MY REPORTING JOB WAS TO FOLLOW FRANK AND STAN - I CAME TO ENJOY IT

When my dad died just over a year ago.....and you’ve heard or experienced something similar, I realized how much I didn’t know about the former North Atlantic sailor - former undertaker’s assistant and lumber company manager. Lots of things I wanted to know but never asked. I vowed it would be different for my boys. I’d simply answer the questions before they thought to ask them. Ever since Ed’s demise, I’ve been busy writing down what I did know about his life, and my mother’s, so that Andrew and Robert can put the finished tome with the family tree their mother has been working on for the past four years. Without apology, I’ve been working on this blog series, in small part, as a sort of biographical inheritance. With everybody so busy around here, accept me, I thought it a good opportunity......for my grandchildren, at least, to make sure they have a skeleton of information about their long departed family members.....and of course dear old grandma and grandpa. Some of the stories aren’t the kind to be shared at the dinner table. I’ll warn them and you in advance.

This morning there’s a streamer coming in off the lakes, and at times I can’t even see the driveway for the February squall. It’s quite attractive, here at Birch Hollow, and the snow laden birches, and shadowed footpath across the The Bog, appears as if it is the work of artist A.Y. Jackson. The frame today is my office window. I have been reminiscing lately about my early years in writing, and thinking back to how I began in the print industry after graduating university. It was an awkward, unconventional start that you might have heard or read about in the old days.....when reporter’s wore “PRESS” cards in the bands of their trademark fedoras. Biographies of industry cronies who got their start in the mail room and worked up through the reporting ranks on to editor.

While it’s true I fancied the idea of being a published writer, I didn’t really anticipate starting out as a cub reporter for a small circulation, once a week publication, that at times, cost me more to go to work than I got in my pay packet. It was a hardship believe me. But like the French Foreign Legion, where one could join-up, to hide in anonymity,.....well, I went to MacTier to forget about the girl who had just dumped me for a classmate. After five years and the expectation Gail and I would get married, after university, suddenly I was alone (I found out that she owned all our friends). I buried myself in work all day. I hated the music on the radio. I still hate those same songs all these years later. I came home and went to bed. I repeated this for that first year on the job. I hated being alone. I was one of those pathetic males who couldn’t go anywhere with anyone without saying at some point, “This is where we used to come to get an ice cream cone,”......or something like that. I wrote poems instead about being an outcast and bitter, dwelling in a big old house......yes, where Gail and I used to hang-out. Gads what a year that was!

I know that it was a necessary break-up. Gail had found Toronto to her liking, and I couldn’t wait to get back to Muskoka, diploma in hand. If we had stayed together I would have likely remained forever in the urban jungle. It makes me cringe just thinking about it. Even though I was born in Toronto and raised until the age of eleven in Burlington, when our family moved to Bracebridge in 1966, I felt liberated by the hinterland as I do today. But it was that first couple of years back at home, after the rigors of university and city life, that required patience and a fair bit of healing. I went from having a hot chick on my arm, to hustling around with a camera bag over my shoulder, in only a matter of days. I cursed, I cried, cursed some more, took some photos, some notes, cried, and well, as my dad used to say, “soldiered on.” The following is a reminiscence I’ve written, in summary, several times previously. This is the version I hope my sons will find interesting one day, when they try to figure out why the old man was so weird.

I started in the reporting business in January 1979. I had just opened a small antique business in Bracebridge, finished up a local history research project for the Muskoka Board of Education, helped launch the Bracebridge Historical Society, and Woodchester Villa and Museum, and framed my degree in Canadian history from York University. It didn’t prepare me for the mitt full of hockey score sheets tumbled onto my desk that first week, on the job in the MacTier office of The Muskoka Lakes / Georgian Bay Beacon. It was my job, as a rookie and only reporter, to decipher the scribbled scoresheets and make them into sports page summaries. As you could hardly read the scribbling, I made a lot of spelling mistakes with player names, and heard about every one of them an hour or so after the paper hit the newstand.

My other job was to chase fire trucks. I had once owned a Polaroid camera but the toughest thing about that was affording and then re-loading the film. The boss handed me a 35 mm Minolta, some film, and sent me off down the highway to get a couple of accident-scene flicks. Talk about experience by immersion. I screwed up the hockey scoresheets for the first ten editions and messed up a lot of film. They didn’t have a line-up of second-string reporters, in the wings, so I guess it was a case of putting up with the misadventures, due to lack of available personnel. They probably figured the local kid would stop screwing up sooner or later. If he could graduate university he could figure out how to use a camera.

I got to stand in cold arenas, along stretches of local highways covering weekly traffic accidents, spent quality time dancing around weaving and bobbing firemen, at house and brush fires, and sat in a stupor for four and five hours at council meetings, trying to find a few newsworthy items for the front page. At one Muskoka council, hell, they used to ask my opinion on decisions they seemed reluctant to make. I wasn’t sure I was entitled to an opinion but I played along. I got myself in a lot of messes back then, like not knowing the difference between receivership and bankruptcy, which very nearly got the newspaper in hot-water when the story came out about a local businessman in peril. And then there was the reality, that in the middle of phone interviews or typing the big news stories of the week, I also had to tend the office supply portion of the MacTier business. You know what? University hadn’t prepared me to handle one blessed moment of my new job. I’m not sure where one would attend, to learn about puking discreetly, while at an accident scene, never missing any of the important actuality. Many times I had to exit quickly to gain composure, in order to come back to the scene for important photos and to make notes. I used to run back and forth to the nearby bush to regain composure. I’m so glad the emergency personnel didn’t pick up on this.......and if they did, they saved it for station house anecdotes.

Every time I heard that town siren I got queasy. I saw some terrible things out there on the road. At times you wanted to scream along with the victims, or plug your ears.....and I’m sure all the first responders felt that way a lot. The first head-on collision I went to, on the Highway 69 “S” curve, put me on my ass in the first two minutes on-site. A car had smashed head-on into a tractor-trailer and the debris field was massive.....the odor of burning fuel toxic. But it was the sound of the man trapped in the car that made me sick to my stomach. When they put the jaws of life to work, the release must have caused him severe pain because the scream was blood curdling. I was down more than I was up at that accident scene. The firemen didn’t know whether I was a casualty of the accident or the rubber-legged reporter.

I had never thought much about my own transition in the business, to be able to tolerate such horrible scenes. One afternoon, a few years later, I had to attend an accident in Muskoka Lakes. Two people had been ejected from the car, and when I got there the bodies were covered with a yellow tarpaulin. There were three reporters from the press at the scene.....(we all had emergency scanners at our offices), and one of them was a new girl who had never attended an accident before. She was acting pretty tough and I knew it was a front for being scared. She went on and on about stuff, while my mate and I stood reverently to the side. Then a substantial gust of wind lifted the tarp, exposing the two deceased on the tarmac. From rosy cheeked and bubbly, she went ashen to nauseous, and also disappeared into the woods behind. While you never get used to it, or at least I didn’t, there was a point of traverse between covering council happenings to road carnage that seemed a well trodden down and familiar path. It was a job. Like all jobs, some aspects just suck. I didn’t hate the calls as much as when I had begun.

I remember being at one terrible accident and looking down, at one point, watching a stream of blood washing against my shoe. It was then that I saw a distraught friend running to the scene, falling and screaming up to the wreckage. I had to leave. It was the last accident scene I photographed. I knew both of the young people killed. I was a writer, not a reporter.

When I got to follow M.P.P. Frank Miller, and M.P. Stan Darling around West Muskoka, it became a welcome reprieve. Both politicians were gentlemen and they treated the press with respect. Frank had known my father Ed for years, and was always kind to me at the plethora of “grip and grins” we covered most weekends. There were ribbon cuttings, anniversaries, birthdays, speaking engagements, club events, and wherever these two representatives showed up, Ted wasn’t far behind. The publisher sent me a list of events on Friday afternoons, and I was to notch every single event. We’d use those pictures over three editions if necessary....but by golly, I never took one of those glad-handing pics that it wasn’t eventually used for some purpose. As I wasn’t a very good photographer, some were a wee bit out of focus.

I’ve written about this before but I can’t forget how both Frank and Stan helped me keep my job. First of all, I didn’t pick up photo-taking easily. I endured many misadventures that, in those days, didn’t rear-up until the Monday afternoon, before press day, when the films were developed. By then, finding out that my flicks didn’t turn out well, usually left us high and dry. I learned how to bracket my photos so I could use different light settings to get at least one usable photo, at the very least. The publisher gave me permission to shoot as many photos as it would take to eliminate the pre-publication panic. Frank, in particular, seemed well aware I was going to screw something up, whether it was a battery failure on the flash unit, or the loss of a pen, or notepad, or something else. So after awhile he would actually talk to me before the group photo, to see for himself what was likely to happen that particular day. Frank would go so far as to help me set up a photograph, and pull every one together into the frame. He’d even help me get all the correct spellings of the folks in the photograph. I don’t know how many times in those years, Frank was my crutch, and photographic assistant at the same time, as he was the event’s special guest....the Member of Parliament.....and the Treasurer of Ontario. I wonder how many other reporters could claim to have had such an important man as an assistant.

Stan Darling was much the same. He was brilliant at public relations.....and had perfected this social aspect of his job. Admittedly he was also concerned about getting good press photos for the regular newsletter (of which I had many published over the years) and he figured the only way to get them from me, was to offer some photo direction and suggestions. Stan was a motivator, no doubt about it. When he thought it was time for the group photograph, no matter whether the host or subject of the party was ready or not, Stan, with a booming voice, would get every one’s attention. I was the first to catch the wink of Stan’s eye that it was time to get to work. Both men had busy Saturday schedules, and on many of these junkets, I’d be with them at two or three other events on the same day. Stan would organize my photo for me, if the others didn’t show the initiative. He was as photogenic as a million dollar model, and he always knew how to look good in a crowd. Stan got to know how many shots I needed to fire off to get some good ones, and it was only when I nodded that he broke rank, donned his fedora, and offered his thanks for the invite.

Frank always had a hard time getting out of events because he loved to talk with folks, some he had known for decades. There were times when I’d have to tap his shoulder to remind him that I was heading down the road for another grip and grin, and that both of us were running late. Stan would already be there and be impatient for “Scoop,” (that was me), to get there as well. While they weren’t always at the same event, I’ve got to tell you, it was great to get so many usable shots on the indoor circuit. I’d gladly fob-off the snowmobile races and ice fishing derbies for the Stan and Frank crawl through my region.

One day, early on in my first year reporting, I met Frank at a local diner in MacTier, about a half hour before the next photo shoot. I’d stopped for something to eat but realized I was short of cash. Frank asked me to join him for lunch, on his dime, and I’m not sure if it was a burger or hot dog, but by golly it was delightful either way. He impressed me because he was just an average guy doing his job for constituents and the province. Frank was a smart businessman and a straight-forward politician. He was immensely patient with me when we were working on an interview. But he took time to chat with a cub reporter and seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say. Actually I think we talked about his son Norman, now our Muskoka MPP, who I’d been to England with, as part of John Rutherford’s famous BMLSS Concert Band of 1974. I’d also played hockey with his son Ross, who I believe was a not-so-bad goalie.

Point is, I felt truly honored, to have had these opportunities, over so many years, of getting to know both Frank and Stan. We shared a lot of cake, cookies, coffee and time out on the hustings, especially at election time. While I didn’t start-out enjoying these ventures, because they were (at times) terribly boring events, gradually I came to appreciate time spent with two local political legends. These were well respected elected officials, I can tell you, and every event I went to, was greatly enhanced the moment they walked through the doors. While I probably expected them to be demanding and a tad cranky with their weekend workloads, they were anything but impatient or uncaring to anyone involved. Even when I suffered equipment failure, both gents were abundantly patient and obliging. Frank would even remind me not to forget my cap when we were about to leave an event.

I only have one regret and it was quite accidental. It is the reason I would threaten to fire any reporter who screwed with copy, as a lark, or made sport of photo orders to get a laugh. It happened a lot and sometimes the joke made its way to print. I’d had taken a series of photographs of Stan at the Rosseau Fall Fair one year, using a motor wind to get shots of the MP enjoying a hamburger....while the chef looked on. I had about a dozen good ones to use, and I thought it would be great to run three or four small, closely cropped shots, on page two of that coming week’s Herald-Gazette. My idea was to use one of him approaching the burger, then biting into it, and then looking satisfied after the first bite. Well, some clown in lay-out thought that switching the order would be neat. So instead, they changed the order I had numbered them, so that the “bite shot” ran as the first of three. Then the look of satisfaction, and then third in the row, was of Stan looking at the burger with a puzzled look.....as one might, who has just bit into something dreadful, or a mouthful of the chef’s hair. As they howled about the sequence on the layout table, Jesus I didn’t think they’d wind up that way in the paper. The publisher hadn’t quite expected it either, and as they were close friends, old Ted had to make a phone call of clarification. Stan, as usual, wasn’t perturbed because the photos were clear and posted with prominence. He didn’t seem to upset about it, but I did suggest I’d make it up to him somehow. I was laughing too hard to fire anybody that day.

The best candid shot of Frank, as I’ve written about before, was at a Huntsville overpass opening. Jim Snow, then Minister of Transport, pulled me aside and told me he was going to take the ceremonial scissors, and instead of cutting the ribbon, would snip off a portion of Frank’s new tie. Jim was a wonderful character, full of interesting stories, and had the kind of twinkle in his eye that meant, to me, he was serious. He let me know that he’d do this on the count of three. Sure enough, on three, with Frank staring at me, Jim dropped the ribbon, grabbed his tie, and took the scissors to the tip as promised. I got the shot. I sort of expect, with Frank’s expression, he knew his associate was up to a prank. Now this was my kind of reporting, all of it memorable and social. There were many times reporters were not treated very well but with these folks, every event they attended had a goodwill attached that was genuine. Including ribbon cuttings like this one.

Knowing Frank back then got me close, for many candid photographs, with Cabinet Ministers such as Frank Drea, Roy McMurtry, and Premier Bill Davis. With Stan and Frank I got a chance to get close to Princess Margaret and Lady Sarah, when they visited Muskoka in the early 1980's. There were many other photo-shoots that Frank and Stan afforded me, over their years in office, that gave me many good front pagers.

I got over the funk of that first year, as an unhappy single guy, in part, because I was occupied with interesting work. I know it may sound overly sentimental, to afford Frank and Stan credit for my recovery, but it was venturing out with these gentleman, into areas and social circumstances I’d never known or experienced in other ways, that was illuminating at a most important time in my writing career. The fact they didn’t blow me off as a rookie reporter was a start. I’m pretty sure in the highly competitive media scrums, newbies don’t get many helping hands to keep their jobs.

Just a bunch of neat memories now. Good for the boy’s scrapbook.

The snowfall this morning has become heavier, since I began this morning journal, and the challenge at this moment, for the writer in residence, is to leave this warm, comfortable, soothing domain, flanked by purring cats and a crackling hearth, to shovel that driveway......that apparently won’t shovel itself.

Farewell for now.