Shutter Speed: My art takes me away from all I know

The summer came and went with more parties and another trip south to Mosport and the exciting world of racing cars. Around this time a quick phone call from my brother Jim presented a new chapter in my young life. Jim, as I mentioned before, was a photographer. He was the principal photographer at the Sault Daily Star in Sault Ste. Marie about 300 miles to the west of North Bay where we grew up. My brother Jim seldom ever calls me. This time I listened as he suggested I might be interested in a job the paper had just posted. The job seemed simple enough to me. It almost didn’t seem like a real job. They were looking for a chief cartoonist, so he said. Cartooning is something I had enjoyed since I was a kid. I was always doodling or making cartoon strips of the various characters I invented. My Father always encouraged me artistically and wanted me to go to the Ontario College of Art in Toronto or Beaus Arts in Montreal. My screwing around in high school prevented that adventure, but working for a newspaper as their cartoonist seemed like exciting stuff to me. I had been at the television station for almost two years and was doing quite well, but my Father encouraged me to see what was on the table with the paper. My Healey was in good condition, but was in the shop from a little meeting I had with a 55 Chevy so Dad suggested I take his ‘B’ to the Soo for the interview. When I got there the cartoonist job was certainly in the offing, but the job had a couple other elements to it. One, ‘photographer’. This I could handle, but I had never written for news before so ‘reporter’ was a big question mark for me. In today’s market unions would never allow a ‘three-way’ man. My Father was a reporter-photographer. I called him and told him what they were offering. I told him they had given me some political cartoons to produce, one of which hit the papers before I was even hired. He asked what they were offering as a salary. I told him and he said there was little to think about. He naturally was right. The paper offered me one hundred and fifty-five dollars a week! That was a hundred and ten more than I was making at the television station. I accepted the job and returned home to resign from work and gather my things for my first adventure away from all that I had ever known. Leaving my old friends was difficult. Making new ones in the Soo proved easy. Naturally the Healey was a magnet for the fairer sex and my interest in sport led me to some great friends. The Soo Greyhounds were the Junior ‘A’ hockey team in town. Getting to report on any sporting event was out of the question. Getting tickets through the paper was easy, so I began to attend all the games. I enjoyed it when the North Bay Trappers came to town to play. There was great rivalry between the two teams. The Greyhounds even let me ride the team bus home to North Bay a few times to report the ‘away’ game. The paper would not pay a reporter to travel with the team, but it was a good way for me to get home even for a night to see my old friends, especially my old girlfriend whose Father owned the North Bay team. I got to know several of the Greyhounds and was asked by one of them to join some of the team at his Mother’s place for dinner one night. The night I went to dinner was the start of something new for me. I until this time, had never had anything to drink. I know it seems strange, but I preferred chasing the girls while my friends tied one on. During dinner, which consisted of more spaghetti than I had ever seen in one bowl, I was encouraged to have a beer or two. Rather than seem like a chump, I drank that one beer. It did change my perspective. After dinner a couple of the guys suggested we head up town to the local hangout and see if there was any action to be had. Three of us piled into my Healey and headed out. The streets were quite slippery. The Soo had a large river that separated it from a town of the same name on the United States side of the border. There was always a cold, damp mist that hung in the air. This mist made the streets into skating rinks on winter nights. While powering through a long turn I lost the car. It spun and slid across a lawn backwards and right through the wall of a small building next to a large house. The car stopped with the back end up to the front of the hard-top inside the building. It stalled. I tried to open the door but it was wedged against something solid. I turned the starter over, put the car in gear and drove out the hole I had made in the side of the building. There was surprisingly little damage to the car. The next day I drove past the turn where I had lost the car. I had hit the side of a blacksmiths shop. The anvil had prevented me from opening the door! I didn’t stop in to say hello.

Work was a bit of a challenge for me. The cartooning was okay and I was getting some work from the local police department doing suspect identification sketches. It was very interesting talking to victims of various crimes when no positive identification photographs were available. One or two of the sketches were instrumental in apprehending a suspect. Taking pictures was also not a difficulty for me. The real problem was the reporting. My ‘beat’ as they called it, was City Hall. Boring, boring, boring! I could not come up with anything interesting from these zombies! I could write a story which was passable and looking back I am not even sure an editor looked at my stuff on City Hall, but the real problem was spelling. Spell check did not exist. In fact, computers were almost twenty years into the future.

One of the assignments I did get that still sticks clearly in my mind is when I was sent about forty miles north of the Soo to cover an accident. A local logger had lost control of his car and left the road. The twist to the story was the road of his misfortune skirted along the side of a lake. The car got out on the ice then went through to the bottom. When I got there a police diver was just entering the water to attempt to recover the body of the driver. It wasn’t long before he had the man on the surface at the edge of the hole where the car had dropped through the ice. I was standing right there with my camera ready to get the shot. As they pulled him from the water one of the officers on one side lost his grip and the man turned over. His face was now less than ten feet from me. The look of total fear and horror I will never forget. It shook me to the core. I had been around death, but never this close. I had difficulty putting the story to words for the paper, but the pictures would have said enough. Papers in those days didn’t print anything as graphic as I had put on film. It wasn’t long after this assignment I was called into the editor’s office. His name was Chester Grant. He told me they couldn’t invest any more time in my inability to spell. I just asked if it wasn’t the editor’s job to keep up the spelling and grammar end of things. I was already quite a sarcastic type. I now had no job! They didn’t need to give you two weeks notice. I was gone right there and then. I quickly and ironically got hired by Canada Post. In later life I would help spearhead a major project for them. At this point I got my own country ‘walk’ of about three miles. I actually loved the job of delivering the mail. I was out in the fresh air, fit as a fiddle and quite happy.

The job unfortunately was only a temporary thing until after the Christmas rush was over. I then found myself on ‘UI’ – unemployment insurance! There were no jobs to be found. I eventually had to sell my Healey to pay the rent and soon there was not enough to even pay the rent and eat. It was one or the other. The fairer sex seem to have disappeared as well. I got odd jobs and even sold my cameras to survive, but eventually ended up out of residence and out on the street. It was the middle of a very long cold winter! I didn’t call home to tell my parents. I could not expose them to my failure. I couch surfed for as long as I could. Eventually I ended up building a little nest in the steeple of the Precious Blood Catholic church on the main street of town. I realized if I undid the lower lock on the front doors of the church I could pull both doors at the same time and let myself in at nightfall when the church closed up for the night. Only two times did someone lock the lower part of the front door. On both those nights I walked all night to stay warm. Not a great experience. Churches in those days left the doors unlocked during the day. They would unlock the doors about 7:15 in the morning for early mass. Many people went to church seven days a week during this time. I am guessing, but I think the parish priest realized he had a nightly visitor as the church bells, just about ten feet from my head, started going off at about 7:00am each morning! The spring sun soon warmed the northern town, took the snow and made me realize I had to make some changes. The sun lifted my spirits, but I knew I had to get my behind in gear!

Next: A new start, a new car and more racing!

Follow the whole Shutter Speed series detailing Allan De La Plante’s travels from rural Ontario to the middle of the Formula 1 circus!

Tagged as: north bay, ontario, sault st marie, the soo