FLORIDA WEATHER REDEEMS ITSELF

LET IT SNOW, RAIN, AND  HAIL IN CANADA BECAUSE I DON'T GIVE A DAMN

The weather in Florida was so bad last year that the pool heating at the condo we were renting collapsed with exhaustion.
We exchanged horror stories about cold weather with our friends, and they were in Florida.  Some vowed they would never return. And they didn't. I hope the weather now is good in Mexico too.
I am ecstatic to report that the 2011 February in Florida has been the best in years. It helped that not only was the new heating equipment for our condo pool working well, even on a few crappy days the pool was 86 F.
 When a pool is that warm, I can handle even a cold front from Canada. I remember as a kid editor working in the Yukon when we went to hot springs outside Whitehorse. The air was freezing. Your hair froze between strokes in the pool. It was a grand experience, made grander perhaps by the over-proof rum.
The contingent of Canadians at our condo flop around in the sun like beached dolphins. And then we all phone home to taunt relatives and friends with the temperatures here.
Unfortunately, there is a new curse to blight our day and to be the new big topic of conversation, the price of gasoline. Usually the conversation around the pool peters out after questions about where you're from and how long it took you to drive down, and what was your route. The location of the best happy hour and early bird special is still topic number one, and will be even if gasoline goes as high as the scare predictions.
All I want to know is why my oil stocks aren't going up at the same rate.
We spent some time anticipating the shuttle launch, and then on the scheduled day, Mary and I and our friends the Garricks made sure we were peering into the eastern sky at precisely the right time hoping to catch a glimpse of the tower of flame even across the peninsula.
 No luck. Guess that is pay back for the time when I saw the shuttle launch without the slightest planning on March 22, 2009.
Thanks to my son Mark, I have paid far more attention in recent years to the shuttle than I expected. I wrote about all his trouble to see one launch on Feb. 7, 2010 in a blog "Chasing the Shuttle".
Then we went in January to the Kennedy Space Centre along with many other Canadians. It was much more interesting than I remembered, and I wrote about it on Feb. 4 in a blog titled SIDE TRIPS FOR SNOW BIRDS.
I wonder if it's just Mark's influence on me but I sense more interest, and a growing nostalgia, in the space program as it winds down. The TV anchors talked wisfully about how it was all going to end. They were as sad as if they were reporting on the cancellation of their favourite hair product.
Everyone seems to be paying more attention. The launches are not just humdrum routine but are back as major events, complete to count-downs.
I'm sure that NASA is feeding this gleefully. And the White House will be paying close attention. Heaven knows that the world needs more good news, even if it costs billions, just as Canadians fleeing from winter need it to be sunny and clear and warm with all the cold fronts staying north of the Great Lakes.

WONDERFUL VISITS TO EGYPTIAN PRISON

THE MIRACLE WAS THAT  MUBARAK SURVIVED TO 2011

My first visit to Egypt wasn't the smartest thing I've ever done.  I showed up with my wife several  months after Anwar Sadat had been assassinated and there were soldiers with machine guns in sandbag bunkers on most corners.
Mary and I had a wonderful time despite my dumb timing. But we were fools in a time capsule where  any turn in the road might reveal a challenging cop or a statute carved an eternity ago.
I returned to 1982 North American civilization filled with dire predictions that the wonders of the Egyptian past may have survived centuries but they may well be ruined in the next one. And it also seemed obvious that the brutal dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak wouldn't last either.
A second visit five years ago showed that the Egyptians were taking better care of their archaeological  treasures than they were three decades ago, and even though his overthrow was inevitable, Mubarak still ruled with an iron fist and very cheap bread. In fact, the media sifted the warning signs and concluded he was secure.      
 My naive first visit was prompted by a wonderful whim of the Toronto Sun's founding publisher, Doug Creighton, who believed in working hard but newspapers were also supposed to be fun and life often looked better through the bottom of a martini glass.
 When news was slow and the city's mood was down, Creighton believed that the Sun should be entertaining as well as informative. I remember him during a depressed time sending Allan Fotheringham  to sample the best hotels in the world. The Sun staff hated Foth's assignment hut the readers loved to hear about the Lord Nelson Hotel in Cape Town where they ironed your newspaper before a  lovely  breakfast.
 Creighton said things were slow around Ontario politics so I should pick several world cities and go see how they were run. And take Mary, he added. So off I went to Rome and Jerusalem. Then I added Cairo since life seemed to be quiet there.
Rome's mayoral office was hospitable and Teddy Kolleck, the legendary mayor of Jersulem, folded Mary and me into a week-long seminar for a committee of world leaders and eminent professors on how he was running the cradle of religions. It was Kolleck's clever manoeuvre against the move at the UN to make Jerusalem an international city not ruled by the Israelis.
We flew directly from Tel Aviv to Cairo on a bootleg flight that didn't exist officially. The plane had no markings, the barf bags were from EgyptAir, and the flight crew were ex American fighter pilots working for El Al.  They flew the battered anonymous jet as if we were in the Six Day war.
Just getting downtown to the Nile Hilton was an adventure since the cab companies and limousine operators were having their own war. I didn't ask to see Sadat's assassination site but we were taken there anyway, and then we were abandoned on a railway crossing in the middle of nowhere because I don't think the driver liked me.
The idea that some Canadian columnist wanted to visit Cairo's administrative headquarters was so farfetched, to the Egyptian bureaucrats that is, that I never did get a reply.
So Mary and I wandered around, wading through the begging kids, ignoring the exorbitant tip demands for any service, getting mixed reactions at all the military checkpoints. At one mosque, they almost hugged us, saying we were the only visitors they had had for a week and what could the soldiers show us.
The fabulous collection of treasures in the  Egyptian Museum were dusty and painters were not even using drop clothes to protect splatters raining down on King Tut's wonders. No one seemed to care.
On my last visit, the improvement in basic housework in the museum was astounding.
The museum, as the world now knows from all the coverage of the uprising, is on Tahrir Square. We spent a lot of time there because it was just outside the back door of the Hilton and it is a crossroads for the city. That is where I went to find the illegal money dealers who gave you deals on Egyptian pounds that were 50% better than in the Hilton lobby. (Nervous transactions because the dealers feared the secret police. And the buyer had to be careful that no phoney notes were shoved into the middle of the wad.)
So why am I detailing a visit 30 years ago? Because in the early months of the new leader, Mubarak, there was no sign, no illusion, no hint, that there was any freedom of any kind for any Egyptian. And no one said it was about to change. Any person holding a sign demanding just one taste of democracy would not have lasted in Tahrir Square. Even though it has been a traditional centre for careful protests, its second name of Liberation Square was cruel irony...until now.
 By noon, the diesel fumes in the square would give you a headache if you didn't retreat from the sun to air conditioning and the excellent Stella beer.  I'm sure for many Egyptians, fear also made that air heavy.
There was no suggestion then that Tahrir Square would really be known more as Liberation Square, not with the suffocating security that blanketed it because of surrounding government offices.
There was one overwhelming fact that any tourist should have noticed on my last visit. When tourists moved between the wonders of the ages like Luxor or the Valley of the Kings, the buses moved in convoy as if it was a military operation in enemy territory. No bus driver or tour company rebelled. If your bus was headed to the Red Sea, it waited at the side of the road in the dusty heat until the main convoy arrived and then you all headed through the hot desert past the watch towers of  soldiers. Safety in numbers, or so the tour companies and dictator hoped.
Any healthy government doesn't live in daily fear of terrorism in every part of the country. And Mubarak's did for its entire life. Surely a government is rotten to its core when it rules by brutal cops and a military that lines the major roads and insists that tourists be protected in ways that are unique in the world.
About 12% of Egyptians are involved in the tourist business. Tourist dollars are essential to the country's economy.  It's not just Egyptians who have died in Liberation Square. Nine German tourists were blown up just outside the museum in 1995. In 1997, more than fifty tourists and Egyptians were killed at the Valley of the Queens.  There was a major bombing at a Red Sea resort where Mary and I had wondered at the tropical fish just months before.
All you had to do was skim the Internet and the deadly deeds of extremists, and the government's warnings about terrorism were mentioned often in items about Egypt. For example, take the overnight train from Cairo to Luxor but it would be better if you didn't get off at certain stations.
The wonder isn't that Mubarek was toppled from his throne made from the skulls of murdered dissidents in 18 days, but that it didn't happen sooner.

SIDE TRIPS FOR SNOWBIRDS FROM I-75

TORONTO TO OAK RIDGE TO ATLANTA TO KENNEDY SPACE CENTRE TO TAMPA WHILE HAVING LOTS OF SCIENTIFIC FUN

Once upon a time, when holidays were too brief and taking the kids on any trip was playing Russian roulette with your credit cards, I perfected the Downing rush to somewhere.
We loaded the car with snacks and good pop and threatened to behead any son who asked whether we were there yet. It worked fine, and readers of the Tely, Sun and the Ontario Motor League magazine seemed to appreciate my tales from the road.
Just before the sons flew the nest, we specialized in Toronto to the south of Florida in 27 non-stop hours. Even though we had four drivers, dad always drives the most, I find, and I used to sink into the sea with a Bacardi and coke in hand, semi-comatose, on Saturday afternoon after fleeing Toronto in the wee hours of Friday morning.
Old habits die hard, and Mary and I have continued the dash to Florida, after increasing it to a civilized two days. My son, Mark, who lives in China, has rejoined the expedition for the last two years. And last year he grumbled that it would be nice to actually see something as we roared south.
So this year I played hooky from the normal schedule. And it took us four days and 300 km. more. Say about $600 extra for museums, motels and meals. But the three Downing musketeers had a good time. (Or so they say. Wait, however, until they're mad at me.)
Mark has a science and chemical engineering degree from U of T, plus a MBA that he finished on an exchange with a Hong Kong university. He was fascinated with the birth place of THE bomb, much of which happened at Oak Ridge in Tennessee. Not that far off the main street for Canadians fleeing to Florida, I-75. Pleasant drive in, and then the museum called the American Museum of Science and Technology. Admission for adults is $5, $4 for seniors. And we had a good visit.
There was one wing jammed with information on the Oak Ridge community and  the staggering numbers of people who worked on the atom bomb. I had no idea that something like 80,000 people were there for a few years, or that the project "borrowed" $100 million worth of silver in the work developing the bomb.
As someone who reads widely and was also in the RCAF a decade later -  not all old military equipment looks that strange to me - I was surprised pleasantly to find much of the material to be new and  interesting. Fascinating stuff on the instant houses and instant transit system that were created in weeks. Don't remember anything about this in my urban geography classes.
Much of the displays in the museum resemble what you find in the better science centres of the world (for example the Ontario Science Museum in Toronto) but the displays related to the Manhattan Project  just brim with information. As Mark quipped in a twitter, the information is so dense, "there is a critical mass of ideas."
So yes, to answer the eternal question from parents hurtling south with kids bouncing off the roofs, it is an interesting detour.
Mary then announced that she had always wanted to see the aquarium in Atlants. I have always gone around Atlanta rather than through it since we were almost mugged on a hot summer night by a street full of angry blacks (but that's another story.)
So we went around and around downtown,  past the CNN headquarters and Coca Cola museum, and then Mark using his I-phone found us Martin Luther King's church. We finally ended up at a Holiday Inn that didn't cost a fortune
We were at the Georgia Aquarium before it opened. It is debt free, it claims, and no wonder. Seniors pay $21.95 each and adults $25.95. I have been to aquariums all over the world and love them, but I have never paid that much. But it says it is the largest squarium in the world and its huge main tank is a wonder to behold. It is packed with such spectacles as three of the world's largest fish, the whale shark, cruising comfortably while a giant manta ray practises languid somersaults over and over.
The fish shimmer and dance in puffs of colour. All the exhibits are first class, the staff great, and the crowds  tolerable. (I would hate to be there during a school break.) For the first time in decades, I thought I might recommend that driving through Atlanta, which many do instead of taking the bypass, is worth considering.
Since Mark in 2010 made two trips across Florida to watch a night launch of the shuttle around 4.15 a.m. on Super Bowl weekend,  it  seemed that not going to the Kennedy Space Centre was rather dumb. After all, we hadn't been there for a couple of decades. (I wrote a blog about Mark's nocturnal adventure, Chasing The Shuttle, on Feb. 7, 2010. On March 22, 2009, I wrote about how most of us now view the shuttle in a blog titled A Shuttle Of Past Glories.)
As the space centre continually reminds visitors, it receives no taxes to support it. Obviously it couldn't exist without all the exhibit and material provided by NASA, and the centre and the active launch pads on the Cape have a symbiotic relationship that is more important to the space centre, I suspect, than it is to NASA.
So there is a hefty admission charge, a basic $39.11 for seniors and $43.46 for adults. Is it worth it? I thought it was. But I really think readers should consider those costs, when one of the big arguments in government today is making programs and projects, whether in culture or education, pay for themselves.
So the aquarium and the space centre don't get government money and as a result, the three Downings had to pay $200 to get in. Do I really have to say that such admission charges mean that there are families who just can't afford it, no matter how wonderful the displays are.
And they were. The garden of rockets at the centre. Walking underneath the gigantic tube of Apollo 18. A wonderful IMAX film about the glorious colours of space revealed by the Hubble telescope after it was fitted with two new lenses in a space walk that we viewed in vivid 3-D technology.

I have not given you a shopping list of what to see in the Georgia Aquarium and the Kennedy Space Centre because you can Google them and see everything they have to offer. i thought every single display was done superbly, from the humble one off to one side in a giant hangar where you could touch a rock from the moon to trying to find the leafy seahorses hiding in the kelp.
However, if I had left Ontario a few days later when the predictions were that most of North America was about to be buried under avalanches of snow at any minute, I might have been inclined to roar right through to where you could swim in the pools, not skate on them.
Thank heavens we caught a break. And thanks to my wife and son, it was a pleasant interlude!

OPERA IN THE BRAZILIAN JUNGLE

(BLOG 4) NOT A PHANTOM BUT A SPECTACLE

It may not be as famous as La Scala but the Amazon Theatre, a beautiful opera house in the middle of nowhere, is celebrated in movies, books and magazines.
I remember visiting the Canadian ambassador to Central America  45 years ago and in the middle of a rant about how Canadians paid too little attention to Central and South America, he looked across the square in San Jose, Costa Rica,  at the old opera house and started telling me what a little jewel it was and how it was well worth a visit.
He gave me a curious look when I said I had been hearing about the opera house most of my life and it would be a delight to visit. You have it confused with the famous one in remote Brazil, he said, and so I did.
It all came back to me with a rush when I flew into Manaus where the mighty Amazon captures its tributary of the Rio Negro. Others in the fishin gparty started talking about the opera house they visited a year before.
And so I found myself at the legendary opera house left behind by fabulously rich rubber barons more than a century ago. If they had to live in the jungle, they thought, they would import the wonders of Europe to make it more palatable.
It really is the stuff of dreams. Like stepping into a shiny page of the National Geographic or watching a documentary or movie that features this grand product of the Belle Epoque era when the finest craftsmen in Europe sent their best work and the choicest materials on river boats far up the Amazon River.
Roof tiles from Alsace. Carrarra marble from Italy. The finest woods. Great glass chandeliers. Years of construction and delays before it opened in 1896 after a noted Italian painter turned the ceilings and walls into heavenly scenes.
It took me back to when I was a kid working in the town library and I discovered a thrilling travel writer called Richard Halliburton. He had been born in 1900 and disappeared on a junk sailing out of Hong Kong in 1939. He roamed a confused and depressed world between the great wars and produced books like The Royal Road to Romance where he wrote with  wonderful enthusiasm about all the famous wonders of nature and all the grand old buildings of the world.
He would have got eventually to Manaus if he had lived because the idea of  a grand theatre in the jungle was exactly the kind of adventurous construction that turned him on.
My love of travel, which endures despite the security hassles and the crowds of tourists that seem to flood any street I'm exploring, comes directly from the enchantment of reading about travel with Halliburton and the other travel bards. They are the poor man's explorers. Now we read when decades ago the more adventurous among us would have joined that expedition to darkest Africa to find King Solomon's Mines or other lost worlds.
The Amazon Theatre fell on hard times after the rest of the world found they could get by with alternatives to Brazilian rubber and for 90 years no opera singers emoted on its stage. Now there is an  opera festival every April and tour guides boast that famous musicians have graced the orchestra pit.
I was impressed by the gigantic angel that loomed out the second floor and wondered how long it had been there. Not long at all! It had been put up just for Christmas, and the Brazilians don't rush to take down their Christmas trees and other decorations which routinely seem to be among the largest in the world.
The opera house is by far the most famous attraction in Northern Brazil. The other appears to be the big fish market just up from a tangle of fishing boats filled with a glistening harvest from the great watery heart of the nation. Here we wander through ripe smells while the opera house smelled of the ages.
Sort of a Beauty and the Beast kind of day.

YOU CAN NEVER GET AWAY FROM IT ALL, EVEN IN THE REMOTE AMAZON BASIN

(BLOG 3) YOU CAN'T ESCAPE CIVILIZATION

Our fishing party flees from the equatorial sun that makes us feel like chickens in a supermarket broiler by visiting an anonymous native village on some stretch of the bewildering maze of channels, lagoons and fast rivers that make the Amazon Basin a gigantic green sponge.
It is the first time in decades of journalism that I have no idea as to the name of the hamlet I am visiting or even where we are roughly.

Yet we find as we scramble up a slippery bank past shallow dugouts carved from single tree trunks that we really haven't got away from it all.
The villagers are 100 in number but they proudly show us their link to the world. The TV sits in a crude wooden box that can be locked. It is linked by sagging wires to a large satellite dish and a diesel generator. One villager boasts that they watched the World Cup. Right now they're watching nothing because first there was no diesel for the generator, then they got the fuel but a part in the crude network isn't working and the replacement hasn't shown up by boat.
So they pass the spare time from hunting and fishing and pounding the poison out of their cassava by playing soccer on the one big flat area they have. There's also a smaller field for the urchins running around us, and maybe 20 spectators can perch on some benches. Several fancy trophies won in matches against neighbouring villages are given a place of honour beside the TV box.
A wiry couple is making manioc in a giant wok over a wood fire. After pounding and cooking the cassava root, they have their main food, a staple that is the Third World's potato and provides about a third of the carbohydrates in world meals.
Two kids watch us solemnly, and then on the urging of our escort, one scampers up a tree to show us how he picks the bean-like berries that are used in food, even dessert, after they're soaked in water. When we don't seem impressed, he slides down 20 feet and then shoots up again. We clap, and he grins at being the day's entertainment.
The villagers in their warm welcome show us their houses, basically one-room huts with thatched roofs replaced every two years or tin roofs. The older families have the bigger rooms.  One villager has a battered loaded shotgun stuck in the thatch over his door and boasts that he has killed a jaguar.
They are quite proud of their two churches. That's right, TWO churches. There hardly seems to be enough worshippers to go around but you have to do something in the village if the TV isn't working and you're tired from working and soccer. Of course the Roman Catholic Church has the finest new boards in its walls because the Church got to Brazil before the Protestants when the Portuguese conquered the natives.

Tiny dugouts sit on the mud of the beach, some with water in them (presumably to keep them from cracking in the sun) and others with nets piled up to dry. We pass two urchins in a dugout in the river on the way to the village and the dugout is so small, it looks like they're sitting in the water.
As proof that politics can reach everywhere, there is one large poster proudly displayed on the side of a shack under a thatched roof. It shows the former Marxist guerilla, Dilma Rousseff, who was sworn in as the leader of Brazil only weeks before.
Back on the mother ship, I reflect that the village is the modern version of being remote. It's in touch with the world but hours from civilization. But then this is a world where climbers crow over their cell phones about their accomplishments when they're on the peak of Everest.
The leader of our fishing party, Walter Oster, head of the Canadian National Sportsmen's Shows, gives another demonstration as he sits beside me, arguing with the Ramada Inn in Florida via cell phone. He says we don't need all the rooms we've reserved for the return trip, but the chain argues we didn't cancel in time. He explains he's on the Amazon somewhere in Brazil but this cuts no ice, not in 2011.
 I'm amazed at the number of my group who want to call home. Can they not enjoy the illusionary isolation?
Time for me to list the surprises of my visit. I expected the rain forest to march right up to the basin's rivers and that I would be able to look up hundreds of feet to see the fabled canopy.
No, the rain forest is back from our tributaries, and the nearer tangled jungle laced with vines is the height of an Ontario woods. And the wondrous melody of birds, like the collared puffbirds, woodcreepers and scythebills, don't hang around the shore. Just the macaws, parrots and toucans. Most animals stay away from the shores too.
No mistaking that water, though. It's billed as black water and it's dark brown to the point of night, occasionally even a deep red. Not to be drunk. There may be no industry for hundreds of kilometres and it's pure, but its bacteria doesn't match the stuff in our gut. If you're not careful, and dare to have the lovely cream soups, like one made from piranha, the resulting war brings the traveller's curse of diarrhoea. "Max", the fishing dentist from Toronto's famous Princess Margaret Hospital, advises us to take the over-the-counter remedy Imodium at the first weakening but if after a day, nothing works, hammer it with Cipro. (I always get a prescription from the world's best doctor, Bernie Gosevitz, whenever I stray from the path.)
One night, after a scholarly lecture on the differences in the peacock bass, we load several boats and set off to hunt for the cayman that we occasionally see during the day as giant submerged logs measuring us for dinner. Our guide leaps on top of the small alligators as if they were bucking broncs and at one point brings a larger one into the boat, while clamping its jaws. I contemplate jumping overboard if it gets loose.
The days pass with non-stop fishing, interrupted occasionally by giant splashes beneath the underbrush when some creature loses out to a high member of the food chain.  Often we had dolphins shadowing our boats, breathing noisily as they lounged on the surface waiting for us to throw back the peacocks. Lazy creatures, but then in the wild, animals always try to conserve energy.
As we tried to. Although once when I paused in casting and casting in the blazing sun, and contemplated the thick coating of sun screen I was wearing, the guide reproached me because they were judged on how many fish we caught. "Hey," I said, "this isn't supposed to be work, it's supposed to be fun."
And it was too as we traded fibs in the dusk on the top deck, the sweat and aches and frustrations of the day behind us.
For once we have an excuse for drinks, to ward off dehydration. And it makes those fish stories seem almost plausible.

EVERYONE KNEW THE NAME OF JUDY WELCH

 WHEN BEAUTY QUEENS RULED TORONTO

Fame can be fleeting for many who were stars on the main stage of Toronto but not for Judy Welch who just died at 74.
 It may have been back in the ancient days of 1956 when she became Miss Toronto but for decades her name was always mentioned when writers or neighbours talked about the vanished era when beauty contests were not seen as degrading and the honey blonde's stats of 35-23-35 were known by many.
A year after she took the Toronto crown, Judy won the Miss World, which really meant something in those days and wasn't just a competition hunting for new backers and TV time.
 She parlayed that into her own modelling agency and represented the newer famous names in beauty and modelling, like Naomi Campbell. Pictures of Judy with the renowned like Mick Jagger, Burt Reynolds and Elvis Presley, and speculation about who were friends and who were relationships, was a staple of the entertainment pages.
I always found the politically correct veto on beauty contests to be stupid since even as a back-sliding Baptist I didn't find it evil to look with ardent admiration on female beauty. Of course the Toronto Sun faced endless hassle over its Page 3 Girls, even though they wore more cloth than is seen at many beaches.
The gutless decision to move the girlie shot to the back of the paper never made sense to me as The Editor because I saw the attacks on the Girl as just another excuse to criticize the politics of our editorials and to assault our tabloid approach. It had little to do with sexism.
The Sun used to take the calendar girls on an annual cruise and I found that many of the women were bright and lively and ecstatic about all the career opportunities that opened up to them after they were in the Sun.
But then Canada has had beauty queens in important positions, even if some Internet biographies of Carole Goss Taylor fail to mention that she was Miss Toronto 1964. I did one of her first interviews after the title and also still had relatives at her Weston Collegiate, and knew that she was very bright, very charming and a cinch to go on to posts like B.C. finance minister and head of the CBC board after she got her start at the Tely and CTV precisely because she was Miss Toronto.
Ironically, the PC activists who have killed most beauty contests haven't been able to deal with the ones with ethnic roots, such as the CHIN bikini competition which bares more than most Miss Toronto contests.
One of Judy Welch's strangest gigs was to stun a gaggle of University of Toronto profs in a skirmish in the academic wars. Murray Ross related the story to me with great relish at the party held for him as he retired as the first president of York University.
To give this a little perspective, let me quote Bill Kilbourn, a gifted writer and wacky Liberal politician on Toronto council,  who had been a York prof and was fond of telling everyone just how savage academic politics could be. He said that you wouldn't realize that a colleague had slashed your throat until you nodded your head and it rolled off.
As Dr. Ross laboured to bring York into existence in 1959, he had been ordered by Queen's Park to meet monthly with a committee of U of T professors to tell them of his plans and to hope they wouldn't block him. Queen's Park kowtowed to U of T in many ways. Not only did it give its politician/professors  a major voice in York's foundation, a U of T rep also sat on the board of the Ryerson Institute of Technology.
Ross started to be bugged by the monthly summons even though he had been a key insider at U of T.
So he plotted. He went to McTamney's, the famous old pawnbrokers on Church St., and rented the largest silver tea-service they had.  And he hired Judy Welch. In the middle of the meeting,  he asked if anyone wanted tea, and without waiting for an answer, tinkled a silver bell. In waltzed Judy in a costume so skimpy, she was falling out of every port. The professors couldn't take their eyes off her. They stuttered like kids when they asked for tea and sugar.
Then Judy left. And several profs demanded to know the name and history of the beauty that had just served them tea. Dr. Ross said vaguely that she was just a member of his staff and he didn't really know her name.
For years, Dr. Ross and Judy Welch had a giggle about the afternoon they flabbergasted the stuffy old profs from University of Toronto. Just one of the many roles she was to play in a busy life studded with celebrities, entertainers and glamour.

KEITH DAVEY, MICHEL GRATTON, HAPPY POLITICAL WARRIORS

 Politics was their life, their sport, their passion

These are the days when my aging friends say they check the obituaries before the birth notices.
Since I was born when my father was 67, I'm not sure the Downings are part of that cliche saying, but I make up for it by not reading either.
Apparently the current Toronto Sun editors act the same way. As our former colleagues pass, they seem to go unnoticed and unlamented, although as many fine writers and newspapers have shown, a good newspaper obituary can be a delightful romp through nostalgia and recent history.
Another Sun Day-Oner phoned me the other day to say that the way things were going, he and I would not get a mention when we went to the big newsroom in the sky. (At least it will be big if Sun Media boss Pierre Karl Peladeau doesn't get his hands on it.)
I hope my late colleague, Bob MacDonald, is not paying attention from whatever heavenly nook he is inhabiting, but I also want to say farewell to Keith Davey before I talk about that passionate bear of a French Canadian, Michel Gratton.
Now Bob hated fatcat Liberals, and Davey certainly seemed to quality there, but I found the Davey away from partisan politics to be a nice guy who was a newspaper junkie. I could never convince Bob of that since he saw Liberals as the devil's spawn.
The last time I saw Davey, at a party thrown by a mutual friend, Senator David Smith, he kept telling me how he loved to go for a walk each morning to get all the papers and to see what I had to say. Sadly, because he was already imprisoned by Alzheimer's, he told me that every five minutes for several hours, but I didn't mind. His joy over journalism was a delight, since attacks against the Grits and him bounced off his wide smile. And he appreciated politicians of every stripe and anyone who wrote about them and did their homework. Ah yes, he loved sports and talking too, and surely those are among the finest things you can say about a gentleman.
We were on a panel once and I accused the Liberals of doing something dastardly in order to win the election. He roared at me and dared me to repeat it. So I did. He paused, then grinned that I seemed to have got his pragmatic politics right.
So farewell, Keith Davey. I'm sure St. Peter will tell you during your morning walk where the newspaper boxes are outside the Pearly Gates because I'm not sure that many political writers, or many Grits for that matter, get inside.
When I hired Michel Gratton to be the Ottawa columnist for the Toronto Sun and our tab empire, there was a slight problem. He had a huge rep and obviously knew politics from the ground down. Yet there  had been some sort of strange incident involving Gratton and a pretty female reporter who just happened to work at the Sun. Gratton at the time was the flack for Prime Minister Brian Mulroney who leaned on him to tell him every last bit of gossip about the press corps.
To this day, I'm not sure just what happened. Did both have too much to drink? Was it a verbal altercation, or did it involve sex or some mangled scoop?
So I asked and was assured there would be no problem. And I checked with Doug Fisher and his key mind and huge collection of files. Doug loved his passion.  So Gratton arrived as the little guy from a humble stretch of Ottawa who was never as comfortable talking in his second language, English, as he was with the French that gushed from him in an argument. Some days I was never quite sure he was comfortable writing in English either because deadlines were something he tried to ignore. But he sure could bring fire and brimstone down on his enemies. What a glorious francophone battler for things he believed in, like Ottawa's Montfort Hospital, that he helped save right in his own backyard where if he wasn't a king, he certainly was a duke.
He was a charter member of the gang of journalists in Ottawa and Toronto who drank because they loved to drink and also to escape their devils. Old-fashioned journalism filled with self-destruction where shy charming driven guys like Paul Rimsteal drank to forget the adulation, deadlines and their failures.
I would arrive in Ottawa and go for my briefing at the National Press Club bar (now long gone) and Gratton, Joe O'Donnell, Mike Duffy (now the sober senator) Norman DePoe and others would tell me glass by glass just what the hell was going on.
Later I hired O'Donnell too as an Ottawa columnist. Les Pyette, the Executive Editor, and I as The Editor sent him to Washington because the big boss, Doug Creighton, warned that if we didn't have a columnist there in a week, one of us would have to go. So O'Donnell, happily ensconced in Ottawa and president of everything, was exiled to the U.S.
O'Donnell made his return the night of a Sun awards banquet.  He was overly refreshed when he entered late and took the only empty chair he could find, which belonged to Creighton who was up speaking as the MC. He leaned back too far and rolled over into the next table. Creighton didn't miss a beat. "I would like you to meet Joe O'Donnell," he boomed since he was used to the characters of journalism.
What fascinating days they were. Keith Davey was running around pulling strings and guys like Gratton and O'Donnell were running around trying to cut the strings in their columns and we all had a fine time. Democracies are so much more fun than dictatorships!