AS EXPO 67 APPROACHED, INTERNATIONAL curiosity about Montreal and Canada grew. The Queen Elizabeth and other hotels enjoyed low vacancy rates. Vacationing families were curious to see a world's fair in the making, and businessmen and professionals had reasons to come often.
Editing panorama was increasingly enjoyable and I did a lot of translating and writing for Bill Bantey at Montreal '6_. As a volunteer I helped Gloria Pierre at Marianopolis with filing and proofreading, and my father in Toronto with translations.
Dad was a charter member of Polish organizations founded in Canada in the mid-1940s which were planning to celebrate 25th anniversaries. "The West" believed World War II had ended, but the exiles in Toronto's Polish community knew it hadn't. Some members believed Poland's legitimate government was in London, England. Others supported the one in Warsaw because it ran Poland -- as a satellite of Russia, of course -- although they weren't communists but insisted reality must be faced.
Toronto therefore had two Polish newspapers for the two "sides". Dad, being a friend of both editors and a respected peacemaker in the community, spent his evenings at home on the phone explaining them to each other.
Non-Polish Canadians didn't care about all that, but communists did. Wherever Poles had fled to around the world there would be celebrations, so the Kremlin gushed a huge flow of inaccurate propaganda in the style of the magazines I had received in Kingston in 1960. They made Canada a quiet battleground. Dad needed a lot of factual information translated into English to distribute to Canadian media and the RCMP. He and I were lucky in that the Royal Mail in those days carried our texts back and forth overnight by train.
Sadly, my back refused to carry much without protesting. I still walked a lot, but sat at typewriters more than I should have.Fortunately, an A&P* supermarket nearby had a delivery service, for 25 cents a trip.
My dreams of decorating our grand apartment kept being pushed aside. Charlie couldn't be bothered with such "unimportant matters" because CFCF-TV kept giving him more pre-expo responsibilities. At home he was only interested in listening to music in the den, the smaller of the two bedrooms. Since I wouldn't make decisions for that room he found time to shop for it -- a massive walnut desk, a leather davenport, broadloom we cut to fit, and fabric for curtains I sewed.
In the huge bright bedroom, the orange crate that was a bedside table on Ridgewood looked ridiculous beside our beautiful carved oak bed ($9 in a Kingston used-furniture store). I looked everywhere for suitable night tables, finally asked a cabinet maker in Westmount, John Larsen, to make a pair to match the bed. They cost $35 each and serve me to this day without a hint of a loose joint, or knob on the small drawer of each. Mr. Larsen sealed their tops with an invisible plastic to make them stainproof, but the rest of the wood is oiled a couple of times a year.
When I asked him to make a chest of drawers, he said wide oak boards were so rare that a large piece would cost at least $600 and we were too young to afford it. Charlie liked the tables and didn't object to the $600, but we couldn't change Mr. Larsen's mind. We had to buy a couple of very ordinary pieces.
I wanted us to go shopping together for artwork, as an investment. We had an awesome lot of wall space to fill, and I felt I shouldn't make such decisions alone. But the TV station was so far from both home and downtown that meeting was difficult, and Charlie sometimes worked seven days a week. When I spotted framed Bartlett prints of Kingston in Ogilvy's grand old department store, he asked me to list the scenes and selected a few sight unseen.
CFCF-TV's expo coverage would mean six months of coordination of countless details and split-second timing. Charlie attended one meeting after another, about new hires, equipment purchases and maintenance, logistics such as driving distances, traffic problems. All the while, the evolution of technologies was speeding up so everyone ran hard to stand still. There was no point in asking him "How was your day?" because he often truly did not know.
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GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.
Non-FictionDuring the first 30 years of my journalistic career in the second half of the 20th century, good jobs of all kinds were available all over Canada. Those of us born in the 1930s and early '40s were in great demand because our generation was very smal...
