Rose's Cantina

In May 1978, I got my first and last full time newspaper job working for the Ottawa Journal. It wasn't my first foray into print journalism. As a 16-year-old, I had a weekly newspaper column with the St. Catharines Standard as a student at West Park Secondary School. The gig paid 25 cents an inch and I learned quickly the art of padding my column with the names of everybody on the football and rowing teams. The Standard later hired me as a summer student. The editors quickly sized me up, and decided I should become the "first woman" writer. So I wrote inches and inches of copy about the first woman rowing coach, the first woman dump truck driver, and the first woman police officer. In exchange for selling my soul, I was given some plum assignments, like covering Marvin Gaye at a champagne reception where he was given the key to the city of Buffalo. (Later that day, he returned the favour by bailing on his concert because he was being chased by private dicks who...

If there's an empty chair at Val Sear's table in Heaven (or the other end) I want to reserve it for myself. Of all the scribes I've met during my 40 years in and around the business, Val was the wittiest and most colorful, at least when it came to using language. He was a master punster, who could always be counted on to deliver the most "Searing"  and insightful comment or lede. Val took ideas, masticated them, and spit them out in 30 words or less. His take was always a "blinding glimpse of the obvious". Today, many of his long time colleagues from the Hill and beyond shared Valisms like these on the National Press Club Virtually Speaking site. Without their permission, I am sharing their stories today. One of my memories of Val Sears was him coming to Ottawa to cover something that turned out to be far less interesting than The Star expected. He just shrugged and said, "Well, we've turned chaff into bricks before....

One of the greatest lessons a parent can teach a child is how to be poor. The ability to navigate the treacherous waters of poverty is not a skill that is easy to acquire, especially in this day and age. A lot of people our age (late middle age to baby boomer) heard about the Dirty Thirties and how our parents and their parents had to scrape by, with one potato to feed the family. (Insert eye rolls here.) There were no jobs back then, we were told, so people did pretty much anything they could: take in laundry, barter for services or dig ditches. My grandfather was the master of this. He was a mechanic, a barber and a farmer, and a bit of a hoarder, who kept a treasure trove of riches in our attic, curiosities, Needful Things, that were given to him by people who could not afford to get their cars fixed. As a kid, I had a whole room full of weird and useless stuff to keep me entertained, including a Victrola which I loved to windup to play my favorite Patti Page ...

I read in the Globe and Mail this morning that Doug Ford was a hash dealer back in 1980. A refrain of an old song went through my head. Those were the days my friend, I thought they'd never end. We'd sing and dance for ever and a day. I didn't smoke a lot of hash in 1980 but I did smoke my share. It was during my rock and roll days when I was a music reviewer for the Ottawa Citizen and I was tooling around in my bright white bowling alley car, sometimes ferrying musicians over to Hull where we would get wasted, then roll home to sleep for 12 hours. I only got arrested for drunk driving once -- another story entirely -- and I only snorted cocaine once, but I did do it. I remember vividly being high on coke, sitting on a Go Train and feeling my throat swell up. I also spent six hours at a Tim Horton's. For a time during that period, I might have been fashioned as a drug dealer, though I like to think of it as being a purveyor of organic substances that wer...