Stories About Storytellers Read online

  All of this was excellent training for the newspaper world, of course, and on graduation he plunged into journalism in Vancouver with the News-Herald, before having cups of coffee with papers in Edmonton, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, then finally, in Vancouver again, as nature surely intended.

  To me he was always a Vancouver guy, even after he became a sort of “Mr. Canada,” roaming the country, gathering ordinary people’s tales on his portable tape recorder. Vancouver suited him, just as it suited the informality of the turtlenecks he always wore, along with grey slacks and a tweed jacket. That was the uniform for his trim body, and I don’t believe I ever saw him in a collar and tie, which he obviously dismissed as a crazy form of eastern formality that he disliked, just as he disliked all formality (“what the hell”). Vancouver seemed to suit his family, too, and there he and his first wife raised their two kids, while Barry worked at the Sun, and, like a typical B.C. guy, went boating and fishing in what he called “the saltchuck.” When I met him on my frequent editorial visits to Vancouver, he seemed happy in his role as the Sun’s books editor. When he said that some day he was going to quit all this and write a bestselling book, I made encouraging noises, as I always did in newsrooms.

  A word about Vancouver. My first week in Canada was spent there, and I never quite got over it. Stepping off the plane and taking a taxi from the airport along Grant McConachie Way still sets me sniffing the salt air and wondering why I ever left. Good old Mr. McConachie was a reason I was able to travel there so often as a boy editor in the late sixties and early seventies. A nice man named Ron Keith was writing the biography of his now-deceased old pal Grant, who had turned his career as a wild, seat-of-the-pants bush pilot into one as the president of Canadian Pacific Airlines. Ron was high in the CPAir structure, and he took it as a personal affront that CPAir jets — with napkins and plates and real knives and forks! — were flying half-empty between Toronto and Vancouver, when his editor could have been using one of these seats to come out and work with him. It seemed churlish to discourage him.

  Happily, Ron Keith’s book, Bush Pilot with a Briefcase (1972), was a huge success. It recounted stories of barnstorming early days (including the Alberta wedding party when Grant’s mechanic, the bridegroom, so enraged the bride by his accidental revelation that he had a wooden leg, that she, a circus professional known as Bitsy the Snake-Charmer, insisted on demonstrating her famous flying splits routine, which went wrong, leaving her locked in full splits position in the local hospital for her wedding night). All this, and Grant’s later business deals to expand CPAirlines around the world, with General MacArthur in occupied Japan (a good deal), and with General Chiang Kai-shek in China (a bad deal) meant that the book deserved its huge sales. It was a typical rags-to-riches business success story, and there is always a keen market for such books.

  But I learned that even the clunky title helped. Any Canadian book with “Bush Pilot” in the title will do well. An American publisher once joked that since books about Abraham Lincoln, about doctors, and about dogs all did well in the United States, the perfect American book title was Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog. In Britain, the humorist Alan Coren did similar research and learned that sure-fire success awaited any book that dealt with Nazis, golf, and cats. His solution was a book named Golfing for Cats, with the flag on the hole that the golfing cat was putting towards neatly adorned by a swastika.

  In Canada, I can report — after a lifetime’s research — that similar success awaits any book with a title that deals with hockey, bush pilots, bears, wolves, and getting rich slowly. I pass this information on as a community service.

  Vancouver, for me, was a second home, and always a place of amazing stories. Sometimes I didn’t even have to leave the airport to come across them. On one occasion I was hanging around, waiting for my bags to arrive off the Toronto flight, when there was an explosion of rage on the other side of the carousel. A big, burly guy who looked like a biker was standing nose to nose with his female companion, bellowing threats and waving his arms really close to her face. She just stood there, eyes closed, taking it. It was the most violent piece of non-violence I had ever seen, and I walked over to the nearby Mountie station to alert them to what was going on.

  “Don’t worry, sir” was the reply. “We’re already on it.”

  A small female Mountie appeared on the scene, backed up by a male Mountie, who played no part in what followed. The biker guy reacted unwisely, and very loudly, to the police approach. “You tryin’ to tell me in this country a guy can’t talk to his lady . . . aagh!” In seconds she had his arm up his back and was frog-marching him away. She was very small, compared to Mr. Biker, but very determined. Around the carousel people exchanged pleased smiles. The threatened woman just stood there, not reacting in any way. Barry Broadfoot, promising anonymity, would have got a great story out of her.

  Try this one, the most unlikely story of my life: I was a young editor — let’s say in my early thirties — and was on business in the city, contacting current authors like Ernie Perrault and Eric Nicol, looking for new authors, and promoting forthcoming books to book review editors like Barry, and I was staying at the Hotel Vancouver. One night at about 9 p.m. (midnight, Toronto time) I was strolling in the lobby, near the Kon Tiki Lounge Bar, when suddenly my arm was gripped and a desperate female voice was hissing through clenched teeth, “Just keep walking, they’re following me, but don’t turn around. Just keep walking. I need you to get me out of this!”

  I kept walking. A glance to the side (not behind) showed a well-dressed woman about ten or fifteen years older than me, bravely staring straight ahead, clutching my upper arm as though we were a couple out on a date.

  We strolled into the Kon Tiki, and confronted by its low-lit tables and couches she whispered, “Over to the far side, where we can sit and face the entrance.”

  We did that.

  She scanned the room cautiously, moving her eyes, not her head. “I think we’re safe,” she whispered. Then, giving me her full attention, she said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you — you may have saved my life.”

  Every chivalrous fibre in my body was now standing at attention. I called a waiter over, and she ordered a large brandy. (My usual tomato juice didn’t seem up to the occasion, and I should have specified “shaken, not stirred.”) As she took her drink I tried to find out what was up, and to soothe her fears. She was safe with me.

  It was the Mafia, she explained. The mob ran the downtown area, and tonight they had pursued her into the hotel. If only I knew how deeply they had their hooks into people like her friend X (and here she mentioned a well-known Vancouverite) and the family of . . . and here the pressure the poor woman was under began to tell. Her voice cracked, and she started to cry, quite loudly. Couples having quiet drinks at nearby tables stared.

  When I stretched out a gallant hand to pat hers, reassuringly, things got worse. “You’re no goddamn good!” she cried, shaking me off, with similar loud reproaches.

  What the very interested room saw was a young man who had obviously mistreated this older lady who was his — what? — companion? Waves of disapproval washed over me from the nice people at the nearby tables, and those beyond.

  I excused myself and went across the lobby to the front desk. When I asked if the house detective was around, within ten seconds an anonymous man appeared at my side, so anonymous that to this day I can’t begin to describe him. I explained to him what had happened so far, and that the strange lady was getting stranger, and louder and louder.

  “Just go back and join her, sir, and leave the rest to me.”

  I went back to my seat in the Kon Tiki. I had barely sat down when the detective was happily hailing my companion. “Hey, Annie, there you are!” In greeting her he put a friendly arm around her shoulders and started to lift. “The rest of us are just around the corner, and I said I’d go and find you and bring . . .” and by this time, as everyone around t
he room resumed their conversation, the arm around her shoulders was propelling her easily across the room and out of the lobby. At a discreet distance I followed this unsung genius as he took her out to the taxi entrance and put her — uncomplaining, I noted — in a cab.

  “Wow!” I said, as the cab whisked her away. “You’ve done this before.”

  “No problem, sir,” he said, smiled, and melted away.

  The only problem for me was the cost of the brandy, but the story was worth it.

  For me, Vancouver was bursting with such stories. If I went walking in Stanley Park — which I always did, of course, my father’s son revelling in the trees — I might come off the cricket pitch near Brockton Oval to find myself on the equivalent of a Braveheart set, as archery club arrows flew whistling at nearby targets. Who knew that arrows in flight were so frighteningly loud? And when I met a prominent Indian publisher at a Vancouver publishing event downtown, why were there so many official Canadian security guards around him, talking into their sleeves? Who knew — in those innocent days before the Air India bombing — that Vancouver was a terrorist centre? Later, after I had commissioned Kim Bolan to write her brave book about the Air India mass murder trial (which she did, despite threats against her life and shots at her house), I sat with her one day in the specially secure courtroom, while the two accused smiled and waved at their families and did not seem to notice the members of the bereaved families sitting sadly nearby.

  More innocently, early in my search for potential authors, I visited Jack Webster’s radio show the day Pierre Laporte’s body was found, and I got to know the man who had given his Scottish-born friend Jack the name “The Oatmeal Savage,” one Allan Fotheringham, then a hard-working local newspaperman given to breaking big stories. I even wheeled barrowloads of soil aboard the flower-laden False Creek houseboat occupied by my friend Stanley Burke; anything to get books out of promising prospects before they were snapped up by my friends Jim Douglas and Scott McIntyre.

  Once, I gave an interview to Rafe Mair, the popular B.C. radio host, on the general subject of books, and he surprised me by telling me that I was famous for my puns, and could I come up with one right now. I failed miserably, explaining that puns didn’t work that way. During the commercial break, and thus off-air, I told Rafe that my favourite pun was Dorothy Parker’s joke: “If all the girls at the Yale prom were laid end to end, I shouldn’t be at all surprised.”

  My friend Rafe went back on the air saying, “I’m talking to the well-known publisher Doug Gibson, and we were just discussing puns. Unfortunately Doug’s favourite pun is too dirty for us to use on the air, so we’ll turn to the question of why Canadian authors . . .”

  My favourite punster was Vancouver’s own Eric Nicol, with whom I happily published four books, starting with Vancouver (1970), his urbane urban history of the city. Even better, in the 1980s I turned Eric loose on the idea of “finding” diaries or letters home from Charles Dickens’ son Francis, from his unsuccessful days as a member of the North West Mounted Police. Since the story is almost unbelievable, let me quote Andreas Schroeder’s entry in The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada.

  Always poised for mischief, Canadian humorist Eric Nicol (rumoured to have been aided and abetted by well-known editor-publisher Douglas Gibson) published Dickens of the Mounted (1989), the fake confessions of Francis Dickens, son of the writer Charles Dickens, who (history confirms) really had joined up with the North West Mounted Police in 1874, and who (history suggests) really had been an utterly inept policeman during his twelve years with the force. The hoax became a runaway best-seller, appearing on both fiction and non-fiction lists, apparently fooling a lot more people than either Nicol or the totally unrepentant Gibson expected — including the RCMP itself, which initially promoted the book as an excellent history of the force’s early days.

  I am happy to report that the person doing the promoting was none other than the RCMP’s head man, Commissioner Norman Inkster. I will not forget the exploratory call from his office saying that they had heard rumours that this “history” the commissioner had been touring the country recommending was actually fiction. I was very happy to confirm that it was all made up by Eric Nicol, right from the very first line, “It was not the best of times, it was not the worst of times, it was Ottawa.”

  The response from the assistant at the other end was as muted as if I had announced the death of a dear friend. I suspect the commissioner did not take the news well.

  “Totally unrepentant” sums up my feelings very well. I take special pride that I gave the book a cover featuring a real, historic photograph of Francis standing on parade in his pillbox hat in, as the caption says, “Fort Pitt, NWT, 1884.” Under the title and subtitle “The astounding long-lost letters of Dickens of the Mounted” I had the designer write in Francis’s hand, “What would Pa think of me now, standing in the Canadian mud!”

  Even better, the endpapers inside the book covers are adorned by an accurate map showing “The Travels of Francis Dickens” and by four copperplate letters, copied from the book, created by a hired calligrapher. Even the photograph of Eric Nicol, “the editor of this book,” shows him poised enthusiastically above old, hand-written archival pieces of paper. The caption reads “Eric Nicol enthralled with his discovery in the UBC library.”

  Eric received such help from the library that he nixed my plan to advise readers who wanted to see the original Dickens letters to be very persistent, since a dispute between UBC’s English and History departments over the ownership of the papers would lead the library to deny that they had any such letters — at least initially, until they were worn down. Mischief should only go so far, I guess. Though I would love to have seen Commissioner Inkster banging a white-gloved fist on the library counter.

  At the centre of the Vancouver excitement — appropriate to any big port city, with a huge, wild hinterland to serve — was the Vancouver Sun, no relation to the papers that arouse male readers elsewhere in the country with morning views of Sunshine Girls. There I met many larger-than-life characters, including Jack Wasserman. He was the Sun’s long-time man on the entertainment beat, and is remembered today by the downtown street named “Wasserman Way.” He is also remembered for his roast. The story goes that his many friends laid on a well-attended roast, with speaker after speaker having great fun insulting their pal Jack, to the delight of the audience. The moment came when Jack rose to reply. Great applause. Before he started to speak, he pounded on the podium and disappeared behind it. Huge hilarity. What a joker!

  Then there was an uneasy pause.

  You can imagine the rest. “Is there a doctor in the house?” “Call an ambulance!” “It’s too late, there’s nothing we can do.”

  And the evening ended with everyone heading off home, thoughtfully.

  To my romantic eye, the Sun newsroom, loud with the clack of typewriters, was straight out of The Front Page. And right at home there was this what-the-hell guy Barry Broadfoot, the book review page editor, with his feet on the desk and — probably — a bottle of rye in the drawer.

  In those days every office had its drunk (not that Barry played that role at the Sun, where I’m sure there were several candidates). I’ve worked with a few people where you knew that nothing that old Bill said after lunch really counted. Often old Bill was an ex-serviceman, and everyone else covered for him as a matter of course. Being a drunk then was a little like having a bad cold today; colleagues made allowances and helped out.

  Barry stood out as such a character there that the CBC’s obituary notice stated that at the Vancouver Sun he was “a reporter, editor, and troublemaker” for seventeen years, starting in 1955. Certainly Allan Fotheringham remembers the legend of Barry the known troublemaker wandering into the little room where tickertapes brought in the latest news. He came out into the noisy newsroom and shouted, “Hey, President Kennedy has just been shot!”

  There was a chorus of
groans, dismissive downward waves, and shouts of “Oh, Broadfoot” and “Barry, get lost” (or the journalistic equivalent), and Barry shrugged, true to his what-the-hell code, and went back to his desk.

  Ten minutes later, the phones started ringing.

  I enjoyed my encounters with this book editor who had seen it all, as we talked about my forthcoming books, which I hoped he’d find space to review. We spent time together eating, and (in Barry’s case) drinking. In case you think this is unfair, in his memoirs he described himself in those days as “a fun-loving, hard-drinking, and fairly talented character.” And one constant theme was that, dammit, he was going to quit this job and go off and write a big important book. Some day. You wait. Some day.

  The scene shifts to my office in Toronto. A phone call comes in from my old pal Barry Broadfoot.

  “Barry! Where are you?”

  “Hi, Doug,” came the light, slightly nasal voice, “I’m in Toronto. Any chance we can have lunch?”

  So we had lunch that very day, a Friday, in a dive on Dundas Square, and he amazed me with the news that he had quit the Sun, cold turkey. As he later put it to that paper’s Denny Boyd, “I came in, hung up my coat, took the cover off my typewriter and looked out at the newsroom. Suddenly it looked like a Russian tractor factory.

  “I said ‘the hell with it.’ I put seventeen years of inter-office memos into a shoebox, liberated the typewriter, and walked out. I felt they owed me that much.”

  So what was he doing now?

  “I’m travelling across the country in a Volkswagen, with this.” He hauled out a surprisingly small tape recorder, the size of a paperback book, when in those days tape recorders were at least the size of a fat briefcase. “And I meet up with people and I ask them, ‘What happened to you in the Depression?’ And, you know, Doug, people were so ashamed of what happened to them that they’re grateful for a chance to talk about it now. You wouldn’t believe the number of people — men as well as women — who break down and cry when they tell their stories, and say, ‘You know, I’ve never told anyone this.’”