Transcript
Transcript: Reflections by Roy MacGregor
[00:00:00 Montage of a series of images: people walking down busy streets; a Canadian flag waving on the side of a building; an aerial view of Parliament Hill and downtown Ottawa; the interior of a library; a view of Earth from space. Texts on screen: Leadership; Policy; Governance; Innovation; Review and Reflection. Produced by the Canada School of Public Service.]
Narrator: Public servants, thought leaders and experts from across Canada are reflecting on the ideas shaping public service: leadership, policy, governance, innovation and beyond. This is the Review and Reflection Series, produced by the Canada School of Public Service.
[00:00:30 Roy MacGregor appears full screen. Text on screen: Roy MacGregor, Journalist / Author / Columnist]
Taki Sarantakis: Welcome. Today, we are having a conversation with somebody who I actually call "Mr. Canadiana". He has a finger on two or three things that are very, very Canadian. And he's been at this a long time. He's been writing about our country in wonderful ways. I think he's actually been called the Poet Laureate of Hockey. And I am talking about Mr. Roy MacGregor. Welcome, sir.
Roy MacGregor: Thank you, sir.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, we're going to start off with hockey. Before we get into your later things about hockey and people that you've worked with and people that you've written books with and about and things like that, tell us your first couple of memories about hockey.
Roy MacGregor: Well, I learned to skate on Morris Monroe's Rink. It was next to our neighbor, Maurice, in Huntsville, Ontario.
[00:01:26 Overlaid aerial photo of the town of Huntsville.]
Roy MacGregor: And the hardest player to get past was a red pine tree. It was a huge red pine right in the middle of the rink. So you had to keep your head up. I started playing hockey, and I thought I was pretty good at it, and I made the Huntsville All-Star team. And my dad, who was a lumberjack, he came in once to see me play. Just he was able to come to one game, and he was so excited about it. I was so excited to come in. We got to the rink and he said, "I'm really excited to see that kid from Parry Sound named Bobby Orr."
[00:02:03 Overlaid image of Bobby Orr. Text on screen: Bobby Orr is an NHL legend from Parry Sound, Ontario, and was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1979.]
Roy MacGregor: Not me! So we go in there, we're playing Bobby Orr. I played against him for several years. We're friends now. We laugh about it. I remember he was so good.
And this is a silly sexist story, which I'll apologize for now, but it just was the times. Our coach, Mye Sedore, couldn't figure out what to do about Bobby Orr. He could score from the blue line, shoot it over our goalie's head.
So, you had to sign a green card before every game, and it signed beside your number just to make sure that you weren't bringing in somebody's older brother or something like that. So, we all signed the card, and the Parry Sound Shamrocks signed theirs first, came over to our dressing room for us to sign. Mye Sedore walks around the dressing room holding up the card, and he says, "Look at the way he signs his name. He writes like a girl!" Wow. We get out on the ice and we find out Bobby Orr is not playing with a ballpoint pen. He's got a hockey stick. And he just creamed us. My dad was quite pleased.
Taki Sarantakis: But as a young Canadian boy, who were you a fan of?
Roy MacGregor: My brother was a great fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs, so of course, I hated them then, and I hate them now, 70 some years later.
Taki Sarantakis: Oh, my goodness. This is terrible. Were you a Montreal Canadians fan?
Roy MacGregor: Yes.
Taki Sarantakis: Oh, my goodness. Oh, this is terrible.
Roy MacGregor: I was a Detroit fan because I like Gordie Howe.
Taki Sarantakis: Yeah. And who is your favorite? Did you have a childhood hero hockey player, Gordie Howe?
[00:03:36 Overlaid image of Gordie Howe. Text on screen: Gordie Howe is a Canadian hockey player, nicknamed "Mr. Hockey", and a Detroit Red Wings Legend.]
Roy MacGregor: I'd say Gordie Howe, yeah. And I was quite smitten with Bobby Hull until I found out later on in life that off the ice, he was not such a charming person.
Taki Sarantakis: Can you tell our viewers, our younger viewers, what a Gordie Howe hat trick is?
Roy MacGregor: Well, the oddity about the Gordie Howe hat trick, and I can't prove this, but I've read it a couple of times he never had it. It's called a Gordie Howe hat trick, where you have a fight, an assist and a goal all in the same game.
[00:04:15 Overlaid image of a statue of Gordie Howe in the Hockey Hall of Fame. Text on screen: The Gordie Howe hat trick was achieved by Howe himself only twice: October 11, 1953, and March 21, 1954.]
Roy MacGregor: I have to think maybe he did have it, but it's become the Gordie Howe hat trick. And Gordie, he was such a wonderful, wonderful, funny man. And he just was Gordie Howe. I played in a charity event out in Saskatchewan once, and Gordie was on the team, and I took my daughter, who was only 14 at the time, Kerry, out and she was excited about meeting Gordie Howe, and we're at the rink, and Gordie comes walking along, and suddenly, bang, my daughter goes flying into the boards. Gordie checked her. Well, she holds this up as one of the greatest things that ever happened to her!
Taki Sarantakis: Oh, and Gordie Howe is about to be posthumously honoured. The Gordie Howe Bridge is about to open, will open this year, connecting Canada and the United States through Winsor and Detroit.
Roy MacGregor: If any trucks get to go over it!
Taki Sarantakis: So let's fast forward a little bit. At some point, you started writing about hockey. Tell us a little bit about that.
Roy MacGregor: Well, I became a journalist by accident. I had failed grade 12 terribly, 37%, average. And they were going to kick me out of school. There used to be grade 13 then, you recall, in Ontario. And they told me to go away for a year or two and think about it. And the English teacher came to the principal's office and said, "I'd like to give him a chance to come back next year. I'm going to start up a new magazine, and I want him to be the editor." That's the only mark I passed, 53%. Made no sense whatsoever. And yet I just loved it. It was great. The business editor was... I'm sorry, the business manager was a young woman who just moved into town. Her father was a new teacher at the school, and she became my wife for 49 years. So there was that connection, too. And I got on, after that, I went to journalism school.
[00:06:25 Overlaid image of the entrance sign at Laurentian University followed by a sign at Western University. Text on screen: Roy MacGregor earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Laurentian University in 1970, followed by a Graduate Diploma in Journalism from the University of Western Ontario (now Western University) in 1972.]
Roy MacGregor: I got on at Maclean's. And then that '72 series, we got married in '72 during the '72 series, as a matter of fact. And I was at Maclean's as a very lowly assistant, but they thought that I knew something about hockey.
[00:06:41 Overlaid image of Ken Dryden. Text on screen: Ken Dryden is a former NHL goaltender, author, and Canadian hockey icon, known for leading Team Canada during the 1972 Summit Series.]
Roy MacGregor: Ken Dryden wanted to write about the '72 series in an article. And they said, "Well, you have to ghost it for him because, of course, hockey players can't write." And Ken and I met and talked, and he had all kinds of binders filled with information that he had dictated during the Summit Series of '72.
Taki Sarantakis: Was he taking notes as he was…
Roy MacGregor: He talked into a tape recorder, and then it was transcribed for him. And they were in these red folders. I read through them, interesting thoughts, interesting mind. And I wrote something which on reflection was just terrible. And he said, "I'd like to take a run at it if you don't mind". I said, Sure, go ahead. And he wrote a story, beautiful story about how, I think, about game five, there was a face off in his end, and he looked up and the Captain of the Soviet team winked at him. It was just that magical moment. They knew they were into something extremely special.
And following that, I went to Doug Gibson at Macmillan, who was a friend, and I said, This guy can write. He's got these notepads. You have a look through them and you talk to him. And it took years and years because Ken was not fast. And that's what became The Game.
[00:07:59 Overlaid image of the cover of the book "The Game".]
Taki Sarantakis: Oh, I thought you guys co-wrote something before that.
Roy MacGregor: Yeah, we wrote, co-wrote Home Team after that.
Taki Sarantakis: And so that was... Oh, it was after that. Okay. And The Game, like an iconic Canadian book.
Roy MacGregor: Absolutely.
Taki Sarantakis: And for those of you who are, again, younger, who enjoy hockey, it's one of the very, very best books on hockey, it chronicles a year in…
Roy MacGregor: Probably the best.
Taki Sarantakis: Yeah, it's iconic.
Roy MacGregor: I had a hockey novel come out the same day, and it was called The Last Season. And Gibson was the publisher, and they had this brilliant idea that they would have these bookmarks in all the bookstores in Canada. On one side would be Ken's The Game, and on the other side would be Roy's The Last Season. I went in every bookstore in Canada, never once saw my side up!
Taki Sarantakis: Well, it's hard to compete with, what was it, a four, five, six-time Stanley Cup champion, and also, Lawyer, Politician, Cabinet Minister.
Roy MacGregor: Good person. Just a good person.
Taki Sarantakis: Very, very good person who we lost relatively recently. Now, tell us about maybe the most famous loonie in Canadian history. Tell us that story.
Roy MacGregor: Well, it was during the Olympics in Utah, in Salt Lake City, and I was down there covering it. I'd gotten to know working with him, Wayne Gretzky, fairly well.
[00:09:32 Overlaid image of Wayne Gretzky. Text on screen: Wayne Gretzky is a legendary Canadian hockey player, widely regarded as one of the greatest in NHL history.]
Roy MacGregor: And he took me aside and he said, "there's a secret that we're going to tell you. You can't tell anyone." And he said, Trent Evans, the ice maker they brought down from Edmonton, and of course, Wayne had known he had buried a loonie at Centre Ice when he made the ice. And the girls knew it and the men knew it. And of course, they both won. It was fantastic. They thought it was the luck of the loonie. Then Wayne came to me and said, "Somebody needs to do this story." We did a book on it. Wayne did the forward and I did the body. And it's just the story of the Lucky Loonie at Salt Lake City that led to Canada being victorious in the one game that we care most about.
Taki Sarantakis: Do you know what happened to that loonie?
Roy MacGregor: I believe it's in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Taki Sarantakis: Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.
[00:10:20 Overlaid image of the exhibit in the Hockey Hall of Fame of the Lucky Loonie]
Roy MacGregor: That's what the idea was anyway. I know that. It should be there if it's not, it really should be.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, you mentioned Wayne Gretzky. Talk to us about a little bit about probably the greatest, probably the great, maybe Bobby Orr, maybe Gordie Howe, the greatest hockey player in history.
Roy MacGregor: Yeah. Well, his father was really... I got to know his father quite well. Remember the lockout year of 1994, Gretzky and friends went over to Europe, but they took... Someone took their dads and Walter. I spent a lot of time with him. He was a little tiny guy. He'd been a good hockey player himself. He built a beautiful rink in their backyard called Wally's Coliseum, of all things.
[00:11:10 Overlaid image of Walter Gretzky Text on screen: "Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it's been" / "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." – Walter Gretzky]
Roy MacGregor: And Walter had all kinds of sayings that now stand as legendary: "Don't go to where the puck is. Go to where the puck is going to be."
Taki Sarantakis: A lot of people that misattribute that to his son.
Roy MacGregor: Yes, exactly. You'll miss 99% of the shots you never take, and all this. And so it was neat to see the father-son dynamic. The other fathers were there, too, as well. It was really nice.
Taki Sarantakis: Before we move on to Wayne, he was like a quintessential hockey dad, quintessential Canadian hockey dad. You mentioned the rink in the backyard.
Roy MacGregor: The National Hockey Dad. Yeah. He's all our hockey dad.
Taki Sarantakis: Worked at Bell Canada, got up, took his kid to the rink every day.
Roy MacGregor: But you know what happened to…? And he told me this story. He was 55. I think he was still working for Bell, and he suffered an aneurysm, a stroke. And it took the part of his brain away that had all the memories of Wayne's Stanley Cups, all the memories of Wayne's great games, even the memory of Wayne scoring 383 goals for the Brantford team back when he was a little boy. And Walter, they tried to get them back into his head through video, the Stanley Cups, and that. He said, "I know it's not the same. I can't get the same feeling that I had at that moment, but I know what happened. I know why they matter. But it's gone."
Taki Sarantakis: Remarkable. Kind of a bit of a stranger in a big part of his life. Another hockey guy, a less obvious hockey guy. Tell us a little bit about your relationship with Stephen Harper, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and hockey.
[00:12:49 Overlaid image of Stephen Harper]
Roy MacGregor: The most unusual incident in my career. I got a call from Michael Levine, who was an agent with Westwood Creative in Toronto. Didn't know each other very well then. He said that he had a client who was working on a hockey book, and he's going to need some help with it, I think.
Taki Sarantakis: It was about the good team, not the Montreal Canadiens. It was about the good proper team.
Roy MacGregor: The bad boys, yeah.
But I didn't know what it was about, and I certainly didn't know who was doing it. I said, Well, yeah, I'd be open to helping someone. I should know who it is, shouldn't I? He said, "Well, I'll tell you in the strictest of confidence, you must not tell anyone. No one's to know." Who is it? "It's the Prime Minister." Stephen Harper? "Yes, the Prime Minister. That's how he relaxes at night." He works on this hockey book
[00:13:46 Overlaid image of the cover of the book "A Great Game".]
Roy MacGregor: on the origins, really, of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Toronto professional hockey, and how the turn from amateur hockey to pro hockey happened and how people fought against it. And I go, well, okay, I'll go and meet with him.
I went down there and met Nigel Wright at the Center Block, up to the Prime Minister's office, the office that he has there, not just the one across at Langevin. And in the Prime Minister's office, we chatted, and I had read through his notes, and I had some 16, 17 comments. And he listened, and he never smiled. I went home and I told my wife, Ellen, and I said, Man, does that guy hate me!
And I had worked on Parliament. I had written some not particularly wonderful stuff about him like everyone else had. I didn't think he liked the media at that time. And then I got called back in by Nigel. And I go back down. And he said in there, Prime Minister said, He goes through every one of those 17 points, and he negates every single one of them. And I go back home, I say, Boy, he really dislikes me. He wanted to shove it at me. And then I got another call, and he said, "The Prime Minister would be happy to work with you." So we start working together.
And there's a very funny incident… He never let himself out. He should have. He said, he asked me what I used to do. And I said, Well, I'd worked on Parliament Hill. And he said, "Well, you know what? I wanted to be accountant when I grew up, but I didn't have enough personality. So I became an economist." Why weren't those lines out there then?
We were up at the summer cottage at Harrington [Lake]. And Ellen was there, and she and Mrs. Harper went for a hike. And the Prime Minister and I worked on his book. And I said, Look, you got to be able to hang this… There's no personality in there. And I said, there's this guy, John Ross Robertson, who was very well known at the time, actually owned the Globe at one point, Globe and Mail. And I said, he's really intriguing because he's fighting hard to [remain] an amateur. And I said, but he's an eccentric. You know what his hobby was? He went to funerals and cried and cried and cried at the back. A super successful Toronto businessman who would leave at lunch and go to somebody's funeral he didn't even know.
Well, I mean, how gold is that for material? He said, "I've got a book on him, but it's not here. It's at 24 Sussex. Let's go." So, all of a sudden, there's these black SUVs pulling up in front of Harrington Lake, and there's Mounties all around, and they're going to go down and get the book. And Ellen and I are supposed to join in our 12-year-old SUV Ford, was rusted and falling apart. The Mountie tells us to get to the back of the line and follow them, down Meech Lake road, really way too fast. Out onto number 5. We're on number 5, and they go into "assassination preventive mode." They're going like this down the highway. We came to that turn at Chelsea and at that four-way stop, I had to pull out because I was not one of those black cars with the lights on. I had to pull out and cut a guy off in a silver Jeep. He came really close behind me, and I thought, he's mad at me. He's chasing. We're going down number 5, and they're shifting like this, taking evasive action. I said to Ellen, what am I supposed to do? Well, you better do it, too. We're taking evasive of action. Nobody's going to assassinate me!
And we get down to 24 Sussex. We pull in. The Jeep pulls in right behind me. I said, oh, jeez, this guy is mad. And he gets out. He's a Mountie, but he's been stationed there waiting for them. So we get down, we get the book. I thought it was quite funny.
Another time we were working late on the book, I was on my phone at home. He was on his phone at his home in 24 Sussex. We're chatting on the phone. I could hear a phone ringing in the background. And I can tell he's getting distracted. And I said, Did you want to get that? He says, "I think I have to get it." And he goes off and he's "mumble, mumble, mumble, mumble, mumble." I couldn't hear clearly, and then I hear a click. And he comes to the back on and he says, "That was THE phone." What do you mean? "The phone. The phone that connects me to the President, the Prime Minister of England, the nuclear phone." Oh, my God. He says, "wrong number". Oh, we're alive. We're talking away, another half hour passes and the phone starts ringing again. I'm thinking there's missiles coming across the Atlantic at this point. And he goes and answers it. And he comes back and he's chuckling. I said, What's up? What's up? He says, "He didn't believe me."
Taki Sarantakis: So let's close hockey here. Give us your take on what hockey means to Canada, to Canadians, why it means so much to Canada, to Canadians?
Roy MacGregor: First of all, to make you do with what you have. You have ice. And who knows the origins? There's all kinds of different theories on the origins, and that doesn't really matter. I like to say it's invented every single day on roads and in backyard rinks. It's reinvented every day by little kids with imaginations and now, wonderfully, little girls with their imaginations.
The nicest thing that's happened to hockey, in my opinion, in all the years that I've covered it has been the growth of the women's hockey. And seeing little girls in hockey rinks as excited as little boys were for decades and decades, it's fantastic. Also, as a journalist, I have always found the women hockey players
[00:20:16 Overlaid image of Team Canada women's hockey team posing with gold medals at the 2010 and 2014 Winter Olympics]
Roy MacGregor: far more interesting to interview, more open to thinking out loud, less likely to deliver the usual clichés, "we just stick to our game". I used to say that, guys, he says, "well, we'll be fine as long as we stick to our game plan". I'd say, What is your game plan?" I have no idea." It's just what they throw out. I've really enjoyed that.
I think what it means to Canada is that it's something that we always believe we're better at than anyone in the world, and we still believe that. It's something that is teamwork. And these are clichés, and I understand the flaws in them. But the fact of the matter is this country could not have ever been populated without teamwork, without sharing, without help. And so that lots of sports have to do with teamwork. Hockey has a huge emphasis on it. Hockey, because of going back to Gordie Howe and Jean Beliveau, people like that, humility is hugely admired. Canadians say "sorry" all the time. Canadians don't like to pop their buttons as much as other people in America. And I think that's part of it, that there's a humility side to it. There's a great skill side to it, of course. Well, now, I mean, there really is a co-ed side to it. And so it's men and women, and we're the best in the world. We're not always. I think it's good when we lose. I know that's a crazy thing to say. I truly believe it's good we lose once in a while.
Taki Sarantakis: I think I was devastated. I think it was 1980. We lost at the Olympics. I was, I think, 12 years old. Just devastated. Just devastated.
Let's move to a second Canadian topic now. For hockey, you said you make do with what you have. Another thing that we have a lot of is rivers and canoeing. In many ways, we owe our existence to rivers as a country, the Saint Lawrence River, and then coming inland and using rivers as our original highways. Tell us a little bit about your relationship with rivers and canoeing. And again, you've written a couple of books on this as well.
Roy MacGregor: It was a big part of my life. I'm very proud to say that my mother taught me how to canoe. My grandfather, her father, was the Chief Ranger of Algonquin Park.
[00:23:05 Overlaid image of Roy MacGregor in a canoe]
Roy MacGregor: They lived in the park. And my mother was a wonderful canoeist. And we'd go all over, and she taught me. And because she had not only her four kids, but usually several cousins and I was living in there in the summer all the time. That was her peace to go out on the water, leave me alone. You could hardly even hear the paddle.
And as time went on, Ellen and I, my wife, we started doing a lot of tripping. And one day I started thinking that… I had this phrase in my head, No canoe, no Canada, because actually so many of the canoe inventions had to do with exploration. All of the exploration could not have taken place without canoeing. And then one day later on, it occurred to me, No rivers, no canoe. And I did take another step for it. It was the rivers. That's why I called them the original highways.
[00:24:04 Overlaid image of the cover of the book "Original Highways".]
Roy MacGregor: I don't know whether that was a good title or not.
They were the original highways. They were what took us everywhere and in large part still carry us around. But the beauty of Canada, I truly believe, lies in the waterways and the rivers and just the wonderful places you can go to. Everyone has a secret place, it seems, in Canada. My secret place is in Algonquin Park, no surprise.
[00:24:29 Overlaid image of a river in Algonquin Park]
Roy MacGregor: But it's a place, it's a falls in which the falls comes... It falls into a granite bowl and spills into another granite bowl and spills into another.... And kids go in there and they paddle in from the camps and they put their life preservers on upside down like a diaper. They pull them up like that and then they slide down from one to the other. It's a magical place. I always say that if this were in the United States, there'd be signs saying "40 minutes to ride", and there'd be shuttle busses taking people into it. But no, you have to paddle in.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, do you remember what Pierre Trudeau, the first Trudeau, said about canoes and canoeing? Can you tell our audience?
[00:25:23 Overlaid image of Pierre Trudeau. Text on screen: "What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature" – Pierre Elliott Trudeau]
Roy MacGregor: He said that basically, if you go 500 yards, you enter a wilderness in a different state of mind. I can't remember his exact words, but that's essentially what it was that it only takes you five minutes of paddling and you've vanished the date. You've gone back into the original territory, which is hard to believe that so much of that has not changed from when whomever was paddling.
Taki Sarantakis: He also said something to the effect of if you can read about Canada, you can write about Nationalism. And he said something like, but until you get out in a canoe you feel Canada in your bones. That was one of the classic Canadian statements about canoeing.
Do you have a favorite canoeing joke?
Roy MacGregor: Pierre Burton, of course, other one, a Canadian knows how to make love in a canoe. My friend, my whitewater friend Phil Chester, a retired teacher up in Deep River, he said, No, no. He says, "A real Canadian knows to take the central thwart out before making love in a canoe."
Taki Sarantakis: All right. Now let's turn to our third and our final talk about Canadiana, and you've hinted at it a little bit. You've mentioned a few times Huntsville and Algonquin Park. You are one of Canada's top authorities on one of Canada's top cultural icons, Tom Thomson.
[00:27:05 Overlaid image of Tom Thomson]
Taki Sarantakis: Tell us a little bit about your relationship, because I know you have a bit of a familial relationship with Tom Thomson the legend, and Algonquin Park.
Roy MacGregor: Well, I grew up with Tom Thomson, but he didn't know it. First of all, we were in Algonquin Park. I was born on the edge of Algonquin Park, in a place called Whitney. And then I grew up in Huntsville, on the other side of Algonquin. I lived in his paintings, so to speak. But there was much more to it than that. My grandfather knew him. He was a Fire Ranger at the time. He wasn't the Chief Ranger then, but he knew Tom Thomson, did not like him. My grandfather didn't swear, for example, Tom Thomson would have swore. He drank. My grandfather didn't drink, and he was perceived to be a bit of a womanizer. One of the women that he was involved with was Winifred Trainor,
[00:27:59 Overlaid image of Winifred Trainor]
Roy MacGregor: whose sister had married my grandfather's brother, so there was a familial connection there. Plus, Winifred lived down the street from us in Huntsville, just down about seven houses. And so I grew up with her. My mother was terrified of her. She'd hide if she thought that Winnie was coming to visit because she was a very opinionated, strong woman.
Taki Sarantakis: And for our viewers, she was rumoured to have been Tom Thomson's fiancé.
Roy MacGregor: Yes, they were rumoured to have been married. Our family certainly believe that. They had looked into renting a cabin and that kind of thing for getting married. And Winifred had maintained that. I helped clean out her house after she passed away in 1962. And of course, it was frozen in time, but they're also, although I can't say I put my hands on them, there were 14 small paintings. Now worth $2 million each. The sketches, $28 million. She didn't even have running hot water in her house. She had no furnace. No heat -
Taki Sarantakis: In Huntsville?
Roy MacGregor: Yeah. Just an old-fashioned oil heater. She had nothing. She never would sell them off. She would never do anything. When she'd go visit her in-laws who moved to the States, and down in New York, she would carry the six-quart basket over to… Her name was Addie Sylvester. She was the Bell Telephone operator in Huntsville. And Addie would take them to her house. She lived alone, and she would put them behind the wood stove. So the wood stove and the 14 paintings were there. They never burnt up.
And so I became very, very interested in the whole Tom Thomson story. I began pursuing it. My cousin inherited all of Winifred's stuff, her cottage, the Tom Thomsons - had kept these paintings at Canoe Lake. I helped clean that out as well. And over the time, I started interviewing people, talking to people that hadn't been spoken to, like Dr. Pocock, Winifred's doctor. Mrs. Daphne Crombie, who I think Tom was chasing her. Her husband was suffering from TB, and they used to send you into the Park - to wrap you in blankets in the winter, even have you out there just breathing that Algonquin Park air or Banff air, wherever it was. And she had been told by the proprietor, the wife of the proprietor of Mowat Lodge, where Tom had been staying at the time of his death in 1917.
Taki Sarantakis: Let's pause on his death. We'll get to his death in a moment. Tell us a little bit about his life. Tell us a little bit about his paintings. Tell us a little bit about why they seem to be Canadiana. They seem to be - like if you talk to people, the Group of Seven. Tell us a little bit about that before we go to his death.
Roy MacGregor: Sure. Well, he painted what he saw, which is a cliché, but it's true.
[00:30:55 Overlaid series of images of Tom Thomson paintings]
Roy MacGregor: Many people in Canada did not believe that that was paintings. That paintings were portraits. Paintings were of old buildings in Europe. They were not of trees, leaves, water. Come on. But he was trained.
He grew up on a farm in Southwestern Ontario, and he took to painting quite early. You couldn't really become a painter there, so he became a commercial artist. And he worked in Toronto as a commercial artist, at Grip. And there were a number of them there, and some of them did later become members of the Group of Seven, McDonald, for example. And they would go off on the weekend and paint around Toronto. And Tom basically discovered Algonquin Park,
[00:31:51 Overlaid image of Mowat Lodge]
Roy MacGregor: where you could get to by train. You could go up there. You could stay. There was a lodge made of an old lumber camp, Mowat Lodge. Stay there and you could go out painting. And he would bring Varly and other members of the Group of Seven up, and they would do their painting.
Taki Sarantakis: And they could fish.
Roy MacGregor: And they could fish. And drink. And have a great old time.
Taki Sarantakis: And drink, and paint.
Roy MacGregor: And meet women. And of course, my grandfather thought they were deadbeats. And there was one story of one of my grandfather's colleagues, went down, was on the train [handcar] that you would go out there and they would move back and forth, the Rangers on the tracks. And he came back into the Ranger office. He said, "Jesus Christ!" He says, "There's a guy down there at the end of the track." He says, "He's got his board up and he's slapping paint all over it." I don't know whether it's my grandfather, not one of the other Rangers says, "Well, he's an artist." "What's an artist?" I mean, that's how alien these people were to the people that they were meeting in the park. And yet they loved to come there. They kept painting. And gradually, some people, like MacCallum, the dentist in Toronto, understood as an art collector, he thought that there was some magic in it. And he saw, as many now would agree completely, the essence and the beauty was in the quickly done ones.
Taki Sarantakis: The little tiny board.
Roy MacGregor: The little ones like what Winnie had in her basket. We all know the big paintings that hung in the public schools, West Wind, Northern…, and The Jack Pine, those kind of ones. And they're beautiful.
Taki Sarantakis: They really are. Do you have a favorite?
Roy MacGregor: They're sketches. Do I have a favorite?
[00:33:38 Overlaid images of the Tom Thompson paintings: "Jack Pine"; "The West Wind" and "The Canoe"]
Roy MacGregor: I like Jack Pine, I think, and I like The West Wind, I do. But favorite, may I? And I'll tell you the reason for this because it's exotic. It's The Canoe. It's just called The Canoe.
Taki Sarantakis: I love that one, too.
Roy MacGregor: This is what's so interesting about it.
Taki Sarantakis: It's like the white birch, I think. It looks "birchy".
Roy MacGregor: It is.
Tom dies, drowns, murdered, whatever you want to call it, in July of 1917. His body surfaces on Canoe Lake. And the mystery begins there. Well, Winifred Trainor, she tried to talk to the Thomson family about the paintings, and there was a rumour, widely held, that she was pregnant. She went off to Philadelphia with her mother for the winter. She had a sister who was training to be a nurse in New York. They stayed the winter in Philadelphia. They did not have relatives there. She came back at Easter, do the math, no child or anything like that. The rumour persisted. She stayed in her house, the Winifred Trainor house, the Trainor house. She stayed there all her life. She died in her '80s, 1962.
20 years plus pass, and Huntsville decides that they're going to honour the group of seven and Tom Thomson by putting up murals. And they put them up around town. They're quite nicely done and attractive. A bit of a tourist attraction. Winifred Trainor's house had been razed to the ground, and they'd put up a brick structure, which was a medical centre for a while. And they said, we'll put something up on the wall there, right where Winifred Trainor lived and died.
The one they put up there was the empty canoe. They never thought. There was no connection. It's just that's what happened. And it just shivers you.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, you turn that rumour into a beautiful novel, Canoe Lake,
[00:35:39 Overlaid image of the cover of the book "Canoe Lake"]
Taki Sarantakis: one of the best Canadian novels of the last century. Talk to us a little bit about why you did that.
Roy MacGregor: Well, as I go back, I was fascinated by the Winifred Trainor - Tom Thomson story. So I thought, well, I'll write it as a novel. I wanted to be a novelist at the time. And I did two novels in the last season. Didn't sell. And I used my journalism to turn to non-fiction. And I still kept doing fiction with children's books and that. But it was one way to get at the Tom Thomson story. It was 1980. So it was early on. And then years and years and years passed. And I thought, really, I've got all this material. I kept getting - other people would send me stuff, interesting things. And it didn't matter what it was. It was always whenever something came up, it was always mysterious.
Even just the other day, I got an email from a fella who said that his uncle... Okay, so Tom drowns in Canoe Lake. His friends tie him to a root. It's summer. Flesh is coming off there. It's ugly. They said, "We're going to bury him." They bury him in the little Canoe Lake Cemetery. Winifred Trainor on behalf of the family arranges for an undertaker to come in, dig up the body and take it down to Leith by the train.
All supposedly done, except a lot of people believe that he didn't do a thing because the undertaker came up late in the day. He worked supposedly through the night. The next morning, he's there with a sealed casket, and it's ready to go to down to Leith. One Ranger, Mark Robinson, went over and checked the hole where the guy had been digging the body out. It didn't seem to him that he could have possibly dug a casket out, removed a body from the… Sorry, a rough casket and put it in a real casket and done all this by himself. He didn't believe that he had done that. I got an email the other day, a guy said his uncle was one of the people that moved the casket from when it went over to Kearney on the track and then changed the tracks for running from North Bay down South, they had to move the casket into another car. He said it was too light. The uncle had always said it was too light to hold a body. There were rocks rolling around in it. Little things like that, right? Just to add to the mystery.
Taki Sarantakis: This is our last question. But in addition to Tom Thomson, the artist being the icon, another Canadian iconic moment or story or tale or mystery is his death. I know you're on record on this already, but tell us, for the benefit of our viewers, how do you think Tom Thomson died?
Roy MacGregor: Well, I think it's a mystery, and I think it's a beautiful mystery. I talked to the Thomson family because there was a movement at one point when DNA became very popular, the DNA identification. Dig up whatever is in Leith, if it's a body, or if it's not, it's not a body, that would prove that he's still in Canoe Lake. Go back to Canoe Lake where they re-buried the bones after having checked it over at one point checked them over and decided it wasn't Tom Thomson. It was, as they said back then, "an Indian", but an Indigenous person who happened to be hunting and on a portage. Well, no, no. Even the Algonquins of that area say that no, this doesn't happen. So there is bones at Canoe Lake. And who do they belong to? Well, DNA might have solved that. But I talked to Tracy Thomson, who's a very wonderful artist in her own right, and she's a grandniece of Tom's. And she said to me, and I think it was just beautifully put, she said, "I don't think we should do that". She said, "It's reached a point now where the mystery and the paintings are inextricably combined. Each supports the other, each lives off the other, each makes the other larger than they could possibly be. Why not just leave the mystery?"
I'm all for that. I think he was killed. I think he's still at Canoe Lake. I can't prove it. I just believe it, and I'm happy doing that.
Taki Sarantakis: Roy McGregor, author, journalist. It has been so much fun talking to you about Canadiana, talking about hockey and rivers and canoes and Tom Thomson. Thank you so much.
Roy MacGregor: Pretty corny. That's Canada. That's me, I guess. Thank you. It was a wonderful interview.
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