Witnessing history from Boston: The 1980 Jimmy Carter presidential re-election campaign and the October Surprise that wasn’t to be

I never worked directly for Jimmy Carter. In fact, I have never met him, unlike my friend Art Milnes, a journalist from Kingston, Ontario, who would years later become a cherished personal friend of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. But I did spend the last 2½ months of the 1980 Jimmy Carter presidential re-election campaign working as a supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research, where I oversaw several hundred phone bank employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Most of our work that autumn was on the Carter campaign and U.S. Senate races.

I was 23 years old and had just moved to West Somerville, Massachusetts and was looking for a job in September 1980. I happened to be walking down the west side of Massachusetts Avenue, near Central Square in Cambridge, on a sunny, but crisp, late summer Boston morning, when I saw a help wanted job ad for interviewers down in a hole-in the-wall basement commercial space below sidewalk level.

I spent my first two days working the phones, polling voters state-by-state. I was then promoted to supervise phone bank interviewers. I remember thinking there apparently really is something to the American Story of meritocracy. My only previous experience in public opinion research had been working a few months earlier in the spring of 1980 on a Quebec Referendum project for a Winnipeg company, Opinion Place/Marketing Insights, as a field interviewer in Peterborough, Ontario for the Center for Canadian Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

My Cambridge Survey Research boss, Mark Leavitt, took me out to my first Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park to celebrate my promotion. I still remember his pre-game advice: “Make sure there is a full aspirin bottle by the coffeemaker for employees.” Back then, sampling was done with actual physical telephone directories and coding was done largely by hand. One of the curiosities I quickly noticed was that our ASA-and-caffeine-driven phone bank interviewers, if they spent more than a a couple of days working a region, would fairly quickly wind up sounding like the respondents from whatever area code they were calling and interviewing people on their political preferences, especially in smaller and more ethnically homogenous areas of the country. Some kid from Jersey would wind up talking slower and softer, like he was from the lowcountry of  South Carolina, after a few days. By far the most difficult voters to reach were those who had telephone numbers in the hollers of Tennessee and Kentucky. You could call 100 numbers and 99 would be unreachable because of some technical glitch, or simply out of service.

While we knew we were in an uphill re-election battle against Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, I don’t think it was until the last days of the campaign, when we realized there would be no “October Surprise” with the release of the 52 United States diplomats and American citizens being held hostage by Iranian students in Tehran, that we also realized we were going to come up short on election day Nov. 4.

We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Red Line “T”. The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

After the Carter campaign, I went to work as research associate at Kenyon and Eckhardt (later Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon and Eckhardt) in Boston. I worked in the research department of the advertising agency’s Boston field office. Major commercial client accounts included airline and automotive companies.

As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

As for Jimmy Carter, well, he would go on to become the most consequential and respected former president in United States history. At 98, he is also the oldest-ever former president.

Millard Fuller founded Habitat for Humanity International in 1976. From humble beginnings in Alabama, he rose to become a self-made marketing millionaire at 29. But as the business prospered, his health, integrity and marriage suffered, he noted later. In 1965, Millard and his wife Linda turned away from their millionaire lifestyle and rededicated their lives to serving God.

Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, remain the best-known faces of Habitat for Humanity. Their involvement began in 1984 when the former president led a work group to New York City to help renovate a six-story building with 19 families in need of decent, affordable shelter.

A non-profit, ecumenical Christian housing ministry, Habitat for Humanity seeks to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness and to make decent shelter a matter of conscience and action.

Through volunteer labour and donations of money and materials, Habitat builds and rehabilitates simple, decent houses alongside the homeowner partner families. It is not a giveaway program. In addition to a down payment and monthly mortgage payments, homeowners invest hundreds of hours of their own labour or sweat equity into building their Habitat house and the houses of others. Habitat houses are sold to partner families at no profit and financed with affordable loans. The homeowners’ monthly mortgage payments are used to build still more Habitat houses.

Jimmy Carter is not only finishing well. He started well.

“For myself and for our Nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.”

Those were the first words spoken by President Jimmy Carter in his inaugural address Jan. 20, 1977. As Art Milnes noted in 2016: “It is often forgotten but President Carter on a January day in 1977 set the gold standard for how a winner treats their opponent. I will let President Ford, who lost that year, tell the rest of the story via his memoirs.”

“Mr. Ford described what happened the day President Carter delivered his Inaugural Address. ‘The weather that morning,’ Ford wrote, ‘was windy and cold, but the atmosphere was full of hope and the crowd that gathered below the East Front of the Capitol reflected that. Chief Justice Burger administered the oath to the thirty-ninth President of the United States.

Carter’s first words were, ”For myself and for our nation I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgD179mgMow). That was so unexpected, such a gracious thing for him to say. The crowd began to applaud, and I bit my lip to mask my emotions. I didn’t know whether to remain seated or to stand. But when the cheers continued I decided to stand and reached over to clasp Carter’s hand.’”

Carter went onto say, “Here before me is the Bible used in the inauguration of our first President, in 1789, and I have just taken the oath of office on the Bible my mother gave me just a few years ago, opened to a timeless admonition from the ancient prophet Micah: “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”

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We haven’t had that spirit here since 1984: The zeitgeist of self improvement and The Learning Annex

The Learning Annex is an American education company based in New York City. It was founded in 1980 by Bill Zanker in his New York City studio apartment with a $5,000 investment.

It is hard to exactly recapture the zeitgeist of that era, but in 1984, I moved to The Bain Apartments Co-operative Inc., the oldest housing co-op in Toronto, located at 100 Bain Ave. in the Riverdale area of Toronto, where it provides affordable housing to mixed income people.  Our neighbourhood was a rectangle formed, give or take a few blocks, by Broadview Avenue in the west, Danforth Avenue in the north, Withrow Park in the east, and Gerrard Street in the south.  My good friend, Ron Graham, from university days a few years earlier at Trent University, who has lived in Vancouver for more than three decades now, lived around the corner on Logan Avenue near Withrow Park at the time.

It is easy to poke fun at Toronto’s sense of self-importance; we did it more than 40 years ago. But truth be told, the Riverdale, Broadview/Danforth area was one of the most beautiful areas I’ve lived in anywhere, including lots of small cities and towns in Canada and the United States, as well as larger cities such as Ottawa, Halifax, Boston, and Durham, North Carolina.

In 1984, I was writing for Ontario Lawyers Weekly, and perhaps as close as I’d ever come to being a “young urban professional,” albeit minus the money and upward-mobility, as this was still journalism after all.

A big part of the mid-1980s’ zeitgeist was self improvement: mind, body and soul. The Learning Annex, with its ubiquitous street boxes, filled an important niche, providing continuing adult education for all kinds of general interest and hobby courses and workshops, often in the evening or over a two-day weekend. If you wanted to learn about tax planning strategies or how to deal with stress, for instance, The Learning Annex likely had a seminar on the subject. While I took several offerings in the autumn of 1984, the one I recall best was a bicycle repair workshop weekend at a bike shop, the name of which I’ve long forgotten, on King Street. I think I still recall it best because I was a pretty unlikely participant. I have been an avid cyclist for most of my life; avid bike repair guy, not so much. From 2007 to 2014, Ian Graham, then sports editor of the Thompson Citizen (now editor), was my go-to-bike repair guy. I’d grab a few Allen keys at home, and deliver my bicycle to the newspaper’s abandoned pressroom at the back of the building on Commercial Place for Ian to work his magic in about 30 seconds on my latest handlebar fiasco. These days, my bike gets dropped off at Doug’s Source for Sports as needed.

Zeitgeists change, of course. While The Learning Annex still exists as a shell of its former self in some larger American cities, it decamped from Toronto some 15 years ago in 2007.

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Riders on the Storm: Brilliance and mental illness; moods, madness and wellness

Kay Redfield Jamison is the Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders and a professor of psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins Hospital at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, who catapulted to fame 25 years ago with a bestseller she wrote about her manic depression, titled “An Unquiet Mind.” Jamison “changed the way we think about moods and madness,” says her publisher, Penguin Random House Books.

Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive (bipolar) illness; she has also experienced it firsthand. For even while she was pursuing her career in academic medicine, In the prologue to “An Unquiet Mind,” Jamison was in a manic grip that sent her running around a parking lot at two in the morning. Later in the book, she described the world going dark when she was unable to get out of bed or make sense of the words she tried to read.

She found herself succumbing to the same exhilarating highs and catastrophic depressions that afflicted many of her patients, as her disorder launched her into ruinous spending sprees, episodes of violence, and an attempted suicide. Jamison explored bipolar illness from the dual perspectives of the healer and the healed, revealing both its terrors and the cruel allure that at times prompted her to resist taking medication.

I was working as a part-time reporter at the Kingston Whig-Standard, finishing writing my master’s thesis (“America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’ Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan” ISBN: 0612046591) at Queen’s University when Jamison’s book was first published. I was able to read an advance book review copy of “An Unquiet Mind” at the Whig back in the Summer of 1995.

Aside from being attracted to her elegant and compelling writing, I wanted to read  Jamison’s book for a much more personal reason; my grad school thesis supervisor had told us about his struggles with manic-depressive (bipolar) illness in the autumn of 1993 during a first semester afternoon seminar. I remember the day vividly. While it was a fairly typical overcast and dreary day for that time of year in the Limestone City on Lake Ontario’s north shore, my supervisor was over-dressed in what appeared to be the warmest cardigan in the world, as if he just couldn’t stay warm no matter what he wore or did. At -30°C (-41°C with the wind chill) as it is here in Thompson, Manitoba, as I write these words some 27 years later on Dec. 23, 2020, the cardigan would have been perfect: that day in Kingston so long ago it somehow looked overdone, out of place.

And it would have been just around then, as he was slowly walking around the classroom, that he told his students about how he suffered from manic-depressive (bipolar) illness. In trying to explain it, he put it this way: “I wake up every day and it’s like I’m waking up at 4 a.m. in the morning. That’s how the world looks.” You don’t have to suffer from a mental illness to immediately understand something of how the world appeared to him. Most of us, I think, have a sense of vulnerability, if we’re not blessedly asleep at that hour. Not a lot of good things are known to happen at 4 a.m. in my experience; sort or reminiscent of the dread middle of the night phone ringing with an unwelcome call jarring you out of a deep sleep for what is seldom, or ever, good news. God, grant us sunrise.

I spent the next two years trying to time my meetings and assignment schedule with my supervisor by trying to guess where he’d be in his mood cycle: despondent and depressed, more-or-less “normal,” not overly up or down (a phase that often ran for months, much longer than either his low lows or high highs lasted usually.)  

In the Summer of 1995, I was writing my thesis in the always-chilly-even-in-summer math computer lab in the basement of Jeffery Hall, which has three floors underground, and opened at Queen’s in 1969, housing the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. The hall is named after Ralph L. Jeffery, who was head of mathematics and chair of graduate studies from 1943 to 1960. That’s also when I read  Jamison’s just-published memoir, “An Unquiet Mind.” I hoped reading one professor would give me some insights into another professor, my professor. And it did.

As I read the book, I remember handing in the first draft of my thesis on a Friday afternoon. More than 100 pages. I had it back Monday morning from my supervisor with detailed handwritten notations and insightful, penetrating comments and questions. I was speechless that he found time even to read it over the weekend, much less comment with laser-like brilliant questions that clearly hadn’t occurred to me in the writing.

Flash-forward a quarter of a century. Judy Bolton-Fasman, Jamison’s granddaughter, is the arts and culture writer for JewishBoston.com. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Forward, Tablet Magazine, Cognoscenti and other venues. And her memoir, “Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets,” is forthcoming in fall 2021 from Mandel Vilar Press.

“Almost a century ago, my grandmother was forced into a frigid shower, ostensibly to calm her down during a devastating panic attack,” Bolton-Fasman wrote Nov. 30 at JewishBoston.com (https://www.jewishboston.com/and-then-unquiet-minds-in-a-quiet-time/).. She was told in no uncertain terms to ‘get a hold of herself.’ At one point, Grandma’s physician brother thought she belonged in an asylum. I picture Grandma in that shower rocking back and forth, shivering more from terror than cold.”

“My grandmother’s story came rushing back,” wrote Bolton-Fasman, as I went over my reporting for an event Dec. 7, aptly called “Unquiet Minds in a Quiet Time: Insights on Mental Health, Resilience and Community,” sponsored by the Ruderman Synagogue Inclusion Project (RSIP), a partnership between Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP) and the Ruderman Family Foundation, a private philanthropic foundation established and  managed by the Ruderman family, both of which are based in Boston and support synagogues “in creating communities where people of all abilities are valued equally and participate fully.”

Kay Redfield Jamison turned 74 last June. Her latest book, “Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire” was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Biography in 2018.

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Holy hyperbole, a.k.a. ‘HOLY MOTHER OF GOD – the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!! … It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad’

Eric Feigl-Ding’s Jan. 20 tweet on Twitter was one of the first to set off COVID-19 pandemic alarm bells. He is a Washington, D.C.  epidemiologist and health economist, and is currently a visiting scientist in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“HOLY MOTHER OF GOD – the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!!” Feigl-Ding’s tweet read. “How bad is that reproductive R0 value? It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad – never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career. I’m not exaggerating.” The estimate of the virus’s contagiousness is captured in a variable called R0, or basic reproduction number for COVID-19, and is a key number used in infectious disease modelling for estimating pandemic growth rate. An R0 of 3.8 meant that every person who caught COVID-19 would transmit it in turn to almost four other people.

Feigl-Ding, 37, had tweeted after reading a paper called “Novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV: early estimation of epidemiological parameters and epidemic predictions,” published on Jan. 23, and providing an early estimation of epidemiological parameters and epidemic predictions using case information from Chinese cities and other countries from Jan. 1-22 to fit a mathematical model to estimate outbreak parameters.

Still, there were problems with Feigl-Ding’s tweet, as Alexis C. Madrigal, a staff writer at The Atlantic, noted just eight days later in a piece headlined, “How to Misinform Yourself About the Coronavirus: Even if you avoid the conspiracy theories, tweeting through a global emergency is messy, context-free, and disorienting” (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/china-coronavirus-twitter/605644/), which appeared online Jan. 28.

Feigl-Ding is in no way an unintelligent man or incompetent epidemiologist; by all accounts he is quite the contrary in both disposition and abilities. Nor is this in any way to suggest the COVID-19 pandemic, which hadn’t even been designated a “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC) by the World Health Organization (WHO) on Jan, 20 [that would come Jan. 30], much less a global pandemic [that would come March 11] was not worthy of a five-alarm fire bells general wake-up call or tweet even back then: it was.

His work focuses on the intersection of public health and public policy. Feigl-Ding has published in leading journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, and Health Policy. In 2018, he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination to run for the party in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, located in the south-central region of the state, and encompassing all of Dauphin County, as well as parts of Cumberland County and York County, including the cities of Harrisburg and York. But in his enthusiasm to tweet, he omitted some context, which he now regrets, he says. What he inadvertently omitted primarily were facts such as other infectious diseases, say measles for instance, also have very high R0 numbers (R0s for measles range from 12 to 18), and by the time he tweeted about the paper, the researchers had already lowered their R0 estimate from 3.8 to 2.5. “And R0, for that matter, is not the be-all and end-all of the danger of a virus,” Madrigal points out “Some highly transmissible diseases are not actually that dangerous.”

Madrigal also rightly observed that “one of the realities of the current information ecosystem” is that while “out-and-out conspiracies and hoaxes will draw some attention, it’s really the stuff that’s close to the boundaries of discourse that grabs the most eyeballs. That is, the information that’s plausible, and that fits into a narrative mounting outside the mainstream, gets the most clicks, likes, and retweets. Bonus points if it’s sensational or something that someone might want to censor.” When Twitter launched in March 2006, its timeline structure was simple: Tweets were displayed in reverse chronological order. In other words, each user’s feed contained tweets from their followers, from the most recent tweets onward. For “top tweets” now, Twitter uses an algorithm-powered feed organized by ranking signals. In addition to ranked content from followers, the feed will sometimes feature “who to follow” suggestions and, and content from other accounts. Users can also provide feedback on content shown in the feed by selecting “show less often.”

In an April-June 2017article in ASA footnotes, a publication of the American Sociological Association, R. Tyson Smith, a visiting assistant professor of sociology at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, who conducts research in the areas of health, gender, social psychology, criminal justice, and the military, suggested, “Twitter is arguably the best way to reach the greatest number of people, in the quickest fashion, and in the least mediated way.”

Probably still true, but not necessarily always a good thing for academics perhaps, as Eric Feigl-Ding quickly discovered to his chagrin.

In all fairness, who among us hasn’t hit the send button on a tweet, email, Facebook post, or other social media platform expression, a tad too soon in retrospect? Not I, I admit.

Think? Yes. Send? Maybe – but only after a very long pause, which on most social media platforms, and perhaps especially on Twitter, is about as likely as successfully asking a multi-line slot machine player to ease up to dampen some of the audiovisual feedback.

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Thompson Community Christmas Dinner and other traditions, times and places

Back a couple of weeks ago on Dec. 2, I noted a Facebook comment on my timeline from one of my oldest friends from high school in Oshawa some 40-and-more years ago now. It was one of those by-the-way (BTW) remarks that was an addendum to the main and unrelated comment. “ Incidentally, I am asking my loved ones how they usually spend their Christmas Day and the holidays in general. Would you care to elaborate about your usual traditions,” Annie asked. I was originally going to answer it right there, but it got me thinking, that maybe I’d wait and write a fuller, more complete post here on the question before Christmas. It’s an interesting topic, and I’m grateful for it as a writing idea that I hadn’t really thought about directly in a broader sense, although I have written a bit about Christmas movie traditions in the past. But Christmas is about more than movies when it comes to traditions.

Annie, who for many, many years now has lived in Ottawa, noted that one of her traditions is that she volunteers “at a soup kitchen at an Anglican church just up the street from my place.”

That’s the kind of tradition, it would seem to me is well worth emulating, although I am sorry to say, I haven’t come close. Way back in 2008, the second Christmas I lived in Thompson, Manitoba, I volunteered in the kitchen at St. Joseph’s Ukrainian Catholic Hall for the Thompson Community Christmas Dinner, which has been an annual holiday staple here since 1991, where folks are treated to a free turkey dinner with all the trimmings on Dec. 25.  Another year, Bobbi Montean oversaw Jeanette and me, and a number of other volunteer drivers, delivering Christmas dinners to shut-ins who couldn’t make it out to St. Joe’s. What I remember best about that experience was that it was dark, very dark, and I was still relatively new to Thompson in terms of knowing the geography (a fact I apparently didn’t know until we started the deliveries), and it was brutally cold. But what am I saying. It is brutally cold every year (or at least it is in my memory)!

A couple of years ago, I also peeled some potatoes under the watchful eye of Nelson Pruder for the community dinner Christmas Eve, and a few other times Jeanette and I have I’ve turned out to take part in and enjoy some ad hoc music-making, and enjoy a turkey plate ourselves Christmas day.

Throughout the last 28 years, local members of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, former Chicken Chef owner Dale Shantz, the Pruder family, particularly Emily, as well as Harlie, and Nelson, who took over from the local branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) in organizing the annual Christmas Day event in 2013, and for the last two years, Mayor Colleen Smook, in her capacity as a private citizen, not as mayor, although if you know Colleen and you know the North, the two are kinda inseparable in some ways, and one of her daughters, Sharon Cordell, and her daughter, Tori Jade Cordell, have led the Thompson Community Christmas Dinner preparation and cooking effort. The dinner ends up feeding around 180 people each year. I worked with Sharon briefly a few years ago in what is now the Wellington & Madeleine Spence Memorial Library on the University College of the North’s Thompson Campus, so I am not at all surprised at this. Like Colleen, Sharon is all about community, albeit with perhaps a bit of an iron fist in a velvet glove activism when necessary to get people’s attention that something is important.

Christmas traditions are important, but not immutable, I think. To some extent, they seem to me to be dependent on where we are both in life, as it were, and geography, which even in a very virtual world, still matters.

One of the earliest family traditions I can recall is that of celebrating my grandfather, William Barker, same name as my dad’s, Christmas day birthday every Dec. 25. My grandfather had what I thought of as his “plant room” in a second-floor room of my grandparents’ home on Verdun Road in Oshawa. I spent a fair bit of time in it in the mid-1960s. It had large southwest facing windows, ideal for growing plants inside in the winter. My grandmother, who died in January 1965 when I was seven, lived long enough to instill a life-long love of Christmas fruitcake in me, whether it be from the monks of Le Magasin de l’Abbayea Val Notre-Dame in Saint-Jean-de-Matha, Quebec, or my local Safeway’s honey and ground almond marzipan-icing topped fruitcake, a love I was astonished to learn later in life is not shared by everyone. My grandfather, who died when I was 10 in September 1967, was hard of hearing, so from him I learned to speak loud enough to be heard even as a child, which has proved useful over the years. I also learned to love the raspberry canes in his garden and simplicity from my grandfather Barker.

My dad, after reportedly being a bit of a hell-raiser in the 1940s and 1950s – especially up at our Pop-In Cottage on Lake Simcoe – when he got together with his favourite brother-in-laws – Ray Seager, Fred Porter and Pat O’Leary – laid off the booze after his second bout of kidney stones, he told me years later.

But I well remember as a boy going into the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) on Richmond Street West at Centre Street in Oshawa the Saturday before Christmas every year to pick up a mickey of Canadian Five Star whisky (and in those days in the 1960s and 1970s the bottle actually had a plastic five-point star on the outside, not some chintzy image-only on the label) for my dad to have on hand for Uncle Ray, Uncle Fred and Uncle Pat Christmas night, when our family would gather at our home at 537 Nipigon Street in Oshawa to celebrate my grandfather’s birthday with a party. In those days before customer self-serve and wine and liquor lists, dad would peruse the list, even though he always picked up the Canadian Five Star whisky, but didn’t pick it up before he filled out his order slip by pen or pencil and handed it to the clerk at the counter, who would then purposefully retrieve it from some pigeonhole in the mysterious area at back.

As I’d say many years later living in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, “we had ourselves a time” at those long ago Christmas birthday parties!

From 1978 to 1991, I spent many a happy Christmas ensconced at the Dell family’s Noone House, built in 1820, on what is now Old Jaffrey Road in Peterborough, New Hampshire, or enjoying a hot toddy in nearby Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire at the Fitzwilliam Inn, built in 1796 as a stop on the old coaching road system between Boston and points north. I still marvel at the memory of opening Christmas presents for the first time in the Noone House library. A room completely given over to being a library in a private family home was almost beyond the ken of my imagination in 1978. While it seems like another lifetime ago now, and perhaps was in many respects, my memories of the love and hospitality extended to me by Heather, and her family, including her sister, Sara, brother Chad, and her parents, Ed and Carol Dell, remain among the post precious I cherish and treasure to this day. It is often said that grace is an “unmerited favour” or gift from God. My Christmas holiday time spent in New England over those 14 years as a young man from my early 20s to mid-30s is surely testament to that.

As Frank Sinatra sang so famously in 1968 in Jacques Revaux’s “My Way,” written a year earlier in France, “Regrets, I’ve had a few,” there will always be a tinge of sadness for the remembrance of things past. But I am also reminded of the words of C.S. Lewis, perhaps the finest apologist for Christianity of the 20th century, from the 1993 movie Shadowlands, where he says, “The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.”

Coincidentally, if there are really coincidences, Chad Walsh, a mid-life convert from atheism to Christianity, as was Clive Staples Lewis, much better known by his initials C.S. Lewis, or to family, friends and academic colleagues, Jack Lewis, and his, wife, Helen Joy Davidman, also a convert from atheism to Christianity, wrote a biographical article on C.S. Lewis for the New York Times in 1948, and Walsh published the first biography of Lewis a few months later, entitled C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, and was a close friend and neighbour of the Dell family on Lake Iroquois in Vermont, where both families had summer cottages.

Walsh, a nationally noted poet and author, was an English professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin. After moving to Beloit to teach there in 1945, he discovered a new interest in Christianity as a result of reading T.S. Eliot and Reinhold Niebuhr, and he joined the Episcopal Church and was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1949. Ed Dell was also later ordained as an Episcopal priest, and Walsh was one of the most significant mentors and friends in his life, while Lewis, whom he had met, had a towering intellectual influence on him, which is saying something, as Ed Dell was neither easily impressed nor suffered fools gladly.

Helen Joy Davidman “corresponded with Chad Walsh about her many questions related to Lewis’s books and her new-found faith,” noted Lyle Dorsett, Billy Graham Professor of Evangelism at the Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, in a 2005 article, “Helen Joy Davidman (Mrs. C.S. Lewis) 1915-1960: A Portrait,” published in Knowing & Doing, the quarterly journal of the C.S. Lewis Institute in Springfield, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C.  “Walsh understood and respected Joy’s pilgrimage so he and his wife, Eva, frequently entertained Joy and her boys at their summer cottage at Lake Iroquois, Vermont,” said Dorsett.

C.S. Lewis died in 1963 when I was only six years old, but I did have the distinct privilege of meeting and sharing a brief bit of time and conversation at that same cottage in the late 1970s with Chad and Eva Walsh.

Some of my traditions date back many years, others are of much more recent vintage, and are perhaps best described as being on the road to becoming tradition, although exactly where that demarcation line is drawn, is not completely clear to me. Take food for instance. I have been making sausage meat dressing or stuffing for the Christmas turkey for so long I can’t quite remember how or when I started. But I’ve made it everywhere it seems. For my parents, for my relatives in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, here in Thompson, Manitoba, you name it.  Perhaps my fondest sausage meat dressing memories go back to 1994 or 1995 in Kingston, Ontario, when I was a graduate student at Queen’s University, and where I made what seemed many pounds and pans of stuffing, or at least so it seemed at the time, one Christmas dinner a quarter century ago now, for participants in Project Reconciliation, a volunteer-based effort, located in the basement of First Baptist Church at the corner of Johnson and Sydenham streets, and aimed at helping recently released federal parolees to integrate back into their local community. The standard joke in Kingston was that nearly all the residents of the Limestone City were either connected to the universities or federal penitentiaries, of which there were nine at the time, and it was often hard to tell at a glance who was connected with which institution.

On the other hand, making Land O’Lakes sour cream cornbread, with my own recipe addition of cream cheese, is much more recent, something I only started doing several years ago here in Thompson, but which I am happy to keep baking until it become a true tradition in time.

Likewise, it is only here in Thompson that I have resumed a tradition that I had long gotten away from: chopping down my own Christmas tree. Jeanette and I had been doing it intermittently since 2008, but if we make it out this year in the next nine days, it will be our third consecutive year since 2017 cutting down Christmas trees for both of us off Jonas Road, south of Thompson. The first year in 2017, the snow was already so deep, Jeanette used snowshoes to get in the adjacent bush with a hand-held saw.

I am also connected to long tradition at midnight mass at St. Lawrence Church here in Thompson, when I see Father Guna, robed in his white and gold sacramental vestments, swinging a thurible, a metal censer suspended from chains and holding burning incense – a scene I find comforting and liturgically meaningful in both sight and smell. Too often, we forget that as Catholics we use all our senses in a participatory way in worship.

Likewise, we recall the Great Antiphons, known as the O antiphons, those Magnificat antiphons chanted or recited at Vespers of the Liturgy of the Hours during the last seven days of Advent preparation known as the Octave before Christmas and also heard as the alleluia verses on the same days from Dec. 17 to Dec. 23 inclusive at mass.

They are referred to as the O antiphons because the title of each one begins with the interjection “O”: O Sapientia (O Wisdom); O Adonai (O Ruler of the House of Israel); O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse); O Clavis David (O Key of David); O Oriens (O Rising Dawn); O Rex Gentium (O King of the Nations); and O Emmanuel (O God With Us). Taking the first letter of each and reversing the order – Emmanuel, Rex, Oriens, Clavis, Radix, Adonai, Sapientia – gives the Latin words ero cras, which means “tomorrow I will come.”

While the exact origins of the polyphonous O antiphons are now shrouded by the mist of time, they probably date back to the late 5th or 6th early century. At the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire in France,  also known as the Abbey of Fleury or Abbaye Saint-Benoît de Fleury, one of the oldest Benedictine abbeys in Western Europe, founded in the 6th century, the O antiphons were traditionally recited by the abbot and other abbey leaders in descending rank, and then a gift was given to each member of the community.

We Catholics also share a collective memory and remember our saints and martyrs in Eucharistic Prayer 1, an essential of the rubrics comprising the Roman Canon or Missal, with origins that reach as far back as the 4th century, and which made an indelible mark on my Catholic boyhood, although it doesn’t have quite the same resonance for most of my Protestant friends, I’ve found.

“In union with the whole Church we honour Mary, the ever-virgin mother of Jesus Christ our Lord and God. We honour Joseph, her husband, the apostles and martyrs Peter and Paul, Andrew, James, John, Thomas, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Simon and Jude; we honour Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus, John and Paul, Cosmas and Damian and all the saints. May their merits and prayers gain us your constant help and protection … to us, also, your sinful servants, who hope in your abundant mercies, graciously grant some share and fellowship with your holy apostles and martyrs: with John the Baptist, Stephen, Matthias, Barnabas, Ignatius, Alexander, Marcellinus, Peter, Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia and all your saints: admit us, we beg you, into their company, not weighing our merits, but granting us your pardon….”

Every pope from Peter up to and including Sixtus II, beheaded Aug. 6, 258 under the edict of Roman Emperor Valerian, was a saint and martyr, including Linus, Anacletus (Cletus), Clement I, Evaristus, Alexander I, Sixtus I (also called Xystus I), Telesphorus, Hyginus, Pius I, Anicetus, Soter, Eleutherius, Victor I, Zephyrinus, Callistus I, Urban I, Pontain, Anterus, Fabian, Cornelius, Lucius I and Stephen I. Sixtus II was the 24th pope.

Christmas movies also are a part of my Christmas tradition.  And what, after all, is Christmas without an annual debate over whether Die Hard properly qualifies as a Christmas movie.

Die Hard, directed by John McTiernan and written by Steven E. de Souza and Jeb Stuart, follows the Christmas Eve exploits of John McClane (Bruce Willis), playing an off-duty New York City cop visiting in Los Angeles for the holidays to see his estranged wife, Holly Gennaro McClane (Bonnie Bedelia), and two daughters, as he takes on a group of highly organized criminals, led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), at a holiday party in the L.A. skyscraper that is the American headquarters of the Japanese-owned business Holly works for, as Gruber and his men stage a heist under the guise of a terrorist attack using hostages, including Holly, to keep police at bay.

Die Hard is based on Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever, and was the sequel to 1966’s The Detective, which was adapted into a 1968 film of the same name that starred Frank Sinatra. Willis, not the first choice for the role (Sinatra declined to reprise his role 20 years after The Detective and action star Arnold Schwarzenegger turned the part down) was known primarily as a comedic television actor in 1988, particularly for co-starring as a private detective with Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting on ABC between March 1985 and May 1989.

Die Hard changed all that and made Willis into an action star. Made for $28 million, Die Hard has grossed more than $140 million theatrically worldwide. The film’s success has spawned four sequels to date: Die Hard 2 in 1990; Die Hard with a Vengeance in 1995; Live Free or Die Hard in 2007 and a Good Day to Die Hard in 2013.

“Among the many holiday nods — 12 bad guys, wife named Holly, giant teddy bear gift in waiting and endless Christmas decor — there’s also a film score featuring ominous renditions of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy sprinkled with the jingling of sleigh bells,” Chin notes http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/die-hard-christmas-movie-debate-calgary-eyeopener-1.4450305

Mark Hughes, a film and television screenwriter, who has also worked as a media specialist and campaign ad writer. Hughes penned a piece for Forbes magazine on Dec. 14, 2011, where he picked Die Hard as number one on his list of “Top Ten Best Christmas Movies Of All Time,” as the story was headlined.

Wrote Hughes: “Die Hard is everything every Christmas movie should always be forever. It’s a mix of the baddie from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas; the unbeatable hero who shows up to teach everyone a lesson from Miracle On 34th Street; the ghosts of past, present, and future who bring insight and change from A Christmas Carol; plus every redemptive struggle about family and personal evolution and good versus evil, all wrapped up in a big shiny box with a bow made of explosions and bullets. There’s Christmas, and then there’s Christmas with punching terrorists in the face and winning back your entire family – which do YOU prefer? It doesn’t matter what you prefer, actually, because Bruce Willis prefers the latter, and Bruce Willis always wins. You’d know that if you watched the Die Hard movies. So start watching now, beginning with this one….”

While I’ve added Die Hard to my annual Christmas viewing list (at least some years), Dickens it ain’t.

Charles Dickens, a heterodox Anglican if ever there was one, of course, wrote A Christmas Carol after he journeyed to Lancashire at the age of 31 in the summer of 1843 to see for himself how life was lived in the industrial north of England. On the train back to London, impacted by the poverty and misery he had seen, he conceptualized A Christmas Carol on the eve of revolutions throughout Europe, counselling that hearts must hear and eyes must see for society to change. He began writing the classic Christmas story a week later. He completed the book that fall in six weeks and the book was published on Dec. 19, 1843, the 177th anniversary of which falls on Tuesday. Since the book was published in 1843, Christmas has never been the same.

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!”

Jeanette has a particular fondness for Linus, Charlie Brown, Lucy and Snoopy in A Charlie Brown Christmas, made in 1965 and one of the most successful animated Christmas specials in TV history. Peanuts creator Charles Schulz and animator Bill Melendez wrote the outline in one day, and the musical score was written by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi. ABC celebrated its 50th anniversary two years ago with a special showing Nov. 30, 2015.

Me, I also like It’s a Wonderful Life, produced and directed by Frank Capra, based on the short story The Greatest Gift, written by Philip Van Doren Stern in 1939.

The film stars Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, a man who has given up his dreams in order to help others, and whose imminent suicide on Christmas Eve brings about the intervention of his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers). Clarence shows George all the lives he has touched and how different life in his community of Bedford Falls, New York would be had he never been born. Film historian James Berardinelli has commented on the parallels between It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol, noting that in both stories, a man revisits his life and potential death (or non-existence) with the help of spirits or angels, culminating in a joyous epiphany and a renewed sense of purpose and life.

It’s a Wonderful Life, released in 1946, is one of the most acclaimed films ever made, and was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture, and has been recognized by the American Film Institute as one of the 100 best American films ever made.

Initially, however, it did middling business at the box office and opened to at best mixed reviews.

For their part, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) weighed in on May 26, 1947 with a memo stating: “With regard to the picture It’s a Wonderful Life, [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists. [In] addition, [redacted] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters.”

In a similar vein to It’s a Wonderful Life, another movie destined to become a  Christmas classic, Miracle on 34th Street, was released a year later in 1947. An old man going by the name of Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) fills in for an intoxicated Santa in Macy’s annual Thanksgiving Day parade. Kringle proves to be such a hit that he is soon appearing regularly at the chain’s main store in midtown Manhattan.

The Christmas movie genre is a rather big tent one, as we Catholics like to say. Who can forget the electrifying Griswold family of Chicago? National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is a 1989 Christmas comedy directed by Jeremiah S. Chechik, written by John Hughes, and starring Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo and Randy Quaid, with Juliette Lewis and Johnny Galecki as the Griswold children Audrey and Rusty. It is the third installment in National Lampoon’s Vacation film series.

More perhaps in the Die Hard vein, or at least not in the Frank Capra one, are some other Christmas bad-ass classics, including Canada’s 1974 contribution, the under appreciated genre classic Black Christmas, starring Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, Andrea Martin, Marian Waldman and John Saxon.

The story follows a group of sorority sisters who are receiving threatening phone calls, while being stalked and murdered during the holiday season by a deranged murderer hiding in the attic of their sorority house.

Inspired by a series of murders that took place in the Westmount section of Montreal, the part urban legend “The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs,” and the true crime unsolved slaying of Janett Christman on the evening of March 18, 1950  in Columbia, Missouri, A. Roy Moore composed the script, which was originally titled Stop Me. Upon American director Bob Clark’s involvement, numerous alterations were made, primarily the shifting to a university setting with young adult characters. Parts of Black Christmas were filmed on the University of Toronto campus.

Nine years later in 1983, Clark would make the light-hearted Christmas classic A Christmas Story, following the adventures of youngster Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley), who spends most of his time dodging a bully (Zack Ward) and dreaming of his ideal Christmas gift, a “Red Ryder air rifle.”

The film was shot on an estimated budget of $620,000 in Toronto in the winter of 1973–74. Black Christmas was purchased by Warner Bros., who distributed the film in North America, releasing it in Canada on Oct. 11, 1974.

In the United States, Warner Bros. timed the release with the Christmas holiday, releasing it on Dec. 20, 1974. It screened at theaters in the United States through late 1975, and would internationally gross over $4 million at the box office.

It took some years after its release, but eventually Black Christmas would receive praise from film critics and historians for being one of the earliest films of its type to conclude without revealing the identity of its villain. It has also earned a following as a cult classic. The film is generally considered to be one of the earliest slasher films,  serving as an influence for Halloween four years later in 1978.

And speaking of Christmas slasher films, who can forget the now 1984 Christmas cult classic Silent Night, Deadly Night, directed by Charles E. Sellier Jr., and starring Robert Brian Wilson, Lilyan Chauvin, Gilmer McCormick, Toni Nero, Linnea Quigley, Britt Leach and Leo Geter. Set during Christmas, the story concerns a young man, Billy, who suffers from post-traumatic stress over witnessing his parents’ Christmas Eve murder and his subsequent upbringing in an abusive Catholic orphanage. In adulthood, the Christmas holiday leads him into a psychological breakdown, and he emerges as a spree killer donning a Santa suit.

After negative reviews and something of a public outcry, the film was pulled from theaters a week after its release on Nov. 9, 1984.

Also part of the Christmas movie genre is Bad Santa, made in 2003 and directed by Terry Zwigoff, and starring Billy Bob Thornton, Tony Cox, Lauren Graham, Brett Kelly, Lauren Tom, John Ritter, and Bernie Mac. It was John Ritter’s last live action film appearance before his death on Sept. 11, 2003. The Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, were the film’s executive producers.

Willie T. Soke (Billy Bob Thornton)and his dwarf assistant Marcus Skidmore (Tony Cox) are professional thieves. Every year, Willie disguises himself as a department store Santa Claus and Marcus disguises himself as an elf in order for both of them to rob shopping malls at night, using Marcus’ wife Lois as their getaway driver and accomplice. Marcus takes his duty as an elf seriously, but Willie is a sex-addicted alcoholic, and is gradually unable to appropriately perform his Santa duties with children, plus his safe-cracking performance is being affected, much to Marcus’ dismay. When they are hired at the Saguaro Square Mall in Phoenix, the vulgar remarks made by Willie shock the prudish mall manager Bob Chipeska, who brings them to the attention of security chief Gin Slagel.

While some Christmas movies have quickly entered the pantheon of yuletide classics to virtual universal acclaim, others become classics more slowly over time, or perhaps as niche classics; Christmas favourites, but not for everyone.

Over the last several years, Christmas with a Capital C, directed by Helmut Schleppi, and shot in February 2010 in Seward in southern Alaska in an inlet on the Kenai Peninsula, has become a favourite for me to watch when the time arrives for Christmas movies.

Hometown Mayor Dan Reed (Ted McGinley) looks forward to each year with enthusiasm to all the events, friends and family that fill this special season in the small fictional town of Trapper Falls, Alaska (Seward).

Together with his brother Greg (Brad Stine), they dedicate time away from their adventure tour company to spread Christmas cheer, including annually putting up a 50-year-old  hand-craved nativity set, given years ago to the town, in the public square.

Probably no need for a spoiler alert even if I tell you Christmas with a Capital C is a Pure Flix Entertainment Christian filmmaking entry in the culture wars and the so-called “War on Christmas” by secularists.  Pure Flix Entertainment is owned by David. A.R. White, raised in a small Mennonite farming town outside of Dodge City, Kansas, brothers Kevin and Bobby Downes, and Michael Scott.

The Christian filmmaking genre, as I wrote in a post headlined “Flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar: Christian movie genre is ‘hot’” back on Sept. 15, 2014 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/flying-largely-under-the-mainstream-cinematic-radar-christian-movie-genre-is-hot/) regularly gets knocked — and truth be told, not unfairly often — by more “secular moviegoers for its heavy-handed theological scripts, clunky acting and cheesy sets, with mainly bad films, which, to be charitable, do little more than preach to the choir.”

Given that Christmas with a Capital C centers in part  — although it will turn out not to be the main point  — around the United States Constitution’s First Amendment Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from making any law respecting an establishment of religion and not only forbids the government from establishing an official religion, but also prohibits government actions that unduly favor one religion over another, as well as prohibiting the government from unduly preferring religion over non-religion, or non-religion over religion, it can be a bit clunky going at times. Christmas with a Capital C may hold the distinction of being the first movie of the genre where the words “Establishment Clause” are actually uttered on screen. The plot has Dan’s old high school rival Mitch Bright (Daniel Baldwin), a mean-spirited and embittered militant atheist returning home after 20 years, Dan is immediately suspicious. Mitch is a highly successful big city lawyer who has never wanted anything to do with Trapper Falls.

Their rivalry re-ignites when the frustrated Mitch takes offense to what he sees as the town’s violation of his rights. Mitch wants the nativity scene removed from the front of City Hall and the word Christmas switched to Happy Holidays on all signs. Fifty years of tradition are now challenged not by an outsider but a former member of the community. As the conflict escalates it goes beyond one person’s opinion but magnifies into an entire town problem when Mitch enters into the mayoral race to have Dan replaced.

In the heat of the legal battle and facing certain defeat, Dan’s wife Kristen (Nancy Stafford) and their daughter Makayla (Francesca Derosa) wanting to show, what she believes to be, the true meaning of Christmas are inspired to launch a “Christmas with a Capital C” campaign as an effort to keep the town together. In doing so they discover the secret behind Mitch’s return.

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Dialing up the future: CompuServe, Tandy’s TRS-80 at RadioShack, and the San Jose Mercury News

The “digital divide” is a term usually used to characterize the gulf between those who have ready access to computers and the internet, and those who do not.

I like to think of it in a more archival sense with the digital divide being a demarcation line between online full-text access to today’s, yesterday’s, along with the year and decades before that’s newspapers, and a world, where even if we all are blessed with a plethora of computers and internet service providers, accessing those newspapers of yesteryear for free is in most cases next to impossible online, unless you are fortunate enough to have access to digitized older newspapers such as can be found at the Thompson Public Library: https://thompsonlibrary.insigniails.com/Library/Digital. Otherwise, archival newspaper research for 1978 still  means scouring bound volumes in a musty newspaper morgue or library, or spending hours in a dark cubicle with one’s head’s buried and eyes straining, spinning reel-after-reel of microfilm or sheet-after-sheet of microfiche.

Does it matter? I think it does. While I can call up verbatim copies of stories I’ve written for most newspapers since 2001, I cannot as easily access stories at a distance in space and time I wrote for the Peterborough Examiner back in 1985 on Paul Croft Jr., who had been a brilliant computer scientist in the late 1960s for Control Data in Minneapolis, but later, while suffering from paranoid delusions stemming from late onset schizophrenia, in 1972 shot and killed in a company parking lot in Canada a co-worker, after hearing voices telling him to do so.

Later, after being released from detention in a mental health institution, but having a relapse into more  mental illness again, largely triggered by not taking his anti-psychotic medications because of their unpleasant side effects, Croft wound up wounding two OPP Tactical Rescue Unit (TRU) officers in 1984, who had arrived at his home in a remote part of Haliburton County, Ontario to execute a warrant under the Ontario Mental Health Act, alleging he had breached the conditions of the lieutenant-governor’s warrant he was subject to, namely by not taking his prescribed meds. By the time I encountered Croft in October 1985, he was on trial in Lindsay, Ontario in what was then the Supreme Court of Ontario, being tried on two counts of attempted murder.

Croft shot the two officers with a high-powered rifle. Both, while injured, recovered and survived.

Again found not guilty by reason of insanity, Croft became among the rarest of the rare among what were then often referred to as the criminally insane: a man detained on not one, but two lieutenant governor’s warrants.

Ditto the 1987-88 series of stories I wrote for the paper on the so-called Peterborough Armouries Conspiracy, which had several dimensions, including a number of police investigations, involving civilian and military police, several court cases, two very tragic suicides, and finally a coroner’s inquest presided over by Ontario’s deputy chief coroner at the time.  Names like Andrew Webster, Ian Shearer, Jeffrey Atkinson,  Lloyd Jackson and Michael Noury have largely been lost in the pre-internet mists of time, recalled only if one happens to have a scrapbook of newspapers clippings, or access to bound volumes of the Peterborough Examiner or its microfilm for 1987-1988.

Without that kind of research access, 30 to 35 years after the events, one’s memories of such stories have a sort of sepia tone or looking through the glass dark quality to them. Although oddly enough you can find a good summary of the Peterborough Armouries Conspiracy story through a June 17, 1987 story headlined “Cyanide deaths a Peterborough nightmare” by Southam News reporter John Kessel, which appeared in among other places, the now Glacier Media-owned Prince George Citizen, which has digitized its older newspapers with the PDF available online at: http://pgnewspapers.pgpl.ca/fedora/repository/pgc%3A1987-06-17-24/PDF/Page%20PDF

I can almost tell you to the day in retrospect when I think the internet “arrived.”

When I arrived at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario as a history graduate student in September 1993, the main library was still Douglas Library on University Avenue, but across the street kitty-corner to it was a massive construction project where they were building the brand-new Stauffer Library on Union Street. This was the end of the brief five-year NDP Bob Rae era in Ontario and while the economy wasn’t strictly speaking in recession, it was far from booming, so projects of such scale in places like Kingston were rare.

I remember using an internet station in the just opened Stauffer Library the next year on one of my first visits in October 1994. The Netscape Navigator browser had just been released that same month, but Queen’s was using the NCSA Mosaic browser, released in 1993, almost the first graphical web browser ever invented. The computer services and library folks at Queen’s got it from day one to their credit. They knew this was going to be so popular with students instantly, the work stations (and there weren’t many) were designed for standing only. How many places in a university library is there no seating? Not many. But they wanted to keep people moving because there would be lineups to use the stations.

I also remember reading the San Jose Mercury News online because it was in Silicon Valley and one of the very first papers in North America online. Today its online archive goes back to June 1985. The funny thing is, the San Jose Mercury News recognized its brief moment in history and for a few years anyway punched well above its weight, doing fine investigative work, both in print and online; a small regional paper no one had ever heard of before the early 1990s unless they lived in Southern California. In its brief shining moment, the San Jose Mercury News had 400 people in its newsroom, revenues of $300 million and profit margins of more than 30 per cent, a bureau in Hanoi, and netted a Pulitzer Prize for foreign news.

In 1994, we all knew intuitively the world had changed with the internet and graphical web browsers. I had sent my first e-mail from Trent University in Peterborough more than three years earlier in the spring of 1991 from the Thomas J. Bata Library on their “Ivory”  server (someone in computer services seemingly had a sense of humour), and was also sitting down as I recall. That was neat, but this was on a whole other scale entirely.

I realized in July 1995, as I was finishing up writing America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’ Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan for my master’s thesis in 20th century American history on the admission of nonimmigrants to the United States, emigration and immigration policy, and foreign relations in Latin America between 1981 and 1989, that my class would likely be the last Queen’s University history class where students, including me, had few online citations in their footnotes or included in their bibliographies, and the style of such citations was still very much in development.

While the San Jose Mercury News is often thought of as pioneering in its online venture, the first newspaper to go online was The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio way back on July 1, 1980.  It was part of a unique CompuServe and Associated Press experiment about the potential of online papers. Eventually other AP member newspapers were part of the project, including the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, The Virginian-Pilot, The Middlesex News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But it was The Columbus Dispatch that published the first “online” newspaper when it began beaming news stories through the CompuServe dial-up service. The paper was the first daily in the United States to test a technology that enabled the day’s news to flow into home computers at 300 words per minute. Users paid $5 per hour for the service. “To become a subscriber,” the paper reported at the time, “a resident will have to have a home computer.  Such equipment is now available in electronics shops.” If you had Tandy’s TRS-80 from RadioShack, founded in 1921 as a mail-order retailer for amateur ham-radio operators and maritime communications officers on Brattle Street in Boston by two London-born brothers, Theodore and Milton Deutschmann, who named the company after the compartment that housed the wireless equipment for ham radios, and a modem with access to the online CompuServe dial-up service, you were ready to go, or at least until the pioneering online experiment ended in 1982.

Launched in November 1977, the $600 TRS-80 was one of the first mass-market personal computers with about 16K of memory and a 12-inch-square monitor with one shade of gray characters and no graphics, using software designed by a still obscure start-up named Microsoft, founded 2½ years earlier in April 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

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Muskol: Nova Scotian Charles Coll’s indispensable Canadian invention

Canadians have been a clever lot over time when it comes to useful inventions. We have been particularly adept at inventing far from glamorous but really useful things. Take the contribution of Peter Lymburner Robertson for instance. After badly cutting his hand while using a slot-headed screwdriver, Robertson, from what is now Milton, Ontario, invented the square-headed screwdriver and square-socket drive Robertson screw in 1908. He received the Canadian patent for his invention in 1909. A person could drive a screw more quickly with this new design and the screw was self-centering so only one hand was needed. On top of that, the driver fit more tightly in the screw’s head, thereby reducing the chance of the screwdriver slipping out.

A few years later, when he overheard a dispute between a local hotelier and deliveryman over broken eggs, British Columbia newspaper publisher Joseph Leopold Coyle helpfully invented the egg carton with individual cushioned slots in 1911. The hotelier had grown frustrated because eggs delivered from a local farm were often broken. Putting all one’s eggs in a basket was standard practice in 1911. Coyle, who established several newspapers in the Bulkley Valley, including the Omineca Herald, the Bulkley Pioneer, and the Interior News, which became the mainstay paper of Smithers and the Bulkley Valley, wondered how best to safely move eggs from Point A to Point B? By 1919, he had sold his newspaper holdings and moved to Vancouver to focus on his Coyle Egg-Safety Carton business. Coyle’s list of inventions would ultimately also include a pocket cigar cutter and a vehicle anti-theft device.

For my money, Muskol, while it may not have quite the everyday utility of a Roberson screwdriver or Coyle egg carton, is nevertheless the most indispensable Canadian invention from June through August in most of the country. Muskol, invented in 1951 by Charles Henry Coll, an avid Canadian outdoorsman from Stellarton, Nova Scotia, repels mosquitoes, black flies, deer flies, stable flies, horse flies (known as bulldogs in much of Western Canada, including Manitoba), ticks and chiggers.

In the early 1950s, Coll began carrying out experiments in his basement workshop on MacLean Street in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, which led to the production of Muskol. He had by that point a unique combination of job experiences, including working in the laboratory for Leaver Brothers Limited in Boston, as well as Tibbetts Paints in Trenton, Nova Scotia, and also as a manager for Thompson and Sutherland Limited hardware, hot air furnaces and plumbing in New Glasgow. At the same time in his basement, Coll began creating fishing lures. On Oct. 1, 1959, the Government of Nova Scotia registered Coll to manufacture and sell a product called “Muskol Lures.” Muskol combined in its name “musk,” the scent produced by deer – and “call” meaning entice and “Coll” the family surname.

Coll’s small, family-owned business, relied on word-of-mouth advertising among those who used Muskol in the early years.

In 1977, Coll was inducted into the Honorary Order of the Kentucky Colonels, an organization that recognizes service and contribution to the global community and supports many kinds of charitable activities. The moniker “Colonel” stuck to Charles Coll and is used on the packaging of Muskol to this day.

The magic ingredient in Muskol is DEET, the common name for N, N-diethyl-m-toluamide, which North Carolina’s Division of Public Health, Department of Health and Human Services’ Communicable Disease Branch, part of the department’s epidemiology section, says is the most effective mosquito repellent available.

Muskol has a DEET concentration of 23.5 per cent. How much DEET is the right amount is one of those questions campers and other outdoors folks like to debate. Repellency of insects is accomplished via evaporation of DEET from the skin. The higher the level of DEET, the longer the evaporation process. DEET was developed in 1944 by Samuel Gertler of the United States Department of Agriculture for use by the United States Army, following its experience of jungle warfare during the Second World War. It was originally tested as a pesticide on farm fields, and entered military use in 1946 and civilian use in the 1950s. Concentrations above 30 per cent experience diminishing returns as they increase, but do increase the length of time of effectiveness per application. Muskol’s DEET concentration 23.5 per cent is effective for about five to eight hours per application. 

The Coll family retained the rights to Muskol until 1982 when they were sold to Schering-Plough Canada Ltd. (which was later acquired in 2015 by Bayer Inc.), shortly after the death of Charles Coll.

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The Tower Treasure, The House on the Cliff and The Secret of the Old Mill: Franklin W. Dixon’s Hardy Boys

As his 90th anniversary of publishing juvenile or children’s literature fast approaches June 1, author Franklin W. Dixon remains indefatigable. Mind you that could be because Franklin W. Dixon is a pseudonym for the many Franklin W. Dixons there have been over the last nine decades writing Hardy Boys books.

The Hardy Boys series, published by Grosset & Dunlap, began on June 1, 1927, with three titles by ghostwriter Leslie McFarlane, writing under the pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon: The Tower Treasure, The House on the Cliff and The Secret of the Old Mill. McFarlane, a Canadian-born journalist, wrote the first 15 or so volumes of the series, establishing the writing style that made the books so successful. Early volumes were published in a cloth hardcover format with colour dust jackets. In 1962, the series switched to a newer cover format with the cover art printed directly on the cover and no dust jacket. In 1979, Simon & Schuster acquired the rights for all new Hardy Boys books.

The son of a school principal, McFarlane was raised in Haileybury, Ontario, located on the northwest shore of Lake Timiskaming, 150 kilometres north of North Bay, and established and named after his English alma mater, Haileybury College, by Charles C. Farr, who had come to the area six years earlier as an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

McFarlane became a freelance writer shortly after high school. He and his family moved to Whitby, Ontario, right next door to where I grew up in Oshawa, in 1936. In fact, McFarlane died in Oshawa in September 1977, at the age of 74.  Before his Hardy Boys non-fame, McFarlane worked as a newspaper reporter in Sudbury, Ontario, Toronto, and briefly in the mid-1920s, in Springfield, Massachusetts as a staff reporter at the Springfield Republican.

Leslie McFarlane is the father of Brian McFarlane, who has written many books himself, and is best remembered as a commentator on CBC Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts between 1964 and 1991, and as an author of almost 100 hockey books, selling more than 1.3 million copies. Leslie McFarlane started writing the Hardy Boys books when his son Brian was around four-years-old.

It was while living in the United States that he replied to an advertisement placed by the Stratemeyer Syndicate for a children’s book ghostwriter. That children’s book would be the Hardy Boys series, which continues to be published. While it’s not altogether clear whether Bayport, said to be located on Barmet Bay, a horseshoe-shaped inlet three miles from the Atlantic Ocean, and the fictional home of youthful sleuths Frank and Joe Hardy, and their parents, Fenton Hardy, a private investigator and retired New York City Police Department (NYPD) detective-lieutenant, who worked in the 71st precinct, and their stay-at-home, Laura, is supposed to be further located in the State of New York (the most likely choice) or New Jersey, or perhaps the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, it is clear the series has an enduring resilience and lasting popularity, not tied to its statehood or who Franklin W. Dixon is this book. The books have been translated into 50 languages.

In 1905, Edward Stratemeyer, a prolific writer in his own right, had founded a network of freelance writers and editors, after realizing he had far more ideas for stories and series than he could write on his own. Writers signed away their rights to royalties and bylines in exchange for a flat fee. Stratemeyer Syndicate’s central aim was to produce a very large number of books at the lowest possible cost.

“The industry that churns out children’s books has changed surprisingly little in the last century,” Daniel A. Gross, a  Boston-based writer and public radio producer, argued in a piece for The Atlantic, “The Mystery of the Hardy Boys and the Invisible Authors” (https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/05/hardy-boys-nancy-drew-ghostwriters/394022/), published two years ago in May 2015.

“The secret behind the longevity of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys is simple,” Gross wrote. “They are still here because their creators found a way to minimize cost, maximize output, and standardize creativity. The solution was an assembly line that made millions by turning writers into anonymous freelancers, a business model that is central to the Internet age.”

Having signed away any royalties without regret, McFarlane was paid a flat fee of $100 per book for most of his Hardy Boys books, which he was churning out in prodigious numbers during the 1930s in the midst of the Great Depression, although still wondering when his agent would be able to send another cheque so he might buy more coal for the furnace.  A well-preserved Hardy Boys first edition is now worth about $1,500.

McFarlane eventually moved back to Canada from the United States, working as a writer, producer and director for the National Film Board (NFB) in Montreal, the CBC and, for a time, after moving to Toronto, where he was a friend of actor Lorne Greene, working as a scriptwriter on the 1960s TV hit, Bonanza. As part of the National Film Board in Montreal, he wrote and directed documentaries and short dramas, including the 1951 documentary Royal Journey, Here’s Hockey, a 1953 documentary featuring Montreal Canadiens’ star Jean Beliveau. He also wrote the documentary titled Herring Hunt, nominated for an Academy Award in 1953 for Live Action Short Film.

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Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage

Consider the headlines for Sunday, July 17, 2016: CBS News is reporting in a July 16 its headline “W.Va. lawmaker: Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung’ on National Mall.” The story goes onto say, “A member of the West Virginia House of Delegates is causing a stir after tweeting that Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.’

“CBS affiliate WOWK-TV reports that Michael Folk, a Republican legislator who is also a United Airlines pilot, posted a tweet Friday night saying: ‘Hillary Clinton, you should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution… then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.’”

Meanwhile, Charles P. Pierce has a July 14 piece in Esquire magazine, headlined, “This Isn’t Funny Anymore. American Democracy Is at Stake.” The subhead reads: “Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor to the American idea.” Pierce writes at the top of the story that not “until Wednesday did we hear clearly the echoes of shiny black boots on German cobblestones.”

Really?

Is this the best we can do in terms of civics and public discourse in 21^st century America? Call anyone we disagree with a traitor and perhaps for extra outrage allude to Hitlerism and Nazism? Is demagoguery the only currency we traffic in for what passes as ideas?

We stand at a dangerous international moment in history when an intersection of events conspire to resurrect Fascism on a scale not seen since the 1930s.

But the American republic can survive this difficult historical moment. Right-wing populism is not centralized authoritarian Fascism.

If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]

Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January.  Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.

There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.

California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.

And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to terms who served two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.

I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts in November 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

I had been working as supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I oversaw telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Jimmy Carter-Ronald Reagan presidential election campaign.

We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Red Line “T.” The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

Demagoguery, while deeply disappointing as it is being manifested by Trump and his supporters, is neither new nor fatal to American politics. It is also not surprising when people feel that politics is a rigged game they can’t possible win at under the normal rules of the political elites.

As I wrote earlier this year, “In an age-before-Trump, you need only to look back to the 1930s and the Canadian-born “Radio Priest” Father Charles Coughlin, from Hamilton, Ontario, later based at Royal Oak, Michigan in the Archdiocese of Detroit, and the anti-Communist and equally anti-Semitic Christian Front he would be the inspiration for in November 1938.” It was the age of demagoguery in American politics. And it was the year 1938.

Although he didn’t personally belong to the organization, and denied that he was anti-Semitic. Historical opinion is divided on whether, or to what extent, Coughlin was anti-Semitic, but it is an uncontested fact his weekly magazine Social Justice reprinted in weekly installments in 1938 the fraudulent and notoriously anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery first published in 1903 that purports to expose a Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world.

Coughlin’s radio show was phenomenally popular. His office received up to 80,000 letters per week from listeners at its peak in the early to mid-1930s. By 1934, Coughlin was the most prominent Roman Catholic speaker on political and financial issues in the United States, with a far broader base of popular support than any bishop or cardinal at the time, with a radio audience that reached tens of millions of people every week. Historian Alan Brinkley wrote in his 1982 book Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression that by 1934 Coughlin  was receiving more than 10,000 letters every day” and that “his clerical staff at times numbered more than a hundred.”  Coughlin foreshadowed modern talk radio and televangelism.

In addition to his anti-Communist stance, and leaving himself open rightly or wrongly to accusations of antisemitism, Coughlin wasn’t the only clergyman to at least also flirt and even dance at times with Spanish fascism, German National Socialism and demagoguery in the United States in the late 1930s. American Protestant clergyman Frank Buchman founded Moral Re-Armament (MRA) in 1938, as an international moral and spiritual movement with Europe rearming militarily on the brink of the Second World War. “The crisis is fundamentally a moral one,” he said. “The nations must rearm morally,” Buchman said in London on May 29, 1938. “Moral recovery is essentially the forerunner of economic recovery. Moral recovery creates not crisis but confidence and unity in every phase of life.”

Buchman had earlier also founded the Oxford Group, in some important ways the predecessor to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Both the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament, under Buchman’s leadership, faced similar charges to what Coughlin did at times; and again, like in the case of Coughlin, historical opinion is divided, but on the evidence it is clear the German Nazi leadership was wary of Buchman and denounced Moral Re-Armament, which went onto do significant post-war reconstruction work in West Germany in the late 1940s, after the Second World War ended.

Only historical amnesia prevents us from remembering 1938. We barely know their names today, yet Coughlin had tens of millions of radio listeners in the United States, while Buchman influenced political elites worldwide.

And the legacy of Moral Re-Armament, close to home here in Northern Manitoba, is not insignificant. Just largely invisible.

Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas Archbishop emeritus Sylvain Lavoie, whose archdiocese includes Thompson, toured during university for seven months with “Up with People,” founded by American J. Blanton Belk in 1965, as a conservative counterweight to attract young people during the turbulent Sixties.

Belk was expected to be the heir apparent to Peter D. Howard, a British journalist, who succeeded Buchman as leader of Moral Re-Armament in 1961, but Belk broke away to incorporate Up With People as a non-profit at the encouragement of then Republican U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower, who urged Belk to distance himself from Moral Re-Armament.

And Winnipeg-born Bob Lowery, for years the Winnipeg Free Press’ Thompson-based correspondent, in a life before journalism and living in Northern Manitoba, and immediately after the Second World War ended in 1945, had joined the Moral Re-Armament crusade to help rebuild war-torn Germany, staying there for more than 20 years until 1969.

During the Second World War he had served with the Royal Canadian Voluntary Reserve. Lowery had earned a philosophy undergraduate degree from the University of Manitoba in 1937.

Robert Newton Lowery was inducted by then governor general Roméo LeBlanc as a Member of the Order of Canada in 1996. In the citation accompanying the honour, LeBlanc noted Lowery was “known for his love of the North and has demonstrated genuine concern for the residents of northern Manitoba, working to redress social, economic and cultural differences through his involvement in all aspects of community life.”

In 1997 he was recognized with a Silver Eagle Outstanding Citizen Award from the Indigenous Women’s Collective of Manitoba. A park is also named after him here in Thompson.

He had moved to northern Manitoba in 1969, the same year he left Moral Re-Armament in West Germany, and become a correspondent for the Winnipeg Free Press, based here in Thompson.

In 1982 Lowery published the book The Unbeatable Breed: People and Events of Northern Manitoba in collaboration with photographer Murray McKenzie.

Lowery retired in 1997. He died at Norway House on Dec. 17, 2000.

As Mitchell Kalpakgian noted in a July 6 essay headlined “Fanatical Ideas and Reasonable Convictions” in Crisis Magazine, a self-described “voice for the faithful Catholic laity” published in Manchester, New Hampshire, “A fanatic is a person obsessed with one idea, a monomaniac ruled by one dominant compulsion that governs all his thoughts and actions. He is enslaved by one predominant passion that dictates all his motives and decisions.”

While their ideas might differ, it is that fanaticism not Fascism that rules this American historical moment.

Quoting G.K. Chesterton, the Catholic convert and apologist, Kalpakgian notes in a chapter entitled “The Maniac” from Orthodoxy, Chesterton explained that the fanatic’s thinking is too “rational” in the sense that he ‘overlooks many other considerations and ignores other evidence that surrounds him.

“The fanatic’s extreme mental concentration on one thing leads to madness at the expense of openness to larger universal truths that lead to wisdom … To think with rabid intensity on one subject consumes the mind to an unhealthy degree of concentration.

“It warps a person’s mind, making him pay undue attention to one matter and ignore objects of larger importance. The fanatic makes himself the center of the universe as only his passions count.”

Wrote Chesterton: “Are there no other stories in the world except yours, and are all men busy with your business?”

Kalpakgian writes that to be “haunted, obsessed, and enslaved by one rigid idea ultimately distorts a person’s humanity. A fanatic lives and dies for one thing only, whether it is revenge, money, work, pleasure, or fame. To think like a monomaniac eventually leads to thinking only with the head and without the conscience or the heart. Ironically, the overworking of the mind on one narrow subject breeds some degree of insanity.

“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason,” writes Chesterton.

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Nova Scotia’s epic management versus union newspaper war between the Chronicle Herald and Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130

I wrote elsewhere on Jan. 25 that the Chronicle-Herald newspaper strike in Nova Scotia, which had been launched by Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 two days earlier, was a “battle that already has all the makings of an epic struggle.”

That was a month after Christmas. Sixty-five days and 10 weeks later, winter has turned to spring. Tomorrow is Easter.

My time at the CH was brief and 16 years was a long time ago.

But I do remember from that time, which coincided both with me serving as vice-president for Eastern Canada for The Newspaper Guild Canada/Communications Workers of America (CWA), as well as working briefly in the Truro bureau of the CH, the courage of several of their folks, at least one of whom is on the picket line now 16 years later, in them fighting, along with the local, national and international union in the spring of 1999 (when I was still working at the Peterborough Examiner in Ontario, before moving to Nova Scotia and the CH that fall) in a hotly contested hearing at the province’s Labour Board, to be rightly included in the newly-formed editorial bargaining unit, as the Chronicle-Herald spent a fortune trying to exclude them in an expensive battle in which the union ultimately prevailed.

What struck me most was their true sense of solidarity with their brothers and sisters at the paper. These were journalists high enough up the CH newsroom hierarchy to be evidently worth the time and expense on management’s part to fight so desperately to exclude them from the newly-formed bargaining unit; they weren’t trying to join the union to win a first contract that might add $20 more to their weekly pay. They were already well compensated relative to their colleagues at the paper and their career trajectories in the spring of 1999 presumably had nowhere to go but up, based on their employment histories and achievements with the paper. There was relatively little personal gain in sight for them in joining the fledgling union bargaining unit. If anything, the opposite was more likely to be true; they risked being blacklisted by CH management and having their career paths frozen. Yet they did fight. On principle. And they won.

“Keep your eye on the strike that started Saturday in Nova Scotia when Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 struck the Chronicle Herald at 12:01 a.m. AST, the minute they were in a legal position to do so,” I wrote Jan. 25.

“While most of the recent attention has been on Postmedia, management proposed more than 1,232 changes to the now expired old contract. All the big issues are in play here. The CH wants to eliminate its digital deskers and outsource the work to Toronto. Other work is being outsourced to Brunswick News in New Brunswick (i.e. Irving). Scab journalists are now producing the local CH news. The Communications Workers of America (CWA), the Newspaper Guild sector’s union parent in Washington, D.C. have very deep pockets, but whether this is the fight they want to stand or fall on in terms of newspapers, which is only a small part of their representation, is hard to say. Sometimes those type of choices are forced on you. As for the CH, it is controlled by the Dennis family, and has been for years, making it the last independent daily of any note in Canada. This is not Postmedia or Glacier or Transcontinental chain ownership. What it is though is a battle that already has all the makings of an epic struggle in an industry where I wish I could say I’ve seen some successful newspaper strikes. Truth is, I haven’t, I’m sorry to say.”

I was working at the Peterborough Examiner when Chicago Typographical Union No. 16, Chicago Web Printing Pressmen’s Union Local 7 and Chicago Mailers Union Local 2 struck the Chicago Tribune on the evening of July 18, 1985 when their contracts with the Chicago Newspaper Publishers’ Association, a collective bargaining association to which the Tribune belonged, expired. The unions were fighting the introduction of new technology and changes in work rules the company sought, including demands for more control of hiring and assignments. In response to the strike, the Tribune began hiring permanent replacement workers. “Violence ensued shortly thereafter,” wrote the Chicago-based United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in a March 1996 decision related to enforcement of a National Labour Relations Board order. “Incidents ranged from the relatively benign, such as unsolicited orders for food deliveries or magazine subscriptions, to more dangerous activities such as the slashing of tires, death threats, and the stabbing of a Tribune delivery driver.  On one occasion, mounted police were called to disperse a mob that had obstructed the path of the Tribune’s delivery trucks.  Stones thrown by the mob injured one of the truck drivers, a policeman, and other Tribune employees.”

The striking Chicago Web Printing Pressmen’s Union Local 7 unconditionally offered to return to work on Jan. 30, 1986.

The printers’ strike, however, continued and lasted 40 months.

Little more than a decade later was the Detroit newspaper strike of July 1995 to December 2000.  Teamsters Locals 372 and 2040 and allied AFL-CIO unions, including the Newspaper Guild of Detroit Local 34022, making up the Metropolitan Council of Newspaper Unions (MCNU), struck the Detroit Newspaper Agency (DNA), as it was known in 1995, which ran the non-editorial business and production operations of the Detroit Free Press, owned at the time by now defunct Knight-Ridder, and the Detroit News, owned by Gannett, under a Joint Operating Agreement  (JOA), on July 13, 1995, with about 2,500 members of six different unions going on strike. Joint Operating Agreements came about as a result of the federal Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970, which allowed for the formation of JOA’s, as they are commonly known, among competing newspaper operations within the same market area. It enshrined in law special exemptions, dating back to 1933 and the E.W. Scripps Co.-owned Albuquerque Tribune in New Mexico, to antitrust laws that ordinarily prohibit such co-operation between competitors, based on the theory it would allow for the survival of multiple daily newspapers in a given urban market where circulation was declining. In practice, however, noble their origins may have been, JOA’s haven’t had that intended result in many cases, especially by the time the 1990s rolled around.

By the seven-week mark of the strike in early September 1995, about 40 per cent of the unionized editorial staff had crossed the picket line to return to work, including Mitch Albom, the Detroit  Free Press sports columnist, who was the newspaper’s best known and most popular writer, and who two years later in 1997 would go onto publish the landmark bestseller, Tuesdays with Morrie, about his dozen or so Tuesday visits in the fall of 1995 in suburban Boston with Morrie Schwartz, a former professor of his at Brandeis University, who Albom had lost touch with until he saw him interviewed about his Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, by Ted Koppel on ABC News Nightline. Schwartz died on Nov. 4, 1995.  Albom began his Sept. 6, 1995 column about the newspaper strike with one word: “Enough.” But he also wrote that he would remain a member of the Newspaper Guild and “give much of what I earn to the people still on strike.” Albom said in an interview, “Newspapers are fire stations, they are police stations, and they should not be shut down.” Albom, “who tried to broker an agreement that would return strikers to work during negotiations,” reported James Bennet of the New York Times on Sept. 6, 1995 in a story headlined, “After 7 Weeks, Detroit Newspaper Strike Takes a Violent Turn,” said that he “thought both sides in the dispute were wrong and that he did not want to be seen as supporting either. ‘I didn’t want to be waved as a flag,'” Albom said.  Ten years later in 2005, Albom and four editors who had read the column and allowed it to go to print were briefly suspended from the Detroit Free Press after Albom filed an April 3, 2005 column that stated Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson, two former Michigan State basketball players, who had gone onto the NBA, were in attendance at an NCAA Final Four semi-final game on, when they were not.  The players had told Albom they planned to attend, and filing Friday before the game, Albom wrote as if the players were there, including that they wore Michigan State green. But Cleaves and Richard’s plans changed at the last minute and they never attended.  Albom was in attendance at the game, but failed to check on the two players’ presence.

Nineteen months after it began, the union leadership said it would call off the strike on Feb. 14, 1997, if the two papers would rehire striking union members. The companies rejected the offer for the most part, saying they would only rehire a fraction of the striking workers, as new vacancies allowed, because they wouldn’t let go of they any of their replacement workers hired during the 19-month strike, resulting in the strike being transformed into a lockout, which continued for years. On July 7, 2000, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. overturned earlier decisions by the National Labor Relations Board that the unions and their members were the victims of a series of unfair labor practice actions committed by the newspapers during the labor dispute. The last of the six unions settled in December, 2000, and, more than five years after it began, the Detroit newspaper strike was over.

And the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild Local 37082 49-day strike against The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2000-2001 took place at a time I sat on the Newspaper Guild’s Washington-based international sector council. At the time of the strike, the two papers had been operating under a JOA since May 23, 1983, with the Seattle Times owned by the Blethen family’s Seattle Times Co., and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer owned by Hearst Corp. When the dispute ended, the Seattle Times newsroom employees wound up settling in terms of wages for what the company was offering when the strike began, but the two-tier pay system was eliminated as a result of the strike, and the amount the company paid toward health insurance premiums went up from 66 percent to 75 percent, so one might argue the union won at least a marginal victory. The Hearst Corp.’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer, or P-I, as it is known in Seattle, ceased print operations on March 17, 2009, becoming an online only publication with a vastly reduced news staff of about 20 people rather than the 165 it had, and a site with mostly commentary, advice and links to other news sites, along with some original reporting. The JOA ended with the cessation of the P-I print edition.

Parker Donham’s March 9 post on his Contrarian blog (http://contrarian.ca/2016/03/09/why-the-herald-workers-are-losing-and-how-they-could-win/), headlined “Why the Herald workers are losing – and how they could win,” where he writes the “notion that 1940s-style industrial union tactics can win the day for journalists in 2016 is delusional,” is probably a hard analysis for the striking HTU workers to read, but still not without merit, in my view.  A look outside the box is often a good thing even if you don’t see the box.

Wrote Donham in part in his post earlier this month: “The striking journalists have also picketed various Herald advertisers – as if driving revenue away from a business whose problems stem from an industry-wide hemorrhage of revenue somehow served their interests.

“The frustration and fear workers feel as they watch their livelihood – their calling – slip away is understandable. But the notion that 1940s-style industrial union tactics can win the day for journalists in 2016 is delusional.

“Whatever faint hope the strikers have rests in part on public opinion. It does not help their cause to construct artificial tests in the form of secondary picket lines, then condemn as enemies anyone who fails these tests. It would make much more sense to court Herald readers, including the mayor and the members of the Greater Halifax Partnership, by demonstrating what journalistic craft and talent means to a modern city.

“Chances of a six-day-a-week print edition of the Chronicle-Herald existing in 2020 are next to nil. Everyone involved – workers, owners, readers, community leaders – must adjust to this new reality.

“That’s the one shining light in this dispiriting conflict. When they aren’t wasting their time on picket lines and posting gratuitous insults, the striking journalists have been producing a creditable daily news website.

“News stories in Local Xpress (http://www.localxpress.ca/) have consistently set a higher journalistic standard than the strike-breaker copy that fills the Herald’s pages. No surprise there. The best Herald writers and editors are very good at what they do.”

So all of that about newspaper strikes remains true. Recent newspaper strike history is clearly not on the side of the Chronicle Herald newsroom strikers from Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 But does that estop them from winning this fight? Not necessarily. Winning against long odds is not impossible or we wouldn’t have David victorious over Goliath, the champion of the Philistines; United Automobile Workers (UAW) besting General Motors in the Flint, Michigan Sit-Down Strike of 1936-37; Mahatma Gandhi outlasting the British Empire; or Nelson Mandela triumphing over the former apartheid state of South Africa stories to tell. The Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 is receiving support not just from their parent union and newspaper union locals far and wide, but also from the Nova Scotia Federation of Labour and the wider public and private sector labour movement in Nova Scotia.

And then there is the matter of resolve, hard to quantify perhaps, but which was in evidence in the kind of resolve that saw one or more of these pioneering picketers exhibit at the provincial labour board in the battle with CH management for inclusion in the new editorial bargaining unit of Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 in the spring of 1999.

Mark Lever, president and chief executive officer of the Chronicle Herald, and a former tennis coach, might think twice or three times before betting on his high-priced legal advice over that.

Resolve: Advantage, HTU Local 30130.

A former vice-president for Eastern Canada for The Newspaper Guild Canada/Communications Workers of America (CWA), and president of Peterborough Typographical Union Local 30248, chartered in 1902, John Barker currently belongs to Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union (MGEU) Component 11, Post Secondary Education, Local 70, University College of the North (UCN), Area 8, where he is a rank-and-file member, working as a library clerk on the Thompson campus of UCN, speaking only for himself in the views he expresses here, there or anywhere. You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22