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Wedding of the Decade
A wonderful reunion on the occasion of John and Erin’s wedding in St. Andrews With thanks to Carm and family for making us feel so welcome.
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Campaign Capers
In 1965, as the November 8 federal election drew to a close, reporters covering the campaign of Conservative leader John Diefenbaker gathered in Prince Albert to await the results. Dief believed he could repeat the miracle of his landslide victory in 1957 while Liberal Lester Pearson sought the majority government Read more…
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That glorious summer
As Montreal bureau chief for Time in 1967, Expo ’67 was my beat for a wonderful summer, much of it spent on the magical isles fashioned in the river with earth from the digging of the new subway. The bilingual countdown that heralded the opening of the World’s Fair on Read more…
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The Battle for Acceptance
For decades, the Parliamentary Press Gallery excluded woman members. It was an old boys’ club and it took strong, independent women like Genevieve Lipsett Skinner to break down the barriers. She had been a reporter in Winnipeg, a lawyer, a member of the Political Equality League and one-time political candidate. Read more…
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A Great Reader
Narrator Richard Clarkin and I recently took to Zoom to discuss recording Power, Prime Ministers and the Press and how he managed to bring life to anecdotes and voices from 150 years of history during some 30 hours of studio work.
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Norman Depoe: The Gold Standard
In 1938, DePoe left the University of British Columbia and signed up with the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals. He left for Europe as a wireless officer. Excerpt: …Service in Europe was a turning point. The action in Italy and Holland brought him face to face with death. In one Read more…
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Flight into Shanghai
The two teachers and their two children were in the Philippines on a Lunar New Year holiday from Shanghai when the outbreak took hold. With their school shut down in China, they decided to fly to New Zealand where friends in their old neighbourhood put them up. Six weeks later, Read more…
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A Woman of Influence: Sara Jeanette Duncan
In 1884 the twenty-five-year-old Duncan persuaded John Cameron, then editor of the Toronto Globe, to pay for articles on the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans. She also sold freelance pieces on the world’s fair to the Washington Post, the London Advertiser, and the Memphis Appeal. That Read more…
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A golf story
Before he won the Liberal leadership in 1990, Jean Chrétien was my guest in a foursome at the Peter Gzowski Invitational, an annual golf tournament to raise money for Frontier College’s literacy programs. Our honorary caddy was the great Canadian cellist Shauna Rolston. As they headed down the first fairway, Read more…
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Deer Town
As I rolled down the car window to take a picture, the deer looked up blankly, then resumed munching on the lawn of a neighbouring house. Welcome to St. Andrews, NB, where the deer run wild in the streets and backyards, chomping their way through hedges, gardens and flower beds. Read more…