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

43. Surprises kept surprising me

I asked the teacher why, at Sir George, only students from other countries were upset enough to protest against racism. He pointed out that Montreal's black community was small and had kept to itself since the days of the Underground Railroad in the 19th century. Then, gently but bluntly he said, "There aren't enough of us yet". When I repeated that to Charles he nodded thoughtfully but said nothing.

The Internet has a lot of information about what happened at Sir George and at Rochdale, and how history sees those episodes. In fact, in recent years documentary films have been made about Montreal's computer riots and shown at international festivals. It was far more significant than we knew at the time.

The Canadian journalistic network in those days was nation-wide because there weren't many of us. A Carleton classmate of mine had married a man who became head of the J-School, and when he was looking around for a broadcasting specialist he called my husband. Charlie and I drove the two hours to Ottawa, where he met with the J-School's head in his living room while his wife and I had tea in their dining room.

During the trip home, my husband said he hadn't given a definite answer, but would not accept the offer. For one thing, the radio and TV equipment used to teach Carleton students was state-of-the-art, whereas Canadian broadcasting station owners resisted upgrading. Charlie felt that students should be taught on simple, basic mikes and cameras, preferably models they could repair themselves.

(Don't laugh. In those days I repaired our toaster, vacuum cleaner, sewing machine, and rewired lamps. They were all made in Canada as well as possible, and were meant to be repaired if necessary -- definitely not to become obsolete!) He believed J-School grads would have to use basic technology in their first jobs, as he had done. Even if it was newer by a couple of generations, they could still cope easily.

However, what really put Charlie off the offer was how his own credentials were regarded. He had dropped out of high school after Grade 11 because it was boring, and begun working at CKLC. He had told the J-School head that fact when the man called to schedule the interview, and was told it didn't matter, that he was wanted because his reputation in the business was excellent.

We figured that "reputation" equalled "credentials", but It turned out that Carleton wanted its first broadcast specialist to have at least a Master's degree. The professor himself had a BJ from Carleton and an MA from Queen's (it couldn't be in journalism because Queen's didn't have a J-School). Carleton would be glad to put the letters MA after Charlie's name in exchange for $3,000.

That shocked both of us. We thought it was dishonest. Charlie wasn't interested in arguing about it, and neither was I. He merely called a couple of days later to say No.

Carleton obviously didn't take time to figure out how Charlie became the outstanding newsman he was. High school bored him because he was curious to know more about the whole world than the curriculum even hinted at. Then he became a compulsive autodidact, spending what spare time he had with books. He read systematically into fields useful in his work, especially history -- of many countries, not just Britain, Canada and the U.S., the narrow range Canadian schools taught.

When as a newsman he dealt with events in a country, he made sure he knew the broad context, and about any related parallel events in other countries. He read about demographics and statistics, political parties, technology of all kinds, architecture, economics....

THAT was why "his reputation was excellent". Carleton's Administration didn't come near to figuring that out. I still think it's odd that its senior minds weren't curious enough to probe the mind of a prospective teacher. Isn't that the key feature of any teacher that students deal with?

I wondered how my J-School professors of the 1950s, founding head Wilfrid Eggleston and his shadow Wilfred Kesterton, would have handled the hiring of their first broadcast specialist. Unfortunately, both had retired by the time of our visit.

I was winding down my hours at Marianopolis, not only because its Administration's structure was changing but because my Father in Toronto had bitten off more Polish community service work than he could chew. He needed letters translated daily from Polish to English, and originals written in English, by someone who grasped the complexity of a communist government controlling Poland while Poles there and everywhere else celebrated 1000 years of Christianity. He said I fitted that description, and it was fortunate that I lived in Montreal where the Polish Consul representing the London Government had his office. Dad especially liked my rates.

Poland's Government-in-Exile, in London, served a diaspora of about 4 million scattered around the world. In Krakow there was a super-human archbishop named Stefan Wyszynski. He was followed faithfully by the vast majority of Polish souls as "the Cold War" between communism and "the Western bloc" waxed and waned. 

CHAPTER 43 of GLIMPSES -- 30