Oliver's Twist (5 page)

Station manager “Hank” Hankinson was a brilliant but eccentric former producer with the CBC International Service in Montreal, banished to the far reaches of the empire for some obscure offence. The station was his personal fiefdom. He appointed his secretary, with whom he had been having an affair for many years, to the post of assistant station manager. At the same time, lowlier staff members were made to clean the toilets twice a week and take out the garbage. During my first turn on the garbage detail, the senior announcer, Uncle
Merlin Gutensohn, offered a comforting insight. While flies buzzed around us, he explained that this was actually part of our training, ensuring that “our powerful and important positions will not make us too proud.”

Hankinson was rightly regarded as one of Rupert's few intellectuals. In my first week at the station, he invited me to enrol in the weekly adult French classes he gave at the local school. He also suggested I join the Canadian Institute of Speech, an institution of his own creation with only one instructor. It specialized in public speaking and vocabulary classes, in person or by correspondence, and offered various levels of graduate and undergraduate diplomas. I declined both. Months passed before I realized why I wasn't being moved off late-night and weekend shifts. I signed up for French lessons and joined the august ranks of the institute. When the next shift schedule was posted, I found myself on days.

Both of these enterprises, especially the speaking and vocabulary training, involved serious study, and Hank had the university degrees to prove his qualifications as an instructor. Despite my resentment at the time, he gave me my first exposure to the serious discipline of effective writing and speaking. Content and style were equally emphasized and tested. Hank drove into us the idea that every word is a building block of thought, a “crystallized idea,” as he put it. A few years later, when we were unionized, the bosses in Vancouver learned of Hank's management practices and invited him to resign. He was a mean old cuss but the first person of real learning I had ever encountered, and I owed him a great deal. I will never forget his delight when I phoned him in Rupert from my Washington, D.C., office on the thirtieth anniversary of
the day he hired me. We laughed over those days and lamented they were no more.

My position at CFPR was intended to be a summer job only but, as so often happened in my life, an intervention by my mother played a hand in my professional fate. Mom was cruising for taxi fares down at the docks one day when a yacht anchored out in the harbour. A small tender made for shore and delivered Bing Crosby and his inseparable buddy, Phil Harris, to the wharf. Crosby was perhaps the biggest music celebrity in the world at that time, with record sales, movies, and an unprecedented multi-million-dollar television contract making him the very definition of a star. His congenial public persona aside, Crosby guarded his privacy and was an elusive character who kept the media at a distance.

That day, he and Harris were sailing up the coast on a salmon-fishing trip. They needed to make an urgent call to Hollywood, but the radio phone on the yacht was broken. My mother coolly offered to contact an acquaintance at the local telephone company, and in no time she had the two men fixed up. An appreciative Crosby asked if there was anything he could do for her. Mom informed him that her son was a local disk jockey. Would the famous crooner give her boy an interview? This struck Crosby as a hilarious idea. Perhaps he enjoyed the thought of being quoted on the wires by a virtual unknown when he consistently refused interview requests from the leading entertainment journalists.

The staff at the studio was astounded when Crosby and Harris strolled through the door—and open-mouthed when Crosby said he was looking for Craig. Sadly, my big chance was not to be: I was enjoying a day off, far from the station. Told this,
Crosby did not miss a beat. “Tell Craig his old pal Bing dropped by to say hello.” In their astonishment, none of the staff thought to ask for an interview or a photograph. The incident bolstered my reputation as someone who knew a few things about the music business, or at least as someone to whom the unexpected and interesting might happen. I credit it with securing me a permanent position not long after.

For all its quirkiness, CFPR set me on my professional path and fostered my ambitions beyond Prince Rupert. It was natural to look for wider horizons, but there was too the insistent inner voice of my eight-year-old self, the child who had been taught to be wary of depending on others, who resisted any ties that might bind.
We have to escape this town
, he told me;
we'll be trapped if we stay. Let's move on and re-create ourselves.

Ironically, he had an unintended ally in the first woman with whom I fell seriously in love, Evelyn Carpenter. She was regarded as the most beautiful girl in Rupert and, like all the women I would become deeply involved with thereafter, she possessed a reticent and reserved nature that disguised a keen intelligence. Although we shared intimacies, Evelyn held out on me sexually, not wanting to make the mistake that unhinged the lives of so many young women and their boyfriends in small towns. In those days, marriage was the only possible outcome of an unwanted pregnancy, and I could never have left Evelyn or Rupert in those circumstances. For all the trouble sex would get me into in the future, its absence at that crucial moment proved to be enormously important.

After two years I had almost worn out the office copying machine, producing resumés and application forms that I sent to radio stations all over North America. No station was too
rinky-dink to hear from me, yet there was nary a bite. The CFPR crowd was not encouraging and predicted only disappointment and frustration.

Then one day in the early spring of 1959, I was summoned to Hankinson's office. I feared that my efforts to abandon him had tried his patience, and he intended to sentence me to the night shift forever. Instead he told me that the CBC radio station in Regina liked my audition tape and was prepared to offer me a job. Was I interested in a transfer to Saskatchewan? Apparently there was no resistance on his part: No one in living memory had been promoted out of Rupert to another position in the Corp. Regina, a provincial capital of ninety thousand people, represented the big leagues to me. There I might have a chance to be heard network wide, and making it to the network was what career advancement at the CBC was all about. I responded to Hankinson's question with an unequivocal yes and literally danced out of his office.

Within a few weeks, my mother was standing at her front door, fighting tears as I threw my suitcase into the trunk of the Meteor. She knew better than I that I'd never be back. The dirt road out of town followed the Skeena River, its current flowing swiftly past me as the river made its way to the Pacific. We were hurrying in the opposite direction, my alter ego and I, exulting in a new beginning. I turned east at Prince George and headed at last into the Prairies, the mountains fading from view, perhaps for a lifetime. I felt prepared for whatever lay ahead. Rupert had given me a graduate degree in the vagaries of life.

Early spring on the West Coast was late winter in Saskatchewan, and I was completely unprepared for the cold. Real winter was so beyond my experience that I fell for an old trick often played on innocents from British Columbia. After any lengthy exposure to temperatures well below freezing at an outdoor parking lot, my car would refuse to start. I could not help but notice that those cars plugged in to the lot's accessible electrical outlets had no such difficulties. Making inquiries, I was told that it was necessary to buy a car with an electric engine. I went from one smiling car salesman to the next, each directing me to another dealer who might have an electric car in stock, before I finally got the joke.

I could take no offence. Regina was the first city I had lived in, and its sophisticated bars and restaurants, its colleges and arts institutions, and its vigorous political life were rife with opportunities for learning and advancement. Plus it had television, a transfixing medium that had not arrived in Rupert before my departure. I watched so much of it in Regina that the family with whom I boarded called me the “test pattern kid.”

CBK Saskatchewan was radio only, the CBC network not yet having granted television broadcasting to the province. Its offices and studios occupied two storeys of a downtown building and accommodated a youthful staff of twenty, including announcers, producers, engineers, a sportscaster, a farm commentator, and a record librarian, plus a bevy of young female secretaries. It was, in sum, nirvana.

Regina, while far from the centre of power in Toronto, was an important regional station and the only one in the province. For that reason, there was much more airtime for original local programming, especially in the afternoons and early evenings. I
had been at the station a year when the network created a new position in the department known as “Outside Broadcasts.” Its elite group of producer/commentators was responsible for just about everything that was broadcast outside the studio, except entertainment programming. Famous CBC names like Byng Whittaker, Frank Willis, and Thom Benson were among its members. I applied for the job and joined them, still based in Regina.

It was the closest thing to a news department that CBK could boast, since it offered no local newscasts. But clearly there was a hunger among listeners. Next to the Saskatchewan Roughriders, the province's favourite obsession was politics. The average citizen was ready at the drop of a Wheat Pool hat to debate national or international affairs. Farmers read
Hansard
for entertainment. Decades of identifying themselves as the hapless victims of forces beyond their control no doubt contributed to the locals' strongly held opinions. The weather, the railways, those eastern bankers, and the devils in Ottawa were easy targets.

Although I had no formal journalistic training or experience, I persuaded the program director that our audience needed to hear a summary, once or twice a day, of happenings at the provincial legislature. I told him it was a service no different from the weather or the daily farm broadcast, and just as essential. The technicians put a broadcast line into the legislature's press gallery and I set up the first bureau there. Before long I was spending as much time at the bureau during sittings of the legislature as I was in the office. So much of life is watching for chances and being prepared for them when they appear. More than any other opportunity, the decision to cover politics in that fervid political climate set me on a lifetime course.

The Regina station was run by one of the originals of Canadian broadcasting, R.H. “Herb” Roberts. He had been an announcer with Canadian National Railways Radio Department, the first national radio network in North America. In the 1920s, the CNR set up small transmitters along the rail line so that firstclass passengers could listen on earphones to one of the wonders of the age. Anyone within range of the station transmitters could listen to broadcasts, making the network truly a national one. The CNR system became the forerunner of the CBC.

Born in Liverpool, England, Roberts managed his station after the fashion of a British colonial administrator. Head office regulations were followed to the letter, discipline was strict, and exemplary behaviour was expected. There was no written order to this effect, but all male staffers knew they should present their prospective brides for inspection and approval. An obviously poor choice might lead to a gentle father-and-son chat. Roberts once called me into his office for a reprimand after I'd played a number from a new Fred Astaire musical: “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You, When You Know I've Been a Liar All My Life?” Such a sentiment was suggestively immoral in Roberts's opinion, and he ordered the record destroyed.

If he was narrow in his personal views, Roberts made up for it with a generous heart. There was no end to his helpfulness (and therefore that of the corporation) when an employee was dealing with illness or personal problems. That was the upside of the paternalism that reigned at most CBC stations. In my case, Roberts arranged a shift schedule that allowed me to take university courses while working. I was chosen for a fast-track training program that the Outside Broadcasts Department
offered in those days, and by 1961 I was preparing items for national network radio shows.

Anyone who covered Saskatchewan in those days was privileged to see nation building up close. In the fifties and sixties, the provincial legislature was both laboratory and battleground for the issues and ideologies that were debated nationally for the balance of the century and beyond. Yet history was not forgotten. In their early fervour, the farmers, preachers, and social reformers who founded the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in 1932 had pledged to “eradicate the last vestiges of capitalism.” When they came to power in the province in 1944 under T.C. Douglas, they were determined, as Marx had advised, to control the means of production, and they set up government-run shoe and blanket factories. The poor should never again be taken advantage of by those capitalist exploiters who were responsible, the CCF believed, for the Depression and the suffering of millions. Of course, the most impractical stateowned enterprises failed, but other experiments with public power companies, pensions, job-security legislation, and health insurance broke new ground. The provincial opposition parties, and the Liberals in particular, bitterly opposed every one of those programs.