That Wasn’t the Plan. Reg Sherren
about it. In the meantime, more clients could potentially become infected by sick escorts.
I couldn’t do it.
Instead, I phoned the city councillor who was the chairperson of the licensing committee. I told him he needed to come to the CBC that morning to watch an interview I was going to air later that night on the Calgary Newshour. He came in and watched George’s interview. He went very pale. The one o’clock licensing committee meeting became an emergency session. He told them what he’d seen. They decided to suspend the escort licences until they could get a handle on the situation; I suspected visions of potential liability were playing in their heads. Other reporters also got the story, but they did not have the interview with George.
Some said I was crazy for blowing my own scoop. The way I saw it, it wasn’t about getting a “scoop”; it was about doing my part in helping people to be safer, or at least informed, as quickly as I could. My own conscience wouldn’t let me wait. As it turned out, some news agencies gave CBC credit for the story anyway.
The escort agencies knew they had to do something about what, until now, they had resisted. They went to AIDS Calgary, asking for help in distributing condoms and in teaching safe-sex practices. But the people who ran the agencies were not happy. Again my life was threatened, and I didn’t like it any better the second time around. But eventually licences were restored and things settled down.
It was a year from the 1988 Olympics. CBC Calgary, with its team of great journalists, was getting traction. And for the first time in its history, CBC-TV became the number one television newscast in the Calgary market.
Breaking Camp
I was now a regular contributor on the network, at least on Saturday Report and on the syndicated news feed, NSS. But I made a decision some thought was even crazier than blowing my own scoop.
I decided to leave.
Perhaps it was just another indication that I really did not have a plan, not a professional one anyway. Calgary was a large market in Canada. The show was number one. I was getting network airtime. But in 1987 I decided to take a job with Here & Now, the television supper-hour show in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. It was a much smaller market, but the decision was a personal one. All my relatives were still back East and I wanted to be closer. It was as simple as that.
Chapter 3 Going Backward to Go Forward
We had been chasing each other around the country. In truth, I had been chasing her. Pam took a reporter position in Edmonton, and I moved to Calgary. While I was establishing myself there, she moved to Vancouver to do media relations at Expo 86 and then returned to reporting, this time at CKVU in Vancouver. She loved temperate Vancouver and lived in Kitsilano, not far from the beach, and now this fellow she had been hopscotching across the country with for close to five years wanted her to move to Newfoundland. In February.
I asked her to come with me, and to my amazement, she said yes. I went ahead and she would follow. She was supposed to arrive on Valentine’s Day, 1987. But a huge blizzard in St. John’s went on for close to three days and she was stuck in Halifax, no doubt trying to decide whether to just book a one-way ticket back to Vancouver.
When she finally did arrive, we were stuck in a third-rate hotel on Kenmount Road for months. With more snow than St. John’s had seen in fifty years (and that’s saying something), it was almost impossible to get out the door. I was ready to jump back on a plane myself. The parkways had so much of the white stuff piled up it was like driving in a huge luge, with snow walls on both sides. You couldn’t see a thing, including cars approaching the intersection, until you were both practically in the intersection. It was nuts.
Eventually we found a house and moved in. There was a six-metre drift in the backyard, higher than the house itself. Not a great start.
But at the station I received a warm welcome from senior producer Paul Harrington, the fellow who had hired me, and it soon became apparent the good karma had followed me east. At work I met Donna Wicks, who worked in finance, and I soon realized we had met before. Donna had been in the same high school class as me one year when we lived in Prince Edward Island. Not only that, but she had married a St. John’s Crown prosecutor named Brad Wicks—the same Brad Wicks who’d been my best buddy when we were both just five years old growing up in Labrador! They still like to joke that I am the one thing they have in common.
Then another fellow arrived from Montreal. Jonathan Crowe, the new sports anchor, sat right next to me. We shared the same sense of humour, and, as it turned out, we also had a connection. Our fathers knew each other and worked together, again up in Labrador. Quickly we all became a tight circle of friends. It more than compensated for the brutal winter.
Mining an Audience
Within a month, I was on the road anyway. A huge strike back in Labrador, in my hometown, was threatening the future of the area. The companies were demanding concessions, saying the steel industry was changing. New players were more competitive and driving down prices. The workers and their union did not want to budge.
I was assigned to produce a documentary—to try and find out the truth, no matter where it took me. It would take me to Labrador, Montreal, Northern Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania, all in barely a week. I would be travelling with Ed Coady, the executive producer at the time, and camera operator Al Crocker.
Those two men were inclined to enjoy a drink on the road. Or two. After travelling to Montreal and Toronto we eventually arrived in the Big Apple. By the time we reached New York City, where I was to interview a Wall Street broker about a huge new Brazilian ore deposit that was undercutting the iron-ore industry in North America, I was feeling more than a little bit desperate. Call it trial by fire—or firewater.
Ed was my new boss, and I was hardly in any position to tell him what to do. Al, a burly longshoreman type, was just happy to be along for the trip. We got to Manhattan early in the afternoon. I had never been to New York City in my life. It seemed to breathe menacingly—a dangerous place. We stayed in an older hotel not far off Broadway. On the street outside, I remember the doorman saying to someone as he was helping them into one of those famous yellow taxis, “New York, New York … you know the best thing about New York? The road to the frickin’ airport!”
Our interview wasn’t scheduled until the next morning. Ed and Al found a nice bar downstairs in the hotel and we settled in. By five or six o’clock that evening, things were well along and we had moved to a small landing with a few tables at the top of a huge winding staircase that led down to the hotel lobby. Al said he wanted to change his pants and disappeared. Then Ed went off to the washroom.
After half an hour I went down to the washrooms, expecting to find Ed lying on the floor after being jumped by some New York ne’er-do-wells. He was nowhere to be found. I went back to my room, a gaudy shoebox with red-and-black-velvet wallpaper and about five deadbolts on the door.
At ten o’clock my hotel room phone rang. It was Ed. He was in a jazz bar in Greenwich Village and I had to come right down. He didn’t say why, but he was the boss. I reluctantly grabbed a cab, climbed some stairs and walked into what could best be described as a “joint.” The first thing I saw was a long bar down one side. I immediately spotted Ed at the corner of the bar. I also noticed that a) he was in a huge argument, and b) we were the only two white people in the entire room.
To say I was concerned would be more than an understatement. Yet by the time I had reached that bar, Ed had turned everything around and had everyone laughing and slapping each other on the back. It was one of his many talents.
I got him back to the hotel, and the next morning, as always, both Ed and Al were right on time. The interview confirmed my research. The iron-ore industry was indeed being turned upside down. We had one more stop. We had to drive out to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, headquarters of Bethlehem Steel, a big player in the iron-ore industry in Labrador. Much of the iron ore mined there wound up in Bethlehem.
On the radio