Oliver's Twist Read online

  VIKING CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published 2011

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

  Copyright © Craig Oliver, 2011

  Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists

  94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  * * *

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Oliver, Craig, 1938–

  Oliver’s twist : the life and times of an unapologetic newshound / Craig Oliver.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-0-670-06522-6

  1. Oliver, Craig, 1938–. 2. Journalists—Canada—Biography. I. Title.

  PN4913.O45A3 2011 070.92 C2011-904684-9

  * * *

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

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  For my mother

  CONTENTS

  1 A Child of Prince Rupert

  2 Hundred-Watt Wonders

  3 Drawn to Power

  4 Into the Canoes

  5 Washington Assignment

  6 The Vulture Brigades

  7 Return to the Rideau

  8 North of North

  9 Uncivil Wars

  10 Sparring with Harper

  11 Last Rivers

  12 Eye of the Beholder

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  1

  A CHILD OF PRINCE RUPERT

  My father was a bootlegger and, for a short time, a jailbird. My mother ran a successful taxi business, also for a short time. Both were alcoholics.

  Their only child was born in Vancouver on November 8, 1938. When war was declared less than a year later, my father took his small family up the coast to Prince Rupert, where he found work in the suddenly busy shipyards. That job ended when a steel crate fell on his foot, severing two toes. There was no such thing as workers’ compensation in those years, but the accident bestowed an unexpected benefit: His disability gave him an automatic deferment from military service.

  My father soon launched himself into the more lucrative career of bootlegging. As a schoolboy, I boosted my popularity by supplying friends with premium Crown Royal bags—darkpurple velvet pouches with gold braided drawstrings—to carry their marble collections. No cheap whisky for my dad. Unfortunately, like many a good salesman, he was too fond of his own product; otherwise, we might have followed the example of the Bronfmans, who grew rich in the same trade. Dad was smart enough; he and his buddies just drank the profits.

  Murray Oliver was a handsome, good-natured man who impressed others with an easy charm and a sharp intelligence. An old beach photo shows him to be short and muscular, built like an athlete and with wavy dark hair. In his own world he was respected, and other men would approach him for advice or ask him to mediate disputes. He was twenty-five years older than my mother, Elizabeth Easton. Nevertheless they moved in together.

  My mother was a lively brunette, short and slim but busty. She was one of four sisters, none of whom could be described as a great beauty, but she possessed a biting wit that did not spare those she regarded as fools, alongside an abiding empathy for those worse off than herself. Certainly, she was up for adventure. It’s likely my father took us to Rupert not only for work but also to elude the law. He and an accomplice had been charged and convicted of fraud after trying to use counterfeit liquor rationing cards. There was no jail sentence, but the authorities were aware of his habits.

  My grandparents are largely a mystery to me, all dead before I was born and rarely spoken of except in cryptic tones. Both families had emigrated from Scotland, the Olivers to Ontario, where my grandfather, Thomas, established a hardware store in Coppercliff, now a suburb of Sudbury, and the Eastons to Winnipeg, the birthplace of my mother. Her father, William Easton, eked out a living as a bill collector during the Depression. Trying to extract money from people who had none was no doubt soul wrenching. One day in Saskatoon, William walked into the path of an oncoming freight train. The family was scandalized when the local paper called it suicide.

  Letters from William Easton to his four daughters survived him, poignant and loving messages mailed from small Prairie towns across his collection territory. Scribbled in dusty rail cars or crummy hotel rooms, they offer thoughtful moral advice on marriage and behaviour, yet they also carry a whiff of gathering gloom, a hint of chronic depression. Like thousands of impoverished Prairie women, his widow, Isabel, moved to the West Coast. There she opened a small bookstore in North Vancouver, but the family survived on the meagre earnings of her oldest son, David. All of the Eastons seemed to have a touch of melancholy. Dog-eared photos portray Isabel as a hard-faced woman gazing sternly at the photographer, the very picture of Scottish Presbyterian rigidity. Still, she wrote hopeful poetry despite a life of disappointment and privation.

  The Ontario Olivers likewise went bust in the Depression and migrated to the West Coast. How my parents met or courted was never revealed to me. Whenever I asked my mother for details later on, she would feign memory loss or develop the vapours, and I could never raise the topic with my father.

  Prince Rupert was still a frontier town when we landed there, originally the western terminus of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway and the end of the line for Chinese rail workers whose children grew up to own the city’s laundries, grocery stores, and popular eateries. Rupert boasts one of the world’s best natural harbours, and the nineteenth-century rail baron and financier Charles M. Hayes intended that it should become the pre-eminent seaport on the West Coast. That dream died when Hayes went down with the Titanic, although Prince Rupert eventually came into its own as a port and staging centre.

  As in many small northern communities of that era, classes and neighbourhoods were sharply divided. From their homes on Upper Third Avenue, a white-skinned elite controlled the town. They operated the law offices and banking institutions, the jewellery and ladies’ wear stores, the movie theatres and car dealerships. Together, they attended meetings of the Chamber of Commerce, the Odd Fellows, and the Loyal Order of the Moose. Occasionally there we
re scandals, such as when a respected doctor ran off with a teenaged patient, or two Third Avenue merchants swapped wives and offspring. The gentry inhabited a separate world and did not mix much with the denizens of Lower Third Avenue—working white families, the Chinese, and the natives—except to sell them things and profit from their sweat.

  The majority of Rupert’s citizens lived by their own rules and worked at jobs full of risk to life and limb. Fishing and logging claimed victims every season, but bar fights and street brawls were equally lethal. A house without a gun was a rarity.

  Natives occupied the lowest ranks in Rupert’s caste system. At the Capital Theatre movie house and at most churches, natives were permitted to sit only in specially designated seats, the worst in the house at the Capital. That no one recognized this practice as blatant segregation did not make it excusable, even though many of the natives felt ownership in having their own seating and did not want to sit with white people anyway.

  My family’s own lot was humble. We lived on the second floor of a seedy apartment building, above a strip of Italian grocery stores and a dry cleaning establishment. A long staircase with a skylight at the top led to our one-room apartment. I played on the landing under the skylight until the day I accidentally tumbled down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk. The bruises don’t linger in memory, but my mother’s cry of anguish has stayed with me. The apartment came with an icebox and wood stove, and my parents soon bought a gramophone.

  Rain was the background music of my childhood. Situated on the edge of lush Pacific rainforest with mountains at its back, Prince Rupert endured what seemed a continuous downpour, lifting occasionally to a drizzle. We wore gumboots year-round and joked of being born with webbed feet. Our famous high school basketball team was named “the Rainmakers.” The rainfall could last for months on end, provoking depression and even suicide, not to mention natural disaster. I recall being woken one morning by a great roar. The rain had lashed down in such torrents that a whole section of mountainside above the town gave way, burying half a dozen citizens in a tomb of mud and splintered timber.

  By 1944, our town of nine thousand souls had become a colony of America, transformed by the presence of some fifteen thousand American troops stationed in our midst. Most were with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, working on the construction of the Alaska Highway; others were infantrymen on their way to combat in the Pacific. The war was never far from our minds, and there were moments of genuine fright. House lights had to be turned off and blackout curtains drawn during periodic air raid warnings. No sliver of illumination was allowed while civilian monitors checked the residential streets, banging on the doors if the blackout order was violated. After Pearl Harbor, a Japanese invasion of the West Coast was expected at any time.

  In this hothouse environment, everyone lived for the moment. If life might be short, it had better be fast, and few relationships survived the ride. My earliest memories are of drunken verbal bouts between my parents, shouts of “chippy” and “whore,” followed by the sounds of shattering glass, physical struggles, and cries of pain. The hostilities ceased when I called out, begging my parents to stop, but the battle resumed the moment they thought I was asleep again. I remember countless late-night parties, punctuated with the high-pitched laughter of women and the roars of inebriated men. In my sleeping place in an alcove off the living room, I played with stacks of American military caps tossed carelessly on my bed.

  Then, the year I started elementary school, my mother vanished from my life as if in a puff of smoke. A photo dated 1945 shows her embracing a square-jawed man named Cliff Dahl. The courts gave custody to my father, a ruling that was almost unprecedented in those days. Either the judge concluded Mom was an unfit parent for reasons I can only guess at, or my father cruelly deceived her. One of their friends later told me that my father had lied about the date of the custody hearing. The loss of her only child—temporarily, as it turned out—plunged my mother into a prolonged depression, the first of many that would plague her as she grew older.

  My father had won sole responsibility for my care, but it proved to be a burden that was far beyond him. His “work” kept him out nights or on the road, and however well-meaning, he was not temperamentally suited to child rearing. He solved the problem by shopping me around as a boarder to various households, all strangers in need of extra dollars. Before being paraded in front of these prospective foster parents, I was dressed up in a blue double-breasted jacket and lectured sternly about making a favourable impression. Some families rejected me with a sweep of the hand, even while I sat there trying to be as appealing as possible. Nope, not our type. Or, he talks a lot, doesn’t he? At other addresses we made the decision ourselves, Dad marching me out while whispering that the people were assholes.

  On some level these painful rebukes and the implicit rejection by my father must have registered. They added to the sting of my mother’s unexplained departure, instilling a profound insecurity that would surface eventually. Until a refuge could be found for me, I was without any semblance of a normal home life. No hovering grandparents, no close connections with aunts, uncles, or cousins, no siblings for companionship or comfort. At the time, however, these experiences seemed perfectly normal to me, hardly damaging to my psyche or self-esteem. I felt no loneliness and in fact revelled in the novelty of my circumstances.

  I knew kids from large close-knit families but I considered their well-disciplined lives a predictable bore. Rupert’s Lower Third was my playground, and in times of my father’s absence, I lived more like a child of the streets than a middle-class schoolboy. On one occasion, I lost the quarter Dad had given me for a school lunch. I had no qualms about begging from a passing tourist rather than go hungry. I was left to look after myself, at least until Dad came home well after midnight.

  Evenings were spent walking a familiar circuit, often in casual search of my father, which meant traipsing up and down Third Avenue and into its seedy beer joints. I had to jump up to catch a glimpse through the oval-shaped windows of the swinging doors and into the smoky haze. The pungent odour of stale beer and wet cigarette butts tossed outside still lingers in my nostrils. My habit was to ask an entering patron to call out for Murray Oliver. If Murray did not emerge, it was on to the next watering hole until I tracked him down. He wasn’t always pleased to be so summoned.

  When the war ended in 1945, all the soldiers left and the town’s kids played in empty barracks and gun emplacements until the government demolished them. We collected army badges and parts of uniforms—hats were big trade items. I found a small pistol that I happily assumed some other boy had lost. It had reddish grips and made a satisfying click when I pulled the trigger. Why it would not ignite the paper caps we bought for our other toy guns, I could never figure out, but I was crushed when some alert adult took it away, recognizing it for the real thing.

  The war was over, but hard drinking and hard living still characterized the community. Rupert thrived in the postwar boom, providing every resource an expanding nation required. As well as benefiting from the fish and lumber harvest, the city was at the centre of recently discovered gold, silver, and copper deposits and could ship all these riches to market by sea or rail. The population swelled to twice its wartime number as fast-buck artists, speculators, and job seekers poured in. They contributed to a volatile mix of hardrock miners and fishermen, steel-handed loggers, cannery workers, and sailors on shore leave. White skins barely outnumbered a population of Tsimshian Indians and Canadian-born Chinese and Japanese.

  This made for a colourful streetscape, especially on Saturday nights. Hundreds of people elbowed one another along the four blocks of Lower Third Avenue as they walked past dingy saloons, greasy-spoon restaurants, illicit gambling joints, and private “clubs” like the Moose Lodge and the Freemasons’. The narrow main drag was bordered by dozens of such enterprises, all housed in tight-fitting wood-frame buildings.

  As a crowded seaport, Rupert was a smaller and more northerly
version of Marseilles and attracted equally eccentric characters. There was one-legged Dominic, owner of the steam bath. He never wore anything but a black suit, the right leg pinned up at the hip. Every Christmas for High Mass, he bought a new black suit, along with a fresh pair of long underwear. Having one leg, he pointed out, saved in shoe leather. The Italian shoe repairman made and maintained Dominic’s single custom boot.

  Ricardo the Hook had lost a hand in the war. I was an appreciative audience for the repertoire of tricks he performed with a mean-looking, curved steel appendage, always sporting a speared cigarette. Twenty-Dollar Dolly White had launched her business during the war years. She bought a dilapidated row house and imported a collection of young ladies from Vancouver. Nearby, in the short alley that became famous locally as “The Line,” Dolly’s own refurbished establishment was known as the “White House,” an elegant stopping place for American officers. A model of the stereotypical hooker with a heart of gold, she took an interest in my welfare and was always a reassuring presence.

  Then there was Eric, the railway conductor, who for years juggled two fiancées living at opposite ends of his run from Rupert to Prince George. The arrangement fell apart when fate brought the two women together in a coach car. Comparing notes on the men they expected to marry, they discovered they were betrothed to the same fellow. Eric was horrified to see the two women step off the train together and, in unison, throw their engagement rings at him. Eric spent hours on his knees trying to retrieve the diamonds from a snowdrift.

  My habitual route took me through an underpass below street level where a dank cellar housed the “Dungeon,” a pool hall where men played for money and the local sharks emptied the pockets of out-of-towners. Popeye, who ran the nearby cigar store, always welcomed me with a free soft drink.

  There really is no such thing as the “common people,” but I suppose that is how these uncommon individuals could be described. They were the companions of my daily life in those years, and I was treated like one of them—always with kindness and never abuse. Strangers could be generous and caring, it seemed, while those closer to home couldn’t always be trusted.