GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.

17. Of significant persons...and pornography

The two brothers came to Kingston often to visit Sister Lenore, and one day dropped in at The Register. Waiting for Fr. Hanley, they stood in front of my desk in the "newsroom" outside his door and threw mild insults and silly puns at each other like a couple of teenagers -- very literate ones, mind you. A secretary and a bookkeeper in the same room laughed with me until tears came. After the boys left, Doreen remarked in her clipped British dialect that she had never imagined clerics were that human.

Why not? Like the rest of us, all the Carters were born to participate in this world according to their innate abilities and opportunities. Alex could no doubt have had a more glamorous posting than Sault Ste. Marie, but like most people who go there he really loved the North and its people, even chose to be buried there. On the other hand, The Boomer's ambitions carried him as far as a priest can go in English-speaking Canada, although he was perfectly bilingual.

One thing I regret not learning over the years from them, from Fr. Hanley and many others, was serious networking. Dad warned that I was too much a dreamer and encouraged me to "see, do, whatever is right in front of you needing to be done, but keep building a network". He worked hard at staying connected with friends from his first 30 years in Poland and added many people in Canada. 

He built his network in an age when one either made phone calls or wrote notes and letters, both costing real time. In my spare time I might update my diary or walk out to explore a new place, but my favourite thing was always sitting in a quiet corner with a book.

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Bill DeMeza's wife, Tud, was a vivacious and super-smart redhead. After they married in Ohio in 1943 the U.S. Army separated them, sending him to edit some European and African editions of the daily published for American armed forces, the Stars and Stripes. So Tud joined the Women's Army Corps and through strategically chosen jobs, even becoming the Army's first female aircraft mechanic, she managed to get posted to Europe in 1944.

After 1945 Bill joined two other journalists in launching The Daily American in Rome. He and Tud soon had two sons, then she took advantage of having live-in staff to start a business she called At Your Service. It did anything foreign businessmen and tourists wanted done, from translation to personal shopping. She even provided bilingual extras for the epic MGM film Quo Vadis. 

In 1950 she and Bill sold their businesses and returned to the States. After he was hired by The Register in '58, Tud founded The Kingston Shopper, a tabloid shopping news weekly for which she sold ads and wrote a column.

I now see that in 1960-61 Bill was improving not only The Register but my writing style. Having one consistent editor was a huge improvement over the Tely experience, where most editors merely enforced style and cut for length. 

Bill's vast network included especially people in Ohio, where his and Tud's families had settled. He kept an eye on a Roman Catholic Cincinnati lawyer named Charles Keating, who campaigned against pornography after founding Citizens for Decent Literature in 1958, and who used his network of lawyers to spread the work across the States.

At that time, Canadians were also concerned about corruption of the morals of children and youth. Federal Justice Minister E. Davie Fulton struggled to update the wording of the Criminal Code section on obscenity. Ontario's Attorney General Kelso Roberts appointed a committee comprising a lawyer, a sociologist, a professor of English and a librarian to review provincial censorship laws. But Canadians have a wide cautious streak. They love striking committees and especially Royal Commissions!

Canada Customs had a little list of banned books which students at both my universities -- Toronto and Carleton -- used to select leisure reading, e.g. Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lolita. We either borrowed a copy or went to the States for a weekend and lied to Customs on the way back.