Dr. Michael Harris address to convocation
I seem to have picked up a degree and lost my voice just at the time when I most needed it but this is Newfoundland and I’ve been through some tough stories, and we’re going to get through this one way or the other tonight.
First of all I have been where your parents are sitting tonight
with sweaty palms, leaning forward in my seat to see my two
daughters, Emily and Payton, walk across the stage like this and
get their degrees. So I’d like you to give yourselves a hug.
You’ve done a great thing and I know what that costs a family
in terms of time and effort, and sacrifice, and support and
everything that I’ve ever done that’s been valuable has
been based on an alliance of some kind or another, and tonight we
have a classic example of that. We have the parents who deserved
that pat on the back, I want to congratulate you tonight. The
professors of this university as well; the university is the gold
standard of values in professions and disciplines, thank God it
isn’t left to the marketplace.
I can tell you in the world of journalism, professional schools
of journalism -- which I hope one day this place will have -- have
made an invaluable contribution. Professors in universities also do
another thing that I think doesn’t get noticed enough. A lot
of people out there don’t really know in detail any of the
stories that I have been so luckily honoured for tonight. The
university is our cultural memory and the things that happened have
a home here and become part of the continuity and things get
transferred from one generation to the next even if you
didn’t live though them, and for that I’m very
grateful.
And then of course there is you, the graduates of tonight. I was
watching from this angle it’s like watching an NFL game from
the sidelines, you get perspectives you wouldn’t see, and I
saw the future streaming past me like a river of hope, I saw your
smiles when you got your degrees. And I want to tell you that the
alliance between yourselves, your parents, and the professors who
have been your mentors is a model for what will happen later. I can
tell you as a person who’s been along a few rocky roads that
it’s almost never the case that you do something by yourself.
And one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about tonight
was this notion that somehow individuals can’t make a
difference anymore. Nothing could be further from the truth, which
isn’t to say that the beginnings are not sometimes
rocky.
When I got back to Newfoundland in 1977, I drove across the
island from Port-aux-Basques, I went to the CBC, they were waiting
for me and they put a stool out in front of a camera, and Ken
Meeker who was a producer of 30-odd years there said, “Sit on
that stool and do a promo so that people who watch Here and Now
will have a reason to watch it, tell them why they should.”
So I spouted some senseless dribble into the camera for about a
minute and a half and then Ken put his hands over his face and put
his head down and said, “That’s enough. That is the
worst promo I have ever seen in 30 years. We’ll see you
tomorrow at 9 o’clock.” So I went back to my hotel room
and I thought to myself, “If that’s the worst one
he’s ever seen I guess there’s nowhere to go but up
from here,” and I went back to work and I’ve popped up
on television a few times since.
The purpose of talking to you about what an individual can do is
not in how easy it’s going to be. We are living in tough
times and there are many reasons to feel if not despairing then at
least cynical, but I don’t feel those things looking at you
tonight. Some people would tell you the sky is falling. I
don’t think it’s falling, and even if it were falling
with what you’ve achieved for yourselves tonight you can
chart a new course to the stars around the falling sky.
I believe in people. It has driven my work, and I think that
when it comes to this whole notion of alliances there’s no
better example than when I came to Newfoundland, [and] started the
Sunday Express. The first partner in that alliance was Harry
Steele. Harry Steele gave me a couple of million dollars and said,
“I want you to begin a paper.” He wanted me to write
the prospectus, hire all the people, get the presses, do the whole
thing, and an important part of that alliance was the financial
backing. It was necessary to do that, to have a partner who would
believe in you while you got this thing up and running.
But the critical ingredient of that newspaper was people exactly
like you because I had to go out and staff a weekly newspaper with
recent graduates who had no experience -- very little -- who were
young and very brilliant but hadn’t yet been given a chance.
And people like Philip Lee, who’s in this audience tonight
somewhere, was one of my best soldiers in some of the toughest
logging we had to do on Mount Cashel. Linda Strowbridge, who was a
graduate of this university; Russell Wangersky, who’s stuff
you probably read from time to time in the Evening Telegram; John
Gushue at the Telegram as well; all of these people were part of
the big alliance that made things possible at that paper, and the
key ingredient was the talent of the young reporters that I
had.
In fact, as much as anything there should be a stream of people
up here if this award is about the Sunday Express and some of the
big things that were done, then those people that I’ve
mentioned should be standing beside me tonight, and I’m very
happy that a few of them are in this building, as well.
Now, given the fact that you’ve had voices of angels from
singers and you’ve had a thespian who sounds like a
Shakespearian actor and now you get a hacksaw voice, I don’t
want to stand in the way of a good party but I do want to say
something personal to all of you about my feelings about this
place. It seems ironic I’ve written hundreds of thousands of
words that have been published, eight books, I‘ve made
movies, I’ve had movies made out of my books, and here I am
tonight with no voice and in a way that’s life. And
especially, life here in Newfoundland where it’s tough, but
people are so wonderfully resilient.
There is the element of this speech which has to go to the
things that I believe. I don’t believe, for example, that
moralizing is the wrong thing to do. A person who won’t
moralize with you about basic values doesn’t have any. One of
the things that I believe in passionately is demonstrated by some
of the people on this stage tonight. The most important thing of
all is engagement. It’s easy for people to become lost in
their own personal lives organizing their own personal successes
but that’s killing us as a society. We have to learn how to
re-engage with each other, love each other enough to care about
what happens to the next person, and part of that is
service.
One of the models, to me one of the great citizens of the
country, is John Crosbie. I’ve known him for a long time. He
was delighted when I decided to write the story of his family. His
exact words were to the effect, “It wasn’t enough to
hatchet me Harris, you had to come back for the whole God damn
family.” So with John’s hearty endorsement, that
project got done. But here is a man who had served political
parties in this country at a high level for a long time and you
would have to have covered public life to see the sacrifice that
people in public life make. And he’s a
Newfoundlander.
And Rick Hillier, a person who everyone in this place knows what
he has done but to me the value of a Rick Hillier is not just in
what he’s done but it’s the way in which he’s
done it, and by that I mean in the peculiar Newfoundland way. We
are people who believe that justice is truth in action. We
don’t stand for people trying to tell us justice is something
based on falsehoods or special interests or somebody else’s
idea of what’s at stake besides the person who got caught in
the gears of the system. Rick Hillier knows how to call a ball and
a strike, and a spade a spade and that to me is a peculiar
Newfoundland trait.
Now, when I was a kid I lived in Toronto and my grandfather was William Tilley and I was a hockey player and my grandfather was just my grandfather, but I didn’t know that he was a shipwright and a master carpenter from Princeton in Bonavista Bay. In 1931, our family had to move from Newfoundland because of the depression and William Tilley went to Ontario to get work. The woman who was to be my grandmother also went to Toronto to work as a domestic, and William Tilley worked on Smythe’s Valley which is Maple Leaf Gardens built in the 1930s and he was one of the carpenters who built that place. But in the middle of the project he fell from the beam and broke his back, so he spent the rest of the 30s with nine children including my mother, living I guess on the good graces of the Salvation Army and welfare cheques and the rest, and he knitted me a hockey net and I was the only kid at that time who had an actual net to put over posts and make a net that we could shoot at, and I thought it was cool. I didn’t quite know how he knew how to do that, but he did.
Every spring my grandfather would say let’s go to the
Credit River and we’ll go smelting and he would make these
nets and we would go there and catch the smelts. And his comment to
me always was the same one, he said, “You know they’re
good but they’re not capelin.” All his life, he wanted
to come back here to Newfoundland, and he never did make that. I
want to tell you one little personal detail about how he died. He
was in a hospital surrounded by his family. I was pretty young, I
was there, too, in his room, and my five aunts were there. And they
were beside themselves trying to give him comfort. We kept asking
him, “What would you like? Is there anything we can
do?” Everyone knew the end was close. And he said, “Yes
there is one thing I would like.” And they said, “What
is that?” And he said, “I’d like some
partridgeberry jam.” They went out, scoured Toronto,
couldn’t find any, came back with some substitute which he
instantly detected as a fraud, and said, “This is not
partridgeberry jam,” and that was the last thing he
said.
Now he always wanted to come back here and one of the reasons
this means so much to me is finally, William Tilley made it back to
Newfoundland tonight because you brought me here and I could never
tell you what that means to me. So the last thing that I’m
going to say to you is bon voyage. I watched your faces. I have no
fear of the future.
Thank you very much.
