-old Cornelia Creteer, daughter of a distillers' hand, in a suburb of Rotterdam.
Grandpa got religion and decided booze was not God's way. No work for him then. So the Salvation Army helped him come to Canada in 1905. There were nine daughters, four of whom died.
There were tough years in Chesley, but the five survivors learned to endure even as passions ran deep.  Four of them put the youngest, who always tattled, upside down in a full rain barrel and she only survived drowning because my grandfather accidentally discovered her. One became a missionary in Nigeria, my mother married a doctor more than twice her age, and Jennie and the other two went on to have large families that spawned farmers, teachers, ministers and nurses.
The girls didn't talk that often in their final years after an exhausting life. No gabbing across the distances between Weston, East York and Chesley. There is a lesson there for all of us as we try to ride out a pandemic, to escape an ending where we slip away in isolation, and our anecdotes, our "remember whens," fall to silent linoleum because there is no one there that has the time to listen.
Don't let the warm times, the magic moments, the embarrassments, dribble into black holes when you still have the opportunity to chat with friends and folks about the family tales of yesteryear.

BOB WEBBER'S VIMY RIDGE

HOW THOMAS RICHARD HENRY SAW IT

Every anniversary of the bloody birth of our nation in the horrors of Vimy Ridge, Bob Webber sat at the battered Underwood in the ancient building known as the Old Lady of Melinda Street and wrote in his sparse style about life in the trenches there from April 9 to April 12, 1917.
He survived as a sapper, sort of a battlefield engineer dealing with everything from the construction  of bridges to the menace of mines, and started at the Evening Telegram in a precarious probationary position covering the sleepy suburbs.
His boss had been in the same war but far above as a flying ace.  Bert Wemp never got around to telling Webber the job was his permanently because the major was busy doing politics on the side, finally becoming the Toronto mayor.
Eventually Webber became financial page editor and started a column that strayed from business news into chatty observations on life around him. The editors tried different titles but it was decided that since Webber was "Everyman" in his views, what could be more natural than name it "How Thomas Richard Henry Sees It" and move it to the editorial page.

When I started as a kid reporter near the end of his 42 years at the beloved Tely, it had to be explained that TRH was really Bob Webber and that the name derived from a expression common in the day about every Tom Dick and Harry.
The newsroom was filled with legendary journalists who had survived World War Two and the battles against the Star which often seemed as tense. Such as Phyllis Griffths, who was in the first Sports Hall of Fame as a championship basketball player, sports columnist starting in 1928, and a woman who pioneered in jobs once done by men.
Griffiths and the stalwarts loved the quiet but genial TRH who otherwise would have been eclipsed by their formidable presence. She called him a "gentleman" whether you used one or two words.
TRH didn't give you a column on one subject or a strident lecture but gentle views in paragraphs. Often readers sent in donations telling him to pick the charity. He raised $2,000, then a huge sum, for a farmer who had lost a foot rescuing a child from a buzz saw. Later she wrote that she had bought a foot and would it be OK if she spent the rest on some cows.
As an awed rookie, I didn't know quite what to make of his chatty items but found later that readers loved it when you gave them several commentaries in one column and didn't always blow fire.
This was back long before you could compose a newspaper on computers and columns pontificated for an eternity. TRH thrived when scissors and copy spikes and pots of glue cluttered the big curved copy desk and fleshy profane men wearing eye shades and cynicism hacked at newspapers and copy paper before stories were sent down pneumatic tubes from the fourth floor to the hot metal world of the typesetters.
One day TRH decided he needed new scissors to deal with the pile of clippings and notes from which he built his column. He probably bought the scissors himself, since the editor who presided over such things often demanded to see the stub before he gave you a new pencil.
And then, because shiny scissors would disappear within seconds from your desk, he went to the engraving room and etched his name with acid on scissors which sit beside me as I write this.
I have no idea how I acquired them since the Old Lady vanished under Bay St. redevelopment in the 1960s and its replacement is gone too after being used by the Globe. But any veteran journalist  accumulates and I have done my share. (I still have unused Telegram envelopes and it died in 1971.)
They're eight inches long (20 cm) with just a few flecks of the black paint that disappeared decades ago. One tip is broken. They tend to mangle rather than cut but I really don't give a damn because it is my humble link back to a vanished time in journalism and to one of the great battles in our history.
It was, as any Canadian should know, the first time the Canadians fought as one army. The four divisions came together of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, all 100,000 Canadians from cities and towns like the Paris where Bob Webber decided to go to war rather than school one morning back in 1915.
All the dictatorships of superior British officers bossing around the colonials were swept aside and Canada emerged with the respect of  the mother countries and also the world.
Just battered scissors, hardly a golden torch to be held high, whether we are talking about the immortal words of In Flanders Fields, or a gentle man who for decades remembered folksy anecdotes for newspaper readers of what daily life was like those terrible days on Vimy Ridge when a country bled its way into military fame.
On those four days on a muddy hill in France, 3,598 Canadians died and 7,000 were wounded. Yet our country fought united. Something to cherish as we pull apart a century later!

WHEN QUARANTINES WERE A COUGH AWAY

 EPIDEMICS AND EVEN PLAGUES LAID IN WAITING

Ironically, the elderly said to be the main worry in this pandemic are survivors of a time when quarantines were as common as flu in January.
In the day, you worried about many threats. I am one of the growing demographic of old farts who remember the gauntlet of pestilences that could lay you low (sometimes six feet down) before the wonders of antibiotics and such miracles as transplants soothed the world 60 or 70 years ago and made more of us live past the Biblical three score years and ten.
Before Salk vaccine ended the parents' dilemma of whether Johnny should go to the municipal pool in case polio lurked there to put him in an iron lung
Before people thought twice about going to the doctor, and suffered, because there was no OHIP.
Before inoculations and vaccinations and idiots who attacked the simple flu shot.
As Steven Pinker documents in stunning detail in his bestseller Enlightenment Now, the world has improved tremendously in every possible way in the last decades. Our history is filled with mass death, whether it is the Asia of the terra cotta warriors, the grim verses of the Old Testament, or the dark centuries when we're not too sure just who died of what.
The good old days basically weren't. Then along comes this pandemic which is a savage echo of the past.
Margaret Atwood in an article in Saturday's Globe recalls her girlhood when warning posters were carried in that black bag by every family doctor to be tacked to the front door of the latest victim of a  host of diseases that would quarantine you for 14 days at least, from varieties of measles and poxes to scarlet fever, whooping cough, mumps, diphtheria etc.
If you were lucky, it was just tonsillitis.
Atwood is several years younger than me and she didn't spend all that time in Toronto but what she described would be familiar to many of us who were around when Toronto staggered out of war.
My father had a huge medical practice around our big home near Gerrard and Greenwood which like most GPs' homes in those days had a waiting room and office and a sign that lit up with the street lights. Quarantine signs were stuffed in his bag beside a cornucopia of cures, some of them mixed himself.
Dad drove a big car, usually with an assortment of neighbourhood kids in the back who went along gleefully for the adventure of the ride and the candies he also had in the bag. He didn't worry about more minor stuff spreading because he believed in getting all that over ASAP. He moved my two sisters and me into the same bedroom to make sure we all got the mumps before it would be really serious.
Dad died the March before the Second World War, exhausted from a flu outbreak, the normal burst of late winter sickness, and his work as chairman of the Toronto school board. It was then an important position, so all the schools got the afternoon off for his funeral.
My uncle kept the practise going so there was a Dr. Downing in the area that once was called Toronto East for more than 50 years.  He regarded the flu as a deadly enemy. My father had put him through medical school at Western but Lou headed first to Saskatchewan. He was the only doctor in Lanigan where a street is named after him. He was also the only dentist, pharmacist and coroner for the area. Of course the Spanish flu almost killed him because he could never rest. It took him six months in Vancouver to end his exhaustion and recover his health.
After I was orphaned, I ended in Chesley with grandparents who avoided the two doctors in town because they couldn't afford visits. (I remember spending summer nights with a feverish head pressed to cool linoleum to endure an ear infection which cost me the upper range.) I suspect that Dr. Morgan wouldn't have charged them because he, like my father and uncle, were used to not being paid. And in the 1930s and 1940s, even in Toronto, some payment came only in chickens, sausages and gratitude.
The middle decades of the last century were a magic time in medicine even for those of us flummoxed by the huge changes. Yet doomsday fears persisted, some times verging on hysteria, about polio and even blood transfusion since the great curses of health were so hard to cure.
For example, the western world doesn't think much about tuberculosis these days, even though it is said that TB killed 10 million in the world in 2018 and every immigrant still has to pass the test, but 60 years ago mass X-rays for TB were common.
 In the first year of what became Ryerson University, every student went through the preliminary testing by the Gage Institute on the campus. Suspicious results meant that you went for a larger X-ray and physical exam at the Institute itself.
To my surprise, I had TB and the Gage recommended to my family doctor that I go to the enormous complex which has been converted to the West Park rehab centre since the need for sanitariums has ended that brought thousands of patients to Toronto and Hamilton and other cities from every nook in the country.
Fortunately my uncle was that doctor and decided my being a patient for months in a sanitarium was not necessary because I was in great shape, even playing on a championship football team. So I dodged that bullet but for years carried a special card with my Gage number, like many other pensioners.
There is one health menace from the past that is still around us, possibly in the ravine in which you like to walk. We don't talk much about rabies now, even though it is said to have killed 59,000 people just last year, but then it did that in far off  places, like Africa.
We used to have epidemics among our wild life, which was front-page news because if you were bitten by a rabid fox or skunk, you had to have 14 painful shots in the abdomen even before the test on the brain of the dead animal was finished because no one wanted to take a chance on what could be a fatal bite.
I was the rabies expert as a kid reporter for the lamented Toronto Telegram, possibly because I brought a passion to the writing. On the way to the streetcar one morning on a downtown street, I was attacked by a squirrel. I suppose it was a funny sight, me jumping in the air, the squirrel snapping at my ankles, then me running over to the curb and bringing up because I had had a fermented evening. But it was as deadly serious as stepping on a rusty nail before tetanus shots.
So there it is, rabies, not something we talk about in Canadian urban centres (fortunately the treatment is now much easier) but last year it killed more than double the number of victims claimed by this pandemic by March 28.
I was an enormous reader as a boy and the accounts of the great plagues over the centuries always fascinated me. I had the occasional nightmare where the chant would be "bring out your dead." The idea of bodies rotting in the streets because no one would collect them horrified me. Yet Black Death killed nearly 50% of Europe and devastated China. There were villages in Quebec during the Spanish flu in 1918 and 1919 where no one survived to do the burying. One estimate said it killed 10% of the world.
Thank heavens, I thought in my boyish naiveness, those days have passed. But have they?
I had a cousin working at what was then called the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph. He got sick while treating a horse in distress. It is hard to know real details because what were said to be the authorities ordered him buried the day he died before his family could even gather.
Such a thing couldn't happen in Ontario, I said, as I tried to find out what really happened. But it did, and the whisper was that it was the plague, which they say still sticks a skeletal fist around a few throats from time to time.
But, you say, that's just a horror story with a rural twist. It couldn't happen in a big city. But it did, to a stalwart woman who worked with me and was one of those fun-filled good reporters who are an asset to any newspaper. Her boyfriend was a lawyer who worked with one of the famous families. She died, like my cousin, suddenly, and was ordered buried within hours because, it was hinted, she was killed by the plague.
No, no, you say, this is the stuff of a bad horror movie. The plague really doesn't exist, does it? According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, there are seven cases of plague death each and every year, and apparently I worked with one and had another victim as a cousin.
So bats hanging in undiscovered caves are now the sword of Damocles hanging by a hair over our heads and world health. No wonder I have the same feeling about pandemics as I do about that Biblical language about war and the rumours of war always being with us.
 Now it's pandemics and the rumours of pandemics.
 And all we can do is to try to reduce them to epidemics.