We ended our status as a nation when, faced with economic ruin, we elected the British-born Frederick Alderdice and his government to lead us elsewhere. Lead us he did. In 1934 Alderdice took us to Commission of Government and we never did get back our status as a nation. It had been promised to us that we would return to Responsible Government. Instead, we were presented at the end with three choices: Responsible Government: Commission of Government; or Confederation with Canada. The rest, as they say, is history.

The more I learn about the events that surrounded the two referenda that took us to Confederation the less I like it. I have always been a staunch believer in Confederation, and I still am, but I see, as the years roll on, how we were directed. We went where Britain and Canada wanted us to go which is NOT to the United States which through its presence in World War Two was putting its “stamp” on us. It wasn’t illegal, but it was a conspiracy. On the other side of that ledger are the expressed thoughts of Joseph R. Smallwood who said words to the effect that conspiracies, openly arrived at, are the heart and soul of democracies.

You may remember that I wrote some years ago that sometimes there are events on which the course of history swings that we may not be much aware of. Sometimes these events do not even become public until long after they have happened. They leave behind them always the eternal question of history; what if? 

The event in question came to life through an article in the Vancouver Sun about the referendum that decided Newfoundland’s fate in 1948. It was the July referendum in which Confederation defeated Responsible Government by the narrowest of margins to carry us in the direction of Canada. It was the second referendum. The Sun reported that in 1948, BEFORE that deciding vote took place the British appointed Newfoundland Governor of the day, Gordon Macdonald, made a bold decision. MacDonald was very British and very much disliked. He represented “government from afar”. He represented the British Commission of Government. Here is the decision that MacDonald made that has only recently come to light. The governor asked then British Prime Minister Clement Atlee to send a naval contingent to Newfoundland to support the local constabulary in St. John’s in case of trouble if Confederation won the vote. The phrase that comes to mind is from the days of Canada’s FLQ crisis. It is “apprehended insurrection”.

His Honour, in 1948, was much concerned that a victory by the Confederate forces might bring violence to the streets of St. John’s. The city was of course a stronghold of support for Responsible Government. The Newfoundland “outports” were largely supportive of Confederation with Canada. Now, according to the documents uncovered in England British Prime Minister Clement Atlee, who had replaced Churchill just before the end of the Second World War, first felt inclined to grant the request from Governor Macdonald but Atlee changed his mind because his advisors told him the threat of violence in Newfoundland after a Confederate victory remained small at best and in fact in the months immediately after that deciding vote in the second referendum much of the bitterness of the once fearsome campaign had ebbed away. Violence never became a real consideration.

The uncovered documents go on to report that the request from Governor Macdonald to the British government was top secret because of the political implications of the matter becoming public. Now today is begged this intriguing question of history – What if?

Would discovery of a request by the ruling governor for a British military presence in Newfoundland to militarily back a Confederate win, PRIOR to the holding of that second referendum be ammunition enough for the forces backing Responsible Government to swing that most critical vote? Would the outrage of Newfoundlanders discovering, as the new found documents indicate, that the British had been asked specifically by the governor of the day to bring a warship to either Conception Bay or Placentia Bay with several hundred military people on board be enough to alter history? The plan was to keep them out of sight so to speak so as to not raise undue concern among the population; particularly the Responsible government supporters. Consider in 1948 that if, armed with the idea of a British warship in our waters, Responsible Government had been able to take advantage of that information and swing enough votes to carry the day.

This will always remain one of histories unanswered questions and was one of histories best kept secrets until now. The leaders of the Responsible Government movement went to their graves without knowing that in Newfoundland the nation the last governor Gordon Macdonald had asked the British government to consider backing up a possible Confederate win with military muscle. It was the “unseen hand “at work in public affairs.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

Our own first hurdle was to find a way get a microwave signal out of Gander. Gander was the town so central to telling the story of plane loads of people who had “come from away” to our province. By way of information, I can tell you that, although we had no television station in Gander, we could send a microwave signal from a tiny concrete building used for telecommunications by a private company that was not in the TV business. They helped us and it worked. We had two TV crews motoring to Gander and a place from which we could transmit their pictures to St. Johns. It is hard to explain but there is a sense that in being able to do that made us feel good although “good” is not the right word.

Within the television business there is a phrase that is called getting “lost in the lens”. What it means is that no matter how horrific a story is, there is an obligation to cover it to the best of our ability. NTV was not an exception in the “lost in the lens” phenomenon. In our newsroom we could see coverage from New York and Washington and everywhere else. Most of the channels were “program” feeds but there was one CBS off-air channel that was being used to co-ordinate that networks coverage. The talk on that channel wasn’t from anchors or news people. It was from producers of various levels directing coverage from ground zero and elsewhere. It was talk about camera availability and technical requirements and all of the thousand of little details that go along with that. It was busy but it was calm and very much under control. If you think I was surprised by that I was not. It is the way things go. It is not a reflection of being hard or not caring. It is just a matter of focus and not of emotion.

That brings me now to the 25th anniversary of 9/11. In Newfoundland we remembered the planes and people who had found shelter in Gander and St. John’s and other places. We have been for centuries a place of shelter. Good for us. It speaks well of us but the anniversary of 9/11 this year took me to my own television set and American networks and the awful images of the Twin Towers in New York falling and the aftermath of it all. Some pictures I had seen for the first time and some stories I had heard for the first time,

In the end some numbers confronted me from that day. Over 1,700 humans died in the collapse of the North Tower. Another 1,000 people died in subsequent collapse of the South Tower. From the fire department another 343 people were killed. The grim total was 2,996 people killed. That included those on planes that were hijacked and included the hijackers themselves.

The shots of the smoking rubble at ground zero had a great impact on me but so did some other shots. One of those was a long parking lot of cars. It was in New Jersey. It was cars parked while their owners went to work on Sept. 11th by commuter train to the World Trade Centre.  They were the cars of hundreds people who weren’t coming home that evening.  It was a another chilling image  from a day that changed our understanding of our flawed world.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

Now I want to share something with you and it may shock you. It is that there is an unreal quality to the archives here or elsewhere. That’s especially true in the early years, what I have presented is a television film archive and television in Newfoundland and Labrador only has a history that goes back to the mid-1950s. The early offerings, although preserved by CJON forever, are in black and white and we did not live in a black and white world.

A great portion of the archives the stories preserved in black and white are from the very early days of television. That is true of a lot of things but certainly is true about a subject of which much has been written. It is the oft-told story of the loss of our Newfoundland railway.  Now it is something of I know a lot about because I worked at the railway in several capacities over the years from office work, to loading trucks, to my proudest moments of working in the dining cars of the old cross island express, affectionately known as The Bullet. I know that story backwards and forwards because I was on one of the last runs of the cross- island passenger express. It was in July of 1969 and wasn’t actually the last run, but it was the second last. We went from St. John’s to Port aux Basques as a working crew in the dining car but ‘deadheaded’, as the expression goes, back to St John’s. That means the crew came back with the dining car and our sleeping car but there were no passengers on the train. It was over. When the train pulled into the station in St. John’s my work with CN was finished.

Now that brings me to how the story of the trains in Newfoundland, as presented to you, is something of an illusion. The railway was never a black and white world. It was a world of rich colour, both on board the trains and across the island. The trees were wonderful. The towns were wonderful. The rivers were great and our glimpses of the Atlantic Ocean were striking. When I wasn’t actually working, I would stand out on the “break” as it called between cars and watch the world go by.

The whole thing was filled with colour and with layered sounds and smells. There was a distinct sound to the rails and the brakes as the train ran over them. There was a sound to the dining car and a sound to the kitchen. The train itself ran on diesel in my time. Older people may remember the coal burners, but they were gone before I arrived. Wherever you went on the train in my day there were things to smell from within the train and from outside it.

At breakfast, dinner and supper our dining car was alive with  the rich smell of food and the food was good. There was bacon in the morning and fried eggs floating in fat and big roasts at dinner and soups all over the place. Apple pies were actually cooked at the CNR bakery in St. John’s and brought on board for the trip across the island. This was presented in a dining car that was neat as a pin. That is why I present to you now with this article a colour picture of the interior of a dining car where I sometimes plied my trade.

I was a summer relief worker as a waiter.  The men in the picture you see are all full-time employees. That picture is warm and inviting. The dress code called for neatly pressed black pants, a white shirt, a black necktie and a fresh white apron and of course black well shined shoes. If you were really cool you had a hand towel around your arm.

For those who might think the service in the end had deteriorated you are wrong. That was a story floated by those who said the railway was stolen from us. It wasn’t. People just stopped using it because buses were a quicker way across the island of Newfoundland. I always say that people liked everything about the cross-island train except actually buying tickets for it. I remember our dining car had six or seven waiters and a cook and a cook’s helper and, in the final days, a total of less than a dozen paying “sleeper” passengers. If you had a sleeping berth, then dining car meals were part of the cost. If you were just riding in the coach seats of another car the costs of meals in the dining car would keep you out. Sandwiches and soft drinks were sold “in coach”. 

Enjoy the picture from the interior of the dining car during the glory days. Look at it and then close your eyes. You can almost hear the echo of a far-off whistle and that clickety-clack sound from a part of our heritage now gone.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

It is challenging enough that we have provincial elections every four years where we get to choose who holds the reins of power. That concept of “one person one vote” is sometimes enough to frighten you spitless. It looks good on the surface but God almighty. The idea of everyone voting on important matters in a referendum should keep you up nights in despair.

In general elections you are voting on what a political party SAYS it will do if elected. They are called election promises and they do not have to be kept. The idea of promising to hold a referendum on any new Labrador power agreement falls into that category. There is no punishment for not doing what you said you would do. In politics, breaking a promise or an undertaking is not a crime.

Now let me step aside here for a moment to tell you a true story that will back up my notion on referenda. I had an associate in the media who held a decent job that paid him decent wages. He paid his taxes. He went to George Street on the weekend. He caused the society in which he operated no trouble. He voted in all elections. He was Joe Citizen, the heart and soul of our democracy.

Joe, however, held the honest belief that the Second World War lasted for seven days and somehow involved Israel and Egypt. I am not making this up. That was the level of my friend’s grip on current affairs. He had somehow, in his mind, conflated the Second World War and the Seven Days War in the Middle East. This man would get to vote in any referendum.

That is the problem with democracy when things wind up in a referendum. It is a hope at least that when we vote for a provincial government, we will elect a body of people whose general political leaning will reflect our thoughts and who will be judged not by one event but rather but the performance of government on a range of issues over four years or so. It is not perfect, but it does not hold the absolute dangers of rule by referendum or running things by what is most popular. I look into the great abyss and ask you to consider how a referendum on capital punishment would turn out if it were held today. Would we confirm our stand that where will be no capital punishment in Canada? I am not sure. I do know right from wrong, but I am not sure about that vote if it were held.

Consider the idea of abortion. How would a free ballot on abortion go in Canada? I do not know. I like our abortion laws, but I would not want the idea put into the hands of every voter for a “yes or no” vote. A wise person said to me once that every man or woman in Canada is against abortion until their daughter needs one.

Do you see my point? A referendum is something for exceedingly rare occasions. The last time I thought something was “referendum worthy” it was over denominational education where the cost of all the school boards was “driving us into the poor house” as mom used to say.

Am I saying the electorate is not smart enough or a ‘one person, one vote’ decision on a power agreement with Quebec? Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. The government of Premier Wakeham has a mandate to govern Newfoundland and Labrador. The government used that mandate. Yes, they broke an election promise but Holy God Almighty, if everyone who broke an election promise got kicked out of the House of Assembly you would not have enough members left for a game of cards.

Now this is an odd point of view for me to defend and there are those who will be angry in my speaking in favour of a broken promise on a referendum. I will leave you with a final word on democracy and voting. It is a thought often credited without proof to Winston Churchill. He did not actually say that. It is more correctly traced to the writings of Socrates. Apart from all the rhetoric on government it reads.          

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

Whoever said that you can file the idea away under ‘food for thought’.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

I was an only child for the first five years of my life. I had my parents’ undivided attention. Then my brother John came along and spoiled almost everything. I say almost because by then I knew how to read. It changed the rest of my life. The first book in Grade 1 I remember after I entered school was David and Ann. That was in a Catholic school. The Protestant schools had a different Grade 1 book but that is the way denominational schools worked. There were a Catholic way and a Protestant way. It made no sense, but our Catholic ‘reader’ book started like this. 

                   “David plays.

                    Ann plays.

                    Mother works.

                    Father works.”  

                    We changed that later in our playground games to read;                       

                    “David plays,

                    Ann plays.

                    Mother works.

                    Father is on Unemployment Insurance.”

My whole family were readers. I had an uncle who kept several books of the Encyclopedia Britannica in his bathroom. This is when Britannica still existed in print form. There were no computers then. There was no such thing as “online”. The “books in the bathroom” tradition says a lot. It continues in my home to this very day, much to the chagrin of my good wife. Britannica is not there but there are several biographies there and a couple of Ray Guy collections and a few issues of The Newfoundland Quarterly.

Beyond grade school the path of reading for me was further shaped at MUN where, in the English way, a student “reads” for his degree. I was lucky enough at MUN to take one English course from Dr. Paddy O’Flaherty and another from playwright Michael Cook. You talk about good fortune.

Eventually I went overseas to England to find adventure and found work in London. I worked for W.H. Smith and Sons. They were, among other things, newspaper, magazine and BOOKSELLERS. I came to understand books and newspapers and magazines and how they were sold. As an aside at my newspaper kiosk in Earls Court where I worked a regular customer for The Times each morning was comedian John Cleese. He always said, “Good morning, The Times please”. I always replied with “Good morning, sir”

You may be wondering where all this leads. When I eventually returned to St. John’s I needed work. I knew about fish plants and brewery work.  I also knew about pick and shovel. I knew about working in a lumber yard and I knew about general labour on a truck. I also knew about the real passion of my life. I knew about books.

I, along with my brother and another friend from university, opened AFTERWORDS Bookstore. Often people ask about the clever name AFTERWORDs. I can tell you the name came by way of the fact that the store we rented at 234 Duckworth Street had previously been occupied by WATERFORD NURSERIES. Their sign was made up of individual wooden letters. A few glasses of wine and a few beers later we came up with the name AFTERWORDS.

So, what is the great lesson? Well, it is simple. In the world of books, you meet many wonderful people. Readers are great. It doesn’t even really matter what they read. The medium is the message. Readers of Harlequin Romances or westerns (“dusters” they are called in the book trade), or sci-fi or biographies or history all seem to be decent people. At AFTERWORDS, in the early days we had a coal burning stove that heated the store. I would spend hours talking books with anybody and everybody. There was a city worker, a postman, a university professor and a whole load of people that were readers and loved talking books.

I loved it and I remember it fondly. I have an e-reader, but I still prefer books that are of PAPER. There is a smell to them and a sound of pages turning. In my home there is the faint smell of old books. I’m not even sorry about that. It is a very welcome background to my life.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

First of all, to establish my credentials, I have been a soccer fan my whole life. I didn’t just show up to this summer soccer spectacular with nothing other than ‘Go Canada Go’ on my lips. I have followed the game. One of the highlights of my broadcast career actually has been that I was part of the broadcast of the Canada -Honduras game in 1985 that sent Canada into its first World Cup. Carl Lake did play-by-play and I did colour as Canada defeated Honduras 2-1 at King George V field. It was great. We did nothing in the World Cup but getting there was a big deal.

Manchester United has been my team in English football since the days of the Munich air disaster in 1958 when a Man United charter crashed and tragically killed the heart of the Manchester team. That is when I started following Man U. I did briefly support Chelsea while I lived in London in the late 1960s and actually was at the Chelsea victory parade that wound its way down Earls Court Road after they defeated Leeds 2-1 and won the F A Cup in 1969-70.

I tell you all that now so you will know that I do know something about soccer. I do know enough to understand that Canada this year was never going to win this 2026 World Cup. They weren’t good enough. That doesn’t mean I didn’t support them and Canada did okay and “punched above their weight” as the expression goes in sport.

Canada didn’t finish first, second, third, or fourth. In fact, the team ended up in 14h place when all the points and goals for and goals against calculations were made. That may not sound great but do understand that in the world rankings Canada’s team is now ranked as the 30th best team so finishing 14th this summer wasn’t bad at all.

What did we learn this year? Well, all is never quite as it appears in soccer. Remember brave little Cape Verde was eventually eliminated by Argentina. That tiny island nation captured our hearts BUT of the 26 players on the Cape Verde squad, 15 aren’t from there. Six are from the Netherlands and another four are from Portugal. They have eligibility because of their parents’ birthplace. Not to worry, it is all legal. I cheered them on as they were still classic underdogs.

The good news this from the World Cup, despite all the bull surrounding it, is that the best team won out in the end. Spain had the best team; the best organized team and the deepest team. They also were one of only a half dozen teams or so that had total passion for the game. Spain played as if they had to win. Lionel Messi and Argentina notwithstanding – Spain was the best.

I loved the whole thing. I knew that England couldn’t win, and I knew Canada couldn’t win – and luckily the United States couldn’t win or I would have to endure that silly “USA. USA. USA” chant. The beautiful game of soccer won!

Where now? What is the future of soccer? If you ask me, it is in Africa and has been now for some time. It used to be South America and right now it is Europe. Despite giving Trump a trophy and having to drag him off the stage from the trophy presentation it was still great. The cream rose to the top and the World Cup, with all its flaws, still brings the world together.

Well, at least it takes it is a step in the right direction. The world does pause to watch it and that is a good thing.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

A couple of things need to be said about gasoline prices, and I guess it falls under that old expression – “I have some good news and some bad news. Which do you want to hear first?’’  Well, the good news is, and you may not like this a whole lot but gasoline, all things being relative, is still a bit of a bargain.

There are aspects of the current price of gas that as horrible as they have remained a bit illusionary. First of all, the cheapest I remember gasoline ever being was, when I was 20 years of age and then it was, under 50 cents a gallon. That is a gallon now and not a litre.  You could still get “no name “gas in Toronto for even less.  It wasn’t Esso or Shell or Texaco or anything you ever heard of. It was just plain old gasoline from budget pumps, and it came from God knows where. This was about 1962. Now at 4.4 litres to the gallon that makes the litre price in those days roughly 12 cents! 

To put that in context you have to look at salaries. My dad was a clerk on Water Street at Parkers. He never made more than $48 per week and that was up into the early 1960s So, who could best afford gasoline? Was it the clerk of 1963 (pronounced clark in the English way) or the clerk of 2026. The answer is the modern clerk. The price of gas is gone up more than 10 times from what it was in the early ’60s, but my dad was spending more of his weekly salary on gas than people with similar jobs today are spending.   

I know that is no consolation, but I just thought I’d drop the numbers on you. Another thing to think about from those heady days of the 1960s is that I had a friend with a big old eight-cylinder car. It was an Oldsmobile 88 actually and he got roughly 12 miles to the gallon. Think about that for fuel efficiency. The four cylinder car in North America hadn’t even been invented. Also, in Europe gasoline prices have been high for decades which is why there were Hillmans and Vauxhalls and VW bugs. When I worked in England in 1966 you hardly ever saw a Chev or a Ford. Nobody could afford to drive a six or eight-cylinder car.

 Gasoline prices were also part of the reason public transit systems work so well in Europe. They were cheap because people were forced to use them and when a system gets a lot of use it makes money and the system gets better. You know what is ironic by on the matter of public transportation? I was on assignment on a special train here in Newfoundland that the government of Brian Peckford put on for a press trip while there were still tracks to run trains on.  The train took the press out to Avondale and back. There was an onboard press conference to announce the “revitalization” of the Newfoundland Railway. Part of Brian Peckford’s dream that he outlined was to one day have a train that came in from Carbonear-Harbour Grace on a daily basis that would carry workers into St. John’s. Workers would park their cars out there and arrive in the capital for work by train just like they do in Europe.

That was a nice dream, but cheap gas means it wasn’t going to happen. The economics for the dream are better now but, unfortunately, we are one railway short. There are some good signs because you an increase now in carpooling. You see places out of town where cars are parked and the drivers pool with other people coming into Sin Johns.  

Anyway, here is bad news. Gasoline prices are about to change our lives significantly and you had better get used to it. It used to cost me roughly $5 a few years ago for a round trip from Topsail into work. That was a big old roomy six-cylinder car that I drove. It had a good stereo, but it drank gas. Today, that same trip would be way higher than that. My VW camper bus (circa) 1977 took more  than  $10 to get me into “town” and back home to Topsail. I also had a big eight-cylinder truck at one time, but I just couldn’t afford to drive it to St. John’s. I could run down to the store in Topsail. The upshot of it all that is that I didn’t drive into St. John’s on weekends like I used to. I sold the truck. Now we have two cars in the family – both are four cylinders. I drive a Korean car that is really tiny, but it just sips gas.

You can also see the change in living patterns. My life has changed. No truck and no van and I don’t drive as much as I used to. The world is different, but I am cheered by a line from my youth when someone asked me how many miles my big six cylinder car with the great stereo got to the gallon. My reply was; “I don’t know because I’ve never had a whole gallon.”    

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

I mention the rain because it is the summer rain that brings out the smell of the lilacs. We have just a few lilac trees but if you have one yourself you will know how the full bloom and that beautiful soft smell of the lilacs is fleeting. It lasts only for a week or so. The only other flower where full bloom is so transitory is the tiny blossom of the apple trees. They last less than a week. The words apple trees don’t imply an orchid. We have only a couple of trees.

What the nice gentle swell of the lilac did for me in the dark was take me back through time to where I was raised in the west end of St. John’s. There were lilac trees there too. We had one. My neighbour up the street had two trees and grandmother’s place next to ours had a couple of trees as well. The people across the street had a couple and there were some on Atlantic Avenue just across from us.

Smell is a wonderful memory trigger and the smell of lilac after a rain is the smell, or at least part of the smell, of the west end of my city. It is a smell that is clean and earthy and full of promise of a nice warm summer. There were other smells as well, not all natural, that were part of the neighbourhood. There was the smell from two bakeries. Mammy’s Bakery was a major enterprise with bread baked twice a day and there was a second smaller bakery owned by former Holy Cross goaltender Frank ‘Butsy’ Moore up in the west end of Hamilton Avenue right across from Victoria Park. The warm smell of fresh baked bread from Mammy’s Bakery and the smell of cherry tarts from Moores was real and was made large after a summer rain. It was beautiful.

The Bennett Brewery also filled the summer air. The sweet smell of hops and brewing beer was very much part of our old neighbourhood. You know I worked at Bennett’s in the plant for a couple of summers and I loved the smell of the place. It was sort of a waste on me because I didn’t drink beer or anything else at the time and the employees got a couple of free beers every day. These were different times. Drinking men making more beer. The brewery later morphed into Molson.

Now there were other smells in the west end you might not even think are possible, but they are. You could smell Horwood’s Lumber Yard. I worked there too for a few summers. You could smell the lumber and the burning wood and hear the lumber saws running. Horwood’s burned wasted wood and sawdust to generate steam heat for their operation. That also powered the great steam whistle that chimed out the hours across my part of St. John’s. The whistle told of start time, the beginning and end of lunch time and “quitting time “. The great Horwood furnace was also responsible for burning all the weed from the Tors Cove dope bust one the legal procedures were over. That is a story for another time, but you could smell it all over the city. I think it was a couple of tons of weed.

The CNR railway carried its own smell when it was active. Part of that smell was steel and part was diesel. I barely remember the old coal burning locomotives, so my memory is of diesel. The dockyard and the train repair shop were also part of that. They were all notes from the same song that was played every day. It was a song of shunting trains and whistles. Mixed in with that was the unique salty smell of the St. John’s harbour. There were still schools of herring in the harbour then but even in the sixties there was no lineup to catch them.

I don’t often think of these things but sometimes on a warm summer night after a rain when I am walking in my garden in Paradise in the quiet dark of the evening, I smell a lilac tree and it all floods back to me. They are nice thoughts.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

First my tale. In September of 1977, the Portuguese trawler Vasco d’Oray caught fire and burned in St. John’s harbour. There was loss of life, and it was a tragedy, so this story is not funny. Eventually with the fire still burning, she was towed away from the wharf in St. John’s and out through the harbour and into nearby Freshwater Bay. There had already been several explosions on board the stricken vessel and she was left to burn in a place where she could do no further harm.

Surviving crew members had left the ship in St. John’s and were being taken off at the wharf. I was there at the scene with an NTV cameraman, so I spoke with several members of the crew on the wharf. I didn’t speak Portuguese and the crew didn’t speak English, so the interview didn’t go well. Actually, it went off the rails. I asked a crew member where the explosion was centered and the first crewman I spoke with said “BOOM.” I replied with the word “BOOM” and the crewman nodded. The second crew member I spoke with seemed to be an officer. He was dressed better than the others on the wharf. “What happened on the ship?” I asked. The man paused for a second and then gave me the single word reply. ’’BOOM!’’ I blinked and replied with the word “BOOM.” Then I held up two fingers. I was trying to find out if there had been a second explosion. The crewman replied with two words. “BOOM BOOM! “I replied, “BOOM BOOM”? That ended the interview.

When I returned to the station and looked at the film after it was developed, we had shots of the Vasco d’Oray being towed away from the wharf still on fire. The rest of the film consisted of three men, of which I was one saying the word “BOOM!” back and forth. Specifically written it was. “BOOM” “BOOM”?” BOOM,” “BOOM”; and then the second crewman spoke “BOOM BOOM!”, “BOOM BOOM?” I replied.

“Boom Boom,” he said. That was the end of the interview.

The other interview gone bad that I recall was a “man in the street” interview done back in the mid-1970s by Carl Lake. “Man in the street” pieces where you interview a citizen on camera are difficult because they are unpredictable. You just do not know where they are going. I remember this interview was shot down on Duckworth Street in front of Johnny Simon’s jewelry store. I remember the name of the store because it had a clock in the front window that belonged to the previous owners of the store. That previous jeweler was named Brady and the clock which lit up spectacularly had the lovely commercial name of Brady of Duckworth on it. I remember it well.

As mentioned, it was Carl Lake doing the interview and he spoke to a group of gentlemen about the subject of inflation in St. John’s. Carl asked if it was a factor in their spending habits. That sounds simple enough except the problem is that all three men were new Canadians and were originally from China. They spoke only a few words of English. Carl did not know that.

With film rolling, Carl inquired of the first man if inflation was affecting his spending at all. The man’s reply was. “Wha?”

Carl repeated the question and the answer this time was. “Oh, Wha?”

Carl was determined to save the interview. It was on film not on videotape, so it was not just a matter of rewinding tape and film was expensive and not to be wasted. With camera still rolling, Carl moved on to another of the gentlemen and asked the same question. This man just looked at him and do not say a word. After a couple of seconds of silence Carl asked the man if he understood the question. The man’s response was classic. He spoke. “Wha?” Wha?

That ended the “streeter” and the lesson. That lesson is that you should speak with the people you are about to interview before you ask the first question. You need to know if you speak the same language as they do.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

Now if I had wanted a stress-free, well-regulated, balanced life then certainly the world of broadcast journalism (news) was the wrong place to go. There was pressure by the ton. The good news is that I loved it all and somehow, I am still here.

Pressure came from a variety of sources. There were long hours and uncertain hours and a heavy workload. That impacts birthdays and anniversaries and cooked dinners and everything in the known universe. I was five years in the business before I even had Christmas Day off. There was also incredible pressure to perform. You had to get the news. That was demanding work. As I have often said, there is no final victory over news. It just keeps on coming. “News Never Stops”

How then did this all come to be? How is it that at age 80 I’m sitting out in the sunshine today waiting for the weekend Globe and Mail to get in from the mainland? Well, I think the answer is in the concept of “balance.” The medical community does not share this notion with me, but I think that some excesses and some shortcomings cancel each other out and you get by. If I drank too much beer in my youth, which I certainly did, and had too many fish and chips, which I certainly did, there is somehow a cancellation in results, and everything is fine. If I ate too much salt meat and potatoes at regular meals and went other days missing meals altogether, then the All-Merciful Ruler of the Universe kept me alert and on my feet. It is a question of balance. Thank the Lord for His tender mercies.    

On the matter of sports there is another balance at work. If you play hard at things like softball and hockey, then you do not have to mow the lawn much or go to aerobics or start doing power walks. It will all be fine. I had a friend who bragged about how many times he and his friends walked around Quidi Vidi Lake. He dropped dead when he was about 62. This balance rule also applies to sleep. You can be up watching news or reading until 2:00 in the morning and that gives you a free pass on having a quick nap after supper. Not a long sleep but what my dad used to call “forty winks.” Also, apart from a full nap in life I was not even above closing my eyes in church or even at family gatherings. My wife warned me about it, but I said I was not really asleep and was only closing my eyes on a kind of “screen saver.”

Now here we are. I still like poutine, which is a fairly recent treat in Newfoundland chip shops. I tell myself it has something from each of the food groups: chips, gravy and cheese curds. That is not exactly balanced so I have had to cut back on that. The same is true of 12-year-old single malt whiskey. A drink of Irish Whiskey in the evening is still part of life and a few strips of bacon in the morning is still okay. Why? Because it all balances out! The whole thing makes sense, at least to me. This is not a recommendation on how you should behave. It is just a thought on how far I have made it down the road. Good luck to you and the path you walk.   

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca