That Wasn’t the Plan

Reg Sherren

Description

Many Canadians will remember Reg Sherren as host of the popular CBC TV program Country Canada, when he criss-crossed the nation sniffing out amazing but little-known stories of life in small towns and rural areas. Others will recall his many years as feature reporter for CBC’s flagship news program, The National, collecting stories like that of Montreal inventor Catalin Alexandru Duru magically soaring above the earth on his home-made hoverboard to set a new Guinness World Record. In the course of his eventful career, Sherren did everything from guest hosting network radio shows like Cross Country Checkup to reporting from war zones, and his experiences make for a book bristling with memorable characters, unbelievable events and provocative reflection.

Breaking news, politics, crime, economics—Sherren covered it all, and always with what Peter Mansbridge called “his unique ability to weave fascinating detail into the fabric of the people and places that make our nation so diverse and so interesting.” In this memoir, Sherren shares behind-the-scenes stories of his career in television journalism and the many Canadians he met along the way, from the time he rode on the back of a humpback whale to a journey down the world’s longest ice road in a solar-powered car.

Sherren also provides insight into the changing business of broadcasting, having witnessed up-close how the industry has evolved, and why it is more important now than ever. That Wasn’t the Plan will appeal to industry insiders, CBC fans, history buffs and anyone who simply enjoys a good rollicking read.

Sujets

• CBC
• Reporter
• Peter Mansbridge
• The National
• Télédiffusion
• Journalism
• Journalist
• Broadcasting
• Memoir
• Cross Country Checkup
• Country Canada
• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
• Date de parution: 03 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781771622554
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

That Wasn’t the Plan
Reg Sherren
That Wasn’t the Plan
A Memoir
C opyright © 2020 Reg Sherren

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca , 1-800-893-5777 , [e-mail] .

Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC , V0N 2H0
www.douglas-mcintyre.com

Edited by Arlene Prunkl
Cover design by Anna Comfort O’Keeffe
Text design by Shed Simas / Onça Design
Printed and bound in Canada
Printed on paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council
Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: That wasn’t the plan : a memoir / Reg Sherren.
Other titles: That was not the plan.
Names: Sherren, Reg, 1959- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200200410 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200200429 | ISBN 9781771622547 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771622554 ( HTML )
Subjects: LCSH : Sherren, Reg, 1959- | LCSH : Television journalists—Canada—Biography.
Classification: LCC PN4913.S47 A3 2020 | DDC 070.4/3092 —dc23

To my family … my dear wife Pamela, and my great source of joy and pride, our children Mitchell and Emma.
And for my dad, Nelson, who passed away while I was writing this book. Dad loved books, loved reading and absorbing what they had to offer. I wish he was here to read this one. Love you, Dad.
Contents Introduction 9 And So It Begins 11 Alberta Bound 31 Going Backward to Go Forward 48 Playing Politics 62 Off to War 76 Boats and Bears 89 Nosing Around the Network 106 The Big Leagues 116 It’s Freezing! And Flooding! 132 Moving On? 148 Treading Dark Water 166 Country Canada 181 Getting Up to Speed 199 Upping Our Game 211 The North 229 Country Canada Cancelled 245 Making the Story My Own 262 Digital Demons 286 Deadly Ice and Polar Bears 308 Systems Change, Not Storytelling 318 It’s Time to Go 343 Acknowledgements 349 About the Author 351
Introduction
Does anybody really have a plan? I don’t think most people do. I certainly didn’t. You can never really predict what life will throw at you. I didn’t even try—much.
But when you find yourself on a Canadian warship less than a hundred kilometres off the coast of Kuwait, and the Navy kid lying in the bunk next to you says, “Jeez, there’s twice as many Iraqi planes in the air today, and we don’t know where they’re coming from …”
Or you’re riding on the back of a humpback whale in a small rubber boat, through no fault of your own, and the beast nearly knocks you into the North Atlantic …
Or when you and your camera operator are stuck in the middle of several hundred angry, protesting crab plant workers, and one of them turns on you both and says, “Let’s throw these two in the harbour!”
At moments like those, you can’t help but find yourself thinking, “ That wasn’t the plan! ”
How did I go from a freckle-faced, red-headed kid growing up in small-town Western Labrador to a journalist travelling the world and telling stories for the CBC ’s flagship news program, The N ational ? That path certainly wasn’t part of any plan I was aware of. As the middle child, in my early years, the plan was simply survival. And with two older brothers and two younger sisters, I had to be quick on my feet, and I became something of an artful dodger. Acting out, pulling pranks, performing, goofing off—anything to get attention—yes, that became my strategy, every day.
But the truth about how I became a journalist—well, that’s another story altogether.
I am one of those increasingly rare journalists who began in the era of film, worked through the age of video, and then evolved into using the digital platforms that have become such a big part of our lives. Each offered its own challenges and opportunities.
These days, the brain sometimes creaks, just like my knees. But in the pages that follow, to the best of my memory, here are some of my most interesting stories from the road, and it is a great honour and pleasure to share them with you. I was barely three when I got the inkling that a career in television might be in my future!

Chapter 1 And So It Begins
Growing Up in Wabush
I grew up in the wilds of Labrador, in remote Wabush, where the idea of becoming a journalist was probably the furthest thing from my mind. As the middle child of five, I found myself constantly competing for attention.
Although remote, Wabush was the land of plenty. Yet the image most folks have of Labrador is of a frozen wasteland with polar bears and long cold winters. I remember visiting Montreal once with my mother, and she was asked if we lived in igloos. But in the land of rich iron-ore deposits, the only igloo was the Igloo Restaurant.
Everyone who wanted a job had one. The townsite—offering cheap, sturdy houses to anyone who ventured north—was built even before the people got there. The mine took care of everything. If a window broke, the mine fixed it. If the furnace failed, the mine installed another one. You worked for them, and they took care of you.
The modern all-grades school had everything a kid could ask for. Music, sports, art and my personal favourite, theatre. The local recreation centre had another huge gymnasium and stage, plus a bowling alley, a library and a darn near Olympic-sized swimming pool. Right next door was the ice rink, where you could also roller skate in the summer. All for fewer than five thousand people.
The land of plenty indeed— if you didn’t mind freezing to death eight months of the year. It often snowed the first week of school, and it stayed. I can remember going trick-or-treating on a Ski-Doo. In the Labrador Trough, as it was known, four metres of snow was not unusual in winter. We would tunnel under it like moles, creating a whole other world beneath the surface of the snow. You had to. Wind chills approaching −70°C were not uncommon. Even with a block heater or two, sometimes you had to take the battery out of your car at night and bring it into the house if you wanted the engine to start in the morning.
We didn’t seem to mind—we always had something to do. I loved to perform, whether in front of Dad’s eight-millimetre-film camera or as one of the designated class clowns. I was in the Christmas play nearly every year, starting with kindergarten. One year I was chief snowbird, the next an elf. Every chance I got to “act,” I did. On my report card one year the teacher had written, “Reg is an attention seeker,” and I thought with amusement, “That’s true!” I also came by my willingness to tell stories or act them out honestly. My mother wrote and told many stories, as did my aunt and my grandmother.
My father, who was one of the iron-ore mine managers, was ahead of his time. He had purchased a reel-to-reel tape recorder—well, it was more than that. It was one of those big polished-wood consoles many people had in their living rooms. Ours had the usual speakers, an AM / FM radio and a record player with space to store the LP s, plus the large reel-to-reel tape recorder, complete with two microphones.
Dad would record us, coaxing us to sing songs or recite poems like “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert Service. It was my first introduction to a microphone, the first time I heard what I sounded like. Little pie-faced Reggie finds his voice.
Dad was also was a damn fine cameraman, recording pictures, if not sound, that chronicled our lives in the Big Land or on vacation across Atlantic Canada. He filmed us tobogganing in the bush, taking family road trips to New Brunswick, loading haystacks on a wagon or digging clams in Prince Edward Island. And usually in there somewhere was footage of Reg acting like a goof for the camera. I guess, in hindsight, Dad was inspiring my imagination. It would take me much further than I ever dreamed of going.
And Wabush, Labrador, was a great place to explore your imagination. It wasn’t as if we were distracted by television—at least not much. In the early days, television consisted of one channel that started at 3:45 in the afternoon with the soap opera The Edge of Night and ended around 11:00 at night. Half the programming was French and everything was black and white. Most programming was a week old with the exception of news and hockey games. They were flown in on rolls of film and broadcast the next day. Radio usually broke the final score of the hockey game the day before you watched it.
We had some American programming, such as Bonanza and The Wonderful World of Disney , but most of it was pure Canadiana— Chez Hélène from CBC TV and Bobino from Radio-Canada ( CBC ’s French-language service) or good old CBC Television programming like Country Canada or The Forest Rangers . That Forest Rangers theme song still plays in my head. I remember coming home for lunch one day to watch Stompin’ Tom Connors get married on Elwood Glover’s Luncheon Date . I thought that was pretty cool. It doesn’t get any more Canadian than that!
When I was in Grade 7, I badly broke my arm. Then they dis