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Against all oddsThirty years ago today a ragtag team of 62 unemployed newspaper people started on an unique and unmatched voyage
I was going to start this piece by saying: "Has it really been 30 years?" But I used that phrase to mark The Toronto Sun's 20th anniversary in 1991, and very likely also wrote it on the 10th anniversary, in 1981. Still, it's true. Has it really been 30 years since a ragtag bunch of 62 unemployed newspaper people started The Sun after the Toronto Telegram folded, throwing 1,200 out of jobs? Time has a way of speeding up as years pass. And over the past 30 years The Sun in Toronto has grown from being an upstart into something of an institution. Cheeky Still, The Sun is special. From its start on Nov. 1, 1971, the 62 Day Oners who created The Sun seemed to have their own ideas of what should be done, and knew better than those in charge. Sometimes they were right. The thing is, everyone was listened to, because no one had a clear idea how to create a responsible but cheeky tabloid. There was a lot of seat-pants flying, which may account for some success -- then and now.
Of the three principals, I'm the only one still at The Sun. Don Hunt, our first general manager and key to our early success (he was the most fiscally responsible), has been gone since the mid-1980s. Doug Creighton, who put the team together and whose idea The Sun was, has been gone for nearly a decade -- though his memory lives on in anecdote, mythology and nostalgia. Doug fired me once, but I forgave him because no one is perfect and you don't discard 30 years of friendship over an emotional error. Doug re-hired me to be founding editor of The Ottawa Sun for a year, and forgot why he bounced me (for quotes in the rival Toronto Star that irritated him but were out of context). So I've outlasted Creighton. The way Doug left was a huge error of judgment by a board of directors that he put together but which didn't understand what made him tick. People who work at The Sun did. Still, life goes on. Doug's photo adorns the wall by the switchboard and his portrait gazes at the elevator on the sixth (executive) floor. The Sun was a dramatic change of life for all of us at the Tely. I'd spent 15 years covering the world for the paper. I was reluctant to take holidays for fear a crisis would happen someplace and someone other than me would be sent to cover it. When The Sun started I was an instant editor. I've now been at The Sun, off and on, twice as long as I was at the Tely. As an aside, when the Tely folded I applied for a job at the Globe and Mail. The editor (and later senator) Dick Doyle wanted no part of me. Had he hired me, there'd have been no Sun. The Sun almost died before it began. At Thanksgiving 1971, everything seemed to collapse. We had no backers. I got home at midnight and told my wife, who'd covered the social work beat for the Tely, that I guessed I'd take a job Marty Goodman had offered me at the Star. Yvonne was adamant: "You're not a Star person, Peter. You'll hate it. They'll try to break you. I've worked there, I know them ..." I grumbled that she was exaggerating. "Have you spoken to Eddie Goodman?" said Yvonne. "Maybe he has ideas about money." Eddie Goodman had ideas about everything, even things he knew something about, like the law. We'd been at the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York in the summer and spent the weekend talking newspapers. I phoned Eddie, told him of The Sun and how our hunt for $6 million start-up had been reduced to $1 million. Was he interested? Eddie said give him the weekend. On holiday Monday he phoned and said he had $750,000 pledged, and go ahead. I phoned Don and Doug, spending Thanksgiving in Muskoka, and the project was on again. The rest, as they say, is history. As it turned out, Eddie's $750,000 was closer to $250,000 cash, the rest in pledges. With two weeks until the Tely folded forever, we rented the top floor of the Eclipse Whitewear Building at King St. W. and John St., swiped all the pencils, paperclips and office supplies we could from the Tely, and negotiated to buy the Tely's street boxes. We were given the Tely library by publisher John Bassett on condition we turn it over to York University "when you guys fail." Bassett went to his grave a Sun supporter. Our first editorial cause was to attack the policies of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau -- reducing the military, lax immigration controls, irresponsible spending. Sound familiar today? I liked to say three things indicated success in the first month of The Sun: We had a bomb scare, we got an angry letter from the PM's Office, Pierre Berton and Charles Templeton threatened to sue us. Not bad signs of our impact. Eddie Monteith, as managing editor, was a sort of keel that kept us steady. He had to cope with Paul Rimstead and Bob MacDonald, neither of whom liked taking orders. Another for whom orders were a nuisance was George Gross, the world's most elegantly-attired sports editor, and today the world's most elegantly-attired sports editor emeritus. George was "The Baron" almost four decades before Conrad Black became "a" baron. Barons can be insufferable at times -- witness Gross gaining legendary status when he once hurled his computerized typewriter in the waste basket, thereby leading a sports department rebellion against the computer age. As a curiosity, even back then The Sun was warning that terrorism was going to be the greatest threat the world faced, and only Israel adequately understood it. We went after the Soviet Union which was busy subverting the free world and encouraging terrorism. All vintage Sun causes. Morale was high because we were swimming upstream, and succeeding. Doug was big on staff parties and pushing his vision of a chain of Suns spanning Canada (maybe the world, as far as I know). Rimstead kept everyone humble by his irreverence toward his bosses and his nightly antics -- like causing power failures on deadline when he plugged in his electric kettle for a hot rum. In the early days, people came in unannounced from the street to offer to type stories or run errands. Many brought gifts of food. Our switchboard, run by Margaret K. (no one could pronounce, much less spell her married name), was a frontline ambassador. She once got President Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, on the phone for me by sweet-talking his assistant who was also from Glasgow. Poor Mr. Kissinger, persuaded that I was a VIP he should talk to, was somewhat nonplussed when I asked him if he thought the Tsar's family escaped assassination at Ekaterinburg in 1918. He said he hadn't the faintest idea. The Sun was (still is) daily turmoil. Looking back, I think we were unwittingly the first newspaper to combine elements of TV into newspapers -- informal, fun, saucy, outspoken -- a curious combination of the relevant (columnists?) and the frivolous (SUNshine Girls). Rivals quipped that Sun columnists covered the political spectrum from Worthington to Zink. Today, Suns are part of the landscape in Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa and Winnipeg (inherited from Quebecor). We've made mistakes and failed at times (not making the Houston Post a tabloid, failing to save United Press Canada) but we've tried. A succession of owners has resulted in changes, but the core remains constant. One thing uniquely "Sun" is that top editors and publishers, when they retire or are removed, seem to become columnists -- a retirement home for the garrulous and opinionated. I'm not sure how this occurred. Maybe I'm foolhardy to mention it. Maybe it shows that a young, free- wheeling outlook is not a matter of years, but of attitude. Today's editor is now saddled with a bunch of columnists who were once his boss, who did the job before him, and probably still think they know better than he does -- which is untrue, except in my case. |
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