CANUS HUMOROUS : 1999-12-26

E. Pauline Johnson and Sarah Binks

Click Here for a Review of Sarah Binks

When I read Sarah Binks for the first time, I believed that the author Professor Heibert had modeled his heroine on E. Pauline Johnson, the late 19^th and early 20th century Canadian poetess of mixed aboriginal-European ancestry.

Each woman gained great fame through means not directly tied to the quality of her poetry. Pauline through public readings and performances. Sarah through the sale of magazine subscriptions, the collection of product labels, and -quantity.

Both women, the imaginary and the real one, were boosted by association with Liberal Party politicians. Sarah was celebrated repeatedly by the Honourable Augustine Windheaver, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Grasshopper Control; Pauline was supported in staging performances by local arms of the Liberal Party.

Like Sarah, Pauline was portrayed as an icon of the struggle with the harsh Canadian landscape and the young country's still-fomenting culture.

· Several of the imaginary Sarah's works such as the Song of the Chore and Song to the Cow as well as the events and personalities of her life seem to be purposeful echoes of Pauline Johnson themes and titles such as her most famous: Song my Paddle Sings.

· Pauline Johnson, although born and raised on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, grew up in an atmosphere that downplayed her aboriginal heritage, and she eventually relied upon her Mohawk grandfather for the knowledge and links to this line of her ancestry. Sarah Binks was also described as a writer and poet who had to rely heavily upon her Grandfather Thurnow for family lore and ancient wisdom including an understanding of the aboriginal people.

· Both women wrote periodically in enigmatic forms and uncommon languages.

· Finally, Sarah's geology-based magnum opus, Up from the Magma and Back Again has parallels in one of Pauline Johnson's final works, the legend for the magma-formed Siwash Rock in Vancouver's Stanley park.

· Both women were believed to be imperfect writers and the creators of overly sentimental, weak poetry.

· Although Pauline Johnson's sad death from breast cancer at age 52 did not have the bizarre overtones of Sarah's fatal encounter with the horse thermometer, it was another tragic, too early event that drew a great public outpouring that powered her notoriety and posthumous fame in the same way as the fictional Sarah Binks was aftermathed.

· Johnson was celebrated primarily after her death as the model of “the New Woman” and as a barrier breaker as a woman. Sarah Binks concludes with a chapter dedicated to “Sarah, the Woman” describing the after effects of her death in a similar spirit.

· There is a small, stone monument to Pauline Johnson in Stanley Park that is minimalist as is Sarah’s monument in her fake home town in Saskatchewan.

· Neither woman’s bodies are at the location of their monuments. Sarah's remains are not there because they do not exist. Johnson wanted her body buried in Stanley Park. But wanting to avoid a precedent, Vancouver City authorities would not allow it and only conceded to having her cremated ashes in the Park.

· Experts like Earle Birney, one of Canada’s most respected poets, a Leacock Medal Winner, and two time Governor General’s Award winner for poetry, thought Pauline’s work was mock-worthy, and loved Sarah Binks the satire.

Johnson's celebrity and the resentment of her work in the stuffier Canadian literary circles were in ascendency during Hiebert's pre-chemistry university days - the time in which he was studying, ruminating on literary history, and absorbing the prevailing attitudes of academia.

However, I have not seen any explicit reference that would verify the Sarah-Pauline link. Professor Hiebert is, in fact, quoted as saying that Sarah was not a reflection of any single person. I accept his word on this and take my Pauline Johnson hallucination to be merely another illustration of the power of Sarah Binks to bear myriad interpretations and reads.

For more on Sarah Binks and Paul Hiebert
What So Funny? Lessons from Canada's Leacock Medal for Humour Writing

and to - TRIVIAS HUMOROUS - Sarah Binks

also

Sarah Binks and the National Research Council in Ottawa

and

The Story of My Copy of Sarah Binks

The Story of My Copy of Sarah Binks

I own a first-edition, first-printing, 1947 copy of Sarah Binks signed by Paul Hiebert. I bought it, appropriately, from a bookstore in Winnipeg (Burton Lysecki Books on Osborne Street), the city where Paul Hiebert spent so much of his life and career. The nice people who shipped Sarah to me said that they had had their Sarah Binks in the shop for a number of years and would miss it.

“It's been like an old friend on the shelf,” the woman told me. “It’s fun to speculate (about its history) - we do it all the time.”

I said I would take good care of her.

Two names in the front of the book offered a clue to its history, but I didn't hold out much hope and didn't think to look at the names for a long time.

But when I did, I Googled and cross referenced the names, “Don and Helen Penner,” and here is what I found - on newspaper, university, and other institutional web sources. The following is from this public information.

In the late 1940s, at the time that Sarah Binks was published and Paul Hiebert was working at the University of Manitoba, a medical doctor in Winnipeg named Donald W. Penner worked as a part-time prof at the university. Penner was destined to become one of “Canada’s foremost pathologists and a pioneer in blood alcohol research, whose work would eventually lead to stricter national laws.”

Today, the University of Manitoba lists him, Penner, among its most distinguished graduates. In fact, he was celebrated while still a student for developing and operating Manitoba’s first blood bank. As an intern, Penner founded Canada’s first lab service for measuring blood-alcohol levels in emergency-room patients, and he introduced the first “Pap” smear test for cancer detection, as well as fine-needle cytology diagnosis, in Manitoba. In addition to his research, his work in medicine, and contributions to health care, Penner found time to serve almost thirty years as a school board trustee in Manitoba. The Dr. D.W. Penner School in south Winnipeg is named in his honour.

The other name written into the front of my book is “Helen” and Dr. D.W. Penner was indeed married to a woman named Helen, who collaborated with him in many of his projects. Among other things, she played a key role in designing and operating the quality assurance and control program for the College of American Pathologists. In 1988, in their seventies, Don and Helen moved to Africa where Dr. Penner worked as a hospital pathologist, and the couple helped form a professional association along with medical training and recruitment programs in Kenya. They did not return to Winnipeg for ten years, both past the age of 80.

Penner was secretary-treasurer of the Canadian Association of Pathologists for 25 years, and the association established an annual prize in his name. He also received the Canadian Medical Association’s highest honour, the F.N.G. Starr Award, and he was a Member of the Order of Canada.

Helen died in January 2004. Don passed away a few months later, presumably initiating the chain of events that put the couple’s old books into other hands and eventually one of them in mine.

I am not sure whose particular hand wrote the two names into the front of my book: Helen’s, Don’s, or Heibert's, but I cherish my Sarah Binks more because the two Penner names are on it and now feel an amplified reason to “take good care of her.”

DBD January 2013

For more on Sarah Binks and Paul Hiebert go to the Home Page or
to - TRIVIAS HUMOROUS - Sarah Binks

also

Paul Hiebert and the National Research Council in Ottawa

Sarah Binks and E. Pauline Johnson

Sarah Binks and the National Research Council of Canada

Click Here for a Review of Sarah Binks

· Paul Hiebert was not merely a great writer and humorist who just happened to earn his living as a chemistry professor. Even though many people know him as the author of Sarah Binks and other works, he regarded himself above all else as a scientist, and he enjoyed great recognition and a special kind of achievement in his field of chemistry. This scientific work may have had a greater impact on Canada and the world, albeit less obvious to many, than his writing. In fact, he conducted and published research that would win the Governor General's Medal for Science even before his graduation in 1924. Heibert was in heady company as a young scientist, collaborating with the venerated Dr. Otto Maass, a leader in the field and a highly decorated science advisor to government. Their joint discoveries in the early 1920s involved the preparation of hydrogen peroxide and would have an influence on chemistry for decades.

· The little factoid that I uncovered was a link to my organization, the National Research Council of Canada. I was amused to learn with the NRC Archives in Ottawa that although Hiebert’s work took place at McGill, he was operating as an NRC Research Fellow at the time of his big discovery and had received his funding for that specific project from NRC in Ottawa. Hiebert had also been an NRC Scholarship Student during his earlier graduate work at McGill. While Hiebert soon moved back to the prairies and his career at UofM, Maas eventually came to Ottawa to work for NRC full-time. I am personally emboldened to know that the author of Sarah Binks worked, even indirectly, for the same organization that employs me and that he did his satirical writing in his off hours away from a science-related job. Hmmm ...

For more on Sarah Binks and Paul Hiebert go to the Home Page or
to - TRIVIAS HUMOROUS - Sarah Binks

also

The Story of My Copy of Sarah Binks

Sarah Binks and E. Pauline Johnson

Three Cheers for Donald Jack

Born on Dec. 6, 1924 in Radcliffe, Lancashire, England, Donald Lamont Jack was one of four children born to a British doctor and a nurse from Canada.

One of his two non-fiction books was about medicine, Rogues, Rebels and Geniuses. The other was the history of the Toronto radio station CFRB, Sinc, Betty and the Morning Man.
While stationed in Germany with the RAF in the last year of the Second World War, Jack attempted short-story writing, but saw few opportunities in Britain and moved to Canada in 1951 to look for work.

Donald Jack’s first jobs in Canada ranged from a worker in survey crew in Alberta to a bank teller in Toronto.

While in Toronto, he studied at the Canadian Theatre School and wrote two plays, which led to a job offer in the script department of Academy Award-winning Crawley Films in Ottawa. Two years later in 1955, the company's head, Budge Crawley, unsatisfied with Jack’s writing ability dismissed him.

Out of work, he tried freelancing with little success for two years.

In 1957 Donald Jack sold the play version of his novelette Breakthrough , published in Maclean's, to CBC Television. It became the first Canadian TV play to be simultaneously telecast to the United States.

His third play, The Canvas Barricade, won first prize in the Stratford Shakespearean Playwriting Competition in 1960. Produced in 1961, it was the first original Canadian play performed on the main stage of the Stratford Festival.

Mr. Jack's Leacock medals came for three volumes of The Bandy Papers : Three Cheers for Me , in 1963, That's Me in the Middle , in 1974 and Me Bandy, You Cissie , in 1980.

He was not yet a Canadian citizen when he wrote the first Leacock medal winning book.

Mr. Jack wrote 40 TV plays, several radio plays and four stage plays. He also wrote 35 documentary film scripts, including Royal Canadian Navy and Canadian Armed Forces training films for the National Film Board. These works often demanded a great deal of research.

Mr. Jack wrote with military discipline, beginning at 9 a.m., taking tea at 11 a.m., lunch

at 1 p.m., tea again at 3 p.m. and finishing at 5 p.m. Jack said his dedication and discipline came from "reminding myself of how lucky I am to be able to be the only thing I ever really wanted to be -- a writer."

During the early 1980s when his wife Nancy became ill, the couple returned to England to be near their daughters and their grandchildren. Nancy died in 1991.

At the time of his death in 2003, Jack had started writing again and was working on the ninth volume of The Bandy Papers. He died of a massive stroke at his home in Telford, Shropshire, England.

From Obits, National Post, Globe and Mail, Others June 2003

Three Cheers for Me Review

Billy Bureaucrat goes to War - Parody

Mervyn J. Huston

Mervyn J. Huston may be the only Leacock Medal winner to have had his own nuclear reactor.

Like Stephen Leacock and some other medalists, Huston considered humour writing to be a sideline. For most of his life, he regarded himself as a scientific researcher, academic, and educator in an unrelated field.

For over four decades, he worked in pharmaceutical sciences spending the last 32 years as Dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Alberta. Just before his retirement in 1978, his UofA Faculty became the first in Canada to acquire a SLOWPOKE Nuclear Reactor for its research designed and built by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL). The reactor provided a source of neutrons for chemistry and other research.

Huston was born in Ashcroft, British Columbia, in 1912 and went to school in Kamloops before heading off to Edmonton where he would spend the most of his academic days. His Bachelors and M.Sc. came at UofA. He earned his Ph.D. in Pharmacology during the war (awarded in 1944) at the University of Washington.

In case you might think he was merely showing up for his scientist job, punching the clock, and collecting his pay in order to have the means to do his humour writing, here are some of his credentials from the pharmaceutical sciences realm: President of the Canadian Pharmaceutical Association; President of the Canadian Foundation for the Advancement of Pharmacy; Canadian delegate to the Council of the Federation International Pharmaceutique; Editor of the Canadian Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences: winner of the Dr. E.R. Squibb Award in Pharmacy, Biochemistry and Public Health, and author of four textbooks and over a hundred scientific and professional papers.

Still it is hard to deny his other side. He was a professional saxophone player who toured with dance bands during his university student days and later played the bassoon in the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, and even performed in a rodeo.

But his favored extracurricular activity was humour writing. He produced many books of this nature: the bestselling The Great Canadian Lover, (Hurtig 1969), Toasts to the Bride, (Hurtig 1969), Canada Eh to Zed, (Hurtig 1973) Great Golf Humour (Hurtig 1977), and Golf and Murphy’s Law, (Hurtig 1981).

His personal favorite book was Gophers Don’t Pay Taxes, (Tree Frog Press 1981) – the Leacock Medal winner, which he finished off after retiring from his day job.

But he did, however, retain the title of Professor Emeritus in retirement - this allowed him to maintain his association with the university and that nuclear reactor.

Click Here for Review of
Gophers don't pay Taxes

--------------------------------------------

Huston’s message to graduating students:

“It’s better to fail gloriously than to succeed meanly ... a person who has not made a plenitude of boo-boos in his life hasn’t been aiming high enough.”

BY THE WAY ...

(After many failed attempts to locate and acquire a first edition Gophers Don’t Pay Taxes, I came across one unexpectedly while scanning the wooden shelves in Eliot’s, a quaint, old-fashioned kind of bookstore on Yonge Street in Toronto on St. Patrick's Day 2013 (I remember the date because a reveller came out of a bar near the store and threw up on the sidewalk in front of me - ah .. Yonge Street).

The book was only $6.95 --- and signed by Huston !

This kind of book-finding luck visited me a number of times. I suspect now that books have been signed by an author tend to be the ones that are preserved from the dumpster and recycling and thus end up on old bookstore shelves for text-based treasure hunters like me)

1978 Leacock Medal

Whirligig

by Ernest Buckler

LESSON 31

The appeal of silly

A 2013 Ottawa Valley “Bad Poetry Contest” drew hundreds of entries and overwhelmed the organizers, who were challenged in evaluating all the good bad poetry. It seems more people like the art form than regularly admit it. We stay in the shadows until something like this contest allows us to indulge in the fancy without critique.

I suspect Ernest Buckler might have been pursuing this same awkward pastime when he wrote the essays, poems, and stories bound into Whirligig, the 1978 Leacock Medal winner. At the time, Canadians knew Buckler best as the novelist whose first work, The Mountain and the Valley, sat in the highest rankings of serious Canadian fiction.

Some of the essays in Whirligig are clever and generally consistent with his thoughtful persona. They include an account of early social networking (the Rural Party Line) and an examination of the Christmas card tradition that demands a process for ensuring cards are never sent to the undeserving and are never too fulsome in their messages.

These essays could, and often did, stand on their own as witty magazine or journal articles.

But I find the book more interesting when Buckler plays with different formats and takes shots at his own profession.

Unlike Farley Mowat, Pierre Berton, and other writers who adapted well to the rise of television and mass media in the 1970s, Buckler was uncomfortable with self-promotion and bookselling based on the personality of the writer. A recluse who stuck close to his rural Nova Scotia home, he had a hard time with the pressure to produce a “roguish thumbnail sketch” and photo of “excruciating cuteness” for a writer “otherwise as sober as oatmeal.”

In the chapter “Bestsellers Make Strange Bedfellows,” Buckler deconstructs the process of book sales, marketing, and promotion with the insight of someone who worked as a book reviewer as well as an author. Aspiring writers with full-time employment, families,

and other demands might be heartened by Buckler’s piece on being a writer while also farming, with its inescapable demands tied to the seasons and living creatures. These bits of prose are fun.

Yet Whirligig is memorable because of the parts when the serious Buckler lets loose in quirky, sometimes bad, poetry . . . bawdy limericks, works of many stanzas, and poems of two lines; poems about animals, religion, culture, relationships, marriage, and — often — sex.

It’s hard to believe that the bookish Buckler, a lifelong bachelor, was not releasing more than a pent-up imagination in “Withdrawal Symptoms or Slam, Bam, Thank You Ma’am/I Trust You Wore Your Diaphragm” or the “Matinee Idle,” which muses about live sex on stage and the strain of eight shows per week: “But where is the actor — With enough vital factor.”

His poems like “Never Laugh at a Giraffe” with its ode to “the elephant who wears no trunks,” “the porcupine [that] sports crochet hooks,” and other beasts could evoke the animal-based poetry of Sarah Binks. But it’s not exactly the same.

I have difficulty defining good or bad poetry. But I know Sarah’s poems were amusing because they were framed by an admiring biography. Buckler’s poems and essays don’t have this feature. They can be rhythmic, emotive, and scholarly, but also irregular and disconnected.

The one-time University of Toronto president Claude Bissell said, in the book’s intro, that the pieces in Whirligig were “written at various times” and this makes the sum “an occasional book,” which is another way of saying “a bathroom reader” — a format that might not have propelled Buckler into the upper strata of Canadian literati, but is still, like good-bad poetry, something many of us enjoy when behind closed doors.

WRITING EXERCISE

Write your own author profile for a publisher’s website in a way that shows you did it begrudgingly and with contempt.

Buckler Bits

Ernest Redmond Buckler, born in 1908, earned a B.A. degree at Dalhousie University followed by an M.A. at the University of Toronto in 1931. After university, he worked as an actuary in the “penitentiary” of the Toronto offices of Manufacturer’s Life.
Then in 1936, he returned to his family farm in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. In 1938, at the age of thirty, Buckler won a modest magazine article contest, which was enough to encourage him into a writing career.
But he stayed on the farm until he passed away in 1984.
The Mountain and the Valley, published in 1952, is consistently ranked among the best novels in Canadian literature. A follow-up, The Cruelest Month, fell short of the commercial and critical achievement of his first. In addition to these and Whirligig, his other books include his 1968 memoir, Oxbells and Fireflies. He wrote text for Nova Scotia: Window on the Sea, published in 1973.
As a reviewer, he wrote for Esquire, Saturday Night, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.

From What's So Funny?

Morley Torgov

At this writing, Morley Torgov is doing a great job at nudging up the life expectancy of he average Leacock Medal winner. He is also glowing beacon of inspiration for anyone who hopes to remain active, engaged, and comfortable into their later years.
Born on December 3, 1927, the now 85-year-old Torontonian is reportedly plugging away at the same daily routine that has served him so well in two daunting fields of human experience for some sixty years: writing the comic and complex stories of Canadian life and wrangling the comic and complex cases of Canadian corporate law.

Torgov got his first taste of writing while a teenager working part time for the local newspaper in his home town, which was, as his fans know well, the Northern Ontario steel mill city of Sault Ste. Marie. He developed his love of words further while in university where he counted literature as his favoured field of study. But the imperative to earn a living and secure a respected profession propelled him into law school at Osgoode Hall where he met his wife Anna Pearl and eventually onto a job as a big city lawyer. They had two children, a boy named Alexander, and a daughter, the actress and artist Sarah Torgov.

Although he continued to write on the side, it was not until his father passed away in the mid-1960s that Torgov felt free enough to pen his first book which drew on difficult personal reminiscences of life the Soo. The book A Good Place to Come From won the Leacock Medal in 1975. In 1983, another of his works, The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick, also won a Leacock Medal.

His writing led to other successful novels, stage plays, and short stories published in leading magazines and papers. He is books prompted television productions, plays by others, and, in the case of Max Glick, a television series.

Torgov inspires for several reasons. He was clearly able to manage is time, focusing on intense bill-paying work in the day and switching in a dedicated way to writing at night. He also used his works as a platform to support the CNIB and to pioneer audio books for the Blind.Finally, Torgov inspires me because he has managed to continue his work, maintain his character, and pursue his interests after personal tragedy, Alexander’s death in 2009: the kind of thing that really tests one’s capacity for humour and kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life.

Max Ferguson Trivia - 1968 Leacock Medal Winner

And Now ...There was Max ...

In March of 2013, just days after my online purchase of “And Now Here’s Max ...,” the author and subject of the book died, reportedly of a heart attack, at the age of 89 in Cobourg, Ontario. I hope the heart attack means it was swift and not presaged by undue ailment. The obituaries made it clear that Max Ferguson was loved by many people including thousands who only knew him as a voice on the radio, but considered him a friend.

The ambiance of his passing made my review of the tattered forty-six-year-old book a bit sad. I too felt I was making a friend, one who was passing away. It would not be the last such experience for me this year.

Although his autobiographical book was written before the halfway point of his life, it provided the substance for most tributes, even those penned by those close to Ferguson. They relied sometimes exclusively on “And Now Here’s Max ...” for stories to describe the man. We like to reminisce and recall happy times when we grieve someone’s passing, and it was probably hard for anyone to surpass Ferguson’s own upbeat reminiscing on his life.

Consistent with the emerging pattern that suggests it takes 20-years-for-happy-nostalgia to set in, Ferguson wrote his book, which is rooted in mid-to-late 1940s experience and instigations, in the late 1960s.

With respect to my compilation of Leacock medalists, I do not want to forget that he, like Donald Jack, Richard J. Needham, Joan Walker, and maybe others, was born in England. Ferguson’s birth was in Durham on February 10, 1924. His family came to Canada when he was a child and settled in London, Ontario where he was raised. Well educated for his time, Ferguson earned a degree in French and English at the University of Western Ontario in 1946 with the objective of a teaching career. This imbedded notion and inclination to teach might have underpinned his later radio days when he promoted the classics through parody and introduced new audiences to folk and traditional music from around the world from his privileged platform at CBC.

Perhaps more than many other Leacock medal winners, Ferguson and his work echoed the

Max on Back of My Tattered Book

changing times and the evolution of Canadian culture. He rubbed shoulders and broke bread with the era’s icons like Lorne Greene, Christopher Plummer, and other CBC fixtures, and he was conscious of grand political machinations around arts and information as manifested in the Gordon and Fowler Royal Commissions.

I am not sure if everyone would agree, but as I catalogue my Leacock collection from this perspective, I am filing Ferguson’s book regionally under Nova Scotia alongside the Salt-Box. His Rawhide radio career came out of the region’s Hank Snow heritage encased in the rise of urban Halifax and the sophistication that comes with an abundance of universities and colleges per capita. It was the blend that would demand a daily country music show, but appreciate an ironic twist.

There is a better reason to label him and his book as Nova Scotian. Ferguson, who was, for years, also an interviewer, reporter, and TV host based in Halifax clearly loved the province, the ocean, and the people. He showed it in his affectionate accounts of fishing tournaments, travels through the Annalpolis valley, and the Acadian personalities.

When his Toronto career circumstances gave him the option of living wherever he wanted, he and his family started packing for Nova Scotia that day.

Review of "And Now ... Here's Max"

Morley Torgov

At this writing, Morley Torgov is doing a great job at nudging up the life expectancy of the average Leacock Medal winner. He is also glowing beacon of inspiration for anyone who hopes to remain active, engaged, and comfortable into their later years.

Born on December 3, 1927, the long-time Torontonian is reportedly plugging away at the same daily routine that has served him so well in two daunting fields of human experience the sixty years: writing the comic and complex stories of Canadian life and wrangling the comic and complex cases of Canadian corporate law.

Finally, Torgov inspires me because he has managed to continue his work, maintain his character, and pursue his interests after personal tragedy, Alexander’s death in 2009: the kind of thing that really tests one’s capacity for humour and kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life.

Canus Humorous Books

Gary Lautens

When I moved back east from Vancouver in the early 1980s, my withdrawal from regular reading of Eric Nicol was soothed by discovery of the Toronto Star’s Lautens.

I recognized this Toronto guy as among the superior ranks of humorists in Canadian journalism. It was right around the time that he won his first Leacock Medal for Humour for Take My Family ... Please!

Lautens was well established as both a journalist and humorist by the time I discovered him, and with his children well into their teens and grown, his writing was becoming less family oriented than it had been when the Take My Family stuff was written.

This early 1980s non-kid orientation was helpful in grabbing my then childless, twenty-something attention.

Although Gary Lautens was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario (then Fort William) on November 3, 1929, he was raised in Hamilton. He graduated with a Bachelor’s degree from McMaster in 1950 and immediately joined the local daily, the Hamilton Spectator, where he eventually established himself as a popular sports columnist.

He married his wife, an almost beauty queen, Jackie in 1957. As described in his book Take My Family... Please, the couple had three children.

Lautens joined the Toronto Star in December 1962. Pierre Berton had just left the Star and had been the paper’s high profile columnist to that point. At the Star, Lautens moved from sports to human interest columns. His career included stints as a writer and periodic reporter for TV and a two-year term as Executive Managing Editor of the Star from 1982 to 1984.

From 1985 until his unexpected 1992 death from a heart attack at 63, he wrote humour columns again - at times being the most widely read columnist in Canada.

Gary's columnist, lawyer, humorist son Stephen's take on his Dad.