No. 285: CBC, MORNINGSIDE & THE CRTC: How I narrowly averted scandal & ridicule with my Canadian radio debut

My consolation: As awful as it went, it could have been worse.

I’M not much of a guest of radio, which is less than ideal when you make your living selling printed words by the thousands. There’s no better place to connect with consumers of journalism and literature than radio and its digital spinoff, podcasts and the giants of publishing and print media are polished pros behind the mic. My croaking voice and stilted delivery aren’t the only reasons I’m not a best-seller like Michael Lewis, but lack of radio-magnetism certainly has made the climb to the Top 10 list that much steeper. Who am I kidding? The climb to Amazon’s Top 1,000 in Sports Humor or categories even more niche-y is akin to the rock face in Ansel Adams’s Yosemite.

Radio has been on my mind this week. I’m an avid NPR listener and in Kingston we’re in range of North Country Public Radio, the upstate New York affiliate of NPR. By “upstate,” understand that we’re talk about a region which has Syracuse, N.Y., just at or slightly outside its southernmost reach of NCPR’s satellite transmitters, which dot the counties on the south shore of Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence.

Yes, NCPR’s market sits in the state of the New York and not so far removed in the eastern flanks from Albany, but it’s also Fly-over America—sparsely populated, largely agricultural, economically hard-pressed with dire numbers of the unemployed and those living below the poverty line. Lake Placid and a couple of other towns in the Thousand Islands draw well-heeled elites on vacation from New York City but otherwise it’s hard-scrabble turf. The largest city in the market, Watertown, gives a seen-much-better-times, buckle-of-the-Rust-Belt vibe—not for nothing did Richard Russo’s draw on this region as a setting for novels about the cash-strapped and downwardly mobile. And, yeah, the region’s other literary lion was Watertown’s and Alexandria Bay’s own Fred Exley, the self-tortured artist against whom all dispirited, sports-obsessed auto-fictionists are measured. Sigh.

(My editor at espn.com, the legendary Jay Lovinger, had the very mixed pleasure of editing Exley and Hunter S. Thompson as well as giving Gary Smith and Richard Ford big breaks. I wrote about Jay, Ex and Ford in this very early entry on the How to Succeed in Sportswriting (without Really Trying) SubStack: No. 10: RICHARD FORD / Re-reading & reconsidering the 80s classic, The Sportswriter.)

I wrote a brief story in the Whig-Standard last week about NCPR and Kingston’s status as the largest market in range of the network’s signal. More than that, Kingston’s demographics, with its colleges, white-collar executive class and income, are much closer to the core audience that NPR draws if Pew Research numbers are an indicator.

As telling, voters in 21st District, which includes most listeners in NCPR’s range on the U.S. side, has elected Elise Stefanik, a Republican, to the House of Representatives for the last six sessions and she has been a loud advocate of federal defunding of public radio—in the last election, she accused NCPR of “election interference” in its reporting. And, yes, as you’ve already guessed, the 21st District has voted for Donald Trump in the last three elections by a margin of 20 percent or so--he’d probably suggest that defunding NPR and PBS is too good for them, that he’d be up for jailing the public broadcaster in the interim at off-shore facilities, if he weren’t so busy trying to sue and dismantle CBS and 60 Minutes.

Of course, these days Canadians are in Elbows Up mode, what with all the “51st state” trash talk and tariffs intended to kill Canadian jobs and resolve. We’re probably typical on that point. We voided plans to head to Florida, our usual, ditto a trip to NYC for theatre and comedy—we didn’t imagine that a little weekend getaway to Ithaca before New Year’s would be our last trip to the US for four years, but here we are. And, yup, I’m the guy in the produce section buying blueberries from Morocco rather than the US. Still trying to find EU-sourced grits.

Nonetheless, I’m an avid listener to NCPR—I’m not much on listening to CBC out of Ottawa. NPR’s coverage of Washington and international politics is appointment stuff for me, ditto BBC News content. Likewise, NPR’s coverage of culture and the arts is more to my tastes than CBC’s.

I’m giving NCPR, NPR and other media outlets I subscribe to (New York Times and the Atlantic among others) exemptions from any Elbows Up prohibition or embargo. They do work that is good and necessary work and, to my mind, their journalism and thought isn’t simply a business or industry, so much as public service, a higher, principled cause. For NCPR, NPR and PBS, it’s especially true, given that their not-for-profit models.

Alas, these aren’t distinctions that many Canadian consumers of U.S. public broadcasters are making—thus are the folks at NCPR are caught in the crossfire, between a threatened if not cratering Canadian audience on the north and an assault from Trump, Stefanik and others in Washington. This was the nut of my Whig-Standard story on NCPR, but while reporting it, in conversation with a dedicated listener

Gord Taylor, a retired transportation executive just north of Kingston, became the linchpin of my story—a Canadian appalled by political winds in the US, a NCPR listener who was for a time disaffected, but has now come back around and restored his membership. You can check out the story on the Whig-Standard website: Upstate New York public broadcaster hoping to hold on to listeners in its biggest market: Kingston

Gord and I chatted about our shared love of radio news and traced it back to listening to Morningside, the CBC morning show hosted by Peter Gzowski back in the 80s and 90s. Our readers in the US will have no idea what I’m talking about and anyone under 50 in Canada is likely in the dark about it too, so here’s a quick primer with stuff pulled the Canadian Encyclopedia’s website:

It wasn’t until he became the CBC radio host of Morningside in 1982 that Gzowski became a Canadian icon. Morningside was a three hour, five days a week morning show from 9:00 a.m. to noon that included up to 10 interviews per show. Guests ranged from leading politicians to writers as prominent as Alice Munro to complete newcomers to ordinary Canadians. Until the show closed in 1997 his curiosity, sensitivity and wit, combined with his patriotism and ability to project personal warmth, made him one of the best (and best-loved) broadcasters in Canada. It is estimated that over his career, Gzowski conducted some 30,000 interviews.

Gord and I talked for a time about Morningside and that prompted me to recount my first experience on Canadian radio: a bit of promotion for The Only Ticket off the Island, a book I wrote about baseball in the Dominican Republic back in the early the early 90s.

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MY first book, The Only Ticket was a misadventure in publishing that scared me off writing anything longer than a magazine story for 15 years. A glowing review in the Globe and Mail was nice, but the whole enterprise was an utter financial failure--my advance was projected to cover my costs but little more, which would have been fine if the publisher, Lester & Orpen Dennys, hadn’t gone bankrupt the same week my book hit the shelves. Yeah, The Only Ticket was L & OD’s death gasp.

Somehow with receivership and other complications, the book went through four publishers, who spent more on postage for my depressing royalties statements than they ever made in sales. Their best income opportunity came when they sold boxes of my books by the pound to be pulped and repurposed as cardboard—if you ever picked up that book, it was likely as a shoebox or toilet paper.

My Morningside appearance to flog The Only Ticket was a fit in the collapsed arc of this story. I should add that, as bad as it was, I narrowly averted disaster, one that would have put my name out there, albeit as a laughingstock. In retrospect, maybe that wouldn’t have been a bad thing—better to be a famous/infamous rube than a respectable unknown.

I thought I had scored a major victory when the publicist from L & OD called me with the news that she had landed me an in-studio interview on the CBC’s flagship radio show. She thought it was a triumph for her as well, at least until Friday that week when she realized that company was no longer issuing payroll cheques to its underpaid minions.

I was only mildly let down when the publicist told me that Gzowski was heading out on summer holiday and other CBC staffers were filling in. An audience with the Great Man would be an effective audition for a recurring slot of some sort, so I imagined. Sigh. Still, I wasn’t checking the gift horse for gingivitis—this was the best chance to sell a book in Canada, a rave review in the Globe and Mail running a poor second. Summer programming on Morningside cobbled together the greatest hits from Gzowski’s interviews over the fall, winter and spring, and some timely stuff and current affairs with stand-in hosts.

I’m not sure who was substituting for Gzowski that day. It wasn’t one of his regulars. Not Stuart MacLean. Not Shelagh Rogers. It was a waspy guy in his mid-30s, maybe a little older, with perfect pitch. With his sensible coif and benign manner, he was indistinguishable from the dozens of loaves of Wonder Bread rolling off the CBC production line back in those determinedly homogenous days.

A segment producer called me and said I was to show up at 7:45 or so and I’d be in the studio with the guest host at 8:30 for 12 to 15 minutes, something approaching an eternity for a book promo on radio. All good, said I. After I hung up I thought I should have asked him exactly when my spot was going to air—Morningside was in the 9 a.m.-to-noon time slot in Toronto. I figured the producer would have a better idea after we finished recording the spot and the show’s schedule was locked in.

On the appointed day I reported 10 minutes early to the Morningside studio, a basement warren in a CBC building on Jarvis Street north of Gerrard, a Victorian-era fortress where presumable Lorne Greene had read news and weather back in the 40s and 50s. Though it was kinda gritty and grimy, a radio fanboy like me couldn’t help but feel like I was treading on historic, even sacred turf.

My hopes and dreams crashed at the starting line—the host introduced me as Gar Joyce, yes, rhymes with “car.” I had told the producer that it “share” or “bear” or “dare,” but evidently the stand-in didn’t get beyond the heading of the notes handed to him. I presumed going in that the interviewer wouldn’t have read my book—that was Munro, Richler & Atwood territory—but it seemed pretty clearly that this fella hadn’t even glanced at the copy on the jacket, the 300-word summary of the subject matter. Across the first three questions, baseball somehow didn’t come up. Then I realized, the host knew nothing about baseball and cared not a bit about sports.

At once distracting and disheartening.

I had come prepared for a chat and realized two minutes in that I was going to have to run with the ball. I wasn’t quite in a dead panic, but I was definitely feeling the pressure to improvise on the spot.

Those who know me know that I can get a little lost in my own thoughts—that I can get into a conversation with myself. More than a few times over the years someone I’ve interviewed has stopped the proceedings and asked me: “What was the question again?” At least a couple of times, there’s been a variation on that theme: “Was there a question there?”

So it was in the Morningside studio I got sucked into a vortex of my own thought while prattling on, desperately scrambling. This was going terribly wrong, I thought, and I could see puzzlement on the face of the engineer wheeling the dials and knobs. The interviewer, it seemed, wasn’t even paying attention. Right at the point where he spread his arms and stretched, I thought to myself, Let’s take this from the top and fix this in editing.

I drew in a breath and was going to say “Fuck it. Let’s do this over.” And if the producer, engineer and host didn’t like it, I would have pulled the chute, walking out of the studio.

But I didn’t form the words and on impulse just kept going. I could tell that seven or eight minutes had passed and didn’t see the point of doing it all over again. I limped through the remainder of time and kept my thanks to the interviewer muted.

When I left the studio, I asked the producer when my segment was going to air—another way of asking if it was going to air and if there was any cleaning up in editing. If Morningside had any quality control in place this misfire wouldn’t have made the cut. I almost dropped to my knees with his casual response.

“It’s on in Toronto at quarter after on tape delay,” he said. “The interview was going live to the Maritimes.”

Yeah, that’s how close I came to saying, “Fuck it” and chewing out the host on Morningside. In a split second I avoided putting Morningside on the CTRC’s shit list and persona non grata at the CBC.