Remembering the Beer Machine
The week before I arrived at the Eclipse Building in downtown Toronto, they removed the beer machine from the Sun’s newsroom. They must have heard I was coming.
Thanks to that larger-than-life icon of Canadian newspapers and broadcasting, John Bassett, I was hired in 1973 by publisher Doug Creighton (himself a contender in the larger-than-life sweepstakes) and managing editor Don Hunt (large but not larger than life) who had stopped in Windsor on their way to Detroit to look at Sunday newspapers.
I was to write for the city’s first Sunday newspaper, articles for the Sunday Sun’s showcase Toronto Magazine section and also contribute a weekly interview to the new paper’s TV guide.
The enterprise was overseen by a pipe-smoking scarecrow named Phil Sykes. His 2IC was a veteran of the Toronto magazine wars, a Brit named Alan Edmonds, who liked to remind us that he looked like Michael Caine when in fact he looked nothing like Michael Caine.
It is fair to say both men were frantic, driven, dedicated, and completely nuts. My initial reaction, having come from the Windsor Star, one of the best and richest provincial newspapers, was to run for the exits.
I was on my way out when the Sunday Sun’s newest employee, a lovely young woman in a flowered sundress, appeared and was promptly seated at the desk next to mine. I decided to stay and marry this woman. I did not stay at the Sun, but I did marry Lynda.
What saved us all from madness and the magazine from silly tabloid-inspired stories cooked up by Sykes and Edmonds, was its editor, Kathy Brooks.
Cool and calm, the picture of elegance smoking through a long cigarette holder, Kathy had great story ideas, a redeeming sense of humor and a knife-sharp editing pencil. Her sidekick, Carolyn Jackson, had a pencil just as sharp and a gimlet eye when it came to dealing with me. I was so memorable, in fact, that meeting her 40 years later, Carolyn promptly reminded me that I couldn’t spell.
My one enduring contribution to the early days of the Sun was this: encountering managing editor Ed Monteith one day, I suggested in passing that if he was looking for seasoned, talented reporters and editors who could be hired for a song, he needed to look no further than the Windsor Star.
Ed’s eyes immediately lit up. Cheap, talented labour?
The next thing I knew, a stream of Windsor Star reporters and editors began arriving at the Sun, enough so that there were rumours the Star’s managing editor phoned Ed to complain. Too late. The inmates had escaped one asylum and taken over another. A couple of the inmates were so crazy, the Sun eventually made them publishers.
All gentle kidding aside, the Sunday Sun changed my life. I got to Hollywood for the first time, dived under Arctic ice, traveled across the country, drove a Formula One racing car (very badly), and, oh yeah, thanks to George Anthony, the entertainment editor, got drunk with John Wayne. Any newspaper that gets you drunk with John Wayne, that’s a pretty darned good newspaper.
Even better, I met and befriended my journalistic heroes, writers I had grown up reading, admiring and envying. I longed to be one of them. I’m not sure if I ever succeeded, but I certainly rubbed shoulders with the best that Toronto journalism in its wondrous heyday had to offer.
The Sun was the gateway drug that allowed me into a much wider universe –movie critic at the Toronto Star; magazine writing in Canada and the United States; screenplays in Los Angeles, Paris, Montreal, and Rome; and finally, detective novels set in Florida and mystery novels set London’s Savoy Hotel.
Half a century later, looking at a yellowed copy of that first Sunday Sun, thinking back on those chaotic, life-changing, wildly exciting early days, I have only one regret.
I’m sorry I missed the beer machine.
They became known as the Windsor Mafia after they arrived in Toronto. Top from from left: Bruce Blackadar, Ron Base, Brian Vallee, Mark Bonokoski. Bottom, from left: Les Pyette, Cam Norton, Bob Burt, Vic Roschov.
