Jack Wasserman was a giant in Vancouver’s journalism scene. His lively and influential column captured the pulse of the city
Being a great media town, Vancouver has its share of star columnists, radio personalities, and TV hosts. Through twists of fate and a tragic death, I was briefly one of them.
My story begins with Jack Wasserman, a newspaperman’s newspaperman who started at the Vancouver Sun as a reporter in 1949 and moved to being a columnist for 25 years. Gossip and entertainment were his beats in a column titled “After Dark.” Jack was a Daymon Runyan kind of a guy who sometimes wrote in the Guys and Dolls style. He was attracted to street characters like a magnet loves a pair of loaded dice.
Jack did what only journalism can do: he told Vancouver that it was someplace – with night life as good or better than Montreal or San Francisco (Toronto didn’t exist yet). Jack did a bit of radio along the way and items on CBC TV’s supper hour news program Hourglass – which is where I come in.
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But Jack had to die first. His smoking, drinking, nightlife, and going in the back door of The Cave Supper Club on Hornby Street caught up with him. Some say his paper moving his deadline to an hour or two earlier put him under lots of pressure. Either way, Jack was giving a speech at the Hotel Vancouver at a do for lumber baron Gordon Gibson Sr. He delivered a line, took a sip of his beverage, and fell down dead at age 50. It was 1977. Many members of the audience thought this was part of his routine. But no, it was an early death by journalism.
Meanwhile, across town, sat Jack’s contemporary, columnist, Allan Fotheringham. Allan was one of the few luminaries not at the Gibson event. His phone rang.
“I was therrrre …” said the Scotch brogue of Jack Webster who added a few Rs to any words he could.
“What?” asked Fotheringham.
“I was right there …” said the brogue.
“Where?” asked Fotheringham.
“Right where it happened, laddy.”
This went on for a bit until Webster broke into plain English to tell Fotheringham that he’d been at the event at which Wasserman died.
So, in the end, the great journalist Webster’s take on the event was not so much the death of a colleague but that he’d been there.
The story of Wasserman’s cremation and burial was told to me by his researcher, Bruce Galt. In the funeral cars sat all the greats, including Bruce, whom I worked with on CBC TV’s Hourglass. Everyone smoked in those days, and as someone was about to flick some ashes into an ornate ashtray in the funeral parlour’s limo, someone yelled:
“That’s Jack.”
Webster filled the void that Wasserman left on Hourglass. Fotheringham filled the void that Wasserman left in the newspaper. I filled the void when Hourglass host Fred Latrimouille filled the void when network talk show host Bob Mclean took time off.
I’m not sure what size shoes Wasserman took, but I know it took a lot of us to fill them.
Allan Bonner was the first North American and the only Canadian to earn an MSc in Risk, Crisis, and Disaster Management from Leicester University in the UK, the only institution in the world offering a full graduate program in this field. Throughout his career, he has tackled some of the most complex issues of our time, including Hong Kong’s return to China, projects for the European Union, NATO, UN agencies, the WTO, the Taser Project, and many other significant challenges.
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