The engineers were famous for their annual three-day drunk, which their graduating class had at the Commodore Ballroom in downtown Vancouver. The Commodore was the most well-known party place in town. I had waited three years for my revenge. We followed the president of the class to a Safeway parking lot, grabbed him, and drove seventy miles to Cultus Lake where we had rented a cabin. Sitting there with him for three days, we published huge headlines in The Ubyssey announcing that the president had mysteriously disappeared and hadn’t shown up to what was to be the culmination of his university career.
The Ubyssey float during a protest parade. I’m the editor, standing at the back with the cool coat on.
When I was playing for the UBC Thunderbirds junior varsity basketball team, our games were broadcast because we played in the Vancouver Senior League against the Vancouver Clover Leafs, the Canadian champions. On my team were Robin Abercrombie, John Shippobotham, and Allan Fotheringham. There were three nervous breakdowns among the radio broadcasters when they tried to follow the play and would say, “Fotheringham passed to Shippobotham who passes to Abercrombie to …” by which time the other team had scored twice.
In the first half of our first game of the season against the famous Clover Leafs, I leaped up to intercept a pass. When I came down, the knee was gone once again. This time I had to have an operation, so I went to Dean Gage, the head of the arts faculty, and asked for a student loan to pay for the medical costs of $135.
At the time I was paying my way through university by going down to the Vancouver Sun at nights and writing up UBC sports. To get there, it was a long bus ride from the university and I had to change buses. There was a wait of about fifteen minutes at the changeover, and unfortunately the bus sat idling in front of a men’s clothing store. Back then the fashion among all the swish fraternity lads was a tweed topcoat. Stark in the window of the men’s shop was a beautiful grey topcoat. I had to sit and look at it every night for weeks. Temptation is a terrible thing. Of course, the day I walked into the administration office at UBC to sign the necessary forms for the student loan, the first person to stroll in the door was Dean Gage, who immediately looked at this impoverished little boy who had no money but was wearing a beautiful grey tweed topcoat.
During my university years, my main girlfriend was Helen (Donnelly) Hutchinson, who worked on the paper and later achieved fame as a national host of CBC Radio’s Morningside show before Peter Gzowski. At UBC parties — she had a wit as sharp as a tack — people would almost pay admission to come to such parties to listen to Helen and me insult each other. We had some silly little spat, and I didn’t phone her for a week. At the time the sorority girls decided to have a crazy football game and enlisted Jack Hutchinson of the B.C. Lions to teach them the rules and coach them. Helen was the quarterback. By the time I had decided to repair the spat, she had so wowed Jack that she later married him. That was the first of her three marriages. She now lives around the corner from my wife and me in Toronto.
With time, in 1953, I became the editor of The Ubyssey. Joe Schlesinger was the previous editor. Joe, who went on to achieve fame as a highly respected correspondent around the world for the CBC, sat in his office and never spoke to me for the entire term, being noted as a silent recent refugee from Czechoslovakia. He approached me one day and asked if I was going to put my name forward for his position.
I was the sports editor at the time. I said I hadn’t thought of it as there was another person, Ed Parker, who seemed to be a shoo-in because he had been waiting for years for the spot and was also sleeping with the news editor. Joe urged me to enter my name. So I did and won the vote twelve to two. Parker and his girlfriend being the two. There were rumours that Joe had stuffed the ballot box, he being a Czech from afar who knew how to do such things. In our meetings in our foreign correspondent days in Paris or London or wherever, when the wine started to flow I would tell that story. Joe would neither confirm nor deny but state, “Yes, and Fotheringham is still writing the same sports stories, just changing the names.” However, he has always enjoyed the speculation.
The tradition at The Ubyssey was to make the final paper of the year the “Goon Edition.” That year we decided to spoof the three downtown papers. And since some of us were working part-time at those papers, we stole the typefaces from the composing rooms and renamed the Vancouver Sun, “The Vancouver Fun,” Vancouver’s Province became the “Vancouver Providence,” and the News Herald became the “Few Herald.” The Sun was owned by the two Cromie brothers. We called them the “Crummie” brothers. Columnist Mamie Maloney became Mamie “Baloney.” Sports editor Erwin Swangard, who I, of course, worked for in the sports department, we called, “Squirming S. Vanguard.”
The UBC Thunderbird rugby team was playing its final game of the season against the University of California Golden Bears. I was high in the UBC press box when I suddenly saw the hulking figure of Erwin Swangard climbing the steps. There was no place for me to run. “Okay, kit,” he said in his heavy German accent, “I’m gonna sue you, I am gonna sue da Alma Mater Society, and I am gonna sue da university.”
My university graduation photograph. I was one of the few The Ubyssey editors to actually graduate.
My life flashed before my eyes. I was about to take final exams, having not attended classes for the year I was editor. I was $400 in debt for another student loan and money my sister, Donna, had loaned me for university. Now I would have no job.
Several days later it grew worse. I received a very official letter under the letterhead of Don Cromie, the Vancouver Sun publisher. It said in very legal language that The Ubyssey had defiled and libelled in a vicious manner his paper and demanded to know the identity of the person responsible for this. I just about fainted until I got to the P.S., which said that such a person obviously had some talent in his viciousness and would he be interested in a position near the executive leather top chairs. I didn’t know if this was a joke or whether he was serious. So I went down to see Don, a man I had never met before. He spent the entire interview with his feet on his desk while trying to flip paper clips over the overhead lamp. I got the job.
4
To Warsaw on a Scooter
The day Don Cromie hired me I was sent to see the managing editor, Hal Straight, a frightening monster of a man of some 260 pounds. He and the now-famous Pierre Berton put out the morning edition by 10:00 a.m. and then drove to the bushes of Stanley Park and drank a twenty-six-ouncer of rye from the neck of the bottle, came back, and put out the afternoon edition. Berton being the star reporter.
As I walked into Straight’s office, I vowed I would demand $50 a week. Stupidly, I asked, “Am I worth $50 a week?”
The managing editor said, “At the moment you are not worth a goddamn cent. Forty-five dollars a week — seven o’clock Monday morning. See you.”
Straight sent me to work for Erwin Swangard, who for the first six months wouldn’t talk to me. Every Monday morning at the sports section meeting he turned to Merv Peters, his assistant editor, and said, “Tell Fotheringham to cover the lacrosse game in New Westminster.”
Peters, who was sitting about four feet away from Swangard, then turned to me and said, “Fotheringham, cover the lacrosse game in New Westminster.” He resented me because I was the only one with a university degree in the department, so he added, “Take the company car. You can drive, of course?”
I