Fish Wrapped Read online

  FISH WRAPPED

  True Confessions From Newsrooms Past

  ESSENTIAL ANTHOLOGIES SERIES 13

  Guernica Editions Inc. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. The Ontario Arts Council is an agency of the Government of Ontario. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  FISH WRAPPED

  True Confessions From Newsrooms Past

  COMPILED AND EDITED BY

  David Sherman

  TORONTO • CHICAGO • BUFFALO • LANCASTER (U.K.)

  2020

  Copyright © 2020, David Sherman, the Contributors and Guernica Editions Inc. All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Michael Mirolla, general editor

  David Sherman, editor

  Cover illustration: Aislin

  Cover design: Mary Hughson

  Interior Design: Rafael Chimicatti

  Guernica Editions Inc.

  287 Templemead Drive, Hamilton (ON), Canada L8W 2W4

  2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, N.Y. 14150-6000 U.S.A.

  www.guernicaeditions.com

  Distributors:

  Independent Publishers Group (IPG)

  600 North Pulaski Road, Chicago IL 60624

  University of Toronto Press Distribution,

  5201 Dufferin Street, Toronto (ON), Canada M3H 5T8

  Gazelle Book Services, White Cross Mills

  High Town, Lancaster LA1 4XS U.K.

  First edition.

  Printed in Canada.

  Legal Deposit – First Quarter

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2019947082

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Fish wrapped : true confessions from newsrooms past / compiled and edited by David Sherman.

  Names: Sherman, David, 1951- editor.

  Description: Series statement: Essential anthologies series ; 13

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190160284 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190160292 | ISBN 9781771834971 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771834988 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781771834995 (Kindle)

  Subjects: LCSH: Reporters and reporting—Canada—Anecdotes. | LCSH: Newspaper editors—Canada— Anecdotes. | LCSH: Journalism—Editing—Anecdotes. | LCSH: Journalism—Canada—Anecdotes.

  Classification: LCC PN4912 .F57 2020 | DDC 070.92/271—dc23

  Contents

  Prologue: years of making magic

  DAVID SHERMAN

  Insult was our lot in life

  RICHARD LITTLEMORE

  Fake news is old hat

  NICHOLAS STEED

  Hot type to no type; when the story was all

  JIM DUFF

  Trenchant tales of sexism, survival et moi

  SUSAN KASTNER

  Bittersweet call of the anarchists’ den

  LIAM LACEY

  I read it in the paper

  MARK ABLEY

  Memories, broken hearts and the cop that wasn’t

  TIM HARPER

  The Sun: collusion, conspiracy and cold beer

  RICHARD LITTLEMORE

  Blood and babes were bread and butter

  JIM WITHERS

  Once upon a time it sang

  DAVID SHERMAN

  The man who wasn’t there

  EARL FOWLER

  Ups and downs of rock ’n’ roll

  PETER HOWELL

  Awash in Spicer’s spirited dinners

  CHARLES GORDON

  Discovering Montreal’s lush life

  PETER COONEY

  Apprentice tarred and taught

  MICHAEL COOKE

  Scents of film reviewing: sex and money

  JAY STONE

  Dining out on celebrity tidbits

  TOMMY SCHNURMACHER

  Funny headline goes here

  JIM WITHERS

  Blooper Central: Copyeditors asleep at the switch

  The junket junkie and the agents of suppression

  JIM SLOTEK

  The gentlemen of the Fourth Estate

  MARIANNE ACKERMAN

  Squashed Dog

  BILL TURPIN

  I as in the first and most important

  SARAH MURDOCH

  Supermarket tabs: what do facts have to do with it?

  LIZ POGUE

  Nothing too small to print

  JOHN POHL

  Cool, sweet taste of printer’s ink

  DANE LANKEN

  Lather, rinse, repeat: a print junkie imposter

  LIZ BRAUN

  Spelling important; truth not so much

  BRIAN DOYLE

  Gripped by the balls

  BRIAN KAPPLER

  Acknowledgements

  About the Editor

  Prologue: years of making magic

  DAVID SHERMAN

  A Grade One teacher suggested we circle the words we could read in the newspaper. So I did. And I started looking forward to the Star, waiting for it anxiously. How did they do that? Every afternoon a thick sheaf of thin paper, as wide as my arms were long, full of pictures and small print and big print and ads for food and furniture and everything else. Every day, except, of course, for Sunday. Montrealers, perhaps still in the throes of its Catholic origins, felt the day of rest was best spent praying over the world’s tribulations, not reading about them.

  My father was a working man and resented paying maybe 25 cents a week for the morning paper, too. It was old news by the time he came home to the Star, his afternoon paper, already an endangered species thanks to the nascent TV news at six.

  But I nagged and nagged. I soon had the Gazette to wake up to and the Star to return from school to before sitting down on the floor for the daily salt-water TV adventures of Lloyd Bridges’ Sea Hunt.

  I never asked anyone how a newspaper was possible. I didn’t know anyone privy to the magic. But I kept reading it. In a few years, I began to recognize bylines. Real people wrote this stuff, some of them from bureaus in places I found all over the globe in my bedroom – Paris, London, Washington, Moscow, Tokyo, mystical foreign worlds in my struggling imagination. I began to look forward to reading them, began to understand what they were talking about.

  Wrestling with these huge broadsheets became compulsive. I started reading stories on games I had seen or listened to the night before. Later, I read stories on shows I had seen the night before. How did they get this pack of paper to my door with insights on something I had seen only a handful of hours after I had seen it?

  So I wrote a letter to the Star. I was 13. It was pretty on point. “How does someone become a reporter? I’d like to do that.”

  I pecked it out on my mother’s Underwood, a fine machine, mailed it and forgot about it. I have no memory of if or how they replied then. But, when I finished high school, the Star did call. They had kept my letter on file. Would I like to be a copy boy in the newsroom for the summer? Are you kidding? More magic.

  The Star building was nearly a block long, its front windows filled with the monstrous Goss presses and the men who made them move. They enchanted me even as a child. But, my first day on the job, five floors above, when they began to roll and the building shook, I smiled. How appropriate. Newspapers made the ground tremble, concrete and mortar shake. This was the place to be.

  I don’t remember a woman on the news desk. I recall only rows of white men in white shirts, bent over, scribbling and calling “Copy!” Not sure they ever looked at me. And, of course, they smoked, just to add to the noir of the grand white space bleached by fluorescents.

  A
managing editor died at his desk, they wheeled him out and the new managing editor’s name was painted on the door while his predecessor was still in rigor.

  The mumbling police radio and its ramifications and the endless wire copy had convinced the men in the newsroom death stalked us all. Just one more obit and the question of how to play it.

  I remember the composing room and hot type and hot men and sweat and fantasy. People worked like this. In the dark and noise and stink. This was how the paper was put together, in purgatory, a symphonic cacophony of regimented chaos.

  I was at the wire machines when the first pictures from the moon came zipping through, line by line, in sets of three wet, coloured sheets and somehow they were going to be put together and printed downstairs and show up at everyone’s door next afternoon. In colour. They were in my hot little hands and came somehow via the moon. No way I could wrap my head around that. More magic.

  When the summer was up they asked me to stay and work the police desk, become a reporter. But, in my family, quitting school would’ve been like dropping out of the priesthood. So I turned my back on getting paid for the best education I could’ve had and went to school. The closest journalism school – a curious notion – was 600 kilometres away. So I stayed in Montreal, fumbled my way through a year or more of McGill and came away cherishing only the fact Ernest Hemingway admitted rewriting a single paragraph 35 times. No magic there. It was work.

  Later, at the Sherbrooke Record, writing editorials, taking pictures and working the darkroom, laying out pages and learning to write, drinking too much coffee with the indefatigable editor, Jim Duff, I made an appointment with a Gazette entertainment editor. I was desperate to work on the big city daily that, under Lindsay Chrysler, had broken big stories, many by the aforementioned Mr. Duff. Before the corporation moved in and Chrysler moved on. As did Duff.

  I showed the entertainment editor my work, in her office in the back of the newsroom, the Promised Land, looking and sounding like it should, and she said I wasn’t ready. Maybe in another year, she said.

  Despondent, I drove back to Sherbrooke and found a letter in my mailbox from the Gazette’s managing editor. Would I meet with their city editor?

  I came into Claude Arpin’s office and he put his feet on his desk, big smile, short hair, healthy belly and a life-is-good attitude.

  He asked only one question: “How much do you want, kid?”

  I ran down St. Antoine St., a puppy off the leash. I called my girlfriend. I called my mother. I called my best friend and he took me out and got me drunk. Pretty easy cause I wasn’t a drinker. One of the happiest days of my life.

  But, it was a rocky love affair. We didn’t always see eye to eye, this career and I. Or maybe it was the interests that controlled my career. Our ambitions differed.

  But there are memories. Eating pancakes and drinking milk in an ugly Ste. Catherine St. diner between sets with Mose Allison. Walking through Old Montreal and Chinatown, eating barbecued pork, with playwright Israel Horowitz. In a huddle with hard-smoking René Lévesque. And, later, at the Paul Sauvé arena, as thousands wept at the loss of the sovereignty referendum, a stoic Lévesque assuaging their grief. A packed and mute dressing room where B.B. King demanded silence so I could ask him questions, hands trembling, sweat dropping onto my notebook. In hotel rooms with Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, and Canned Heat, who, when we were done, said: “You know where we can get some grass?” Moi?

  Yes, the love affair was rocky. We split up and came back together a few times. I finally learned how it all worked, or most of it, at least. Some of it I would’ve been better off not knowing.

  If raising a child takes a community, so does putting together a good paper.

  That contract between a community and its paper has been shattered. The papers no longer come to my door. Worse than that, I get queasy and I get angry when I see the wasting disease they’re suffering.

  But, when I spot a newspaper at a café or restaurant, I sometimes see what used to be, like looking at a faded picture of a young, long-ago lover.

  In the pages that follow, some of the country’s esteemed journalists look back at their love affairs with the mystical process that brought together communities and newspapers.

  As Liam Lacey points out, the Bogart film Deadline U.S.A. was bemoaning the drift to softer lifestyle pieces in the 50s. Television’s invasion had left papers bloodied but upright. Later, assaulted by the Internet, corporations and their hedge-fund overlords decided to slowly strangle the geese that had laid so many large, shiny eggs, alienating their communities and customers.

  For the writers on the following pages, the not-so-gentle descent into irrelevancy was bitter and not excessively sweet.

  Here are their eulogies to lives dedicated to the fish-wrap business, many of whom, to stretch a metaphor, ended up as obsolete and tossed aside as the fish wrap they churned out.

  Insult was our lot in life

  RICHARD LITTLEMORE

  Fish wrap. Birdcage liner. No one is more willing than newspaper people to embrace the insults piled upon our product. Maybe it’s a defence mechanism. In a business where you’re slamming through reams of material every day, it’s inevitable that things will go wrong and, when they do, it will happen in front of the whole world. In such a business, you need a thick skin. Or maybe our willingness to repeat these slurs reflects a subconscious longing for our contribution to serve some lasting purpose – no matter how low and utilitarian.

  If our craftiness is not collectible, at least it’s nice to see it enjoying a second life – even if only as a safe place for the new puppy to do its business.

  Such was the tone of the triumphant story that Vancouver Sun editorial writer Nat Cole (no relation) brought to the office one day in the early 1990s. Nat came into the morning editorial meeting, tickled, because he’d stopped for take-out from his local fish ‘n’ chip shop the previous evening and found that his dinner was wrapped in his own editorial. It was, he said, perfect same-day service. He cast about the place looking to see if there was someone he recognized, to establish whether the package was, itself, an editorial comment – a greasy smear of his opinion piece. But the editorial was unsigned, so no one had a clue of Nat’s role. It was just the fates, offering up equal parts insult and honour.

  But maybe our fish-wrap obsession has nothing to do with a hankering for lasting impact. Maybe the impermanence of news (and, now woefully, of newspapers) was the source of the charm all along. There has always been something liberating about the life of an ink-stained wretch. Whether your day’s labour resulted in the best and most fabulous scoop of your career, or the worst and most humiliating mistake – in 24 hours or less, it was fish wrap, and you began the next day with a blank page and a clean slate. In that light, you might be forgiven for suspecting that all we black-humoured newspaper cynics were really closeted optimists, addicted to our daily dose of hope.

  That’s a better explanation for a second story about fish wrap. This one also unfolded at the Vancouver Sun, in early 1995, around the time that Conrad Black was consolidating his ownership of what had been the Southam newspaper chain. I was no fan of the pompous Lord Black of Crossharbour, but it was hard to think that his influence could be worse than what we were enduring already. When I landed my first newspaper job at the Ottawa Citizen in 1977, Southam was a staid but respectable family firm, evincing a corporate policy amounting to noblesse oblige. But the chain soon fell into the hands of a bunch of accountants who didn’t understand the newspaper business and who counted the bottom line as more important than the black line.

  When the last pre-Black Southam CEO, Bill Ardell, visited the Vancouver Sun in 1994, he wandered, perhaps accidentally, into the morning editorial meeting, so we tried to include him in the discussion on a string of stories about which he seemed blissfully unaware. Finally, one of the writers said: “Did you even read the paper today?” And when Ardell paused, deer in the headlights-style, she a
dded: “Like, other than the ROB.” He admitted that he had not.

  So, when Black came along (and before he began looting older papers in the chain to underwrite the National Post), it seemed a nice change. There was more money for newsrooms and more interest in the product. Sure, Black and his network interfered more obviously in editorial policy, but at least they knew there was an editorial policy. To mark the change, when Black made his first visit as proprietor, photographer Glen Baglo went out and bought a big salmon, wrapped it in a copy of that day’s Sun and offered it as a prop. Black, hugely to his credit, clasped both salmon and paper to his breast and stood for the photo. I was cheered by the resulting image; it was fun to think that the new owner got it. It was promising to think he might even have a sense of humour. Baglo says: no. Black took the packaged salmon, stood still for exactly three frames and then cast off the paper and the salmon like yesterday’s news.

  Still, the shot was glorious, and Baglo left it on the photo desk with a note saying: “Don’t mention the fish in the cutline.” He wanted readers to discover it on their own terms. The editors ignored the note and mentioned the salmon in the hed, the kicker and the cutline, each of which said, pleadingly, that the future of newspapers was not fish wrap.

  Too bad. Fish wrap was good. In fact, fish wrap was the best.

  RICHARD LITTLEMORE has given up sports cars, strong drink and, hardest of all, newspapering, but continues to pay his exorbitant Vancouver mortgage by ghostwriting everything from speeches to books, and, periodically and mostly for fun – scratching out the odd bit of journalism.

  Fake news is old hat

  NICHOLAS STEED

  Fake news? We didn’t have to invent it. It just came naturally.

  Barely out of my teens I am two weeks into my first job as a reporter on the Woodstock Sentinel Review, a daily broadsheet covering rural Southwest Ontario. Total journalism training so far: a quick read of a book on how to become a reporter. The secret to finding scoops, it says, is keen observation of your surroundings. As the book suggests, I look around. Sure enough I spot large numbers of black and white Holstein Friesian cows dotted around the Oxford County countryside. Hard to miss them, actually. The idea comes to me in a flash. Why not start a feature called Cow of the Week – a picture of a champion cow and an interview with the farmer?