A distinguished gentleman

Gerry Charron: A man
of high achievement

Gerry Charron was a distinguished man, a man of high achievement.

When he was still at a very tender age, Gerry took over the family business after his father died. Later, by dint of dedication and a keen work ethic, he earned his stripes as a materials manager for the Ford Motor Company. He was respected and trusted gentleman.

But there can be no doubt what Gerry Charron would consider the greatest of his many achievements: a successful marriage that would have marked the beginning of its 62^nd year this Valentine’s Day; and, with the help of his wife and partner Mollie, raising six children. Moreover, he sent all six of those kids out into the world armed with an education and, perhaps even more important, a set of values that each of them today continues to instill in their own children and grandchildren — and that the rest of us who knew him would do well to emulate.

Gerry was also a God-fearing man, a Christian, and a faithful Catholic. Anyone who slipped into a church pew at St. Anne’s in Walkerville or St. Joseph the Worker would have heard his melodious baritone giving voice to the most heavenly hymns. He devoted himself to the church choir just as he devoted himself to his faith.

Adapting the tenets of one’s faith to the evolving values of one’s own conscience, values that can be tested by your own family, might prove difficult for some people. Not for Gerry. He was a man of boundless love and great compassion, two qualities at the core of both his faith and his values.

His daughter Vicki well remembers the time she learned she was pregnant with her first child, Carson. For Vicki, it was the fulfillment of a long-held dream. Still, she worried how her father, this man she adored so unreservedly, would take to the news. After all, at the time she was still single and living with a man who had been married before. How would her dad react to this news?

Vicki needn’t have worried. When she finally screwed up the courage to share her news, she looked up into his eyes and said, “Daddy, I’m going to have a baby.” He returned her gaze, an eyebrow ever so slightly arched, and then a smile came across his face. “Are you?” he said. “Honey, that’s wonderful.”

And really, that is just but one example of the beneficence and unconditional love Gerry continually showed his children, and the families that they in turn would raise. He was often heard to say family always came first, and it has been one of the more valuable lessons many of us have learned at his knee.

It is at times like this we often pause and reflect on our own lives and how miserably some of us fail to measure up in comparison to this man. In that regard, Gerry set the bar pretty high. He was extraordinary, and blessed with many gifts that he never hesitated to share, be it with his family or with the wider world.

And now, each member of that family is left to make their way in this world without him. But, thank God, they will not be without his guiding hand. For all of them will go out into that world equipped with those gifts he shared so selflessly: his compassion, his capacity for forgiveness, his fondness for laughter and a good meal, and his unbounded ability to both love and to accept love. And each of them, and all of us, will go on from here comforted by the knowledge that love is the answer. Love is always the answer, no matter the question.

Gerry Charron taught us that.

Cold and damn cold

Edmonton in autumn:
it doesn’t get any better

Maybe you’ve heard of Stockholm Syndrome. If you haven’t, I’ll do my best to explain it here without going into minute — and thus, boring — detail.

Stockholm Syndrome holds that people held against their will quickly come to realize they rely wholly on their captors for their well-being. Over time, that reliance transforms into empathy, affection, even love.

Patty Hearst, the kidnapped newspaper heiress-turned-domestic terrorist, was a documented victim of Stockholm Syndrome. Peter Pocklington claimed he suffered from it, too, when he was taken hostage. Small groups can be similarly affected. Probably a most striking example was the staff of a bank in Stockholm that gave the syndrome its name. Many of the female tellers grew so attached to their captors during the six days and nights they spent together under siege in a bank vault that they actively engaged in sexual activity.

It has been posited that Stockholm Syndrome can affect not just individuals and small groups but larger groups as well. It is my argument that an entire community — even one that is home to more than a million people — can fall under its spell.

Say hello to Edmonton, Alberta.

Edmonton is an utterly charming city located on the edge of Canada’s boreal forest, within a two-hour drive of the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. And despite its preponderance of Soviet-era architecture — both in appearance and vintage — Edmonton was built amidst a wild, natural setting and at times can be breathtakingly gorgeous.

Edmonton is a lovely place to visit — and most certainly a wonderful place to live and raise a family — for about five months of the year. Summer in Edmonton is a delight; not too hot, not at all humid and, if it’s a dry summer, there are no mosquitoes or other airbound pests. Autumn presents the city at its best. The fall colours from its canopy of elms and ashes, the crisp air, and the bright sunshine all combine to offer resident and visitor alike a delightful reminder of the city’s charms.

As for the other seven months, well, those charms are not so evident. Visually, spring is the worst. Once the snow is gone, the city is slow to green. The resulting brown landscape is unrelentingly bleak. Then there is the litter. Snow is on the ground for more than six months of the year. Once it melts, what remains is half-a-year’s worth of litter, as well as six months of accumulated sand, left behind by city work crews who dumped load after load in an effort to make snowbound roads passable. Edmonton in the spring is, to put it kindly, the highest branch on the ugly tree.

Then there is winter, the season on which I base my assertions about Stockholm Syndrome.

It’s not just the snow. The snow can be charming. Edmonton does not endure blizzards. What comes instead is gentle snowfall that is reminiscent of a Currier and Ives Christmas card. The only drawback is that once is starts snowing, it doesn’t stop for three days. And that is not an exaggeration.

Nor is it the cold, though cold it can be. On most winter days, the sun shines brilliantly in a cloudless sky. You cannot help but marvel at how it can be so bright and so cold at the same time.

No, the problem is not winter. The problem is that there is so much of it. The first snowfall usually comes before Halloween. It’s usually there to stay by the first week of November. And it is still on the ground in late April, well into May in shady areas. Daylight is in depressingly short supply. Through December and January, when the city feels most like a Siberian outpost, you go to work in the dark and return home the same way. By the time the winter solstice officially arrives on Dec. 21, Edmonton has already endured close to two months of winter.

After all that, the cold is simply adding insult to injury. Frosty temperatures linger in Edmonton when most of the rest of the northern hemisphere is revelling in autumn or awakening to spring. As for the months in between, you need only look at one of those colour-coded weather maps. See that large blob of purple that creeps down from the polar region? More often than not, Edmonton is smack-dab in the middle of it. Sadly, it is often the only major North American city enduring temperatures so frigid that they are the same whether measured in Fahrenheit or Celsius.

I can remember once flying from Edmonton to Palm Springs, where I live now. Our flight’s departure was delayed for two hours. It was too cold to de-ice the plane. Maintenance crews had to wait until it “warmed up” to minus 35 to apply the aircraft-saving goo. Ugh.

Longtime Edmontonians will tell you the best way to endure winter is to embrace it, and there is a certain logic to that. You can’t stay indoors all the time. But they make a game of how best to “survive” winter, and take a great pride in doing so. I know this, because for 16 and-a-half winters I shared this pride. I only threw in the scarf after I discovered my angina meant that if I wanted to keep living, I would no longer be able to put up with sub-Arctic nights and bone-chilling curling rinks. It meant getting the hell out of Dodge.

It was only after I removed myself from the isolation of an Edmonton winter that I realized this survival strategy so many Edmontonians employ is, in a word, perverse. In two words: really perverse. The best of human existence should not be measured by our ability to “survive.” As my daughter points out, survival is not something you aspire to. It should serve only as the baseline of your existence. After all, if we need only drink water to survive, why drink beer?

For close to seven months of the year, winter is Edmonton’s captor and for all that time, Stockholm Syndrome-afflicted Edmontonians appease it, co-exist with it and some, dare I say it, love it. Yet just because humans can endure an Edmonton winter doesn’t mean they should revel in their suffering.

I read somewhere once that Edmonton, which is home to 1.2 million hearty souls, is Canada’s best-kept secret, yet it’s a secret with an identity problem. The author suggested twice as many people would call the city home if only something could be done about the bloody winters. As a columnist in the Edmonton Journal for a dozen years, I understood such thinking. I once suggested in print that the city’s slogan should be: “Edmonton: Not as bad as you think.”

Nowadays, civic boosters are promoting a more positive spin on that saying: “Edmonton: Cooler than you think.” Yeah, it’s cute all right, but it’s also a declaration of unconditional surrender to winter, its cruel jailer. Alas, those bank tellers in Stockholm might have approved.

Call me Rocky

For most of my life, I’ve been a pretty determined fellow. That has not always served me well, however. Take the time when I was nine. That was the year I decided I wanted to change my name — to Rocky.

No, not that Rocky

Growing up, I was never a big fan of the name Terry. I’ve grown more accustomed to it over time, having the benefit of its use for 60-plus years. In fact, its distinctiveness probably suits my contrarian nature. But when I was nine? Ugh. Terry didn’t suit my self-image as an independent young man — well, as independent as a nine-year-old can be. Not even the fact I was a goaltender in minor hockey and one of the greatest goalies of that era was Terry Sawchuk, could dissuade me. I just figured Sawchuk surely hated his name as much as I hated mine.

But Rocky? Why Rocky? Well, it was in honour of my first true boyhood hero, the great left fielder for the Detroit Tigers, Rocco Domenico (Rocky) Colavito Jr.

I grew up in a small white-bread Ontario town so I understood nothing about ethnicity, Italian or otherwise. All I knew was that Rocky Colavito was about the coolest-sounding name ever and if I could be called Rocky, too, maybe some of that coolness would rub off on me.

Yet Rocky Colavito was cool for more than just his name. He had just come off his best season ever: 129 runs on 169 hits, 140 RBIs, a .290 average and a .402 on-base percentage. Players today would kill for numbers like that. Moreover, the Tigers had managed a pretty good season themselves: 101 wins, which in most seasons would be pennant-worthy. Alas, it was 1961, the year the Yankees, an even more formidable team, won 109 games behind Roger Maris’s 61 home runs and Mickey Mantle’s 54. The Tigers, sigh, finished eight games back.

The only games in which the Tigers regularly trounced the powerful Yankees were in my imagination, as I played the game I loved by myself, in the parking lot of the school across the street, equipped with nothing more than a ball and a bat.

My hero, Rocky Colavito

Like my father, who grew up as the only boy on a farm, I was skilled at keeping myself entertained. And certainly, on those endless summer afternoons, I would create entire nine-inning games in my head, the Tigers usually the victors against the best of the rest of the American League. My mother and my sisters would sometimes watch from across the street, and wonder how it was that I could miss the ball so many times with my swings. What they didn’t realize was that they were watching the Yankees at bat. When the Tigers were at the plate, their bats were mighty indeed and the ball sailed to the outer regions of the parking lot. The Tigers had many great players on those magnificent afternoons: Al Kaline, Stormin’ Norman Cash, Dick McAuliffe, Charlie Maxwell, and with the great Jim Bunning, Frank Lary and Hank Aguirre on the mound. But always, always, it was Rocky Colavito who led them to victory.

So it was that with a supreme confidence that defied all logic, even for a nine-year-old, I gamely announced to my mother one day that henceforth, I wished to be known as Rocky. She was indulgent, as mothers are with their little boys, but damn if she didn’t keep getting it wrong and calling me Terry. My dad didn’t even try. He didn’t have to. If he was speaking to me, he called me “Son.” If he was talking about me, I was “the lad” … as in, “What the hell is the lad talking about?”

At my insistence, my mother did inform my Grade 4 teacher of my sudden name change and, surprisingly, she agreed to share the news with the class. Yet the teacher, too, kept getting the name wrong, even after I would correct her.

“It’s Rocky,” I’d say when she called on me.

“Fine,” she’d say, then five minutes later get it wrong again.

As for the rest of the kids … well, they were all nine, too. How do you think they reacted?

So, to my not insignificant regret, the name Rocky did not stick. I had failed in reinventing myself in the image of Rocky Colavito and henceforth faced the disturbing realization that for better or worse, I would be stuck with Terry.

Still, my devotion to the Tigers continued for many years to come. Twenty or so years later, my father gave me a Tigers jacket for Christmas. It still fits like a glove — as does my enduring affection for Rocky Colavito.

Sunday newspapers

Newspapers have been in financial difficulty for about as long as my recent memory can recall.

Not all newspapers, of course. Most of the large metro dailies that have been in the news lately because of the financial challenges they face have only recently begun to feel the effects of declining revenues, smaller page counts and shrinking news holes.

But the canaries in the newspapering mine, the community weeklies, have been taking financial body blows for the better part of two decades. It was in the early 1990s that national advertisers — the large retailers who gradually took control of the retail landscapes on Everytown’s main street — began steering their valuable ad dollars away from hometown newspapers and into flyers and the Pennysaver-type publications that often came with them.

I was there. I got to watch it happen.

Admittedly, there is little correlation between the sort of financial distress that resulted for weeklies then and the calamity facing huge metro dailies now, except for one thing: Both cases provide textbook examples that once-successful business models can break and, when they do, chaos and ruin follow. I was unfortunate enough to experience that in both situations — first as a community newspaper publisher liquidating everything I had in a futile attempt to survive, then as one of the worker bees tossed over the side by a metro daily looking to do the same.

Last year, I suggested to a friend who is a newsroom executive at the Toronto Star that I thought the newsprint version of the daily newspaper could be dead within 10 years. He thought that viewpoint too pessimistic. It would take a generation, he responded.

At the time, I bowed to his greater wisdom. Upon reflection, I am no longer sure I was wrong.

In recent years, we have seen the demise of two once-great newspapers: the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The latter continues only in a digital format. The Chicago Tribune retreated into bankruptcy protection, taking some of its more robust titles, including the Los Angeles Times, with it. Even the venerated Boston Globe appeared threatened.

More recently, we have seen the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Orleans Times-Picayune announce a retreat in its print schedule from daily to three days a week, and Postmedia spike the Sunday editions of its newspapers in Edmonton, Ottawa and Calgary.

All of these developments, recent past and present, are accompanied by significant job losses in newsrooms and elsewhere in newspaper operations. Young people who aspire to lifelong careers in journalism, even those already gainfully employed in many of these newsrooms, are quickly coming to the realization a Plan B might be prudent.

The executives who run these companies — most of whom, it should be noted, bear no similarity to the newspaper barons of old but, rather, come from the more generic ranks of accounting and business schools — see the economic fortunes of their titles tied to the digital age. If only, they reason, the revenue lost from the printed product can be retrieved from the online version. To that end, they envision the day when newly installed paywalls on their news sites will generate revenue, while they cut their losses by tossing assorted print products out of the boat.

Well, good luck with that. I have some experience with this sort of thing, and this is what I see.

• Killing Sunday newspapers is foolhardy. Sunday is the one day a week when many people have time to read a printed newspaper. To deny them that opportunity is to break them of the habit of reading a printed newspaper altogether. As strategies go, it only serves to hasten the newsprint-free era these executives seek to delay.

• If there is an economic model for daily newspapers that still works, it likely can be found in providing a service that is marketable but not found elsewhere: long-form journalism. Leave the breaking news to the TV networks and online news sites. Print products are uniquely well-suited for providing background and context, and what better day to do that than on Sunday?

• Not every newspaper product needs to be its own profit centre. If there is a common rationale for killing a Sunday newspaper but keeping the often skimpier, more barren Monday edition, it is because Monday still makes money. Yet it is the Sunday paper that builds the brand and provides a critical part of the circulation that keeps the newspaper in front of its potential customers. It is, in a word, advertising. Newspapers never made any money from publishing TV guides all those years, either, but those products built circulation because people bought the papers to find out what was on TV that week. As a result, newspaper publishers were able to charge more on those days for their papers and for the advertising in them. TV guides have outlived their usefulness, but the principle still holds.

None of this is going to be easy. It’s unsettling. Our democracy depends on the free flow of ideas and an informed citizenry. Yet an important component of that — the good old-fashioned newspaper — is being choked to death by a marketplace that places little value on it. So be it.

Nevertheless, the demand, the desire, for information is still there. Some might even argue that demand is greater than ever. If that is true, then newspapers can survive, even thrive, if they are smart, if they are innovative, about how they adapt. So far, the people who run the newspaper industry are showing little evidence they are up to the task.

Dad

This is the eulogy I wrote for my former father-in-law, who died in November 2010 in Dundas, Ontario:

My thanks to the family for giving me this opportunity to speak.

My name is Terry McConnell, I live in Edmonton, Alberta, and I have known Sumio Motomura for 37 years. For 15 of those years, he was my father-in-law -- but through them all, in my heart, he has always been "Dad."

He had barely turned 40 when we first met. I was the fresh-faced kid who was dating his teenage daughter, and I don't think Dad was too impressed with me at first. I do remember what broke the ice, though. One night I was feeling the rather painful effects of a nasty infection and Kim asked Dad if he would take me to the hospital. He paused, thought about it for a few seconds, finally said, "All right," and off we went. I don't remember if we talked much on the drive, but when we arrived at the emergency ward, I discovered I was out of cigarettes -- we were both smokers in those days, much to Mother Edith's continuing dismay -- and I asked him if I could have one. He gave me his pack. A few days later, after I was feeling better, he asked me to meet him in a local pub for a few beers. I think his motivation was to determine my intentions toward his daughter, but he and I had such a good time, I don't even remember if we got around to talking about it.

What I do remember, though, is the gratitude I felt as Dad, Mother, Linda and the boys came to embrace me as as a member of their family. I also remember the sacrifices they made so Kim and I could marry. Dad had been going to school every summer to upgrade his teaching credentials but the summer we tied the knot, he took a job instead to help pay for the wedding. I don't know if I ever did thank him for that.

Dad and I spent a lot of time together in the years that followed and he was an enormously positive influence on me. He made me a better man. He also tried to make me a better golfer -- though sadly, none of his talent for the sport rubbed off on me. He got me interested in curling, too; it's a passion I continue to indulge to this day. we did a gazillion other things together, too: from football games in Detroit to family vacations to embarking on home improvement projects where he was a much better manager than I was a flunkey.

Those projects were but an example of all the things he and Mother did for Kim and I -- far too many things for me to enumerate here. So I was pretty happy about what we could help give them in return -- grandchildren.

I can still hear the delight in Dad's voice the night I called to tell him he was about to become a grandfather for the first time. That fall, on the morning after Shannon was born, he and Mother drove down to the hospital in Chatham so they could make their introductions. Kim had a caesarian -- pretty major surgery -- and she wasn't moving much. So I took Dad down to the maternity ward to show him his new granddaughter. I'll never forget this. He smiled, shook his head, and said only one word: "Fantastic!"

I discovered when Shannon was born that there is such a thing as love at first sight. You could tell Dad felt the same way.

Rare is the circumstance when you can honestly say your father-in-law is also one of your best friends, yet I could say that about Dad in the years we spent together. Everyone in the family will tell you the same thing I'm about to share now. He had this way about him -- a certain generosity of spirit we all admired and wished we could find within ourselves. You knew he was proud of you even though he might never say the words. There was this twinkle in his eye and a certain way of showing confidence in you that helped you find confidence in yourself. It was the way he introduced you to his friends and the way he would always, always make that little extra effort to let you know you were important to him.

Dad was the type of person I have always aspired to be. He was kind and compassionate, considerate and thoughtful, empathetic and slow to anger -- though he certainly faced enough provocation in his life. He certainly loved to Laugh. Most of all, though, I think Dad had a grace about him that we would all do well to emulate.

Few are the men I have loved deeply in this life. My own father comes to mind, my grandfathers, certainly the men my own two sons, Mac and Jamie, have grown to become. But my heart will always hold a special place for Sumio (Monty) Motomura. His was a tender, loving heart. There is a tombstone in Ireland that bears this inscription: "Death leaves a heartache no one can heal; Love leaves a memory no one can steal." I find comfort in that. May the dearest man I have ever known be at peace; and for the rest of our days, may we all show the love he so generously shared with us.

Loss of the artful nude

I am a storyteller -- by nature and by profession. It is what I am and what I do.

Truth be told, I have a catalogue of life stories that I regularly mine -- primarily for the benefit of my children, and usually because they contain life lessons I wish to impart. I share this with you now because the subject of this essay is just one of those stories. As is often the case, it might take me a while to get to the point, so I shall not dally any longer.

Shortly after my 17th birthday, I walked into the drug store in the small town where I grew up and began to peruse the magazines on display there. One in particular caught my eye. The photo on the cover was of a comely young lass wearing a T-shirt inscribed with the words, "Student Power." She was pulling up the shirt to reveal her tummy and, enticingly, the lower part of a bare breast. On her tummy was painted the symbol of a bunny head.

Yup, the magazine was Playboy.

In a rare flash of courage, perhaps emboldened by teenage lust, I picked up that September 1969 copy of Playboy and took it to the grandmotherly type behind the counter. She looked at me askance, the way you would envision grandmotherly types looking at you if you were 17 and buying a package of condoms. After all, she knew me, she knew my father, she knew my mother and was certainly more accustomed to me buying a comic book than a girlie magazine. But she rang up the transaction anyway and I left the store with my first Playboy firmly in my grasp.

It was one of those adolescent rites of passage.

To be sure, I was 17 and curious, yet I was not uneducated in the female form. My father kept an old calendar in our basement, by the furnace, that depicted a painting of a young undraped woman who absolutely radiated beauty and grace. My brother and I discovered it quite by accident when we were probably no more than nine or 10, and from time to time we would furtively examine -- study might be the better word -- this fine example of the artful nude.

In retrospect, that is what the photos in Playboy were providing -- artful nudes for the masses. These women were perfect in every respect, thanks to the judicious use of makeup, complimentary lighting and the magic of airbrushing. We knew they weren't real. They were subjects of art -- and we appreciated them as such.

That's why I was in for a bit of a shock the first time I picked up what can only be described as a pornographic magazine. It was at a friend's house a year or two later when most of the kids my age were moving out of their parents' homes and embarking on new lives.

Quite frankly, I was shocked by what I saw. Sure, the girls depicted in those pages were naked, but they weren't nudes if you follow my thinking. They weren't given the benefit of makeup and complimentary lighting. There was no airbrushing. These girls had zits and hair growing in places where maybe it shouldn't be growing. Their teeth weren't perfectly straight. Some weren't even all that pretty. But what was really shocking was what they were doing -- either to some submissive male, or to another female or perhaps to themselves. This wasn't an appreciation of the naked form, I thought. This was a gynecological exam.

There was an artless debasement to be found in these pages that I decided then and there wasn't for me.

Porn was not easily accessible in those days, so a resolution to avoid it was easy to make. Instead, I would continue to be a loyal Playboy reader -- which, ironically, didn't prove too difficult. Once I had brought my first copy home, I rarely had to buy Playboy again. My father, figuring if his kid could buy Playboy, so could he, began to bring home the monthly issue.

But I digress.

Fast forward 40 years. Today's Playboy has lost many of the loyal readers it once enjoyed -- including me, I admit -- and is slowly going broke. I won't be surprised if it fails to survive its iconic founder, Hugh Hefner. Porn, on the other hand -- due largely to the Internet -- is a lot tougher to ignore.

This is worrisome. Playboy in its heyday was the primer for the sophisticated, erudite male. Its pages offered the reader a joyful, albeit hedonistic lifestyle: how to successfully interact with others, how to be polite, what to wear and not wear, what drinks to sample, what music and literature would broaden your horizons, the virtues of personal hygiene. Most important of all, it taught you how to treat women: with class, with dignity, with sensitivity and humour and, yes, with a graceful love. What could be more seductive?

Porn does none of that. Porn is a vulgarity; it might as well depict two dogs fucking.

Yet porn is everywhere.

A friend of mine -- a learned traveller and writer -- says if you click at random on as few as five successive web links, you will end up on a porn site. Enter the name of someone famous in a search engine and you will instantly be given a menu of porn to choose from, even if it is just the famous person's face badly photoshopped onto someone else's body. Believe it or not, there is even cartoon porn these days. Bugs Bunny must spin in his grave.

Non-existent is the porn site that serves up anything remotely approaching an erotic appreciation of nudity as art. Like the mags of the 1970s, what is instead predominant are the graphic gynecological exams. Well, no thanks.

Maybe I feel this way because sometime after my 17th birthday, I turned into an old fart. But I don't think it's as simple as that. I think we have lost something as a society in the past half-century. These days, we have become so desensitized to the stuff that is circulated for mass consumption -- be it on the Internet, in movies, even on television -- that when a graphic account of sexual activity is put on a public platform, people barely notice. Well, maybe they should.

You can learn nothing about healthy relationships from pornography. It will not teach you understanding, empathy, compassion, forgiveness or love. Hell, it won't even teach you technique. All it can show you is humanity in, literally, the worst possible light.

The Playboy bunny, with his devotion to grace, art and the virtues of good lighting, would not understand.