Paper Trails

Description

One of Canada’s greatest journalists shares a half century of the stories behind the stories.

From his vantage point harnessed to a tree overlooking the town of Huntsville (he tended to wander), a very young Roy MacGregor got in the habit of watching people—what they did, who they talked to, where they went. He has been getting to know his fellow Canadians and telling us all about them ever since.
    From his early days in the pages of Maclean’s, to stints at the Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, National Post and most famously from his perch on page two of the Globe and Mail, MacGregor was one of the country’s must-read journalists. While news media were leaning increasingly right or left, he always leaned north, his curiosity trained by the deep woods and cold lakes of Algonquin Park to share stories from Canada’s farthest reaches, even as he worked in the newsrooms of its southern capitols. From Parliament to the backyard rink, subarctic shores to prairie expanses, MacGregor shaped the way Canadians saw and thought about themselves—never entirely untethered from the land and its history.
    When MacGregor was still a young editor at Maclean’s, the 21-year-old chief of the Waskaganish (aka Rupert’s House) Crees, Billy Diamond, found in Roy a willing listener as the chief was appealing desperately to newsrooms across Ottawa, trying to bring attention to the tainted-water emergency in his community. Where other journalists had shrugged off Diamond’s appeals, MacGregor got on a tiny plane into northern Quebec. From there began a long friendship that would one day lead MacGregor to a Winnipeg secret location with Elijah Harper and his advisors, a host of the most influential Indigenous leaders in Canada, as the Manitoba MPP contemplated the Charlottetown Accord and a vote that could shatter what seemed at the time the country’s last chance to save Confederation. 
    This was the sort of exclusive access to vital Canadian stories that Roy MacGregor always seemed to secure. And as his ardent fans will discover, the observant small-town boy turned pre-eminent journalist put his rare vantage point to exceptional use. Filled with reminiscences of an age when Canadian newsrooms were populated by outsized characters, outright rogues and passionate practitioners, the unputdownable Paper Trails is a must-read account of a life lived in stories.“Immensely readable. . . . MacGregor gives personal insight into many well-known events, often offering quirky observations and asides. . . . Entertaining and insightful.“ —Winnipeg Free Press

“Wondering what to do until Top Gun 3 arrives?  Don’t worry, Chris Hadfield’s got it covered. And who better?” —Rowland White, Sunday Times bestselling author of Vulcan 607

“[Paper Trails] vividly demonstrates how [MacGregor] has held his place as one of Canada’s greatest journalists and best-liked practitioners for more than 50 years. Blunt in spots, lighthearted and self-deprecating, the book reflects the author’s deep love for country and chosen field of journalism, even as he is clear-eyed about past and present challenges in both.” —Policy Magazine

“Paper Trails is a powerful book filled with memorable characters and plenty of historical markers. . . . Insightful. It is a book that one can live in and be grateful for the many corridors it opens up.” —The Peterborough ExaminerROY MACGREGOR is the acclaimed and bestselling author of Home Team: Fathers, Sons and Hockey (shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award); A Life in the Bush (winner of the US Rutstrum Award for Best Wilderness Book and the CAA Award for Biography); and bestsellers Northern Light, Canoe Country and Original Highways; as well as two novels, Canoe Lake and The Last Season, and the popular Screech Owls mystery series for young readers. A longtime columnist for the Globe and Mail and numerous other newspapers and magazines, MacGregor won four National Magazine Awards and two National Newspaper Awards. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and was described in the citation as one of Canada’s “most gifted storytellers.”It was a long walk through the woods to the place I have loved more than any other—our grandparents’ log cottage on Lake of Two Rivers in the heart of Ontario’s vast Algonquin Park. My mother took me there from the little Red Cross outpost at Whitney when I was all of four days old, so this would have been the first of many, many trails.

Lake of Two Rivers had to be the place, with the Madawaska River entering the lake on the west end and leaving at the east end, that led to a lifelong love of canoeing. Like the hand-carved Indigenous-boy doll in Bill Mason’s wonderful 1966 film Paddle to the Sea, I could theoretically paddle all the way to the ocean—down the Madawaska, through the Ottawa Valley to the Ottawa River, down the Ottawa to the St. Lawrence River—paddling east until I reached the Atlantic. Theoretically, of course. Not something a four-day-old, let alone a seventy-four-year-old—the age at which I am typing this—would do. But you can dream of the possibility.

Canoe tripping involves a lot of trails, some portages so long and difficult you wonder how the hell you ever came up with such a “vacation” plan. But I have always loved the bush and the Far North. The more off the beaten path the better.

The other trails are all paper, whether newspapers, magazines, scripts or books. Millions upon millions of words, almost exclusively about this amazing country, Canada, and the people who live in it and love it. I like to say I have written more books than I have read, which is hopefully an exaggeration, but looking back over all those books, all those journalism jobs at various newspapers and magazines, it almost seems possible. The places those trails have taken me to . . . the people I have encountered along the way.

A favourite editor has a term that she claims essentially sums up my career: “MacGregor luck.” She says it sarcastically; she says it laughing; she says it often. Sometimes she captures the sentiment in just one word— “horseshoes.”

I am forced to admit that there is some merit to what she says. I was lucky enough to spend every summer of a happy childhood in Algonquin Park, where my father, Duncan, worked at his brother-in-law’s hardwood lumber mill, where my grandfather, Tom McCormick, served as chief ranger, and where my mother, Helen, was born in a tent on the shores of Brule Lake. Her mother, Bea McCormick, had gone into labor on a steaming-hot early August day, and to keep her cool the nurse at the tiny village in the heart of the park had village loggers setup a tent on the beach, soak blankets in the cool lake water and string the wet blankets on poles set up around the birthing mattress.

Growing up in Huntsville, a pretty, small town in Ontario’s cottage country, was another lucky break. Here, I forged lifelong friendships and played competitive hockey, lacrosse and baseball in a sports-mad community. A Huntsville High School English teacher saved me from being booted out of school and started me on the path to journalism. I fell in love with a beautiful young woman in grade eleven and, halfa dozen years later, we married. Ellen and I soon had four healthy babies, three girls and a boy, who grew up to be four accomplished adults. Six grandchildren would follow, all healthy, all unique. Horseshoes, indeed.

I should have been fired after publishing my first piece in a national publication. The story that ended up in print had a mistake that was the equivalent to, say, claiming Winnipeg’s Guess Who had created the famous rock opera Tommy. (Well, that actually was the mistake, but more on that later . . .) No matter. Lucky as ever, I wiggled free.

How about the time Maclean’s magazine dispatched this young, wet-behind-the-ears reporter to Montreal for a cover profile on Mordecai Richler? The famous author’s publisher had arranged for us to meet up at the Montreal Press Club, where Richler proceeded to order a fresh round of beer every time I hit the halfway mark of my glass. He suggested we do the formal interview at his apartment, and on our walk he stopped at a depanneur, where he bought two bottles of Rémy Martin cognac. Next thing I know I’m waking with a thundering headache in my room at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, still wearing the same clothes I had on when I walked into the press club, the bedcovers untouched . . .

MacGregor luck would save me, once again.

But more on that later.
 

How things have changed in this business. I wrote my first stories on a portable Viking typewriter my mother bought me at Eaton’s as a Christmas present. Eventually, I moved on to electronic IBM typewriters, then, while at the Toronto Star, a Radio Shack TRS-80,which we reporters called the “Trash 80.” There were other Radio Shack computers—some capable of holding more than one column!— that you hooked up to a pay phone with rubber couplings; you could watch your story go, letter by letter, off to the desk back in Toronto. You waited breathlessly for the signal that your work had arrived safely— otherwise, you did it all again.

Next came laptops, increasingly powerful, and then the internet and cell phones and Bluetooth and even watches that could count your steps, take your blood pressure, catch your incoming e-mails and call 911 if they detected that you’d fallen. When I began at the Ottawa Citizen, in 1986, the newsroom was filled with more than a hundred reporters, editors, librarians, secretaries and receptionists. Several dozen print shop workers were in the back typing the stories all over again to create lead-type blocks for the printing process. Other workers carried the heavy blocks over to the plant in another part of the building, where the paper was printed, stacked and taken to the loading ramps for the delivery trucks. The noise throughout the Baxter Road building was numbing: phones constantly ringing, copy editors shouting, doors slamming as a new non-smoking rule went into place and editors ran back and forth between the outdoor smoking area and their blue pencils.

So much change. Who needs a library when you have Google? Who needs receptionists when callers reach a menu that will either stall them or take them to the very person they need to speak to? But who talks anyway when you can send an e-mail or a text? The last time I entered the Citizen building there were seven reporters, and it was utterly silent. Today, the building has been transformed into a roller rink, the thinning paper published by a skeleton staff working mostly from home.

Such a journey this has been. Maclean’s three different times . . . the weekend supplements, The Canadian and, later, Today . . . Toronto Star . . . Ottawa Citizen . . . National Post . . . then five straight years of five page 2columns a week at the Globe and Mail, followed by another dozen wonderful years at the Globe writing sports, features, opinion, the arts. A few years of post-retirement freelancing—the Globe, Cottage Life, the New York Times, Zoomer magazine, Canadian Geographic—and soon the paper trail ran a full fifty years.
 

The best times in journalism were elections. I covered Canadian federal and provincial elections for decades. Newspapers had money, I had a company credit card and the assignment was always simple: go wherever you want, “take the pulse of the country,” file at the end of each day. There was no better feeling than when the rental car entered a community or a rural area where I knew not a single soul, but I was absolutely confident that by day’s end I would file a story about someone, or something, of interest, and the following day it would magically appear in print. Never writer’s block; never a missed deadline. Horseshoes across the country, east to west, south to north.

Somehow, I scraped through without ever losing a lawsuit— even one from a sitting cabinet minister. I survived the death of a magazine and a lost job at a time when Ellen was pregnant with our youngest of four children. There have, over that half-century of journalism, been blown jet engines, threatening weapons at Oka, a snowstorm on James Bay that forced us to take shelter for three days on a barren island, physical threats from unhappy athletes— and more fun than I ever could have imagined. And if the thirteen chapters to come aren’t enough, each is followed by one or more “vignettes,” pertinent—and sometimes not so pertinent—to the chapter just finished.

My friend the editor has it right. MacGregor luck. There have, of course, been some bad turns—life is not entirely a box of chocolates, I am also here to report. But, by and large, a life in words has been the greatest adventure I could hope for—and more.CA

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