SO WHY SHOULD I CARE VERY MUCH about The Vancouver Sun's birthday, 100th or otherwise?
A good question and somewhat timely, in light of the fact that the newspaper recently (Feb. 12) put out a humungous 100th anniversary edition, and has continued its Century theme by publishing more vignettes from its past.
To start with, my answer is that I'm interested because The Sun was the first newspaper that I ever became aware of, at approximately the time I learned to read. That "first time" was quite early in the paper's history -- in fact, some 77 years ago.
It must have been a habit-forming experience, since I'm still a subscriber. But the best part -- and this is a personal-interest disclosure -- occurred when in early adulthood I became a reporter for the paper, and enjoyed 15 years on its news staff, about two-thirds of which I spent mostly as a political specialist, covering the legislature in Victoria and then covering parliament in Ottawa.
YOU KNOW, I WAS CONNED into getting hooked on The Sun. By that I mean I, as a boy, couldn't resist the comics -- a full page of them in black and white on weekdays, and on weekends filling an entire section of their own, in color. Oh, those newspapers, they sure knew how to build readership.
Blondie! Popeye! Terry and the Pirates! Alley Oop! Dick Tracy, etc. etc. I mean, what normal kid ever cared about anything in the paper outside of the comics?
I must confess that, eventually, my interest did spread beyond the comic pages. Somehow, I discovered a thing called The Editorial Page. I don't wish to mislead here, so I have to say that at the age of eight or ten I found no value whatsoever in the editorials; they were terribly dull, obtuse and pompous (as many editorials still are today).
But I did find the editorial page section known as Letters to The Editor -- and that played a large part in my ultimate entry into the news business (with, I repeat, The Vancouver Sun) late in the year 1947.
AS ANY FAN OF LETTERS-TO-THE-EDITOR can tell you, the letters were, and still are, about almost any subject that might be in, or not in, the news, and they came from ordinary people, expressing their genuine concerns and interests. I remember becoming quite worked up over the injustices people often wrote about.
The letters and my habit of reading them stimulated in me a continuing interest in public affairs, and I'd say provided me with the beginnings of a long-term education in public issues and politics. So, looking back, it seems only natural that I could do nothing other than one day make my living by writing about those things.
ACTUALLY, FAMILY LORE WAS also at the root of my reporting ambitions. The story was that my paternal grandfather, Christopher Craigie Young, had been a reporter in about 1895 for The Glasgow Evening News. He died in March, 1910, aged 55, of tuberculosis. His death was registered by a nephew named J. Wilson, of 304 South Wellington St., Glasgow. The Lanark County Register of Deaths lists him as a journalist, widower of Grace McGill, formerly of Stirling, and son of the late William Young, "book canvasser." (My thanks here to son-in-law Eric Wickberg for his great research help on family history.)
There are no family records detailing any news work Christopher Young did; I never met him, of course, his death having occurred 19 years before I was born.
ACTUALLY, FAMILY LORE WAS also at the root of my reporting ambitions. The story was that my paternal grandfather, Christopher Craigie Young, had been a reporter in about 1895 for The Glasgow Evening News. He died in March, 1910, aged 55, of tuberculosis. His death was registered by a nephew named J. Wilson, of 304 South Wellington St., Glasgow. The Lanark County Register of Deaths lists him as a journalist, widower of Grace McGill, formerly of Stirling, and son of the late William Young, "book canvasser." (My thanks here to son-in-law Eric Wickberg for his great research help on family history.)
There are no family records detailing any news work Christopher Young did; I never met him, of course, his death having occurred 19 years before I was born.
STILL, I HAVE SOME GROUNDS for claiming at least a touch of news-scribbling genes. When I as a boy heard that story about Christopher Young I thought, "Wow, my grandfather was a newspaper reporter -- sounds exciting, lots of fun, glamorous, being right out there, where things are happening, meeting lots of interesting people, recording history as it happens. Oh, I think I'd like to do that . . .Well, maybe, some day. . ."
Grandfather Young is recorded in the death registry as having died of "Tuberculosis Phthisis." He was probably susceptible to TB, having suffered coal gas damage to his lungs practicing his reporting trade a few years earlier. That damage occurred when he went down into a Scottish coal mine to cover a disaster, and it no doubt shortened his life. I resolved that if I ever became a reporter I would do my best to take every possible safety precaution in covering anything like a mine disaster -- but, still, a reporter I thought I could be.
As things turned out in my 43 years in news, I never came close to having to cover any mine disaster, coal or other. Just political disasters, I suppose I could say. And perhaps a little lung damage from too much hanging around smoke-filled rooms, to say nothing of spending excessive hours in hot- air-filled legislative chambers.
IT SHOULD BE REMEMBERED that the early letters-to-the-editor I spoke of above appeared during the 1930s, when it seemed as if half the population couldn't get a regular job. Winter had its good points then, especially if it snowed a lot, because when snow and ice gummed up the B.C. Electric Railway Co. streetcar tracks (our only public transit system then, and it was a very good one), calls went out for temporary laborers to work at shovelling snow and ice away from the tracks.
My father, who fell on hard times like many scores of thousands of other Canadians in The Great Depression, was one of those temporary snow-removal workers one winter. The pay was low, but it was better than "relief," a term which, by the way, has for many years been replaced by the word "welfare." I believe the intent of those who made the change, the swine, was to make poverty sound better.
It was a terrible period and it was to my recollection pretty well covered by The Sun. There were scandals in the "relief " administration, including suicide from exposure of bureaucratic swindling of relief funds, and all of that made for sensational headlines.
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I HAVE MORE TO SAY ABOUT The Sun and my time with it, but for now I'll adjourn this bit of personal history. In due course, this space will contain additional installments on The Sun and me.
