Beyond the Six String Nation #18: Runs in the Family? (part 1)
Getting to something I promised last April
Today would have been dad’s 93rd birthday if he hadn’t died at 66. Instead, as of this past August, my sister and I have two parents lost to cancer, though dad might well have survived the cancer – it was the cascade of pneumonia and MRSA at the hospital that actually killed him. And maybe fear too. I think he was afraid if he slept at the hospital he might die, so he forced himself to stay awake and that didn’t do him any good at all. Grandma lived to 94 – swimming in the lake just about every day until she was probably 91 or 92, couple of gin and tonics in the early evening and only as much dementia as might be expected at that age, along with the corollary sharp recall of events from her childhood and teens.
Both mum and dad’s oncologists assured me that their cancers were not hereditary. But I’m getting up there now myself and it’s only natural to wonder how many sunsets might be left.
In the Polaroid above, I can see my face so clearly in my mum’s. Some people say I look like my dad but, for one thing, I can’t really grow a beard to save my life. I inherited from both my parents a sense of humour steeped in the Goons and Python, wide ranging palates and voracious appetites in both food (I even enjoy lamb, which dad hated, and okra, which mum hated) and music, a gift for mimicry, and the basic pillars of their politics and sense of social justice – if not their specific brand of action on those fronts. So when I made it clear I was pursuing my passion (and my politics) through culture and media rather than leafleting, there was some consternation. If you read my April 3rd piece about my dad, forgive me for telling this joke again: after leaving a career in union leadership, he and a couple of friends founded a consultancy that, among other things, produced videos on things like “Occupational Health & Safety” and “Collective Bargaining” with original music composed by the great Ian Tamblyn (pictured below). And I liked to tell people that when dad saw that I wasn’t following in his footsteps, he changed his footsteps to make it look as if I was.
What I alluded to hesitatingly in the April post was the reason for his departure from the leadership of the United Steelworkers. Around 1976 or ‘77, dad had put his hat in the ring to be elected as director of District 6 of the Union – a big territory covering Canada’s industrial heartland and out to the mines of the maritimes. He was well liked and progressive and experienced and, as far as I understood it, widely expected to win. But something happened that I never understood exactly. Some sort of back room deals were cut to defeat my father and install someone with closer ties to the U.S. bosses or something like that. People who had supported him – including good friends and colleagues and even the neighbour whose house my sister and I went to for lunch sometimes when mum was working – betrayed him overnight and the victory was delivered to what I believed was some darker force. Dad was devastated. I don’t really recall this but he went into a deep depression that lasted for months. Mum told me just a few years ago that she let it go on for a bit, thinking it to be a natural reaction; but after too many days of him sulking silently in a corner, she gave him an ultimatum that either he snap out of it and re-engage with his family or she was out of there. It worked, which is maybe why I don’t remember this period very well or have any sense of how precarious our family was in that moment. Dad would have been 45 or 46 then.
And the reason this revelation from mum resonated so powerfully for me was that the circumstances around that episode so closely resembled my own experience at the exact same age when I’d been hosting a groundbreaking and internationally recognized weekly national show at CBC Radio for almost 10 years.
I realize that I’m about to dive into some painful (for me) and potentially boring (for you) stuff here, so rather than test your tolerance overmuch, I’m going to publish this as part one, continue beavering away at the dreadful details of my CBC career and the parallels with my dad’s betrayal by the Steelworkers and schedule that to post a week from now, serial-fashion, so you can resume the drama same time next week if you so wish. For now, I’ll just say thanks for reading – it’s much appreciated.
Hey Jowi!
THANKS for continuing to communicate with the Nation via Six Strings!
Please allow me tell you (if it's any consolation...) and simultaneously console your Dad (not that he'll ever know -- although he was obviously working for a "good cause", and on the "right team"!) that you and he are unfortunately not alone!
Apparently, much more often than not, Managers and Bosses (whom I now like to dismiss as my former "surperiors" ) tend to make the wrong decisions, usually for the wrong reasons (basically selfish and personal) simply because they know they can get away with it.
I've got a vague "idea" about what happened with you., and I'm looking forward to reading your story next week -- even though I suspect it's going to be a painful tale....
It's almost five years since my own "retirement".from the CBC.
I'd given 42 years of my life to IDEAS -- the first 22 years as a freelancer, making documentaries, while supporting that addictive bad habit by filling-in as a guest host with every show on both ratio networks. (Those stupid "superiors" suffered from the delusion that reading Intros and Extros was more "valuable" work than the thankless labour of researching, writing,, recording and mixing the documentaries for which IDEAS was justly famous....)
For the final two decades of my "career," I was promoted to the position of host. This granted me the priviledge of continuing to make documentaries -- on average at least twice as many as any other producer on the show -- while also hosting, and performing an ever-increasing number of feature (and cheaper) hour-long intetviews.
When I retired -- at the tender age of 68 -- one of the CBC's Vice -Presidents made the mistake of calling me the "Voice of Canada".
Five days later, I woke up to discover that my computer -- with 42 years of precious contact coordinates, and thousands of irrecoverable files and documents -- had been bulk-erased, even though I'd been promised I would have access for at least three months after my retirement. When I called to ask what was going on, a Middle Manager informed me that I'd been declared to be some sort of *SECURITY THREAT*. I
She informed me that I was suddenly under a lifelong ban from ever again setting foot on any CBC property -- from coast-to-coast-to-coast. She also instructed to empty my office -- which I had also been promised would be available to me for the next three months -- by midnight that evening.
I asked her WHO had declared me to be a security threat, and was told I was not alllowed to ask.
I asked WHAT was the nature of my threat, and was told I was not allowed to ask that question either.
(Our former "superiors" have apparenty never heard of Magna Carta.)
And things got worse....
Although I hosted every IDEAS show for two long decades -- five nights every week, from 1999 to 2019 -- I was retroactively informed that I'd been "on probation" for the first three years. Despite the fact that my regular conribution to the Pension Fund was deducted from my paycheck; and despite the fact that nobody ever told me to sign on with "I'm Paul Kennedy, the probationary host of IDEAS, welcome to IDEAS", my monthly pension check will always be !5% less that it should be. I suspect that these funds have probably been channeled into the million dollar bonuses that CBC Senior Managers' secretly give themsrlves evrery year, or perhaps to pay for the CBC President's numerous weekly flights from New York (where she continues to live) to Ottawa (where the Broadcasting Act requires her to be "in residence")
This entire idiotic tragicomedy sent me into a lengthy depression from which I am only just now beginning to recover....
YOU (and your Dad) ARE NOT ALONE!
Someday, the dilettants and charlatans who currently run the Mothercorpse will be exposed as the incompetent idiots that they obviously are, but that's not likely to happen before Pierre Poilievre has completely defunded he most crucially important cultural institution in the country that we both love....
*sigh*