Heroes Read online

  Following that long-ago encounter in Vancouver, I knew that the wellspring of my friend’s talent would never run dry: that it might die with him but not before him. Now he is gone, but his books will outlast him. We must celebrate the unparalleled relevance of Pierre Berton’s accomplishments. We shall not read his like again.

  — 2001

  June Callwood: A Passion for Compassion

  ITALIANS HAVE SAINTS.

  The Japanese have National Treasures.

  We had June Callwood.

  Every country is a mystery composed of the lives of men and women, bound loosely together in common citizenship and a “Republic of Dreams.” But each generation is fortunate enough to be blessed with the presence of a few unusual individuals who have the ability to move outside their own concerns and take up the plight of others, often strangers, and help one another in the agonizing proximity of poverty, disease and damnation.

  June Callwood was one of those rare compassion dispensers, a woman for all seasons, who once advised a group of McMaster University social science students: “I wish that you suffer enough guilt to grow a conscience—but not so much as to sour your life.”

  The last time I saw her, at a December 2006 reception for Stéphane Dion, the freshly minted Liberal leader, she seemed to be having a good day, and when she got up to leave, she danced a little jig and winked at me, not for a moment acknowledging that we both knew how fatally ill she was. We never met again. Looking back on that magic moment, I was reminded of Pablo Picasso, who once wisely observed that it takes a long time to feel young.

  Her own youth was a drab endurance test, with an absent father, an aloof mother and no steady family income. Growing up, she existed on potatoes and water for days at a time. She began her journalism career at the Brantford Expositor in 1941, then joined the Globe and Mail, where she met the love of her life, sportswriter Trent Frayne, though she continued to use her own surname because the paper did not employ married women at the time.

  Writing became her profession, but compassion remained her calling. She helped establish no fewer than fifty epicentres of social activism, including hostels for abused women and the first AIDS hospice in the country. She never let up in her struggle for justice and freedom, but she did it with such good humour that few could refute her causes. “She sees the good things people do, however small, instead of being consumed by the bad stuff that can be ragingly conspicuous,” wrote her biographer Anne Dublin. “By embracing the good, she found the passion she needs to fight for it.”

  Callwood wrote more than two dozen books under her own name and was the ghost writer of many more. My favourite was her Portrait of Canada, a lively and evocative portrayal of her country at a time when its history was supposed to be so dull that only academics were fit write it. In her take, she mischievously pointed out that “Canadians are the third-largest ethnic group in America.”

  Much of her best writing was published in magazines. During the 1950s I served with her at Maclean’s under the fabulous editorial duo of Ralph Allen and Pierre Berton. They never wasted a word. She had a favourite story about how abruptly stories were assigned in those days:

  Berton: “We’d like a piece on the universe.”

  Callwood: “The universe?”

  Berton: “Yeah. The universe. Deadline in two weeks.”

  Callwood: “Fine.”

  Her home life was solid, but she was not immune to personal tragedies such as the accidental death of her youngest child, Casey, and her own cancer, which was diagnosed in November 2003. She spent sixty-six years in journalism and won every award going plus some created specifically for her. But her greatest concern was for the protection of civil rights. “Very often, our view of civil liberties … [is] shaped primarily by something in our Canadian bones,” she maintained. “That gut reaction, a conservative reaction, is what makes us a distinctive people. We are not Americans who happen to have drawn the worst climate and best geography; we are a different people, and this is nowhere more apparent than it is in the area of civil rights.”

  That was the bedrock of her belief system, and she personalized it. “Each person is like a stone in a pond,” she observed near the end of her life. “Individual actions, good or bad, send out tiny ripples that change the surface of the public pond. People, by choice, can spread warm understanding or cold indifference.”

  Her own choice was crystal clear.

  — 2007

  Jack Poole: The Shy Birth Father of the Vancouver Olympics

  LIKE THE PULL of an invisible whirlwind, the proud forest of Vancouver skyscrapers attracted a posse of unorthodox business tycoons whose fiscal fantasies had a habit of coming true. The greatest and yet most modest of them was John W. Poole, the cofounder and moving spirit of next year’s Olympic Games, who died just before the Olympic furor started, after an epic battle with pancreatic cancer.

  Unlike most of his Vancouver contemporaries, who tended to regard themselves as Sungods cavorting on the playing fields of the Lord, Poole was never satisfied with his skyline-altering achievements. He rightly described himself as “an un-public person,” and in his pre-Olympic days, his name seldom appeared in the press. He was ill at ease with journalists, especially when being interviewed in his eighteenth-floor chairman’s office at Daon Development Corporation, which was large enough to hold a platoon of foot soldiers, complete with camp followers. On one such occasion, his nervous answers to my nervous questions about his next megaproject left me with the impression that he was as apprehensive as a wrestler sweating in the ring, convinced his championship rounds would never come. As it turned out, this was a fairly accurate reading of his withdrawn personality, since Poole had indeed spent part of his youth as a semi-successful professional wrestler.

  A photogenic six footer, the youthful Poole, who grew up in Mortlach, Saskatchewan, graduated in civil engineering from the University of Saskatchewan when he was seventeen. He married his high school sweetheart, Darlene. Though he jobbed around Alberta for a while, his lucky gusher was not an oil well but his meeting with a financially brilliant misanthrope named Graham Dawson. A perpetually angry visitor to our discontented earth, Dawson never learned to spend his money happily and tried to impose Upper Canadian puritanism on Vancouver’s Lower Granville hedonism.

  When Poole and Dawson became co-founders of Daon, their two-bit construction company was struggling on the down side of breaking even. To give the upstart firm what then passed for gravitas, the partners hired former Lions quarterback Joe Kapp as their in-house celebrity.

  In 1976, during a brief holiday to California, Poole counted up the houses-for-sale want ads in the Los Angeles Times and was stunned to discover there were only 1,400 vacancies in a city of 3.6 million. “We thought, Gee, can this really be as good as it looks—well, it wasn’t, it was a hell of a lot better,” he told me.

  Within the next twenty months, Poole had amassed California’s largest land bank and expanded into half a dozen American metropolitan areas. By 1980, with net income running an incredible $1 million a week, Daon had become the second- largest publicly owned real estate firm in North America. His personal holdings of Daon shares were worth $100 million, which bloomed forth an annual dividend of more than $1 million.

  Unlike his Howe Street peers, who expended their extra energy on exotic hobbies, such as squiring young chicks in aubergine bikinis, who, they seriously claimed, were a useful hedge against inflation, Poole stuck to raising Hereford and Simmental cattle on his 160-acre ranch near Surrey. After years of hesitating, he did purchase an expensive motor yacht, but his log book seldom showed more than a dozen outings a year.

  Those who knew him best realized that he lived on the tongue of the wind, a man driven more by his dreams for others than for himself. One of the twenty-first century’s hallmarks is that no one is indispensable—that, like it or not, most of us have become interchangeable.

  Not Jack Poole.

  Every country is a mystery composed of the lives o
f strangers who meet at great occasions such as the Olympics and feel good about their country and better about themselves. Such spectacles inevitably have more than one founding father. But suffice it to say that those who are in the know quite simply insist, “There would have been no Olympics without Jack.”

  — 2009

  Marshall McLuhan: Calling Planet Earth

  MARSHALL MCLUHAN SLUMPS through the doors of the midtown Toronto restaurant with an oddly rolling motion, like that of a shore-bound sailor, squinting into the half-light, testing his senses against the glum, plastic dining room. At fifty-nine, white-haired and full of honours, McLuhan has grown a little weary of watching the world through his famous rear-view mirror. His Delphic ideas, which once made him sound like a distant interplanetary intelligence, became the dominant cultural insights of twentieth-century life, so that even the girls who enhanced the mystery of their sexuality with tinted stockings and dark glasses were subconsciously responding to his message.

  “I heard a story the other day,” McLuhan says as we begin a long, relaxed lunch, “about a Scot who comes on the scene of a motor crash. The injured are lying around, and poking one of the survivors in the stomach with his walking stick, he asks: ‘Has the insurance adjuster been here yet?’ Not yet, is the reply, prompting the Scotsman to ask, ‘Do you mind if I lie down beside you?’” The hour or two we spent together every month or so bristled with one-liners such as his imaginary quote from the Greek god Zeus, warning his fellow deity, “Narcissus, watch yourself! “

  When I was a University of Toronto student in the fifties, McLuhan used to be pointed out on the campus as that kooky author of The Mechanical Bride, and in those days he always seemed painfully intense. Now there was a playful aura about him; he had turned himself into an intellectual minstrel, almost a court jester, coining apocryphal slogans for an apocalyptic age. As a fellow diner got up and paid for his meal, McLuhan winked at me. “Money is the poor man’s credit card,” he said, and seconds later told a story about a man who went on a date with Siamese twins: “The next day a friend wanted to know if he’d had a good time, and his answer was ‘Well, yes and no.’”

  His humour was infectious, but Canadian critics had been inordinately harsh on McLuhan’s two most recent books, and I asked him why he stayed in Canada instead of moving permanently to the U.S., where several Ivy League universities offered amenable surroundings, amiable colleagues, large salaries and the respect of his peers. Even though he had had dozens of attractive offers—and did leave temporarily to occupy such prestige-encrusted posts as the Schweitzer Chair at New York’s Fordham University—he always came back. “It’s a nuisance having my books criticized. It’s like being caught with your fly open,” he admitted. “It confuses my students. But I don’t think I’ve ever had more than half a dozen students who read anything I’ve written anyway. They’re not interested in my stuff, and they know very well that if they use it anywhere in their essays, it’s going to be held against them. I warn them never to quote me. Some of my fellow academics are very hostile, but I sympathize with them. They’ve been asleep for five hundred years, and they don’t like anybody who comes along and stirs them up. Still, I experience a great deal of liberty here in Toronto that I wouldn’t get in the States, because I’m taken quite seriously there. The fact that Canadians don’t take me seriously at all is a huge advantage. It makes me a free man.”

  The pop culture we’ve adopted from the U.S. discards its gurus with alarming haste, and McLuhan by this time was not being listened to quite as attentively as he once was. Yet his intuitive leaps, the quality of his probes into a dim future where not only facts, but also the very dimensions that contain them would be changing, remained as relevant as ever. “The new human occupation of the electronic age has become surveillance, CIA-style,” he decreed. “Espionage is now the total human activity—whether you call it audience rating, consumer surveys and so on. All men are now engaged as hunters of espionage. So women are completely free to take over the dominant role in our society. Women’s liberation represents demand for absolute mobility, not just physical and political freedom to change roles, jobs and attitudes, but total mobility. At the same time, Canadian politicians are faced with a serious dropout problem. They’re still talking, but fewer people are bothering to listen. The successor to politics will be propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times. So politics will eventually be replaced by ‘imagery.’ Politicians will be only too happy to abdicate in favour of their images, because the image will be so much more powerful than they could ever be.”

  That’s not your usual chatter over a plate of fettucine alfredo, grown cold and sticky. But McLuhan’s soliloquy turned more relevant when he zeroed in on his favourite politician, then in power. “Pierre Trudeau must be at least 40 percent Indian because nobody could penetrate his tribal mask,” he told me. “Pierre has no personal judgment, but he is always interpreting the whole process that he’s involved in. So that when he slides down a banister or hops off a camel, it’s not really a way of expressing what it feels like to be Trudeau—it’s trying to express what sort of a hell of a hang-up he’s in. He’ll do anything to snap the tension.”

  “Marshall McLuhan and John Kenneth Galbraith are the two greatest modern Canadians the United States has produced,” British novelist Anthony Burgess once wryly observed. The influence of McLuhan’s intellectual pyrotechnics was best caught in a Financial Post article by Alexander Ross: “There was a time when every university in Germany had a free period at 11 in the morning, because that was when Hegel was lecturing in Berlin. McLuhan is that kind of man, in our very own midst. So be proud.”

  Proud we should be, and it was Tom Wolfe, the tart-tongued New York journalist, who coquettishly inquired: “Suppose McLuhan is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov—what if he is right?”

  To which Marshall McLuhan, with that tight John Wayne smile, which signalled his most telling sallies, replied: “I’d rather be wrong.”

  —1971

  Ralph Allen: The Man from Oxbow

  I WAS IN QUEBEC CITY yesterday morning when I heard the CBC announce that Ralph Allen, who was the most influential of the postwar editors at Maclean’s and my most memorable mentor, had died in the night.

  When that cool voice delivered this stunning news, I thought, How can they presume to sum him up in a hundred words? Now I am trying to sum him up in a thousand and that, too, is an impertinent presumption.

  I cannot write about Ralph the war correspondent or Ralph the fisherman or Ralph the raconteur. In the decade I knew him, we had what he once called “the tough relationship between editor and writer”; and we were very different men, of different generations, different backgrounds, different personalities. But I don’t expect ever again to know a man I can so implicitly trust and so unabashedly revere. It was he who formed the sensibilities and attitudes that allowed me to view Canadian politics “with a mind cleared of cant.”

  When I first went to Maclean’s in 1956, Ralph Allen was its editor, and he made all of us who worked for him seem special, bigger than we were, better writers than we knew how to be. He made us feel part of an admirable adventure. He sat, fat, freckled, red-headed, quick-tempered—and irreplaceable—in a corner office, and the world outside looked manageable. When I look back on those heady times, I realize we were only basking in his reflection and the world was not manageable; we were not golden and never again thought that we were.

  As an editor he was no hot-eyed radical but a man of reason, a man of civility and no pretence. His natural enemies were poseurs of every description—war correspondents who hadn’t gone to the front lines and journalists who talked better than they wrote—mediocrity in all its aspects.

  He sought excellence relentlessly. He was a hard and exacting editor. In some ways he did not fit the temper of his times; he was something of a puritan (although no prude)
and, for a journalist, uncharacteristically dedicated to defending the individual’s right to personal privacy.

  His sense of integrity and instinct for fairness were such a large part of his character that it was easy to overlook his personal courage, his sensibilities, his wit and his vitality. He could transform the banter of a ten o’clock coffee break into a memory you would savour for a decade.

  Even his interoffice memos were graceful, and as he got older, he overcame more and more of his natural shyness and began to talk as he wrote, in flawless cadence and metaphors that ought to have been bronzed. His most serious writing went into his novels. They were autobiographical only in the sense that in each of them there was one character vainly standing up for reason in a mad world. (His evocative Peace River Country curiously portrayed a patch of little-known Canadian geography that later turned out to be the home turf of Alvy, my last, most endearing and most enduring wife.)

  Ralph’s secret was that what he really wanted to be and what he had been best at—like Roy MacGregor, who I think of as his natural heir, both stylistically and ethically—was sports writing and, specifically, hockey: “For 27 glorious minutes last Saturday night Canada came close to rediscovering the only unique part of its inheritance. In spite of what they’ll say in the commission on culture and the proliferating expositions and festivals and aids-in-grant to anybody who knows anybody else, the only true Canadian invention is a game called hockey.”

  Ralph found uncharacteristic joy in his books, and I remember that on the heady day after he finished his last novel, he phoned me and said that it was “damned good.” When a volume of mine was published, he sent a note in which he said that “writing a book has always struck me as a very close parallel to going to a war; a great place to have been and a great place to be back from.”