Fifty years ago today - on Oct. 19, 1957 - Maurice "Rocket" Richard of the Montreal Canadiens reached a milestone that is still pretty incredible: the first player in the NHL to score 500 goals in a career. Richard was 36, and at the time was the oldest player in the league. Here's a radio account from that week.
On Aug. 10, 1926, Max House was born. A former lieutenant-governor of Newfoundland and Labrador and a renowned neurologist, House is perhaps best known for his contributions to developing telemedicine - not only in his home province, but at an international level. He's a charming man to interview (and, yes, his name really is Maxwell House ... albeit with a first name of Arthur).
On July 31, 1952, Ross Reid was born. The future St. John's East MP's name comes from two prominent business families - the Reids, who built the Newfoundland Railway; and the Rosses, from New Brunswick. Although he held St. John's East for just one term, much of his adult life has been in politics. He worked in the Prime Minister's Office under Brian Mulroney, and emerged as a candidate for the federal Progressive Conservatives, defeating New Democrat Jack Harris in 1988. Reid became minister of fisheries, briefly, before the Tories were routed in 1993. Reid has been involved in international development work, and more recently has been an influential but largely unseen force in the provincial PC party and government. Earlier this year, he left his position as deputy minister in the office of Premier Danny Williams to devote himself full time to the Tory campaign for the October general election.
On July 30, 2006, Top of the Pops signed off from the BBC, after a 42-year reign. I'm still surprised that TOTP had dwindled to the point that it was irrelevant; clips I've seen over the years were often schlocky and not a little fake (lip synching was definitely OK, even haphazard attempts), but it was an institution. The site is still up, with a spinoff blog still going. Top of the Pops had the good luck to launch as the so-called British Invasion was gearing up. According to this Wikipedia entry, here are the Jan. 1, 1964, opening-show acts, in order: The Rolling Stones, Dusty Springfield, the Dave Clark Five, the Hollies, the Swinging Blue Jeans (you may not remember the name, but you may remember "Hippy Hippy Shake") and, yep, the Beatles. Quite the setlist.
On July 25, 1992, the Barcelona Olympics opened. It marked the first time in two decades that the Olympic Games were held without an organized boycott. Canada did rather well; click here for a recap.
On July 24, 1967 - 40 years ago today - French president Charles de Gaulle touched off a diplomatic row - and a powerful nerve in Quebec - when he said, "Vive le Quebec libre" to a crowd in Montreal. De Gaulle had come to see Expo 67 for himself; the uproar contributed to him cutting his state visit short. Watch CBC coverage of the day here, including de Gaulle's emphatic phrasing. Toronto Life magazine picked the speech as one of the 10 great moments in Toronto history ... which may seem odd, until you remember the exodus that left Montreal for the GTA in the years that followed.
On July 23, 1986, Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson in a royal wedding that was pretty much impossible to ignore that summer. I get a headache reliving it; it all struck me as a bit rich at the time, and I wasn't surprised that the marriage dissolved in a decade or so (although I was surprised that Ferguson later acknowledged she knew the marriage was doomed within days).
On July 19, 1955, Dalton McGuinty was born (in Ottawa, refuting the assumption I developed while living there that no one was actually born in Ottawa). The future Ontario premier was an unlikely pick for a run to the top of the political heap. He edged through the middle of the field for the Liberal leadership in 1996 (he was fourth on the first ballot), besting frontrunners like Gerard Kennedy. At that point, Mike Harris's Tories were in ascendancy; McGuinty was plucky enough to hang in and run the clock out on Harris and his successor, Ernie Eves, winning the general election in 2003.
On July 18, 2003, the body of a man to be confirmed as British scientist David Kelly was found in a wooded area in Oxfordshire. Kelly's death, presumed a suicide, was deeply disturbing, as he had been fingered as a source of a highly controversial BBC News broadcast that said a "sexed-up" intelligence report had been presented about Iraq's weapons. The subsequent Hutton Inquiry report, which was sharply critical of how those remarks got to air, is good reading for any journalist, or anyone concerned about how news gets reported.
On July 17, 2006, Mickey Spillane died, at 88. Spillane flourished in the era when pulp fiction sold in the millions, and revelled in being cheap and tawdry and exciting. Spillane nonetheless became a household name, even pitching beer in the 1980s. I couldn't find the commercial, but I did find these excerpts from a Dick Cavett appearance.
On July 16, 2004, Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison following her conviction on obstruction of justice and other charges related to lying to investigators about the sale of stock she had owned. Perhaps to make herself feel better, Stewart compared herself to Nelson Mandela and the "many, many good people [who] have gone to prison."
On July 13, 1949, the house of assembly opened for its first session as a province within Canada. The house had been closed when the non-elected Commission of Government took over Newfoundland's affairs in 1934. The image above comes from Bitstop.
On July 12, 1926, Colin Low was born. Low is far from a household name in Canada, but his career deserves respect. He helped define some of the best work of the National Film Board, and earned two Oscars in the 1960s for his shorts (one animated, one documentary). His name has a resonance in Newfoundland and Labrador; he oversaw the NFB's role in what has become known as the "Fogo process," in which people on Fogo Island used film to help figure out the future of their communities. Low directed the best-known of the films that came out of it, The Children of Fogo Island, which becomes more fascinating as time goes by.
On July 11, 1980, the L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site unveiled a plaque formally declaring what had happened two years earlier: the site had been selected as a UNESCO world heritage site. In 1980, Parks Canada reconstructed a longhouse and two smaller structures, near where Norse had built a settlement around 1000.
On July 10, 1946, comedian Roger Abbott was born. (As a trivia note, he was born in Birkenhead, England, although he grew up in Montreal.) A founding member of the Royal Canadian Air Farce, Abbott has been on the airwaves in various guises for more than three decades. For my generation, the Air Farce has long been cast as "your parents' comedy team," but I admire Abbott for determination in getting a laugh.
On July 8, 1933, Antonio Lamer was born in Montreal. He became chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1990, a position he held for nine years. In Newfoundland and Labrador, he is best known for chairing a commission of inquiry into three murder cases, involving Gregory Parsons, Randy Druken and Ronald Dalton. Lamer's report, which was released in June 2006, was highly critical of what he dubbed "tunnel vision" in the Parsons and Druken cases among investigators and prosecutors.
July 8 is also the date in 1892 of the Great Fire in St. John's, which was the Daily Dot one year ago.
On July 7, 1930, Arthur Conan Doyle died. Doyle had very broad literary interests, and delved in science fiction, poetry and historical fiction, but will always be known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. More than a century after Holmes's debut, he's a fascinating detective, and indeed a fascinating character of literature. Most summers, for whatever reason (I think it's the relaxed feeling in the air, and the inclination to sit on the deck in the dusk with a beer), I work through a few Sherlock Holmes stories, which never fail to entertain.
Now copyright-free, Sherlock Holmes lives comfortably in cyberspace. An illustrated version is here, and you can read through Project Gutenberg's collection here. The Sherlock Holmes Public Library offers old BBC renditions of Holmes stories here.
On July 6, 1907, painter Frida Kahlo was born. A century after her birth, Kahlo's importance as a painter seems beyond debate; an Associated Press obituary from 1954, though, carried in the New York Times, shows that her significance at the time was due to her husband:
Frida Kahlo, wife of Diego Rivera, the noted painter, was found dead in her home today. Her age was 44. She had been suffering from cancer for several years.
Aside from her age not being listed accurately - not sure if that was a reporting error, or a fudge on Kahlo's part - it's interesting to see how Kahlo's reputation came into her own in the years that followed. You can see some of her paintings through this link.
On July 5, 1943, Robbie Robertson was born in Toronto. A prodigy of a guitarist, Robertson had already toured extensively with Ronnie Hawkins before he was out of his teens. Sans Hawkins, the band formed itself as, well, The Band, backing up Bob Dylan and then recording by themselves. Robertson's songwriting is hard to match ... it's just too infrequent these days! Robertson was named last week to the Order of Canada.
On July 3, 1957 - 50 years ago - the first of a long-running annual series of Pugwash conferences on peace, science and technology was held in the Nova Scotia town of the same name. The next meeting begins in a few days, near the site of the first. Click here to listen to a CBC Radio report from 1995, the year that Joseph Rotblat (at right) won the Nobel Peace Prize.
On July 2, 1983, the Police released their final album Synchronicity. If I think back to the summer of 1983, yep, this is pretty much what comes to mind. And the fall, for that matter; even as Sting hustled off in jazzy start to his solo career, Synchronicity hung around the charts for months. The Police, currently regrouped and on tour, have lifted the tricolour design of the cover on their website.
On July 1, 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, the Newfoundland Regiment was cut down during fighting at the French community of Beaumont Hamel. A famous statistic well known to children growing up here is that only 68 of 801 members of the regiment were left unwounded, or at least able to answer the roll call of the next day. Two days ago, my friends Chris Brookes and Curtis Rumbolt received a gold medal at the New York Festivals for a five-part radio documentary they made last year called What We Might Have Been; you can listen to it here, on Chris's Battery Radio site.
On June 30, 1953, the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, began producing the Corvette. The Chevrolet sportscar is still in production, although I would wager its heyday was as a quintessential hook of boomer history ... before even Prince got the lusty hook for Little Red Corvette.
On June 29, 1974, in a story that resonated at least as much with the politics of the Cold War as it did with the dance world, Russian ballet superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov defected, in Toronto. As this Tim Knight clip for The National shows, the story was a sensation at the time.
I am a journalist with CBC News in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. I'm taller than I look. This blog has been running quietly since 2004.
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