Читать книгу Boy from Nowhere - Allan Fotheringham - Страница 9

Campus Chaff

While at high school I won both the 100-yard and 880-yard races. I didn’t enter the 220 or the 440 because I was so lazy and had to develop stamina for those extended sprints. In the 880 I just trailed the field and then, because I was a sprinter, I made a mad dash the last fifty yards.

At the Fraser Valley annual track championships I won both the 100 and 880. I came home with two first-place red ribbons, but no one in my house paid any attention. I had to hitchhike from Chilliwack sixty-five miles to Vancouver to track meets, then hitchhike home. And through all of my many track meets, my parents never once attended. My mother was too busy running the Carman United Church choir, and my stepfather was the secretary-treasurer of the church — they being more interested in saving the natives in Africa. I resent that to this day.

Russ Dyer, our physical education teacher, arranged for me to get a track scholarship at the University of Washington in Seattle, which had a journalism school. An unfortunate visit to an illegal basketball tournament and a wrecked knee put an end to that. At Easter our basketball team was invited to a tournament in Trail, British Columbia, which pitted some of the best schools in British Columbia against some of the best in Alberta.

I approached Barry Harford, the principal, with the idea of participating. He was a wimp. I never did like him, and I don’t think he liked me. He said, “Look, Allan, you took fourth, the highest outside-Vancouver school in the B.C. championships, and it was a great finish to the season. Why don’t you quit while you’re ahead?” The wrong thing to say to a stubborn seventeen-year-old. And he wouldn’t give his permission.

Well, as captain, I figured, we would be on Easter holidays for ten days and no school could tell me what to do. One of the guys on the team, Bob Henderson, had a father who owned the town’s only funeral home. We could get a hearse and could all pile into it one on top of the other. In those days there wasn’t even a road from Chilliwack to Trail, which is almost in the Rocky Mountains. We had to drive down through the United States on a trip that almost took a day.

On the second day of the tournament, after I scored fourteen points in the first half of a game and was headed for the highest total I’d ever had, I wrecked my knee and spent the rest of the tournament hobbling around on crutches. We then had to take the day-long trip back home and piled on top of one another again, which didn’t do the untreated knee any good. So it was almost a week before I finally got to a doctor, who put the entire leg into a cast.

Some months later, the day I was to have the cast cut off, the team played a noon-hour softball game against the teachers to raise money for my doctor’s bills. I walked back to the school from the doctor’s office, and grateful for what they were doing, I offered to go up to bat and hit some fly balls before the game. Stupid. I took one swing — crunch! There went the knee again. Typical show-off. The principal shook his head — the “I told you so” reaction.

With my leg up I managed to get through Senior Matric. A chap called Owen Nelmes (who later became my brother-in-law) went to orientation at the University of British Columbia and saw on the notice board something called “University Co-operative Society.” It was a house run by a revolving group of students — twelve in all — and presided over by a fat English lady who cooked and cleaned. You paid your monthly rent until graduation to be replaced by another flood of freshmen. Owen was a year ahead of me at Chilliwack and had gone to the University of Washington, hoping to get into medical school. Once there he realized he would never be able to afford it and returned to pharmacy school at UBC. The two of us wound up at the co-op.

Teachers at Chilliwack Senior High had been urging me to go to university because they could see that I could write. The UBC campus newspaper, The Ubyssey (the UBC initials being a bad play on The Odyssey), was famous for turning out people such as Pierre Berton, Eric Nicol, Lister Sinclair, and dozens of other top Canadian journalists. On the first day of university I went down to the paper’s office in the basement of Brock Hall and was sent out on an assignment. I had never been told before what to write. The next day I went in again and was sent out on another assignment. After writing it and handing it in, I said to myself: To hell with this. I went home to the co-op, sat down, and wrote in longhand a column attacking the UBC engineers as a bunch of weaklings and morons who couldn’t even attract a girlfriend.

I went to The Ubyssey office and threw the article into the basket on the desk. The following day I picked up the paper, and my column was on the front page where it stayed for my short three years at The Ubyssey.

My knee having now recovered, I tried out for the junior varsity basketball squad, the JVs. One afternoon, after practice, I was walking out of the gym when a gang of husky engineering students, led by Paul White, grabbed me, threw me into a car, and drove me downtown. The number one meeting place and the busiest intersection in Vancouver was at Granville and Georgia in front of the Birks Jewellers clock. The engineers chained me to the towering clock and locked me in with large padlocks, then fled. Everybody in Vancouver coming out of work at 5:00 p.m. looked at me as if I were nuts. Somebody finally phoned the fire station, and some firemen came and cut me loose with bolt cutters.

With my brother, Jack, at my high school graduation in 1950. That’s me on the left. How did I afford that suit?

So my column, which was called “Campus Chaff,” stepped up the attacks on the engineers. When The Ubyssey had its term end, it had a dinner at a restaurant in Stanley Park where I took Pat Arnold, my girlfriend. Just as the dinner was beginning, a waiter came over and said someone was at the door asking for me. I went to the door, and guess what. Four more engineer thugs grabbed me and put me into a car. One of them walked in, sat in the chair beside Miss Arnold, and said I wouldn’t be back that evening. The engineers then drove me across Lions Gate Bridge to West Vancouver way up in the forest, took what little money I had, and left me in the darkness, miles from anywhere. I had to walk and walk and walk. Finally, I found a farmhouse and had to tell the rather dubious occupants what had happened. They lent me enough money to take a taxi home.

The engineers were famous for their annual three-day drunk, which their graduating class had at the Commodore Ballroom in downtown Vancouver. The Commodore was the most well-known party place in town. I had waited three years for my revenge. We followed the president of the class to a Safeway parking lot, grabbed him, and drove seventy miles to Cultus Lake where we had rented a cabin. Sitting there with him for three days, we published huge headlines in The Ubyssey announcing that the president had mysteriously disappeared and hadn’t shown up to what was to be the culmination of his university career.

The Ubyssey float during a protest parade. I’m the editor, standing at the back with the cool coat on.

When I was playing for the UBC Thunderbirds junior varsity basketball team, our games were broadcast because we played in the Vancouver Senior League against the Vancouver Clover Leafs, the Canadian champions. On my team were Robin Abercrombie, John Shippobotham, and Allan Fotheringham. There were three nervous breakdowns among the radio broadcasters when they tried to follow the play and would say, “Fotheringham passed to Shippobotham who passes to Abercrombie to …” by which time the other team had scored twice.

In the first half of our first game of the season against the famous Clover Leafs, I leaped up to intercept a pass. When I came down, the knee was gone once again. This time I had to have an operation, so I went to Dean Gage, the head of the arts faculty, and asked for a student loan to pay for the medical costs of $135.

At the time I was paying my way through university by going down to the Vancouver Sun at nights and writing up UBC sports. To get there, it was a long bus ride from the university and I had to change buses. There was a wait of about fifteen minutes at the changeover, and unfortunately the bus sat idling in front of a men’s clothing store. Back then the fashion among all the swish fraternity lads was a tweed topcoat. Stark in the window of the men’s shop was a beautiful grey topcoat. I had to sit and look at it every night for weeks. Temptation is a terrible thing. Of course, the day I walked into the administration office at UBC to sign the necessary forms for the student loan, the first person to stroll in the door was Dean Gage, who immediately looked at this impoverished little boy who had no money but was wearing a beautiful grey tweed topcoat.

During my university years, my main girlfriend was Helen (Donnelly) Hutchinson, who worked on the paper and later achieved fame as a national host of CBC Radio’s Morningside show before Peter Gzowski. At UBC parties — she had a wit as sharp as a tack — people would almost pay admission to come to such parties to listen to Helen and me insult each other. We had some silly little spat, and I didn’t phone her for a week. At the time the sorority girls decided to have a crazy football game and enlisted Jack Hutchinson of the B.C. Lions to teach them the rules and coach them. Helen was the quarterback. By the time I had decided to repair the spat, she had so wowed Jack that she later married him. That was the first of her three marriages. She now lives around the corner from my wife and me in Toronto.

With time, in 1953, I became the editor of The Ubyssey. Joe Schlesinger was the previous editor. Joe, who went on to achieve fame as a highly respected correspondent around the world for the CBC, sat in his office and never spoke to me for the entire term, being noted as a silent recent refugee from Czechoslovakia. He approached me one day and asked if I was going to put my name forward for his position.

I was the sports editor at the time. I said I hadn’t thought of it as there was another person, Ed Parker, who seemed to be a shoo-in because he had been waiting for years for the spot and was also sleeping with the news editor. Joe urged me to enter my name. So I did and won the vote twelve to two. Parker and his girlfriend being the two. There were rumours that Joe had stuffed the ballot box, he being a Czech from afar who knew how to do such things. In our meetings in our foreign correspondent days in Paris or London or wherever, when the wine started to flow I would tell that story. Joe would neither confirm nor deny but state, “Yes, and Fotheringham is still writing the same sports stories, just changing the names.” However, he has always enjoyed the speculation.

The tradition at The Ubyssey was to make the final paper of the year the “Goon Edition.” That year we decided to spoof the three downtown papers. And since some of us were working part-time at those papers, we stole the typefaces from the composing rooms and renamed the Vancouver Sun, “The Vancouver Fun,” Vancouver’s Province became the “Vancouver Providence,” and the News Herald became the “Few Herald.” The Sun was owned by the two Cromie brothers. We called them the “Crummie” brothers. Columnist Mamie Maloney became Mamie “Baloney.” Sports editor Erwin Swangard, who I, of course, worked for in the sports department, we called, “Squirming S. Vanguard.”

The UBC Thunderbird rugby team was playing its final game of the season against the University of California Golden Bears. I was high in the UBC press box when I suddenly saw the hulking figure of Erwin Swangard climbing the steps. There was no place for me to run. “Okay, kit,” he said in his heavy German accent, “I’m gonna sue you, I am gonna sue da Alma Mater Society, and I am gonna sue da university.”

My university graduation photograph. I was one of the few The Ubyssey editors to actually graduate.

My life flashed before my eyes. I was about to take final exams, having not attended classes for the year I was editor. I was $400 in debt for another student loan and money my sister, Donna, had loaned me for university. Now I would have no job.

Several days later it grew worse. I received a very official letter under the letterhead of Don Cromie, the Vancouver Sun publisher. It said in very legal language that The Ubyssey had defiled and libelled in a vicious manner his paper and demanded to know the identity of the person responsible for this. I just about fainted until I got to the P.S., which said that such a person obviously had some talent in his viciousness and would he be interested in a position near the executive leather top chairs. I didn’t know if this was a joke or whether he was serious. So I went down to see Don, a man I had never met before. He spent the entire interview with his feet on his desk while trying to flip paper clips over the overhead lamp. I got the job.