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

28. My serious freelancing begins

"So why not lower the voting age?**

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During one Thursday night every month, two men and I who had the titles of associate editors of The Challenge went down to The Gazette on St. Antoine St. to put our tabloid to bed. Because Leo MacGillivray was an editor at the daily we met at his desk in the newsroom. He had scoliosis severe enough to need two canes for walking, but chose not to use a wheelchair at work because of crowded desks, narrow doors, and an occasional step.

His good friend Hugh MacLeod was very tall, thin, grey-faced, in senior management at an advertising or publishing house. The pure printer's ink in his veins prompted him, a non-Catholic, to join The Challenge the first time Leo mentioned it.

Our turn on the rotary press came after the next day's Gazette and any contract jobs were finished, so we waited a lot, just hanging out. The press run for our 12,000 copies wasn't the awesome, thunderous event I loved at the Tely. It lasted just a few minutes.

Leo arranged for the Junior Staff to watch once. About 25 of us (some parents came) entered the building around 8 on a spring evening. After 1 a.m. we walked out to almost 10 inches of wet snow. It hadn't been forecast. No one was dressed for it. Monsignor Crowley paid for several taxis to take teens home, and enjoyed the story so much that he shared it with Cardinal Leger.

A week later, Charlie and I took delivery of the dark blue 1964 Plymouth Valiant we ordered in the Fall. Its gearshift had round push-buttons in a chrome panel left of the steering wheel, and beside them the parking brake, a vertical slide you pressed down then simply raised to release. The car was so elegant, enjoyable, fun to be with that I named it Lancelot.

When a typographers' strike closed La Presse in June a dynamic entrepreneur, Pierre Péladeau, risked launching Le Journal de Montréal the next day. A tabloid mainly about sports and sex, it immediately had the highest circulation in the province. Toronto's Globe subscribed because occasional columns were written by nationalists like René Lévesque, a broadcaster more impatient and passionate about ideas surging through Jean Lesage's Quebec than were the calm, scholarly philosophers at Le Devoir and La Presse.

The typographers' union also struck the Globe in Toronto, but its managers kept it going by doing the strikers' work. The result was papers full of typographical errors, unjustified columns, articles whose final paragraphs vanished instead of being "continued on page...". Circulation rose because the first issues were collectors' items. By the time the strike ended in December the managers were good typographers.

Quebec politics began interesting the Globe's board of directors. My boss in the Montreal Bureau, David Oancia, hired a full-time reporter, Robert Rice. They took turns going out to cover stories because none of us wanted me to be alone with the telephone when a story was breaking, which began happening often.

Every day now I was translating most editorials in Le Devoir , La Presse and Le Journal de Montreal in full, along with commentators David flagged. We even checked Montreal-Matin after major events. David gave me an office key so I could begin work around 8 a.m. instead of 9 and in case he and Bob were out at the same time. I brought my lunch and ate as I worked past noon. I also began having assorted pains from head to toe.

My workload had doubled, the daily hours had increased to almost six, but I was still paid for five three-hour mornings a week. As my first anniversary approached I asked for a raise. David nodded, relayed my request to the board, they rejected it.

I decided to resign, mainly because two interesting freelance opportunities had appeared.

One was a bilingual monthly magazine Mayor Jean Drapeau launched "to underline our desire for international co-operation and to show the true personality of Montreal" to the whole world prior to EXPO 67. Called montreal '64 (no caps was its style, and the second digit changed with the years), it had articles in both official languages with a few elements in Spanish, Italian and German. Volume 1 Number 1 in May had a press run of 50,000 copies. They were distributed by Canadian embassies, consulates, and high commissions in 125 countries -- all the members the United Nations had at that time.