The concert and my grandson last week brought me something strange. The whole thing filled me with deep emotion. I tried to hide it as I sat in the back row of the auditorium with my wife and family and craned my neck and saw my young grandson up there on the stage. He was in the front row and was so little and so earnest. He sang with his classmates and performed in all the right ways. It all went perfectly except one of his little classmates started to cry and had to be given an off-stage break. It did not matter, it was all wonderful and, in a way, moving.

The concert was a time of great reflection for me. I waved heartily to my grandson in the middle of it all. He told me after that he knew I was there. That pleased me. I hope I did not embarrass him. Seeing him in his school concert shirt made be think about what I sometimes call “time passages”. One of the great truths of life is that it sure does not take long. I was at my own first school concert back in 1954. I was about seven years old. As I mentioned, we started school later in those days.

This thought occurred to me somewhere between songs in last week’s concert, where did the years go? Can it really have been 70-odd years between hearing two different versions of Row, Row, Row Your Boat?  One was in a Conception Bay school auditorium and the other in the Aula Maxima at St. Bon’s. How did that happen?

Somewhere in the gap between the years me are successes and failures, wins and losses, triumphs and tragedies. I wondered to myself what lay ahead for my little grandson. I hope he does well. I am sure he will. It is a great question without answer.

The other event I attended last week was on the same day as the kindergarten concert. It was a funeral in St. John’s. I was out to a funeral home to pay respects to an old friend who had died after what I call “a life well lived”. She was into her 90s and remained active every year of her life. She was part of a wonderful and large family, and they were all there to see her off.

Her husband, also gone to glory, and her sons were like myself – St. Bon’s boys and all, like me, grew up on Pleasant Street. They were up above the Patrick Street intersection. I was below it. There was also a card playing connection between our two families.

The wake was a great send-off if you can say about a funeral but there was still great sadness about it. I looked across the room at the casket and the mourners and my friend’s family and wondered a similar thought to the one I had at my grandson’s kindergarten concert. Where have the years gone?

In the two events I attended, the concert and the funeral, there is connection and meaning. I am not even sure how to express it, but it is there. There is some eternal truth that is, on some important level, part of life. That part I do understand even if I can’t  put it in words. 

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

“Tonight, on The Dukes of Hazzard; Boss Hogg and the Duke boys find that trouble comes in pairs. That’s The Dukes of Hazzard tonight at 9 – only on NTV.”

That is what I was doing during the Ocean Ranger tragedy. I just wasn’t involved in the news aspect of it at NTV. I was doing TV voice-overs. Now to be sure being “the staff announcer “, which is what the position was called, was an honest but unexciting living and I eventually escaped back into the wonderful world that is broadcast television news. While I was staff announcer, though, there was one benefit. There was extra money to be made. Some announce gigs were great, others were just awful.

Once I did a contest for a mainland advertising agency that paid me $1,200 for a single commercial. It was part of a contest called Spin-to-Win, and I was paid for all of the draws and all the wheel spins, but I also was paid for the commercial for the contest. A national agency came in to produce it. The first “take” was the best one but they fiddled with it and worked all day to justify flying to Newfoundland. In the end they used the first take from 8 o’clock that morning. I didn’t care. For $1,200 I would have worked round the clock. This was back in the 1970s when $1,200 could almost get you a new car. It was great. It wasn’t very demanding like news but, I was young and money is money.

Now the dark side of the moon of the staff announcer job happened when a firm came to Newfoundland with a new brand of Vienna sausages to hawk. This wasn’t like Maple Leaf sausages. This was a lesser new brand unknown until that time in Newfoundland. They wanted to crack the local market, confident there was room enough here for both Maple Leaf and them. I won’t name the brand, but you probably wouldn’t recognize the name anyway. It was something like Acme Sausages or Eddies A-1 Vienna Sausages. I’m not even sure they are still in business. Anyway, they got me to do their television commercials. The fee for me as staff announcer was supposed to be a flat $350. It wasn’t a big pay day like Spin-to-Win, but it was still money and, like I said, money is money. The problem was the distributor didn’t actually have much money. He did have plenty of product. He asked if I might consider taking the $350 fee in kind. In other words, this guy wanted to pay me in sausages. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time so I said yes. A few tins of Vienna sausages would never go astray, even if they weren’t Maple Leaf. I obviously forgot to do the math because these tins of Vienna sausages in the late 1970s were retailing for about 30 cents a tin. That means that in one afternoon, for about four hours work, I became the proud owner of roughly 1,250 tins of Vienna Sausages. With 48 tins to a case I had more than 26 cases to get home to my house. It took two trips in a small four-cylinder car. Taking them all in one all would have ripped the guts out of the vehicle. Well, I had no children at the time, but me and wife Judy were eating those Vienna Sausages for a year. We had them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We had them on toast, and for snacks and right out of the tin… We fried them with eggs. We baked them into casseroles. We may have had them for Christmas dinner, but I guess that’s a stretch.

You know, strangely enough, it was about five or six years later that I ran into a couple of tins of them that had showed up in an old leather camera bag in our hall closet. I didn’t open them and I didn’t keep them as souvenirs. I just threw them out. The sausages do live on in memory. Once in a while, if I’m out somewhere and I am offered a Vienna sausage, or something like it, I’ll take it. It’s a great memory trigger and with the first bite wherever I am I’ll think of the Duke boys, Boss Hogg, Spin-to –Win and the year I hit the Vienna sausage jackpot.

Such is the world of broadcasting.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

That is right word for online versions of ourselves. It is an “edited” depiction. For instance, all the photographs I use are carefully chosen. You won’t see shots of me fighting a cold with a runny nose and uncombed hair and there won’t be pictures of me spilling gravy on my shirt. There will certainly be no moments of quarrels between me and the missus on-line. They won’t see the light of day. My achievements, such as they are, are presented for your consideration. My failures, well they aren’t presented at all.

The world in which I live is chronicled as a place of great order and happiness where there are no beer tins in the woods and no pieces of old lumber lying around my garden. That garden I show in the pictures always is neatly mowed in summer. No signs of the millions of dandelions that actually thrive there every spring will appear. You won’t see our old rusty barbeque left out uncovered through the winter. I will spare you that. Nor will you find any picture of last December’s Christmas tree that was shoved up behind our shed in mid-January. It is still there this May with bits of tinsel still clinging bravely to now bare branches.

This is not said that “my page” is a complete fiction but if you think you might know me from reading my on-line presence you will be led astray. It is me putting my best foot forward. It is like those profiles that have been done that ask what books you are reading. People will answer War and Peace or some Churchill biography when the real answer is probably something like Resort Tarts or Nuns on Wheels Gone Wild. A couple of decades ago I did one of the “Twenty Questions” things for the Telegram. I look at it now and I seem really interesting because they sent me the questions in advance, so I had a chance to edit myself. That is where Facebook is today. The edited self.

My page online makes me appear “interesting” as a person. I am far more interesting there then I am in the real world. That isn’t a sin or anything like it, but I do remind myself that everything I post to Facebook adds to a view of me that in the end isn’t really me at all.

Having said all of that, I am still a pretty good guy, I think. At least that is my hope.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca