CHRISTMAS IN GRAVENHURST -

WHAT REPORTING TAUGHT ME ABOUT LIFE - THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE IT INTERESTING - SUCCESSES, FAILURES, EMOTIONS, AND COMMONPLACE

IT FEELS LIKE ENGLAND OUT THERE TODAY. IT WAS LIKE THIS MOST DAYS I WAS IN NOTTINGHAM AND LONDON, AND I LOVED IT. I JUST FOUND THE UMBRELLA I BOUGHT THERE…..AND THAT WAS THE LAST TIME I USED IT. A WALK OVER TO THE BOG, AND I'M BACK IN MUSKOKA AGAIN…..AND IT'S JUST WONDERFUL. I DON'T OWN A SNOWMOBILE ALTHOUGH I'M SORRY FOR THOSE WHO DO HAVE ONE SITTING ON THEIR PROPERTY……WAITING FOR THE CANADIAN WINTER TO COME HOWLING OVER THE HORIZON. SNOWMOBILING BRINGS A LOT OF REVENUE, AND SPIN-OFF BUSINESS TO OUR REGION, SO AS PART OF THAT BUSINESS COMMUNITY…..PLEASE LET IT SNOW….SOON!

My publisher kept asking me to do "On The Street," human interest stories. Impromtu, quickie interviews with folks trying to get to their jobs, to lunch, to appointments, to pick-up their kids, get dinner on……I hated the concept, and I tune-out when they do it on the evening news. It is a shallow, stupid thing to do…..especially if you're genuinely interested in real human character stuff in the first place. The reporters I fobbed the assignment on, couldn't have cared less about doing the gig, except for the fact their beer money and a bit left over for rent, kind of depended on it. These same eager-beaver reporters would have just as soon, picked someone out of the crowd, and asked to do a full interview….than hit ten or twenty folks, with a couple of surface, frivolous questions that usually generated several (goofy) word responses……..providing a very unentertaining newspaper section. But then I was always dodging and darting to avoid management when they got what they thought was a brilliant idea. They had a disconnect with the editorial composition of the paper, because they focused on the advertising component. That was their job, and during my tenure as editor, they did a pretty good job getting us through economic downturns. It's when they decided to take someone else's advice, whether that was an advertiser's opinion, or a member of the congregation at a local church, or from a club associate. Instead of asking the front-liners, who lived and breathed the newspaper business, they imposed ideas on us without consultation. Believing in the product, and knowing very well what the readership wanted…..and what some with vested interest wanted more, we had an editorial game we used to play to get rid of bad plans. I can't tell you how many grand concepts got crushed, because we decided against. The one thing they did know, is that the editorial staff had won-over the readership, and had made friends in high places. They knew our wages were such that, well, they were getting a bargain every week from our proficiency, accuracy, and reliability. We were still a crew of bastards and manipulators, but we got the job done. We could get advertising management to back-off….usually, by deferring long enough that they forgot the project entirely.

What we got tired of most, was being minimized by management. In only a few years of working together, our news staff was coming up with huge feature projects and in-depth human interest stories, without even the slightest meddling of the advertising department. And because of our interest in improving our own capabilities as writers, we gave advertisers an even better publication to be associated. We were starving artists, and the only way to improve our lot, was to work long and hard, to get those portfolio news and feature stories out there………as most hoped the daily press would come calling if the material demonstrated our talents. We worked well beyond the weekly pay-cheque, but you could always tell, management wanted more. "What about that "Man on the Street" feature I asked for," asked the publisher. "Yea, we're working on that……coming along just fine, and I'll let you know how we progress." When what I mumbled under my breath was, "I don't think so buddy." I was, and remain, irreverent to my superiors, which today, makes me the last writer on earth, you'd want beneath the company masthead…..if complacency is the flag you plan on flying. It's actually my badge of honor that most publishers would rather hire the greenest reporter, than employ the guy who always knew how much sand to dump in the vaseline….to convince management to take me seriously.

I didn't decide to be difficult because of ego, or that I have a problem with authority figures. (Of course I do…..that's why I blog). What I didn't appreciate was employing me as an "ideas man," and then letting a friend of a friend of a friend influence our editorial content. We were closest to the news sources and the readers. We were ground level, and believe me, we heard from our subscribers. When we had to go and cover large events, readers were afforded up-close-and-personal occasions to give us crap for what we did or didn't do in the last issue. We listened to all sides. Why not? Our mission, as I mentioned earlier, was to get better, so that we could get a higher profile writing job in the future. If someone could give us good advice….and a great story lead, by golly, this is what we lived for…..and I'm telling you honestly, we all wanted the byline under those big, triple banked, front page headlines……or the prominent half or full page features.

When I wrote my most recent blog about the work of local volunteer firemen, it fits exactly into this profile……of me wanting to do a proper human interest story, not a hurry-up "Q & A" on a street corner, that at best, offers a weak….very weak editorial outcome. I offered this as a compromise to the publisher, and it worked for awhile. We decided to pool the names of citizens we thought would make good feature articles, and we pursued it for about six issues. Until of course, names started to be pushed onto our desks, as potential (you will do these) interview subjects. Yup, the advertising department flourished with these ideas, of how to income-generate off everything in the paper. Soon we were looking at lists of interviews that included the captains of mainstream business, club presidents, and folks that had some significant relationship with management. There was nothing particularly wrong with this……to them, and once again, we found ourselves in that quandary of keeping a job, until we found another, or capitulating, on the off-chance we could take these folks, regardless, and tap them for a good story. We made it a challenge, to make the staged-interviews better than management….even the subject, could have imagined. On an average however, we got bored, and seeing as they were making the editorial decisions, and not good ones, we started to concoct the million and one reasons we didn't have time that week, that month to do the interviews. The problem you see, the advertising folks couldn't do what we did each week……write. They could write notes and memos all over the place, but they knew it wasn't the right path, to order us to do something we didn't believe in. I'm not suggesting sabotage, but what the hell. We could ask their friends all kinds of incriminating questions to fill that white space of the human interest section of the paper……we knew how to make someone look real bad, in the first two paragraphs. So advertising knew when to let loose the tether, and let the writers enjoy a little freedom of the press themselves.

Here's a case in point. In my years as both a reporter, historian, writer generally, I have met thousands of folks in our South Muskoka communities. Our meetings might not have been about newspaper interviews, or anything that involved me writing a single word of overview. But circumstances of community events and organizations I've belonged to, over the decades, has given me a pretty good sampling of the citizens who make up our neighborhoods. In these same years, just as you have, opinions have been garnered about these folks…..from work relationships, to recreation, association, business connections, and as neighbors good and not-so-good. I've known real-life curmudgeons, who are irritable, over-bearing, selfish, stern from sunrise to sunset, and yet I've known them most of my life…..without ever seriously questioning their choice of attitude. They are who they are…..live and let live. I probably wouldn't ask them to do a man on the street interview, or be interested in what they had to say generally. I like friendly people who don't bite.

There have been a couple of gents I've come across, not as a reporter, but as acquaintances through sport. Both were retired and well occupied by their daily projects. Both were not the type to be offering interviews to the local press….and I had no real interest in asking them for a few moments of their time. But you know, it did cross my mind, why these two successful gents were so damn irritable almost all the time. It wasn't a priority to figure it out, and we continued to meet each other at events with a traditional, "Hello, how are you," and that just about wraps it up. One day, I happened to be looking through some scrapbooks in an archives collection, and came upon a story that stopped me in my tracks. I read that article three times because it answered some questions I had about these gents. It was about a fire. Many years earlier. A tragic house fire that claimed the lives of a number of children. The account of it was like this…… The volunteer firemen had their ladder up to a second story window, to rescue a brother holding his young sister with the family dog at his side. One of the fireman, at the window, had grabbed the hand of the young man, and was preparing to guide him onto the ladder. The flames were pressing closer, and there wasn't much time to get them from the upper story, before the whole house became a fireball. Just when it looked like a successful rescue was imminent, the floor beneath them collapsed, the children and dog falling into the fire. That's the way the bodies were found, crumpled together on the first floor.

There were more names of firemen given in that article…..ninety percent of them I knew from almost daily interactions. I don't know what I would be like, after an event such as this, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be as content as I find myself today. And as I judged the individuals as unfriendly and generally grumpy old men, how reprehensible on my part, not to have pondered seriously, the kind of experiences they might have had over a life time; that may have influenced day to day demeanor. These folks never got the care or attention for the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder they suffered…..and whether it was debilitating or not……or they tucked it deep into their psyches, it was the human interest story I needed to know……as a neighbor to these folks……but one I will never be able to address as a reporter, because I know what suffering it will re-generate.

When I wrote about my own on-site emergency reporting, in yesterday's blog, it was with this story in mind. I purposely studied the faces of the firemen, and first responders to fires and accident scenes, moreso than on the victims…..which was my job. What I found, over the years, was the preamble to some future stresses for these folks, just as I was getting photographs at the arena, of mean body-checks and vicious fights, that inch by inch, were shaping those individual characters involved. Those were the physical injuries. The broken arms, wrists, shoulders and knees.

At fires and accident scenes, I watched the transition through the camera lens. I saw brave, bloodied faces, exhausted humanity, angry, sad, often emotionless faces, as the event progressed. As for those firemen, up close, there was a suppression of fear…..and expectation, out of that oath of service, to help those in crisis. The real human interest stories in our community, could be found at scenes as I've described, where humanity shone like a beacon in a dark, threatening sky. But I never felt compelled to trouble them with a reporter's inquiry, the pen scratching copious notes to try and explain what one photograph, in a fraction of a second, could reflect of the soul within.

I have seen the dejection and the expression of sheer joy, on the faces of those first responders……sometimes on the same sweat-covered face, when casualties turn fatal, and when others are of a minor nature……such as when a child is removed safely from a car seat, uninjured,….. but rescuers having to step over the remains of the mother and father, not quite so fortunate. These are members of our community. I could never consider putting their stories out there for public consumption, just to sell a few more papers. On more than a few occasions, however, they have sought me out……as a friend, who understands what it's like to attend these horrific scenes, just to compare experiences, and most of all, validate their feelings, and mine……because for a lot of years, I shadowed them through those unfortunate highs and very lows, all over South Muskoka. Not that I would ever violate their trust, but I can tell you……they need our compassion as good neighbors, friends and family. Most of us, have no concept, how these tragic situations, etch down hard on those people we call first responders.

We should all think about those human interest stories when we try to generalize and offer overviews, at the expense of appreciating all the humanity invested here…. of which most of us will never know the full measure of pain and suffering.