WHOEVER WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR SUPERVISING my 10-week summer internship at The Telegram didn't admit it to me. From Day One I had so much to do, and so much fun doing it, that I didn't think about being monitored. Yet it must have been happening because the fact that what I wrote was published did not reveal how I performed, which mattered far more.
The City Editor who hired me, Art Cole, was holidaying in Europe by the time I arrived in late May so assignments came from whoever sat in his chair: Art Holland and George Brimmell are the only names I remember. After Mr. Cole returned he didn't pay particular attention to me, except to give me a few press passes to summer stock musicals in August. Those weren't assignments to write reviews, merely tickets no one else wanted. Wilfrid Eggleston, the head of Carleton's Journalism School whose acquaintance with Mr. Cole lay behind the Tely internship, didn't ask me to submit a report during or after those wonderful weeks.
But some sort of grapevine passed reports about me to Managing Editor J.D. MacFarlane, who signed pay cheques. (Adjusted for inflation, my $74 a week in 1958 would be $618.46 in 2015, according to the Bank of Canada "inflation calculator".) And word must have travelled on to Carleton. But I'll never know.
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Editors sent me out a few times with reporters who had regular beats, to watch them work. A police reporter took me to Bloor and Yonge after a bank robbery. His press badge entitled him to join other reporters questioning investigators, but I had to stand back, behind regular police officers who framed the site with body language in the days before yellow tape.
Chatting with everyone around was normal crowd behaviour in Toronto then; the city had only about half a million residents, mainly WASPS (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). I stood near a policeman around my Father's age who freely answered questions. He made it clear that he wasn't part of the investigating team but had been at bank robbery sites before. When he said he thought this event resembled recent ones in some ways, I asked for details. He cited at least two aspects I can't remember now. They turned out to be information investigators didn't tell the reporter I had come with. He wrote something like "a policeman said...", making his story more interesting than what the Star had.
He invited me to join him at a bank robbery a few weeks later. The same policeman was there, and spotted me with a look which combined recognition with displeasure. He wasn't interacting with the public this time. I guessed he had figured out how his opinions got into the Tely the last time.
Over supper, I told the parental unit that I couldn't put my finger on what it was about the two incidents that made me uncomfortable. Mom and Dad hadn't commented on what happened at the first robbery site, but now one of them pointed out that on that occasion the policeman had made an error, behaved unprofessionally: he should not have shared inside information with civilian strangers. He likely wouldn't have had he known I was with the Tely man. As a professional in my own right I had taken advantage of his error during the first event. Mom thought that was the key point, and caused his mistrust of strangers during the second.
Simply put, I had damaged his faith in people. With hindsight, I regret that a lot.
The two Wilfs at Carleton emphasized the crucial importance of being aware of our responsibilities as journalists, of consequences following on everything we did and wrote. I remember an entire lecture devoted to the weights of words and how they may colour a reader's thinking. How does a person enter a room? Do they shuffle, slink, march, walk, storm, rush...? Our job was to deliver facts without bias. After the first robbery, I had repeated hearsay to the police reporter. Gossip, opinions, are not facts.
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My assignments were soft news, ranging through age groups and occupations, providing a fabulous spectrum of experiences.
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GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.
Non-FictionDuring the first 30 years of my journalistic career in the second half of the 20th century, good jobs of all kinds were available all over Canada. Those of us born in the 1930s and early '40s were in great demand because our generation was very smal...
