Where have all the milkmen, sidewalk knife sharpeners and CBC staff announcers gone? - Michael's essay

Missing persons - people and jobs we long ago discarded for reasons lost to history. For example, beat cops. In all the rhetoric about community policing, why hasn't anybody suggested bringing back the cop who walks a beat, the long-ago friendly flatfoot? 

Everybody on our block knew the beat cop by name. He was an ally, a source of information, a finder of lost kids, a role model, someone who understood the tremors of the neighbourhood because he knew its people with their troubles and concerns. You never see a cop on the streets of our large cities these days. They drive around in cars or in the summer, ride bicycles; a cop on a bike is like a nun in a chorus line -  what's the point?

The sidewalk knife sharpener - usually Italian, usually in his 50s or 60s. He dragged around a home-made contraption with a grinding wheel turned by a fan belt, to sharpen the knives. He carried a school bell to announce his presence. Now of course, he has been replaced by a guy in a big truck with all kinds of modern honing equipment. All of the right tools. No sense of humour, no pride in the work.

Paper boys/girls: When newspapers were delivered door to door, the paper carrier was the first-time-in-the-workforce entrepreneur. No matter the weather, the boy or girl trudged down to the end of the block, cut the string on the papers and delivered them up and down the street. If they were very good, they could make a tight fold of the paper and toss a strike to the front door. The money wasn't great but it bought you Cokes and french fries and got you into a ball game on Sunday afternoon. Now my papers are delivered by a nice woman in a nice red car.

Milkmen - and they were all men. Every morning they would arrive, in uniform, with fresh milk, in bottles and they always seemed preternaturally friendly. They had time to chat about the day or the weather; never about politics. Sometimes they had a special on ice cream or some other dairy product. Their arrival signaled two things -the start of the day and a benign attitude to customer service. Now we buy bagged milk.

CBC staff announcers: These were men and women whose primary focus was not journalism but communicating to an audience. Their magic lay in the quality of their voices and the uncanny ability to make reading sound like talking, to lift the words off the page as they used to say. Some became legends: Alan McFee,  Rex Loring, Alan Maitland, Jan Tennant, Judy Maddren. And some were great characters who seemed consumed with the mission to drive CBC bureaucrats crazy.

The great Max Ferguson started as a staff announcer. They could do pretty much everything: read commercials, narrate documentaries, read poetry, give the news of the day an authoritative voice. Over the years, they were gradually replaced by journalists, like me, who had to learn, painfully, how to talk on the radio. With the staff announcer gone, the CBC has lost  part of its history.

There are others: shop class teachers, receptionists who really can direct your call, gas station mechanics who know a spark plug from a  radiator cap, cab drivers who really know your city. All of these examples and more sound like the outward symptoms of that dreaded illness, old fartism. And its cousin ROCD or Raving Old Coot Disorder. But the one thing that these men and women had in common was the idea of service to the public, whether in broadcasting or delivering the milk.

And to my understanding of things, that is something we have surrendered, and try as we might, we can't find a way to bring it back.