Many Canadians try to pinch pennies when they travel abroad, looking for bargains on airfare and accommodations. Not federal International Cooperation minister Bev Oda, who found herself in trouble this week for having a grand old time at taxpayers’ expense during a trip to London, England last year.
It was bad enough that the Minister decided that the five-star Grange St. Paul’s Hotel wasn’t up to her standards and canceled her $287 Cdn./night reservation — quite reasonable for a London five-star hotel — in favour of a $665/night reservation at The Savoy, a favourite with visiting heads of state, and stuck the taxpayer with the Grange’s $287 cancellation penalty.
But did she really need a $16 glass of orange juice?
As outrageous as these prices might be, Oda wasn’t the first minister to get busted living the high life before her ministerial years come to an end and the perks and privileges disappear.
Those with long memories might recall Suzanne Blais-Grenier’s love of travel. Now largely a forgotten figure, the then-Environment Minister was blasted in 1985-86 for spending $65,000 ($127,000 in 2012 dollars) on two trips to Europe that seemed to involve more fun than government business.
She was soon demoted by then prime minister Brian Mulroney, and later kicked out of the Progressive Conservative party.
It’s not just Canada that has had problems with ministers who didn’t always appreciate value-for-money.
Ireland’s former Arts, Sports and Tourism minister John O’Donoghue caused howls of outrage in 2009 when it was discovered that he spent over $600 Cdn. on a three-minute limousine ride between two terminals at London’s Heathrow Airport.
An airport shuttle bus could have taken him between terminals at no charge.
The same year, Irish environment minister John Gormley made a point of taking the ferry across to the U.K to reduce his carbon footprint — where he was promptly met by a chauffeured car that had been driven five hours from London to whisk him away. In total, the car and chauffeur cost taxpayers about $3,500 Cdn.
On the continent, France has had numerous problems with ministers’ free-spending ways. Herve Gaymard, the finance minister, handed in his resignation in 2005 after it was discovered that his luxurious 6,500 sq. ft. (!) home near the Champs-Elysee — shared by his wife and eight children — was costing French taxpayers the equivalent of $23,000 Cdn. every month.
To make matters worse, he was simultaneously renting out his other apartment for $3,700 Cdn. per month.
“I have always lived humbly. I don’t have money,” he told a reporter in his own defence.
Though French president Nicolas Sarkozy vowed a crackdown on such lavish spending, he himself was roundly criticized one year later after his son Pierre Sarkozy — better known in rap circles as DJ Mosey – called home from Ukraine complaining of an upset stomach.
The president promptly dispatched a government jet to Ukraine to airlift his son to a French hospital, covering 30 percent of the bill himself and leaving taxpayers on the hook for the balance.
As comical or outrageous as these abuses are, one can only imagine how much worse things would be without Freedom of Information laws.
On the subject of travel, if you ever wanted to visit Europe at a reasonable price, this is the year to do it. While gateway cities like London, Paris and Amsterdam will always be expensive, high-quality accommodations in Europe’s secondary cities are so ridiculously cheap right now due to the recession that it can cost about as much to travel to Europe as it would to travel to a major U.S. city if you can catch a seat sale. Consider the following, based on a July 7-14 stay:
Berlin — Park Plaza Prenzlauer Berg (4*): $55 Cdn./night
Copenhagen — First Hotel Copenhagen (4*): $105 Cdn./night
Lisbon — Hotel Lutecia (4*): $63 Cdn./night
Vienna — Rainers Hotel Vienna (4*): $65 Cdn./night
This weekend will be a busy one at the Canada-U.S. border as thousands of Manitobans gather up their passports and head down to Grand Forks, Fargo or Minneapolis/St. Paul for a weekend getaway.
What if going to another country were as easy as locking the front door and stepping just down the street?
A relatively low fence separates these homes in Surrey, B.C. from a small playground across the street in Blaine, Wash.
...While this fence separating Tecate, Mexico from Tecate, Calif. sends a more firm message
Even in this age of increasingly intensive border security, it’s still possible to do that in parts of the world.
I’m not talking here about the many border cities that face each other across rivers and straits, such as Detroit, Mich. and Windsor, Ont., Copenhagen, Denmark and Malmo, Sweden or El Paso, Tex. and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. I’m talking about cities and towns where an international boundary cuts right through the middle of neighbourhoods, creating such an invisible line that, if you were in a helicopter looking down, it would be difficult to tell where one country begins and the other ends.
That’s the reality in several communities around the world which through some quirk of history ended up being split in two by a line on a map.
Is it "Chuy" or "Chui"? Depends on what side of the street you're on.
One community that is almost perfectly split in two is Chui, Brazil/Chuy, Uruguay. The border between the two countries runs down the town’s main street, curiously known as Av. Uruguai (Uruguay Ave.) on the Brazilian side of the street and Av. Brasil (Brazil Ave.) on the Uruguayan side. The split resulted from a long-running dispute between the two countries, with the fate of Chui/Chuy becoming the focal point.
The 10,000 locals and the tourists who drop in to visit the town’s many Duty Free shops are reportedly free to wander back and forth between the two parts of town at will, with customs and immigration posts being located on the roads to and from town.
The Town of Putte: Where Belgium and the Netherlands are just across the street from each other.
A similar situation can be found in Putte, Belgium/Netherlands, where homes on the opposite sides of Canadalaan (Canada Ave.) face each other across the international border. The abolition of border controls between the Netherlands and Belgium have made life easier for the residents of Putte, whose town was once best known as a smuggler’s haven — and a headache for both Dutch and Belgian border guards.
The town has been divided since the Peace of Munster agreement between Spain and the Netherlands in 1648, which identified the town as the dividing point between the Dutch-ruled Northern Netherlands (now simply The Netherlands) and the Spanish-ruled Southern Netherlands (now Belgium).
There's no longer a border guard stationed at the striped pole and hut in Valga/Valka -- but keep your passport handy anyway.
The twin towns of Valga, Estonia and Valka, Latvia were actually a single town founded under the German name Walk in 1286. When Estonia and Latvia declared independence from the Russian Empire amid the chaos of the Russian Revolution and the end of World War I, both tried to claim Valga/Valka as their own. A British civil servant named Stephen Tallents was dispatched to help resolve the dispute, which dragged on for six months until the two countries agreed to split the town in the summer of 1920.
The Soviet years brought some freedom to wander back and forth between the Estonian and Latvian parts of town, with the two being little more than Soviet provinces. When Estonia and Latvia regained their independence 20 years ago, life became more difficult for Valka/Valga’s residents, who had to pass through border checkpoints to visit friends or to go to work.
It wasn’t until 2007 that residents were once again allowed to wander around town without clearing customs, though prominent gold-coloured signs posted along the border still warn locals to ensure that they are carrying passports when crossing frontiers.
The Estonian Valga is the more populous end of town, with a population of about 14,000, compared to Latvian Valka‘s 6,000 residents.
A bit of lighter fare in this week’s View from Seven, as we take a trip back to the ’70s, thanks to the phenomenal video archive maintained and frequently updated by Vancouver YouTuber robatsea2009, and additional clips fromGWhizIneedAnameandronj218.
Modern-day Zellers, Wal-Mart and Target stores look like boutiques compared to the rather ugly “new” K-Mart store featured in this 1978 ad from a Cleveland TV station. But at least the musical theme is rather upbeat.
It’s 1979, and this new thing called “VHS” has come on the market, allowing you to record movies anywhere and play them back on your TV set. Trouble is, you’ll need to lug a huge camera and recorder around with you all day.
Jeez, do they still have Saturday morning cartoons? (CBS, 1975)
A young Connie Chung makes a brief appearance during a local station break in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve 1976.
Slow news day in Cleveland? This 1978 newscast (with five anchors, including one who’s wearing a tomato-red jacket) opens with a “bad news” story: yes, the price of hamburger is going up! Check out some ’70s technology at about the 03:00 mark.
A fascinating behind-the-scenes clip showing NBC’s Jessica Savitch letting loose a rant while preparing for an evening news update, possibly in early December, 1979. It’s not clear how this clip came to be in the public domain, but probably came from an unencrypted satellite feed that network staff either accidentally left open, or deliberately left open for the entertainment of master control operators at affiliate stations and the relatively few Americans who owned satellite dishes at the time.
Savitch died in a 1983 motor vehicle accident, only a few weeks after delivering a news update in which some people suspect she might have been slightly inebriated or stoned.
An even more serious meltdown by ABC News Chicago correspondent Max Robinson, recorded from the satellite feed, after discovering that network brass had decided to have a (white) anchorman in Washington do the lead-in to his story on the May 25, 1979 crash of American Airlines Flight 191 at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.
“He seemed rather nice,” Northwest Orient flight attendant Tina Mucklow later recalled. “He was never cruel or nasty. He was thoughtful and calm.”
A rather odd way to describe the man who had hijacked her airliner and threatened to blow up the two of them, and everyone else on Northwest Orient Flight 305, on Nov. 24, 1971.
The drama had started in the mid-afternoon as the three-engined Boeing 727 was on the final leg of a milk run route from Minneapolis/St. Paul to Seattle, with stops en route in Great Falls, Missoula, Spokane and Portland. With only 36 passengers aboard, there was plenty of room for everyone to spread out.
Fellow flight attendant Florence Schaffner had been handed a note by a middle-aged man sitting alone in row 18, by all appearances a business traveler with his suit, tie and briefcase.
Being young, single and attractive — literally a job requirement at the time — Schaffner was used to being hit on. So she did what she usually did with such notes: she stuffed it in her pocket, intending to dispose of it later.
The man in row 18 was having none of it. “Miss, you should read that note I gave you,” he quietly told her minutes later. “I have a bomb in my briefcase.”
After he opened his briefcase and showed her a jumble of red canisters and wires, Schaffner sat next to him and took down his demands: $200,000 cash in $20 bills, and two sets of parachutes.
“No funny stuff, or I’ll do the job,” he warned her grimly.
After circling overhead under the pretense of a ground delay while the needed cash and parachutes were rounded up, Flight 305 finally landed in Seattle at 5:40 p.m., nearly three hours after leaving Portland.
It was only when they left the aircraft in a remote parking area and were met by FBI agents that many passengers realized that they had been hijacked. Few had taken much notice of the man sitting in row 18, who had boarded the flight in Portland using a one-way ticket made out to “Dan Cooper”.
Only Cooper, Mucklow and the three pilots were still aboard when the flight took off after 7 p.m. with instructions to fly to Reno, Nev. at a low airspeed and altitude.
After sitting next to the hijacker and showing him how to operate the rear airstairs, a built-in stairway under the tail which could be used to board and disembark passengers at small, poorly equipped airports, Mucklow was told to go to the cockpit and stay there.
Shortly after 8 p.m., while flying over southwestern Washington State, a warning light and sudden drop in cabin pressure told the crew that Cooper had successfully lowered the airstairs. At 8:13 p.m., an unsettling bounce caused by the airflow forcing the stairway to bounce back up as Cooper jumped clear of the aircraft indicated that the hijacker was gone.
Whatever happened to Dan Cooper — or D. B. Cooper, as he became known due to a misunderstanding in the confusion that followed — remains a mystery. None of the $200,000 has ever re-entered circulation, though some of it was later found, waterlogged and too damaged to be used, on the banks of the Columbia River in 1980.
An instruction card on how to operate the rear airstairs, confirmed to have come from a Northwest Orient Boeing 727, was found in the woods under Flight 305′s flight path in 1978, but further searches of the area yielded nothing.
Various possible suspects were suggested over the years, including:
Duane Weber, who was nominated by his widow on the basis of a supposed deathbed confession in 1995 but later cleared of suspicion by fingerprint and DNA testing
Murderer John List, who bore a resemblance to the flight attendants’ description of Cooper, but is not considered a suspect
Sex-change recipient Bobby/Barbara Dayton, who later claimed to be Cooper, only to recant
Disgruntled Northwest Orient purser Ken Christiansen, suspected by his own brother but dismissed as a suspect due to lack of evidence and Christiansen’s relatively short stature, compared to the crew’s description of Cooper as being about six feet tall.
Now comes the latest nominee, an Oregon man named Lynn Cooper. Cooper, who died in 1999, is being named as a suspect by his niece, Marla Cooper.
Though it’s a possibility that’s being taken seriously, careful examination of the evidence against Lynn Cooper needs to be done before the book can be closed on the 40-year mystery of D. B. Cooper.
Forgotten in the story over the years was the rash of imitators who followed in D. B. Cooper’s footsteps, some of whom generated more snickering than mystery in their ham-handed efforts to get rich quick.
There was Richard McCoy, who hijacked and bailed out of a United Airlines Boeing 727 in April 1972. Unlike the “thoughtful and calm” Cooper, McCoy was somewhat absent-minded. He accidentally forgot a manila envelope containing his typewritten hijacking plans in the boarding area, which an airline employee helpfully brought aboard in search of its owner.
After takeoff, McCoy drew attention to himself by going into the washroom and emerging wearing a wig and sunglasses. A convict being transported by a police officer tried to point out the oddly behaving passenger, but was told to “forget about it”.
McCoy was soon arrested and imprisoned. He escaped, but was killed in a shootout in 1974. Rumours circulated for years that Cooper and McCoy were the same man, but have been dismissed as unsubstantiated.
Twenty-two year old Vietnam vet Robb Heady botched a June 1972 United Airlines hijacking by accidentally letting go of the bag containing the ransom money during his nighttime jump from a Boeing 727 over Nevada.
With no time to search for the loot which had plunged to earth without him, Heady went off instead in search of the car he had left parked in a remote area a few miles from where he touched down. Police had swarmed the area and found the car, however, and had put it under constant surveillance on suspicion that it might be the hijacker’s getaway car.
Heady was arrested as he approached the vehicle.
Then there was 49-year-old engineer Frederick Hahneman, who parachuted out of an Eastern Airlines Boeing 727 over Honduras in 1972 with a $303,000 ransom. Eastern offered a $25,000 reward for his capture — the equivalent of $129,000 in 2010 dollars, and a fortune by Honduran standards. Hahneman pondered his dilemma and came to the conclusion that he would be better off in American than Honduran hands. He turned himself in at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa.
Or how about Frank Sibley? Sporting a rifle and a ski mask, he pedaled a bicycle on to the airfield in Reno, Nev. on Aug. 18, 1972. He proceeded to haul his bicycle up the stairs into a United Airlines Boeing 727 preparing to depart for San Francisco, stormed the cockpit — and then became angry when he discovered that the passengers and flight attendants had all gotten off and returned to the terminal while he was busy dictating his demands to the pilots.
Sibley was able to get the remaining crew to fly him to Vancouver, however, where he ranted about the Vietnam War while being interviewed by a reporter from CJOR radio (a step down from his original demand of a full press conference). They were then off to Seattle, where he was shot and wounded by FBI agents posing as a United Airlines relief crew.
And perhaps most bizarre — and sad — was the July 1980 hijacking of a Northwest Orient Boeing 727 in Seattle by 17-year-old Glen Tripp, who started out with a demand for $100,000 and a parachute. By nighttime, the increasingly tired and hungry hijacker had reduced his demands to a rental car and some cheeseburgers.
After his arrest, it was learned that Tripp was mentally challenged.
Tripp tried to hijack another Northwest Orient flight while out on probation in 1983, only to be shot dead by an FBI agent when he made a threatening gesture with a shoe box in which he claimed to have a bomb. Investigators later discovered that the box contained nothing but paper.
The seemingly less bumbling Cooper, if he survived parachuting into rugged terrain on a cold, stormy November night in 1971, would be the only person to hijack a U.S. jetliner and get away with it.
Yet, if the now-deceased Lynn Cooper turns out to have been “D. B. Cooper”, don’t expect to hear much about it from Tina Mucklow Larson, the former Northwest flight attendant who sat next to Cooper on Flight 305 and showed him how to operate the airstairs after leaving Seattle for Reno.
Mucklow, now in her early sixties, does not do interviews. She has maintained a low profile over the years, reportedly not out of fear of Cooper, who would now be in his mid-eighties if still alive, but out of exasperation with reporters, writers and “Cooper buffs”. Since 1971, her single-minded focus has been on getting on with life.
This past weekend, a U.S. writer claims to have tracked the elusive Mucklow down at her home in an undisclosed location in Oregon, wondering if the passage of time might have made her more receptive to speaking publicly about her life since Nov. 24, 1971, if not about the hijacking itself.
A reminder that even though D. B. Cooper might have been a Robin Hood-style hero to some, others are still dealing with the consequences of his crime, 40 years later.
Sunday, Aug. 7, 1949 The hottest day in Winnipeg: 40.6°C
The visitors from Chicago came prepared for all contingencies.
Twenty-five of them were making the long train trip from Chicago to Jasper, with a stopover in Winnipeg. In preparation for their first trip to Canada, one of them was carrying four boxes of woolens.
Ultimately, woolens would be the last thing they would need during their stay in the Gateway to the West. It was Sunday, Aug. 7, 1949, roughly the half-way point of the warmer summer months.
Too warm, in fact. A hot, dry air mass had made its way up into Canada from the southern United States, bringing with it record high temperatures, scorching most of the country’s cities except for those along the coasts.
In Winnipeg, it send the thermometer soaring to over 40°C that Sunday, the highest recorded temperature to date.
The city’s efforts to keep cool was putting a strain on the city’s water supply. The previous day, the heat had caused Winnipeggers’ water consumption to rise 20 percent above average Saturday levels.
On Sunday, the worst day of the heat wave, water consumption soared to 60 percent higher than average as city residents, few of whom had air conditioning in their homes, struggled to stay cool.
It was a struggle for the city’s Mounties to keep cool as well. While their City of Winnipeg counterparts had been given permission by the Chief of Police to doff their jackets and work in their shirtsleeves — a rare relaxation of a traditionally strict dress code — RCMP officers were required to wear their red scarlet tunics at all times on account of the fact that RCMP Commissioner S. T. Wood was in town for his annual inspection.
Wood, to his credit, did call off a planned outdoor full-dress parade, conceding that it would be a bit much in the 40°C heat.
Civilians largely stayed out of the way of police in any case. Many fled to the nearest pools they could find. Others paid the 35-cent admission to attend a matinee — still a bargain at $3.47 in 2011 dollars — in one of several air conditioned movie theatres, such as the Garrick Theatre where the comedy Ma and Pa Kettle was showing.
The result was an 85 percent drop in police activity between 8 p.m. Saturday and 8 p.m. Sunday. The exceptions to this included a theft of ice, appropriately enough, from the Brothers Bakery at 831 Magnus Ave., 34 city residents being charged with drunkenness (described colourfully by the Free Press as a “limp looking lot”), and a report of two boys setting sail on a home-made raft on the Red River in Fort Rouge before returning safely to shore.
The heat continued into Monday, but cloudy and cooler weather moved in by Tuesday, bringing the heat wave to an end.
Saturday, Aug. 11, 1962 The worst rains: A month’s worth of precipitation in a single day
It was not a good night for sleeping in Winnipeg in the early morning hours of Saturday, Aug. 11, 1962. At 2 a.m., it was still 22°C in the city, with 84 percent humidity.
It would get worse. At about 4:15 a.m., the city’s slumber was disturbed by a severe thunderstorm passing over the city.
First there was the intense cloud-to-ground lightning, waking residents up with bright flashes of light and the sound of thunder.
Then the skies opened up and the rain started to fall.
The rain poured down with intensity. Within the storm’s first 10 minutes, a half-inch of rain — 12.7 millimetres, or about one-sixth of the total average rainfall for the month of August — had fallen on the city.
By about 4:45 a.m., 30 minutes after the storm’s arrival, total rainfall had reached one inch, or 25.4 millimetres.
At 5 a.m., it was still raining.
And at 6 a.m. as well.
In fact, it wasn’t until sometime between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. that the thunderstorms finally came to an end. Yet the city was still being soaked by light showers, which continued until about 11 a.m.
The morning brought no relief to Winnipeggers whose sleep had been disturbed by the heat, humidity and thunderstorm. Many found their basements flooded with water.
Some disregarded the danger and waded into the water, including a Kent Road resident who died from electrocution.
For those needing to get around town, transit service was disrupted by the damage that lightning strikes had done to trolley wires throughout the city, while flooded streets caused further problems.
The afternoon brought still more precipitation, as rain started again at 2 p.m. and continued until after 5 p.m.
By the time it was all over, 83.8 millimetres or 3.3 inches of rain had fallen on Winnipeg in a single day — more than normally falls on the city during the entire month of August, a new record.
Thirty-one years later, the city came within a mere two-tenths of a millimetre of breaking the 1962 record when 83.6 millimetres of rain fell on the city on July 25, 1993, amid rains that started at 10 a.m. and continued until 5:30 a.m. the next day.
The city recovered from the Deluge of ’62, but would be faced with a much bigger — and more legendary storm — less than four years later.
Friday, Mar. 4, 1966 The Great Blizzard
“I spent three hours standing on Portage Avenue with a damned transfer in my hand,” an anonymous young woman, one of thousands of Winnipeggers trying in vain to get home, told a Winnipeg Free Press reporter on Friday, Mar. 4, 1966.
The storm had started overnight. At midnight, the city was being buffeted by 52 km/h winds from the north and visibility of just one kilometre.
By 2 a.m., the already powerful winds had increased to 59 km/h and visibility had dropped to just 200 metres.
As the city started to awaken at 6 a.m., visibility was down to zero and the winds were howling at 72 km/h.
Despite the intense snowstorm, some Winnipeggers resolutely did their best to go to work — or to go shopping.
It wasn’t a particularly good idea. At about 8:40 a.m., a multi-vehicle collision on the St. James Bridge closed the road to traffic — and the city’s problems were just starting.
Many companies, recognizing the severity of the storm, had encouraged their employees to stay home. But by 10:30 a.m., the situation was escalating out of control with many streets partially blocked by stranded motorists.
Thus, Mayor Steve Juba officially ordered city residents to stay home if at all possible and to keep the streets clear of unnecessary traffic.
By 11 a.m., the city’s transit service could no longer keep its buses running through the rising snow drifts and was officially shut down.
Then the fun started.
Downtown office workers, realizing that they had little hope of getting home, frantically began calling nearby hotels trying to arrange a room for the night. Soon, the city’s hotels were all completely booked.
The Bay and Eaton’s found themselves with a particularly serious problem on their hands. Despite the weather, hundreds of Winnipeggers had made their way downtown to do some shopping — and then found themselves trapped there after transit service shut down at 11 a.m.
Both stores tried to close at 3:30 p.m. so that staff and customers could get home before dark, but it soon became obvious that many people would have to spend the night in the store.
A surreal feeling must have settled over the city as the thousands of people who couldn’t get home accepted their fate.
At Eaton’s, there were reports of stranded customers and staff wandering the aisles aimlessly while others passed the time chatting, playing cards or making phone calls.
A reporter who checked up on how the Viscount Gort Hotel was coping with the storm was informed that about 100 people were taking part in a sing-along in the bar, while guests at the Marlborough were volunteering as waiters and maids in place of employees who couldn’t make it in.
The Winnipeg Free Press was able to publish newspapers in spite of only about one-third of staff being able to report to work. As these newspapers couldn’t be delivered, however, CKRC 630 announcer Bob Washington took the unprecedented step of reading the newspaper aloud over the radio.
Radio stations also issued appeals for those who could safely do so to deliver food to people stranded in their offices and elsewhere.
As night fell, city residents were encouraged to stay off the jammed phone lines and to leave their porch lights on for the benefit of those trying to navigate their way home in the storm.
Ten people settled in to sleep wherever they could find space at a Polo Park barber shop, while another 15 spent the night sleeping in the offices of Midwest Mining Supplies in St. James.
Eaton’s set up beds for customers, strictly segregated by sex: men slept on the seventh floor, while women slept on the ninth floor.
The residents of a farm house near Horndean, Man., a tiny hamlet east of Winkler, found themselves with plenty of company for the night as passengers of a Grey Goose Bus Lines coach, destined for southwestern Manitoba, needed a place to spend the night after their bus became stranded.
Overnight, conditions gradually improved. By 10 p.m., visibility was greater than one kilometre for the first time in 21 hours. But it took another 12 hours for the city’s transit system to resume service and to start returning weary blizzard refugees to their homes.
It was a storm that brought out the best in Winnipeggers. Strangers forced together by fate became new friends, and kept each others’ spirits up by lending each other food, cigarettes and liquor.
And for those old enough to remember it, Mar. 4, 1966 remains perhaps the most memorable date in the city’s history.
Newspapers have changed a lot over the years. The front pages of modern-day newspapers are rich with photographs, whereas 50 years ago they were often filled with dispatches from around the country and around the world — stories about the crisis in Berlin, events at the U.N., details about a plane crash in a faraway land, and so on.
Years before that, the newspaper filled two roles. It served as the primary method of relaying news from the outside world, and for sharing gossip about what everyone in town was up to. It wasn’t so much news you can use as news about you and everyone around you.
Much of what was printed then wouldn’t be printed today. No modern day newspaper would report that someone found a lost parcel on a street corner, or publish a letter to the editor from someone who threatened to blow up the editor, a matter which presumably would be forwarded directly to police these days.
Yet it was often the things that wouldn’t get published these days that fueled demand for newspapers.
Even very little news could be turned into some kind of news, as this report on a relatively quiet 24 hours on Mar. 16-17, 1922 in Windsor, Ont. illustrates. During that 24-hour period, Windsor Police had little difficulty maintaining law and order in Canada’s Motor City, with their only calls being three reports of family quarrels and a report that someone had thrown a dead cat on the lawn of police court interpreter William Englander’s home at 222 Wyandotte St. E. It’s now the site of a shabby low-rent building that’s home to a “psychic reader”. Perhaps he or she knows who the (presumably long-dead) culprit was.
The last tango in Paris would have taken place in 1914 if the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Leon Adolphe Amette, had had his way in the final months of peace prior to the outbreak of World War I. On Jan. 13, the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix reported that the Cardinal had been “distressed by the persistence of the vogue of the tango” but “felt it his duty to now to intervene formally”. Thus, the newspaper reported that dancing the tango was now “a sin which must be confessed and for which penance must be done”.
“We condemn the dance imported from abroad known under the name of the tango, which, by its nature, is indecent and offensive to morals and Christians may not in conscience take part therein.”
At the time, it was predicted that the prohibition of the tango “would produce profound emotion and dismay in Parisian social circles.”
Mental health issues were as much a problem in the olden days as they are today. On Friday, Dec. 17, 1926, residents of Hornell, N.Y. were shocked to see a 30 year old man in front of a local hotel, dressed only in his underwear and babbling incoherently. The next day, a wire service report identified the “mystery man” as Dr. Knute Houck, a “prominent Washington physician” at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. He had reportedly left Washington in search of his 28-year-old wife, Gladys, who had gone missing. Her body was found in the Potomac river about three months later. Her husband was detained for a time, but then released from custody after a coroner’s jury found that she had died by “drowning in an unknown manner”.
After several months as a nationwide sensation, the Houck case then faded into the mists of history.
The articles immediately to the right of the “Street Singer in Underwear” article illustrates how newspapers covered even the most minor of local events in 1926. Under the headline Cuts His Hand, we learn that 24-year-old George A. DeHart of 419 North Ninth Street received four stitches for a laceration he suffered on the forearm while cutting down a tree in Reading, Pa. Below that, we learn that “Policeman Lloyd found a box containing a child’s dress at Fifth and Washington streets. It was taken to [the] police station and will be turned over to the owner if proper claim is established.”
And thus ended another exciting day in Reading.
They just don’t write letters to the editor like they used to. In 1912, the entire town of Waihi, New Zealand, a mining community on the country’s North Island, was on edge as a miners’ strike moved closer to boiling over. One newspaper publisher, a certain Mr. McRobie, took a pro-management stance which at least one miner took exception to, as this letter to the editor illustrates:
Waihi, Oct. 16
Mr. McRobie, proprietor of the local newspaper, yesterday received the following letter:
“You dirty, black, trimmed-whiskered mongrel, if you don’t alter your hostile tactics toward the Waihi Miners’ Union in your leading articles in your dirty, gutter-snipe rag, I inform you candidly that I have 250 plugs of gelignite, 100 detonators, and six coils of fuse, of which you shall swallow some if you keep on at the rate you are going. Now, McRobie, I have warned you; so beware. I am in earnest, ‘Only a Striker’.”
There is no record of McRobie being blown to Kingdom Come, but the Waihi strike turned violent a month later, on Nov. 12, 1912, when striker Fred Evans was killed when strikebreakers and police stormed the miners’ hall. The incident is still remembered in New Zealand as Black Tuesday.
The heat of a July day can certainly make one want to strip down to as little clothing as you can decently wear outdoors. But when a group of Doukhobors got hot under the collar about the arrest of one of their colleagues in Nelson, B.C. in July 1928, the stripping down threatened to turn into full-frontal nudity.
“This morning the city and provincial police loaded them into a bus, took them to the outskirts of town and told them to go home. They declared they would return to Nelson and stage a parade au naturel.”
Four years later, they actually did demonstrate in the nude in the village of Thrums, 16 miles from Nelson, when 33 women and 84 men were arrested for walking around town in the buff. Police restored law and order by spraying the protesters with water and itching power, ultimately herding them into an orchard to await arrest.
Note above that the Lawrence Daily World-Journal seemed to include a 1920s version of Facebook status updates in its pages: “George Sullivans drove to Topeka July Fourth to see the fireworks.” “Mrs. Jim Jones was shopping in Vinland Saturday evening.” “Earnest George helped Henry Rhoe shock oats Saturday, but became ill and had to come home at noon.” And you thought Facebook was based on a new idea.
“Childless Families, Debauchery of Sex Arouse Clergyman”, was the unfortunate (or possibly mischievous) headline of a story published in the Milwaukee Journal on Aug. 24, 1937. This item, which originated from Buffalo, N.Y., reported on the comments of Rev. Dr. M. R. de Hann of Grand Rapids, Mich., decrying the declining numbers of large families. “Debauchery of sex and the sanctity of the home are driving America toward moral doom,” he told a conference.
Eighty-two years before the release of Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, Australians waited patiently to watch a real-life production of The Pornic Pranks of the Elite where members of the public lucky enough to get a seat in the court room could take in the details of Wallace vs. Wallace and Strong, Melbourne’s most colourful divorce case of 1907.
To make a long story short, Charles and Ruby Wallace were a couple of means in Melbourne, but certainly not a happy couple. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Charles had greeted the news that his wife was three months pregnant in 1901 with, “That is impossible, we have only been married six weeks.”
Mrs. Wallace took to partying without her husband, returning home late at night, and rarely waking up before midday. By 1906, she was making regular visits to a Melbourne doctor named Strong, who became the co-respondent in the Wallaces’ 1907 divorce case.
Are you a former employee or an old fan of CJAY, CKY, KCND or CKND? Have any interesting stories about what happened behind the scenes or on-air? Then The View from Seven wants to hear from you! Read on, and then share with us your stories and your memories in the comments section below! Comments never close, and the readers keep on coming week after week.
Dr. Andrew Stewart and his fellow members of the Board of Broadcast Governors (BBG) certainly couldn’t have been accused of going on a junket, arriving as they did in Winnipeg in the middle of January, 1960.
As the members of the BBG — which regulated Canada’s airwaves from 1958 to 1968 — and a crowd of observers gathered in a seventh floor meeting room at the Fort Garry Hotel, the city outside was enveloped in a dull, grey light freezing drizzle that started in the morning and continued into the mid-afternoon.
It was a good day to be indoors watching the meeting that was the talk of the town: the BBG’s public hearings which would determine who would be granted the valuable Channel 7 television licence that would finally break the CBC’s monopoly on Winnipeg television.
The people gathered at the Fort Garry Hotel that day represented a Who’s Who of Winnipeg society.
The first application was heard from R. S. Misener and Associates, backed by the Moffat family which owned Winnipeg’s CKY radio station, Investors Syndicate president T. O. Peterson and the owners of CKSB Radio in St. Boniface and CFAM Radio in Altona.
The proposed station could be “a potent and positive force in our society… exploring new frontiers of the mind… and bringing about all that is good in our cultural community,” Misener vowed to the Board, before going on to present a programming schedule that included game shows, five-pin bowling, cooking and sewing shows and a Saturday late night movie called “The Owl Prowl”.
The second application was presented by Red River Television, backed by Great-West Life chairman Joseph Harris, the Sifton and Richardson families, and Winnipeg Free Press publisher R. S. Malone. A morning “Breakfast Club” program based on NBC’s “Today” show would be the anchor program in the station’s schedule, along with local music and homemaker programs and a wide range of popular U.S. programs in prime-time.
The final application was presented by Perimeter Television, fronted by CJOB founder Jack Blick and supported by lawyer Graeme Haig and other investors. Perimeter was vague on how it would program its station – which presumably would have operated as CJOB-TV — aside from a promise that its newsreaders would deliver the news in “perfect English”.
Ultimately, the Misener application was given the green light.
Later, the BBG — staffed at the time by appointees of the Diefenbaker Conservative government — would face accusations that licences were given out based on political considerations.
The Misener group were reasonably discreet in terms of their political preferences, but could partisan considerations have cost Red River Television its chance at winning a TV licence, given the principals’ Liberal Party connections?
William Hull noted in his 1994 book on the history of the Board of Broadcast Governors that the accusations of partisan favouritism mainly swirled around the granting of a Toronto Channel 9 licence to a group led by John Bassett, a well-known Conservative; and in permitting CKVR-TV in Barrie, Ont., whose owner happened to be a former Liberal candidate, to expand its signal to cover the lucrative Toronto market later in the ’60s.
If there were any complaints about politics being a factor in determining the outcome of the Winnipeg hearings, they were discreet ones.
Hull concluded that some members of the Board who were in charge of choosing a licence winner were “actively involved in partisan political activities, and some clearly looked for some personal gain from this,” but also observed that if the Board’s decisions were political, board members were careful to leave no evidence behind.
Having presumably won the licence in January 1960 on the basis of merit — in the absence of any evidence to the contrary — the Misener group would have to work quickly to get their station on the air.
The reason: There was competition coming from south of the border.
In 1956, a group of investors associated with a Grand Forks radio station won permission from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to construct a new Channel 12 TV station in the tiny border town of Pembina, N.D.
Their goal, however, wasn’t to serve Pembina and the sparsely populated surrounding area. It was to serve Winnipeg audiences, 100 kilometres to the north, and hopefully make some money satisfying Canadians’ insatiable appetite for American TV programming.
The station was slow to get to air, though. It wasn’t until early 1959 — nearly three years after they were awarded the licence — that the serious work of building studios and erecting a tower got under way.
Now with a second Winnipeg station under construction at Polo Park, it became urgent for the Pembina operation to finally get up and running.
Thus began a mad race between the owners of Channel 7 and Channel 12 — which would become better known as CJAY-TV and KCND-TV later in the year — to beat the other station to air.
“The idea of KCND was to come into the (Winnipeg) market as the second station, but in the interim the licence was granted to CJAY, so they were building at the same time,” former KCND-CKND employee Dorothy Lien told the Winnipeg Free Press in 1989.
“It was a great race between the stations to see who would get their tower up [first],” she recalled. “I remember driving down to Pembina in September of 1960 to watch our antenna being mounted, and then driving back to Ste. Agathe to see that they were at the stage of getting theirs up, too.”
The race was as close as one got to a photo finish in the broadcasting industry.
On Sunday, Nov. 6, 1960, Winnipeggers noticed a test signal coming in from Pembina on Channel 12. On Monday, Nov. 7, the half-finished station went on air at 6 p.m. with a limited program selection, owing to the fact that the station was literally not yet connected to the ABC and NBC networks from which it would obtain most of its programming.
Given that the only other option in Winnipeg was to watch the CBC station, viewers weren’t exactly choosy.
Five days later, at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 12, 1960, CJAY-TV Channel 7 signed on from a brand-new studio next to Polo Park Shopping Centre.
Though CJAY had lost the race to air, it still had a decided advantage over its cross-border rival.
“We had very low power and very poor microwave [linking the station to the networks],” Lien told the Winnipeg Free Press in 1989. “We really didn’t make an impact for about six years. People didn’t have the antennas to bring in Channel 12.”
KCND had been modeled after KVOS-TV, a small outlet in Bellingham, Wash., just across the border from Vancouver, which discovered that there was big money to be made in buying programs at low Bellingham rates and selling advertising at high Vancouver-Victoria rates.
The practice was controversial, given that KVOS was at times selling advertising on programs for which a B.C. broadcaster had supposedly purchased “exclusive” rights; but it also made KVOS one of North America’s most profitable TV stations for a time.
But there was a critical difference between KVOS and KCND.
KVOS’s transmitter was only 70 kilometres from central Vancouver and just 45 kilometres from Victoria, close enough to put a strong and clear “Grade-A” signal into those communities, as it still does today.
KCND’s transmitter was 100 kilometres from central Winnipeg. Its “Grade-A” signal only went as far north as Niverville, beyond which ground clutter and weather tended to interfere with reception.
Given that there were no cable systems in Winnipeg at the time, it was an oversight on the part of the station’s owners that threatened to bankrupt the station.
“Our signal was never as strong in Winnipeg as our engineers thought it would be,” lamented Boyd Christenson, an early KCND announcer and program host who was interviewed by the Winnipeg Free Press in the mid ’80s. (* – see footnote)
“We weren’t getting the dollars we needed out of Winnipeg to sustain the station,” Christenson said, describing the station’s financially troubled early years.
The station’s fortunes dramatically improved after the arrival of cable TV in Winnipeg in the late ’60s.
KCND’s survival in the early years was no doubt driven by the fascination that many Manitobans had for the glamour of Kennedy-era America and a yearning for something different on their screens, which led to a cult following in Winnipeg.
“KCND was strictly bargain basement,” former Winnipeg resident Greg Klymkiw wrote in a June 2010 article for the Electric Sheep web site. “Though to kids, tired of fiddlers from Newfoundland and joyful Canucks winning useless pen and pencil sets on stupid Canadian TV, KCND was… AMERICA!”
“I kind of fell in love with KCND-TV Channel 12,” a commentator named Rob wrote to The View from Seven in November 2010. “For some reason the channel 12 logo was very cool!”
“My dad’s bedroom TV had only local stations, but he got channel 12 by installing an interior Channel 12 Antenna… sometime in ’71 or ’72 but we weren’t allowed to use his TV. My younger brother used to sneak in there and watch reruns of ‘Lost in Space’ at 6 PM while my dad was working evenings,” Rob wrote.
“Sometimes my dad called us to his bedroom to watch ‘Chiller Thriller’ at 10:30 PM Saturday night,” he added, referring to the station’s popular Saturday night horror movies.
On the Canadian side of the border, CJAY-TV was not only putting a cleaner signal into Winnipeg, but also benefitting from its ability to purchase programming from all three U.S. networks between its commitments to the CTV Network, which it joined as a founding member in 1961.
CJAY also had a wide range of local programs, many of them live. This made early local TV unpredictable and, at times, hilarious.
“One time we were doing a game show,” longtime CJAY-CKY employee Fred Harland told the Winnipeg Free Press in 1989. “And this truck driver walked right through the middle of the shot.”
“Of course, this was a live show. Everybody laughed, but nobody said anything, then two minutes later he came back the other way. I guess he was finished making his delivery.”
“So the host — I think it was Stew MacPherson — stopped him and said, ‘Sir, do you mind if we talk to you for a second?’”
“This guy didn’t know what was going on. So Stew walked over to him and said, ‘Do you know you’re on television right now — for the second time?’”
“And the guy looked right at the cameras and said, ‘My ol’ lady’s gonna — (expletive) when she sees this.’”
Pranks were also common. CJAY sportscaster Jack Wells was the victim of one prank where the telephone that was placed on the news set for decorative purposes started ringing while he was on the air.
“I just picked it up and said, ‘OK honey, I’ll be home for dinner in about 20 minutes,’” Wells told the Free Press in 1989.
“Videotape has made boy geniuses out of a lot of people,” former announcer and program host Al Johnson said in a 1980 special marking CJAY-CKY’s 20th anniversary. “But live television — that was the trick.”
“To be able to withstand two or three or five years of that was a killer. You’d end up in the booby hatch today. A lot of our good friends did. Hit the bottle…”
“Let’s not tell those stories, Al,” host Ray Torgrud interrupted.
Another favourite victim of pranksters at CJAY was “Uncle Bob” Swarts, who hosted a popular children’s show called Archie and his Friends from 1965 to 1986.
In the same May 1989 interview — just two weeks before Swarts’s death on June 9, 1989 — Harland recalled an on-air prank where one of the puppets, a dog named Petite, was the victim of a gunpowder-filled birthday cake that exploded as the puppet leaned over to blow out the candles.
“There was shrapnel flying everywhere. The dog was scorched and Uncle Bob’s eyebrows were singed… and after he cleared the smoke out of his lungs, Bob didn’t know what to say. So we went straight to commercial.”
In spite of the early bloopers and financial struggles, both stations survived.
The Moffat family, which owned CKY Radio for decades and were early investors in CJAY, bought out the station’s other owners in 1973. For consistency, the Moffats rebranded CJAY-TV as CKY-TV on June 1, 1973. The station remained in its original Polo Park studio until relocating to downtown Winnipeg in 2006.
Canwest Broadcasting, headed by Paul Morton, Izzy Asper and Seymour Epstein, took over KCND in late March 1975 and proceeded to consolidate the station’s Pembina, N.D. and Winnipeg studios (then located at Portage and Winchester in St. James, but deemed unsuitable for Canwest’s needs) under a single roof on St. Mary’s Road in St. Vital. The rebranded all-Canadian operation took to the air as CKND on Aug. 31, 1975.
As both stations celebrate their 50th anniversaries this week, take some time now to journey down memory lane. Then share your memories of local television in the comments section. (I’m particularly interested in hearing from former employees of CJAY, CKY, KCND or CKND as to what was best and worst about working at those stations.)
(* – Technically, it would have been possible for KCND or later KNRR to put a higher quality Grade-A signal into the southern half of Winnipeg, but they both erected their tower on the wrong side of the North Dakota-Minnesota border. According to the Radio Coverage Prediction utility on the Communications Research Centre Canada web site, a Channel 12 station running 220kW from a 600-metre tower on the higher terrain 30 kilometres east of Pembina would have put a Grade-A signal into Winnipeg. They could not have done this from the lowlands west of Pembina, where both stations located their 427-metre towers.)
CJAY-TV goes on the air, Nov. 1960 (Click to enlarge. Thanks to rob1961 for the file.)
An early CJAY-TV local game show called “Lucky Seven”, hosted by Al Johnson, believed to be from either 1960 or 1961 (Source: Archiewood)
“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!”, a pilot’s voice cried out over the radio on the afternoon of Thursday, July 8, 1965.
Far below, a witness watched in horror as the tail of the passenger aircraft separated and the debris — which included tiny, falling dots which the witness learned were passengers sucked out of the decompressing cabin — fell to earth.
From far away, air traffic controllers watched helplessly as the aircraft disappeared from their radar screens.
Evidence would show that someone had set off a bomb in the plane’s rear lavatory.
It was not a crime that happened in a troubled Third World country, nor to an airline associated with a dictatorial regime, nor on a prestigious route on which a bombing would get maximum media attention.
It happened right here in Canada, on a domestic flight from Vancouver to Prince George, B.C.
At 2:42 p.m. on July 8, 1965, Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 21, a DC-6B nicknamed Empress of the City of Buenos Aires — registration CF-CUQ –took off from Vancouver International Airport with Capt. John Steele at the controls. Five other crew members and 46 passengers were aboard this flight.
It was supposed to be a routine milk run through a series of isolated northern towns. The first stop would be at Prince George, followed by stops at Fort St. John, Fort Nelson and Watson Lake before concluding the trip at Whitehorse, Yukon.
Nothing seemed amiss for most of the first leg of the journey. The plane followed its flight plan route for about 45 minutes before changing course slightly to minimize turbulence.
At about 3:40 p.m., nearly an hour after taking off from Vancouver, the routine pattern of air traffic control communications was broken by a voice calling out “Mayday!” three times.
At the same time, a witness watched from the ground as the aircraft disintegrated in midair and crashed in a sparsely populated area, inhabited mainly by loggers and ranchers, about 30 kilometres west of 100 Mile House, B.C. There were no survivors.
Two Winnipeg residents were among the victims, listed on the passenger manifest as a Mr. and Mrs. Covello of 866 Borebank St. in River Heights.
Investigators would later find traces of potassium nitrate and carbon — the ingredients of gunpowder and stumping power — in the wreckage in the vicinity of the airplane’s rear lavatory, and tiny bits of shrapnel buried everywhere. Evidence of pre-crash damage to pipes and a bulkhead, and of a hole in the side of the fuselage, left investigators certain that they were dealing with a case of mass murder, not an accident.
Who would do such a thing, and why?
To this day — 45 years later — no one knows for sure.
The investigation would focus on four people.
One was a 40-year-old unemployed man who purchased $125,000 worth of flight insurance ($864,000 in 2010 dollars) less than half an hour before departure, naming his wife, daughter, mother and neice as beneficiaries. He was reportedly on his way to Prince George to go to work at a pulp mill, but when RCMP visited all of the pulp mills in the area, no one knew of the man or of any job offer.
Another was a 54-year-old passenger who had extensive experience working with explosives and who had been charged with a 1958 Vancouver murder. His reason for being on the flight was at least known, however: he was travelling on business using a ticket purchased for him by a construction firm.
A 29-year-old was also on his way north to accept a job offer. The one thing that did stand out to investigators was that he owned a considerable amount of gunpowder, the substance that investigators believe was used to blow up Flight 21. Four 11-ounce tins from his collection couldn’t be accounted for.
Finally, the least likely passenger to come to investigators’ attention was an accountant who had recently been involved in an audit of a failed financial services firm. Rumours circulated that he had been murdered because of potential far-reaching implications of what he knew, but the RCMP later discounted this theory.
In 1965, it would have been easy to bring weapons and explosives on to a passenger airliner. Security checkpoints weren’t established in the nation’s airports until the early ’70s, when a rash of hijackings finally forced change on the industry.
At the time, passengers simply checked in, walked to the gate and boarded the flight uninspected. Anything that could be brought on board a transit bus could be just as easily brought aboard an airliner. Airports had a less visible security presence than a modern-day shopping centre. The perception that flying was only for the well-to-do reinforced the feeling of complacency.
Forty-five years later, the case remains not only unsolved, but also largely forgotten. The only Canadian-linked aviation bombings that most Canadians have ever heard of were the two bombings believed to have been carried out by Sikh extremists in 1985, of an Air India 747 en route from Canada to India via the U.K. and, on the same day, of a baggage handling area at Tokyo’s Narita Airport by a bomb hidden in a suitcase that had just been taken off a CP Air flight. The bag in question was supposed to be transfered to another Air India flight.
Few have ever heard of Canadian Pacific Flight 21, or of a Canadian Pacific C-47 which was bombed out of the skies over Quebec in 1949 by a man who wanted to kill his wife so that he could collect the insurance money and marry his mistress.
The wreckage of Flight 21 still sits in the B.C. woods, a little over a kilometre east of what appears to be an isolated logging road. One man who hadn’t forgotten ventured out to the site some time back, where he found momentos left at the site by family members, who also haven’t forgotten.
It’s the August long weekend, which is pretty much the trough of the current affairs low season. It’s a good time, therefore, to put in a plug for some online movies worth checking out and for a couple of new entrants in the Winnipeg blogosphere.
Audrey Hepburn in "Wait Until Dark" (1967) (Click on image to watch)
If you’re interested in a good old-fashioned horror movie, be sure to check out the 1967 classic Wait Until Dark. A blind woman unwittingly finds herself in possession of a children’s doll stuffed with drugs, and has to outwit the three thugs trying to get it back. Audrey Hepburn was subsequently nominated for Best Actress for her role as Suzy Hendrix.
"The War Game" (1965) (Click image to watch)
Another rather chilling movie from about the same era is The War Game. Produced in 1965 as a BBC docudrama about the calamity that would result from a nuclear war — based on research on what happened in Japan following the 1945 attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in European cities engulfed in firestorms caused by WWII carpet-bombing campaigns — The War Game was deemed “too horrifying” to be aired until the mid-’80s. Though now tame by modern TV standards, it’s still a riveting drama.
Peter Finch in "Network" (1976) (Click image to watch)
In 1976, director Sidney Lumet’s new motion picture, Network, seemed like a far-fetched fantasy. After all, what network would be desperate enough to turn its evening newscast over to a ranting, delusional man in need of psychiatric care and give political extremists their own weekly prime-time network show? All these years later, Lumet and writer Paddy Chayefsky’s absurd movie about a TV network’s ruthless pursuit of ratings doesn’t seem so far-fetched after all. It won four Oscars, including Best Actor and Best Actress in a Leading Role.
"Le Dîner de cons" (1999) (Click on image to watch)
Before (or after) seeing Dinner for Schmucks, currently one of the most heavily promoted summer comedies, be sure to check out the French movie on which it was based — Le Dîner de cons (English title: The Dinner Game). A Chinese web site has thoughtfully posted the entire movie with English subtitles. As is usually the case, the Hollywood remake (given a 51% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) is considered inferior to the French original (with a 73% rating).
William Holden and Larry Hagman in "S.O.B." (1981) (Click on image to watch)
Finally, if you have a soft spot for black comedy, check out 1981′s S.O.B., Blake Edwards’ satire of the motion picture industry. Though it falls a bit flat in parts, other parts are laugh-out-loud funny — which is more than can be said for many Hollywood comedies.
Now, on to a couple of recent entrants to the blogosphere worth checking out. The first is from CBC reporter James Turner, who writes about local crime and justice issues in The Crime Scene. And if you’re interested in local history, check out Robert Galston’s The Common, which focuses on the people and streets of Point Douglas that played a major role in Winnipeg’s rise from a mere village to Canada’s eighth-largest metropolitan area.
As a somewhat compulsive reader, a weekly tradition of mine is to read the Winnipeg Real Estate News. In addition to taking a glance at a historical piece about the violent 1906 streetcar strike of a century ago, and marvelling at how a condo on William Avenue near the Health Sciences Centre costs more today than a condo in far more desirable River Heights or Charleswood cost a decade ago, my eye happened to wander across Allen Willoughby’s column.
This week, Allen took readers down Memory Lane with tidbits about life in the “olden days”.
All your male teachers wore neckties and female teachers had their hair done every day and wore high heels
You always got your windshield cleaned, oil checked and gas pumped
It was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner at a real restaurant with your parents
They threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed — and they did
No one ever asked where the car keys were because they were always in the ignition and the car doors were never locked
Willoughby’s article was, of course, for entertainment value and was in no way meant to be a comprehensive look back at the old days.
Were the ”good old days” really all that great, though?
I can’t speak to that personally, not having lived through that era. There is reason to believe, however, that in many ways we’re better off today.
Remember when we had more funerals for people killed in automobile accidents? Road transportation is safer today than it has been in many years. For example, Japan Today reported on Jan. 2, 2010 that, for the first time since 1952, fewer than 5,000 people were killed in motor vehicle accidents in Japan in 2009. That’s less than half the number of people killed on Japanese roads in 1959 (when fatalities topped 10,000 for the first time) and less than one-third the 1970 number (when 16,765 people were killed in their worst year on record).
Remember when travelling overseas was only for the rich, or a once-in-a-lifetime excursion? In October 1956, Trans-Canada Air Lines (the forerunner of Air Canada) advertised a seat sale that, if you booked quickly, allowed you to fly Montreal-London round trip for the rock-bottom price of $416 — the equivalent of $3,410 in 2010 dollars. Today’s best price for a non-stop Montreal-London round trip, departing July 3 and returning July 17: $1,176 rising to $1,583 after taxes, fees and surcharges. Or you can make the round-trip today in Executive Class for $3,225 after taxes, fees and surcharges – $185 less than TCA’s lowest inflation-adjusted 1956 price.
Remember when the only choice you had on television was “on” or “off”? The CBC held a monopoly on television in Winnipeg until 1960. Cable television didn’t arrive with its bounty of seven channels to watch — yes, only seven! — until the late ’60s.
If you were born in the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s, it’s not likely that you would remember any of these things — or even heard of them until now.
Let’s face it: every decade and every era had its problems. It will be interesting to be alive in 40 years time and to see how people look back on our times.
Certainly, our times are not perfect. Our standard of living, however, is still generally very, very good compared to the past.
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