CASTRO, TRUDEAU AND BARTLEMAN

          AND LET'S NOT FORGET MARGARET

The seeds for Canada being the honest broker of the talks that led to the thaw in the Cuban boycott by the U.S.  were sown in a remarkable visit in 1976 to the island. It was sandwiched between state visits to Venezuela and Mexico, like a prison between two meadows.
It starred the Three Mouthketeers of Fidel Castro, Pierre Trudeau, and Margaret with baby Michel on one hip when she hadn't lost him in Mexico.
What a trip! The press corps had a wonderful time. So did the islanders. The Cubans turned out by the tens of thousands  (although many were forced to.)  Canucks were more fun that the dour Soviets and their grim faces and  monolithic architecture. Secret police were obvious everywhere. You had to write down your currency transactions.
It was an Iron Curtain country floating in the Caribbean, which led to a zany touch to the coverage. There are still bizarre bits about that trip floating in myths soaked with Cuba libres.
For example, there was a story that Trudeau once tried as a youth to canoe to Cuba from the Florida keys.
For example, John Harbron, a professor and editor who had studied in Havana and boasted a personal relationship with Trudeau, told me the reason the PM's Spanish was so good is that he had attended university in Cuba too.
For example, a good source told me that one reason for the rapport between Castro and Trudeau, besides the fact that neither gave a damn about what anyone else thought, is that a Jesuit priest who had taught Trudeau and made a great impression was later one of Castro's teachers.
For example, the media left Margaret alone for a wacky week, despite her stunts, because we believed she was mentally ill. For starters, we wondered about postpartum depression because Michel was only four months old.
So we cut her a break, so to speak. It was an uneasy truce because after all Trudeau was thrusting both his wife and his son into our faces when he knew she was having problems. It got so bad that Castro at some points carted Michel around as if he was the babysitter.
Finally I discovered Margaret in the lobby of the Caracas Hilton, very sexy but also shouting curses at her husband's secretary. When I intervened, she unloaded on me. Turned out I knew more swear words. So she fled to the state banquet where she gave a Nazi salute as O Canada was played and turned her back in the receiving line.
Almost matched her giving Michel in Mexico to a young Canadian backpacker to cuddle and then wandering off, forgetting about him, which led to a frantic RCMP search.
On the plane trip home, I got her to sing childish songs that she had composed for the wives of the leaders of Venezuela and Mexico into the media microphones. The next day I was on TV to refute her claim that I had pledged it was off-the-record.

But back to diplomacy. Castro and Trudeau had open admiration for each other. Trudeau generally wouldn't speak to me but when I asked him about SCUBA diving with the Cuban dictator, he was almost giddy in his praise, saying that they had gone deeper than he had ever been before and that Castro and his bodyguards just cut the fish apart in the depths, not caring a whit about sharks.
Ironically, years later, another Canadian that made an impression on Castro also went SCUBA diving with him even though he wasn't experienced.
As James Bartleman, our former lieutenant-governor, says in one of his fascinating four books on his life as our ambassador to countries like Cuba, he went to clear his mask when he was with Castro and one of the bodyguards held him up out of the water so he could do that without difficulty.
Years later, after the able Bartleman had been a key advisor to Jean Chretien as PM, the Liberal government dispatched him back to Cuba for secret talks when Canada was trying to improve the relations between the U.S. and Cuba.
Nothing much happened that time, Bartleman told me, even though he had had a relationship with Castro who had routinely dropped in on him unannounced and talked all night when he was stationed there. Bartleman said he was fascinated by the attention until he realized that Fidel was probably just looking for an audience. His feelings for the Cubans cooled a trifle when they poisoned his beloved dog.
Various partnerships between Canada and Cuba, even when the Soviet Union kept the island economy from drowning, have blossomed over the years, along with Canada being the largest source of tourists.
In recent years, the Americans dreamed up strange reasons for charter flights even though it was illegal technically for an ordinary Yank to visit.
 Yet Canada continued to be the major source of  tourism  from the entire world, and Canada continued to be the secret neutral territory when the two wanted to talk, all due to the personal chemistry 38 years ago between two dictators, a giddy dame and a drooling baby.





   

TRUDEAU WOMEN AS SONGBIRDS

CAN'T THEY JUST SING KUMBAYA

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

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

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

DRINKING WITH FIDEL

HE JUST DIDNT GIVE A DAMN

My strangest interview ever, both in setting and in rudeness, was with Fidel Castro.
I suspect this happened to many, whether diplomats or columnists trying not to fall off the couch.
It was January, 1976, and Pierre Trudeau, led by Margaret featuring the most famous nipples on the island, was visiting Mexico, Cuba and Venezuela.
 I have never covered a more remarkable state visit, mainly because Cuba was wrapped in a steel cocoon of brutal state terrorism, gnawing secrecy, empty beaches and traumatized citizens.
The Canadian group ended up one night at the Canadian embassy and quickly degenerated into a warm haze of cigar smoke and rum, lots of rum.
It was so crowded, you couldn't have slipped a rumour past the security bullies who invited themselves in so they could watch us better. Each of us had our own clutch of thugs. Mine had warmed up to me earlier when I traded five portions of my little rationed steak for their five plates of seafood.
There was a commotion and a surge of new arrivals which lurched against me until I stood on a couch so I didn't get trampled. Pushed up with me was some soldier in green fatigues who straightened himself angrily and materialized into a teetering Fidel.
People shouted questions at him but he, several feet higher, ignored them, puffing on a Cohiba (it was decades later he stopped smoking the famous and expensive cigar) and swigging what I assumed was product from Havana Club, the distillery he confiscated from the Bacardi family.
I thought I can interview him and it will be exclusive because who else can hear us in the noise of the party.  I would soften him up by asking if it was true he might have pitched in the majors if he had  a curve. (I wrote about this on Nov. 25, 2014, in a Downing blog titled Don Hunt, Fidel Castro And Me.)
He ignored me.
I then ventured some minor question and he roared "speak Spanish." I replied that since I knew he had studied law in English, his English was better than my Spanish.
He waved the cigar  to silence me.
This was going nowhere so I thought I might as well go for broke. I asked why he hadn't told Cuban parents that their sons coming home in body bags had actually died in an African war to which he had committed his army without telling the country.
He stared at me. And puffed. And drank. I stared back and slowly and deliberately, since I had had a lot of rum and was just trying not to fall off the couch, which wasn't a stable platform, repeated my question.

He glared at me. And puffed. And drank. Then he yelled at the people beneath us to get out of his way and left, with me muttering about why was he acting like Trudeau who did the same when Sun writers like me asked a question he didn't like... usually all of the questions.
It was the closest I got in several days of wandering through crowds and factories. Bizarrely, he often was not the centre of attention since Margaret, mother of our PM, generally wore a Liberal election T-shirt that was so tight it looked like she was launching rockets. And she and Fidel were always very close. As was Trudeau.
The body language showed  a bromance between the dictators. Justin in not calling a brutal dictator a brutal dictator is just carrying on the family tradition of fawning over their pet killer.
Pete Trudeau, the father, could get quite enthusiastic in his praise. I found that out when I  took advantage when I was in a knot of reporters with the PM  to ask, as a fellow SCUBA diver, that I understood he had gone diving with Fidel. For once, I thought, he won't ignore me.

Trudeau rhapsodized about the experience, saying that he had never gone deeper than with Castro and his bodyguards, and how they had just butchered live fish with their knives, not caring at all about how the blood in the water around them might attract sharks.
Not what they teach you in diving 101 but it was the longest and most genuine chat I had ever had with Trudeau so I spun it out.
When we left, the Trudeaus, Castro, and some figurehead president gathered outside the Canadian plane while the security thugs pushed the rest of us aboard.
I saw Boris Spremo, the great Toronto Star photographer, sneak away so I did too. Obviously the final pictures could be controversial - Castro wrapping Trudeau, and of course Margaret, in great bear hugs.
As I raised my camera, a security thug pushed me towards the plane's stairs. I dug in. There was an angry cursing confrontation which the official group ignored. So I yelled at Castro to tell the security jerk to leave me alone before I punched him. This panicked the thug and he backed off, so I got one picture.
The Star used Boris on Page 1 but I couldn't get my pictures back home to the Sun in time from our next destination, Caracas, having no resources with me for that.
Years later I was telling James Bartleman, who did such a wonderful job as our lieutenant-governor, about the encounter. He detailed some of his experiences as the Canadian ambassador to Cuba in one of his four fine books and he told me some more.
Castro used to drop in on him at the embassy and talk all night. Bartleman was pleased until he figured out that the garrulous Castro was looking for an audience, any audience. (I related some of this in a Downing blog headlined Castro, Trudeau and Bartleman on Dec. 27, 2014.)
When I told Bartleman about Trudeau diving with Castro, he said that when he went diving with the Communist dictator, he went to the surface to clear his mask and to his amazement had a burly body guard come up underneath and hold him above the water so he could do it in comfort.
Other stories weren't so nice, like the Cubans poisoning the Bartleman dog, wiretapping him and harassing his driver even though Bartleman represented a country used by the U.S. as a secret channel in dealing with Cuba despite the official boycott. In fact, Bartleman later was sent secretly by PM Jean Chretien to meet with the Castro brothers to see what could be done about that boycott.
It seems that the Grits have always had a yen to deal with the Castros no matter how many citizens they imprisoned on phoney charges. No wonder Justin apes his father.
I have visited Cuba since that grand adventure at least a dozen times. It started off as such a difficult experience that you had to fill out a form detailing all your spending or they wouldn't let you leave. I remember going to an "underground" church service when there was a chance that the worshippers would be jailed.  I  wrote about being held and questioned for hours just because a homosexual under surveillance had talked to me for a minute or so.
Then there was the poor soul from Quebec who appealed to me after a young "'lady" seduced him and got him to marry her so she could get into Canada.
I couldn't help him. Or the orthopaedic surgeon stuck doing resort back rubs in 1997.
And now the bully is dead, who used communism rather than the Catholic religion he was taught as a boy to seize power and throw out the diseased lackeys of the American mob.
And all the tourists who think all that cloak-and-dagger brutality was just media malarkey can continue to ignore a murderous past and guzzle their Cuba libres. To them Fidel was just a myth.
Sure he was, a myth who imprisoned you if he didn't like your views, if you were lucky.

THE SPOILED, PETULANT AND EGOTISTICAL TRUDEAUS

THE DIVINE RIGHT OF THE VERY RICH

Even if the Liberals were not led by a devious and obsequious drama queen, I would not vote Grit.
But since Pete Trudeau's family still has one skeletal claw on the party, it's easy to vote for a party led by a Tory who doesn't act as if he has cornered all the morality in the country.
My first brush with the Trudeaus came as a Dodger fan when Jackie Robinson smashed the colour bar in baseball when he was promoted courageously from the Montreal Royals, a team largely owned and controlled by Peter Trudeau's father. That was mentioned in the English press but wasn't a big deal.
My next contact came, although I didn't know it, as I squinted into the blizzard over the Yukon's Lake LaBarge (of Robert Service fame.) We had made two forced landing with wheels on the rotten ice. My story made the front pages of the country because I was covering James Sinclair, a major cabinet minister who years later became the father-in-law to Pete, the pirouetting PM, and the grandfather to our current PM.
I was in charge of the Tely coverage when the politician who always contrived vainly to be really different - like boycotting the honourable war and lying about his age - became leader of the county much to the shock of the people who really knew him.
As the Tely skidded into the mists, I had on my desk one of the sexiest pictures I have ever seen outside the famous Marilyn Monroe calendar picture. It was said by the photographer, who wanted the kingly sum of $600, to be 18 year-old Margaret Sinclair in a bathing suit on the beach in Tahiti where she met a much older man who said diffidently over drinks that he was the prime minister of her country.
I never ran that picture on Page One because such was the relationship between the Telegram and the Liberals that I knew they would sue or humiliate us if it was really some other voluptuous creature. I left the picture on my desk as I put out the final edition and walked out of the silent building that has just been destroyed by the Globe.
I never knew that in my future was a profane encounter between me and Margaret in Caracas when I came to the defense of the PM's private secretary when Margaret was calling him every possible obscenity in front of dozens of tourists in a hotel lobby.
I was irked and tired so I used the F word in every possible construction, matched vowel by vowel by Margaret who was so infuriated by me that she marched into the state dinner and gave a Nazi salute to the Maple Leaf flag.
Then on the plane home,  I coaxed her into singing the silly songs she had made up to serenade the wives of the leaders  of the countries we had toured, and woke the next day to find myself being vilified on TV and radio as Margaret insisted into every mike that I had told her it was all off the record. (She had waited for every last tape recorder to be fired up.)
I could go on, like the time she led an alternative march at a UN conference in Vancouver that was to highlight the pails of drinking water that women in the Third World had to lug home daily. I pointed out that she had an inch of water in her pail, while the cabinet minister assigned by the PM to escort her for the day was loyally carting a full pail. She flounced off on a profane cloud.
She flirted from famous Manhattan night clubs to rooms with suspicious smells in Toronto - often spectacularly without her panties -while her husband confounded friend and foe in Ottawa. I was slightly handicapped in trying to figure out what stunt he would pull next because he generally ignored my questions. We once had a conversation about his SCUBA diving with Fidel Castro which ended abruptly when he remembered he was actually talking to someone from the despised Sun.
On one walkabout at the Kortright Centre, Pete encouraged Sacha to go into the crowd and shake hands with another cute toddler who just happened to be my youngest son, Mark, and film of the kids made the National. The same secretary who I had defended in Venezuela whispered with relish that he was going to be pleased to tell the boss that it was a Downing kid just to watch him scowl because he was a great hater.
By the way, that same Sacha, the PM's youngest brother, is a film-maker who got into trouble with a flesh-eating disease while shooting a documentary in Madagascar and was rescued by a young film director from Toronto, Gordon Weiske. He was carried through the jungle on Gord's back to the medical help which saved his life.
After my friend Gordon related the story to me, I asked whether a friendship had sprung up as a result. "No," Gord said, "he never even thanked me,"
"Sounds like the family, " I said. "After all, you didn't have anything more to offer, like votes, or a private island for a free vacation."

WORKING THE PHONES

They knew how to work the phones. That was a theme in the flood of nostalgia after the death of Brian Mulroney, which was a nice repetition of what was said after John Turner. There was also nostalgia about the many kind things they did outside the spotlight of publicity.

I love both things about those giants. Now I have reached my anecdotage, to the chagrin of the family, I like stories about such history more than the formal accomplishment facts. I also confess that facts grow dimmer which is a curse to me who lasted through my cub days as a dumb reporter because I could remember exactly the trivia of history when it was only seconds to deadline.

There are those who grumble about the famous names that I can pepper in a blog but then there were four decades when I was trying to figure just wot-in-hell was going on in the stout silos of politics, business and sports while I worked for two great newspapers and dabbled in other media which treated me like a rube. But then that was life when work could be a premier's delusion or an actress that maybe would later date an Oscar winner or a fender bender on a back concession.. You covered whatever you were told to cover, and life could explode out of tedium in the next minute.

I did get to see the jerk side of famous people. And the flashes of decency.

I was confirmed as Editor of the Toronto Sun in 1985 with a headline that almost made me forget the months of doing the work in tedious addition to being a daily columnist. One thing I will never forget is the telephone call I got from Brian Mulroney to congratulate me. Sure I knew that he had probably been jogged into action by staff but when my secretary Rosemary Little said calmly that the prime minister was on the phone, I first went to the office door to make sure there was no gag going on in the newsroom. (Any denizen of a feisty newsroom will know that I mean.)

It was nice to have the butterscotch tones of the top politician in the country wash over me. Wouldn't you like it if the PM called to wish you well in a big promotion? It certainly knocked my cynicism about politicians for a loop.

If you read about Mulroney you know that he could use a personal phone call like he was granting you a Nobel. Read a great biography by Steve Paikin called John Turner: An Intimate Biography and you can see how Turner also weaponized Bell. There is something about a call from a famous man that makes you remember more good than bad. I must confess as a Tory I was inclined to like the Conservative ones more than the Liberal ones but then Mulroney to me was a gentle thoughtful man in his private musings and Turner wasn't. 

It may have been that time at the Shaw Festival that his wife Geills complained loudly that Mary and I had better seats than they did, or at Roy Thomson Hall when Turner and I got front row seats at a John McDermott concert because John announced above us that the former PM had helped his success and that I as an old friend had written the liner notes for his album of war songs.

Turner ignored me sitting beside him and I smelled the reason was not my columns but that he was soused. Drinking had been a problem for both PMs (but I won't throw insults as a rum-and-coke media survivor. And Mulroney became such an avid counsellor for abstention that he would have fit right in with the old Sherlock TV series.)

The relationship between political leaders and old columnists has always wandered in a mine field. I wrote thousands of columns realizing that what I said was also being read by the target with whom I could share an elevator the next morning. And of course there were also those occasions when the pol would retaliate from his dais perch.

My introduction to the danger of public criticism came when John Diefenbaker asked my publisher to fire me, the same Dief who had been introduced years before around Ottawa by my father, a Toronto Tory power, as not a struggling prairie lawyer but a future Conservative leader.

I have had many encounters with the greats of Canadian politics but I will spare you, from the weird like singing a duet of "Oh yes I'm the great pretender," that hit by The Platters, with Kim Campbell when we were discussing puberty songs at an editorial board, to being ignored by PET when he and I were the only ones touring a medical lab in Mexico.

I am playing it safe by staying away from lengthy discussion about the wives. After all, the female of the species is more dangerous than the male. I was once driven from the front door of a new premier  by the shouting wife attired only (I think) in a slip. It was just another evening in a Venezuela luxury hotel lobby before I came across Margaret Trudeau verbally lambasting an aide for some alleged error. I liked the aide and came to his defence to divert her. She cursed me. I was in no mood for that, having just battled to get my column sent from South America to a city the locals had never heard of. So I cursed back. She and I got quite inventive which startled many tourists. After she was retrieved by an embarrassed official, she faced the wall in the receiving line for an official banquet and gave a Nazi salute.

Naturally it made the news. The famous are aways under a cruel microscope which we must remember when we judge. So we should treasure those like Brian Mulroney who survive with honour.

THE OSCARS OF CANADIAN JOURNALISM

WE USED TO JUDGE BY THE NNAs

When I was a kid reporter surrounded by what I considered the giants of Canadian journalism, the annual National Newspaper Awards were a really big deal.
The Toronto Telegram got more than its share of NNAs. And when I left my decorated colleagues and went out into the trenches to do battle with the Star in one of the toughest newspaper fights in North America, I was facing more award winners, although, as we crowed, not as many as the Tely's.
The NNAs were handed out on a great weekend that was the Toronto Press Club's not-so-humble celebration like the Oscars  in L.A. Invitations to some events had to be earned. Politicians on the make made sure they were there. It was the anchor in our claim to be Canada's best newspaper town.
It all began with the Byline Ball on Friday night, then a Saturday brunch for the Canadian News Hall of Fame, then the presentation banquet with a famous speaker like Walter Cronkite. Survivors would struggle into the Sunday brunch thrown by Toronto firefighters where they handed out their awards.

 I remember Mayor David Crombie giving a speech there lambasting most of the press in the room and then giving me as press club president a set of gold cuff links with the city crest. (Today that would be scandalous.)
Upstairs in the Royal York were the roaring hospitality rooms of companies like INCO which figured it was a smart idea to wine and dine the press, just as the firefighters did to ensure they got paid as much as the cops. Room numbers were prized.
Now mostly just memories,  except for the NNAs. And there are some, particularly at the Toronto Sun, the Tely's phoenix, who claim an official cold shoulder by the NNA committee, although Andy Donato has been nominated this year. Yet with his incredible production record, you would have thought he would have won more than once.
The ball featured a Miss Byline contest, which may seem quaint now, especially to feminists. But many beauty queen winners, such as Judy Welch as Miss Toronto, found it launched great careers. And Carol Goss Taylor, went from Miss Byline to Miss Toronto to head of the CBC and B.C.'s finance minister. The night of the ball, she was just this lovely shy thing from my old high school, Weston, and her parents said she needed a chaperone. So Mary and I looked after her, although if her Dad had known some of my thoughts, I wouldn't have been acceptable.
The ball is gone, along with the Press Club, the hall of fame and most beauty contests. The banquet wanders the land, demonstrating, I guess, that the NNAs are  truly national even though the idea was born and nurtured in Toronto which remains Canada's best media town. Firefighters have a separate lunch.
I look back on all this with some bemusement as someone involved in every part of the weekend and press club and later as a NNA judge. And I remember, as many of us do, my entries that I think should have won the NNA instead of that #$%*$##@ one.
That was as a columnist. My record as an editor is much better because I like to think that I was responsible directly for two winners, indirectly for one, and then there was my advice to Donato in 1976 that he was putting in the wrong three cartoons in his entry. So I made the final cut, he won, and for several years, I was pressed into service each January as his advisor. When that didn't work, he went back to ignoring any advice I might try to give him, especially if it was a cartoon idea.

Peter Geddes was a brilliant but moody two-way man at the Tely (both writer and photographer) when he left us for a sabattical in his native Australia. He had been back only a few days in 1964 when the Star came out with a Page One scoop that Bob Reguly had found Hal Banks in the Brooklyn navy yard..
 Reguly won an NNA for the story but not for the picture he took with a cardboard camera he bought in a drugstore. (When thugs spotted him and pursued, the cab saved him by speeding away. Reguly was so grateful, he took the film out and gave the driver the camera. Legend says the Star wouldn't reimburse him.)
Geddes was dispatched to Manhattan without knowing the slightest detail about this huge search that Canading authorities had been making for the crooked union boss
He phoned to tell me he was got one picture of Banks on the deck of a tug before goons had chased him. I relaxed. At least we had something. Then the darkroom technician brought me the dripping picture. I phoned Geddes to say he had photographed the wrong guy, that Banks, in casual clothes, was in the background, out of focus, while the guy in the gangster suit, sharp as a tack, was unknown to us. So Wasyl Kowalishen returned to the darkroom, with me standing over him giving unwelcome advice, and worked with the enlarger, dodging and using all the old tricks, until he rescued more of Banks.
And Geddes won that NNA even though it should have also gone to Reguly. Afterwards he turned his back on the business even though he had fluked into the top award. He said if he had continued, it would have cost him his marriage and turned him alcoholic. He never came to collect the award or cheque.
 Years later,  after Margaret Sinclair and Pierre Trudeau had just married and went skiing at Whistler, we discovered Geddes running the ski lift. He said he had sold all his cameras. I urged him to go to a drugstore, like Reguly, buy a disposable camera, shoot a roll and I would have it collected. He refused for any amount to scoop the country. In those days, not everyone had a camera in their phone.
When Michael Popovich won for the Tely in 1970, it was almost as strange as the Banks affair. He had written, sort of, the account of a drug addict shooting up in the grimy washroom of a restaurant on Dundas near Jarvis before he died.
The tale was all there, mangled, So I rewrote it, completely, from lede to death. Popovich never thanked me, submitted it to the NNAs, won, never thanked me again, and left the business to become a GTA councillor.
In 1989, I was the Sun Editor and determined to get more photographs into the paper.  I loved pictures, as do most readers, and we were a tabloid, daily discarding many pictures taken by one of the finest staffs of news photogs in North America. So I started two pages of pictures each Sunday in the Comment section. Some were photo essays, unrelated to hard news.
 One day I was brought a compelling array of pictures taken by Sun and other photographers on a private project to capture the gritty side of downtown. Sleeping on subway grates or in cardboard boxes etc. The gifted Fred Thornhill won the NNA that year because we ran his picture in that section that the  bosses grabbed away from me months later. The Sun has never repeated on a regular basis.
I was so impressed by a series of political gems by Doug Fisher that I urged him to enter the NNAs. When I found he hadn't at the deadline, I put in the entry for him. He won a Citation, and sat uncomfortably at the presentation because he didn't believe in that sort of thing.
But most of us do. It was wonderful to work with all the stars who won NNAs at the Tely and Sun  And I include on my list all those who won before or after they worked with me. I'm looking forward to Donato winning for a second time because he earns it for his wit, his pen and his longevity as a cartoonist and painter. Not bad for a golfer!
My list is a Roll of Honour:  Lubor Zink, Peter Worthington (4 times), Judith Robinson, Ken MacTaggart (2), Andrew MacFarlane (2),  John Fraser (3).  David Billington (2) Bill Dampier, Dorothy Howarth, Laurie McKechnie, Del Bell, Val Sears, Wayne Parrish (2), Jean Sonmor, Bill McGuire, Marilyn Dunlop, Bill Stevenson, Linda Diebel, Bob Hesketh, George Gross, Scott Young, Bob Pennington, Al Sokol, John Robertson, Al Strachan, Russ Cooper, Yardley Jones, Ralph Hicklin, Ted Reeve, Trent Frayne, Barry Gray, Allan Fotheringham,  Peter Dunlop, Stan Behal, Mike Cassesse (2), Christie Blatchford, Bob Reguly (3)  Ron Haggart, Bill Sandford, Tim McKenna, David Cooper, Sean Browne, Michael Peake, Veronica Milne........
I've probably forgotten some but the list is quite incredible, especially when you consider the bitching that the Sun is ignored. Just look at what its photographers have done, although that staff has shrunk  to a pale shadow, along with the space, and the photographs are processed in India.
However,  I'll always be quick to add more names from the Sun, and other former colleagues, because every winner should be special to colleagues and readers and be eternal despite any chill in the business.

MY ESCAPES FROM PLANE CRASHES

MY LIFE COULD HAVE BEEN A LOT SHORTER

I was called back from what would have been my first plane trip. Ten minutes later, the pilots died.
Years later, after I had flown four times,  I was in two forced landings within two hours in a Yukon blizzard.
I have been in a plane that caught fire, one that fell thousands of feet in the middle of the night, and one where another plane tried to land on top of us.
As I tell anyone worried about air travel, come fly with me because Fate or Satan have already swung their deadly fists at my planes...and missed.
Yet for some cocky reason, maybe just the insouciance of youth, I actually joined the RCAF Reserve. Now, I try not to dwell on flaming plane wreckage because then the bottle of Mount Gay rum empties.
What just triggered such uncomfortable memories was a full page in the National Post on the death this month of Helen Klaben who with her bush plane pilot survived 49 days after a crash in the Yukon wilderness in February, 1963.
It was an icy story that fascinated Canada as they survived on hot water and toothpaste after a bit of food ran out - the sardines, tuna and fruit that you take on a flight when you don't expect to spend a frozen eternity contemplating white nothingness.
Yet that public infatuation back in 1963 was tempered with the reality that air crashes then, particularly in the North, were a lot more common than they are now, thank heavens.
My log book of escapes began when I got a summer job as a glorified office boy at a famous Malton firm called Sanderson Aircraft which serviced and repaired planes and built wings and tails for the iconic planes of de Havilland.
I had never flown, so our two pilots were determined to introduce me to their passion. They were going to test a Cessna Crane that had just been overhauled and I scrambled in. The office manager ran into the hangar and yelled that I was paid to do the books (I did a terrible job) not to go joyriding.  I slunk back to my desk.
They ran into trouble on takeoff and radioed the tower they would land on the road in front of the giant A.V. Roe plant, the fabled home of the Arrow and the CF-100. High tension lines flipped them over and they burned to death, with only one wedding ring to help with identities.
So there I was at my desk fielding newspaper calls, telling a Tely reporter who only a few years later would be my colleague that I didn't know anything. (Ironically, the plane was owned indirectly by the New York Times.)
Before my last year at Ryerson, determined to be different, I got a summer job as Editor of the Whitehorse Star, which was rather a stupid thing to do when I had limited resources. But I survived with a CN rail pass to Edmonton and CP Air to Whitehorse to live with the publisher, Harry Boyle.
Whitehorse was then a frontier town that didn't have much time for tenderfoots like me. But within days Harry threw me into the middle of the tempestuous federal election of 1957 which, along with a rerun in 1958, ditched the Liberal dynasty and brought a prairie evangelist named John Diefenbaker to spluttering Tory power.
The Yukon MP was a Liberal, Aubrey Simmons, shadowed by the most famous lawyer in the territory, George Van Roggen (such a Grit power he was appointed senator.) The Tory candidate was his law partner (they actually shared a giant "partner's desk.'') Erik Nielsen went on to fame as deputy prime minister and a Conservative covered with thorns and controversies.
The Liberals were hunting for gimmicks to stave off defeat. The brass came up with the idea of having James Sinclair, the fisheries minister, become the first cabinet minister ever to campaign in the territories where all travel was difficult.
Yes, that Sinclair. One of the Liberal stars, past and present, because he was the able charismatic  Rhodes scholar and major cabinet power before the fourth of his five daughters, Margaret, married Pierre Trudeau. If you want to know what he looked like, look at his grandson, Justin.
We loaded ourselves aboard a Beaver, ironically the famous workhorse of the north made by de Havilland, and flew off, first to a silver mine and then to Dawson City. One of the most picturesque election rallies I ever covered. Then the next day back to Whitehorse for an evening meeting.
The future senator turned out to have booze in that legal briefcase and there was plenty of amiable talk, including kidding of Sinclair about having to pay for all those weddings.
Then came the snow. And the biggest peaks on the continent disappeared. I was writing a story to telegraph to the Canadian Press in Edmonton and kept scribbling new words for storm as the blizzard became a whiteout.
The pilot, Ron Connelley, said he was under visual flight rules but that didn't matter anyway because he couldn't continue with his instruments, which didn't include radar, without eventually running into a mountain.
We tried calling Whitehorse. Nothing. Connelley got a glimpse of a famous landmark, Lake Laberge, and said that in late May he wasn't sure how good the ice would be.
Someone recited a line from The Cremation of Sam McGee and I ventured that I had just found out that I laid out the Star on an accountant's desk that the poem's creator, Robert Service, had used in the Dawson bank.
Then we landed, our wheels skidding through drifts and bouncing on patches of broken ice. It was morbidly peaceful when we got out into the gloom, and someone laughed that we all better not pee in the same place. Then a celebratory drink from that briefcase.
After an hour or two of trying to see the shore, or anything, Connelley said it seemed to be clearing. We all climbed in and made a terrible takeoff. It was a bad call. It was worse now over the lake. Connelley said we should vote to see if we should risk another landing, my first clue as to how dangerous he thought the first one was.
We got one burst through the static on the radio to tell Whitehorse airport where we thought we were. Connelley cut short the discussion and vote on whether we should land again by doing exactly that before he said "we run into something."No wonder he became a legend in northern aviation!
We hiked through the driving snow to the nearest shore with me carrying Sinclair's bag because he had been badly injured on a speaking tour in Russia the year before. So I was the only one to fall through, which was a source of great merriment to the shivering party when I only sank to my chest. More proof that the ice was rotten came six days later when the ice went out just after the plane was retrieved.
We hiked five kilometres or so through the snow and mud to the gravel of the Alaska Highway where a car driven by a Whitehorse merchant found us and then took us at dangerous speeds to the election rally while I went to the telegraph office to file a story which made the front page of every newspaper in the country.  (The wire service paid me the grand sum of $15 for my national "scoop.")
That Yukon election campaign continued to make news all the way to Time magazine which managed to screw up six facts in my account. After all, the territorial supreme court controverted, or cancelled, the Yukon result by throwing out 10% of the ballots, including mine. It hasn't happened since in this country which has seen its share of election fraud.
The five of us in the Beaver never got visibly excited about our adventure. Of course it helped that Connelley was experienced and Sinclair was a RCAF veteran. It was just another plane incident as far as Yukoners were concerned. But our forced landings were a major story elsewhere because Canadians love to read about people trapped by snow particularly when they are having a warm spring. The election fraud was just icing on a snow cake.
My other aerial dances with death didn't last as long as that experience which had the added zing of happening on the stage of one of the most famous of all Canadian poems, the one that so many drunks recite when they're feeling good.
Pan Am, once one of the most famous of all airlines, inaugurated a press excursion to publicize the first jet service to South and Central America. I was the only Canadian with an exuberant bunch of high-ranking Americans, including the legendary Bill Mauldin who won two Pulitzers for his World War Two cartoons.
Mauldin turned to me on what turned out to be our last hop between capitals and said he didn't want to alarm me but he was a pilot and he was pretty sure the plane was on fire and he hoped we made it beyond the terrorists underneath us in Guatemala.  I said I had been in the air force but I already had suspected that because the pilot kept cranking the undercarriage up and down trying to blow out the flames because he had emptied the extinguishers.
So we skidded through the foam of an emergency landing at Merida in the Yucatan Peninsula. Then the undercarriage collapsed. Then we all ran up an enormous bar bill.
I remember a flight from the Caribbean to New York where everyone was so overly refreshed that there was no hysteria after the plane fell like we were on a midway ride. Most of us were pinned against the ceiling and some ended up with blood flowing from scalp abrasions. Maybe I don't remember more because I didn't even get bruised....and I made my connection home.
Mary and I joined two couples to fly in a medium-sized twin-engined plane from a private airport in Johannesburg to a safari camp in Botswana. I was in the right-hand co-pilot seat to help balance the load as we taxied out. Then we were cleared for takeoff by the tower at the public airport 15 kilometres away from us across Jo-burg.
As we lifted off, the shadow of a bush plane fell on the cockpit and our pilot banked hard left to pull out of the path of a plane landing right on top of us, its pilot oblivious to the fact we were underneath.
The tower tried to chastise our pilot as he cursed into the radio, then tried to talk him out of filing an incident report. After all, the air traffic controller said, we hadn't touched. Our pilot insisted, saying that the trouble with the "bloody Boer farmers is they feel they can fly anywhere without filing flight plans or paying attention to anyone else."
He didn't take kindly to my bitter joke that if there had been a crash, he and I would have just been mentioned in passing because two of the other four passengers were a direct descendant of Robert E. Lee of Civil War fame and the famous Times reporter who had masterminded the release of the Pentagon papers.
At least it gave us another anecdote to tell that night as we waited for the elephants and lions to gather at the waterhole.
 Or to forget!
 Remembering near misses is best shoved to the back of memory banks and only thought of again for a few moments when there is a newspaper story about someone who once went through 49 days of frozen hell and then lived on for another 45 years to die peacefully in California.

CANADA'S NNAs ARE GOLDEN OSCARS

BOB REGULY'S AWFUL END TO GREAT CAREER

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

NAMING THE IDIOTS

 

Supposed friends used to say when an old fart like me retired that he or she was worn out. The reality is that in most cases we don't want to stand the BS a second longer.

It has always been the case that the good old days often weren't. They were "good" only in your nostalgia which has been edited by more holes in your memory than cheesecloth so that you have forgotten the crap of daily hassles.

But now the nonsense has multiplied to ruin what we hoped would be more sensible public life.

There are new hurdles the height of the mountains I once climbed in the Yukon all fed by an explosion of populism infected with tribalism and politically correct views where facts and logic don't mean a damn thing. The crazies have shot machine guns at history.

So even when they  talk about the past without endless apologies, they don't mention what really happened because it doesn't suit the latest pandering to the latest clutch-and-grab of activists.

And so we trash the past and slander its leaders because a few mouthy jerks want to justify their income and existence and public rep rather than actually work for a living.

Ryerson University is being renamed because some educrats who know little about the history of influential Egerton Ryerson and the school's great six decades have been intimidated and seduced by a supposedly large movement which knows nothing about the man and the school. 

I do! And I know the man and the school were great. The hell with those who disagree, and say Egerton Ryerson was the architect of the awful Indian residential schools that crushed indigenous kids after it ripped them away from their parents.

I will spare you a recitation of all my proof that I know more about the man and the university than the name-changers but just check my biography on blog.johndowning.ca. I will also refer you to my three blogs over recent years about the phony name crisis and the grand circus when the university was born out of post-war chaos.

But Ryerson did hire me to write the book about its early history. I did help write its first history plaques after I was student president and student newspaper editor. I did serve on several task forces, the board of governors, search committees, (my nominee, Walter Pitman, became president) advisory committees and I did teach there. I did turn down a request to head a course.

So I do know what I am talking about more than the current excuses of leaders. And when I argue the renaming was stupid, I am hardly alone. The National Post had an article April 28 by a Ryerson prof, Patrice Dutil, which began: "The renaming ... was driven by a systematic process of shaming Canadian history by outright distortions and gross misunderstandings."

The Post also had an April 6, 2021, article by Dutil and Ryerson prof Ron Stagg that outlined the wonderful background of Egerton Ryerson as one of the most significant fathers of education in Ontario and Canada. I blogged about it the next day titled Only The Ignorant Would Rename Ryerson.

It's just incredible there was not more of an uproar when Ryerson's statue, one of the most famous in the city, was destroyed. Paid for by public subscription including pupils throughout Canada and even the eastern U.S. because he brought free education to all elementary and high schools, as well as starting a museum, art gallery, art school, publishing house, and teacher's college which still exist in grander form. Strange if not shocking that I never heard any of the leaders at ROM and Victoria College and the many other offsprings of his countless endeavours defend the reputation of this giant being slaughtered by intellectual pygmies.

But then too many of our leaders are gutless when it comes to reasoning with those who say ALL our past is rooted in racism and hatred of minorities and there is nothing to do but apologize endlessly even when the indigenous claim is for land that was under water before the awful white men dumped fill. The claim has been made for areas where there was never an indigenous population according to various university studies. 

And so we trash a man who did so much for his country that he should be a national treasure.  But heck, he was one of those damn preachers who believed it was his duty to preach Christianity and serve others and actually live with the "natives" and teach them about farming and have one as his best friend. He even started agricultural experiments to test the climate.

The militant indigenous demands for more rights and money would be blessed if Egerton Ryerson were still alive because he would be a great leader for all their legitimate causes and have enough sense to caution them against their more ridiculous demands. 

A friend is writing a book about the Ryerson debacle who is an expert in indigenous history. This means he is starting from a deep hole because he knows what he is talking about and the point I have been making is that facts no longer seem to matter, especially when it comes to kowtowing on indigenous mythology. But it really doesn't matter what he knows or says because it will be ridiculed because it doesn't help whatever cause the ignorant have dreamed up to milk us. The cause is more important than any fact.

This published author told me in an email:"It's kinda scary that the professors who teach at Ryerson know so precious little about Ryerson and the true history of the Indian residential schools."

I will spare you the bile from all my fellow grads who wish that Ryerson would concentrate on just teaching instead of running around frantically trying to be in front of every trendy issue.

The response to my blog last Dec. 10 titled The Scalping of Ryerson's Past reassured me wrongly then  that the administration  wouldn't be nuts enough to go ahead with renaming once the impact sunk in of all those who thought it a bizarre idea.

Once again I turned out to be as as wrong as I was when I thought as a veteran columnist and editor who had twice rejected offers from two parties to run for them that the public would finally see through Trudeau The Lesser as he excuses his gropings and muggings and continual conflicts of interest. You would have thought they would have been warned by the shenanigans of his dad, Pete The Diffident, and his mother Margaret, who was the strangest wife of a PM that this country will ever have.

I had thought in recent years it was finally going well at what used to be slurred as Rye High, as I wrote on Sept. 21, 2019 in a blog titled Happy Birthday Ryerson University.

Ah, those were the days my friend, back when few knew much about Ryerson Institute of Technology and the grand accomplishments of Egerton Ryerson were buried in history, not hateful lies.

Our class was tiny but grads became editors and professors and columnists and publishers and even university publicists. We huddled in a glorified closet to gossip and gripe over lunch. And we made up a song and sang it in the annual student revue called RIOT (after the school initials.)

Ryerson all hail to thee

You're preferred to Ryerson

Other schools are tiresome

Cause they charge a higher sum

You are best cause you charge less

Hail to thee O Ryerson.

It did charge less, and it was also better than my time at U of T.  However, now they have sawed off the horn of the unicorn, a useful title for my book that I stole from an early Ryerson pioneer before delusions warped education at 50 Gould.

 I will never forget that ditty or my school buddies or those early years in the 1950s.

 I will never not think that Egerton Ryerson was a Goliath of education. But his name has been trashed now even though the final stage of the name change, the Legislature, a confused and reluctant parent, still has to approve it.

That probably will happen but I know as the Canadian National Exhibition president who applied for a new act to cover changes at the big fair only to have the Legislature pass the wrong language that anything can happen when MPPs get involved. 

It would be only fitting if they screwed it up. After all, everyone else has as they ignore all the facts.