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The Current Transcript for April 5, 2021

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[SOUND CLIP] He was a man. He knew about things like Shamis. He was about to do things to a car. Things were pretty all right.

MATT GALLOWAY: It is Easter Monday, spring is here and it's been a tough year for so many of us. So we thought you could do with a bit of a lift. In 30 minutes, Dave, Morley and a vinyl cafe classic from the late great Stuart McLean.

MG: Also this morning, spring brings with it the return of birdsong. In Australia there is one bird that is having a bit of trouble serenading the new season. It's called the Regent Honeyeater. We'll tell you why, in about an hour.

MG: And then:

LINDA HICKEY: I'm no, you know, accordion expert by any stretch of the imagination. But to me, my own personal opinion, he is the best bellow bender on a button box that has ever been.

MG: Harry Hibbs was a legend of Newfoundland music who helped bring the traditional songs of the island to the mainland selling millions of albums in the process. Coming up, how fans are trying to bring home the accordion of the man known as His Nibs 30 years after his death.

MG: We begin, though, with a fight over the right to vote. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. And this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Big brands take aim at state of Georgia’s new voting laws

Guests: Carol Anderson, Paul Sergius Koku, Amna Kirmani

MG: Republicans in the state of Georgia may have expected some backlash from Democrats and civil rights groups after passing major changes to voting laws, they may not have expected the anger from the sports world and corporate America as well. Major League Baseball announced on Friday that this year's All-Star Game and amateur draft will no longer take place in Atlanta, Georgia, in protest of the new legislation. And the CEOs of Delta and Coca-Cola, both headquartered in that state, have also spoken out against the changes. Critics say the new laws are discriminatory, unnecessary and will make it more difficult for black people in particular to cast a ballot. Here is President Joe Biden's take.

JOE BIDEN: This is Jim Crow on steroids, what they're doing, and in Georgia and 40 other states, what it's all about. Imagine passing a law saying you cannot provide water or food for someone standing in line to vote. Can't do that. Come on, or you're going to close a polling place at five o'clock when working people just get off. This is all about keeping working folks and ordinary folks that I grew up with from being able to vote.

MG: Carol Anderson is a professor of African-American studies at Emory University in Atlanta and the author of several books, including her latest One Person, No Vote.

MG: Carol, good morning.

CAROL ANDERSON: Good morning, Matt.

MG: You just heard Joe Biden calling this new law Jim Crow on steroids. Just briefly for Canadians, explain what that means.

CA: What that means is a series of policies that don't define that this is about stopping black people from voting, but looking race neutral on its surface, but targeted at African-American voters to disenfranchise them. Disenfranchisement was one of the key elements of Jim Crow in the United States.

MG: And is that what this is? Is this at its heart, a move to take that vote away from, in particular, black people in the state?

CA: Absolutely. Absolutely. It is in response to a massive black voter turnout in the 2020 election and in the 2021 Senate runoff race that brought us, Senator Warnock and Senator Ossoff. It is the Republican response to that.

MG: Walk me through this. There are several provisions of this law, including the limiting the use of drop boxes, shortening the period of absentee voting, new changes to ID requirements as well. The Republican governor of that state, Brian Kemp, says this will expand access to voting and make voting more secure. What effect do you think it will actually have?

CA: I think it will have just the opposite effect. One, the strict new ID requirements on absentee ballots is just identity theft waiting to happen, requiring copies of your driver's licence, your birth date and the last four of your Social Security number. I think that the the reduction of drop boxes, which are these like mailboxes where you could put in your absentee ballot in the Atlanta area alone, it's going to go from over 90 drop boxes that we had in 2020 to about 23 or so, under this new law. For a city the size of Atlanta, it is a targeted hit at reducing access to the ballot box for African-Americans. It's like the Republican legislature looked up and said, how did they vote? And then went after each one of those mechanisms in this new law.

MG: Joe Biden mentioned making it illegal to give people water in the line. We've heard about this. What is the rationale behind that?

CA: Yes. Besides being cruel, the rationale is, is that the state has shut down over 200 polling places, 75 percent of those in minority and poor communities. This is where you see those long lines, like in Cobb County in the primary, we had an 11 hour line to vote. And so what the rationale is, what the Republicans said was this will stop people from campaigning or encouraging people to vote a certain way by giving them a bottle of water.

MG: Why would the state's Republican leadership want to limit access to the voting process specifically for black voters?

CA: Primarily because the party has moved so far to the right that its policies cannot resonate with the increasing diversity of Georgia, the demographic diversity of Georgia. And they know that when it comes to full on access to the ballot box that they can't win. So it was like how the... One of the Republican leaders in Gwinnett County said, we've got to have these changes or the Republicans will never win again.

MG: And do you see a direct link between... You mentioned Raphael Warnock, the black senator from Georgia, being elected. Do you see a direct connection between his election and laws like this?

CA: Oh, absolutely. This is a response to the demonstration of black electoral power. This is a response to what these demographic changes can mean for the political structure of both Georgia and the United States. It is a backlash against that.

MG: The other interesting element-- interesting he says-- around the timing of this is that this comes in the midst of the trial for the former police officer accused in the murder of George Floyd, you have what happened last summer in terms of a reckoning around race. What do you make of the timing of this broadly?

CA: You know, it's stemming from the same place, it's where you have in the trial the language about the fear of this big black man threatening, threatening law and order. It is the fear about this, this massive crowd threatening the police when they were saying, get your knee off his neck, you're killing him. What we're seeing here in Georgia is the fear of black voters.

MG: Do you think the response from corporate America I mentioned Delta and Coca-Cola both with headquarters in Georgia, but also for Major League Baseball, saying it's going to pull the all star game out of Atlanta. Do you see that reaction changing the course, the trajectory of what you're describing at all?

CA: I think it can have a major influence, particularly if those corporations stop funding the folks who are suppressing the vote. What we're seeing is an attempt by the legislature itself to now go after those corporations. But the power of these corporations in terms of saying we will not fund you for undermining democracy is real.

MG: And when you say funding, you mean through political donations to those lawmakers?

CA: Yes. Yes. By allowing those lawmakers to have the resources they need in order to sit in these spaces and create these laws.

MG: Just before I let you go broadly, what do you think is at stake here? Because we're talking about Georgia, but there are many other states that are looking at changing their voting regulations. And people say that it's all in line with what's happening in Georgia. So what do you think broadly is at stake here?

CA: American democracy is on the line here. One of the key elements in the Georgia law that we haven't talked about is basically the Republicans having, in the state legislature, having the power to overrule or to remove the county election boards and install their own election tsar who will certify the election. So you've got this twin pincer motion that you stop black people from having access to the ballot box and you put in place those who will certify the election regardless of the popular vote that is so anti-democratic, anti democracy. That's what's at stake here.

MG: It's always great to talk to you, Carol. Thank you very much.

CA: Thank you so much Matt.

MG: Carol Anderson, professor of African-American studies at Emory University in Atlanta and the author of several books, including One Person, No Vote. We're speaking about corporate America and corporate America's response to this new law. This is not the first time that big corporations have been nudged into social or political activism.

MG: Amna Kirmani is a marketing professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. Paul Sergius Kuko is a marketing professor at Florida Atlantic University College of Business. He's research boycott actions. Good morning to you both.

AMNA KIRMANI: Morning.

PAUL SERGIUS KOKU: Good morning.

MG: Paul. Start with you. Were you surprised by Major League Baseball on Friday announcing that it was going to pull the all star game from the city of Atlanta?

PAUL SERGIUS KOKU: Well, yeah, I was surprised by the news. But, in retrospect, I would say it's in character, because we have a lot of minority players in baseball and if you watch what has been happening during the past three years, especially, corporations are becoming vocal in terms of expressing their viewpoints. These are the corporate social responsibility, particularly in justice versus injustice issues or inequities. So I am not entirely surprised.

MG: I want to ask you about more broadly what's happening in just a moment. But Amna from you, how much impact do you think the idea of pulling a baseball game and a baseball draft from a city would have?

[Cross talk]

MG: Amna go ahead.

AK: Yeah, from an economic point of view, the estimate is about one hundred million dollars will be lost in terms of Georgia tourism for the pulling of the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, which is a lot of money, and especially during the pandemic, the hotels, the tourist industry was counting on this. So I think that hurts. In terms of Coca-Cola and Delta so far, what they've done is just made a statement that this is unacceptable and it's unclear whether they're willing to withdraw donations to Republican lawmakers who supported the law.

MG: Paul, you mentioned corporate social responsibility. These are companies that were pretty subdued at first before they decided that they would condemn the new law. Why do you think Coca-Cola and Delta felt that they needed to put some sort of statement out, Paul?

PAUL SERGIUS KOKU: Well, I think a lot of reactions to black consumers or I wouldn't say necessarily black consumers, but minority consumers who's [inaudible] are state. So it is a normal response to consumers, consumers reaction.

MG: Is it a normal response, though, for a corporation to weigh into politics like this?

PAUL SERGIUS KOKU: Well no it's not out of character, as I said earlier, corporate social responsibility is coming to the floor. So it is not entirely out of character. But as you have correctly observed, the initial reaction was rather tepid. But once they realised that consumers are becoming rather vocal about the opposition, they changed. They quickly switched positions. So I think it's a reaction to the consumer's stance.

MG: James Quincey is the CEO of Coca-Cola. He was speaking on CNBC last week. Take a listen to what he had to say.

JAMES QUINCEY: We have always opposed this legislation. Many things are approved and done and achieved in private without having to take a public stance. But in this case, it does not work, clearly. And so we're being more forceful in our public position.

MG: Amna, What do you make of that? That Coca-Cola was always concerned about this but didn't actually say anything earlier on?

AK: That's a weak argument. If they had really felt that way, they would have been more public in their response. But, you know, corporations are in between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, they rely on Georgia politicians, they lobby them, they give the money, they want certain tax breaks, also favourable legislation. So that's the economic part of it. On the other hand, they have employees as well as consumers. So other stakeholders who really believe strongly that this voting law is discriminatory. And so there is this Trade-Off they have to make between their economic self-interest and the values of their customers.

MG: So what would they have to lose in making a statement like this? It was interesting that the CEO of Delta said that the new law was based on, in his words, the lie of election fraud in 2020. And then the Republicans in Georgia said, well, we're going to cancel your tax break on jet fuel. So Amna what would a corporation have to lose by stepping into this?

AK: They could potentially lose a lot of money in terms of these tax breaks, in terms of their influence over future legislation in Georgia and certainly in terms of their personal relationships with Georgia lawmakers. So this can be harmful to them. The issue is whether what they're saying publicly to everybody is what they're saying privately to the politicians also.

MG: Well, and Carol Anderson said that if you really want to create change, it's not just about the public statements that you make. It's also about, in her words, funding those politicians.

AK: Absolutely, and if these corporations followed up with concrete steps that are about taking a stand against this law with the legislature, such as withdrawing money from the politicians, that would go a long way and making, ensuring that this is what they truly believe.

MG: Paul, what is the expectation now in the current climate that we live in that corporations will do something beyond simply putting a statement out on social media?

PAUL SERGIUS KOKU: What I think, this is going to be the trend because stakeholders, particularly consumers and employees, are becoming much more active and vocal in the expression of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with corporations that do not necessarily act in their interests. So corporations have their eyes on what consumers or stakeholders do or say. So I think, as the professor has correctly stated, they'll be doing a fine line between politicians and consumers, as well as their employees.

MG: Why should? I mean, you can imagine that there are people who might be arguing that private corporations have no place in politics. Why should you know, we expect a corporation to make any statement at all on a law?

PAUL SERGIUS KOKU: Is that for me?

MG: Yeah.

PAUL SERGIUS KOKU: Well, that is the argument that Milton Friedman used to make in the 70s. Right. And that corporations have only one responsibility, and that is to their shareholders. But you and I, or at least many commentators have realised that, that is utterly false. Corporations should be responsible to all the stakeholders, not only the shareholders. And therefore, we expect... Look, the corporations are supported by the communities in which they live. Why should we not expect corporations to be responsive to the communities in which they live, the communities that support them. I think it is only fair and logical that we should expect them to respect or at least pay attention to the communities that support them.

MG: How then, Paul, will this go beyond simply putting a statement out? I mean, you can see the criticism that comes from people who are working on the ground level, saying you need to do more than a statement on social media, you need to step up. Do you expect, you know, the moves of corporate America to have an impact, have a long term impact on what's happening here?

PAUL SERGIUS KOKU: Well, that depends. It depends on how long consumers and stakeholders are prepared to hold them accountable. I want to think that this is not a knee jerk reaction. You see, consumers have a very short memory, generally. So if these efforts are not sustained after three months or so, we'll see corporations going back to what they normally do, and that is just trying to make money. But if they are held accountable and the efforts are sustained, then of course you would expect them to be responsive.

MG: Amna, Carol Anderson was talking about how this is really about, you know, the future of democracy and was pointing to other states where similar legislations are being considered. How likely do you think it is from your perspective to see consumers keep up the pressure on corporate America, not just to get involved, but to make change?

AK: All the studies that have been done over the last few years find that consumers are becoming increasingly activist in wanting their companies to stand up for social justice and to express their values. And so I think this is going to continue. Millennials in particular and younger consumers really demand value driven corporations. So this is a trend that corporations are going to have to deal with in changing their role from just economic self-interest to more of a social justice approach.

MG: And if you don't make that statement, if you don't step into it, then you... What happens?

AK: Well, then you face calls for boycotts, as these companies did in Georgia, you get consumers actively posting negative comments about you on social media. You get a lot of negative publicity. And in the end, that might affect your bottom line.

MG: It is fascinating to see this unfold and we will watch what happens in the days ahead. In the meantime, thank you both for being here this morning.

AK: Thank you.

PAUL SERGIUS KOKU: Thank you for having us.

MG: Paul Sergius Koku, and Amna Kirmani marketing professors. Paul is with the Florida Atlantic University College of Business. Amna is with the University of Maryland, and their Robert H Smith School of Business.

MG: Your CBC News is next. And then a classic from the late great Stuart McLane. It's the Vinyl Cafe and the Circle of Life, coming up in six minutes. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current on CBC Radio one. Stay with us.

Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Cafe: Tree of Heaven

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway, you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MG: Still to come:

MG: Can you name the best selling musician in Canada in the late 1960s, would you guess that his instrument of choice was the accordion? We will be talking Harry Hibbs with some of his biggest fans coming up a little bit later on. But first, let's check in with Dave and Morley.

[Music: Theme]

MG: Spring is in full swing across this country, and nature is proving to us that it finds a way to carry on even in the face of a global pandemic. Of course, life has always found a way, as Stuart McLean captured so well in his story, The Tree of Heaven. And we at The Current cannot take full credit for bringing you this classic story. You actually have a listener named Ginni Burton to thank. Ginni wrote us around Easter last year telling us that she could do with a Dave and Morley story to keep her spirits up. So this is for Ginni Burton and anyone else feeling nostalgic and needing a lift.

STUART MCLEAN: Summer arrived during the second week of June. The week began hot and sticky and the temperature kept rising. The sky had settled into a gloomy opaqueness that wasn't blue but wasn't grey either. It was just heavy and thick. One morning in the middle of the hot spell, Dave met Susan Thompson, pushing her daughter Jennifer down the street. Susan and her husband, Bob, moved into the Gillingham house during the winter, Susan looked distracted and harassed. Oh, she said, glancing up and down the street, the babysitter didn't show up. Susan was only doing local errands, the bank and the grocery store, she was going to be gone a half an hour, forty five minutes at the most, Dave said, give me Jennifer. You can pick her up on your way home. And that's how Dave came to be standing on his front porch the other day, holding a baby girl in his arms and ringing his own doorbell.

STUART MCLEAN: When Morley answered, he tried to look concerned. She followed me home. He said, Can we keep her? [laughter]

STUART MCLEAN: Dave arrived home with Jennifer again a week later. This time it was a Saturday afternoon and Morley wasn't home. The kids neither. This time Dave sat happily on the front stoop while Jennifer slept in her stroller. When she woke up and started to cry, he had a flare of panic, but he went inside and fetched a popsicle from the freezer and the two of them shared the Popsicle. By the time Susan arrived to pick up her daughter, Dave and Jennifer were fast friends. Dave waved goodbye using the baby method, opening and closing his hand as if he were squeezing a ball.

STUART MCLEAN: Bye bye, he said bye bye.

STUART MCLEAN: When they were gone, Dave surveyed the mess that Jennifer left behind. There was popsicle juice everywhere, on his pants and his shirt and his hands, for starters, and on the porch and in little puddles on the walk where Jennifer's stroller had been parked, Dave had forgotten what it was like to live with little children.

STUART MCLEAN: He went inside to change, and as he walked across the living room, he remembered that there was once a time when he had to kick a path through the toys to get from one side of this room to the other, a time when fatigue was such a constant companion that to do something as simple as putting the Lego away required more energy than he thought he would ever see again. There was a time when eating even seemed impossible, when he and Morley had to eat in shifts if they went somewhere where the kids. He remembered the night he had paced the sidewalk in front of a Chinese restaurant with Stephanie howling in her snugly while Morley ate anxiously in the restaurant window. [laughter].

STUART MCLEAN: Now, now, at three o'clock on this Saturday afternoon, he didn't even know where his teenage daughter was. There was a certain relief in that. Relief that he no longer had to be on constant kid patrol, that if they were left alone for five minutes, his children wouldn't necessarily stick their fingers in an electric socket or fall down a flight of stairs or crawl across the room and help themselves to a bowl of cat food. But there was a certain loneliness too. Dave poked at his cheese sandwich and he thought that the mess of childhood was gone from his life forever. He'd had two cracks at it. His childhood and theirs, but it was over now the end of childhood, a melancholy thought and lost in melancholy, Dave couldn't even say for certain if his children would remember their childhood as the best of times. He'd always thought he had had a happy childhood. But on this melancholy afternoon, he couldn't even be sure of that. When Dave woke up on Sunday morning, his first conscious thought was he should clean the car. Used to do this every Sunday morning, he used to do the exterior one week and the interior the next. Rotating, and this was years ago when he bought his first new car and there were no children messing up his life. When having a clean car seemed important. Back in the days when Dave thought he would keep the car maybe three years, four tops, and then he would trade it in and get a new one, trade it up.

STUART MCLEAN: Now, he knew he was never going to trade up, [laughter] he wasn't even going to trade in, he was going to be the last person on Earth to drive this car. As he lay there in bed, being careful not to move abruptly, being careful not to wake his wife. Dave remembered the summer he had stopped cleaning his car each week. It was the summer Stephanie was, what, six, maybe seven? They drove to Detroit one Saturday to have dinner with Mark Knopfler and then watch his concert at the Olympia. And on the way home somewhere around Lemington, Stephanie leaned forward from the back seat and said quietly, I feel sick. [Laughter] And before morally, it even turned completely around, Stephanie threw up. It was a disgorgement of heroic proportions. [laughter]Erupting out of her with freight train fury, she opened her mouth and delivered a spout that cleared the front seat and splattered against the dashboard. Most of it with painful and pinpoint accuracy disappearing into the heating vent. When they got home, Dave scrubbed the car within an inch of its life, he used detergents and disinfectants, scrub brushes and toothbrushes and all that winter, the sour smell of vomit returned every time he turned on the heater. Even now, even after all these years, even after he had emptied bottles of air freshener and jars of essential oils into the heater, he was still convinced the odour hovered for a few moments whenever he switched on the heat.

STUART MCLEAN: The Schellenberg's who lived next door have a smell in their car. Every time the Schellenberg's start their car, it fills with a distinctive odour of lamb curry. It just started one day out of the blue, Arnie Shellenberger will explain if you should notice it. Arnie took his car to three mechanics before he found one who could explain it to him. Some belt in the bowels of his engine was rubbing against some block. He could have it repaired for four hundred dollars, or he could live with five minutes of lamb curry. It's a kind of a pleasant smell, Arnie decided. The smell of Stephanie's misadventure was otherwise, and its incessant presence had gradually worn away Dave's pride of ownership. Over the years, Dave's car fell into inexorable decline. He hardly noticed the mess anymore. For years, there was a constant dusting of goldfish crackers on all of the seats and raisins, little black pellets, as if he was sharing his car with a worn of rabbits or perhaps a family of elk. One morning when he looked at the mess of his car, he wondered if while he slept, a family of elk didn't munch their nightly way along the shadows of his laneway. And when the mood sees them, nudge his car doors open and take it for a spin, leaving their little piles of pellets behind.

STUART MCLEAN: So on this Sunday morning, when Dave woke up early and was seized with this unfamiliar urge to clean his car, he slipped out of bed quietly and he went downstairs and on a shelf in the basement, he found a yellow bucket with an old shamy so hard and stiff he couldn't imagine it being of any use to anyone. He brought the shamy upstairs and filled the sink with hot water, and he let it soak while he made coffee. And when he reached into the water and found the deerskin slippery and soft, he felt a surge of satisfaction that he had even found it, was good. That he could renew it like that with hot water made him feel mildly competent. He was a man, he knew about things like Shamis, he was about to do things to a car. Things were pretty all right. These were the melancholy thoughts that Dave carried with his yellow bucket and his damp deerskin into the driveway that Sunday morning, and it was with this lingering sense of sadness that Dave got down on his hands and his knees and he began to empty the car of the detritus of the years, thinking as he pulled candy wrappers and old pencil stubs from under the passenger seat of how the generations that bracketed his had grown too old. Both his mother and his father and his son and his daughter had deserted him, abandoned him. No one needed him anymore. He filled a small plastic bag and he went inside for another. He found a bleached rayon scarf on the back window ledge that looked like it had been lying in the sun for years and a pot of congealed lip gloss and a pair of sunglasses he had never seen before and wizened apple cores. And a leathery, hard plug of something that he first thought was a cigar and then realised was a mummified banana. [loud laughter]

STUART MCLEAN: He found a cucumber under the front seat, and when he reached out to pick it up, his hand went right through it. It had been over a week since Morley had been shopping. The cucumber reminded him of the summer afternoon, something had distracted Morley while she was unpacking groceries, and she had forgotten the bag of meat in the trunk. The babysitter had found the meat three days later and phoned Dave at work to ask if he thought the hot dogs would still be all right. I don't think so, said Dave, how do they smell? They smell disgusting, said the babysitter, but I was going to boil them. With growing despondency, Dave realised he would never be able to return his car to its pre child state and in a way it no longer mattered. Once there was a time when he cared, but he didn't care anymore. He was on his knees by the back door, on the driver's side, trying to pluck a reluctant pencil out of a crevice when he noticed a slight haze of green between the driver's seat in the front door. When he reached out to wipe the haze that felt soft and fluttering, not sticky like he expected. And he leaned forward and he squinted. And then he leaned forward more and blinked in amazement when he realised that something had taken root in the sand in the bottom of his car. There was a tiny plant growing there, Dave's first impulse was to pluck the little green thing off the floor, but he hesitated for a moment and in the moment of hesitation, he was overcome with the miracle of it. Somehow, a seed had landed on the floor of his car and it had found enough dirt and sand and decomposing organic matter to germinate. It amazed him. A flower in the desert. Life affirming life, it was reproduction and it was happening in his car. He took the shamy and dripped some water into the well by the door, and he frowned, there was dirt and sand there, but hardly a medium for healthy growth. He went to the front garden and came back with a handful of soil. And he padded it carefully around the seedling, it took him over an hour to finish cleaning the car, he kept coming back to the driver's side door to examine the plant. Before he went in for breakfast, he jockeyed the car in the driveway so the rays of the early morning sun caught the side door. And he left the door open, so they caught his seedling.

STUART MCLEAN: Morley was up and about, I have to go in, she said. I'll be home, I don't know, three, maybe four. And she breezed out the side door and she climbed into the car when she saw how clean it was. She smiled and gave Dave the thumbs up. And then she drove away. Dave was left in the driveway looking horrified. He'd heard a story on the radio once about a little girl, she was, what, two years old, and she had climbed onto the back of her father's delivery truck just as he was leaving for work. David imagined when he had heard the story that her father worked for FedEx and the little girl was standing on the back step of one of those big FedEx delivery vans. This was in the country and he travelled for several kilometres up hills and hour round sharp corners before anyone could stop him. When someone asked the little girl what she was thinking during the ride, she said, Hold on, hold on. As Dave stood in his driveway watching Morley leave, he was muttering the same words to his plant. He didn't have time to warn her or he was reluctant to warn her, he was worried what Morley might do if he told her something was growing in the car. He was worried that she might not understand. Morley didn't come home until supper. And when she pulled into the driveway, Dave ran out to meet her. How was your day? He asked. He was staring at her feet as she opened the door, not her face. She almost put her heel down right on top of his seedling. Look out! Dave bellowed. Morley looked at him as if he were crazy. What is the matter? She said. I thought. And that was the moment of truth.

STUART MCLEAN: That was the moment he could have said there's a seedling in the car and I don't want you to kill it because it's not just a seedling, it's it's the struggle of life itself. But he didn't say it. He didn't say it because, well, it's hard to know, isn't it? It's hard to know why we say or don't say anything. Maybe he didn't say anything because in his heart, he knew Morley felt no insecurity about her role as a nurturing human being. All Dave had ever done was gone to work, and he didn't want anything to harm this plant, this life that had fallen under his care, and he had no confidence in his ability to explain this. He found excuses all that week to use the car every day. This was something he hardly ever did. He would invent lunchtime errands that required the car. He would drive to a quiet lane that bordered some railroad tracks, and he'd park in a sunny spot with a door open and sit and eat his lunch. He bought bottled water every day. Amusing himself by changing the brands. Today, he told his seedling, you're drinking from a French glacier.

STUART MCLEAN: The first day he did this, he poured out so much water that he almost washed the seedling away. He had to scratch a handful of earth from the hill by the railroad tracks and added to his little garden to soak up the flood. The next day, he tried using a Styrofoam coffee cup and he had the same disastrous flood. But this time he was prepared. He had bought a small bag of potting soil at the hardware store and he had it open and ready. For the rest of the week, he filled his mouth with water and he carefully measured the water out, squirt by squirt. Life to life, by Friday, his seedling had grown an inch. That night, he dreamed it was summer and he was driving his car along a winding mountain road, like down some Mediterranean mountain toward the sea. Maybe it was in Monaco. It was hard to tell exactly because his plant, which must have been jungle ivy or something, had filled the car in his dream. It had twisted around the handbrake, put up the steering column and onto the mirror in front of the windshield. And sitting in the driver's seat was like sitting in a jungle. Dave kept trying to brush leaves away from his face, and the car kept going faster and faster. And suddenly Dave realised he wasn't driving anymore. The plant was driving [laughter]. The ivy had the wheel and it was driving too damn fast. And there was a corner coming and they were going too fast for the corner and they were drifting into the oncoming lane. And there was a truck coming the other way, just like in a James Bond movie. It was a FedEx truck and it was laughing at them. And as it passed, Dave spotted Morley and the kids. They were standing on a ledge on the back of the truck and they were screaming, hold on, hold on. He woke up sweating with his heart pounding, and he went downstairs and he made himself a cup of tea and added a shot of brandy. And he sat in the backyard and watched a raccoon the size of an industrial vacuum cleaner waddle along his neighbour's fence.

STUART MCLEAN: When he finished the tea, he went inside and got his car keys and he opened the car door. It was hard to see in that light. So we went back inside and he got a flashlight. His seedling was over an inch tall, now. An inch and a half of wobbly green stem that looked entrancing in the yellow spotlight of the night. It had begun to branch out, the fresh green leaves, mysteriously serrated and much too well-formed for something so small, it looked like a miniature shrub. Dave was enchanted. He was also terrified that someone was going to see it and pull it up or worse, not see it and step on it. There was no time like the present. He thought. Looking up at the moon, he reached down and tugged at his plant. And he carried it to the back of his yard, like you might carry a baby chick to a corner by the fence, and he broke the grass and he placed the little seedling there and he said, there, there. And he went back to bed. And he forgot about it.

STUART MCLEAN: And he will not remember it for three more weeks. And when he does, he will go to the corner of his yard by the fence and to his great surprise, he will find that his plant will have grown as high as his knees. He will not show it to Morley for two more weeks after that. He will show it to her at the beginning of August, and when he does, it will be higher than his waist. He will tell her he found the seed in the car and that one night he planted it in this corner. And look what came. It's an ailanthus known also as the Tree of Heaven, a persistent and resourceful little tree that was brought to New York years ago from Asia and thrives in urban environments, a tree that can sprout in a crack of the pavement and under porches and decks and apparently in cars.

STUART MCLEAN: Dave's plant will keep growing until it is nearly 60 feet tall. And at the end of every summer, it will produce small yellow green flowers. And in the early fall, the flowers will be followed by beautiful, ready fruit bearing seeds with little wings like maple keys. Its leaves will come late in the spring and every spring Dave will think his tree has died until suddenly it comes alive every spring. A miracle. And every spring, when the leaves finally come, Dave will stand in his backyard and think of this summer and the tiny seedling he found in his car, and he will look at his tree and think that things survive. Even without his presence, even without him, life goes on, life has a will of its own, and he needn't worry. His job isn't to worry or do things. His job is to watch and wonder. Thank you very much.

MG: That was Tree of Heaven, Dave and Morley story written and told by the late great Stuart McLean. It first aired on the Vinyl Café on CBC Radio in 2003. Well, coming up after your regional update.

[SOUND CLIP: bird songs]

MG: Can you tell the difference between those two birdsongs? We will find out why a man who studies the Regent honeyeater calls one of those, the good song and why the other is bad news for a feathered friend. And after that, the legendary Harry Hibbs accordion is heading home. Here's a bit of what that instrument used to sound like in his hands.

[SOUND CLIP: Harry Hibbs playing the accordion]

MG: The story of Harry Hibbs, his accordion and heading home. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current were back in 90 seconds. Stay with us.

[Music: Theme]

Teaching the regent honeyeater how to sing; and bringing Harry Hibbs’s accordion home to Newfoundland

Guest: Ross Crates, Linda Hickey, Marty Hibbs

MG: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway, you're listening to The Current. This time of year, birdsong can bring a spring to your step or at the very least help you wake up in the morning.

MG: For one bird, though, the song that it's singing isn't hitting all the right notes. The Regent Honeyeater is an endangered songbird in Australia, and its distinct call is sounding a bit off these days. Ross Crates is trying to fix that. He is a research fellow at the Australian National University and an avian conservationist with the Difficult Bird Research Group.

MG: Ross, good morning.

ROSS CRATES: Hi Matt.

MG: I'm just looking at a photo of this bird. It's beautiful. What is the Regent Honeyeater and why is it so special?

RC: Oh, they are, as you say, they're an absolutely stunning bird. I have this amazing bright yellow tail, big scalloping of black and white on their chest. And it's a really weird face, where they have like a bare skin patch around the eye that sort of warps. And the term regent comes from the fact that they are black and yellow. It's common for those coloured birds to be called regent. So unfortunately, this amazing looking bird is in some big trouble. They're critically endangered. We think there's probably only three hundred left in the world. And so, yeah, they're on the brink of extinction.

MG: And have you seen one through your own eyes?

RC: Oh, I have seen quite a few, fortunately. Yes. I was very lucky, actually. The first time I saw one was on the second day of my fieldwork. So I wasn't really expecting to come across them quite so easily. So it's probably a combination of hard work, but mostly good luck to be in the right place at the right time.

MG: How did your research into focussing in particular on this bird's song?

RC: Originally, we had no plans whatsoever to study the song of Regent Honeyeaters, that there was kind of notes in the literature that they mimicked other species. But shortly after we found the few birds, we noticed these random individuals that were starting to... We found that they were singing the songs of other species and basically what was happening was that this was really unusual. And we decided that we'd try to make a note of the songs of every male Regent Honeyeater that we came across during our monitoring program. What we found is that the song of the species is very different in different parts of the range. And then there's these random proportion of birds that have learnt the songs of other species and sound, nothing like a Regent Honeyeater.

MG: That's fascinating. It's strange to talk about it without hearing the Regent Honeyeater so we're going to play you some bird calls.

[SOUND CLIP: Regent Honeyeater bird call/good]

MG: OK, so, Ross, what's that?

RC: That is the song, that's the good song, so that's the song that the males that live in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, that's kind of the core of the remaining world population. That's the song that most of the males sing.

MG: What is this then?

[SOUND CLIP: Regent Honeyeater bird song/bad]

RC: That's the song of a captive bred bird. So what we found is that the males that are bred in captivity in Sydney have developed these songs that are very different to the males that are hanging on in the wild.

MG: Help me understand that. How does that happen if the birds are bred in captivity. Why are their songs different?

RC: Songbirds and parrots, they actually learn their song. Songs are not innate to many birds. And so what has to happen is young birds will learn to sing their song over the first year of their life, by listening to the sounds of other individuals that know the song. So it's what we call it's like a culturally, kind of, acquired trait. And so what we're finding is that in captivity, the birds have kind of over time developed this unusual song and the young birds are kind of taken, they're crashed away from the adults because they're still breeding, obviously. And so what we found is that the juveniles have kind of developed this unusual song because they're not hearing the sounds of the adult males that they should be hearing.

MG: What happens when they're released into the wild?

RC: Well, we know that some juvenile males can pair up with with wild females, but we're just a little bit worried that if the captive males are making sounds or songs that might not be, kind of, so appealing to the females that are left that, that might impact their kind of breeding success when they're released.

MG: Which would be incredibly important given how critically endangered these birds are.

RC: Yeah, exactly. This is what we found with, even within the wild population. We found that males that sing unusual songs. So either the males sound like the other bird species or males that sing kind of weird variations of what they should sound like, as in the song you played first there. We found that those males are less likely to be paired and less likely to nest with the female.

MG: All right. Let me play something else.

[SOUND CLIP: bird songs]

MG: It's like "stump the band" where I ask the avian expert what he's listening to. What is that?

RC: Yes. So that's two different songs there. The first one is a little wattle bird. So that's another Honeyeater species. And it's actually not a little wattle at all. It's the song of a little wattle bird, but it's actually a Regent Honeyeater that's learnt to sing that song. The second one is a little fry bird. So the same thing. These are two male regent honeyeaters that we monitored for a few weeks over our program that sounded nothing like a Regent Honeyeater to should sound, as you can hear, and it picked up the songs of these other species.

MG: The last thing I want to play you is a slower version of the Regent Honeyeater song.

[SOUND CLIP: Regent Honeyeater bird song/slower]

MG: What would cause the bird to slow itself down in its song?

RC: What we think is happening is that as the population is declining, the population is also becoming less dense. So what we mean by that is that every individual bird is having fewer opportunities to interact with other birds. And so what we're finding compared to the songs of regent honeyeaters that were recorded sort of 20 years ago, approximately, the songs are becoming less complex over time. So the wild birds are essentially losing syllables. They're losing variation in the song. And there's good research that shows that a lot of females, kind of female birds, they prefer to mate with males that have complex songs because obviously it's more difficult to produce these sounds. And in that sense, if you can produce a complex song, is kind of a signal of your quality as a good male to pair up with. But yeah, we're finding is that as the is declining and becoming less dense, the songs are kind of simplifying over time.

MG: So how are you going about trying to reintroduce the correct songs to these birds?

So there's two ways. Well, the first way is we're trying to do everything we can to try and preserve the wild population. So the reason we've established our monitoring program in the first place to try and find the wild birds and find these small pockets of habitat that they're still trying to breed in. And so having put a real big effort into finding where these birds are in the wild, we can now start to do things like protect their nest, increase their breeding success and make sure that those wild birds are hanging on. The other way we're doing it is to teach the captive bred birds to try to sing more like the wild birds. So what we're doing is we're taking the recordings of the wild birds that still have a good song. We're kind of making a bit of a mixtape and we're playing the mix tape to the young birds in captivity.

MG: What happens? I mean, are the young birds good learners? Do they take from what they hear in the mix tape and recreate that?

RC: This is a question we haven't been out to answer yet because we're actually in the middle of these experiments. The young birds are about four months old at the moment. So they're kind of in the middle of their song learning phase. So they've been exposed to these wild playback tracks for about three months now. And we expect to have an answer as to whether they sound any more like the wild males should sound within about another three or four months.

MG: And what do you do? I mean, you have speakers that are all set up around where they would be nesting so that they could hear these sounds?

RC: Yeah, that's it. So when the young birds kind of are independent from their adults in the aviaries, they're taken out of their aviary so that the the adult birds can have a second brood, the young birds are taken to their own aviary and we play the songs of these through speakers in hope that the young birds will pick up these sounds that they're being exposed to.

MG: What's at stake here? I mean, you hinted at this a little bit just in terms of the role of these songs, in terms of the preservation of the species, but why should we be concerned about these birds losing their original songs?

RC: There's a direct analogy between these birds losing songs and human societies losing languages, you know, so from a fundamental sense, you know, we're losing something from the world. If these birds have become so rare that they're essentially, you know, struggling to maintain their own language, as it were, in the form of a song. On a more sort of conservation level. We're seeing this is a really sort of urgent sign that this species is on the brink of extinction. We're worried that if the females kind of breed less with these males, fewer young young birds are fledged. That means the next generation has fewer adult duties to learn from. And then we have a higher proportion of males singing weird songs. And essentially it could potentially lead to the loss of the Regent Honeyeaters completely.

MG: Ross, this is fascinating work. And I really appreciate you telling us about what you're up to and good luck.

RC: Thank you, Matt.

MG: Ross Crates is a research fellow at the Australian National University.

[Music: Electronic music]

MG: You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One, my name is Matt Galloway.

VOICE: Many of you probably don't know that in the late 60s and the early 1970s, the best selling musician in Canada wasn't a long haired rock and roller or coffeehouse folky. Instead it was a small, quiet man. His trademark was salt and pepper cap, a wink and a shy smile. It was an accordion player and he came from Bell Island, Newfoundland. His name was Harry Hibbs.

[SOUND CLIP: Here's a half hour of [inaudible] music with Newfies favourite son Harry Hibbs. Accordion music]

MG: Still today, Harry Hibbs is often called Newfoundland's favourite son, the musician has been dead for more than 30 years. But in the 60s and 70s, Harry Hibbs was a superstar in Toronto and throughout Atlantic Canada. In one year, he went from factory worker to fame, eventually starring in a TV show earning seven gold records and selling more than a million and a half albums. [SOUND CLIP: Harry Hibbs performing].

MG: Harry Hibbs, also known as His Nibs, brought traditional Newfoundland music to the mainland and for Newfoundlanders living in Toronto at that time, fed a heart longing for home like no one else did. Linda Hickey just might be His Nibs' biggest fan. She is hoping to finally bring his accordion home to Belle Island this summer. [SOUND CLIP: There's a place called Belle Island, by Harry Hibbs]

MG: Linda Hickey is in St. John's, Newfoundland. Linda, good morning.

LINDA HICKEY: Good morning. Good morning, Matt. How nice to hear from you.

MG: It's great to have you on the program. What's it like hearing that music?

LH: Believe it or not, right now I'm a little bit welled up and goosebumps. So it's just incredible how that happens to me. You know, you just play two of my very favourite of the many, many songs that Harry performed, and it just has such an impact. It's just incredible.

MG: Tell me about the goosebumps. What is it about his music that you love so much?

LH: I think the music, you know, it's part of our culture, it's part of who we are, it's part of what we grew up with. It's memories of our homes, it's our own kitchen. We didn't always have live performers, of course, in our kitchen, but we had record players. And you would have an opportunity and you'd hear that stuff. So it was kind of ingrained in you. You know, to me, I'm, you know, accordion expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have a fair bit of experience over the last years putting together some of Harry's work. And to me, my own personal opinion, he is the best bellow bender on a button box that has ever been.

MG: Where would you hear... That's high praise. Where would you hear that music?

LH: You know, I grew up in a mining town not Bell Island where Harry came from, but another mining town in Labrador, Labrador City. And funnily enough, you know, there was lots of Bell Islanders there, too. You know, we all went to school together and it was the Sunday afternoon. It was the Saturday evening, you know, that was to stuff. It was the records that were playing. If you turned on the radio station, that's what you heard. You just knew that name. For us growing up as children and like I said, in my mother's household, you know, when the record album was put on, you were told to shhh because they were listening to these songs. Right. The thing for me is I can't tell you why I loved music as much as that, it can tear me up some of those songs, the sad ones, particularly like leaving, you know, Bell Island. I can't imagine how that must have felt. The jigs and reels, you know, those toe tapping, the hand clapping ones. You know I'm engaged in music all the time. It's all around because all of my friends are musicians and, you know, a lot of accordion players. Through this pandemic, you know, I have been able to incorporate that bellow box that's making its journey home to Bell Island and put life back into it. And even though it's covid time, we have been able to make that thing talk through social media. So that's a really fun thing to do.

MG: How did you get your hands on this accordion?

LH: So through Marty Hibbs, through Harry's brother. And so we've been working on an exhibit for his hometown in Bell Island at the Community Museum. And so through Marty, we made some connections. And Marty said, I think I can get one of Harry's accordion, you know, da da da da da. And, you know, we ended up that it was his brother Mike, who had the accordion. Mike actually came down to Newfoundland and carried that accordion with him and basically handed it over to me to ensure that it became part of the exhibit, of the Harry Hibbs exhibit that's going to happen at the museum.

MG: And you've been handing it over to other musicians as well in the province, right?

LH: And so what happened, I had it in my house and I was like, oh, my God. Like, I have the holy grail of accordion here in my house. And it was in my closet. And I was a bit nervous. I was like, oh, my God, if anything ever happened to this, you know, da da da da. And then I thought, oh, my God, I just can't let it sit there. You know, covid came and we started putting it out there and I started taking some pictures and said, you know, we got the Holy Grail here in St John's now. And then all of a sudden I started getting aficionados, I call them, contacting me, saying, can I get a picture with it? Can I see it? Can I touch it? And then I was afraid to let people play it because, you know, I didn't want anything to happen to it. But then I knew the people who wanted to play it. They were experts at what they were doing. So they had people like, you know, famous accordion players in Newfoundland like Mark Hiscock and Ryan Baker and Paul Hamilton and Chris Beamers. These guys grew up listening to Harry Hibbs, that's how they learn to play. And so they wanted to be part of it. And then all of a sudden, you know, I would record it live and we would put it out on Facebook and, you know, all the social media channels. And then people just started to connect. And believe it or not, Matt, we had over a million views in a year of people watching this stuff. And the comments that came back were just incredible.

MG: That's amazing.

LH: It was incredible because people were saying, you just gave me a little piece of home or I remember that song, my mother, you know, used to play it or my mother used to listen to it or that was in our house on Sunday's while dinner was cooking. So all these memories, you know, it evoked memories in people who were literally around the world. We had people that had Newfoundland connections in Sri Lanka and Australia and Ireland and Scotland. And so they were everywhere and they were saying, you have just given me a little piece of home. So how nice was that to make that connection during this, you know, this pandemic period that we're going through.

MG: And as you say, I mean, it's a lot of pressure having the holy grail of accordions with you in the closet. What's the grand plan for it? I mean, you're talking about taking it home to Bell Island. What's the big picture?

LH: So right now, for the last year or so, we've been putting it out there, letting musicians play it, you know, young and old alike, you know, the youngest little guy we had was Luke Mercer. And Luke was about nine or 10 years old at the time when he played it. And he begged his mother to contact me and ask if he could hold it and play it. And I was like, how does this kid know this? He's 10 years old, but he did. And he played it magically. And his mother told me the night before, he kept saying to his mother, Mom, is it really going to happen? Am I going to get to play Harry's accordion? And he kept it up and kept it up. And finally she said, Luke, if you don't go to bed and give it up, I'm going to call Linda and tell her you're not going to get it, to get him to go to bed. Then we decided we were going to do a tribute to His Nibs, Harry Hibbs. So we contacted The Rooms, which is our provincial museum here in St. John's. We said this would be a perfect venue to be able to do this. We did the show in the midst of a pandemic and The Rooms now has the accordion on an exhibit there. And it's going to stay there now until it makes its journey home to Bell Island, which we hope will be this summer.

MG: You mentioned Marty Hibbs. He is Harry's younger brother. He was his manager and he is in Toronto. Marty, good morning to you.

MARTY HIBBS: Good morning, Matt. Good morning, Linda.

LH: Good morning, Marty.

MG: What do you make of what Linda has been up to, Marty?

MH: Well, I'll tell ya what, just listening to Linda, she's got me all excited. I want to play that accordion. [laughter] There's no doubt Linda is probably one of Harry's biggest, if not the biggest fan. She's been so instrumental in so many things we've done. We don't have any family back on the island. And I moved here. Harry brought me here when I was literally like, I think eight or nine years old. He raised me. My dad died. And so we don't have any family, so to speak, up on the island. So it's really exciting to hear what's happening from Linda.

MG: You had a front row view of his, kind of, rocket to fame. What was that like? I mean, describe what was going on at the time.

MH: Well, strange enough, I look back on it now and I'm now realising that I didn't understand it when it was happening because I grew up with it. Harry played for family only. He never, ever played in public, the most introverted, kind, gentle person you've ever met in your life. And he had an accident in the factory when he was recuperating from the hospital stay, he was on crutches. And his friends that would normally play at the house with him, invite him to go to a dance that was being put on in Toronto for Newfoundlanders away from home. And Harry went out to it reluctantly and I went with him. I was 15 years old. They coax him to get on stage and from there everything just was a blur because from that date, which was early 1968 until 69, the following year, Harry had released his first album, gotten a gold record and has now his own local TV show in CHCH Tv Hamilton. From there on it was just like a roller coaster ride. It was incredible. I thought everybody lived that life and now I look back on it and say wow. It was a ride. I was very blessed to have been part of it and to ride it all the way.

MG: What do you think his music meant? I mean, you talked about people who are away from home. What do you think his music meant to Newfoundlanders who are in Toronto?

MH: See, believe it or not, that's where it really hit home, because these people that moved to Toronto because they needed work. These are people that hit hard times, just like Bell Island, the mines closing down. People had to move away, including Harry. Harry, you got a job in a factory. And there was this Newfie go home attitude. I do remember, you know, signs saying Newfie go home, it was just a weird situation. And they felt out of place here because it's such a big city and they just longed for home, including myself. To me, home is still Newfoundland. And that's really strange because, I mean, I grew up in Toronto, I was educated in Toronto, I worked in Toronto all my life. I've never lived in Newfoundland since I left. But it's still home.

MG: At the height of that fame. What were those concerts like? I mean, just describe the vibe in the room.

MH: Oh, it was just, the floors would rattle. Harry was mostly known in the beginning because his first album had ten jiggs and reels. It was accordion, the actual floor shook and you could feel it because everybody, everybody was doing the Newfie stomp. It was amazing and it just... They loved it. They just wanted more and more. They couldn't get enough of it. And if he'd stop and slow down and do a few songs, that's fine. But then they'd want the jiggs and reels again.

MG: Is that what people are looking for now, Linda? I mean, you mentioned the pandemic and these covid times, you know, we're stuck inside or we can't get together with people. We can't be in a big hall, for the most part, watching somebody perform on stage and we're away from home in many ways. Is that what people are kind of drawing on from his music now, do you think?

LH: Absolutely. These two shows that The Rooms there were people in the audience like they had to sit, you couldn't stand because of the covid measures and they were rocking on their seats and their feet were tapping and they were clapping their hands. And they were you know, people said to me, my God, this is so nice. And there was one lady sitting in the very front row who was crying hysterically because the songs had brought so many memories back to her, she was from Bell Island, this lady was. Ironically, I think Harry's up there saying, I'm going to push out my own little bit of stuff from the heavens. Right. Like during covid times, because it was unique how it all came together.

MG: Marty, your brother's been gone for 30 years. Could you possibly imagine what Linda is describing right now?

MH: It's moving. It's very touching. And you don't realise it until you're in there. And I'll always remember that. And as the night went on, it just grew. The crescendo it just kept going and it peaked. And then and the actual climax of the show was the last number that he did, something like Danny Boy. And it would just... The place would just go nuts. You can't help but feel it. It's electric.

MG: What do you think you'll be feeling when you head back to Bell Island and this exhibit is finally unveiled?

MH: I think it's going to be emotional. We were kind of disappointed because we'd already booked everything, had everything arranged and it was cut off there with the covid deal, but I'm really looking forward to it.

MG: Linda, this will be the toughest question for you is, as the biggest fan of Harry Hibbs, His Nibs. But I mean, what's a favourite song that we could play?

LH: Oh, my gosh, that's hard. But all accordion players have different styles. Harry had a unique, mellow, relaxed style to it and he could sing and play. That's not so easy, I can tell you, because I'm trying to learn to play this thing. If you looked at Harry playing it, it was like so effortless. To him it was like breathing. He had that ability. But then he could pick it up and get your caps off the floor. And when he played something like the Fighting 59, that's generally how we start things off. That is the one that gets people moving.

MG: All right. Well, let's end with a bit of Fighting 59. It's great to speak with you both about this. Thank you very much.

LH: Oh, thank you, Matt, so much. Thank you, Marty, it's so nice to hear you.

MH: You're very welcome, guys. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Linda. Have a great day.

MG: Take care of yourself. Bye bye.

[SOUND CLIP: Harry Higgs, Fighting 59]

MG: That'll be some party on Bell Island when the time comes. Linda Hickey was in St. John's, Marty Hibbs was in Toronto, and that is The Current for this Easter Monday. Coming up next on CBC Radio One, it's Q. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you tomorrow and let your man with the accordion take us home.

[SOUND CLIP: Fighting 59 con't]

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