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.

My cousin Lyell

As you grow older, the people you’ve known since childhood grow fewer in number. Certainly you expect to lose those dear souls who first welcomed you into this world -- your grandparents, your parents, aunts and uncles. It is, after all, the way things are supposed to be.

It’s a different sense of loss, though, when you grieve those with whom you have shared a lifetime’s experiences. That’s why it is so difficult now to say goodbye to Lyell McKinnon.

Lyell is my cousin. More importantly, he has been my friend -- my earnest, steadfast and loyal friend -- for my whole life. Knowing he is gone is hard enough. Understanding that he is gone, accepting that he is gone, is heartbreaking.

Because we are cousins, I never used to think of Lyell as my best friend -- because I always thought your cousin can’t be your best friend any more than your brother or your father can be. Now that I’m older, I understand more clearly that your best friend can be anybody. Your best friend is that person who understands you when no one else seems to, who supports you when no one else wants to, who challenges you when no one is inclined to, who accepts you when no one else is willing to and who lets you know they love you when you think no one else does.

For me, for many years, that person was Lyell McKinnon.

I can’t tell you my first memory of Lyell. He was always just there. But I remember like it was yesterday the carefree summer holidays spent at his family’s home in Lambeth, the excitement we shared on every single Christmas day from the time I was a toddler to probably the year I was first married. There are too many memories to recall here of the times we shared on our grandparents’ farm, along with my brother Michael and our cousin Ross. They rush into my mind like water through a floodgate. It’s all too much to sort out and reflect upon.

What is clearer to me, though, are the memories from our teen years. Lyell and I always had many shared interests, even into our adolescence, and that is a rare thing indeed for children to experience. We were as close to each other in our late teens sitting in Varsity Stadium, listening to performances by John Lennon and the Doors, as we were as pre-teens on a camping trip through the Maritimes and New England with his mom and dad, as we were as little kids, shooting ants in the driveway with garden hoses.

I was telling Lyell’s brother Doug the other night when we spoke on the phone about the day I drove to Hamilton to find an apartment for school. I first swung by the McKinnon home in Thornhill to see if Lyell wanted to come with me. I strolled into his bedroom unannounced and asked if he felt like going for a drive. Immediately, Lyell was good to go. He was always good to go. He helped me find an apartment, too -- and we returned to Thornhill with a sense of satisfaction in a job well done.

It was only marriage and the time-consuming responsibilities of children that ultimately meant we spent less time together. Then geography took its toll. I guess it still does -- 4,000 kilometres will do that. But our bond was never really broken. Nor will it now. Lyell and I always stayed in touch. I always admired how, whenever he sent me a note, he would sign it, “Love, from Lyell.” Love can be a loaded word for men to share. I wish it wasn’t so. But I always responded in kind and I’m glad now that I did -- for I love Lyell. I will always love Lyell. He has been, and always will be, my best friend.

Take care, Lyell. Love, from Terry.

Saving Shannon

A life without burdens is a life without regrets — and we all have regrets, no matter what Frank Sinatra said. No adult is that carefree. Granted, some people may carry their burdens as lightly as we would a bag of feathers; yet there are others who are so bowed by the weight, they can barely function.

Like most people, I would probably place myself somewhere between the two. I have come to appreciate my burdens. I am not particularly fond of them, but they are mine. Most are the result of mistakes I have made that led to failures in my life, some of them complete, ruinous failures. But my failures, perhaps even more than my successes, have shaped who I am today — and frankly, I like who I am today. I say that despite the fact my appearance seems to have aged dramatically in the past five years, and not for the better. Some people look more seasoned and mature as they age. I just look old — but that’s fodder for another essay.

I consider myself fortunate there are few things that really cause me to lose sleep, or awaken me in the grip of an anxiety attack. And by a “few,” I mean one. Truth be known, that one event in my life is so terrifying to recall that to even think about it as I write this causes me to pause, shake my head and whisper “Thank God” under my breath.

Here’s the strange thing about it: This event, this life burden that stays with me and sometimes terrifies me so, was not a mistake, nor did it lead to failure. Quite the contrary, it was probably the single most noteworthy success of my life. But I also realize that success was the result of fate more than guile. What scares me most is realizing how easily that event could have unfolded in a different way, a horribly wrong way because of a lapse in my judgment. Had that happened, I don’t know how I ever would have lived with myself.

It was the spring of 1980. My then wife Kim and I were living in southwestern Ontario and had moved into a new home only a few months before. Our oldest child, Shannon, was barely 15 months old at the time and she was a going concern. By that, I don’t mean to suggest she was difficult or a handful because she wasn’t. Quite the opposite. Shannon was, in a word, delightful — the apple of her Daddy’s eye. For that matter, she still is.

But Shannon had learned to walk and had therefore developed a keen appreciation for exploration and there was much in this house to explore. Kim and I had already discussed this development and she had identified a few troubles spots around our new home that needed to be baby-proofed.

One of the most perilous was the sump pump well in the laundry room. Sump pumps are not common in the West; so let me explain what’s involved. The well is a hole in the floor of the basement, usually half-filled with water and in which an electric pump is placed. Its job is to pump water away from the house’s foundation. If it fails — as this sump pump once did during a power blackout — and it rains, the basement floods.

Kim pointed to the open well and suggested the baby could fall in. I assured her I would do something to block it off. But I didn’t. I don’t know why. As a young man — I was 27 then — I was less focused, less diligent, less conscientious than I like to think I am now.

Days passed and we both forgot about our discussion, or at least forgot about doing something about it. And so it came to pass that one night Kim and I were in the basement rec room watching television. She was seated. I was standing — I don’t remember why — when I heard the sound of splashing water. I turned to Kim.

“Did you hear that?” I asked.

“Hear what?” she replied, distracted by the TV program.

“Sounds like water,” I said, my voice trailing off. But something, somewhere, told me not to ignore that noise. “Go,” the feeling said. “Go now!”

I took the dozen or so steps down the hall, past the bathroom and the toilet that would have been the logical source of the splashing. Instead, I kept going until I reached the darkened laundry room and flicked on the light. All I saw were two little legs protruding from the hole in the floor. My little girl had fallen into the well, head first.

I don’t think my feet touched the floor as I raced across the room, grabbed her by the ankles, and yanked her out. I can still remember the look on Shannon’s face as I enveloped her in my arms: the wide eyes, the gasp for air. Thank God Almighty; she had instinctively held her breath while she was underwater and waiting to be rescued.

I don’t even remember if she cried. If she did, it may have been because she sensed how terrified her father was. But I took my daughter to her mother and she was fine after that. She needed a bath; sump-pump water is not pleasant, but she was no worse for wear; nor did she develop a fear of water. By the time she was five, Shannon was in a swim class with kids twice her age.

It’s been almost 30 years since that night. Shannon is married and has two children of her own. I am very proud of her and the life she has made for her family.

But there are nights — more nights than I care to admit — when I awaken with dread; or when I am about to fall asleep and my mind drifts back to that evening. On such occasions, I am so terrified by the prospect of what might have been that my stomach churns, my pulse races and my chest heaves.

What if I had been sitting next to Kim instead of standing near the doorway? Would I have heard the splashing then? What if I dismissed the sound as inconsequential, instead of being compelled to investigate? Even now, 30 years later, the consequences are too horrible to contemplate.

A guardian angel, either mine or Shannon’s, was on watch that night, ensured I heard that noise, and told me not to dally. Of that I am certain, and for that I am grateful.