The As It Happens Files (29 page)

Then Mike played “Amazing Grace” for all of us, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Ted Ostrowski told me later that Mike Stevens was the first person he’d met in Labrador who seemed genuinely moved by the plight of these children, who wasn’t using them to advance his own causes. He seemed genuinely to want to help. I think that’s what moved us, too, when we heard him.

As it turned out, we weren’t the only ones who were moved as we learned three years later, when Mike Stevens joined us on stage in the Glenn Gould Studio for our 35th-anniversary show.

We had a stellar lineup that day. Former host Michael Enright joined us again, as did former producers Mark Starowicz and George Jamieson. Pam Wallin, who in 2003 was the Canadian Consul in New York, joined us by phone as did Irish peace broker and Nobel Prize winner John Hume and American radio star Garrison Keillor. We even had a live band with us on stage, led by the great Doug Riley (now the late, great Doug Riley, sadly).

But the guest I was most looking forward to talking to again was Mike Stevens. I wanted to let him know he made a lasting impression on us back in 2000, and was curious about what he’d been up to since. He picked up the story again from Bosnia, where he’d gone after talking to us from Ellesmere Island.

When he got to Bosnia, he phoned his wife to tell her he’d arrived safely, and she told him, “You’ve got about three hundred emails here. It’s all over the news. What’s happening?”

What was happening was that people all over the country who had heard Mike’s story on the radio wanted to know what they could do to help the children in Sheshatshui. Mike told them that if they had any old musical instruments lying around that they didn’t need anymore, they should leave their phone numbers with him and he personally would arrange to come and collect them and he would see that the instruments got to the kids in Sheshatshui. In no time, he had a house full of musical instruments and was planning another trip to Labrador. And this is how ArtsCan Circle was born.

ArtsCan Circle grew like Topsy. Today it sends musical instruments not only to Sheshatshui but also to other native communities—like Natuashish in Labrador, Pikangikum in northern Ontario and Kugluktuk at the mouth of the Coppermine River in western Nunavut. Instruments and performers, too—people like David Anderson and Bruce McGregor
(aka
Magoo) and Mike’s musical partner, Raymond McLain. On their first trip to Kugluktuk in January 2006, they took four used guitars, eight
new
guitars, a saxophone, an assortment of percussion instruments, some accordions and a complete 24-track Mackie hard-drive recording system. Magoo says they played music and taught music and juggling and helped the kids dramatize their stories. They also set up the recording gear and taught teachers and community leaders how to use it, hoping it would serve as a way to record Kugluktuk’s music, stories and history and also share them with people in the south. The temperature, with wind chill, was a brisk minus 47 degrees, but the reception was very warm.

Naturally, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Sometimes the instruments are destroyed almost as soon as they show up. At one place, Mike was told that all the instruments he’d delivered had been stolen, but then it turned out that some kids had taken them home from school in order to set up their own band, which was just fine with Mike. That’s the kind of thing he was hoping would happen.

During our conversation in the Glenn Gould Studio in November 2003, Mike took a harmonica out of his pocket and gave us another demonstration of his musical virtuosity. Did I mention that he’s played the Grand Ole Opry over three hundred times? Let me just take a moment to toot his horn, as it were.

Mike’s performing has earned him a pile of honours, including being named Entertainer of the Year for five consecutive years at the Central Canadian Bluegrass Awards.
Country Music News
called him “the best harmonica player in country/bluegrass music today.” And if you don’t care for bluegrass, he can give you jazz or rock. So I was curious about
exactly what kind of stuff he was playing now for the native kids he was calling on. This is what he told us:

So he played for us again. This time it was brilliant and very funny. The audience roared their approval, and in my mind I could hear the laughter of hundreds of little kids from Labrador to the western Arctic, and I thought,
Aren’t they lucky to have met Mike Stevens? Aren’t we all?

The last time we spoke, Mike was about to leave for another visit to Sheshatshui, and this time he was taking his son Colin with him. They were going to drive all the way from Brights Grove, Ontario (near Sarnia)—a very long car trip, especially when you consider that the last thousand-mile stretch, from Baie Comeau to Goose Bay, is all
gravel.

“This is something you
want
to do?” I asked.

Yes, he did—and so did Colin. Mike’s son had been about seven when the whole Sheshatshui project started. He’d driven around the country with his dad, collecting instruments; he’d sipped tea with the donors and heard their stories;
and now Colin was really eager to go to Labrador and share that part of the adventure, too.

I said I wished we could do another interview on the radio, and Mike said that documentary filmmaker Brian White was going on this trip with him, so he hoped the story would be kept alive.

I believe it will.

Spirited radio

O
n my very last day at
As It Happens,
November 30, 2005, my producers and co-host presented me—live on air—with a sort of
This Is Your Life
package that they had assembled from bits and pieces of my 35 years in broadcasting—TV and radio. There were clips from my earliest television interviews and some memorable
As It Happens
bits. There were comments and toasts—and a few lies—from former colleagues like Paul Soles and Mark Starowicz. My colleagues had gone so far as to track down the man who’d given me my very first job at the CBC, Rod Holmes.
(Thank you,
Rod.) They’d even cajoled three former prime ministers to record a goodbye; maybe some of the PMs had wished me gone a long time ago, but they were kind enough not to say so.

It was hilarious in some spots, touching in others. To tell you the truth, at times it felt a little like an obituary; I kept pinching myself to make sure I was still alive.

Mike Stevens was there again. And so was Feist.

It’s funny how Feist came to be on the show. In the weeks leading up to my departure, I was given carte blanche to interview a few of the people I’d always wanted to talk to but hadn’t. So they booked interviews for me with writers David Mitchell and Yann Martel; with Pinchas Zukerman, the violinist and conductor of the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa; with comedian and actor Bob Newhart. I even got to
flirt a bit with Ted Koppel, who happened to be stepping down from his perch at ABC’s
Nightline
at around the same time.

Sometime during that last month, producer Sarah Martin asked me about my favourite music. Sarah, by the way, is a megatalented lady: she speaks English, French and
Vietnamese,
and she served as our “fixer” in Vietnam when we took the show there in the year 2000. Sarah used her language skills and her charm to cut some very good deals on hotels there, the same way she charmed former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing into appearing on the show—speaking English, too.

Now Sarah and writer Chris Howden—one of the funniest people I’ve ever met—were sharing the job of organizing and producing my exit. So when Sarah asked me about music, I assumed she was thinking about preparing a few special musical interludes for November 30th. I told her I loved Mozart, Paul Desmond, Gershwin, Piaf and the Beatles. She took some notes and went away.

The next day Sarah came back with her music list and said sweetly, “Excuse me, but are there any musicians you like who are still, um,
alive?”

Poor Sarah. It came to me then that she was trying to book a Musical Guest for me; she wasn’t going to just spin a disk or two.
Ronnie Hawkins would be fun,
I thought, but how would we get a whole band into our little crawl space? Yo-Yo Ma was probably tied up. And that’s when I remembered that my son, David, had just given me a CD by a young Canadian singer/songwriter called Feist, and she was
awesome.
I told Sarah. It’s a credit to both Sarah and the singer that we did get Leslie Feist into our studio to record some talk and music on such short notice.

As we rolled through my broadcasting career on that November night in 2005, I was hard pressed not to shed a few
tears at times. In fact, by the end of the programme, Barbara and I were misty-eyed. Then our handsome young intern Kevin Ball burst into the studio wearing a kilt and playing
Bolero
on the bagpipes, and we turned to laughing again.

Kevin was very sweet and he showed great promise as a producer, but I gather he was a bit reluctant to barge in on us, to say nothing of playing
Bolero.
Mark Ulster told me later they’d had to threaten to never let him work there again if he didn’t get into his kilt and perform. Kevin must have wondered at the time if working at
As It Happens
was worth the cost, but he finally agreed. The result was spectacular in every way.

But suddenly, I found myself wondering if
not
working there was what I wanted to do. Was I ready to retire, really?

At times I still wonder. There are days when I miss it a lot—the stories, the laughter, the daily chase, the wit and good nature and even the bad grammar of the producers, sparring with Barbara, watching everyone’s kids grow up. There were a
lot
of babies born into the
As It Happens
family in the last few years; I guess those producers weren’t working
all
the time, whatever they pretended.

And there’s the “unfinished business”: the ongoing stories, stories I’d covered for 30 years, some of them, and whose outcomes were still in question. What will happen, I wonder, in the Middle East, in Africa, in China, in the Arctic and the Antarctic, in space? What about Somalia and Zimbabwe, Kosovo and Haiti and Cuba? Will the Americans have a black president? How will Canada fare in the 21st century? Will the Toronto Maple Leafs ever win the Stanley Cup?

What will happen in Darfur?

The first mention I find of Darfur in our logs is April 3, 2004. We spoke that day to Jan Egeland, Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs at the U.N., about the ongoing conflict in Sudan. Nothing surprising there: the Sudanese had been going at each other for decades—north against south. But Mr. Egeland was talking now about fighting in an area we weren’t so familiar with, in the west of the country. In Darfur. There was a tragedy unfolding there, he told us, and he hoped the world would become aware of it and maybe do something to keep it from becoming a full-blown disaster.

In other words, we should try to keep it from becoming another Rwanda. In those days, just ten years after the Rwandan genocide, “never again” was a phrase that cropped up again and again in international congresses:
never again
a Srebrenica (the Bosnian massacre);
never again
a Rwanda. Just as, after the Second World War, the world had promised,
never again
another Holocaust.