'Like a thousand Polaroids': CBC's Ted Blades reflects on a career in journalism

Let's begin near the beginning.

It's October 1988. A cold wind tearing down Commonwealth Avenue drives freezing rain through every seam in my jacket. I'm in a tight knot of reporters huddled at the gated entrance to the Sprung Greenhouse. We're waiting for Kenny Rogers to emerge from the massive glowing dome a hundred metres past the gate. We are bathed, as Mount Pearl is bathed, in the inflatable greenhouse's ghastly orange light.

It's been about a year now since Brian Peckford proudly proclaimed that Phil and Dawn Sprung, whom the premier met while shopping around for cheaper alternatives for rural hockey rinks, could grow a cucumber in six days "using the same technology they have at Disneyland" (where, it's worth noting, everything is pretend).

Sadly, the Sprungs (tent makers from Calgary, really) proved to be faux gardeners, and the N.L. government was soon looking for investors. Rogers was in town for a concert at Memorial Stadium. He was also on the board of Dole pineapple and he'd been asked to check out the Sprung operation.

Back in the huddle, we see his limo coming out the lane (it's not as glamorous as you might think. It's a Gulliver's limo, the only white one in town at the time, and last weekend it probably played a major role in a wedding in Wedgewood Park). The TV cameramen, all men then, snap on their lights as the limo comes to a halt. The passenger window slides down and there he is, Mr  Know When to Hold 'Em. We ask him what he makes of the greenhouse. He mumbles a few platitudes and says he has to talk to the board, and with that he's gone.

It's late, I'm chilled to the bone and all I have for tomorrow's Morning Show is less than a minute of tape in which, really, Rogers doesn't say anything at all. But my overwhelming thought is, why would you want to be a journalist anywhere else? Where else could you end up talking to Kenny Rogers about cucumbers under a blood orange sky?

Sometimes geography, sometimes something else

I've worked for the CBC in British Columbia, Ontario, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, and regardless of the meagre skills I might bring to the table, much of the success I've had as a radio journalist has been because I chose to work here in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Sometimes it's simple geography, what with all manner of adventurers and travellers arriving or departing from our perch on the edge of the continent: cross-country runners, cyclists and skateboarders, hot air balloonists leaving for England (I remember a huge crowd encircling the Feildian Grounds one night to watch one set of adventurers lift off in their gondola), people rowing across the Atlantic in impossibly small boats, two lifeboats full of Sri Lankan refugees showing up off St. Shott's, but the moment that stands out for me on this front was the day Nelson and Winnie Mandela stopped off for gas.

The leader of the African National Congress was just out of prison and not yet the first Black president of South Africa, and he was on a bit of a world tour. Then prime minister Brian Mulroney had sent a government jet to London to fly them to Ottawa, and I got a call at home on a Sunday morning telling me the jet was going to stop on the far side of St. John's airport to refuel.

It seemed improbable, but we had to check it out, and a couple of hours later, I'm standing next to the man himself as he and his wife address the small group of supporters who came out to the airport. When Winnie Mandela tells them that their protests here, half a world away, helped free her husband, there isn't a dry eye in the parking lot.

Location aside, though, the great gift N.L. brought to so many of the stories I covered was the vigour and passion with which people express themselves here. At the end of the 20th century my family and I moved to British Columbia, where I opened, and ran, the CBC's first radio station in Victoria. Three years later we were back, and my wife wondered one day why the stories here were so much better than what we heard in B.C.

The basics were the same — Person A upset with Person or Organization B because of Reason C —but the stories were simply more compelling. Why? Because people in N.L. have a passionate and colourful way of expressing themselves and it simply makes for better radio.

'It's not like they have fingerprints'

I'm reminded of the time I interviewed a farmer on the west coast of the island who'd had his turnip crop stolen out of his fields. I asked if there was any way of identifying his turnips, and without missing a beat he replied, "Well, it's not like they have fingerprints."  It's no accident N.L. punches above its weight in the entertainment business.  

It has, of course, not been all fun. Most of the stories I covered were serious, about events and decisions that changed people's lives forever and changed our society too. The images flash through my memory now like a thousand Polaroids.

There's Father Jim Hickey, standing up in court to plead guilty to 20 charges of sexual assault, gross indecency and indecent assault involving teenage boys. He was sentenced to five years in jail and died behind bars at the age of 59.

There's federal communications officer Doug Scott trying to keep a group of angry fisherman from breaking down the doors to one of the salons in the Delta Hotel, to get into the room where Fisheries Minister John Crosbie is announcing the northern cod moratorium, As police come to quell the near riot, CBC Radio hosts Jim Wellman and Kathryn King carry on with our live broadcast to the province and the country.

There's Clyde Wells standing on a chair in the midst of a large crowd jammed into the tiny old terminal at St John's airport. With tears streaming down his cheeks, and his voice breaking, he's explaining why he voted against the Meech Lake Accord. He'd been painted as a pariah by the mainland press but the people I talked to that night said he was their hero.

There's the Innu elder, whose name I am ashamed to say I forget, sitting on the plastic-covered floor of a house in Davis Inlet, showing me how to split a caribou leg bone in two with an axe to get at the soft, white marrow inside and how a fatty, high-energy meal of marrow, eaten raw, might help a hunter make it through a freezing night in the old days, and how he didn't know exactly where or when he was born, just out on the land, on Nitassinan, maybe 80 summers ago, maybe 79.

I remember thinking, "This man's family still lived a nomadic existence, following the caribou herds, in his lifetime." And here he is now in his granddaughter's house in Davis Inlet, which like all the other houses in that community where the Innu had been relocated, has a kitchen sink and a fully equipped bathroom but no plumbing. The unfinished bathtubs were used, in most houses I visited, as a place to store laundry or firewood. Instead of toilets they used honey buckets and tossed the contents out onto the snow.  And this was within my lifetime.

No wonder they were desperate to move. 25 Years Is Long Enough, the documentary Winston White and I aired on On The Go, won a B'nai Brith Human Rights Award and helped put pressure on the federal government to facilitate the Innu's move to Natuashish in 2002.  

There's wildlife biologist Holly Hogan, stopping briefly on our hike down the Signal Hill trail, to call a junco to her, and it comes. Her thoughts on what life at sea can teach us about life on land landed me, and OTG, the first-ever Atlantic Journalism Award for a podcast.

There's Beatrice Hunter, a 44-year-old grandmother from Labrador, standing quietly as her handcuffs are removed ahead of our interview. She's in Her Majesty's Penitentiary because she violated a court order to stay off the Muskrat Falls construction site. I've come in through the gates and the barbed wire to ask her why her cause is worth all this. Her quiet dignity and her resolve stay with me.

It's now time to stop

I could go on, but — like my time at the CBC — it's time to stop.

By my own rough count, I've conducted some 25,000 interviews in the past 36 years. I've spoken to almost every premier, cabinet minister, and musician in the province. I've asked countless mayors, council members, university professors and students about what they do and why.

There have been bakers and berry-pickers, inventors and athletes, precocious 10-year-olds who could easily do my job and surly spokespeople unhappy that I had the temerity to ask a pointed question. A million memories, most of them fondly held. I wouldn't change a thing.  

But I have to say my proudest, and often happiest, moments as a public broadcaster have happened when all the prep work, the pre-interviews, the writing of intros and questions, the meetings to decide how we're going to tackle a big story, all fell away, replaced by the need to simply be on the air and in the moment because our listeners needed us.

People still stop me on the street to say how important it was that we were there through Dark N.L. (that three-day January blackout in 2014), hurricanes Igor and Leslie, and, most recently, Snowmageddon (the giant blizzard that shut the northeast Avalon down for a week in early 2020). Passing on survival information, letting people know when the power might come back, making connections between people who could help each other out, and simply being a familiar voice in the middle of all that chaos, that's what this job is all about.

Don't get me wrong; I will miss it.

I'll miss our afternoons together, I'll miss inflicting my musical tastes on our listeners, I'll miss the opportunities to ask important people important questions. But it's time to turn the mic over to someone new. I hope you'll grant them the same welcome and acceptance CBC listeners have given me all these years.

Thank you so much. It's been a slice.

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