1967 Leacock Medal - Needham's Inferno

Needham Trivia and High School Sit-In

When I was a teenager, we all knew about the Globe and Mail columnist Richard J. Needham because he had caused a disturbance down the road at Whitby’s Henry Street High.[i]

In 1967, the year Needham won the Leacock Medal for Humour, he made news in our area not because of his award or his writing, but because of his address to the Henry Street “School Spirit Week” assembly.  He told three hundred fresh faces in the gym that he was in favour of “freedom of drink, freedom of sex, voluntary education and the abolishment of all laws except those restraining murder and property damage.”^[ii]  

Needham told the assembly that “Sex, liquor and gambling laws are not worth observing and I break them every chance I get” adding that “The only way to change them is to refuse to obey them.” The next day the students staged a sit-in protest, and we wanted to read newspapers for the first time.[iii]

 In life and in his writing, Richard J. Needham seemed unrestrained.

He could serve up one joke, one bit of nonsense, one sardonic shot after another after another after another for pages and pages as he did throughout most of his 1967 medal book Needham’s Inferno.  Whereas other humorists take a breather once in a while and devote several passages to deliver a bit of incongruity, Needham jumps from one sentence to the next without letting up. 

In a single paragraph, he lists close to a dozen purposely irritating methods used to deliver columns to his editor: “carved on tree in High Park, engraved on the head of a pin, signalled with flags from a flotilla in the lake ... spelled out by a circus elephant ... rhythmic clanking .. through the radiators in Morse code ...  200-foot totem pole...  (squirrels) each with a fortune cookie between its teeth ...  in Sanskrit or maybe Australian.”  Even when not being funny in a specific way, he peppers his stories with gibberish and nonsense names like “Fifi Farenheit,” “Claude Hopper,” “Earnest Consideration,” “Alice Aforethought,” and his own alter ego, the booze-loving “Rudolph J. Needleberry.”

In his Globe and Mail columns and this collection, he kept readers on edge with an energetic silliness that was biting and unique.  For no particular reason beyond irreverence, he maligned his newspaper with epithets like “The Mop and Pail” and “The Goat and Snail” that struck a chord, stuck, and persist to today. In reference to the Managing Editor,[iv] the man who gave Needham his column, the writer throws out adjectives like “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short” adding that “when he pollutes the waters of Lake Simcoe with his presence, he is often mistaken for a snapping turtle.” 

Needham was not just flame-thrower ruthless, but sometimes crude and often lecherous. Many ruminations poked across the boundaries of what is politically correct.  His columns, as captured in Inferno, were a reflection of those other times. They echoed the Mad Men sexism and sexual revolution in derisive commentaries on the Toronto dating scene and the presumed female obsession with finding a “first-class man.” 

Of a woman who lowered her standards, Needham describes her desperations by telling us that “She went out with men who wore hats, men who wore rimless spectacles, and ... who wore sharply pointed shoes with paper-thin soles ... who read Zane Grey ... who carefully studied and added up the restaurant bill ...  who took her to Fort York (and) the Royal Ontario Museum ...  who sucked Clorets just before they kissed ... who put their correct names and addresses on LCBO purchase slips ...” and other similarly flawed beings.

Needham was not a struggling single person using humour in frustration. With a long marriage, grown children, and grandchildren, he was looking at the singles scene with the same detached amusement he applied to politics, business, and especially his own profession. 

In a Faustian tale, he makes a pact with the Devil and then reveals that “Daily newspaper columnists don’t have any souls.”  He makes you feel sorry for poor naïve Satan.

If Needham’s Inferno ended around the hundred-page mark, it could be filed away as a string of comical, but random thoughts and quotable, but disconnected comments.  But the book shifts into sub-collections of a different sort with essays on issues like education.  Here, he hints at the libertarian themes that would characterize his later life in a satire that predicts an institution to fight obesity called the Food Control Board of Ontario (FCBO).

The most striking parts of the last half of Inferno explore morality and ethics.  Needham was from the generation of newspaper reporters who entered the field with little formal education and came up in an apprenticeship way.  For many journalists of the time, reading was limited to the materials of their trade.  But Needham seems comfortable referencing Plato, Cervantes, Melville, Faulkner, Balzac, Flaubert, Goethe, and particularly Albert Camus on writing (“Art is the distance that time gives to suffering”) as well as characters and concepts from opera and theatre.

There is a depth to his madness that’s easier to feel than to explain.  It stings, cries political reform, and philosophizes. And it’s sweetly silly. It pushes the definition of Canadian humour well beyond kindly contemplation.

It would be hard to officially place Richard J. Needham on a platform above Leacock Medalists like W.O. Mitchell, Mordecai Richler, and Robertson Davies or to hold him up as exemplary of Canadian sensibilities. 

But when I’m all alone and thinking of nothing in particular, it’s Needham, Needhamisms and “School Spirit Week” at Henry Street High that pop into my mind most often, cause my head to shake, and make me laugh. 

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[i] “Principal feels strike sparked by Needham,” Globe and Mail, Friday April 28, 1967, p. 51

[ii] Editorial in The Youth’s Instructor (The Seventh Day Adventists) Sept 19, 1967, p.5, Trends by Walter T. Crandall

[iii] I attended high school in Port Perry about 30 km away.

[iv] A future Senator (Richard J. Doyle)

1965 Leacock Medal - War Stories by Gregory Clark

 

Gregory Clark’s 1965 Leacock Medal book describes bloody, plodding conflict in the two world wars.  Its title, War Stories, is not misleading.  But collectively, these stories also describe a different battle. The one to stay sane amidst the insane and to maintain a sense of humour. I hope to never have the face-to-face familiarity with war that Gregory Clark had.  But like all of humanity and its peculiar subset of aspiring writers, I have had my brushes with sadness and have my own interest in Clark’s example.

Books about war often take one of two approaches: the close-up, soldier’s eye view of death and ruin or the sanitized view from aloft of military strategists.

But Clark, a decorated Vimy Ridge officer in the First World War and an embedded  correspondent throughout almost all of the Second, speaks as a veteran soldier who also has the journalist’s capacity to analyze and observe.[i]  The combination gave him the inclination to look at the absurdities of war with sensitivity.

The book draws its material from Clark’s feature articles in Weekend Magazine.[ii]  In the “War Stories,” the difficult subject matter and the magazine format were merged into a refined technique.  Almost all of the pieces were either heart-wrenching stories with a lighter twist at the end or a humorous episode punctuated with a reminder of war.

Clark details a mob attack on a French woman “collaborator” who had been involved with a German soldier. Then his story jumps ahead to the day years later when “The German boy came back and married her.” The sad tale of an old Italian woman who was ostracized as a witch in her bombed out village transforms when she is revealed to be the protector of escaping Allied P.O.W.’s.

In a story with a lighter core, Clark, a fly-fishing fanatic, describes the day he spent casting in the streams in southern England.  He realizes that these streams were those celebrated in the iconic book Where the Bright Waters Meet. Clark was standing in the middle of his personal heaven.  The day ends with a supper of fresh fish and talk of the book. 

But that’s not the end of this story.  One last sentence adds a typical Clark twist: “The order presently came; and the young men piled into their lorries; and we went on down to the sea.”  It was 1944. The men were off to Normandy and “the Sausage Machine.”

Gregory Clark was in his fifties during the Second World War, and he could have easily avoided the grimness that time around. He had done his part in 1916 at Sanctuary Wood.  In that battle, his battalion dropped from 22 officers and 680 men to 3 officers and 78 men in just two days of fighting. Four months later, with reinforcements, the same battalion lost another 1,000 men at the Somme.  But he returned to the battles a few decades later and worked the World War II frontlines only coming home after the death of James Murray Clark of the Regina Rifle Regiment in 1944.

Somehow Clark emerged from the wars, the loss of his son, and later personal tragedies with the capacity to hold onto those thoughts of fly-fishing, to focus on smiling faces, to care for others, and to celebrate the softer side to the end of his own life.  The answer may lie in the journalist-soldier ability to stand back and observe even though you still feel.

This may be, more than any technical writing tricks, the greatest lesson Greg Clark’s War Stories offers to those of us who hope to write, persevere, and keep a sense of humour in the wake of our own inevitable heartbreaks and setbacks.[iii]

 
The War-Zone Comm Officer - A Parody

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[i]  Born in Toronto on September 25, 1892, Clark died in the city on February 3, 1977.  He worked for the Toronto Star from 1911 to 1947. His father was the editor-in-chief of the Star.  His great-nephew is broadcaster Tom Clark.

[ii] For many years, Clark’s columns featured art work by his fishing buddy, cartoonist Jimmie Frise. In 1947 Clark and Frise joined the Montreal Standard (later becoming the Weekend Magazine) as a team, but Frise died  the next year at the age of  57.  Afterward, Clark's stories were illustrated by Duncan MacPherson.

[iii] For a thorough biography check out - The Life & Times of Greg Clark:  Canada’s Favourite Story Teller(1981) by Jock Carroll

 

1966 Nursery rhymes - By George Bain

If you ripped every second page out of George Bain’s Nursery rhymes to be read aloud by young parents with old children, you’d have a book that could sit on the shelf between Dr. Seuss and Winnie-the-Pooh.  Every second page of the 1966 Leacock medal winner speaks in a fun, three-to-eight-year-old-kid way.

Yet whole and intact, Bain’s book belongs on the hard to reach shelves alongside works of literature.

Colourful illustrations and verse laid out in the abecedarium - A is for ape, B is for beaver - style for kids fill half the book.  But each of these pages sits opposites one of prose, biological information, and facts about the animal.  

Bain, a respected journalist,[i] proposed the two-pronged format under the premise that young parents needed ammunition to beat back inquisitive children.  Children who, upon hearing funny verses, react with “persistent whys, whens, and hows.”

You can learn a lot - from tidbits like the scientific names of fish to the answer as to whether a zebra is a white animal with black stripes or a marked black animal.  On the letter-G animal, the Gnu, we learn of the “Brindled Gnu” and that there never was a “zoologist named Watt” and no sub-species “known as Watt’s Gnu.” Useful stuff when dealing with kids.

The two sides of the book feed off each other, making the whole more than the sum of a kid’s book and a bunch of facts and a reminder of the power that lies in  mixing genres.   Like other Leacock medal books, a mix elevates simple content with an incongruous context.  But unlike the others, Nursery Rhymes would not have succeeded with words alone.  The drawings of animals and ornate lettering gave made the parody work. The Leacock  Medal awarders could have justly split the medal between illustrator Colette MacNeil and Bain.  

Nevertheless, Bain[ii] deserves full credit for an innovative concept that spoke to the times.  His book reflects the backend of the baby boom when those babies were becoming children, homes were being built, and family concerns were ascending.  Many parents needed a laugh.  I wish I had the book when my kids were little.

Although my copy is fragile and the dust jacket is tattered, I may lend it to some parents to see if mental gymnastics remain part of the practice of reading to kids today.  In any case, I’m pretty sure that young parents can still use a laugh and that double-edged humour still works.

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[i] George Bain (1920 - 2006) wrote elegant newspaper columns.  But his most celebrated act was to use the F... word in print.   In 1968 when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau swore at an opposition member in the House of Commons, most of the media merely reported that Trudeau used an obscenity or quoted the Prime Minister as saying the words were “fuddle duddle.”  Bain set the record straight, using the notorious four letters in sequence for the first time in a major Canadian publication (Globe and Mail).

[ii] Although known primarily as a political journalist, George Bain did not restrict his humour to side projects like his Leacock Medal Book. He injected humour into his regular columns and wrote mock newspaper reports, like his pretend Letters from Lilac, Saskatchewan.   Bain authored other books of humour including I've Been Around and Around and Around, Letters from Lilac, Champagne is for Breakfast, and Gotcha.