"Through the Front Page" by Judith Timson
My father died well before the age of Twitter. But Dad always spoke in tweets. He called them headlines: "Race riots, Birmingham, firehoses, tragedy," was Dad's brisk summation of a tumultuous chapter of the American civil rights movement. "A dark night for Canada's finest," telegraphed his outrage over a deadly loggers strike in Newfoundland. "Bobby's down" came sideways out of his mouth as he hung up the phone after hearing about the mortal shooting of Robert F. Kennedy, brother to the already felled president. From a young age, I took this as normal parental discourse.
My father's suit of armor was a trench coat, a white shirt and a black editing pencil stuck behind his ear. Dad was straight from central casting in a town of warring newspapers, spectacular news stunts and newsmen who loitered at the press club when they weren't working — and when they were — burnishing their reputations.
He was a small man — a bantam rooster, said one of his adoring female acolytes — with a craggy face, a Jimmy Durante nose, and deep-set brown eyes that instantly called your bluff. Raised in Toronto's tough east end, RT was one of a handful of newsmen with high school education who began as a copyboy and through grit and genius, ended up in the executive suite of the Toronto Star as city editor, managing editor and finally executive editor.
As a young girl, I absorbed tales of Dad's reporting prowess along with the fumes of his Export Plains and Canadian Club. He chased big stories — a mining explosion in Springhill, Nova Scotia, those riots in Birmingham. Then, as an editor, he defined major events by the strategy he deployed to get the story: "First I rented a helicopter. Then I flew two guys to the site." Apres moi, le headline.
Dad left early and stayed out drinking most nights. He would finally lurch through the front door and my mother, my brother and I would take a sharp breath. He had a verbal mean streak that could leave us winded. Was he disappointed in us? Or just himself. I never knew.
Some nights he didn't come home at all, which earned him a nickname like one of the horses he bet on: Into the Night. Or he would bring the party home and my brother and I, along with our determinedly gracious mother would wake to big band music, laughter (those female peals worried me), ice cubes clinking and once, slap shuffle down, the startling sound of Dad in his shoes tap dancing in an empty bathtub. One school morning, I encountered a large bearded stranger holding a rose and inquiring of my mother, stirring our Cream of Wheat: "Madam, would you tell me where I am so I may call a taxi?"
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It wasn't until I stepped into my father's world as a 16 year old that it all began to make sense. My summer job was to answer the phones in the newsroom of Canada's largest newspaper. Every morning at 5:30, after driving downtown together, I followed Dad through the press room of the old Toronto Star building on King Street. The pressmen smiled and nodded, some shaking his hand as we walked through. His employees called him by his initials and so I too began to think of him as RT. "Line one for you, RT!" I yelled, feeling indispensable. RT was steely except when he winked in my direction. I lived for those winks — and for the strange new rapport we developed. Somehow he had turned into the stern but benevolent father I never encountered at home, one whose employees lined up to whisper how he had saved them in a crisis. At home Dad was the crisis.
But here in the newsroom, Dad was King. Of course I fell for it. Nothing since would ever seem as compelling to me as that daily struggle to create a great city newspaper out of an avalanche of morally urgent narratives — kids suffocating in abandoned refrigerators, nurses on trial for murder, gangsters shot in daylight, pedophiles and prostitutes, interspersed with higher-toned happenings — federal elections, Prime Ministerial pronouncements, municipal brouhahas. All of it spun against the clock, into black and white gold.
RT proudly introduced me to every character in the newsroom — including an elderly semi-blind horse handicapper and a maniacal copy editor who gleefully terrified interns by gouging his cork leg with a letter spike.
I went off to university, and after working one summer at a smaller paper, I accepted an internship at the Star. That was the moment I stepped through the front page for good. I never lost my awe at being inside a big city newsroom, wire bells ringing, copy boys dashing, typewriters clacking and reporters filing stories as if from the very centre of gravity. I soon learned that when you are working on a big story, you never want to be anywhere else.
Summer ended but I stayed on. No university degree could come close to the joy of a front page byline.
One night, a major flood hit Rapid City, South Dakota, drowning more than 200 people. I pestered the night editor to send me. Finally he assigned me and a photographer to fly down. I called my parents. Mom said what about typhus? But RT gruffly gave me my marching orders: "Here's what you do, you get down to Rapid City. You rent a boat. You take that boat out on the swollen river. And then you write your story: 'I took a ride on the river of death.'"
Who else had a father who talked like that? I never did rent the boat. But I've been in it ever since. In Rapid City, for two sleepless nights I wandered the soggy river bank, searching for stories. One dispatch I filed sounded like something he would have written: "They buried Bonnie in her Mama's arms." When I returned, there was a memo of loving praise from Dad, signed modestly, "the King." Many more RT memos followed and even occasionally flowers. Who could resist? Not a daughter who had finally figured out how to get her father's attention.
We packed a lifetime of closeness into those few newsroom years before I moved on to magazines and a new kind of journalism, telling the story from my point of view. RT's rules of reporting were pretty straightforward. He'd materialize at my desk, stabbing the desk with his pencil to make a point, whether it was what people really voted for municipally (to fix their potholes), or how to confront a Prime Minister (carefully). I marveled at his rapid fire decision making, his democratic social manner — racetrack touts and premiers all got the same snappy banter — and most of all, his stunning nose for news. He could choose a front page picture, write a headline or dictate what the front page should be and never waver. But once, when I was leaving the office with him at the end of a hard week, a colleague asked him how he was. "It's Friday," said RT slowly, "and I fooled them again for another week." I knew just how he felt. Maybe that was how the whole business felt.
Every week Dad took me to lunch, setting a glass of wine at my place. Now we were colleagues, conspirators - and occasionally opponents. Once he snapped while nervous reporters watched: "It's MY newspaper, not yours." Actually it was neither of ours, and RT was eventually eased out of one senior job and then another. After his third canny comeback, he retired early from the business that had been his lifeblood.
The culture of alcohol had come to an end. And the paper he and his cronies put out despite those bacchanalian nights now crusaded against drunk driving. RT got out of both drinking and newspapering at just the right time. He stopped drinking, cold, after a stroke, from which he fully recovered. And he left the paper just as the bottom line began to mean more than the headline.
In a single generation, the business would replace street-smart newsmen with grad school hotshots. And a generation after that it would teeter on the edge of extinction as a new wild west of bloggers, tweeters and online contributors frayed forever the definition of who could deliver the news.
My father, the consummate newsman of his era, cleanly missed the internet explosion of mine.
He died of a heart attack at 71. Suddenly, the man who invented journalism for me was gone.
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I still miss his black pencil goading me to be a better journalist. In those years I felt guided, protected, and loved by my father. He had finally come through for me. I guess I had for him too — valiantly guiding my boat on that river of death.
In a world where headlines ruled, newsprint was endless and he was king, RT couldn't possibly have foreseen today's brutal layoffs, shuttered printing plants, newspapers dying. But I bet he could have summed it up just fine: "News business down. Boat for sale."