The As It Happens Files (2 page)

More often than not, it is the suicide bombers, the assassins, the cheats and tyrants of the world who make headlines,
along with the train derailments, ice storms, hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes and floods. Small wonder that people in the news business tend to have a rather gloomy view of fate and human nature. On
As It Happens,
we’ve told those stories, too. “We bring you the world in your radio,” we tell people. It’s history-in-the-making told by the people making it: the lawyers and crooks, the teachers and bums, the doctors, victims, bankers, prime ministers, presidents, movie stars, singers, scientists and Nobel Prize winners.

It’s fun to have the movers and shakers at the other end of a phone line, and I know I’m lucky to have had the opportunity to chew the fat with Margaret Atwood and Judi Dench and Chubby Checker. But after eight years and more than ten thousand interviews, I find it’s the Ignacio Siberios who stick in my mind even more than the big names; ordinary people more than celebrities—ordinary people who surprised us, and maybe themselves, with their escapades or their extraordinary efforts in the service of a particular goal.

I’m thinking of Donald Flickinger of Toledo, Ohio, for instance, who took 75 years to complete his university degree; he was 96 when he got his first degree—an associate degree from the University of Toledo. The ceremony was awesome, he said, but he wasn’t happy that it took him so long to get it.

“Why
did
it take so much time?” I asked him.

Well, he’d started in 1928. Then came the Depression; he didn’t have the five dollars per credit hour he needed to pay for his courses. Then there was the war, and after that he got married, and he travelled a lot, programming computers. There was no time to attend class regularly. For a few years, he and his wife
did
attend classes together, but then he retired and they did more travelling together until she died. Now that he did have a degree of sorts, though, he felt he should get serious about his education and get himself a
real
degree, a Bachelor of Science maybe, or a B.A.
Maybe even a new romance,
I mused.

Or how about Doug Stead, who spent over $120,000 fighting a $117 speeding ticket in British Columbia, because the ticket was based on photo radar, which he thought violated the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”? It was a principle that took precedence over mere money apparently. The same perceived aversion to injustice and bullying led senior citizen Betty Hyde to crash a Royal Bank meeting in Ottawa so she could tell the President in person how outraged she was over the bank’s decision to close her local branch in New Edinburgh.

“There were bankers to the left of us and bankers to the right,” she said, making it sound like the Battle of Queenston Heights.

But Betty Hyde was not cowed, and shortly afterwards bank officials announced that the branch would remain open. The day we got Mrs. Hyde on the phone to tell us about her victory was her 80th birthday, and the Royal had sent her birthday greetings and a bouquet of flowers. My Ottawa spies tell me, however, that Betty Hyde is now deceased and the Royal Bank has indeed closed its doors on the people of New Edinburgh. I don’t know if there was a connection.

You can’t predict what will push people to the edge—and over. David and Nicola Hunt sold their house, gave up their jobs and moved 480 kilometres from Manchester to Hessenford, England, to look for a dog that had gone missing on a visit to Hessenford some weeks earlier. Now David and Nicola have gone missing; at least, I can’t find them. If anyone knows where they are now, or whether Holly has been found, please let me know.

Of course, when you’re talking about pets, you’re entering a new dimension. We’ve interviewed people who’ve had brain surgery performed on their goldfish (What’s that you say? You didn’t know goldfish had brains?) and people who’ve given them mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Sometimes it’s the animals themselves that are bent on overcoming the odds, like the pet-store dog who was in the habit of unlatching his cage at night and then liberating all his doggie friends from
their
cages so they could come out and revel the night away.

Some of these people (and their four-footed friends) could be considered slightly eccentric perhaps. As every loyal listener knows, British eccentrics are a category unto themselves on
As It Happens,
but the breed has also been spotted elsewhere. You might want to put Jess Yeager of North Platte, Nebraska, into this group. Mr. Yeager washes his horse—actually, all his horses—at the local car wash, or at least he did until the day the police told him it was illegal. They said if he did it again, he’d be fined.

I asked him if the horses liked being run through the car wash.

“You soap the horse down, spray her off … they like it a lot,” he said. He didn’t see why it was suddenly a problem.

“I’ve been living here for 30 years and doing it the whole time.”

Mr. Yeager said if the police couldn’t show him the law that said it was illegal to wash your horse at the car wash, he’d just keep right on doing it.

Or how about the man in Grande Prairie, Alberta, who insisted on riding his horse to town and
parking
him? Apparently, this is also in contravention of the local municipal code. Would you call him eccentric? Would you say the same of the man in North Bay, Ontario, who’s spent half a lifetime trying to produce the perfect bear-proof suit?

And who could forget the screaming Finns? This is a group of strong-lunged men who, for some reason that escapes me now but must have made perfect sense at the time, decided one day to start shouting clauses from the Maastricht Treaty (the European Constitution as it then was) to an audience. We were entertained by the shouting and the conversation, and when they came to Toronto, they gave a live performance in the atrium of the CBC building and popped into our studio to shout “O Canada!”

Here’s a strange thing about Finland: I don’t know why, but
As It Happens
has a devoted following there. Fans have written to tell us that they get up at 5:30 in the morning to listen to CBC Radio. I guess it’s so dark there in the winter that five in the morning isn’t too different from noon, but it has always struck me as odd that we should have forged this special link with the Finns. Perhaps it’s just because
they
are odd or because Finns and Canadians are odd in the same way.

There’s no limit to the weird stuff people get up to, which brings me back to the indomitable Ignacio Siberio. Two years after our conversation, I called his office in Miami to see how he was doing and whether there had been any lasting fall-out from his fishing mishap. I have to confess that I was a bit apprehensive about phoning; he was no spring chicken, after all. What if Ignacio were not among us anymore? A preposterous notion, as it turned out. He answered the phone, and we resumed our conversation as if we’d spoken the day before. I asked him first if he’d had any further adventures since we’d last talked.

“Oh yes,” he said. “It happened again the next week.”

“What happened the next week? You lost your boat again the next week?”

“Yes, exactly. I had lost my anchor, you see, and it was a very expens—”

“Just a second, Mr. Siberio. You lost your boat
again?
Was it the same boat? Did you recover your boat?”

“Oh yes, I got it back. It was 80 miles away when we found it.”

“So you went out and you lost your anchor …”

“Yes. I went fishing again a few days later, and a pin came out of the anchor and I lost it. It was a very expensive anchor, so I went back to where I’d lost it and I let the boat drift to where I thought it might be and I got out to look for it. My attention was on the ocean floor and the wind shifted, and while I was swimming one way, the boat started drifting in the opposite direction. But I got it this time. It was about four blocks away when I looked up.

“You have more lives than a cat,” I told him.

“More than 20,” he agreed. “I’ve been close to death probably more than 20 times. There was the time I was hanging from a building six floors up, in my underwear, trying to get into my apartment …”

Here’s the story: Ignacio was living in a sixth-floor penthouse at the time. It was a hot summer day, and a couple of children came to the door to ask him if he could help them get their parakeet back; the bird had somehow got tangled up in the TV aerial on the roof. Ignacio wasn’t dressed, but he stepped just outside his door, to an exterior walkway, to see if he could spot the bird—and the wind blew the door shut behind him.

When the kids saw what had happened, they ran away.

“I was a young guy then,” Ignacio told me. “I thought,
I won’t go in this fashion to the manager.
Society was more prudish then. Today I wouldn’t mind going in my underwear anywhere.”

Ignacio decided that if he went up onto the roof, he might be able to lower himself to his balcony and get back into his apartment from the other side, but he miscalculated. He let himself down partway, clinging to a piece of ironwork, but he couldn’t reach the balcony, and now it seemed he couldn’t get back up either. His hands were sweating in the heat, and he thought,
This is it for me. Now I’m going to die.

What was worse, he had an audience. The children had run to the vacant lot next door and, seeing his predicament, had begun to make a lot of noise, which had drawn a substantial crowd of interested onlookers.

Somehow he scrambled back to the roof and lived to tell that tale, too. I forgot to ask about the parakeet. When I finish this book, I may move to Miami and write about the further adventures of Ignacio Siberio—but first, some more tales from Radioland.

Radio fit for a king

T
he day before I started hosting
As It Happens,
Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in a Paris tunnel. I remember turning on the radio that Sunday morning to hear the news from Michael Enright:

My first reaction was shock, the way we are always shocked by sudden and untimely deaths. How could this be? She was so young, so beautiful, so …
alive.
And I felt sad. Sad for her, sad for her two young boys, sad even for Charles. I was sad on my own behalf, too. Diana seemed flaky at times, her marriage was a bust, and maybe she hadn’t been prepared for the unique demands that marriage to a royal heir would make on her, but she was beautiful—and glamorous, too. I know this may sound ridiculous, but I think for many girls and women, Diana the Princess Bride reminded us of a time when we were very small and could imagine ourselves in the role of fairy princess dreaming of knights on white chargers.

Diana’s life, though, wasn’t a fairy tale, and it wasn’t to be lived happily ever after. After her marriage fell apart, she pulled herself up by her Valentino straps and went back to
work. She campaigned for a ban on land mines, she visited hospitals, she reached out to children dying of AIDS. She doted on Harry and William, of course, and when she learned to laugh again, her smile lit up the world. She also gave television interviews in which she revealed far too much about her private life, but that seems to be the way of a modern celebrity, royal or not.

But as we all know, bad news is good news for people who work in news—hence my second reaction, which was along the lines of “What a great story to kick off with!” As I continued hearing about Diana on that last day of August 1997, I was busy putting wine and beer on ice and setting out food for a little garden party I was throwing, a sort of getting-to-know-you affair for me and the
As It Happens
crew. Naturally, we had planned to talk about what might be put on the air the next day, which was Labour Day in Canada and the U.S. Holidays can be a problem when it comes to finding stories and people to talk about them, but there was no mystery about what the story would be this Labour Day; the only question was, who would we find to talk to?

An event like Diana’s death—a Big Event—is both easier and harder than less earth-shaking stories to cover. It’s easier because it’s a story everyone’s interested in. Easier, too, because almost everyone you can think of to call will be happy to talk to you about it on the radio, provided they’re not fully booked doing other radio and television shows.

It’s harder because, with all the media in the world focused on the same topic, it’s a challenge to find an angle that isn’t already being covered. We comforted ourselves with the thought that if people were listening to
our
programme, we could assume they weren’t taking in all the other shows as well. In any case we wanted to give them the best possible coverage. I don’t remember whether we had any eureka ideas
that afternoon in my back garden, but early the next day, our chase producers hit the phones, and by air time we had a pretty good roster. Dame Barbara Cartland, Diana’s step-grandmother, was first up: