“George Garrett is one of the most remarkable reporters of news that I have ever known. He has always had the ability to smell a good story and to report on it honestly and accurately.” —Jim Pattison, Canadian business magnate Starting from humble beginnings as a farm boy in Saskatchewan, George Garrett rose through the ranks of journalism and came to be known as the reporter who, as radio personality Rafe Mair recalled, “seemed to know details almost as soon as the police did” on such infamous stories as the Clifford Olson murders. He was willing to take risks to get to the real story, which resulted in his being assaulted in the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles among many other scrapes. In this memoir, Garrett shares the behind-the-scenes tales of his harrowing, humorous and occasionally humiliating investigative tactics, from posing as an accident victim to uncover the questionable practices of an insurance claim lawyer, to acting as a tow truck driver to expose a forgery scheme, and baring it all for the sake of an interview with a local nudist colony. Garrett also delves into the personal details of his life, sharing the hardships and resilience that marks him as an empathetic storyteller. He reveals the heartbreaking loss of his son in a canoeing accident, and his wife Joan’s devastating diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease which inspired him to dedicate his time to supporting the Alzheimer Society. Through it all, George Garrett never lost the insatiable curiosity that, according to Rafe Mair, made him the “standard by which good reporting is judged.”
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George Garrett. George Garrett
George Garrett
Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1. Curiosity
Chapter 2. The Big City
Chapter 3. The Hustler
Chapter 4. A Radio Career
Chapter 5. My Career Moves On
Chapter 6. Family Life
Chapter 7. Radio During the Wartime Years and Beyond
Chapter 8. My News Career and the Cop Shop
Chapter 9. From Scandal to Discipline. A New Era for the Vancouver Police Department
Chapter 10. Hail to Nearly All the Chiefs!
Chapter 11. The Mounties, Then and Now
Chapter 12. From the Skids to the Supreme Court
Chapter 13. Sex in the Seamy City
Chapter 14. The Reporter Goes Undercover
Chapter 15. More Colourful Stories and Characters
Chapter 16. Contacts
Chapter 17. Take Me to Jail
Chapter 18. The Tough Streets of LA
Chapter 19. The Monster, Clifford Olson
Chapter 20. The Tragic Toll
Chapter 21. Standoff at Gustafsen Lake. and Other Protests
Chapter 22. The Squamish Five and Terrorism in Canada
Chapter 23. Kidnappings and Murder
Chapter 24. The Politicians
Chapter 25. The Passing of Eras
Chapter 26. A Rewarding Life
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
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“George Garrett is one of the most remarkable reporters of news that I have ever known. George has always had the ability to smell a good story and to report on it honestly and accurately. George is well respected for his work and also for his knowledge of the subjects or activities that he reported on.”— Jim Pattison“Some reporters are excellent to deal with and over the years may form professional and personal relationships with officers. I know a well-respected reporter by the name of George Garrett who worked in the Vancouver area for many years. He was so well liked and respected by police officers that he is still invited to many police functions in spite of the fact he is retired. George Garrett always did his job and reported the good with the bad. If a police officer or department made a mistake, he reported it fairly and accurately without personal bias. I think that is what garnered him the respect. He was a professional and reported all of the facts and all of the story.”— Constable Wayne Ryan, author of Souls Behind the Badge“During my tenure with Vancouver’s Major Crime Squad, the floor was strictly off-limits to civilian personnel. The only exception to the rule was a crime reporter named George Garrett who was given full access to the Homicide Unit. (Personally … I think he had his own key.) Garrett reported with insight, colour and accuracy and could be trusted with information that was ‘off the record.’ He acted as an invaluable liaison between the police and the media.”— Wayne Cope, author of Vancouver Blue“A must-read for anyone interested in BC history. [George is] one of the most significant figures in the history of BC journalism.”—Harold Munro, Vancouver Sun editor
George Garrett
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Summers were spent on the farm, staying with my grandmother, Della. To us she was just Grandma Garrett, but she’d had an interesting life. Born in Kentucky, she married a man named Tamblyn and had a family of five, including my Aunt Lucille. After Tamblyn passed away, Grandma married a man named George Garrett, who had come to the United States from Ireland. It must have been about 1864. Family legend has it that his name was really Gariety but the US immigration official in New York said, “That’s too hard to spell. Your name is Garrett.” In any case, my grandfather joined the Yankee Army during the US Civil War as either a drummer boy or a bugle boy. Little is known of his life except that he died in an Old Soldiers’ Home in North Dakota. What is known is that he married a woman named Ruth in the 1870s and raised a family of four boys and one girl. He married a second time to my Grandma Della, near the turn of the century, and had three children. They were my father, Peter, born in Brainard, Minnesota, and his sisters, Della and Alice. Grandpa died when my dad was just a boy of thirteen. It fell to him to look after his mother and at least one of his sisters. His sister Della went to live with wealthy relatives in the United States. After my grandfather’s death, Grandma married a man named Shea. A new member of the family came along, a little girl named Josie. We always referred to my dad’s mother as Grandma Garrett, although her married name was now Shea. Some said Josie was Shea’s child from a relationship with a maid. In any case, it was Grandma who raised her, and to our family she was always Aunt Josie.
Another favourite was Aunt Lucille, Dad’s half-sister. She was a no-nonsense, large-framed woman who could and did work like a man. In her younger years, she married a man named Tim Trusedale. The marriage soon broke up and each lived alone on separate farms. I loved to visit Uncle Tim. There was always a pail of jam on the table, and he had one of those old gramophones—an RCA Victrola—that played cylinders with the famous “His Master’s Voice” logo. With a cigarette holder clenched in his teeth, Uncle Tim used to say, “If you were my kid, I’d turn you over my knee”—meaning I would have had a spanking. He never did; nor did my father. Tim had once owned an old car, probably a Star, but it lay rusting in his farmyard atop a hill on the lonely Saskatchewan prairie. Playing in that car all by myself was pure heaven.
