TRAVELS ONLY IN MY MIND

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Now that I am in my anecdotage, as my family remark rudely, my travels are limited by macular degeneration, diabetes, hearing aids, and a tendency to fall over.  So a dependance on wheelchairs, walkers and other drivers now limit me so I can only dream of flying with the RCAF north of Canada  as I once did

My old travelling companion is not hampered. My son John Henry celebrated turning 61 by traipsing around Europe and publishing on Facebook the photo trophies of visiting the birthplace of his grandmother in Holland. His wife Marie happily toured the France of her ancestors.

And I savoured every pixel. Once John Henry (JHDIII) and I gawked our way around the Caribbean and exotic sites from Easter Island to the Galapagos and the dangerous bits of South America. The memories meld now into a gazpacho of delight and splashing in the Trent substitutes for diving with hammerhead sharks. 

JHDIII had a drink or two at Harry's. There are a few bars like that dotted in legendary cities. But the picture took me back to the one in Venice where I once roamed on glorious visits. Like that trip with Bill Davis where I saved the premier and Cathy from being arrested at the Trevi Fountain.

It was Sunday morning in Venice and the press corp were tired from journalism before the days of cell phones and computers and you had to find a telegraph office to file. So we decided to greet the day at Harry's just over from the famous hotel. I was dragged along because David Allen of the Star and Allan Dickie of CP (we called them the Giant and the Midget) insisted. We were huddled around a starched table cloth on a tiny table when the big doors banged open.

It was like a scene from a movie in the early 1970s. In swept Orson Welles dressed in black with blonde bimbos on each arm. He carried a cape and cigar box which he handed to the bartender. He enthroned himself imperiously on a banquette, looked disdainfully at the crowd and snapped his fingers. The bartender ran up, unwrapped a cigar, cut the end and then lit it. Welles blew a plume of smoke over the  rabble as the girls giggled at being so close to a famous man.

I stood up and said let's go, we have seen everything now. 

When JHDIII sent me that picture it all came back to the years when my only concerns were not falling into a canal while drunk and where in hell was a telegraph office. I have many tales (the family say too many) and often the stars in them have gone to death and legend. I crashed into Mandela in Kyoto, was teargassed in Seoul, crash-landed with Justin Trudeau's grandfather in the Yukon, posed with Clinton, badgered Netanyahu.......

But I remember that beer at that bar looking across at the swollen actor with all the other stories that now churn in a memory that has volcanoes of missing facts.

All the John Henrys After 1870

 

David Onley's Triumphed In His Space

It was just another municipal staff Christmas party that I poked into one evening on the hunt for anything that might interest a Sun reader. My daily marathon for 40 years and thousands of columns and editorials. Nodded to friendly aldermen and dodged the roasted. Mel Lastman glared and I retreated to a nook where Charles Onley waited to go home.

We chatted carefully about issues, because after all, he was one of the top municipal lawyers in the country and his fief of North York was a giant suburb even if Toronto did look down at it. Then popped a transportation subject even stranger than Santa's sleigh, magnetic levitation. I had been a leading critic of the Tory experiment to build a costly test track at the Ex, aided by info from Grit critics including an earnest crippled researcher named David Onley.

Then it all came together even for a tired journalist on the hunt for something, anything, for tomorrow's paper. This was the father, and he didn't want to talk about wheel-less streetcars floating on magnets but that researcher.

I had never really talked to this borough solicitor but it didn't matter because he went on and on about how happy he was that "his" boy  had survived his rough start to marriage to a gospel singer and a family. Then he paused. And then he cried.

Just two men at the edge of a party that was limping along in a mandatory office-party way. Two crying men, because I was crying too. Any father would.

It had got better later for "his" boy. There had been braces, crutches, wheelchairs, but then from the seat of a motorized scooter David had soared into space. He loved to write about space.  He loved to talk about space. And so he became a broadcaster and wrote a best seller and became a familiar role model and TV personality.

The last time I saw David after half a century of watching his cheerful diplomacy as a champion on accessible issues was at last fall's 29th induction luncheon for the Canadian Disability Hall of Fame. I have been on its selection committee since it began when former senator Vim Kochhar inspired its start as the Terry Fox Hall of Fame.

 It has prospered with famous recipients but the title has changed since the Fox family created problems that we couldn't work out even when such populist giants as former mayor David Crombie and Onley were involved. Just another example that accessibility to all may appear a universal wish but its real achievements are a nuanced dance through mine fields of politics, pride, costs and stupidity.

I have never missed the annual presentation but that has become a challenge since the grand Royal York Hotel - where I have been in and out for 70 years - might as well be a fortress with drawbridges down when you are in a wheelchair as I have been for several years. My son Mark is a formidable help but even so Onley in his motorized scooter and I in my wheelchair were the stragglers later at the eastern entrance with its small special elevator.

Plenty of time to chat and smile at the hassles, but then David was 72 when he died, a lifetime of overcoming hurdles from legs that don't work like those on the people who flash by. I am just a newbie with canes, walkers and wheelchairs. But still, the casual insolence of the dumb who don't recognize the  hurdles they so carelessly leave around is astounding.

I recall a lunch at the Underground Railroad when David and I chatted into the early afternoon with John Henry Jackson, the owner who had been an Argo quarterback. What a pleasant time. I walked happily back to the Sun, which had not yet been mangled. Onley left after me to find that his car with hand controls and the warning sign had been towed. It didn't matter that with no police offering to help, he had been marooned by a stupid cop. It was now up to him to get from Sherbourne and King to the foot of Yonge when he can't walk. I wrote about it later and yelled at the chief but to David it was just another day.

Ontario has been blessed with the men and women like David who have been our lieutenant-governors. (I would not say the same about the GGs)  In Ontario, they may have often looked like kings and queens from the Establishment but most have never lacked the commoner touch.

For example, John Black Aird was as elegant as his name. A baron of Bay Street. Yet even when his back was killing him. he was playing floor hockey with the kids at Variety Village. He was whipsawed by a crisis in 1985 when the Tories and Grits were in a virtual tie after an election and it was up to him who was to rule. So he chose to go with David Peterson and his deal and the Tories' long reign ended. He gave me the scoop about that in a few common sense observations one noon at the Press Club when I hosted him as president.

As Sun Editor I lambasted him in the editorial about a Grit bagman coming through for the party.  He laughed that off as "just politics," and kept a column I later wrote about him encased in plastic on his law office desk. Our lieutenant-governors have always had an understanding appreciation about how politics is played. 

 Lincoln Alexander was a prime example of that. He had started as the humble son of a railway porter but moved comfortably in the halls of power after he used his RCAF war pay to become a lawyer. As a Tory MP, he heckled Pierre Trudeau so savagely one day that PET yelled "fuck off" which Hansard after much soul-searching made "fuddle duddle."

Because you couldn't have the millionaire PM curse the only working class black in the Commons.

As CNE president, I stood with Linc reviewing the veterans march past on Warriors' Day at the great fair. An elderly woman, sagging in the heat, the sweat staining her uniform, marched determinedly past.  Linc was so moved that he yelled encouragement and leaned out waving to her and would have fallen if I hadn't grabbed him by the belt of his RCAF uniform. There I was, once the lowest rank in the reserve,  holding a very very senior officer so he didn't fall 10 feet off a reviewing stand.

I told Onley that anecdote one day and he gave the same gentle broad smile with which he greeted the good and the bad of life. If only all of us could take the bad hands that fate deals us and perservere too, no matter what the hurdles.

WHEN SANTA AND THE CUP WERE HUGE

 To swim through memories to high school and my career as a slow guard in football and then my anxious Telegram moments as a football scribe and editor is dangerous because my good old days were often not. But in 1955, just getting girls to smile at me and the coach not to suggest I was the slowest player on our team of future NHL, CFL, lacrosse and university stalwarts rated as A++.

The Santa Claus parade was key to boasting at Weston Collegiate, the second oldest high school in a city that had not yet exploded in every possible way to match a country that was busy growing up after stalling after the war. Eatons and Simpsons dominated retail and the giants cunningly had a couple of reps at each high school. They were the cream of the school. Eatons reached to their reps for the bulk of the Santa parade and they reached out to the inside crowd and you made sure everyone knew that you were one of the marchers. I remember little about the parade but the faces of the kids along the cold streets made it all worthwhile. It was a magical Saturday to match the radio broadcasts from Toyland in Eatons and standing in the halls to sing along with the carollers when Simpsons opened for the day. No wonder the two giant stores were our shopping destination and a cop had to control the pedestrians crossing between the two stores where Eatons was cheaper but Simpsons wrapped better.

The CFL, like the NHL, was smaller. But I noticed that despite all the references to Canadian players in the telecast on Sunday, the striking difference 67 years later was the absence of the names of Toronto high school athletes. I remember a halfback smashing over me for a TD at the high school final at Varsity who went on to star with the Tiger Cats and that our points were scored by Bob Pulford who was a solid Toronto Maple Leaf assistant captain. We had a tight end who played with the Parkdale Lions (longer than I did) which was the farm club of the Argos who used him on occasion.

At the Telegram, I was pressed into service as a fast typist who had played football for the special Grey Cup edition where I wrote the play by play of the entire game. I knew all about the special atmosphere at Exhibition Stadium, which was so adequate for football that they tore it down in hope of getting into the NFL, because one Cup afternoon I spent the entire afternoon sitting ignored on the bench of the losing team. The special Cup edition almost ended my journalism career because when I was in charge in the final Tely year, I didn't realize my news editor was so unconscious on vodka that he didn't know he was at work and screwed up our football stories. You didn't do that when your publisher owned the Argos.

Oh yes, my Sunday was more than a trip back 67 years. The good stuff shone like nuggets in a Klondike stream. The bad stuff, like my son getting so trapped in the jam downtown from the Santa Claus parade that my car exploded and had to be towed for expensive repairs, is deleted. After all, seven decades have passed while the city and sports have doubled along with the size of the defensive line.

We were called the Weston Ironman because the high school coach Mel Thompson believed that you played 60 minutes if you could still walk. I still have the leather football jacket and may even be able to get into it. Don't know but the memories fit just fine....no matter what the Downings say.

INACCESSIBLE TORONTO'S HASSLES

 It seemed such a simple task. Getting Mark my loyal bullmoose son to take me to the grand old Royal York Hotel for the 29th induction luncheon of the Canadian Disability Hall of Fame. I have been on the selection committee from the start before I was hobbled into a wheelchair.

It took four hours and I missed the start thanks to a downtown so snarled with traffic that it might as well have been a Ukrainian city under Russian attack. Plenty of time to look at election signs for an assortment of anonymous candidates. Plenty of time to think that the city traffic is now run so stupidly that all 25 councillors and the mayor should be replaced. Fortunately some have quit and a few, like Stephen Holyday, Mike Colle and Michael Thompson, perhaps deserve to get another crack at saving a city from the woke activists and bureaucratic nincompoops who couldn't run a sandbox in a kindergarten.

Of course parking downtown now requires a second mortgage. Back in 1958 when I first covered luncheons at the Royal York as a hungry cub reporter, I strolled over from the Old Lady of Melinda St., the Tely, and made my way to the gilded caverns. It took a few minute. The Tely vanished in 1971 and the hotel has primped its way through many changes. It took us half an hour from downtown Etobicoke just to get to the western flank. And that was just the start of climbing Everest.

It was silly of us who thought with four degrees and a lifetime of experience downtown that it would be easy to access even a giant hotel. But no western entrance, and the south doors are not accessible supposedly to simple-minded dolts. We actually did get inside with the help of bemused hotel staff and I dragged myself up several flights of grand stairs while Mark lugged up the wheelchair and went off to find some nook that didn't cost a fortune to park.

I pushed my wheelchair towards the two banks of elevators and finally won the competition to get aboard one by shoving my wheelchair into some giddy thing. Best block I have thrown since my football days at high school and college. Of course the luncheon had started and it didn't matter much because the tables were too close together for a wheelchair and an 86-year-old fart to get through.

Mark finally returned and I found my corner and could concentrate on the heroes of the day. Josh Dueck, Greg Westlake and Lorin MacDonald, stars from the worlds of Paralympics, human rights and hockey who know all about not only being champions at what they do but how to handle the hassles and frustrations of dealing with a giant city and a giant hotel which make such feeble attempts to actually let people moved around.

This hall of fame started with Vim Kochhar, then a senator, who had the inspiration for what we called the Terry Fox Hall of Fame, that great Canadian who ran across the country and into our hearts as he persevered and became an icon for all disabled. Early recipients were Edwin Baker and Rick Hansen. We renamed the hall because of some difficulty with the Fox family and Vim, who can be very persuasive, has had the Tiny Perfect Worship chair it for a year....which has turned into 29 even though David Crombie, still smiling and deaf like me, has the city clamouring for his attention.

The selection committee has had such notables as Rev. Bob Rumball, the great football player, and Con Di Nino, the former senator, as we sift through the remarkable biographies from people who smash the odds as they achieve, and achieve, and achieve. I have served on several hall of fame selection committees in the political, journalism and sports worlds but this is the one where the nominations leave me thankful that there are so many of our neighbours who hurdle adversities as if they are just  sidewalks cracks.

Too bad that so much still has to be done. As proof of that, we leave the grand hotel by heading to the eastern side. Along the way we encounter a hall of fame notable, David Onley, in a superior motorized wheelchair which makes mine look like a Model T compared to a Jag. But there is only one way out, a small elevator that takes David while we wait. Behind us are giant meeting rooms and hundreds of hotel rooms. And I use the small elevator and wait in the cold for Mark to negotiate a loan and pay for parking.

How nice the city has become so accessible....

Shopping For Health

I have waded through oceans of bureaucratese, medical goofs, misinformation, lies, propaganda and just plain crap and concluded that I need as much protection against the virus and politicians as I can get.

I have a bullseye stapled to my chest and most of the world seems poised to use me as target practise.

So I went to get another shot. I already have two boosters but I seemed to match the most vulnerable among the old farts just floating along trying to avoid the latest stupidness of man. And doctors seemed to think it was a smart idea.

Shoppers didn't. Despite a vacant office, and I mean space not their minds, I was turned away in my wheelchair and told to talk to my GP.

Bernie Gosevitz may be the best family doctor          in the world so now I will intrude into his incredible sked and waste a lot of my time, and his time, and family time just to try to stay alive for the next pandemic to come along.

My medical profile is terrible. I do like waking up because it is such a surprise. And I certainly match the profile of someone reading obits for pleasure at all those I have survived... for now

I am 86 and have been a diabetic for a million needles. My pacemaker has been doing an admirable job with my atrial filibration. The five specialists who grunt at me regularly give me nine prescriptions and four vitamins and mysterious capsules to go with the two insulins.

I walk like a drunk when I am not falling out of my wheelchair and breaking ribs and decorating my forehead with stitches.

I came home in a medical plane from my last U.S. trip and the insurance refused to pay until my specialists grunted at them for a change.

Thanks to Mark, my son, who thank heavens took some cooking courses at George Brown to go along with his two degrees, I have actually survived at home despite two stays in three hospitals over a decade.

So I didn't expect any trouble when I showed up at the Shoppers at Six Points along with my 87-year-old wife also in a wheelchair pushed by another stalwart son Brett. She takes as much medicine as I do and Mark and Brett are the size of the Argo line and prob ably can play better than them too.

We were greeted with the sort of reception that you get when the clerks don't know wotinhell they're doing.

From above I heard a sympathetic groan from my old friend, Murray Koffler, the founder of Shoppers, and the wonderful renaissance guru that was such a magical force in culture, education and just about any nook in Toronto that mattered.

Koffler and I were in at the start of the outdoor art show in Nathan Phillips Square and with his money and smarts and my civic bluster we managed to intimidate officials long enough to make the show a success.

No wonder I had no trouble as head of the city advisory committe giving Koffler the top civic honour. He certainly knew how to deal with bureaucrats and heaven knows they certainly know how to screw up when given the slightest chance with our health and with our money. 

I am a big  believer in shots. When I was on the Runnymede Health Centre board, I moved that any staffer who didn't get a shot during a flu epidemic not have a job. My father had a huge family practise in the east end and he moved my two sisters and I into the same bedroom during mumps and measles and other outbreaks to make sure we got sick before we became adults.

He also was a big booster of doing things like that when he was chairman of the Toronto school board. He certainly didn't tolerate nonsense like ambulance staff and paramedics not getting protected by shots.

When Dad died and my uncle took over the practise, he had the same approach.

Thank heavens for the sensible approach of the old family doctor who didn't like populist renegades who thought BS equalled science. The anti-vaxxers were treated with the contempt they deserved.

They decided in my first year of university that I had had TB the year before. My uncle considered my last year of high school when I played 60 minutes of football in the championship game at Varsity and was active in other activities like the school play, puffed on his pipe and said it was nonsense for me to go to the Weston sanitarium. 

He considered all the evidence and decided not to put  my life on hold for a year.

Common sense was what he used. If only there was more of that when we fight pandemics.

Sad Anniversary

We are lamenting the anniversary of an awful assault on our history, yet our awful leaders pretend it never happened. Two lines echo from the past when I consider the disgraceful renaming of Ryerson University and destruction of the statue of Egerton Ryerson, our most famous educator and the obstetrician delivering many of our major institutions and ministries.

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down was the haunting melody from The Band in 1969, and FDR's A Day That Will Live In Infamy is one of the most famous presidential quotes.Surely the toppling of this giant memento should have also stimulated haunting songs and soaring oratory.

 But a year has passed and with the honourable exception of the National Post, the media and our cowardly leaders stay muzzled by the fear of the Indigenous lobby. No lament! No broadsides of oratory! No inquiry! The police played Keystone Cops even though evidence was piled higher than the Scarborough Bluffs.

The vandals escape charges/fines/jail for blatant criminal acts. I cry out for the days of such Post/Sun crusaders as Christie Blatchford, a Ryerson grad who would have taken the incriminating facts from profs like Patrice Dutil and driven them like swords into the craven administrators and the Greek chorus chanting lies. Dutil warned in the Post on June 8, 2021, that many universities could face similar destructive mischief when activists launch pathetic BS barrages over names and past.

Another Ryerson warrior, Mark Bonokoski, wrote in despair in the Sun about the Ryerson debacle and said he would tear up his degree.

There was no question when Ryerson hired me to write its history what would be the cover.

Since 1889 Egerton's statue had stared at Gould St., nearly 10 feet tall on a granite base of similar height that cost $8,300 from governments and pupils who loved him for innovating a Canadian first - free schooling for all. Behind him rose his incubator for education and culture that Cumberland designed in 1851. For decades they made their home of St. James Square a favourite attraction for all.

The man, the sculptor and the architect created so much that these werebizarre targets for a lawless mob using the incredible past mistreatment of the Indigenous to justify destroying a grand reputation and a statue worth $260,000 in modern funds and millions in historic value.

If the goal really was to punish Canadians for decades of their brutal handling by governments and churches, there are genuine targets for perverted activism in the Indigenous world, not that any sensible person would justify assaulting our past with distorted posturing.

Such as Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant whose history is not disputed. No need to cheat about his wars and dealings, unlike the lies about Ryerson. He kept and traded as slaves many Africans and captured warriors. Yet his statue hasn't been destroyed in his Brantford, and Brant County and a hospital haven't been renamed. His portraits are featured in great galleries.

Apparently not a useful target but then the activists failed in most subjects, including history.

His many critics scorned him as "Monster" Brant. The statue of Ryerson was dubbed affectionately as Eggie by many thousands.Yet it suited the twisted few to tear one man and statue down and ignore the other.