Powers, Lecovin, and I stood in wild anticipation. Surely, surely, we wouldn’t have the luck to get the blonde. Finally, the last fat old lady was dispatched and we were introduced to twenty-five-year-old Ella Dimitrieva, who would be our companion in the tiny Volkswagen for three whole weeks on the way to the Black Sea.
Lecovin’s plan was to get to Istanbul, turn left, and head back to Vancouver across India and Burma, while Powers and I would get back to our jobs in London on my Vespa scooter, which I had shipped from Copenhagen to Athens.
Ella as an eight-year-old child had been through the siege of Leningrad and had been so weak she couldn’t get out of bed, her sole ration being one raw potato. The streets were so clogged with corpses that the survivors were too weak to carry them away. As we drove to Moscow, Karkhov, and Kiev, we took her dancing at night in the best hotels. She suddenly discovered lipstick and somehow acquired silk stockings.
Alas, all was not well with Lecovin. The guy I’d seen so funny on the stage at UBC turned out to be mean, a cheapskate who tried to cheat farmers when they sold us gas. He was completely humourless in person, which was tough when you were three weeks in a Volkswagen with four people.
The original plan was to drive through Romania and Bulgaria on the way to Istanbul. But the famed Soviet bureaucracy came into play. They gave us a visa to Bulgaria, but not to Romania. We couldn’t get to Bulgaria without crossing Romania. So we had to take a ship from Kiev to Odessa on the Black Sea.
First they told us there was no road between the large city of Kiev and the large city of Odessa, which was laughable, of course. When we laughed at them, they then said we couldn’t drive ourselves because of military reasons and they would supply us with a driver while we took the train there. We laughed that one off. I should add here that Powers and I had this brilliant idea of paying for the trip by taking pictures of every pretty Russian girl we saw and selling them to Playboy as a “Girls Of Russia” feature.
The final night in Odessa, overlooking the sea from a beautiful restaurant, we had dinner and fond words for Ella. Much wine, much laughs, and she took us down to the dock, kissed us all goodbye, and then turned us over to the police, who seized all of our photographs.
Lecovin, while Powers and I were dallying with Ella, had gone in first, and they had seized his camera. Instead of coming back and warning us, he scuttled aboard the ship to save himself. Powers and I insisted we weren’t going to budge until we got our cameras back.
At first they claimed they had a photo lab and would process the pictures there. Stubbornly, we waited, knowing that was nonsense, and then they admitted it wasn’t true but they were keeping the cameras. We said we weren’t getting on the ship until we got our cameras back. They then came to us and said the ship was leaving at 6:00 a.m. and if we didn’t board we would be in Russia with an expired visa.
We got onboard and didn’t speak to Lecovin, who had betrayed us for his own safety, for the three days it took the ship to stop in Romania and Bulgaria before reaching Istanbul. In Istanbul Lecovin turned left and we turned right. Powers and I picked up my Vespa in Athens and went back to London.
After returning to Vancouver, I wrote about the experience in my column, naming names. Lecovin avoided me for years.
Upon my return to London, I worked for a while at Reuters. But since I had used up all of the money intended for my flight to Vancouver on the trip to Russia and knowing it was time to return to Canada, my parents sent me cash for the airfare home.
6
Newspaper Madness
A dignified and shy girl arrives from England to be Erwin Swangard’s new secretary. On her first day veteran reporter Barry Broadfoot walks by her desk, puts down a dime, and walks on. He does the same thing every day until two weeks later the bewildered Ann Barling summons up the courage to ask him what he’s doing.
“When it gets to forty bucks,” explains Broadfoot, “I want a piece of tail.”
This was the Vancouver Sun of the 1950s.
At the office Christmas party Nelles Hamilton and Don Stainsby get into a fistfight. Somebody always got into a fight at the office Christmas party. No one paid any attention to them until we heard a blood-curdling scream. Nelles had Stainsby pinioned across an office desk, which as usual was two feet deep in stale newspapers, yellowing copy paper, and dead cheese sandwiches — all disguising that Stainsby was impaled through his back by a buried copy spike.
This was the Vancouver Sun of the 1950s.
When Sputnik went up, publisher Don Cromie ordered Sun photogs to the top of Cromie-owned Grouse Mountain across the harbour on the theory that the Sun, being five thousand feet closer to a world scoop, would catch the satellite as it flew past. Deni Eagland — or was it Brian Kent? — drew a sharp fingernail across a negative and (presto!) we had another international first.
At the famous Cromie annual blowout at the Commodore Ballroom, after Don unveiled a huge red neon sign signifying a record two hundred thousand circulation and rolled out onstage a white Cadillac convertible for the circulation manager, Bobby Ackles — originally, the water boy of the B.C. Lions, later general manager, and still later a high poobah with the Dallas Cowboys — punched out assistant sports editor Merv Peters all the way down the Commodore’s celebrated long staircases.
We separated them, made them shake hands, and went off to fetch the car. By the time we got back, Ackles had knocked out Merv’s lights and kicked him in a knee, which required serious hospital time. Ah, fun times.
Tom Thumb Butler was quietly typing in the sports room when the cops walked in. They wanted him in the slammer immediately for forty-three unpaid parking tickets. We had to do a whip-around to save him from a criminal record.
Stu McNeill, who was the Canadian Army hundred-yard sprint champion in Europe during the war, was the natural expert to cover the 1954 four-minute mile showdown between Roger Bannister and John Landy at Vancouver’s British Empire Games.
A week before the event, emboldened by the grape, Stu was detected outside the Kerrisdale Arena after covering a lacrosse game, waving in taxis and offering $20 bills to anyone who would accept his largesse. Erwin busted him to covering archery and badminton for the Games, giving the priceless track assignment to me, a kid who had just graduated months earlier from UBC.
The next night Stu warmed up — awaiting Erwin’s arrival — by hurling typewriters against the columns that held up the Sun Tower. By the time Erwin appeared, dodging like O.J. Simpson at the airport, Stu had destroyed twenty-five typewriters. Erwin survived. Stu didn’t.
One night, after a fight in the darkroom, John Kirkwood put his fist through a window, occasioning a major flow of claret. Tom Ardies and Nelles Hamilton attempted to drive him the several blocks to the emergency ward of St. Paul’s Hospital. Only one problem. They were so blasted, the two best reporters in town, they couldn’t remember where it was.
Assistant publisher Himie Koshevoy walked through the women’s department, asking how things were “in the Ovary Tower.”
Simma Holt, enraged, charged up to Jack Scott at the city desk because of changes in her copy. “What’s wrong?” he protested. “I changed only three words.” The words were: “By Simma Holt.” He fled in panic to the men’s loo and locked himself in a cubicle. Simma followed, stood on the throne in the adjoining booth, and beat him over the head.
Tom Ardies, the best reporter on the paper, walked into Erwin’s office one day and demanded “a raise or else.”
Erwin said, “I think I’ll take the or else.”
Ardies went back to his desk and started typing.
Fashion editor Marie Moreau was sent to Cuba to interview new dictator Fidel Castro. She got the interview, beating out the astounded world press. On