Working the Dead Beat (40 page)

Like many veteran journalists, Jennings was a reformed smoker. He had started sneaking puffs at eleven and it soon became compulsive. He consumed three packs a day until he quit in 1980, after his first child was born. He relapsed for a few months after the terrorist attacks in 2001, but conquered his addiction for a second time. In the spring of 2005 he appeared frail and was said to be suffering from a cold and then an upper respiratory ailment when he didn't travel to Rome to anchor
ABC
's coverage of the death of Pope John Paul II early in April. Then, looking weak and speaking in a raspy voice, Jennings appeared at the end of the newscast on April 5 to tell viewers he was undergoing treatment for lung cancer. He died at home in his New York apartment, surrounded by his family, four months later, on August 7. He was sixty-seven.

Eight days before his death, Jennings was informed that he had been inducted into the Order of Canada; his daughter, Elizabeth, represented him at the posthumous ceremony in October 2005. After cremation, Jennings's ashes were divided, with half resting at his home on Long Island and the rest at his summer home in the Gatineau Hills outside Ottawa. It was a more than symbolic commemoration of his dual citizenship.

 

Service

 

 

Real versus Pseudo Events

U
NAWARE THAT HE
had been declared dead in the national media, Gordon Lightfoot emerged from his dentist's office on a Thursday afternoon in February 2010, climbed into his car, and turned on the radio. That's when he heard he had departed this mortal coil, possibly as long ago as the previous night — an ingenious way to avoid the dentist's drill.

“I was quite surprised to hear it myself,” the singer-songwriter of such iconic tunes as “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” and “If You Could Read My Mind” joked in calls to media outlets. “I'm fine. I'm in great health. I've been doing just fine. The whole thing's a hoax,” he said, noting with pleasure that “all of a sudden, my music is in heavy rotation.”

The hoax began with a prank call to musician Ronnie Hawkins's management from a person claiming to be Lightfoot's grandson. The caller solicited some tributes and then broadcast them on Twitter. Other outlets re-tweeted the news, adding fillips and details, spurring on the hoax until it went viral and was reported on several national news sites. Few, with the notable exception of the
Globe and Mail
, bothered to ask the fundamental questions: Is this true? What is the source?

The spiral from “Lightfoot is dead” to “Lightfoot is alive” took about an hour. The aftermath was huge as analysts questioned how the hoax could have been perpetrated and the gulled fell all over themselves in the blogosphere, trying to justify how and why they had been pranked.

David Akin, then a national affairs correspondent for the CanWest News Service, explained at length in a blog that he had merely tweeted an alert that had caught his eye: “Ontario-born singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot has died, according to sources close to the singer.” Akin argued that because he hadn't included a link to another source or an attribution, people wrongly assumed that he was the source of the bulletin, when in fact he hadn't done any reporting. He had merely passed on something he had seen in the blogosphere. That used to be called gossip.

Lightfoot is not the first nor will he be the last person to be killed off prematurely. Former Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard was reported dead in September 2005, when he was in hospital suffering from flesh-eating disease. Former Toronto Maple Leafs hockey coach Pat Burns was declared dead in several media outlets before he phoned the
Toronto Star
, one of the culprits, and said in a frail voice, “I'm alive and kicking. I'm hanging in.” Comedian Bob Hope was twice reported dead and his advance obituary was posted on the Internet, while Pope John Paul II's death was pronounced three times in the media — a record — before his actual demise on April 1, 2005. Mark Twain, who was twice declared dead, is famous for his quip “reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated.”

The frequency of these false reports will probably increase in the age of 24/7 news and the cut-throat competition for viewer hits by reporters who bypass traditional editorial safeguards to claim bragging rights for breaking news on Twitter feeds and websites. It is all part of media outlets' attempts to prove to advertisers and subscribers that news “happens” first on their websites.

I'm not the the only one to bemoan the hair-trigger journalism of unsourced hits and manufactured events. Daniel J. Boorstin, the American historian, librarian of Congress, and author of
The Creators
and
The Discoverers
, wrote a book fifty years ago called
The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream
. It was published later as
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.
The book is about the melding of perception and reality in American culture. On one level it's a history of public relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; on another level it's a prediction of a future in which invented, packaged, and massaged news takes precedence over the real thing, so that “newsworthy” events gradually become products that are manufactured like soap. If the trend continues, Boorstin points out, there will come a time when journalism and entertainment will merge, where the goal is no longer to tell the truth but to get and maintain the attention of an audience. Boorstin first made that argument in 1962, after watching television coverage of the presidential debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

One of the concepts Boorstin talks about in
The Image
is the pseudo event: the hyped press conference or anniversary story that really isn't news at all but is staged to look like it is by flashy massaging and catchy headlines. You have no idea how many end-of-year and end-of-decade retrospective pieces I have written over the years. The purpose is to have stuff in the bank over Christmas so that journalists can have time off and publishers don't have to pay double overtime on statutory holidays. Of course, every so often real news does happen and throws the system into spasm — the tsunami on Boxing Day 2004; the death of Oscar Peterson on December 23, 2007; the assassination of Benazir Bhutto four days later, on December 27, 2007.

The fact that the news spiral about Gordon Lightfoot's supposed death collapsed within an hour shows that pseudo events have no staying power — “no legs,” as we used to say about a puff piece. The very same day that a prankster invented the death of this cultural icon, another newsworthy Canadian really did die: John Babcock, the last surviving veteran of the First World War.

There had been a huge push, led by the Dominion Institute, to recognize the passing of an era — the death of the last Canadian veteran of the First World War — by giving him a state funeral. There were three contenders: Lloyd Clemett, Dwight Percy Wilson, and John Babcock, all of them old men who had lied about their ages to go overseas to fight for king and country. The problem was that none of them made it to the front lines before the fighting stopped and none of them wanted to win the tontine of a state funeral.

As early as 2006, the Dominion Institute, an organization dedicated to arousing interest in and knowledge of our collective past, launched a petition (eventually signed by ninety thousand Canadians) lobbying the government to “honour” the last veteran with a state funeral. Parliament was easily persuaded. Not so the veterans and their families. They all valued Canada and its valorous military tradition, but they didn't want to call attention to themselves as heroes based merely on longevity. They had too much respect for the concept of the Unknown Soldier, in which an unidentified body symbolizes all those who fought, with none claiming precedence or glory over the others.

The pressure mounted on John Babcock and his family after Lloyd Clemett died in February 2007 and Dwight Percy Wilson a few months later in May 2007. “I just happened to be at a certain place at a certain time,” Babcock said at the time, brushing off the clamour to turn him into a symbol. There was another complication. Babcock had relinquished his Canadian citizenship many decades earlier, when he moved to the United States looking for work, and had actually volunteered for the American armed forces in the Second World War. No problem. In a special ceremony, his Canadian citizenship was reinstated. Still he and his family balked at becoming the focus of a pseudo event, showing the quiet dignity and unassuming integrity that we like to boast is the backbone of our national character.

Foiled, the Dominion Institute, which morphed into the Historica-Dominion Institute as the years passed, retreated from insisting on a state funeral to urging that one be “offered” to Babcock and his family. Again they said no, politely but firmly. How about a day of commemoration? How about giving the next gold medal won by a Canadian athlete to Babcock's family? The suggestions escalated like something out of a
Mad Men
advertising campaign, while Babcock quietly lived out his days in Spokane, Washington, finally dying, ironically, on the very day that the media had whipped itself into a frenzy about the non-death of cultural icon Gordon Lightfoot.

There are many ways of serving your country. Lyle Creelman, a nurse who cared for the survivors of Nazi concentration camps; Kay Gimpel, who monitored the safety of Allied agents behind enemy lines during the Second World War; and Smoky Smith, the last surviving Canadian winner of the Victoria Cross, fit the traditional narrative of volunteering in times of war. But not all forms of service occur on battlefields. The ten lives I have written about in this chapter include Helen Allen, a journalist who helped children find adoptive families, and Anna Maria de Souza, who raised millions of dollars for medical research through her annual Brazilian Ball. Some, like Donald Marshall, Lucien Saumur, Israel Halperin, and Rudolf Vrba, were victims themselves — of a racist justice system, of religious persecution, of Cold War paranoia, and of the German genocide of European Jews — but they surmounted their own suffering to help others. Finally, John Weir, like Babcock, was a kid seeking adventure and glory. Unlike Babcock, though, he endured more than he could possibly have imagined, as a fighter pilot and a prisoner of war.

The lesson of these lives is that life is what you make of it: each of them refused to succumb to tragedy, happenstance, or fate. And in doing so, they made society a bit more tolerant, a bit more caring, and a lot better for the rest of us.

 

Helen Allen

Journalist and Children's Advocate

August 16, 1907 – November 9, 2006

F
OR THREE DECADES
Helen Allen was a news-hen for
the
Telegram
, a Toronto newspaper. She was stuck in the women's pages until a chance assignment turned into a life-changing vocation: finding parents for needy children. Her newspaper column, “Today's Child,” featured pictures of orphaned children and heartrending tales of their deprivation, culminating in a naked appeal for people to come forward to adopt them.

We are used to seeing that kind of thing on late-night cable television — for dogs and cats and children from famine-ridden and war-torn corners of the Third World — but Allen made her adoption pitches for children right here in Canada. Bizarre as these public appeals may sound today, in an era when protecting personal privacy is a primary concern of child welfare authorities, her column was an innovative force in improving the lives of thousands of emotionally needy and often physically damaged children.

In the early 1960s, having a child “out of wedlock” was socially and morally unacceptable. So, at a time when reliable contraception and legal abortions were virtually unprocurable, many young women with unplanned pregnancies left town to “visit an aunt” when their baby bumps began to show. After giving birth, the young women, willingly or not, typically gave up their babies for adoption and returned home to resume their lives as though nothing had happened. We now know how traumatic that socially acceptable practice was for mothers, children, siblings, and grandparents.

The ranks of healthy infants available for adoption were swelled by older children, who had been abandoned by parents unable or unwilling to raise their own offspring, or who had been apprehended by child welfare authorities because they were living in unhealthy or even dangerous situations. Many of these “hard-to-place” children had been trundled from one foster home to another or had marked birthday after birthday in orphanages and other residential institutions.

Helen Allen believed that all children deserved parents and a home to call their own. For nearly twenty years she devoted her energies to the task through her column and the long-running television program
Family Finder
. Although nobody knows for certain how many of those adoptions were successful, there is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that many, many children were happier and healthier because of her actions.

The late media mogul John Bassett, who was the last publisher of the
Telegram
, considered Allen's long-running adoption column “her real life's work.” She “has helped this country enormously by giving new hope and new opportunities to the nation's richest resource, our children,” he wrote in a tribute to her in 1982, and “nothing has given me greater pride than being associated with her in this task.”

HELEN KATHLEEN ALLEN
was born on August 16, 1907, near Saskatoon, the only child of a Presbyterian minister and a schoolteacher. Her father moved from one congregation to another, until the family eventually settled in Aurora, north of Toronto. He died of meningitis when Helen was five, and her mother worked as a supply teacher to support them both.

Allen thought her childhood was happy, although she did regret that her single mother never had enough money to buy her the bicycle she craved. Later, looking back as an adult, she realized that it had been tough to grow up without siblings or a father, but she never exploited her own situation as a motivating force in her crusade to find adoptive parents for needy children.

After high school she did a four-year degree in modern languages (French and German) at University College at the University of Toronto, financed with $2,000 from her mother's savings. Allen joined the German Club, which turned out to be a lively collection of people, including Professors Geoffrey Holt and Barker Fairley, who got together on a weekly basis to sing German songs.

An older cousin who worked on the student newspaper, the
Varsity
, introduced her to its editor, a young man named Charles Stacey. A year older, he was destined for a stellar career as a military historian and biographer of Mackenzie King. His revealing study
A Very Double Life
, based on the stuffy and politically astute former prime minister's diaries, showed the lifelong bachelor to be a mama's boy who walked the nighttime streets of Ottawa imploring prostitutes to abandon their trade, and a spiritualist who communed beyond the grave with Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, among other historical giants.

Stacey and Allen dated but went their separate ways after graduation — he to Oxford and Princeton, she to a reporter's job at the
Telegram
after earning her BA in 1929. For the next three decades she did general assignment reporting, reviewed movies, edited the women's pages, and covered select political events, criminal trials, and the 1939 royal tour of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

What made her name, however, was the adoption column, an assignment she had taken on reluctantly. The idea came about in a confluence of incidents, experience, and inspiration dating back to a front-page story in the early 1960s, about a young boy being publicly beaten by his father on a downtown street corner.
Telegram
publisher John Bassett assigned reporter Andrew MacFarlane to investigate and write an article on child abuse — a foreign concept in an era when many parents, especially fathers, thought beating their offspring was a routine part of child rearing.

MacFarlane contacted the office of James Band, the deputy minister of welfare in Ontario. Band supplied huge amounts of information on child protection services and took MacFarlane to visit an orphanage that housed dozens of children three years of age and under. The journalist quickly realized that many of those children had short attention spans, played aggressively, and, despite being “cuddled” by volunteers, appeared to lack warmth and curiosity. Both the reporter and the civil servant believed the children needed families and permanent homes if they were to have any chance of growing up emotionally healthy.

A few years later, in 1964, Band sought out MacFarlane, who by then was the
Telegram
's managing editor, and suggested he run an “advertising” feature to make the public aware of the plight of those forgotten children. Both MacFarlane and Bassett took up the idea enthusiastically and assigned the column to Allen, telling her to contact the more than fifty regional Children's Aid Societies that operated in Ontario under the Child Welfare Act, find some children who were waiting for families, and run their pictures and write about them in the paper. The plan was to run “Today's Child” for a few weeks and check the response.

Children's Aid Societies, which are protective by definition, were largely horrified at the idea of parading children along with their physical and emotional problems in a public newspaper. To them the column reeked of “freak shows” at carnivals. Only three were willing to participate: Hamilton, Kenora, and Toronto. Although disappointing, the response was sufficient to give Allen enough children to produce a daily column for three weeks.

The first child was a fifteen-month-old girl of mixed race named Hope, a difficult placement in those homogeneous days before immigration rules were relaxed and Canada had an official multiculturalism policy. Nevertheless, forty prospective adoptive parents wrote in response to Hope's story. Their letters were passed along to the Children's Aid Society for screening, assessing, and processing. “I wrote about twenty-three children in those first Today's Child columns that summer,” Allen recalled years later, “and when the results were finally assessed, eighteen of those youngsters found homes.”

After three years of daily columns, “Today's Child” expanded to other daily and weekly papers throughout Ontario. The following year, Allen proposed doing a television version of the column based on a California program that delivered commercials for a variety of products, reserving one day a week for children wanting to be adopted. Armed with a tape of the American show, Allen and social worker Victoria Leach, then Ontario's adoption co-­ordinator, approached
CFTO
, the Toronto television station that was partly owned by Bassett. “It took them all of fifteen minutes to make up their minds,” Allen reported later.
Family Finder
, which ran commercial-free, debuted in the fall of 1968 and became the longest-running program on the channel.

When the
Telegram
folded in 1971, the Ontario government hired Allen as an information officer in the Ministry of Community and Social Services. She continued to write the column three times a week — it was syndicated by the government to more than twenty daily newspapers, including the
Toronto Star
— appear on the television program, and speak about adoption to community and service groups.

In the early 1970s, television and newspaper reporters publicized the plight of the many children who had become victims of the ongoing conflict in Vietnam. The orphanages in Saigon were overflowing with abandoned or parentless children. Social changes, including the widely available contraceptive pill and the zero-population-growth political movement, had decimated the baby surplus of a decade before in the West. That fact, plus the human desire to help needy children, had lots of North Americans flying to Vietnam and trying to pick up babies in exchange for cash or services.

The local adoption agencies were floundering, so the Ontario Ministry of Social and Community Services sent Leach and Allen to Saigon to work with the Vietnamese. As the north Vietnam army advanced and the Americans were pulling out, the two women rescued close to sixty children, brought them to Canada, and found homes for them.

Allen received many honours, including being named to the Order of Canada (OC), an honorary doctorate from York University, and the Award of Merit from the City of Toronto. In the late 1970s she was at an OC reception when she encountered Charles Stacey, a fellow laureate and her beau from back in the 1920s.

Allen, who had never married, and Stacey, by then a widower, renewed their affection for each other and were quietly married on October 3, 1980. The bride was seventy-three and the groom seventy-four. A little more than a year later, she officially retired from “Today's Child” and
Family Finder
, although she continued to spend two days a week answering mail and writing adoption bulletins.

The Staceys were a very companionable couple. They loved to entertain at small dinner parties, read Jane Austen novels aloud to each other, and travel. After he died suddenly of a heart attack in November 1989, she continued to live in their Rosedale apartment until late in 2002, when she moved into a retirement residence. That's where she died of congestive heart failure on November 9, 2006, at the age of ninety-nine.