Kenneth’s Reflections – October 27, 2012
It’s now well over 30 years since I had the most exhilarating and exhausting job of my life — being a daily columnist on The Globe & Mail. Back then we did a column five times a week: the late journalists Scott Young, Bruce West, Richard Needham (whose funeral I’d later conduct) among my colleagues. Today it’s usually three days. Along with the column I did three evening TV commentaries, another three on radio and so on. Not to forget speaking engagements. I was, I admit, never able to dash off a column as some did, who did them admirably. (In the years I was a columnist, I didn’t have a single lunch with a friend.) Anyway, now and then, I did a column headed with one word: “Reflections.” It was a collection of random comments on questions I’d been asked, letters I’d received, books I’d read, memories I’d retained, talks I’d heard. That’s why now, so many years later, you’ll sometimes find on my blog, the simple heading: “Reflections.”
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One evening, a week or so ago, Barbara and I went to the launch of the memoir of television news anchor Lloyd Robertson: “The Kind of Life it’s Been.” Lloyd and I, along with our wives, Barbara and Nancy, have been friends a long time. (He’s also been a professional and generous supporter of mine for quite awhile, including especially my first book, The Little Immigrants.) Several months ago, he invited me to read his manuscript before publication, and give him comments. I enjoyed its readability, stories of family and stories of broadcasting. But one passage, in the ninth chapter, gave me pause: his disclosure of a mental health issue he endured in the early 1970s while the national news anchor on CBC television. His mother had suffered mental illness for many years, and suddenly during a tense union-management conflict at the network Lloyd was plunged into his own mental crisis: “It was scary for Nancy,” he says, recalling a night he woke up walking the floor and, as he writes, “spouting gibberish.” In his memoir, he sums it up saying: “I recall losing touch with reality, fighting for control of my own thoughts, while seeming to be pulled down into a dark abyss…:” He was quickly hospitalized in strict secrecy since CBC executives panicked, worrying their news anchor had a mental disorder. After all, his mother endured a serious and prolonged one. As he once told me: “My poor mother had a lobotomy and after it she and I could not even communicate. I couldn’t even take a friend home. She was out of touch with reality. When my father –who was a great father – died, she actually asked me at his funeral, why I was crying.”
When I read parts of this in his manuscript, I had contradictory thoughts. He was certainly being frank. So I didn’t suggest he drop it, but I did say he should think again. I argued he didn’t owe the public a disclosure of his own medical history. There is, after all, an ever widening “right to privacy” sentiment. I was hesitant about his readiness to reveal aspects of his private life.
In any case, Lloyd wasn’t. He laid it all out. In fact, on an evening in late September, before the book was launched, he spoke of his experience as a boy and adult to hundreds of psychiatrists at the invitation of the Canadian Psychiatric Association in Montreal. He let the light in and was clearly right to do so. I was wrong. His book, filled with anecdotes, including sadly the multitude of nasty plots at the CBC, is relaxed reading, revealing of himself obviously, but also the charged culture of the CBC. The man who emerges is the man you’ve all seen on the screen: the proverbial “integrity figure,” first and last. That I can testify after years of knowing him well. (The Kind of Life it’s Been, published by Harper Collins is now in bookstores across Canada at $33.99.)
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I still remember a week in the spring of 1966, when Time Magazine ran what was probably its most startling cover line ever: “Is God Dead?” It came back the other day in a quotation used by United Church scholar, Peter Wyatt, (Emeritus Principal of Emmanuel College at U of T), as he began his recent sermon in a Toronto church: “If God is dead, as some claim, then he died trying to find a just solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.” (Those who don’t like the wit might reflect on a line from the deceased New Yorker writer James Thurber: “Everything should be able to withstand the test of humor.”) Peter then delivered a sermon carefully crafted, not so much polemical as reflective. We all, regardless of point of view, will benefit from it. He raised issues that are theological as well as historical, doing so in an even handed way. His sermon is available by going to: www.rosedaleunited.org/sermon-archives/october-21-2012
(By the way, Peter is Editor of a theological journal, appearing three times yearly, readable and insightful: Touchstone, founded in 1982, and available by inquiring at: revjohn.hogman@bellnet.ca,).
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This month’s blog welcomes new recipients. Most living in a part of Canada that is part of me as I am part of it: Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton. Most, not all, are affiliated one way or another, with the United Church, in particular Knox United in Glace Bay, where for many years I sat with my brother, between our late parents, and came to know some of the finest people I’ll ever know. That some of them are still with us — one of whom I’m told is in her nineties — gives me great pleasure. The kind office administrator at Knox, Sharon Stevenson, will print these musings, so they’ll have a paper copy to read in their homes. May they be blessed , as so long ago they blessed me.
October 27, 2012.
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