April 16, 1979

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A business prince waiting to be king

It’s the sixth week on the road, the fourth country, and the fourth stop in Canada. This time the city is Toronto, the airport, Malton. The converted RAF VC-10 arrives exactly on time as usual. The press is waiting behind the proper barriers. By Angela Ferrante11 min

Sports

Peanuts, Cracker Jack and if they don’t win it’s the same

Umpires picketed, wearing placards that looked like chest protectors, teams voted to allow women sportswriters into dressing rooms and vendors barked “hot dogs, peanuts, cold beer” and “you can’t tell the millionaires without a program” as the snows receded and the 104th National League and 79th American League baseball seasons opened last week. By Hal Quinn10 min

Frontlines

Jim Unger: the mind behind ‘Herman’

When Jim Unger moved recently, he took an unfinished thought with him. He carried it from a lonely 17th-floor Ottawa apartment the few blocks to a large house he bought so he could once again, at the age of 41, live under the same roof as his parents. By Roy MacGregor8 min

Frontlines

Old McGill is alive and well in the new Quebec

At David Johnston’s official presentation last February as McGill principal-to-be, a French-speaking reporter offhandedly dismissed his maladroitness with Quebec’s official language. “He’ll learn it,” she gushed. “And, anyway, he’s so handsome.” By David Thomas7 min

12d

Letters

Peter Newman’s editorial Canadian Banks and the Invasion of the Money Snatchers... (March 12) makes reference to me as having made some arguments reflecting concern on the entry of foreign banks to Canada. I wish I could take the credit but, in fact, it belongs to the Toronto-Dominion Bank, from whose brief I was quoting by way of challenging the governor of the Bank of Canada, Gerald Bouey, to answer their assertions.

38d

Environment

Of whales and their watchers

"Now I can die easy,” sighed the grandmotherly American perched on the volcanic rock of Pacific Rim National Park’s Box Island. Seconds before, less than 225 feet away, a Grey whale had emerged to blow a spout of delicate white mist into the air and then paused, as if to admire the wisp dissolving above the blue sea. By Anne Roberts, Marsha Boulton6 min

40d

Labor

A town paying its union dues

In its sylvan, lakeside setting the pretty northwest Ontario town of Kenora (population, 11,000) has the deceptive appearance of an idyllic community. But those who have visited the town know its harder edge and now a very harsh human reality threatens the vestiges of natural harmony. By Peter Carlyle-Gordge6 min

Art

Music and silence on canvas

Yves Gaucher doesn’t seem to fit anywhere in the exuberant, tropical landscape of Canadian art in the ’70s. He is a native Québécois who thinks art “owes nothing to its geographical or political contexts”; an artist content to keep rolling paint out on stretched canvas while others busily experiment in video, performance and mixed plastic media; a solitary, philosophical worker who has more in common with the New York abstractionists of the ’50s than with his Canadian contemporaries. By John Bentley Mays5 min

Born-again dirigibles, the Hindenburg legacy

40b

Transportation

Born-again dirigibles, the Hindenburg legacy

The death of the airship industry came that rainy evening of May 6, 1937, when the majestic Hindenburg, that German luxury liner of the skies, burst into a 500-foot-high fireball while landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey. The explosion, which occurred when highly flammable hydrogen gas ignited, killed 13 passengers and 22 crewmen. By Julianne Labreche4 min

Column

The flack who brought you Hush Puppies is selling the Prime Minister like dog food

Eric Nicol, the humorist who deals with tragic things, once wrote that each one of us—every human being—is diminished slightly every time a grown man stands on a TV screen and tells how his life has been changed by an underarm deodorant. Each lie, each debasement of dignity, chips away at what man has been trying to achieve ever since he crawled out of a swamp. By Allan Fotheringham4 min

ELECTION '79

Clark: turning the barbs around

Conservative leader Joe Clark spent a morning last week touring the tar sands in Alberta. He asked some inane questions (“What is your natural vegetation here?”). He made a few general comments about his plans for development of the oil-soaked sands, which turned out to be essentially the same as the government’s (encourage private enterprise with tax breaks and use government money only as a last resort). By Ian Urquhart4 min

April 91979