A couple of reporters from Frank Magazine hit the big smoke the week after the Labour Day weekend. We sat talking about journalism on the patio of the Devil's Advocate, at Bay and Gerrard. With few reservations, I like Frank's feisty style. Recently gunning for Police Union Prez Craig Bromell, I think they should be gunning for the politicians instead. Frank types think all the action is in Ottawa, while I argue that T.O.'s a much more happening kind of place.
For me, it was mentally stimulating to be sitting outside on a warm day talking about how Survivor could possibly have been a runaway television hit, and why there is so little investigative journalism available anymore. The latter is a question I ask myself repeatedly.
According to one eager Frank scribe, the lack of investigative journalism can be explained in part by the mainstream media's obsession with arts and entertainment copy. Was it the media or the reader who decided the brand of perfume worn by Julia Roberts or the breakfast eaten by Kevin Costner are more appealing reading than journalism of the more probing kind.
My patio encounter opened the floodgates to the days when Frank reporter Michael Woloschuk was literally living in the Elizabeth Street offices of Toronto Free Press.
Sent by Kingston Whig Standard editor Neil Reynolds as a casual visitor, Woloschuk was bunking down in St. Nicholas Street digs, with a telephone and fax. A scrap with the landlord rendered him temporarily homeless.
Sending another landlord to retrieve his duvet and camera equipment, Woloschuk became a permanent resident of 111 Elizabeth for the whole of one winter.
Frank editors had decided to do a few cover stories, dateline T.O. During office hours, Woloschuk and I would work together on stories to be filed back to the Ottawa magazine. At first jointly enthusiastic, we convinced ourselves we were destined to set the world on fire.
The pattern of our days ran the same. After I left for home, just up the street, Woloschuk would turn in for the night on the sofa of office colleague Vince Tassone. On sleepless nights, he had Tassone's stereo and television for company. Half the time, Woloschuk, nicknamed Fletch after the character played by Chevy Chase in the movie of the same name, would be on the telephone looking for fresh stories. Early in the morning, he would dash out to shower at a nearby health club, and be back at the office in time for a breakfast of coffee and bagels.
Woloschuk, who lived for a good story, was the product of the aforementioned Neil Reynolds, a reporter's dream of an editor. Now out in Vancouver, after leaving the Ottawa Citizen, Reynolds has always gone a long way to encourage investigative journalism, and is a working inspiration in the industry.
Naturally nosy, loaded with an easy charm, and fearful of no one, Woloschuk would go to almost any end to unearth the facts. Once when working on a cover story about a prominent politician under the headline, "Frannie Get Your Gun," he was hell-bent to get to a Northern Ontario cemetery to find the grave of the victim shot by the politician, for illustration. Vince Tassone, who in those days wore an ankle-length winter coat, went off gravehunting with him. Armed with a map of the cemetery, the pair arrived in the snow-covered graveyard at dusk. They hoped to paw their way through the snow to find the right grave before darkness closed in. Finding it just in the nick of time, they took pictures and had to make their way back through the cemetery with a flashlight. Village housewives peeking out at the scene from behind lace curtains must have wondered about the graveyard ghouls.
Good as he was at his job, Woloschuk had the worst personal luck imaginable. He twice broke a front tooth eating pizza sent by Tassone's mother and sampled without incident by everyone else. Popular with the opposite sex, a string of women on the hunt, always seemed to catch up with him at the most inopportune of moments.
Woloschuk�s nerve was legendary. Another cover story detailed the romance of a politician with a member of the local mob. As the story was being written, an anonymous telephone caller issued a death threat. Unflappable Fletch suggested we take our lap computer down to the nearest bar, where he could write and drink scotch at the same time.
Word eventually leaked out that Frank had a reporter in residence at TFP, and a few local politicians called to see if we could secretly "Frank" their political opponents.
One of the more enduring legacies left behind by Woloschuk when he moved on to greener fields was Canadian boxing champ George Chuvalo. Along with some of his television cronies, he invited me to meet Chuvalo at an Etobicoke bar. With his raconteur ways, Chuvalo impressed me right away, and he wrote a column for TFP up until the death of his wife Lynne.
For the first few weeks after the departure of Woloschuk, life was a little duller around TFP offices, particularly when Tassone went around forlornly whistling the theme tune from the movie Fletch.
Joining up with Reynolds again, Woloschuk did a stint at the Ottawa Citizen, wrote a book about the McCain brothers of New Brunswick and was more recently downsized out of a columnist job by the Ottawa Sun.
Frank colleagues told me at the Devil's Advocate that Michael (Fletch) Woloschuk is currently AWOL on some mysterious assignment in faraway Singapore.
In my mind's eye, I see him sipping pina coladas made from scotch in a string hammock.
Any day now, we're bound to hear a big ruckus from out of Singapore.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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