“Your dad would be so happy.”
More than a few people have said variations of that, since I told them this spring I was moving to the Star. And I’m pretty sure they’re right.
As I told the congregation when eulogizing my father, George Radwanski, nearly a dozen years ago, his professional days at this newspaper in the 1980s — including four years as editor-in-chief — were probably the ones he looked back on most fondly.
And during a very difficult final decade of his life, my journalism career seemed to bring him some solace, even when I was at a newspaper — The Globe and Mail — that was once his rival. So what a joy it would be, now, to see me in his old stomping grounds.
But for me, it’s not quite that simple, for reasons that anyone with a father who loomed large might understand.
For a long time, his past at the Star was part of the a reason why I thought the place would never be for me.
So I find myself, this Father’s Day weekend, still wrapping my head around how that changed — how a homecoming of sorts was now an added incentive to come here, rather than a deterrent.
Through a certain retrospective lens, it might all seem inevitable.
My dad started at the Star when I was a few months old after spending most of his career until then as an Ottawa columnist, and he exited before I turned seven. But that was still enough time for a rather romantic view to take hold in me.
He only brought me into the office once or twice. But I still have an image, possibly shaped by his accounts, of the sort of bustling, smoky, profane, hard-living newsroom you see in old movies. I was under the impression at the time that the Star building at One Yonge Street — the start of the longest street in the world, as he liked to point out — was Toronto’s tallest after the CN Tower. (It wasn’t.)
I think I was also aware, at some level, of how much his role at the Star made my dad a figure in the city. He was an old-school journalist and a big personality — a guy who once chased Pope John Paul II halfway around the world seeking an interview, before somehow briefly cornering him on a private plane. And everyone, from politicians to restaurateurs to my pediatrician, was eager to hear his views on the state of the world and share theirs.
At home, I was a preternaturally young Star reader (the sports section and comics to start). I distinctly recall, when I was a bit older, making my own version of the newspaper out of construction paper, putting an elastic around it and dropping it at our front door.
I’d be kidding myself to suggest all this didn’t influence my entry into journalism.
But I was determined that the path I carved, starting with launching an online political magazine with a few friends back in the early internet days, would be distinctly mine.
As I worked my way through the National Post and Maclean’s to the Globe, I was hypersensitive to any connections drawn between our careers, to the point where I’d chafe when old industry vets would ask after him.
It wasn’t just that I was worried people would think I’d somehow gotten ahead because of him — although I could never quite shake that fear, even after his post-journalism political and consulting career collapsed rather horrifically in a weird Ottawa scandal that most people have now forgotten.
It was also that I didn’t want views of who I was to be shaped by who he was.
We were very close, and I greatly admired his intellect and values (including a deep progressivism rooted in the Pierre Trudeau era). But we were very different people.
I was less brash than him, less drawn to every debate, more inclined to find common ground with others, more attuned to modern sensitivities.
It wasn’t so much that I wanted people to notice those differences, as that I didn’t want them to have to think about them at all. I just wanted to be taken on my own merits.
For so long, I didn’t imagine that would be possible at the newspaper where he was best remembered, or at least where I most remembered him.
The easiest explanation for what’s changed is the passage of time.
There’s barely anyone at the Star now who was there in his day, and I’m quite sure most of the buoyantly young staff don’t know who he was.
Meanwhile my own career has been going for more than a quarter-century, and he’s sadly been gone for nearly half of that time. Any worry about being judged on my own merits would be rather daft by now.
But that doesn’t fully explain why the family history is something I’m willing to lean into; why I’m choosing to draw some attention to it through this column, even.
The longer a parent is gone, the more you want to keep your connection to them alive. The link from one generation to the next becomes more profound, and so does the desire to build upon what was left behind.
There have been times, since his day, when the future of this newspaper and most others looked uncertain.
But the Star as it exists now — with energetic new leadership, a dogged but not cynical determination to hold our politicians and business leaders to account, and a renewed sense of purpose, especially when it comes to standing up for people at risk of being left behind during these challenging times — is one that I think would fill him with hope.
He might not recognize the shiny new newsroom that replaced the one at One Yonge, but he’d recognize what’s motivating the people inside it.
He’d be right to be happy that I’ve landed here. And I’m old and wise enough now to admit that makes me happy, too.
