October 9, 1978

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Business

Down where the going gets tough

Drooping downward through months of worldwide contempt, unresponsive to central-bank market intervention, growing more sickly through four interest-rate increases, Canada’s dollar has become the invalid among international currencies. Amid mollifying phrases from Ottawa mandarins which mystified money traders the dollar tumbled another 2½ cents during the month of September and was hovering below 85 cents last week. By Roderick McQueen, Ian Brown8 min

Cover Story

The end of a beginning

To many Roman Catholics it seemed like a sudden, awesome sign: the “little wren” had perished. Just when their humble, beloved new pontiff had started to calm the turbulent forces of change within the church with the warmth of his smile, Pope John Paul I was dead of a heart attack. By Angela Ferrante8 min

Canadian News

How many mailing days before Christmas?

At half-past midnight on Sept. 27, André Ouellet, acting labor minister, and Bob McGarry, president of the Letter Carriers’ Union of Canada, emerged beaming from a conference room on the top floor of one of the shiny, new office towers the government has built across the river from Parliament Hill in Hull, Quebec. By Ian Urquhart7 min

Religion

Comfortable pulpits, uncomfortable pews

This autumn, as the faculty returned to the quiet campus of McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, members were met with a special Thanksgiving harvest: the largest number of students in the history of the 90year-old Baptist college. By Kenneth Bagnell6 min

Letters

After reading Barbara Amiel’s article, But How Will They Teach Little Girls . . . (Sept. 18), I can assure her that the issue of sex-role stereotyping is no laughing matter to adolescents. As a psychologist I have conducted a number of studies of personality development as well as having counselled a number of individuals.

World News

Peace in our time? Well, maybe not

Not long ago, Chinese Foreign Minister Huang Hua told a Western contact that his country needed 20 years of peace to modernize its economy and bring its society up to date. Last week that hope began to seem a shade optimistic. Peking reported that on its southern border the Vietnamese were systematically "preparing for war” — clearing houses to create fields of fire, plowing dugouts and setting up new barbed-wire fortifications—and for the second time in a month broke off talks with Hanoi about mutual problems. By Michael Clugston5 min

Show Business

The Cookie Muppet proves a masterpiece himself

Mr. Cooke? Mr. Alistair Cooke?” The doorman fairly bursts with pride. It isn’t everyone, after all, who stands guard on a national institution. Ever since he hosted the widely acclaimed Omnibus series some 25 years ago, Cooke has been a television fixture. By Rita Christopher5 min

Health

High risk in the lower depths

In the struggle to pump coal-black petroleum up from oceans’ depths, the shock troops are the divers. There are 1,500 of these young men ministering to giant offshore oil rigs, some in fins and face masks diving just below the surface, others in hard hats laying pipeline or welding in inky darkness 600 feet down—where if their life-support systems failed they’d be instantly compacted into something resembling strawberry jam. By Arturo Gonzalez4 min

Where are the males of yesteryear? TV’s Day Of The Wimp is at hand

In two new fall TV series, Kaz and Paper Chase, there is a male lead who is physically and sexually a hapless schnook. Both these highly touted programs need a closer look. What we find would—as my old granny used to say— gag a maggot on a gut wagon. By William Casselman4 min

People

Once voted the world’s most beautiful woman, Ava Gardner is now 56, looking slightly doughy around the middle, and during the Montreal filming of her latest disaster flick City on Fire (she did Earthquake in ’74) she was so near-sighted she couldn’t read the cue cards without her glasses. By Jane O’Hara4 min

Column

We have met the enemy and it is us-unless we learn to become our own watchdog

In 1940, before he joined the Canadian Army, my father worked for a time in a munitions plant outside Montreal where many of the workers were afflicted with TNT poisoning by vapors from the “cooking” explosives. Symptoms were especially acute among women who suffered severe menstrual disorders. By Warner Troyer4 min

October 21978