I have never accepted a Facebook invitation for an app. In fact, just recently, I have blocked Zynga Bingo, BINGO Blitz, Criminal Case and Slotomania Slot Machines, although I admit, Criminal Case is kind of tempting to check out . Philosophically, it’s not that I have a problem with them. They’re no better or worse, I suppose, than a myriad other things you can do on Facebook. They’re just not my thing.
Bingo? Well, my only connection to bingo in recent years has been working some monthly ones as fundraisers at St. Lawrence Parish Hall here in Thompson with my brothers from Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961. Hey, you can’t be Catholic, right, and have no connection to bingo? Before I joined the Knights of Columbus, the last bingo games I had been to were circa 1972 and 1973 when I was 15 and 16 years old, working for Len Ovenden and Doris Metcalfe, selling refreshments on the wooden flooring over the hockey ice surface at the old Civic Auditorium in Oshawa, Ontario. In those days, bingo players used plastic chips, not daubers, a fact I didn’t discover until 2013. It wasn’t as good a gig entertainment-wise as working OHA Major Junior A hockey games – where we worked the first two periods only – so I could watch with undivided attention the Oshawa Generals play the often crucial third period – for free.
But bingo players were big spenders (as were women at wrestling when wrestling made occasional appearances in Oshawa in the early 1970s … Jody Hamilton, the American masked wrestler, who wrestled solo at the time under the ring name The Assassin, once either deliberately or accidentally [probably deliberately] kicked over a whole tray of pop in waxed cups with lids, I had sitting on the floor, as I served another patron, en route to the ring. His manager promptly but discretely bought them all with a generous tip. Just a bit of unscripted show biz for the fans.)
As well, while I “like” posts and photographs that I spot on Facebook with some frequency, and even comment on some of them occasionally, I rarely accept out of the blue invitations to “like” a particular page, but there are exceptions. Like this morning when I got an invitation to “like” Christopher Heard’s, The Suite Life: The Magic and Mystery of Hotel Living, which you can find a link to here at: https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Suite-Life-The-Magic-and-Mystery-of-Hotel-Living/231463750263919?notif_t=fbpage_fan_invite
Mind you, in the interest of transparency, I have to tell you Christopher Heard, an accomplished author and film historian, is my second cousin. While I haven’t seen Christopher, who is about six years younger than me, in about 40 years now, we both grew up in Oshawa, and crossed paths at family events, often at my Aunt Norma and Uncle Ray Seager’s place, which had an above-ground pool. What I remember was Chris was a tall and quiet kid. Not how you would describe (quiet) my five Seager first cousins, who were a fun-loving rambunctious lot! Me? I was probably somewhere between those two poles. A bit on the quiet side, but not above getting up to a bit of mischief, especially in my teens and 20s, as Joanne, David, Sharon, and Maurice Leveille, Joanne’s husband, could attest to and no doubt happily would if the occasion was right. The recurring common elements of various escapades seemed to revolve around motorcycles and girls.
Christopher Heard’s dad, Bill Heard, was my sacrament of confirmation sponsor on May 8, 1968 at St. Mary of the People Roman Catholic Church, built 11 years earlier in 1957, when Bishop Francis Marrocco, still an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Toronto, confirmed me. Bishop Marrocco was named bishop of the Diocese of Peterborough just over a month later on June 10, 1968. My confirmation name is James. Bill Heard was a convert from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism.
What I only learned a couple of years ago, at least that I recall, from Marie Heard, the family genealogist, was that my father, William Barker, himself a convert from the United Church of Canada to Catholicism, had been Bill Heard’s confirmation sponsor years earlier.
As I wrote here not so long ago on Feb. 20 in a post headlined, “Newsgathering travels: From Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories to Churchill, Manitoba to Middle Musquodoboit Harbour, Nova Scotia, and a few places in between” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/02/20/newsgathering-travels-from-tuktoyaktuk-in-the-northwest-territories-to-churchill-manitoba-to-middle-musquodoboit-harbour-nova-scotia-and-a-few-places-in-between/), “As a journalist, I always enjoyed getting out of the office or newsroom to travel whenever the opportunity presented itself and I could talk my way into a trip somewhere. Newspaper travel meant someone was spending money to send me somewhere, hence the story was usually interesting….” I’ve been able to write about polar bears and beluga whales in Churchill, after a boat trip out on Hudson Bay into the territorial waters of Nunavut, and up the Seal River; travel to The Pas to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Cathedral for the episcopal ordination of Archbishop Murray Chatlain, as the sixth bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas; take Manitoba road trips into Cross Lake, Nelson House and Snow Lake for stories and photographs, while former Churchill riding Liberal MP Tina Keeper, and Kevin Carlson, then with Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak (MKO), were kind enough to let me fly into Tadoule Lake and Lac Brochet with them on a day trip; fly into Tuktoyaktuk at 69.4428° N in the Northwest Territories from Inuvik on an 18-seat Twin Otter for a story; drive for almost three hours through continuous freezing rain out to the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) Strait Area Campus in Port Hawkesbury to hear then Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative Premier John Hamm talk about a proposed Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project to be located on the Strait of Canso; as well as more pleasant drives on assignment in Nova Scotia, such as one on a balmy Maritime spring evening into Middle Musquodoboit Harbour on the Eastern Shore’s Musquodoboit Harbour River, or the Folly Lake-Folly Gap-Folly Mountain area and through the Cobequid Mountains and Wentworth Valley to Londonderry, formerly known as Acadia Mines, in Colchester County.
Pity my poor cousin, Christopher Heard, then. While I was traipsing around in such Canadian glamor destinations as Tuktoyaktuk and Middle Musquodoboit Harbour, chasing stories, Chris was making something of a name for himself as a luxury hotel living Toronto writer ensconced comfortably as writer-in-residence at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel! The Suite Life: The Magic and Mystery of Hotel Living, pun, of course, intended, was published in 2011 by Dundurn Press and is an exploration of hotel culture. As Mark Medley noted in a Nov. 13, 2010 National Post story on Heard (http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/11/13/the-royal-york-is-haunted-and-author-christopher-heard-should-know-he-lives-there/), “living in the Royal York, one of the poshest hotels in the city, means you encounter a curious assortment of people. Since moving in, Heard has run into Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), Slash, Ricky Gervais, Martin Sheen and the Dalai Lama, among others.”
Heard has also written a number of other books, including celebrity biographies on subjects such as Britney Spears, Kiefer Sutherland, Johnny Depp, John Woo and Mickey Rourke.
He got his big break 20 years ago in the mid-1990s working as a movie reviewer for CBC Newsworld’s On the Arts, when he was sent to New York to interview Kapuskasing, Ontario-born Titanic director James Cameron. In an Oct. 18, 2011 story, Heard reportedly told Matt Bone of the Toronto-based online entertainment magazine, The GATE (http://www.thegate.ca/spotlight/interviews/010958/how-christopher-heard-became-a-biographer-to-some-of-hollywoods-elite/), “We had this wonderful conversation in New York, Cameron and I. When I got back to Toronto, I checked my stuff and the tapes for the interview weren’t there. “The tapes of the other people were there, Katherine Bigelow and all these other people but Cameron’s wasn’t there. So I panicked, as that was the main person I was there to interview. So I called New York and said, ‘Jeez you forgot to put the tape in,’ and it turned out that Cameron had enjoyed the chat so much, he had kept the tapes aside to make a copy so he could use that tape in his corporate video for his company Lightstorm Entertainment. So when the show aired, Random House Doubleday publishers called me and said ‘nobody has written a book about James Cameron, would you consider that?’ I’d always wanted to be an author but I had grown up such a painfully shy and introverted kid, that’s not something you think would be possible. I signed the contract to do the Cameron book [Dreaming Aloud: The Films of James Cameron], and as it was released [1997] at the same time as the film Titanic, the success of Titanic sort of dragged the book up with it, and Random House said ‘whatever you want to do with your next book, you can have it’.'”
Heard, who met and interviewed actor Leonard Nimoy once (in a hotel room, of course), talked to CTV News last week about why the death of the actor, who played Spock on Star Trek, at the age of 83 on Feb. 27, touched so many people. You can watch a clip of the interview here at: http://video.theloop.ca/watch/nimoy-touched-so-many-people/4084457360001#.VPYM-Y5LOld
You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22
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