September 3, 1979

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Canada

THE HONORABLE FLORA

Toes ripened by the shower, the minister of state for external affairs walked barefoot through the torn and thrown newspapers, stepped up onto the chesterfield, sighed, then settled contentedly over a nest of congratulatory headlines. By Roy MacGregor16 min

Books

The commodity between the covers

The store was The Albert Britnell Book Shop in Toronto, where Mackenzie King once bought his books. A 19th-century air of decorum still persisted—a touch of the 20th confined to the back of the shop where new paperback best sellers were propped like foundlings in their ready-for-display cardboard prams. By Mari Jackson9 min

Frontlines

Hawk in search of a perch

John Bowden Connally leans his six-foot, two-inch frame over the lectern and fixes his eyes, set in a permanent squint, on his audience of Orange County, California, businessmen. America, Connally says, with his right fist slamming into his left palm to emphasize the point, is entering a “decade of danger.” By Ian Urquhart7 min

Sports

A good kick in the grass

Keith Eddy, former international soccer star in England, stood in the sun in Largo, Florida, this spring watching a handful of hopefuls trying out for the Toronto Blizzard, the newly formed entry into the North American Soccer League (NASL). By Hal Quinn7 min

People

In Japan the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union has taken on another crusade. Following in the turn-of-thecentury footsteps of Carry Nation, who literally took a hatchet to barroom stools to save Americans from alcohol, Tokyo activist Kikue Takahashi is out for the blood of hundreds of thousands of Japanese men who annually head off to nearby Seoul, Taipei, Manila and Bangkok on “sex trips.” By Marsha Boulton6 min

World

Pulling back the welcome mat

In the desolate cell of a migrant worker’s hostel on the Paris outskirts, he wakens each morning from a dream of lost sun and bougainvillea to the cramped plasterboard reality of a dormitory where the stench of communal cooking and fear hangs in the air. By Marci McDonald6 min

Letters

I realize that this will be considered heretical in this democracy-loving, allforgiving, ever-hoping Canada of ours, but I wish we could dispose ourselves of such types as those in Six Nights on Mean Street (July 23) who recently ravaged the streets of Bathurst, New Brunswick.

Behavior

'Tis the season to be crazy . . . fa-la-la-la-la

The secret, of course, is to keep your eye on a grape and your mouth agape. Forty-six-year-old Paul Tavila can probably do it better than any man alive. And two weeks ago the hours of patience and practice paid off in a big way. For Tavila regained the world record for catching a tossed grape in the mouth. By William Lowther5 min

Column

Hanging out at the shopping mall—the somatose generation sleepwalks into the ’80s

In front of the Arcadia at Ontario’s Mississauga Square One shopping centre is a black machine called a computerized sex tester. “The bad kids,” the girl at the pet shop had told me, “are in the Arcadia and hanging around the cinemas. The good kids are at the Five Kitchens food places.” By Barbara Amiel4 min

Archeology

The mystery of an old child

Last month the grass on Woodpecker Island Bluff had baked to a brown, woolly fuzz in the dry heat that had persisted in southern Alberta since spring. A heart-stopping distance below the bluff ran the muddy Oldman River, sluggish and shallow. By Suzanne Zwarun4 min

August 271979