The Citizen, 2008-03-20, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MARCH 20, 2008. PAGE 5.
Bonnie
Gropp
TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt
Finding a friend
Rock music is the most brutal, ugly,
vicious form of expression…sly, lewd –
in plain fact, dirty … a rancid-smelling
aphrodisiac … martial music of every
delinquent on the face of the earth.
– Frank Sinatra, 1957
Yeah, right. This, from Old Blue Eyes, a guy
who partied with mobsters, smacked hookers
around and had people he didn’t care for
beaten up by hired thugs. But he loathed rock
and roll. Just like Pierre Berton.
Berton? The savviest Canuck ever to peck
out a newspaper column.
Back in the 1960s, he wrote for The Toronto
Daily Star five days a week and he did it for
many years. His turf was the right hand edge
of the second section, and he used his space to
churn out exposes, satires, profiles, rants and
raves.
His research was breathtaking, his wit was
biting and more than a few times, his gall was
unmitigated.
Berton was, in the old untrivialized sense of
the word, awesome. But he wasn’t perfect.
Each December he produced a column of
year-end predictions, and in it, he invariably
announced with unshakeable confidence that
the musical times, they were a-changin’. Rock
and roll, he assured his readers, was finally on
its deathbed.
He was wrong. It’s a half-century later and
rock and roll still isn’t extinct – whereas Pierre
Berton is.
As a matter of fact, some of the rock groups
that most outraged Berton and Sinatra half a
century ago are still on the circuit.
Hang around Vancouver’s GM Place, or
Toronto’s Air Canada Centre and sooner or
later a scalper will offer you tickets for the
latest incarnation of The Kinks, The Who, The
Hollies, The Troggs…
And of course…The Stones.
The Rolling Stones. What a force of nature
is there, my friends.
Mick and the boys have been enthralling
kids and infuriating parents since nineteen-
sixty-freaking-two, if you can believe it.
And that’s despite people trying to bury
them from the beginning.
Forty years ago Truman Capote looked at
Jagger and sniffed: “He moves like a parody
between a majorette girl and Fred Astaire.”
In 1971 John Lennon said: “I think it’s a lot
of hype. I like Honky Tonk Women but I think
Mick’s a joke, with all that fag dancing; I
always did. I enjoy it, I’ll probably go and see
his films and all, like everybody else, but
really, I think it’s a joke.”
Yeah, well. Time has passed. Jagger’s still
strutting and prancing while Capote and
Lennon are playing in some underworld
backup band with Old Blue Eyes.
And Pierre Berton’s doing PR.
Who could’ve imagined it? Not Marianne
Faithfull, that’s for sure. ‘Way back in the
early 60s, the English rock star was already
writing off The Stones:
“You can’t go on doing that thing for years.
I mean, just imagine having to sing
Satisfaction when you’re 45.”
Jagger is still singing about his lack of
satisfaction – and he hasn’t seen 45 for better
than two decades.
Of course, nobody’s harder on old rock and
rollers than old rock and rollers themselves.
Remember loveable, winsome, self-
deprecating flower child Joni Mitchell? So
does David Crosby, who played with her (in all
senses of the word), back in the Sixties.
“Joni,” recalls Crosby “was about as modest
as Mussolini.”
Grace Slick was no kinder to her bandmate
Paul Kantner, a man not renowned for his
linguistic smarts. When Kantner went off on a
climbing expedition in the Himalayas, Slick
cracked: “Paul is climbing Everest because it’s
the only mountain in the area he can
pronounce.”
Neil Young was equally harsh about…well,
Neil Young. “Our parents were into
Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney and Perry
Como,” said Young. “Now, I’M Perry
Como.”
But of all the acid-tongued rock and rollers
of the sixties, Grace Slick was the one you
really didn’t want to cross. She’ll turn a
grandmotherly 70 years old next year but she’s
still got a merciless vision and a wicked
tongue in her head.
Last year, like millions of others, she took in
a Rolling Stones concert.
She wasn’t impressed.
“Seeing a Rolling Stones performance,” she
told a radio interviewer, “is like watching
rotting fruit”.
Ouch.
I’m sure that somewhere in the underworld,
Pierre Berton is laughing like a loon.
Arthur
Black
Other Views These dinosaurs rockin’ on
The most underrated politician in
Ontario in 50 years has died – still
without being given the recognition he
deserves.
Donald C. MacDonald, who led the New
Democratic Party and its predecessor, the
Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, from
1953-70, has been called “the happy warrior,”
as if his main contribution was keeping
smiling in adversity.
But he was much more. MacDonald took
over when the party had only two of 90 seats
in the legislature and gave it a voice that was
missing and for a time led an opposition party
that pound-for-pound was the most effective in
memory.
For the first two years he led without a seat
or desk in the Queen’s Park building, writing
his press releases in his party’s nearby office
and walking them over to hand to reporters.
He made slight progress in 1955, when he
was elected an MPP and led a three-member
caucus and, as its ablest speaker, was official
critic of 20 Ministries, including agriculture,
although his Toronto riding had few blades of
grass.
But he talked to farmers and became
knowledgeable and even led it to a famous by-
election win in western Ontario farmland,
where NDP pleas previously had fallen on
stony ground.
From 1963-67 MacDonald led a dazzling,
seven-member caucus that gave the long-
entrenched Progressive Conservative
government more headaches than a Liberal
caucus three times its size.
MacDonald provided more than his share by
informed, irrepressible questioning, helped
particularly by a 26-year-old Stephen Lewis,
whose oratory still has not been equalled.
When Lewis first spoke, premier John
Robarts acknowledged “something new has
been added to this legislature” and one
discouraged minister conceded he could “not
even think of competing in ability to use the
English language.”
MacDonald and his small team focused on
inadequacies in government and in the 1967
election swelled to 20 seats.
But by the late 1960s he was in his mid-50s
and New Democrats talked of having a leader
who seemed more in tune with the times. Jim
Renwick, a former corporation lawyer who
brought huge legal expertise to the NDP team,
challenged him for leader and lost.
Lewis, who supported Renwick, possibly to
test the prospects for himself, then gathered
support for himself behind the scenes and,
when he presented this, MacDonald quickly
stepped down.
MacDonald contended he could have won,
but a challenge by Lewis would have enabled
opponents to claim the NDP did not have
confidence in its leader and hurt it in an
election due in 1971.
Lewis took over as leader, but despite his
oratorical dominance, managed in three
elections to win only three per cent more of
the vote than it had won under MacDonald.
Lewis was seen by many not as just a good
talker, but too slick – too clever by three-
quarters, one critic said. MacDonald thought
Lewis attempted to jolt rather than woo voters.
There are grounds for arguing, although
there is no way of settling it, MacDonald
would have done as well or better, if the party
had kept him. Macdonald served as an MPP
without bitterness under Lewis and his
successor as leader, Michael Cassidy, until
1982, when he showed rare unselfishness.
He was among those who urged Bob Rae,
then the party’s articulate finance critic in the
Commons, to run for Ontario leader to revive
the party after Cassidy. Rae won and needed a
provincial seat and asked Renwick, whose
riding was in the same area of Toronto as his
federal seat, to step aside, but Renwick
thought he had as good credentials to stay and
refused.
Rae asked others without success and
MacDonald then felt, having encouraged Rae
to run, he should give him the seat he had held
for 27 years and could have retained forever,
Rae took it and went on to become premier.
Rae ironically has left the NDP and is a
Liberal, hoping to become prime minister,
which must have been galling to the man
whose whole life was standing by his party.
Eric
Dowd
FFrroomm
QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk
It was Grade 5, a class comprised of kids
who had pretty much been together since
kindergarten. School life was familiar, new
faces rare.
But on this particular Monday, we noticed a
stranger seated at the back desk just inside the
door. As the room filled, however, only brief
curious glances went her way because we had
been told a student teacher would be joining us
at the beginning of the week.
We were, therefore quite surprised when
another young person entered the room and
was introduced as the person who would be
assisting in the classroom. Then even more
surprised when that announcement was
followed by a welcome to our new student
seated at the back.
You might wonder how we could possibly
have mistaken an 11-year-old for a student
teacher. But our new arrival was astonishingly
mature, a stature and development she attained
early. It only took until recess, however, to be
assured that at the core of this person was
indeed the heart and mind of a child.
And it was to my great pleasure that she
became my good friend.
We were a bit of an odd pairing. Normie was
physically, as mentioned, quite grown up for
her age. Also, while she proved time and time
again that this maturity did not extend fully to
the mental and emotional aspect of her being;
she could skip and giggle with the best of us;
there did seem to be a centred calm about her
that most of us had yet to attain. It was a hint
of the wisdom that comes with years.
Anyway, for whatever reason she became
yin to my yang, a partnership that lasted until
she moved away at the beginning of eighth
grade. In those years I made every excuse to
spend time at her home, a large, rambling
ranch occupied by her and her mother. They
were different than other families I knew, did
things that few others I hung out with had ever
experienced, like live theatre and trips to
Toronto.
When they moved it was to a nearby city
that allowed us to stay in touch, visiting on
weekends and in the summer. Eventually,
however, she went to the ‘big’ city and our
times together became fewer and fewer.
Until somehow I lost touch completely. In
the almost three decades since last seeing or
hearing from her, I have thought of her often
and wondered where she might be now. Then,
one day, listening to my son talk about
Facebook, I asked if it really might help me
locate a long, lost friend. He said it was
possible and offered to get me set up.
We immediately found the name, and within
a week I was talking to her on the phone as if
no time had passed. This past weekend we
spent a day together, remembering and
catching up on a good chunk of our lives.
I can often find conversation difficult,
particularly for extended periods of time. But
the funny thing is, and always was, that for me
chatting with Normie was easy. Conversation
picks up, maybe not where it left off exactly,
but with no awkward silences or stilted talk.
I’m not certain what’s made the reclaiming
of this relationship so important to me.
Perhaps it was that our friendship was cut
short before it had run its course, or achieved
life-long status.
One thing that’s certain, friends come and
go in life, but the absence of this one was
particularly felt. I’m happy to have her back in
mine.
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Remembering an underrated leader