Working the Dead Beat (11 page)

In a much more restrained and powerful article in
Saturday Night
magazine in January 1955, novelist Hugh MacLennan wrote presciently about the “gentleness and ferocity” that co-existed in Richard and warned of the danger in provoking his rage: “Every great player must expect to be marked closely, but for ten years the Rocket has been systematically heckled by rival coaches who know intuitively that nobody can more easily be taken advantage of than a genius. Richard can stand any amount of roughness that comes naturally with the game, but after a night in which he has been cynically tripped, slashed, held, boarded, and verbally insulted by lesser men he is apt to go wild. His rage is curiously impersonal — an explosion against frustration itself.”

Less than two months later Montreal itself exploded in what came to be known as the Richard Riot. Tensions had been percolating for years between Richard and the unilingual, authoritarian
NHL
president Clarence Campbell, a Rhodes Scholar, former
NHL
referee, and lieutenant colonel in the Canadian Army.

A year earlier, Richard, in a ghostwritten column in a Montreal weekly that he hadn't even read, had called Campbell a dictator for the way he had “over-penalized” his brother Henri and Boom Boom Geoffrion for vicious behaviour in fights they had not initiated. Campbell went ballistic, with the result that Canadiens general manager Frank Selke persuaded Richard to offer an abject apology and to post a thousand-dollar bond. Campbell publicly released the details, which infuriated the French media. They accused the
NHL
of muzzling their hero, who by then had agreed to stop allowing his name to appear as a byline on somebody else's prose.

An anglophone referee named McLean seemed to be blind when Richard was under attack and yet omniscient when the Rocket retaliated. Encountering the referee in a New York hotel lobby, Richard grabbed him and began swinging. That earned him a $500 fine from Campbell. Then, in a losing game against the Bruins in Boston on March 13, 1955, Richard got into an altercation with opposing defenceman Hal Laycoe. Sticks were raised, and Laycoe opened a gash in Richard's scalp. Trent Frayne, who was there, described Richard attacking the defenceman with his stick: “wielding it across Laycoe's shoulders and neck as though taking an axe to a tree.” The benches emptied, and in the ensuing brawl Richard punched linesman Cliff Thompson, a retired defenceman for the Bruins, in the face — twice. Campbell ordered that Richard, the Canadiens' leading scorer, be suspended for the rest of the season, including the playoffs.

The lengthy suspension outraged fans and killed Richard's hopes of winning his first league scoring title. Everybody had an opinion on Campbell's verdict, including Mayor Jean Drapeau, who publicly warned him to skip the Canadiens' next home game because even showing up would look like a “provocation.” Campbell refused, which inflamed the already angry fans. When he arrived at a game against the Detroit Red Wings, who were tied for first place with the Canadiens, Campbell was pelted with tomatoes and other debris. A fan punched him in the face, another hurled a canister of tear gas. The game was abruptly forfeited to the Red Wings and attendees were ordered to leave the arena, swelling the militant crowds rampaging through the streets of downtown Montreal.

The rioters caused an estimated $100,000 in property damage, thirty-seven injuries, and a hundred arrests before the police exerted control. Even the Rocket himself was persuaded to speak on radio the next morning, in French and English, to calm the crowd. Richard's teammate Boom Boom Geoffrion won the scoring title that season and the Detroit Red Wings took the Stanley Cup. The following year Richard returned to the ice and led his team to the first of five successive Stanley Cup victories.

After that, his glory days on the ice were over. He showed up at training camp in the fall of 1960, but nothing seemed the same, and impulsively he decided to retire in September, a month after his thirty-ninth birthday. He had put on some pounds, his reflexes were slowing down, and he had suffered injuries, including a broken bone in one of his ankles and a severed Achilles tendon, which had kept him from playing the full season in his last three years. Management wanted him to go while the crowds still roared as he slapped the puck into the net — sooner rather than later — and offered him a three-year post-retirement job in public relations at his playing salary.

Years later Richard admitted that he had left the game too soon. He really didn't know what to do with himself off the ice. Several post-playing positions, including as inaugural coach of the Quebec Nordiques, fizzled. Unlike his teammate Toe Blake, who had a distinguished post-playing career as coach of the Canadiens, or Jean Beliveau, who moved into the executive ranks of the organization, Richard was really only at ease on the ice or at home with his family. Eventually he split with the Canadiens and started a number of business ventures, including owning a tavern, selling fishing tackle, and appearing in commercials endorsing hair products.

What brought him back into the fold and the public eye was the closing ceremonies for the venerable Forum on March 11, 1996. The game itself was not memorable. Instead of one of their traditional rivals — the Leafs, the Bruins, or the Red Wings — the Habs were up against the upstart Dallas Stars. After the final whistle sounded and the three stars had been named in a game in which the
bleu-blanc-rouge
defeated the Stars 4–1, a work crew unrolled four red carpets stretching in a huge square from the blue lines. As funeral music was played, surviving Hall of Fame players, wearing their team sweaters, walked on to the ice as the crowd roared. The last to appear was Richard. The building erupted in a standing ovation that lasted nearly eight minutes, despite the Rocket's attempts to quell the cascading waves of applause. It was as though the fans — many of whom were too young to have ever seen him play — recognized the depths of passion in the vulnerable, ageing figure with the taciturn demeanour. They bathed him in love and admiration as though he represented all of their grandfathers. By the time francophone announcer Richard Garneau intoned, “
Mesdames et messieurs, vous avez devant vous le coeur et l'âme du Forum
,” the crowd was spent and Richard himself was weeping.

It was a living tribute, one that would be echoed four years later, when more than 100,000 fans lined up around the clock and around the block to pay their last respects as his coffin lay in state in the new Molson Centre on May 30, 2000. They then thronged the streets the following day to watch the funeral procession wend its way to Notre-Dame Basilica in Old Montreal. It was the end of an era — and the birth of Rocket Richard, nationalist hero.

 

June Callwood

Writer and Social Activist

June 2, 1924 – April 14, 2007

A
FTER SHE WAS
diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2003, June Callwood talked about gliding over Georgian Bay, contemplating all the pain she had experienced in her life and wondering whether there was “anything spiritual” that could help ease her misery. “And I thought, floating up there, ‘This is what it's all about. It's kindness. Not top-down kindness, giving a toonie to a street person and treating them like a slot machine, but stopping and talking to them. If people can behave well to each other, that's all that there is,'” she told
Globe
journalist John Allemang. An atheist, she took that philosophy of kindness, which was as close as she could come to a religious belief, and sprinkled it liberally as she carried on her personal campaign against injustice, even as cancer rampaged through her body.

Known as a doer, a “secular saint,” a fundraiser, a civic activist, a fierce campaigner for human rights, and a “general nuisance,” she wrote thirty-odd books, more than a thousand magazine articles, close to five hundred newspaper columns, and hosted at least two television shows,
In Touch
and
National Treasures
. She helped establish fifty organizations — more than most people join in their lifetimes. The institutions range across the arts, human rights, civil liberties, and social welfare. In recompense, she was given nearly twenty honorary degrees, named a Companion of the Order of Canada, and had a street, a park, and Ontario's volunteerism award named in her honour.

Life itself inspired her activism. Her mother and father were inept as parents, so she learned early on “to take care of myself and live in my imagination, and as soon as I could find books, I was reading them.” Words became magic for Callwood. She used them to persuade, denounce, and describe. They were the source of her livelihood, her prodigious influence in effecting social change, and her solace.

She also had two grandfathers “who were crazy about me,” so she didn't mind her parents' lack of attention, because she was loved and praised. “I grew up thinking people take care of one another and you have to do that to be a good person; you have to be available to help others. And I also grew up fearless, so that helped.”

Her self-confidence took perennial tumbles when it came to her vocation. “Fear of failure is huge with me in writing. I have never written something I thought was good enough,” she said in an interview five months before she died on April 14, 2007. Of all the books she wrote, she never attempted a memoir. “I'm not very introspective,” she explained. “I don't think there are a lot of complications about me.” Besides, she was never sure she could write about her life without colouring her memories, and the reporter in her wouldn't allow that.

JUNE ROSE CALLWOOD
was born in Chatham, Ontario, on June 2, 1924, the elder daughter of Harold (“Byng”) and Gladys (née Lavoie) Callwood. Her mother's family had settled in Quebec City in 1650 and could claim some native blood; her father's ancestry was British. He was a plumber by trade and an entrepreneur by inclination. “My father was a rake who made life very hard for my mother. She eloped with him at sixteen to escape her convent school,” she told her friend, writer Sylvia Fraser, in a 2005
Toronto Life
profile.

She spent her first two years in the town of Tilbury, the home of her grandfather, Harold Callwood, a magistrate. When she was two, her family moved to Belle River, a village near Windsor where her other grandfather, bootlegger Bill Lavoie, had built himself a massive stone house from the proceeds of running liquor across the Detroit River during Prohibition. Her father established the Superior Tinning and Retinning Company and set about, with his wife's help, recycling rusty milk cans using a re-coating process he'd invented.

At six, June entered Belle River's Catholic school and was immediately accelerated into Grade 3. An avid reader, she consumed books in the local library, acquiring general knowledge “so I wouldn't feel so helpless.” By the time she was ten and her sister, Jane, was eight, her parents' business had gone bust.

A bigger loss was in the offing. Her father skipped out on his family (and his financial liabilities) three years later and found work threshing wheat on prairie farms for a dollar a day. Callwood's mother took in sewing, but she and her daughters were usually only half a step ahead of the bailiff, and there was one three-day stretch when they ate raw potatoes dug out of somebody else's garden.

The war improved their situation. With many men overseas, her mother landed a job as a bank teller. Callwood attended Brantford Collegiate and gained friends and status as a cheerleader. Television producer Ross McLean was a classmate. He once described her as “a definite original,” saying: “Her beauty and her openness caught our fancy, for sure, but so did her unconventional ways.”

Athletically she was a freestyle, backstroke, and high-diving champion, but she was also honing her writing skills by working on the high school newspaper and entering (and winning) a short-story contest. A man named Judge Sweet gave her the prize and told her she should look him up if she ever needed a job — a circumstance that emerged sooner than either of them had anticipated. After her mother complained in the middle of a quarrel that she was tired of supporting her rebellious daughter, the furious teenager went to see Judge Sweet, who was on the board of directors of the
Brantford Expositor
. He gave her a letter of introduction to the publisher, who hired her as a proofreader at $7.50 a week.

In 1942 the
Toronto Star
offered her a job for $25 a week. “I was eighteen, but I looked about twelve, despite the high heels, and when the editors saw me, they had no respect for me,” she said later. She was supposed to answer the mail and write captions, but her editor fired her after only two weeks for writing a smartass letter to a sergeant who had complained that she'd misidentified an army tank.

She then applied to be a Spitfire pilot but was rejected by the Royal Canadian Air Force Women's Division because they didn't train women to fly. She was outraged. The
Globe and Mail
gave her a trial assignment covering an Ontario Medical Association convention at the Royal York Hotel, but her nerves got the better of her. Don Carlson, a reporter for the
Toronto Star
, took pity on her and wrote her piece after filing his own. On the strength of that
OMA
story, the
Globe
hired her as a general-assignment reporter. After that break from a male reporter, she could never endorse second-wave feminist rage at the oppressions of the patriarchal society.

She met Trent (“Bill”) Gardiner Frayne at the
Globe
; he was a journalist whose photograph and writing she had admired since her days at the
Brantford Expositor
. They were married on May 13, 1944. Callwood, who was nineteen, wore a grey flannel suit and white hat. She didn't change her name because the
Globe
wanted to keep her on staff; two reporters named Frayne — one male, the other female — would look suspicious in an era when married women were expected to stay home.

Being married to Frayne meant “everything” to her. “My dad was a rascal, and I fell in love with [Frayne] because he was a rock. I wanted somebody I could be safe with, who I could count on and who wouldn't walk out in the middle of the night like my dad did, never be promiscuous, never lie — just an honourable man,” she said in November 2006. “And he was handsome as hell,” she added with a grin. The added bonus was his sense of humour. “He's hilarious. Dear with his children, and the freaky thing was that it never occurred to him that his wife shouldn't work. It never crossed his mind.” She always referred to him as “my guy” and they called each other “Dreamy.”

The question of working was rendered moot when Callwood became pregnant three months after the wedding. “I wanted babies, I always wanted to be a mother and I assumed I was going to be a marvellous mother.” She quit work before her first child, Jill, was born on May 24, 1945. Motherhood, which Callwood embraced enthusiastically, also turned her into a freelance writer, as a home-based way of earning money.

She wrote her first magazine article (for
Liberty
, earning fifty dollars) about Violet Milstead, the instructor who was teaching her how to fly a single-­engine Aeronca Super Chief. Callwood loved flying, but she gave it up after nearly snaring her plane in power lines. The prospect of being seriously hurt or killed was too alarming, given that she had one small child and was expecting another. Brant (“Barney”) was born on May 31, 1948.

By comparison, writing was harmless. She produced her first piece for
Maclean's
magazine on the Leslie Bell Singers, an amateur women's choir, in June 1947. Four years later, Callwood and Frayne cobbled together the down payment for a modest two-storey clapboard house on a large, maple-shaded lot surrounded by farmland in Toronto's west end. By then they had a third child, Jesse (born May 15, 1951). Although the house was renovated and expanded over the years, it remained their home and workplace.

Callwood was a whirlwind of activity in the 1950s, writing regularly for
Maclean's
to produce stories that varied from a profile of swimmer Marilyn Bell to the newfangled birth control pill, the death of the Avro Arrow, and even the meaning of the universe. She also began collaborating with Dr. Marion Hilliard — her own doctor — by ghostwriting a monthly column in
Chatelaine
when Doris Anderson was editor of the magazine.

“She was gay,” Callwood said, remembering how Hilliard wanted her to say in a column on lovemaking that “it doesn't matter whether you are the same sex or not,” but “I was too scandalized to do it.” In 1957 Doubleday published
A Woman Doctor Looks at Life and Love
, a book that Callwood ghosted, based on the long-running magazine column. It became a bestseller, was eventually translated into forty languages, and launched Callwood on a prolific career as a ghostwriter for such celebrities as Barbara Walters, Otto Preminger, and Bob White, the Canadian labour leader.

And then everything crashed around her. Just when her three children were in school and she had a steady freelance income, she was whacked by depression. She sought help from a therapist and then turned the experience into a book,
Love, Hate, Fear, Anger and the Other Lively Emotions
, which was published in 1964 under her own name. She and her husband also had the surprise joy of conceiving their youngest, unexpected child, Casey, who was born September 12, 1961, when Callwood was thirty-seven.

The 1960s saw the emergence of Callwood the social activist. Like so many other things in her life, it happened because of a connection with one of her children. Teenaged Barney was living in Yorkville, then a hippie section of Toronto. Every so often he would bring home a destitute friend. “I was so shocked because I had seen us get out of Depression and scarcity and people not having enough,” she said, “and then, all of a sudden, I got hit with the kids from Yorkville, and they had bad teeth and many of them had grown up in foster homes and I thought, ‘What the hell is going on?'”

Eventually she founded Digger House (named after a group that had tried to establish self-supporting communes in England in the 1600s), a shelter for homeless kids. She paid the first month's rent of $600, the equivalent of the fee for a magazine article. It was the first of several hostels she would help organize, always in response to a directly perceived need.

She also became a street protester, joining a demonstration against the Vietnam War in July 1968. When she tried to help another demonstrator, who was in police custody, she was herself arrested, hauled off to the Don Jail, and charged with obstructing the police. Pierre Berton testified at her trial. She was acquitted, but the experience had turned her into an activist, albeit one who was always dressed to the nines, complete with earrings, high-heeled shoes, and matching handbag.

Over the next two decades she helped found Nellie's (1973), a shelter for abused women, and Jessie's (1982), a home for teenagers and their babies. She also became deeply involved with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews, the Writers' Union, the Writers' Trust, and
PEN
Canada. Callwood brought her enthusiasm, energy, contacts, and persuasiveness to all of these activities. Sometimes, though, she became frustrated with the politically correct tenor of the times. A start-up manager par excellence, she was probably too impatient and energetic to be an effective maintenance manager involved in the running of an organization on a day-to-day basis.

When poet M. Nourbese Philip complained that a
PEN
congress had put too much emphasis on white writers, Ms. Callwood exploded with a crude expletive. “She was being obnoxious so I told her to fuck off,” she recalled. Years later, a black female staff member complained at a Nellie's board meeting that the white staff members were racist; Callwood challenged her remark. Tempers flashed, and somebody called Callwood herself a racist. Shaken, she left the meeting and eventually the organization.

In the chaos, the provincial government contacted Callwood with a stern reminder that the Nellie's operating grant would be cancelled if the enclosed forms weren't filed immediately. “To my eternal credit, I decided I had to save Nellie's so I phoned them and said they had to come and pick up this paperwork, but there was a moment there . . .” she said, five months before she died, her eyes glittering. The attenuated silence called to mind a comment she had made in the
Globe
in 2004: “It took me years to stop being angry, and I'm not over being hurt yet.”