Oliver's Twist Read online

  Captain Androsov seemed an escapee from the pages of a novel by Joseph Conrad. A Bulgarian who had served as an officer in the Russian navy of the czar, he had fought against the Bolsheviks in the 1917 revolution. There could be no doubt of his worthiness as a ship’s commander, but he was a forbidding character and completely paranoid. The Cold War was in full force, and he believed his fierce opposition to the Communists made him a target of Soviet spies. They might assassinate him, if only they could discover where Prince Rupert was.

  With the rank of third cook, my domain was the ship’s galley. I reported to the genial and massive chief cook, Mr. Green. He took great pleasure in exploiting my inexperience. When I swabbed the officers’ mess, I discovered he had given me salt water, which dried the next day into a dirty brown scum. When I delivered boiled breakfast eggs to the captain’s cabin, they proved to be thoroughly rotten. The smell hung in the air for days, but an investigation of the incident was inconclusive.

  The rest of the ship’s crew could have served central casting as cutthroat pirates. Some were barely reformed criminals, none had finished high school, and a few were illiterate. We slept in open crew quarters in the ship’s forecastle. My second night at sea, I awoke to a hand creeping through the bunk toward my genitals. Still half asleep, I came out of the narrow bed swinging and was never bothered again.

  It seemed to me most of the ship’s company were destined for wasted, hopeless lives. Yet no one had to tell them they would go nowhere without an education. They wanted to learn, but either they were too proud to admit it or had no idea where to start. Seeing stacks of reading material in my bunk, they dubbed me “the Professor.” I spent long nights answering questions about literature and history, subjects I knew little of, although more than they.

  Strangely enough, I loved the sea time and had no doubt I could rise to the officer ranks one day. I was making almost two hundred dollars a month, more than I had ever possessed in my life. This certainly beat going back to school for grade twelve, so at the end of the season I lied about my age and signed on for a full year. I had not figured on my mother’s views on this idea. When the school principal called to report my failure to appear in class, Mom’s reaction was swift and decisive. She hopped in her taxi, tore down to the Alexander Mackenzie, and made straight for the captain’s quarters. The poor skipper was cornered by a harridan accusing him of everything from kidnapping to the exploitation of child labour. He invited me to ship out. It was back to high school and Mom’s apartment for me.

  There were compensations. Cliff, though somewhat distant, became an important and positive influence on my life. He was a skilled hunter and shooter, a physically imposing man and a superb athlete, tough but not mean. His quiet-spoken manner was reassuring, never threatening, and he personified the art of power in reserve—whether physical or intellectual.

  Dad, meanwhile, had returned to Vancouver. Although our exchange of letters was sporadic, the move was apparently a good one for him. In the spring of my final year of high school, he wrote that I should expect a graduation present. Soon after, a CPR shipping agent called to tell me they were unloading an item for me. It was a 1954 Ford Meteor, used but a beauty. I was class president that year, and although a complete lack of interest in maths and science cost me my high school matriculation, the car was not reclaimed.

  Those few years spent with me at home, with her business prospering and her relationship with Cliff apparently solid, were the happiest of Mom’s life. She and I almost believed the worst was behind us.

  2

  HUNDRED-WATT WONDERS

  I may owe my broadcasting career to William Shakespeare. At a party I hosted while Mom and Cliff were out of town one weekend, a guest spotted my well-thumbed Kittredge collection of Shakespeare plays and sonnets. The bard’s tragedies had been a particular passion of mine in high school dramatics. The surprised visitor was an Englishman and an out-of-work actor who longed to return to the stage. While awaiting a summons from the Old Vic, he was serving as a CBC radio announcer in our obscure Pacific outpost. In his view, anyone who appreciated Shakespeare was ideally suited to employment with the public broadcasting corporation. Nothing would do but that I must come and audition for the summer relief announcer position at the local radio station, CFPR.

  In Rupert, musical tastes ran to Hank Snow or the Rhythm Pals, but among those who aspired to higher art, the CBC was a beacon. The smallest CBC station in the country and the only radio station based in town, it owed its existence to the war and the U.S. army’s concern for the contentment of its troops. During the war years, the Americans not only arranged for what amounted to legalized prostitution in Prince Rupert, but they also built their own broadcasting facility, stocking it with a priceless collection of the most popular records of the day. There were original label seventy-eights of the jazz and classical greats, from Fats Waller and Nat King Cole, to Frank Sinatra and Enrico Caruso. Sadly, all were thrown out during postwar renovations by an engineer who saw no value in them.

  After the war, the ramshackle studio building and its equipment were handed over to the Canadian government, which in turn gave them to the CBC. The fledgling CFPR served as little more than a glorified repeater station for the national broadcaster, part of a chain of drone transmitters across British Columbia. Normally such stations were unmanned, but along with the physical assets, the station had inherited a small staff, and since no one was ever fired from Mother Corp—not then and rarely now—the tiny enterprise became a full-fledged station in the CBC kingdom with all the attendant accoutrements. Its mission was to educate and enlighten citizens in the backwoods of Canada by exposing them to a larger culture—that is, the culture of Toronto, where 90 percent of CFPR’s programming originated.

  Most of the ten or so employees held titles that were grandiose and inflated: executive producer, technical supervisor, station manager, and assistant manager. The rest were secretaries. But there was not a great deal to do. Between programming that came direct from Toronto via transmission cables, staff were permitted only a few slots in the off-hours for local content. The result was that seemingly endless string quartets jostled on air with hometown introductions to hits by Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. The walls of the studio building were so thin that taping had to stop when a heavy truck passed by. The control room also housed the transmitter—all 250 watts’ worth and about as powerful as three lightbulbs.

  I presented myself for the audition with genuine excitement and not the slightest mike fright, thanks to prior experience with the high school PA system and as a fill-in dispatcher at Mom’s taxi company. To get the job I had to pass the CBC’s standard announcer’s test: a competent reading of an old classical music program script, complete with correct pronunciation of all proper names. “Good evening from Massey Hall,” I intoned, not knowing what or where Massey Hall might be. There followed introductions to works by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century masters, some of whose unfamiliar names I had practised with a friend. Although the senior producer judged my presentation below par, he liked my “modulation,” and I was hired as a summer relief announcer. No one else had applied and the station was seriously short-staffed thanks to the absence of a veteran announcer who had gone off on a binge. The fellow phoned in daily, promising to return, but he never did.

  At eighteen, I was the youngest CBC staff announcer in the country, but management seemed reluctant to give an inexperienced youngster full professional acknowledgment. While the other announcers added a folksy “Uncle” to their names, the better to foster a warm connection with the audience, I was to call myself “Cousin Craig.” But I did not complain. I was intrigued by radio as a listener and enthralled by it as a broadcaster. In those early days before unions, the announcer’s job included news gathering and reporting. This perfectly suited my inherent curiosity about other people’s business; finally, a legitimate reason to ask otherwise rude questions of important people. The element of public performance was also irresistible to some
one who had enjoyed high school dramatics and public speaking. I was about to become a local celebrity and felt utterly in my element.

  My tenure was to begin on July 1, a national holiday celebrated in those days as Dominion Day. Naturally, I stayed home. The station manager called with my first lesson about the radio business: News does not take a holiday, nor do news announcers. If I did not accept that, then I had better try a different line of work.

  Yet my first assignment had nothing to do with news. I was put on a shift as a disk jockey, after which promotion came fast. With but a single day’s training, I was thrust into the chair of the morning host, Uncle Fred, who had arrived too drunk to perform. The morning wake-up program enjoyed the station’s biggest audience. For the first and only time in my life, I was hit with debilitating jitters. This was not tape, this was live radio, and that realization left me so rattled, I could barely read the control room clock. The two-line switchboard almost overheated with complaints about my incorrect time checks. Buses were missed, kids were late for school, appointments were hopelessly confused.

  On the quieter afternoon shift the next day, I was given a copy of the CBC program schedule and told to deliver on-air promotions for upcoming shows. Many spots were designated “TBA,” an acronym foreign to me, but judging by the schedule a program so frequently aired that I concluded it must be immensely popular. I exhorted listeners not to miss it.

  Unlike other CBC stations, CFPR carried advertising spots. Within a week, sponsors were demanding my head, especially the upscale beauty salon whose establishment I repeatedly called a “saloon.” Nor was the Chevy dealer amused when I kept referring to his car as the Chev-roo-lay instead of the more refined Chev-vra-lay. One morning on the 6 a.m. sign-on shift, I found that a fellow announcer had hidden the officially approved CBC recording of “God Save the Queen” as a prank. In desperation, I sang it in full voice. This was an insult to the sovereign and a firing offence in the mind of the program director, but the encyclopedic handbook of CBC regulations saved me. While it decreed that every programming day must begin with the national anthem and the tribute to Her Majesty, it did not rule out alternative renderings, as long as they were respectful. I argued necessity and ingenuity. Still, I received the first of many written reprimands. The program director described my transgression as the worst he had witnessed in his entire broadcasting career. Not long after, his career was cut short when he fell in love with a local nurse and followed her east. My career continued.

  I was an old pro in the eyes of the new program director, a man who had recently left a full-time position as an RCMP corporal. For a while, all available local airtime was filled with music by the RCMP band. And, for a brief period, the noble redcoat did double duty, hanging his uniform in the station closet and donning civvies for radio work. One day I was fooling with the revolver he’d left hanging there when, to my astonishment, it went off, missing an individual in the toilet next door by inches. Since the program boss had broken all the rules by leaving his weapon loaded and unlocked, the incident was quickly covered up and the sound of a reported gunshot dismissed as an automobile backfire.

  Another time I was lucky to avoid dismissal for an escapade that clearly violated CBC regulations. One Saturday night, after signing off at midnight as expected, I joined some friends at a late-night party. Few other radio signals managed to pierce the mountains that ringed Rupert, and we couldn’t find any music we liked. I returned to the station and put CFPR back on the air at 3 a.m. For three hours, we enjoyed our own private broadcast, with musical selections on demand and tender messages from me to my girlfriend at the time. On Monday morning, Will Hankinson, the station manager, remarked that he had awoken in the night and thought he had heard my voice sending personal greetings to all my pals. Must have been a dream, he concluded. If I had actually done such a thing, he explained pointedly, he would have had to sack me.

  I was returned to nighttime assignments when Uncle Fred righted himself in the morning slot. The evening shift was usually undemanding and consisted mainly of “riding the board,” which meant sitting at the control console with all its dials, knobs, and meters and making sure that network programs from Toronto were rebroadcast without too much static. Between network offerings, we cleared our throats, summoned our best deepchest voices, and announced the station breaks: “CFPR Prince Rupert.” Then we sank into boredom for another hour or more, until the next call to radio stardom.

  We often wondered whether anyone in Rupert was listening to our highbrow CBC fare. To settle the matter, we decided on a test. One night, all four staff announcers gathered round the microphone during a two-hour concert by a Montreal chamber orchestra, the Montreal Baroque Trio. On cue, we opened the mike with the strings still resonating in the background and shouted in unison, “Fuck off!” No one called or ever remarked on the incident.

  Frequently the network lines, which snaked their way over the coastal mountains from Vancouver, broke down—always a welcome event. Rupert was then allowed to fill the time with its own music, including a Top Ten Hits show. I was introduced, complete with echo-chamber sound effects and theme music, as “your host with the most on the coast.” Elvis, the Big Bopper, Jim Reeves, Johnny Mathis, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis were given free rein.

  The handling of news was equally amateurish. We had no dedicated reporters to cover local happenings, nor did we have access to wire services such as Canadian Press for world events. Our source was the local rag, the Prince Rupert Daily News, an operation widely acknowledged to be in the pockets of the town’s leading industrialists at the pulp mill and the fish plant. We clipped the top local news and sports stories out of the paper, pasted them to a blank sheet, and read them on air, unchanged and unedited but for the correction of the odd obvious error. Weather reports were gleaned from a study of the skies through the station window. A natural curiosity led me to pursue interviews with local worthies, thus providing some homegrown public affairs content.

  Station manager “Hank” Hankinson was a brilliant but eccentric former producer with the CBC International Service in Montreal, banished to the far reaches of the empire for some obscure offence. The station was his personal fiefdom. He appointed his secretary, with whom he had been having an affair for many years, to the post of assistant station manager. At the same time, lowlier staff members were made to clean the toilets twice a week and take out the garbage. During my first turn on the garbage detail, the senior announcer, Uncle Merlin Gutensohn, offered a comforting insight. While flies buzzed around us, he explained that this was actually part of our training, ensuring that “our powerful and important positions will not make us too proud.”

  Hankinson was rightly regarded as one of Rupert’s few intellectuals. In my first week at the station, he invited me to enrol in the weekly adult French classes he gave at the local school. He also suggested I join the Canadian Institute of Speech, an institution of his own creation with only one instructor. It specialized in public speaking and vocabulary classes, in person or by correspondence, and offered various levels of graduate and undergraduate diplomas. I declined both. Months passed before I realized why I wasn’t being moved off late-night and weekend shifts. I signed up for French lessons and joined the august ranks of the institute. When the next shift schedule was posted, I found myself on days.

  Both of these enterprises, especially the speaking and vocabulary training, involved serious study, and Hank had the university degrees to prove his qualifications as an instructor. Despite my resentment at the time, he gave me my first exposure to the serious discipline of effective writing and speaking. Content and style were equally emphasized and tested. Hank drove into us the idea that every word is a building block of thought, a “crystallized idea,” as he put it. A few years later, when we were unionized, the bosses in Vancouver learned of Hank’s management practices and invited him to resign. He was a mean old cuss but the first person of real learning I had ever encountered, and I owed him a great deal. I w
ill never forget his delight when I phoned him in Rupert from my Washington, D.C., office on the thirtieth anniversary of the day he hired me. We laughed over those days and lamented they were no more.

  My position at CFPR was intended to be a summer job only but, as so often happened in my life, an intervention by my mother played a hand in my professional fate. Mom was cruising for taxi fares down at the docks one day when a yacht anchored out in the harbour. A small tender made for shore and delivered Bing Crosby and his inseparable buddy, Phil Harris, to the wharf. Crosby was perhaps the biggest music celebrity in the world at that time, with record sales, movies, and an unprecedented multi-million-dollar television contract making him the very definition of a star. His congenial public persona aside, Crosby guarded his privacy and was an elusive character who kept the media at a distance.

  That day, he and Harris were sailing up the coast on a salmon-fishing trip. They needed to make an urgent call to Hollywood, but the radio phone on the yacht was broken. My mother coolly offered to contact an acquaintance at the local telephone company, and in no time she had the two men fixed up. An appreciative Crosby asked if there was anything he could do for her. Mom informed him that her son was a local disk jockey. Would the famous crooner give her boy an interview? This struck Crosby as a hilarious idea. Perhaps he enjoyed the thought of being quoted on the wires by a virtual unknown when he consistently refused interview requests from the leading entertainment journalists.

  The staff at the studio was astounded when Crosby and Harris strolled through the door—and open-mouthed when Crosby said he was looking for Craig. Sadly, my big chance was not to be: I was enjoying a day off, far from the station. Told this, Crosby did not miss a beat. “Tell Craig his old pal Bing dropped by to say hello.” In their astonishment, none of the staff thought to ask for an interview or a photograph. The incident bolstered my reputation as someone who knew a few things about the music business, or at least as someone to whom the unexpected and interesting might happen. I credit it with securing me a permanent position not long after.