The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
So, you see, we had a Chinese meal the other night with Pierre Berton at a Toronto watering hole. Some 315 people watched. Pierre Berton once told me that he thought in his youth he might have a drinking problem but, luckily, he would fall asleep rapidly after several beers ? and that solved the problem. The reason 315 bodies paid $150 each for an 11-course Chinese meal was that this was Berton's annual fund-raising gala for the Berton House Writers' Retreat. Pierre Berton, as we all know to the point of boredom, was born in Dawson City in the Yukon. He left for stardom and riches elsewhere, and the city fathers decided ? once he became famous ? to turn his family home, a very modest little house, into a museum. Pierre Berton just turned 84 and, as the most-prolific journalist/author this little country has ever produced, was out this week flogging on the publicity circuit his 50th (and last, we don't believe it) book. Instead of the family pad being turned into the cobwebs of a museum, he had a better idea. Why not make it a retreat for young and aspiring writers? As a wise man once said, writing is the only job in the world that you can only do alone. (Ask my wife, ask any wife of any scribbler.) Pierre Berton, when he was some 17, got drunk with a buddy and they stole a car in Dawson City and of course wrecked it and got caught. Charged and appearing in court, young Berton thought he was going to jail and his career, let alone his life and his future, would be over. The main witness, owner of the car, walked into court. The judge ? Dawson City being a small town and everyone knowing everyone else ? immediately recognized him as the chief bootlegger. "Case dismissed!" he pronounced, and Pierre Berton is with us today. And so, all the loot from the Chinese feast goes to one young scribbler, who has to have proof of publishing at least one book, to sit alone ? with $2,000 a month pen money, to become the new Hemingway. See 'Lucky' P.# Con't from P.# Berton, to this day, types with two fingers ? as if out of an old Walter Winchell movie. He has never seen a computer he didn't hate. All those 50 books have come out of a typewriter. At one stage, he owned some 20 of them ? Underwoods, one would guess ? so he could cannabalize the parts as his present one broke down. He now, I take it, has progressed to an IBM electric. Way to go, Pierre! At the University of B.C., Berton devoted his whole time to The Ubyssey ? a bad pun on the initials UBC and the Odyssey ? the infamous campus paper that produced everyone from Earle Birney to Eric Nicol and Helen Hutchinson and Ron Haggart and Joe Schlesinger, and knew by his final exam he would never qualify for a degree. With his usual luck, one of those renowned absent-minded professors lost all the results of the exam and had to give everyone a pass. And lucky Pierre actually got a B.A. His fame at the Vancouver Sun was such that Scott Young, a fine writer (and father of Neil Young) was sent out from Toronto to recruit him. Young invited him for a drink at the Hotel Vancouver and said, "Maclean's publisher Napier Moore has entrusted me to give you an offer of between $4,000 and $5,000 a year." Berton looked at the floor for a moment and said, "I think I?ll take the $5,000." At the riotous farewell party in the Sun newsroom, pals suddenly appeared with two stretchers, strapped Pierre and lifetime wife Janet in them, carried them down the elevators, raced to the airport, and dumped the bound stretchers at the Air Canada counter, and fled gleefully. When the CBC invented Front Page Challenge, Berton was asked to be fill-in while the search went on for more worthy talent. He lasted 38 years. (Gordie Howe appeared five times and they guessed him once.) When we would travel the country with FPC for tapings, at the party that would always follow in Cornerbrook, Red Deer or wherever, Berton with a little grape in him would recite the Robert Service classic The Shooting of Dan McGrew in wild dramatic fashion, throwing himself on the floor ? before the astounded locals ? when he was shot by The Lady Known as Lou. At the Chinese noodle fest, he went to the mike and, off the top of his head, shouted out the five-minute Dan McGrew epic, missing only his six-foot-plus dive to the floor. I've got Pierre Berton stories you'd pay to hear.
