Village Squire, 1979-11, Page 38PROFILE
After ups and downs
Don Campbell's
starting over
Don Campbell has led the kind of life
that reads like a story. Now, at an age
when many men are thinking about
retirement, he's writing a new chapter.
At age 60 Don Campbell decided to take
a whack at something that had always
interested him: writing. He wrote a column
Acres of Memories and then became a
syndicated radio columnist and his
reputation is spreading. It's a success story
but just one of the many interesting things
he's been involved in in his lifetime.
It'd been a rollercoaster life of successes
and disappointments. The kind of life that
makes a man never get too high when
things are going well or too low when
things are going badly because he knows
from experience things are likely to
change. He came to Canada 26 years ago
from England where he was born in
Sheffield. His father was Scottish but was
in the air force and was stationed in
England at a time when the Royal Air
Force was just being formed. His mother,
from Sheffield went home to give birth to
her son.
It didn't take too long for the first
disaster of Don Campbell's young life to
occur. His father was just out of the air
force and the family was relatively well off
when the great Crash of 29 wiped out the
family's wealth. Nearly overnight they
went figuratively from riches to rags, he
recalls. His father was dead a year later.
His mother was left with four children to
36 Village squire, November 1979
raise and no widow's pension. "To
aggravate the situation," he recalls, "I had
a very, very bad vocal impediment and 1
couldn't speak coherently until 1 was 16.
My mother used to buy second hand
clothes from the wealthy people she had
known and I used to peddle them around to
make a buck."
He also sold newspapers which lead him
to a great deal of pain when he reached the
secondary school level which in England is
from ages 12 to 16. He was caned twice a
day during those years, once for not doing.
his homework and once for being late to
school. He had a paper route in the
morning and another at night. The
morning route didn't finish until just
before school and by the time he got home
and. changed and got back to school he was •
late. After finishing his night route he was
too tired to do homework. He didn't