Читать книгу That Wasn’t the Plan - Reg Sherren - Страница 7

I grew up in the wilds of Labrador, in remote Wabush, where the idea of becoming a journalist was probably the furthest thing from my mind. As the middle child of five, I found myself constantly competing for attention.

Although remote, Wabush was the land of plenty. Yet the image most folks have of Labrador is of a frozen wasteland with polar bears and long cold winters. I remember visiting Montreal once with my mother, and she was asked if we lived in igloos. But in the land of rich iron-ore deposits, the only igloo was the Igloo Restaurant.

Everyone who wanted a job had one. The townsite—offering cheap, sturdy houses to anyone who ventured north—was built even before the people got there. The mine took care of everything. If a window broke, the mine fixed it. If the furnace failed, the mine installed another one. You worked for them, and they took care of you.

The modern all-grades school had everything a kid could ask for. Music, sports, art and my personal favourite, theatre. The local recreation centre had another huge gymnasium and stage, plus a bowling alley, a library and a darn near Olympic-sized swimming pool. Right next door was the ice rink, where you could also roller skate in the summer. All for fewer than five thousand people.

The land of plenty indeed—if you didn’t mind freezing to death eight months of the year. It often snowed the first week of school, and it stayed. I can remember going trick-or-treating on a Ski-Doo. In the Labrador Trough, as it was known, four metres of snow was not unusual in winter. We would tunnel under it like moles, creating a whole other world beneath the surface of the snow. You had to. Wind chills approaching −70°C were not uncommon. Even with a block heater or two, sometimes you had to take the battery out of your car at night and bring it into the house if you wanted the engine to start in the morning.

We didn’t seem to mind—we always had something to do. I loved to perform, whether in front of Dad’s eight-millimetre-film camera or as one of the designated class clowns. I was in the Christmas play nearly every year, starting with kindergarten. One year I was chief snowbird, the next an elf. Every chance I got to “act,” I did. On my report card one year the teacher had written, “Reg is an attention seeker,” and I thought with amusement, “That’s true!” I also came by my willingness to tell stories or act them out honestly. My mother wrote and told many stories, as did my aunt and my grandmother.

My father, who was one of the iron-ore mine managers, was ahead of his time. He had purchased a reel-to-reel tape recorder—well, it was more than that. It was one of those big polished-wood consoles many people had in their living rooms. Ours had the usual speakers, an AM/FM radio and a record player with space to store the LPs, plus the large reel-to-reel tape recorder, complete with two microphones.

Dad would record us, coaxing us to sing songs or recite poems like “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert Service. It was my first introduction to a microphone, the first time I heard what I sounded like. Little pie-faced Reggie finds his voice.

Dad was also was a damn fine cameraman, recording pictures, if not sound, that chronicled our lives in the Big Land or on vacation across Atlantic Canada. He filmed us tobogganing in the bush, taking family road trips to New Brunswick, loading haystacks on a wagon or digging clams in Prince Edward Island. And usually in there somewhere was footage of Reg acting like a goof for the camera. I guess, in hindsight, Dad was inspiring my imagination. It would take me much further than I ever dreamed of going.

And Wabush, Labrador, was a great place to explore your imagination. It wasn’t as if we were distracted by television—at least not much. In the early days, television consisted of one channel that started at 3:45 in the afternoon with the soap opera The Edge of Night and ended around 11:00 at night. Half the programming was French and everything was black and white. Most programming was a week old with the exception of news and hockey games. They were flown in on rolls of film and broadcast the next day. Radio usually broke the final score of the hockey game the day before you watched it.

We had some American programming, such as Bonanza and The Wonderful World of Disney, but most of it was pure Canadiana—Chez Hélène from CBC TV and Bobino from Radio-Canada (CBC’s French-language service) or good old CBC Television programming like Country Canada or The Forest Rangers. That Forest Rangers theme song still plays in my head. I remember coming home for lunch one day to watch Stompin’ Tom Connors get married on Elwood Glover’s Luncheon Date. I thought that was pretty cool. It doesn’t get any more Canadian than that!

When I was in Grade 7, I badly broke my arm. Then they discovered a cyst was eating through the bone and whisked me off to Montreal for surgery, where I was on a ward with three adult men at the Royal Victoria Hospital. One fellow was in traction, the result of being sideswiped by a transport truck while riding his motorcycle; the second had had both his legs crushed while loading a giant roll of newsprint down at the docks. The third, an elderly gentleman, had cataracts. He and I would watch westerns together on a twelve-inch black-and-white portable TV. He couldn’t see the picture, so I would describe the action for him. It was my first gig as a commentator.

When I was in Grade 8, I entered a contest at our local radio station, CFLW. The idea was for contestants to sketch their version of the troglodyte, a caveman-type character from a hit song by a group called the Jimmy Castor Bunch. I drew this primitive-looking fellow in a tattered tuxedo with a bone through his nose and somehow managed to win an album by Three Dog Night called Golden Biscuits.

I still remember walking into the radio station, tucked into the basement of what was essentially a bungalow (the manager lived upstairs), to pick up my very first record album. I was twelve years old. The cramped space had posters on the walls from different performers, tiny studios with microphones, control boards, and panelling with little holes that the fellow showing me around said was something called “soundproofing.”

Banging away in a small room by itself was a big green metal monster called a teletype. The teletype was like an extremely early mechanical version of the internet, used to deliver news wire services to various radio, TV and newspaper organizations through a dedicated telephone line. Not that I knew any of that then. That machine hammered out stories from around the world twenty-four hours a day. They rolled off the top, still warm from the ink-stained keys, in one long, continuous river of newsprint containing entire newscasts, sports, entertainment bulletins and weather forecasts. It was a wondrous thing.

At home at night, I would listen to different stations on my crystal radio set. The radio kit was a Christmas present that supplied the hardware to build your very own radio. It also offered the ability to escape. Sometimes stations from faraway places would find their way skipping across the Labrador sky: CFGO Ottawa, WOR New York or WBZ Boston.

Three years later, when I was fifteen, I landed my first job at that same Wabush radio station as an announcer—and I use the term loosely. How I got the job I’m not really sure. My best buddy, Larry Hennessey, was already working there and put in a good word, but I suspect my father’s position may have also had something to do with it. Whatever the reason, I landed the noon-to-five time slot on Sunday afternoons.

I had absolutely zero training. For my first show I was given some very brief instruction by the fellow on the air before me, a guy who called himself Buffalo Bill Cody. He looked a little like Wild Bill Hickok with his long hair, moustache, cowboy hat and fringe jacket, and he wasn’t a very good teacher. He showed me how to turn on the microphone and which controls delivered sound from the turntables or the reel-to-reel machine, and then he left. I sat there facing a baffling array of switches and dials. I spent the next five hours apologizing for being on the air—when I could get on the air—and my broadcasting career was born.

Being on the air was just one of my duties. I also had to make sure all the garbage cans were clean for Monday morning, and I had to change the paper—those big rolls of newsprint—on the teletype. Sometimes the big green monster would jam up. Once, I recall, all that balled-up friction caused it to almost catch fire. There was a lot of smoke. Some years later, after college, my first story with my very own byline would be hammered out on the big green machine in radio and TV stations across the system.

CFLW, that first station brave enough to hire me, was part of the Humber Valley Broadcasting chain, started by Dr. Noel Murphy, an obstetrician from Corner Brook, Newfoundland. His vision eventually stretched across the western part of the province, and then north. CFLW (Coming from Labrador West) had gone on the air in 1971.

There was no real music format. You could play pretty much whatever you liked, and I did. Sometimes I would play hard rockers like Led Zeppelin followed by a sketch from Monty Python (I had all their albums) before rolling the tape on Back to the Bible, a half-hour religious program sent from the United States. They paid Humber Valley Broadcasting good money for that half-hour, I was told, and programs like it could be the financial bread and butter of smaller stations.

Often you were the only person in the station. Going to the bathroom meant rolling an extended version of Glen Campbell’s rendition of “Classical Gas.” For bigger jobs—say, if you needed to step out to pick up a pizza— “Alice’s Restaurant” was the song to use. It was over eighteen minutes long and the Hudson Restaurant was just a few minutes away. You got anything you wanted, thanks to “Alice’s Restaurant”!

Playing Glen Campbell or a new ABBA hit on the radio was fun for a while, but after a couple of years, even I had to admit it was time to develop some version of a career strategy. My interest in theatre continued. I had a blast acting alongside Labrador greats like the Doyle clan and Kevin Lewis, an immense talent, in the Carol Players theatre troupe. I was giving some serious thought to that possibility but didn’t have a clue how to go about it.

The big money in Labrador was made working in construction or in the local mine. I worked in both. Money was no problem. I made a lot of money for someone my age. The summer after I graduated from high school, 1976, I was making close to $2,500 every two weeks. So after I managed to save some of it, I decided I would travel.

The mine had a company plane that flew regularly to Montreal. Back then you could often hitch a ride and go on an adventure for a few days. I used to stay in a small tourist home on Sherbrooke Street just up from the Voyageur bus terminal. Now that I think about it, I can’t imagine my son or daughter doing things like that at the age of sixteen or seventeen, but I was already living on my own and thought nothing of it.

In 1977, I flew alone from Montreal to the Canary Islands, just because it was the most exotic-looking place I could find at the travel agency. I flew out of the old Mirabel airport and landed in Tenerife in January, just two months before the largest air accident in the history of aviation took place there. A KLM aircraft collided with a Pan Am flight on the runway, and 583 people died.

On another trip to Montreal, I found myself in the lounge in the hotel across from where I was staying (no, I was not legally old enough to be in that lounge) when a gentleman came in with his wife. I was sitting at the bar with empty seats on either side of me. I saw he was looking around and the place was full, so I said, “Would you like me to move over so you can sit together?” He appreciated the gesture and we struck up a conversation.

Turned out he was a journalist with the Montreal Star. I told him I was from Newfoundland and Labrador, and he told me he had travelled across Newfoundland covering the last passenger train. It was called the Newfie Bullet, which was kind of an ironic joke: the Bullet was being discontinued because it was too slow. I told him the joke about the fellow who decided to commit suicide by lying down on the tracks but died of starvation waiting for the train to show up. He laughed and laughed. I also told him I had a little radio gig at our local station. He said, “Well then, you should come to the Press Club with us!” We grabbed a cab over to the Sheraton Mount Royal Hotel on Peel Street.

The Press Club was around the back, in the basement of the hotel. I remember the heavy wood panelling and all these serious-looking people in suits, and thinking, “I’m way out of my depth here.” In one corner I saw Peter Kent, who just the year before had become the main anchor of The National on CBC Television. I had watched him introduce the stories about the air disaster in Tenerife. At that moment I didn’t have enough nerve to introduce myself, but I remember thinking, “That fellow is a big deal.” Did it leave an impression? Absolutely. So when I got back to Labrador and learned about a new college radio and television broadcasting program opening in North Bay, Ontario, I decided to check it out.

Canadore College had state-of-the-art equipment and, as part of the program, students operated a radio station and even broadcasted a nightly TV newscast on cable. It was a perfect fit, but I was honestly scared to death at the prospect. Wabush was familiar and comfortable. I could go off on adventures, but I could always come home. Somehow, I knew making this change would change everything—forever.

As things turned out, the decision was made for me. I didn’t leave home, home left me. My family, the only family I knew, was going up in flames. Divorce was in the air for my parents, and change seemed inevitable.

But because I was from outside Ontario, getting into Canadore College was not going to be easy. I had to write several essays and complete manual dexterity tests. I guess I didn’t put any square pegs into round holes, though, because I landed one of the four available first-year positions for non-Ontario residents.

Then something happened that has stayed with me ever since. Two weeks before I was to leave for school, I was walking behind the Sir Wilfred Grenfell Hotel in Wabush when I saw a wallet lying on the ground outside the entrance to the hotel’s pub. Inside it was one piece of ID from the University of Toronto and $800 in cash.

I didn’t recognize the face on the card, so I thought, “He must be staying at the hotel.” I checked at the front desk and sure enough, he was. I went upstairs and knocked on his door. He proved to be an engineering student working for the summer at the mine. He couldn’t thank me enough and wanted to give me a reward. “No thanks,” I said. “It’s your wallet and I’m just glad I could get it back to you.”

Two weeks later, I was on a train out of Montreal bound for North Bay, Ontario. Everything I owned was in half a dozen cardboard boxes in baggage. I was staring out the window—miles away really, worrying about the future—when a fellow tapped me on the arm and said, “Are you Reg Sherren, by any chance?”

I said yes, wondering what sort of trouble was headed my way now, when he said, “I just found your wallet in the bathroom and thought you might want it back.” I had $2,000 in cash and even more in traveller’s cheques in that wallet, as well as all my ID and a credit card. I did not even know I had lost it. It must have fallen out from the motion of the train while I was fumbling around in the confined space of the washroom.

If you believe in such things, good karma found me that day and paid me back. It was a lesson I have never forgotten. It has been said many ways: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” or “What goes around, comes around,” or “Kindness begets kindness.” They are all true.