EP3 Roger Bill Dangerously Close to Contempt | Journalism's Unrepentant Agitator

This special in-person edition of #SpillingtheMeans ia a deep-dive conversation with journalist and author Alex Bill. Breaking away from the usual "read and react" format, this episode features a face-to-face sit-down with the man who lived the story, providing a tangible look at the effort required to document a life as complex as his father’s.

In this wide-ranging discussion, Alex Bill explores the dual nature of his latest project: a meticulously researched biography of his father, Roger Bill. The conversation covers:

The Business of News: Alex discusses his role as editor of *All Newfoundland Labrador* and how their subscription-based model thrives in a struggling industry.
The Draft Resistor Experience: A look at Roger’s journey from a Republican upbringing in Indiana to becoming a fugitive in Canada during the Vietnam War.
The Activist Legacy:The fascinating history of how Roger and a group of architects fought "Plan 91" to save downtown St. John’s from being gutted by a four-lane highway.
A Son’s Perspective: The challenge of maintaining journalistic objectivity while uncovering emotional family letters and exploring the flaws and successes of a local media icon.

0:00 Introduction
0:18 Sponsor: Biblio Gifting
0:46 Interview begins with Alex Bill
1:20 Alex Bill's background in journalism
2:13 The business model of All Newfoundland Labrador
3:51 The decline of print vs. digital security
5:08 Growing up in a house of journalists
5:55 From law school back to the newsroom
6:48 The role of luck in a career
7:40 The effort of writing a 86,000-word biography
9:39 Interviewing a "difficult" subject: Roger Bill
10:48 Balancing son vs. journalist perspectives
11:56 The emotional letter Roger wrote to his father
13:10 Impact of the Vietnam War and the draft
15:14 Roger's Republican roots in Indiana
17:41 Living as a fugitive and secret U.S. visits
19:40 Researching draft resistors in Newfoundland
22:36 Newfoundland's unique affinity for Americans
24:32 Plan 91: Saving downtown St. John's from a highway
26:13 Why Roger Bill made Newfoundland his home

Buy the book on Amazon here:
https://www.amazon.ca/Dangerously-Close-Contempt-Journalisms-Unrepentant/dp/1738353664

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Spilling the beans conversations around aspiring biography. A big thank you to our sponsor, Biblio Gifting. If you want to move beyond generic corporate gifts, Biblio Gifting offers curated book collections that let your recipients choose their own read. From starter to strategic packages, it's about personalized marketing with a real social impact. Check them out to be an early adopter. Well, folks, uh here we are. We're in the basement of my house. Normally I shoot in a room next door, but I wanted to change it up a bit. This is spilling the means, and I am sitting with someone who's actually written a book. So the idea behind spilling the means is to read a book and then talk about the book. But Alex and I were talking over Facebook Messenger, and the idea to actually interview him about the book that he wrote about his father came up, and I said, absolutely, let's do it. So without any further ado, Alex, could you introduce yourself and we'll take this conversation wherever it goes?

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Sure. I'm Alex Bill. I'm the editor of the business news website, All Newfoundland Labrador. Uh, we cover business and politics. I've been doing it for a decade in St. John's with a newsroom of seven reporters. Uh been a journalist, yeah, so 10 years. I have a podcast with Andrew Parsons now, the honorable on the hack, a little bit of a side hustle. And a couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to branch out and expand into another medium, try and operate in a different way that I have done from my journalism career previously, and write a book. And I picked uh my own father, Roger Bill, in his life story. And uh that's what leads me to being here today.

SPEAKER_01 2:00

Well, what I love about an introduction, there's so much for me to dig into. Being a guy that spent my entire career in the media, who actually met your father, it's this is interesting. First thing I want to touch on is um, I guess, all Newfoundland Labrador. That's fascinating what you're doing there. And you have seven people in the newsroom.

SPEAKER_00 2:18

Yeah, seven reporters covering, I don't know, we probably write about 50 stories a week, uh publishing at night. And it was founded in Nova Scotia as all Nova Scotia more than 20 years ago, very early to the stage of being an internet-only news organization, uh, which of course gave us such and a subscription-based one. So when all the newspapers in Canada and the world really uh adopted the internet advertising-led model, uh that quickly lost ground to social media in the late 2000s, and you know, they were just in this financial hole for the last decade. We avoided that altogether. And uh, it's been a great benefit. Uh, very fortunate to work for a news organization that's profitable there's and growing. There's not a lot in Canada.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Yeah, you and you make reference to it in there because uh the founder or the founders knew your dad, uh, right? You talked about a bit of nepotism there. Yeah. I think, Alex, you've gone on and uh earned your keep uh despite whatever you say about nepotism. But uh yeah, yeah, it's very interesting to me because you know, as many people know, I worked at the Telegram and I was on the business side of it. What we were trying to do is exactly that. The challenge that we had, and this conversation is going to be kind of wide-ranging, we are gonna get to the book, but um I we had we didn't have a pure play, um pure play digital piece. The worry was always the declining revenue in print. So everything I was doing, and one lady from PEI, I'll never forget it, she came in and said, Jerry, are you worried that the you know you're hastening the demise of the print? And I said to her, Have you talked to any of your car dealers lately? They're abandoning us. No, I'm not worried about it. I'm I'm coming up with options. The fact that this entity is 20 years old is fantastic. I I'm really excited for you guys to keep that going.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

Yeah, we're excited to be doing it. Uh, you know, it's we're we're very protective about our content. You can't copy paste anything, you can't take screenshots. Uh, and so, you know, if you go on Reddit or or Facebook, the average person might not know about us, or that, you know, we might have done the story they were talking about three months earlier. Uh that's the trade-off you get for having that financial security in a in a business that doesn't have much of it.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Well, I think what I really like about it, the people that are subscribing to your uh entity, they have the wherewithal to spend the money and believe in it, right? So anyway, kudos to you guys for that. Um tell me a little bit about you know your upbringing in terms of the the fact that you're you are following in your father's footsteps quite a lot here now with this.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Yeah. My father and my mother, they're both journalists. Uh I was a student journalist at Memorial University. Uh it was the news editor of the Muse uh after a year as a sports editor and submissions editor. And I reached a point, and this would have been in around 2006, 2007, where I thought maybe I don't want to be a journalist. It really seems like it's kind of a tough industry right now. And that was 20 years ago, uh, and it's a tougher industry today. And there was a part of me, a proud 21-year-old part of me, who thought, ah, I'd like to be Alex Bill. I don't want to be Roger Bill's son or Dean Fleet's son. Uh, my, you know, working in this town, making a name for myself separately for them. So I went off and I traveled for a bit and I did some jobs, and I went to law school and I became a lawyer. Uh, and I am a member of the Bar non-practicing. And it was just kind of luck and connection, the sort of Plinko game of life that led me back into journalism. Uh, and I'm incredibly grateful it turned out that way because it it really does kind of feel like a calling. Like I was raised that way. I didn't go to school for it because my school was at the dinner table. Uh my parents brought their work home with them and talked about it, and they would watch the news with me and comment on it, and and I would learn things that way. I grew up with it. Um which has to be some kind of advantage. Uh and uh yeah, so be to be doing it today. Uh yeah, it's just uh I'm just really lucky and I don't take that for granted. I think a lot of people, and you're you know, as somebody who's diving into people with interesting lives and biographies, a lot of them take either they take for granted or s or they don't, but people around them do. Just how much luck really matters in the scheme of things. Yeah. It's like 50% for for anybody who kind of comes to any kind of a claim. You just have to be in the right place at the right time. You have to have the capability to capitalize on it. Because if you don't, then you know you're making you're not making your own luck, but uh it matters.

SPEAKER_01 7:18

Oh I I agree. Um so I guess you know, there I without delving too much more into your life, the fact that you took on a book and you're right. I mean, I always say, you know, podcast is a heavy lift. You have a job, you wrote a book, and now you have a podcast. And we'll dig into the podcast in a second. But I what makes me so excited, Alex, is to actually have this in my hand and then think about the effort. As I'm reading through it, and I will acknowledge I'm only on page 68 right now. My plan is to sit with you and talk about it. I certainly have knowledge about your father's beginnings, and then I'll get into where he got into the media business and all that, but I'll talk about that probably after and do the spilling the means, spilling the beans, spilling the means on the book. But uh tell me a little bit about the the thought. First of all, a lot of people want to write a book. You actually did it. Tell me what that means to you to have accomplished this beautiful book.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Yeah, um I won't lie, I am proud of it. Uh I'd like to sell more copies, and you know that's obviously the goal, but it was a challenge to myself to see if I could do something like this. Um, because I've written something like 5,000 stories over the last decade. Most of those are 475 words. Uh and I can get granular uh in detail and on business topics, but to you know, weave a narrative over 86,000 words, which I think is around where the book is, is an entirely different ball game. To kind of structure something over a year and a half and and see it through is entirely different than what I would be doing in my job in Daily News. Uh and uh yeah, it was a lot. There were periods where it got really intense and took a lot of time. My wife and I have a baby now, and uh, she recently said to me, So when our child is in high school and you're considering doing a second book, what might you like to write about? It's kind of a warning, it shot across the bow. Uh so yeah, it it it was a lot.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

Yeah. Well, you know, uh it's a lot, and then to think that the topic you chose is your dad. And I I find like the the writing so well done, but it's also interesting because not an easy topic. Your dad, who I met, cannot not, he's not always an easy guy to uh converse with, right? Has very intense uh opinions on different things, and and uh I just I'm I'm impressed with the fact that you pulled a trigger on this, knowing, and you even said it at the beginning, that uh this could rub some people the wrong way, right?

SPEAKER_00 10:10

Yeah, uh it it I had some beta readers, as people often do, and you share with them and stuff, and one of them, he thought I should take it in an entirely different direction and make it a little more expository, I suppose, and reflect on my relationship. And I didn't want to do that. I, you know, only refer to him in the book as Roger and my personal life, he's dad. Uh in chapter seven, I come into the story a little bit and I'm referring to myself a couple of times in the third person, which feels weird, but I really did, despite an obvious bias, treat it as a journalist where you know this is a book about Roger Bill and he has flaws, and I'm gonna explore those flaws as as I explore his uh, you know, kinder features and his successes as well. And I'm gonna talk to people with whom he's had conflict. Uh, and you know, we get into that. There's a CBC regional director with whom he butted heads, and I got comment from him. Uh Chris Brooks is somebody who features in the book at several different points. Unfortunately, he passed away, but you know, he and Roger were quite close, and then they had a falling out and and really butted heads professionally. Yeah, and so the book will get into that as well. And um, you know, when I'm reaching out to those people, they know they're talking to his son, so maybe they pull their punches, but uh certainly I I tried to lift all those rocks um and and treat it professionally.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

Well, you know, I've gotten about a third of the book read right now, and I tell you it's uh it's wow. I the the one part that was incredibly emotional, and I'm jumping around a bit, and I told you this before we hit recordings with the f your father writing the letter to his dad. Uh, and for those that don't know, maybe you just set that up a little bit, because m many people you say your dad is not famous, you know. In many quarters he sort of is in Newfoundland and Labrador. So just tell us a little bit about that letter to his dad and why he had to write it.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

Sure. I'll I'll perhaps give it like a 30-second short, uh broad approach. So he's a journalist and he had a winding career with CBC and then as an independent media professional in Newfoundland, which is kind of a unique thing. Uh, but before that, he was raised in small town Indiana, uh a place called Muncie that was known as Middletown USA and had sociological studies done because it was considered one of the most average towns in all of America. Yeah. And he was a sport star in his high school, and you know, uh you've got the athletic body as well. Were you an athlete? Uh yeah, not a great one, yeah, but I played a lot of sport growing up. Basketball, ultimate frisbee, volleyball, uh interesting. Yeah, those sorts of things later in life, squash. Uh my knees don't let me do much of that anymore, so now I run in a straight line. But he was, and and and that was his life. And it was the kind of life that doesn't normally take one to being in Newfoundland, Canada, but Vietnam happened. Yeah. And even though he was kind of raised in a, you know, Republican household in this, you know, middle-class Midwestern town, uh he developed feelings and opinions about the war and politics generally that led him to kind of great conflict with the American administration of the day. He winds up uh deciding I'm not gonna fight in Vietnam, and he was drafted. Uh, so you know, when he's leaving, he doesn't know if he'll ever be able to return. He's going to be leaving as a fugitive. And uh and uh he writes a letter to his father with whom he was very close. Uh it was a closeness punctuated by tension, uh for sure. Close in a way that he wasn't always with his mother the same way. And um uh yeah, it was a really emotional thing for a guy who most people who know him might know him to be boisterous, uh opinionated, loud, but not necessarily an emotional person. So uh to have that letter and to see that side of him and be able to show it in the book was um I was happy to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_01 14:20

Well, I think it was very smart of you to do that, and then you followed up with a letter that was sent to your mom and your dad. But yeah, for me personally, it was tough because I lost my dad when I was 14. That just the the frankly, the courage your father had to do what he did. And the other thing that struck me is how hard it was on the whole family, and uh, you know, his brother had served in the Second World War, I believe, was it? No.

SPEAKER_00 14:44

No, uh, he had served it post-war. Uh during the Cuban Missile Crisis, uh he was in the Navy, uh, didn't see active combat, but he served.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean that puts a kind of a uh a wide chasm into many families, so it's really interesting to see what you did with that part of the book. Um tell me a little more about you know your dad in terms of why he would be in, you know, he grew up in a Republican family, and he did not aspire to their ideals in the in terms of that part of it, I guess, did he?

SPEAKER_00 15:20

Yeah, it it's complicated, and I think you know, spoiler alert, there is no simple answer and to that in the book, and I think it shows how little things can take people in different directions, you know, the butterfly flapping its wings a continent away kind of thing. Uh, you know, his father would was a traveling salesperson, who take him to libraries. He they were uh Freemasons.

SPEAKER_01 15:47

Saturday morning libraries, which really struck me as interesting. As a young man, he'd go to the library with his dad on a Saturday morning.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

That's right, his father was a traveling salesperson, he'd be loading up on books to take on his road trips, and he'd take his son to the library. He was a skeptic, his father. Uh he might have been, you know, uh a conformist as the times were. I mean, they founded a swimming pool, my grandparents and some other people in their community, coincidentally, after that town desegregated its swimming pool, they founded a new private one a few kilometers away. That's the kind of like Republican type household in Indiana that he was raised in. Yeah. But they were skeptics. They were Freemasons, they were uh, you know, they would question things, and I guess that skepticism, uh, that curiosity, uh, which certainly helped him as a journalist, was instilled in him in a young age, and that grew and manifested in a much different way than I think anybody in the family or community would have expected.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

Yeah. And it's interesting when he moved, he moved to Vancouver first. And I was thinking about how hard it must have been for him to try and assimilate. He's essentially on the run, I guess, right? He is. That must have been incredibly difficult. Did you get much time to talk to him about that part of it?

SPEAKER_00 17:08

Yeah, I did. And uh he enjoyed talking about that side of things. I think if if he had if he could have chosen the direction of this book, it would have been a book about the draft dodger experience in Canada, of which he was a smaller part. Yeah. Uh you know, I think a lot of people, particularly, you know, my generation and younger, forget that this they know that there were draft dodgers, tens of thousands in Canada, but they might forget that when those people came, they did so with the expectation that they would never be able to return. And he actually did clandestinely a couple of times. Yeah, you talk about it in a book, which is fascinating. Well, on Christmas 1969. Yeah, he went back for a surprise Christmas visit, even though their next door neighbor was an FBI agent, and he was uh thrilled but terrified at the same time, and then sad at the end of it because he realized he he wasn't going to be able to do that sort of thing again. Yeah. And uh, of course, when Jimmy Carter was elected in uh 76, inaugurated in 77, the first thing he did was give them amnesty. So it wasn't actually that long of a period of being a fugitive, nine years. But you know, those people thought it could be their whole lives. And many of them, including my father, started in British Columbia, uh, quite a few in Ontario. But he was a BC and just kind of worked his way east a little, perhaps not aimlessly, but certainly unmoored. There was no anchor, no nothing connecting him to anything until well more than a decade later, he bought a little plot of land in Poochkov, Newfoundland.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

Yeah, and uh it's funny about that FBI agent, he had been stationed at Goose Bay. Yeah. So your father was kind of really the connection is very uncanny, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 18:51

I know, and he and he passed away a long time ago, so I don't know if he ever got to realize the connection, like, oh, that Roger Bill, who I always had to check in on and maybe arrest one day, he wound up in Newfoundland. I remember that place. Uh, you know, uh fortunately, a lot of people who I would have liked to talk to for the book are no longer with us, and he and he was certainly one of them, but uh yeah, great small world connection.

SPEAKER_01 19:12

So, okay, let's you take me on a journey here now. So we've gone from the you know the draft dodger, draft resistor, I think is what you say in the book, right?

SPEAKER_00 19:21

Yeah, the the nomenclature is kind of funny. He doesn't abhor, but he doesn't adopt draft dodger, and I use it as a term of convenience, but yeah, he might use draft resistor or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

So he's in Canada, he went to Vancouver, he was in Ontario, he moved to Nova Scotia, he's in Newfoundland. Tell us a little bit about that because it's fascinating. Some of the other names you mention of people that are similar to your dad that I didn't realize, the owner of Mary Jane's uh is one. Dick Reeves at VOCM, who I actually worked with at one point. That's fascinating to me, Alex.

SPEAKER_00 19:53

Yeah, and there is a like a broader cohort of people, Kitty Drake, uh, who um I believe Mary Philip Pratt, uh she came with her first husband. Yeah. The term draft dodger can be broad or it can be narrow. And if you're if you use it broadly, then there's quite a few people who came to Newfoundland. But if you use it narrowly, specifically that somebody was drafted, told you're going to serve, and then they left as a fugitive, there's actually very few who came to Newfoundland, fewer still who stayed. Uh that broader use uh gets used more often today because I think there's a romanticism that has evolved around the Vietnam War and the draft dodgers over the decades. And it's kind of cool to say, oh, this guy who has kind of an interesting story. Well, he was a draft dodger, he was a draft dodger. Yeah. I I spoke with one guy uh who I won't name because I don't want to embarrass him, but he he was under the impression his own father was, and his father had passed away, he was a university professor until his mother had to correct him. No, actually, he wasn't drafted. And as this guy, he probably would have been a draft dodger. He came to Canada in that time period and was opposed to the war, but he wasn't actually drafted. So, you know, his own son didn't realize he wasn't a draft dodger. So that was uh really for me one of the more interesting pieces of research. And there's like 200 something footnotes in this book. It is a story about my father, but it was exhaustively researched. And that was kind of the quite obvious actually, in the amount of footnotes, and yeah, it's quite obvious. Yeah, and uh it uh that was one of the more interesting pieces to do because you know, I I didn't want to say never uh or only, but I could not find another draft dodger who was drafted, who left as a fugitive, who settled in Newfoundland permanently.

SPEAKER_02 21:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

Uh couldn't find a single other one. There's several who are close, people who are married to one or another, people who sort of fit the bill. Um the parents of the current NDP leader of Ontario, you know, she describes them as draft dodgers. So he wasn't actually drafted.

SPEAKER_01 21:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

That sort of thing. So um uh probably something I wish I could have more time, and you know, if I was in a different line of work, like academics, I'd still pursue that further. Yeah. Uh because it uh it's an interesting piece of Canada's history, of which Newfoundland doesn't really play a big part. No. We were just struggling, you know. Vietnam was a world away, not only because it was, you know, very far to the east, uh, you know, the rest of the country was experiencing it in a different way. We had a different relationship with America than the rest of Canada did. We were far more uh positively predisposed towards Americans than the rest of Canada was at the time.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Well, I I got into that um part of your book and I found that interesting. You're right. I mean, 1949 when we joined Canada, and you're getting into the the uh Andrew Crosby and Chess Crosby connection and Jeff Sterling and all that, which I've read about. You're right. I mean, there was more of an affinity. I remember my own parents telling me when the Americans came here there was so much money and such an affinity for the United States, uh, which not every other province in Canada has. That was a fascinating part of the book, too.

SPEAKER_00 23:04

Yeah, we just had a different relationship. They brought money, they brought development. There wasn't this inferiority complex that the rest of Canada had because we knew we were so much poorer and that they were bringing this different way of life to the province in a lot of ways. I mean, you look at the area around Argentia, even in even in Poochkov, like the satellite lounge and the and the the well artesian well they built out there was the best well that the area had seen for decades. You know, there was just a level of engineering and capital and interest. And there wasn't this, you know, perhaps the way that Canadians had that tension with Americans was the way Newfoundlanders had a tension with Canadians. You know, the relationships were different.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

It's interesting, you know, when you talk like that and and your father had seen so much of the rest of the world, but he settled here. In in your what what do you think is the reason that he actually made this his home for so long?

SPEAKER_00 24:01

Yeah, that's a great question. And uh I just wrote a book about it, so you'd think I'd have an easier answer on recall. Yeah. But I do. I think you know part of it is just happenstance. He had been wandering for so long and he found himself in a place that was different. He found himself uh very quickly involved in his community. He was a part of not just the community in Puchko, but the community in St. John's uh very quickly, in that he wasn't in any of his other stops. He went to graduate school here, and less than maybe six months into that, he and an architect uh got interested in this development plan for the city of St. John's called Plan 91. And that was this all-encompassing plan that brought a lot to the city, including changes, I think the Outer Ring Road, uh Donovan's Industrial Park, uh water expansion into Windsor Lake. But there were other parts of the plan that were uh really quite alarming, and including uh notably the plan to take the Harbor Arterial Highway and extend it all the way through downtown St. John's. And so many people, this is one other piece of the book in the history that I really like doing because so many people don't know it today. That St. John's very nearly became a city with a highway cutting right through its downtown. Rollins Cross would have been gone, the Gower Street United Church would have had a highway inches from its doorsteps, or a four-lane thoroughfare. You know, all these cities in Canada were doing it and they regretted it today, like Toronto and the Garden or Fredericton and its highway into the bridge downtown. Uh and St. John's almost had it, but Roger and and Bill McCallum and uh several architects, Philip Peret was a part of it, uh, started an activist group, People's Planning Program, and they just got to work and rallied local opposition. And this continued through the development of Atlantic Place, a battle which they lost. But Plan 91 to build that highway through downtown, uh, they were successful in getting the city to I guess cancel that plan. Uh and that made him that gave him a sense of community that he didn't have anywhere else. And to say nothing of the things that make Newfoundland unique that he was also attracted to. And so you kind of add all that up, and all of a sudden, he had a home for the first time in a decade. Yeah. And uh and that remained his home and remains his home today, 50 years later. It's interesting, Alex.

SPEAKER_01 26:29

I didn't know about that highway actually. When that highway, the um Crosstown Arterial, I think it was what it was called, right? The Crosstown Arterial.

SPEAKER_02 26:37

Yeah, Crosstown.

SPEAKER_01 26:38

Harbor Arterial was being built while my father was dying in hospital. So that has a real sense of uh history for me. I did not know that plan. Of course, I didn't know that your dad was involved in in stopping it. I'm actually not a big fan of activism, but as I listened to you, wow, what a great thing they did. Like they should be really proud. I guess your dad is proud of that.

SPEAKER_00 27:01

For sure. And you know, it it changed the way, and and not just this alone, there are other people, Shani Duff, Shane O'Day, um, you know, and other committees and groups, but collectively, they changed the way that um built heritage is considered in this town. And there were programs that were added onto that in the 70s, like uh the including the beautification plan, which involved making jelly bean row out of the east end of downtown. Uh, and while there are people who bemoan red tape and developers say St. John's has all these problems, and and they've got some good points. Yeah. The built heritage character of this city remains distinct in a way that it isn't in Halifax. And it's not in a lot of other cities in Electic Canada and Canada, and it's a real cultural treasure today. You know, one that comes with problems too. But uh, there is a group of people um including um your former publisher at Telegram, who is a part of that group as well. And uh that's where your dad and him probably got to know each other. That's where they first got to know each other, and there is that movement in the 70s in Newfoundland that uh Sandra Gwynn described as the Newfoundland Renaissance that we get into in the book as well. And um, you know, Roger was here for that and and and came to be a part of that, and uh that's we we don't even all this is in the book before we even get into a career in life in journalism.

SPEAKER_01 28:26

Yeah. Well, just one uh before we move on to that, I want to touch on the Atlantic place and he comes face to face with Andrew Crosby. By the way, I'll probably be doing a book on the Cross or a podcast episode on the Crosby's How Can You Not in in Business. But they came face to face and uh there was a lot of opposition. I mean, that must have been something, that meeting.

SPEAKER_00 28:46

Yeah, you know, it's funny. I I I spoke with Andrew's been gone a long time, of course. Uh I spoke with his son Rob, who uh I always had an amicable relationship with, who's also unfortunately gone today. And you know, Andrew had this reputation of, you know, he's a heavy drinker, and I guess it could flare up, but he was he was considered like a guy people liked. He was a likable guy and people liked working with him. But, you know, an Atlantic place he faced public opposition in a way that he hadn't for much of his business career, you know, and there was political showdowns because he remained aligned with Joey Smallwood and the Liberals while his brother went to the PCs. Uh, but he was in the public eye and and kind of facing public opposition in a way he hadn't before. And perhaps because Roger, my father, was an American, he decided to make try and focus him as like the leader or the center of that opposition as a sort of counterintelligence campaign. Yeah. And uh and yeah, by happenstance, they wound up face to face only the one time, and it was an amicable conversation. But Andrew, and you know, in the subsequent decade, his business empire really fell apart, and Atlantic Place was a part of that. You know, he thought there was other elements, competitors, agents who were either funding or supporting people like my father, and this conspiracy theory sort of stuff, but he was under the gun on a project that uh Atlantic Place is not a beloved piece of downtown uh no architecture.

SPEAKER_01 30:15

No, no, it's not. Funny, I was uh taking some people from Ontario around and we went over on the south side, and that was a topic of discussion. It just doesn't seem to fit in. It's there anyway.

SPEAKER_00 30:25

Mary Walsh in her uh and she's quoted in the book, I took it from somewhere else and cited it, described it as the great big brick bowel movement.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

Mary Walsh, leave it to that. We've interviewed her on the other podcast I own Gale Force Winds. But um, so tell us a little bit about the journey now. Your dad is in Newfoundland, he's he's been he it's interesting, he's with the CBC of all places, and I know your mom worked there for years, but it's certainly the establishment in terms of journalism in Newfoundland, Labrador, right?

SPEAKER_00 30:57

Yeah, uh it and it remains so, and it was then in the 70s, it was really considered in some quarters of Catholic establishment too, uh, with earning the moniker or the Catholic Boys Club in some places. Carl Wells in his book uh said that, and Carl was not out at the time, so but you know, people never publicly said anything about their suspicions if they had them. They would say, Oh, Carl, you're a Protestant. You know, it was the CBC with the high- they did a lot of hiring in Catholic St. John's in the 70s, and he wound up there kind of just by chance. He was doing editorials for uh On the Go, the radio program. He would describe them as editorial cartoons, you know, in audio form. And that grew, and he had like six different jobs and promotions over a two-year span, and all of a sudden he's the producer of uh uh current affairs, uh, which is the not news stuff, the documentaries, uh the sort of in-depth stuff uh for radio in the city, and they're doing radio dramas and they're getting sued and taken to court. And really, for a place that had kind of been this buttoned-up uh established broadcaster, they're kind of moving in through the 70s and and finding a new kind of way for the CBC to exist in Canada, 70s and 80s by this point. And um, yeah, he had a lot of latitude to push the envelope and um courted a lot of controversy. The title of the book comes from a court case. Uh, there was a radio program that he and Chris Brooks did. Chris Brooks was the creator of the program called Oil and the Family. It was a radio soap opera. Uh, very contemporary. They they they filmed on what was happening that day that week and went on to air that day. And they had sort of uh parodied, I suppose, a dispute between the Right to Life Association, uh, and boy, I don't want to get this wrong. It's so long ago that I wrote it. Uh and um the uh the family planning um association. I'm getting it wrong, but close. Anyway, there was an ongoing court case that they were planning and uh they were fighting. And the Right to Life Association and an affiliated person said that by kind of dragging that into the public, they were in contempt of the some decision on that court case, and they got hauled in. Anyway, they were not found uh in contempt of court, but the the program wasn't, but the judge said that they were dangerously dangerously close to contempt of court, which is hence where I got the title of the book.

SPEAKER_01 33:38

Amazing. Um yeah, so he's at the CBC. He lasts how many years is he there?

SPEAKER_00 33:44

So 20. Uh he's local, he moves, he becomes uh the executive producer of Sunday morning, which is the in Toronto, the flagship radio broadcast. He replaced uh the vinyl cafe creator, uh Stuart McLean, who went on to great success but wasn't having success there. And um didn't like it and didn't like being in Toronto, and my mother got pregnant with me. She was with the fifth state, they decided to come back to Newfoundland, but he stayed with Sunday morning then as a regional field producer. Interesting. And that led to a short but very interesting stint as a foreign correspondent. And he uh the first major posting of which was China uh during ostensibly an economic conference uh between Gorba Trev and uh Deng Xiaoping. But uh these little protests uh in Tiananmen Square started percolating at the time. Uh so he was the first CBC reporter on the ground for Tiananmen Square, and he filed from there and was remained in uh Beijing and Shanghai and Beijing again. He was gone before the tanks rolled in, but yeah, his first foreign assignment just happened to be Tiananmen Square in China.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

Man, uh it's it's fascinating. No wonder you wrote a book about your dad. He's got such an interesting life. So he comes from Tiananmen Square, he's he's but he comes back to Newfoundland. And tell us a little bit about where he what he does next.

SPEAKER_00 35:10

Well, so he's he does this for a little while longer. He's living in Puchko, but he's doing Tiananmen Square, he's going to the Gulf War and he's in Saudi Arabia, not Iraq, but he's covering the Gulf War, covers uh Yugoslav wars, uh covers uh civil strife in Haiti, uh tension between India and Cat and Pakistan over Kashmir, and in fact is one of the first foreign journalists uh back in Kashmir after a ban of several years. Uh and uh eventually that got to be a bit much from my mother. And the time comes to come back to St. John's and he returns to CBC Radio uh again in the current affairs role, now for the whole province. And um, you know, he's he's doing a mix of being a reporter and covering things like Mount Cashel and being a producer and moving money around for budgets and uh and not doing story assignment, but like finding the right people for the jobs, and so it was really nice to talk to a lot of people that we know from CBC in later years. Debbie Cooper got her first job as a sports reporter hired by my dad. Wow. And so there's that history, yeah. But CBC, you know, it's a huge bureaucracy. We there there is red tape that I cannot imagine in my job. There are various executives and producers and people who have nothing to do with news who have have a major impact on your career and your work. And in the 90s, particularly the late 90s under Christian and Martin, the budgets are just getting hacked to death. And this is all kind of combining to some job dissatisfaction and some wandering eye, and a buyout opportunity comes along, and he says, I'll take the buyout and I'll start my own thing. And he starts Sussex Place Incorporated, and they're doing contract work mostly for CPAC, uh, the Canadian uh public affairs channel, um, and pretty dry stuff sometimes, but they're also doing global, they're doing the weather network uh as cable is finally expanding across Canada. And very early in the days of internet broadcasting, and this is where you and he kind of collided a little bit, not collided, uh connected. Connected uh he is doing early stage internet broadcasting.

SPEAKER_01 37:21

Well, you get me excited again. And and I did read the part there where you're talking about where I'm talking about that in your book. Yeah, I mean, I they, you know, I remember Miller, so my role at the time was the director of digital operations, and um I was trying to bring this type of stuff to the telegram, and Miller was very connected to technology anyway. He brings your dad in, and we sit down and he starts to tell me about what they're gonna do, and I'm listening to them talk, and I'm like, wow, you know, at the time the telegram.com was huge, but it didn't have really a good capacity to broadcast. Video was still very new, and your dad, and this is what I said to you, you know, he was way ahead of his time before YouTube was even there. So I was extremely excited to have your dad be there, and Tristan Clark was there with him as well, a very talented videographer. So, yeah, it was a really interesting time for me to see someone like your dad and listen to him talk about where his vision was.

SPEAKER_00 38:23

Yeah, it you know, it makes you wonder what might have happened if he kept up with that side of the business. Uh, because obviously we see where it went with with YouTube and generally with the internet, and and the the potential to be there that early and creating content and learning how to do it in in that space could have been huge. But you know, he wasn't wired that way. He's not the CEO type, he just likes chasing a good story, and the video broadcasting in the internet was making them no money at the time or very little. Uh, one video that I remember, because I was a teenager and I was lugging equipment around, and I'm sure you do too, that definitely got people's attention for like what the internet was going to become in Newfoundland was the demolition of the, I believe I might get it wrong, the former military barracks in Argentia.

SPEAKER_01 39:13

Yeah, that's it. And uh There was a name on it, uh the block or sea block on it. I can't remember the exact name. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:20

Eight-story building, a big building in Plazentia. Big building Argentia, big explosive demolition, and who doesn't like explosions? And they caught that from a bunch of different angles. I still found uh some copies of that video floating around the internet. And um and people remember that one. It's like, oh wow, look at this company. They're like, nobody's done this before. And um, you know, that that's just what they were doing. They was they were always they were just chasing a good story uh and uh a good image, yeah, a good video. They weren't necessarily thinking of the long-term fiscal upside. Yeah, but you know, they made a successful business out of it. They bought an office building downtown, it's still there on Bond Street, um, big green building, and uh, you know, carved out a nice living in a place that it's not always easy to do that in Newfoundland, and um continued in that world and then started shooting like production video, kind of the some similar work to what you're doing now, uh, for uh international development agencies, got some UN work, that sort of thing, where it wasn't necessarily like news or journalism, it was more like video broadcasting uh covering uh you know conferences. Uh and there's a piece in the book about them covering a water conference in Kyoto, and the Americans go to a war in Iraq the next day, and all of a sudden half the delegates get up and leave. And the the conference is like a ghost town after that. And uh and he liked doing that and liked to travel uh, but it started his mind wandering again, and he wanted to get back into the sort of gritty push-the-envelope journalism that he hadn't been doing for a few years. So he gave it all up and he bought into an alternative newspaper in St. John's, current.

SPEAKER_01 41:12

I uh yeah, now we're I'm getting even more excited, even though I love the video side of things. The current was something else. And I mean, I was at the Telegram at the time, it was in your face, uh, just provocative, but it was needed, I think. And your your dad was the guy to do it, wasn't he?

SPEAKER_00 41:33

Yeah, it's the kind of thing you expect like uh just a 25-year-old Robert Rousser to be doing, not a 63-year-old one, which I think was around his age at the time. Provocative is the word. Uh, the cover with Andy Wells wearing a ball gag, which he volunteered to do. There's nothing photoshopped about that, uh, is framed in our house.

SPEAKER_01 41:52

Not AI back then.

SPEAKER_00 41:53

No AI back then. Andy agreed to do it because he was a bit of a nut himself. Uh the uh it was really like a poking in the eye of the rich and famous, doing lists of the most expensive homes in the city, and some hard news too, but often really like kind of gossipy stuff about politicians and business people and their connections, a little bit which we might do not quite so tabloidy, but we kind of touch on that ourselves at all Newfoundland Labrador. Frank magazine was an inspiration. Uh yeah, and um, and you know, they were threatened with lawsuits several times. Uh my father put my parents put the house in my mom's name in case in case he got sued and lost. Uh they would get threatening lawsuits from lawyers and publish them in the letter in full in the next edition of the uh of the uh magazine. And uh, you know, at this point I'm like 1920, I'm almost an adult, and and this is you know seeing my parents in it or my father at least in this whole different light, and uh uh covering it now decades later, um with just a whole different lens and approach uh was really fun to do for the book. It was all fun, yeah, but like going back into the things I could actually remember was fun in a different way.

SPEAKER_01 43:13

Well, just back to the current, I remember when he would publish, you know, the names, addresses, and uh the uh estimated value of the homes. And I mean, people would devour that stuff. Yeah, they couldn't they couldn't keep the magazines on the stands, they just filed. Yeah, the other one they would publish, which uh was interesting and controversial, was anyone who was charged with impaired driving. Um, which, you know, I know I knew some people that were on that and they weren't very happy, but you know what? You're charged with impaired driving. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:47

There it is. Right, these weren't like just your regular hard tickets. They included a former city councilor who owned a driving school, a driving training program. They included uh a very prominent businessman who owned a major Car insurance company. So there is sort of a I guess a saying like these are the people who kind of impact how we use and operate automobiles in this pro province, and they are skirting these laws that are meant for all of us. Yeah, I mean, it was absolutely the kind of publication that will piss people off and rub some people the wrong way. As a lot of alternative newspapers and magazines would have had in the day. So it wasn't for everybody, and it would and you wouldn't agree with all of it, but uh it was it was interesting reading and people ate it up.

SPEAKER_01 44:40

Was Current the one that put um the ballistic one, the picture? Was that the Current magazine, or was that another one? Remember the the one where they had the um um skateboards covering private purse.

SPEAKER_00 44:55

And it had some suggestive ads. I don't I think I know the one you're talking about. I'm not sure if that was them or the scope. Oh, okay. Uh, but yeah, there was a there was a lot of that. They had a sex issue. Uh, and Joan Sullivan, who's the editor of the Newfoundland Quarterly, wrote the introduction for it, and she was kind of incredulous. She said, I thought they were all sex issues.

SPEAKER_01 45:15

Uh yeah. Well, you know, we're coming close to the end of our conversation. Um, as I said, what I'm gonna do is finish the book and then I'll add what my experience was to reading it and and some of the highlights. If you were to summarize your experience, Alex, you know, uh this is a book and it's a book about your dad. Um just give us what what's what what would be your summary of your experience in this doing this? Summary of my experience. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm hitting my mic. Well, that's a podcaster who cares. Most people just hit it and they don't.

SPEAKER_00 45:51

Yeah, no, I uh apologize. And we gotta touch on your podcast before we talk things. But so I guess, yeah, so my my experience, which is really for me, not for the viewers, but I'll give it to you anyway. Uh it was you know, forcing myself to disconnect from the love and affection that I have for my father, which is mixed with, of course, conflict intention like any parent and son, to capture his life as wholesomely, holistically, and broadly as possible, look at it objectively, and then merge that with those feelings and that experience that I've had over my life. And you know, it it's probably made me more aware and kind of conscious about you know his imperfections or flaws and simultaneously more, I guess, uh I feel more love for him, you know. Uh knowing that, yeah, knowing that he's flawed like I'm flawed, and to see those parts of him that you know I don't know if if he feels the same way looking at it, I don't know if anybody likes to, but you know, look you look at your parents, and everybody comes to learn their parents are human at a certain stage and they get in fights with them or whatever, and sometimes much worse. Uh and you know, I've long since passed that, but you still kind of hold your parents in a certain light, and then when you are forced, as part of a work like this, to humanize them in a different way for a for a broader audience, you have to look at them differently, and being able to do that only makes me appreciate that father that I grew up with and still have all that much more. So that's my experience.

SPEAKER_01 47:45

Well, that was amazing. Um, yeah, I I I get that. I got you know, your father came into my life briefly, came in with a lot of gusto, came in with those ideas. I keep coming back to that technologically uh technological innovation that was way ahead of its time, very memorable. And then uh I remember when you talked to me a couple of years ago and you were writing the book, and I was like, wow, yeah, this is my experience. I mean, I may have only been in the room with your dad three or four times, but I saw what they were trying to do, and that that impressed me. I can see why you would love a man like that, despite whatever flaws uh we all have, as I think about my own children and trying to keep them on the straight and narrow. Um, I want to end this with the fact that you've now uh taken on a podcast, uh, The Honorable and the Hack. And as I said to you before I hit record, uh, you know, Andrew, um, Andrew Parsons, your your partner in that, uh was very, very gracious to us when he was in government. Very busy guy. One I never forget, he flew in from Europe, got in at like 4 a.m., and I think we were interviewing him at nine, and he had like two hours sleep. This was at an Energy and L show, uh, but he made time to stop and talk to us. Tell us about the honorable and the hack. I really am anyone who starts a podcast, you have my attention. Not only because you're somewhat of a competitor, but you're you're certainly taking on a heavy lift as you are learning.

SPEAKER_00 49:15

Yeah, it's a lot of work, uh, which is why I I think a lot of people say they'd like to do it or they're thinking about doing it and never do, um, even though it isn't there there are more and more out there. Uh although very few in Newfoundland. Yeah. You have yours. Uh the Signal at CBC, which has the backdrop and the support of the CBC, has one. I'm not jealous of their budget. I tell people we have the same budget. Yeah. We we have ours. Uh there is an arts and entertainment one, Hulk Caesar, that does great work with a similarly legit limited budget. There is very few uh in this market. Um for good reason. It's it's a hard way to make a buck. And Andrew had the idea. Uh he had been on the other side of uh a lot of reporters' questions over the years. You know, he had been in the media uh quite a bit as a politician, moving on to this new stage of his career where he's a lobbyist and he's connecting people and companies. And uh he just thought it would be sort of interesting thing to do that nobody else, or very few people were doing here. And uh, and that's I really when I say nobody else, it's because yours is a very different podcast. Like we're I guess you could say competitors because we're both making podcasts, and now you've got another one, and I think it's a fantastic idea, and I'm really grateful you're doing it. Uh, but each one is really in its own lane, I think. I agree with you. And then this lane, like commentary and interviews on political matters, uh uh, even though you interview politicians all the time, what we're doing hasn't really been done and isn't really being done the same way here. Uh so yeah, that's why we're doing it. And I'm just a sucker for punishment, I guess. If I take on one more thing, my wife is just gonna murder me.

SPEAKER_01 51:06

Uh you know, I'm to the point where you know you are different because you have street credibility. You know, you have many, your journalistic roots, as we've just discussed, go deep. Um, and and Andrew's political background, I mean, now he's on the other side of it. Like it is fascinating. But again, you know what? Pulling the trigger on making something happen, that's what I keep saying to people. And we do a lot of business stuff. We're in very different lanes, we're mostly business oriented. But what I always say to people that are trying to start something, just get it going. The best quote from the first episode we did on The Commander, Harry Steele, was a quote about the the airline industry, and uh it wasn't Harry's quote, someone else said it, but he said, This is not a business, this is a disease. And I actually think that that's kind of where I am in my life. People said to me, like, don't isn't Gale Force winds keeping you busy? I said, You're damn right it is. Well, what the hell are you starting another one for? It's a different lane, it's it's once a month. It's I read books anyway. So that's why I love what you and Andrew are doing. You are carving out a niche, and frankly, you know, the traditional media is gone by the wayside. I spent almost 30 years embedded in that industry. Uh the fact that All Newfoundland and Labrador is an entity of 20 years, God, I love that. 10 years. All Nova Scotia is 20 years. We're 10 years. But I love that. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 52:32

So, you know, uh, where do you hope to take the podcast? Yeah, to your point, there's definitely a little bit of ego involved, right? Like you're seeing, well, nobody else is doing this. I can do this, I can create something, and I want to. And uh, and you know, that ego is uh kept in check by the very difficult uh remuneration. But uh, you know, there's there's something of that. Where do we want it to go? Well, we want to to get some sponsors, we want to uh have the advertising that can allow us to kind of improve the technical side, uh kind of improve our lighting, improve our sound, improve our, you know, what we edit in. We want to have recurring guests. There's been a couple already I could see coming back and stay contemporary, and we want to have, you know, singular guests who are great stories and kind of biographical in themselves. And that's been sort of the a little bit of the learning experience. Andrew often asks a lot of those biographical questions of our people in the background stuff, and I'll get into the contemporary stuff. We have a good balance that way. Uh we uh, you know, we we like to think that it could grow. And there are podcasts in the political space like the Hurley Burley uh in federal politics. Uh, and and we like to think that we can kind of fill a similar void here where you're getting commentary uh mixed with inside baseball, you know, an inside connection and analysis, like I because I'm in the House of Assembly sometimes, or my colleagues are, and he's got political connections. And it's not a liberal, of course, because you know I'm there and I'm nonpartisan and he's been able to work across the aisle. And we intentionally had, I think, three PCs on before we had a single liberal uh for that reason. So, you know, we we want to see it grow and become sustainable, uh, which is always the challenge, and uh we'll see if we get there.

SPEAKER_01 54:21

Well, I think you will. I mean, it's uh what I love about it, you know, you're authentic. And I think that's what's so important about this industry, Alex, is it's authentic. We don't I don't I don't have notes here, you know. Um I haven't finished the book. My son said to me, Dad, he's 18. He goes, You can't tell anyone you're you're interviewing the guy and you haven't finished his book. And I said, I don't care. I'm gonna talk about the book after the fact. And and uh I've read some of it, and it's really important to be authentic. The other thing I like about it is you're not you know sitting there with notes. You guys have street credibility. You've been there, you've you know, you've got a career in journalism. I just love the fact that you've taken, you've first of all, this uh it is like I'm reading through it, and you're going through the history of your dad and your mom and back to their parents, and the amount of effort. That's part of it, frankly, makes me tired only because I know I'm interviewing you and I'm thinking, holy shit, the amount of effort that went into this. And that's what I think about that you pull the trigger. You know what I'm excited about? I guarantee you, um, and I shouldn't say this, I should ask you, is there another book in your future, despite the fact that your wife wants it done when you're chick you're chilling in high school? Yeah, uh, I think so.

SPEAKER_00 55:37

Yeah. It has to be the right topic at the right moment. Uh, but part of this was me seeing if I could write a book. And um I have, and you know, convinced a publisher to pick it up uh after Books Incorporated would have been great, and uh are a few years in now and are growing and work with other journalists. Uh, they have a book with Mike Connors of NTV, for instance, uh, and you convince a few people to buy it. Uh so yeah, I think another one could happen. Um, I considered other options um before this one. Uh I considered a sort of multi-generational look at the Mount Cashel, uh, which was a big part of my mother's career. And I decided against it for a few reasons. It was good, it would have been really hard to do it by day job. Uh, I considered, you know, Bill Rowe hasn't, you know, the the the days of the Bill Rowe biography are kind of gone now, and nobody had sort of written a book about Andrew Fury and how this guy he might be the premier for a decade. Maybe I'll write about him. I decided I just wasn't into it that much, and probably lucky for me, yeah. Uh, because he didn't stick around. Uh, but uh, you know, I consider those types of things, and I don't know what the book will be when it comes again, or if it comes again in five years or 10 or 15. But yeah, I also think I'll write another one one day.

SPEAKER_01 56:59

Well, um I am going to say thank you and shake your hand. It's uh anyone who's created a a or written a book, uh had you have my utmost respect. Anyone who started a podcast, knowing what goes on to pull that off, you have my utmost, utmost respect. Uh, one thing I do have to do is thank our uh sponsor. We do have a sponsor, and uh it's biblio gifting. And I'll just tell you a little bit about that, Alex. That's something that a a guy I met in the newspaper business, Alex Lyott, created, and it's absolutely fascinating what he's doing. He actually has technology, he's one of the most uh probably talented digital marketers you ever want to meet. And when he first started this, I was like, What are you doing? You're using all your tools to promote books. Um but what it is, it's biblio gifting curates the ability for corporations or people to gift books. So if you want to gift 20, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 books, which is brilliant when you think about it, the ability to gift a book to someone is incredible. Yeah, I know you can do that on Apple and all that, but that's one on a digital. He will gift the actual hard copy as well. So might be someone for you to talk to. AlexLiott, bibliogifting.com. Roger Bill, Alex Bill. It's been a pleasure having a chat. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you for watching or listening to Spilling the Means. Please like, follow, and share our content. A big thank you to our sponsor, Biblio Gifting. If you want to move beyond generic corporate gifts, Biblio Gifting offers curated book collections that let your recipients choose their own read. From starter to strategic packages, it's about personalized marketing with a real social impact. Check them out to be an early adopter.