George Maharis and Martin Milne in “Route 66” TV series.
Last weekend, I stopped at one of the service stations in town to gas up my car. As I painfully watched the LED readout of my gas purchase whiz higher and higher, a guy pulled up to the pump across from me. He was in town for the weekend car show, driving a Corvette, an early one, like the one Todd Stiles and Buz Murdock drove in the hit TV series Route 66. As he began filling his car, I caught his eye.
“This must be the least fun part of driving a car like that,” I said to the guy, “filling a gas guzzler like your Vet.”
“Not at all,” he said. “It’s my guilty pleasure.” (more…)
Classic image from Woodstock Festival in 1969. Smithsonian Magazine.
I happened to be hitchhiking that life-changing afternoon. My parents had purchased a hobby farm outside Bethany, Ont. But with my family away in the late 1960s, suddenly the farm became my responsibility. So, this early August day, not owning a car to get me from Toronto to the farm, I chose to hitchhike my way there. My last ride pulled over at the intersection of Hwys 115 and 35, and I ran toward the car for the lift.
That’s when I tripped off the curb of the road, twisted my ankle really severely. And everything changed. (more…)
Richard Nixon, found out, covering up the truth, nearly impeached, claiming, “I am not a crook!” Poliitico.
I dodged most of the last few months of my university classes to see it. I sensed – as a journalist-in-training in the early 1970s – that reality was more important than theory. So, we all crowded into a student lounge at Toronto Metropolitan University (then Ryerson) to watch the daily TV Senate Committee hearings into connections between the Watergate break-in and then president Richard Nixon.
I specifically remember Committee Chair Sen. Sam Ervin sparring with Nixon’s then White House adviser John Ehrlichman.
“The President seems to extend executive privilege way out past the atmosphere,” Ervin said later. “What he says is executive privilege, is nothing but executive poppycock.” (more…)
The reporter had asked her final question about my appearance at a regional theatre in Alberta that afternoon. Jana Semeniuk turned her camera off. But she gestured for me to stay put for a second. She had one more question to ask, but she wanted to be sure it was OK to ask it on camera. I nodded.
“Have you ever heard of the TV show The Hilarious House of Frightenstein?” she asked. I nodded again. “Is it true you wrote that show?”
“Half true,” I said. “I co-created it with my writing partner Ross Perigoe. Want to know more? Roll your camera and I’ll tell you.” (more…)
Statue of Ryerson toppled in Toronto, June 6, 2021. BBCNews
It started with registration and Frosh Week in September 1968. I was so eager to attend the school I even lined up at the bookstore to buy a jacket with his name “Ryerson” arched across the back. Three years later, I reached a milestone there when I received the certificate signifying that I had completed all my courses in broadcast journalism. But I returned a few years later, when Ryerson had become a degree-granting institution, completed the makeup courses, and stood in line again to receive my BA in 1976.
“By virtue of the authority granted by the province of Ontario under the Polytechnical Act, 1962, Ryerson has awarded the degree Bachelor of Applied Arts to Theodore Barris,” the document said. Next to my name, a seal with the bust of Egerton Ryerson embossed on the degree.
I thought of that seal, and that bust, Monday morning, as I learned that demonstrators in front of the main gates of Ryerson University in downtown Toronto had toppled the statue of the institution’s namesake. (more…)
Final frames of Canada 67, the featured film at the Telephone Pavilion, Expo 67.
I stood in what seemed thunderous chaos. Horses galloped to the right of me, to the left of me. Lances appeared to whisk past my ears. The ground felt as if it were trembling beneath my feet. And I grabbed my dad’s arm, fearing if I didn’t I might topple over. Just audible above the din of the rhythmic panting of the horses and the pounding of their hooves, I could hear singing.
78 RPM V-Disc of “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” recorded in 1943 by Bing Crosby and re-released by the U.S. War Department the following year.
I walked up the front walk in the darkness of the early evening. I quietly put my luggage down on the front step of my parents’ Los Angeles home and knocked on the door. This was a plan my dad and I had hatched weeks before. It was finally coming to pass. He knew I had flown in from Toronto. My mother didn’t know. And this night – just before Dec. 25 – my mom opened the front door. I was the last person she expected.
“What are you doing here?” she shrieked.
“It’s a surprise Dad and I’ve been working on for weeks,” I said, as I hugged her for the first time since the summer. “I just wanted to be home for Christmas.” (more…)
George Bernard Shaw earned the Nobel Peace Prize for literature (1925), but didn’t make many friends among teachers.
Stepping up to a music stand, last Saturday night, I realized it was the worst possible phrase to use. And it was the best possible phrase to use. I wanted to draw the audience in. I wanted to provoke it a bit too. I wondered how best to capture the essence of the evening. Then it hit me. I glanced down at my script on the music stand, and I finally blurted it out in one of my introductions.
“You know that old George Bernard Shaw quote?” I asked. “It says, ‘Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.’”
The audible groan was entirely predictable. The St. Andrew’s Chalmers Presbyterian Church on Toronto Street was full of music-loving parents, music-practising youngsters and music-teaching instructors. It was the annual winter concert to raise funds for the Uxbridge Music Scholarship Trust, on this occasion featuring some of our community’s top-notch music teachers – including Rebecca and Tim Bastmeyer, Michelle Charlton, Carlie Laidlaw, Susan Luke, Jennifer Neveu-Cooke, Cynthia Nidd, Chris Saunders and Amy Peck. But this time they were performing, not professing. And the partisan audience didn’t like Shaw’s cryptic quotation one bit. Nor did I.
“Frankly, I think that’s hogwash,” I added. And then I went on to introduce Carlie Laidlaw, the lead singer with a group called Parental Discretion Band and another called Saunders Road. I continued by explaining that she’s the vocalist responsible for singing the national anthem at events around town and for recording a CD called “Hummingbird,” whose proceeds fund three hospitals around the GTA. I pointed out that Laidlaw provided warm-up for a concert headlining Murray McLauchlan. Finally, I reminded everyone, she also teaches music.
“Stick that in your pipe, G.B. Shaw, and smoke it,” I thought.
Then, I began to think about all the teachers in my life who’ve offered me those three vital dimensions of the teaching/learning equation. First, they knew what it was they needed to teach. Then, they understood how to explain it to others. Finally, they knew how to show others exactly the way it was done with the simplicity of kindergarten teacher, but with the expertise of a professor emeritus. Contrary to Mr. Shaw’s perception, teachers I’ve known could both teach and do.
Probably the earliest teacher in my life on those counts was the man who taught me both Grade 5 and Grade 7 at elementary school. Mike Malott couldn’t have been more than 10 years my senior, but he knew the pathways to hearts and minds of my classroom of 11-year-olds and then 13-year-olds better than anyone I’ve ever encountered. He inspired our fascination for history by showing us its characters. And on the sports playground, Malott imparted the skills of baseball and soccer by making us believe in each other as teammates and because we knew he could play any one of the positions around the field better than anyone in town. We knew he could show us as well as tell us anything the game had to offer.
At Ryerson, I experienced the brilliance of broadcast writer Christina MacBeth. She taught the craft of writing for advertisers, by showing us how they determined consumers’ needs. She delivered the basics of writing to time, by helping us see the language not just as bits of copy, but as split-seconds of a ticking clock. And she made us respect the vitality of English by forcing us not to write passively, but to construct images actively. I remember the day she came into a class, told us all our assignments were lame and boring, and then took away the best crutch we’d ever known – the passive verb “to be.”
“For the rest of the semester you cannot use any form of the verb ‘to be’ in any script assignment you hand in,” she said.
And we thought she was crazy. She was. Crazy like a fox. By the end of the semester, because MacBeth had forced us to employ words of action and impact, we were writing the best copy of our lives, all because she knew from doing it, how to teach it.
And I guess I need to thank my father – the greatest teacher of my life. I’ll never forget that day in elementary school, when, after typing my umpteenth essay to help me get a passing grade, he put his foot down.
“That’s the last one,” he said. “From now on you do the typing.”
By understanding I needed to learn by doing it myself, he forced me to sit at the practise pads. He showed me the concept of touch-typing. And he illustrated that axiom our entire family of writers has come to live by. “Nothing ever gets done,” he always said, “until the seat of the pants hits the seat of the chair.” Classic words from a man who knew how to teach, but even better, how to do.
Magazine publisher Ritchie Yorke, left, hobnobbed with the biggest rock stars, including John Lennon of the Beatles. He wasn’t nearly as friendly with his writer-contributors.
I’m often asked what it’s like being a freelancer – someone who creates often without knowing whether the work will ever be published. Suffice to say, it’s a speculative jungle out there. I know. As a newspaper and magazine writer for some 40 years, I’ve been eaten alive whole more than a few times. A bit of background:
In the late 1960s, I enrolled at Ryerson (before it was a university) in the Radio and Television Arts program. While working towards my diploma (1968-1971) I craved a taste of the real writing world, so I began submitting ideas for features to magazines and newspapers.
Ned Powers, as editor of the Star-Phoenix, taught that people and community make the best stories. Photo courtesy Thistledown Press.
January was particularly cold in 1972, the year I arrived in Saskatoon. On average it was minus-30 that month. Nonetheless, that was the month I made an important career-altering phone call. For the previous three years I had worked feverishly as a student at Ryerson training myself to become a gainfully employed broadcaster. I had landed my first post-diploma job in Saskatoon, working in educational TV. But, to stretch my writing skills (and make a few extra bucks), I had also pitched a few ideas to the Saskatoon city newspaper, The Star-Phoenix.
“We’ll give you a try,” the pleasant voice on the other end of the phone said. “Cover the University of Saskatchewan appearance of Mitch Ryder. We’ll see how it goes.”
