Our granddaughter Lianne Watt graduated from the University of Victoria and is now a teacher, just as her mother is. Two other grandchildren, Lianne’s brother, Trevor, and their cousin, Mary Paige Field, graduated from the same university. Trevor is a salesman. Mary Paige graduated from a nursing program at BCIT and is now a registered nurse in the maternity ward of a major Vancouver hospital. In fact, she is nursing in the very unit where she was born twenty-six years earlier. Her brother and our oldest grandson, Kenny Field—named after our late son, Ken—graduated from the Columbia Academy Broadcasting School in Vancouver. He spent six months working with an audio-visual firm in Melbourne, Australia. On his return to Canada he was hired as a broadcast engineer by an audio-visual company based in Vancouver. The company acquired a contract to broadcast college football and basketball games from cities throughout the Pacific Northwest, California, Arizona and Utah. Kenny is now based in Los Angeles.
Life was good until about 2010, when Joan began acting strangely. Her pleasant demeanour changed almost overnight. A diagnosis by a specialist confirmed that she had Alzheimer’s disease, a form of dementia that affects so many people, particularly as they age. After three very difficult years of us trying to care for her at home, it became obvious to me and my daughters that their mother had to be placed in full-time care—it had become utterly impossible to care for her at home. We were fortunate to have her placed in an outstanding care facility—Carelife Fleetwood—operated by Fraser Health in the Fleetwood district of Surrey. But the decision to place her there was the most difficult I have ever made. As with many caregivers, I felt a profound sense of guilt for depriving my beloved spouse of everything she cherished—our pleasant home and way of life. But it is better for Joan and for me that she is receiving proper care.
Nothing can compare to the feeling of coming home to an empty house after more than fifty years of a happy married life. The antidote to being lonely is to keep busy. I do that through my involvement in my church and by staying in touch with loyal, caring friends. I am also involved with the Alzheimer Society of BC and with a new service a few of us have established to provide free transportation to treatment facilities for cancer patients.
I visit Joan almost every day although she really doesn’t know me now. I clean her eyeglasses, brush her hair, put her lipstick on and take her for a ride in the wheelchair. There is not much else I can do except try to show her that I love her dearly.
I have always had concerns about how my busy life as a reporter affected my close-knit family. Lorrie was kind enough to give me her recollections. She wrote:
I have many fond memories of growing up as a reporter’s daughter. Other kids in the neighbourhood had fathers who were auto mechanics, car salesmen, office managers or factory workers. I was the only one of my friends who got to go inside the “Crystal Palace” (the CKNW studio). I had the opportunity to meet many well-known people in Vancouver. I was always so proud when other kids’ parents would tell me how much they enjoyed listening to my dad’s stories or how much CKNW was a part of their daily routine. I was the only one of my friends who enjoyed opportunities like tickets to the car show, boat show and other Vancouver events. An annual highlight for us growing up was the early spring press day at Playland. We would get a badge pinned to our jackets for unlimited rides on the roller coaster, Tilt-a-Whirl and the Zipper. Dad took me for my first roller-coaster ride when I was just tall enough, and it continues to be my favourite ride anywhere.
It didn’t hurt having the same last name as Dad once I got a little older. While I was a university student, I remember a summer job interview with BC Hydro; near the end of the interview, the office manager asked me if I was any relation to George Garrett. I told him that he was my father, and the manager went on to tell me he had been a loyal listener for years and what a tremendous reporter Dad was. I got the job!
I couldn’t be more proud of the work Dad has done. He was a skilled reporter and worked hard to get the story and to get the facts right. He was also known as “Gentleman George,” as he always showed tremendous respect to people he interviewed. He would sometimes call a family member in advance of releasing a story to make them aware. While gentle, he still had the toughness required for the job. I remember one time he was pushed by the courts to reveal a source for a story. He protected me from all the details, but I just remember being a teenager at the time and asking him what could happen. If he didn’t reveal the source, he explained, he could go to jail. I expected him to reveal it, but he said he never would—his honour and integrity was at stake. Thankfully he never went to jail, but it was then that I became aware of his total commitment to his job and the reporter’s code.
When dad was a beat reporter, we drove a CKNW news cruiser, which was always a white car with decals on both sides. Dad used to remind us that we were in a marked car and we needed to behave so we wouldn’t reflect badly on the radio station—a very clever way of keeping the kids in line while we were in the car. As a teenager, all my friends knew whose dad that was picking us up at the dance or pizza place. Once he became an investigative reporter, he drove an unmarked car but was still always recognized wherever he went.
Through his work, Dad has made connections with people in many professions. He is well loved by police, media, judges and listeners alike. You can’t go anywhere with Dad without bumping into someone who knows him from somewhere or who recognizes him or his voice. I love going places with him now and noticing someone looking at him a couple of times before approaching him. Even now that he has been retired for over twenty years, he still has strangers approaching him and asking, “Aren’t you George Garrett?” I beam with pride when he says that he is and the stranger bestows some well-deserved praise or recalls how they have enjoyed Dad’s reporting over the years. What a legacy!
Chapter 7
Radio During the Wartime Years and Beyond
Listening to the radio during the war years not only sparked my interest in becoming a broadcaster, but it also piqued my curiosity about war. Although much too young to understand what it all meant, I do recall the radio broadcasts of the war news. I remember outstanding correspondents like Edward R. Murrow on CBS and Matthew Halton on the CBC. Murrow’s “This Is London” broadcasts during the Battle of Britain in 1940 were historic. They brought the sounds and word pictures of exploding bombs and air-raid sirens into the homes of millions. Halton had been a highly respected correspondent for the Toronto Star as far back as the 1930s. He was one of the first reporters who consistently warned that Hitler was building an army and would likely invade other countries. Halton and several other correspondents provided a Canadian perspective on what was happening in the war, particularly in Europe. Their word descriptions were powerful. As many people have said, radio is “theatre of the mind.” It certainly was in World War II.
I was barely five years old when Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Great Britain declared war, and because Canada was part of the British Empire, Canada’s prime minister, Mackenzie King, announced that Canada would also declare war on Germany. Canada was woefully unprepared for war but soon recruited an army. There were plenty of men looking for work. The country had not yet emerged from the deep Depression of the 1930s that followed the stock market crash of 1929. People were desperate. Hungry men lined up for food in soup kitchens, and many families including ours were “on relief.” Relief included groceries delivered to the farm as well as coal in winter. The land was parched. Dust storms blew away the topsoil and farms were fallow. It was the worst of times. The war machine geared up as quickly as possible to produce military vehicles, aircraft, ships, weapons and other war matériel as recruits lined up to serve. Canada’s war effort was given a big boost by an enthusiastic minister in the Mackenzie King cabinet—Clarence Decatur Howe, better known as C.D. Howe—who was named Minister of Munitions and Supply. He was a powerful minister who made things happen. He organized matériel, including shipbuilding and armaments manufacturing, to support the war effort. Howe was so powerful that he became known as the “Minister of Everything.” When he lost his seat in Thunder Bay in the 1958 Conservative Party sweep, led by John Diefenbaker, I had the good fortune to interview Mr. Howe by long-distance telephone during CKNW’s election night coverage. I told Mr. Howe that he had been described as the Minister of Everything. He replied,