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

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