Friendly Rivalry Led to my Blogging

In days of old when knights were bold and blogs weren't invented... Well, maybe not that long ago! But back in 1963 when I was 14 I started what would have been a blog if the personal computer and the Internet had been invented.

John F. Kennedy was the President of the United States back then. He would be assassinated seven months later. I was in Grade 7 at Roxboro Elementary School in the Montreal suburb of Roxboro, Quebec.

I was always the geeky sort of kid, skinny, awkward, not particularly athletic. And my friends were a select few. One of my best friends was Derek. He was even more socially awkward than I was so no wonder we hit it off so well.

I had discovered a love for writing the year before in Grade 6. It wasn't so much a love of writing as a love of having people ooh and aah over something I had written. We had an assignment in English class to write an essay about a current event. It was just after John Glenn had made the first American orbital flight around the world in Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962.

Some neighbours, the Wallgates who ran an antique shop, had closed down and retired and they gave our family a box of old books. One of them was a miniature collection of Shakespeare's plays. I was fascinated by these tiny little books and by Shakespearian language.

So when I wrote that essay for English class, I decided to write about John Glenn's flight and to write it as a play in Shakespearian style. Well, the reaction was phenomenal. The teacher loved it and I got perfect marks.

Most of you reading this probably don't remember Glenn's flight but it was big news at the time. Not only was it America's first orbital space flight but it was fraught with difficulties and tension on re-entry. The space capsule would plummet to earth creating massive friction with the atmosphere and very hot temperatures.

Meteors are space rocks that enter the atmosphere and flare up when the friction of entering the earth's atmosphere literally burns them to a cinder. To prevent this from happening, John Glenn's capsule was fitted with a heat shield. This would protect his tiny capsule from becoming a meteor.

Glenn's flight had been subject to bugs from the beginning. It had been delayed eleven days because of malfunctions and weather. But take off it did. The flight was supposed to be three orbits. During the first orbit a failure of the automatic-control system forced Glenn to fly the craft manually. Then telemetry indicated that the heat shield might be loose. If that was the case, Glenn and his capsule would fry to a crisp on re-entry.

A work-around was devised and Glenn landed safely. It was later shown that the telemetry was faulty and the heat shield had been okay. Nevertheless, at the time the world was on tenterhooks as we watched Glenn's re-entry.

So I made a short Shakespearian play about John Glenn's flight. Unfortunately I no longer have it. But I remember some of the lines to this day, almost 60 years later.

I started with something like this:

Head of NASA: Prithee John! Wouldst thou like to fly a rocket?

Glenn: Indeed I wouldst if I can take my lucky locket.

And later in the play Glenn had the line: My heat shield is a-coming off!

Anyway, the reaction gave me a passion for writing that I still have today. Even though I tend to be a procrastinator when it comes to starting something. Once I get started though, I'm usually gung-ho all the way.

But back to 1963 and how I got into "blogging". My friend Derek decided to start a "newspaper". It was a hand written two to four page effort on 8 1/2 by 11 paper. He called it The Montreal Mirror. Circulation - at least two as I know he and I both read it! I think he passed it around to a few classmates as well. Derek mixed real news with jokes, riddles and cartoons. He created a cartoon cat named Sveinhutt, a corruption of the German word schweinhund.

I was delighted and it inspired me to start my own "rival newspaper". Not being as urbane as my friend Derek, I opted to name my "newspaper" after my favorite animal. I called it The Aardvark Social. It had nothing to do with aardvarks. Or with social life. The name just popped into my head. And I made it a mix of news and humor as well.

And I created my own cartoon characters. A mouse, a cow, an elephant and and an anteater. I called them Hercimer Z. Oldemows, Adrelina Weinerbomb, Jeremiah A. Heavy and Phineas H. Anteater. How does one remember this stuff?

We had a friendly rivalry and tried to upstage each other. My Dad had a typewriter so I started by making my newsletter typewritten. Then Derek decided, in good humour of course, to accuse my little rag of being communist. Because well, the initials are TAS and there was a Soviet news agency Tass. And "social" was about as close to "socialist" as you could get. Wasn't it obvious? We had a lot of fun with our little rivalry.

Unfortunately, like my lost play about John Glenn, none of my Aardvark Socials survived. Or so I thought!

Then yesterday, one of my old friends messaged me on Facebook. He had come across an old issue of The Aardvark Social! How was that possible?

My friend Mike and his family had invited me to join them on a trip to Prince Edward Island in 1964. While we were there apparently, because I had forgotten completely, I hand wrote a special PEI edition of The Aardvark Social. Hand written, of course, as I did not drag my Dad's typewriter along on the trip.

I was flabbergasted. Mike had sent a photocopy of the front page. I had him email me a photocopy of my little rag in its entirety. It came out at four pages and Mike had contributed some excellent drawings as well as a column called The Social Yak and an article on the native MicMac tribe. The front page is below.

The edition is dated July 16, 1964. The lead article notes that this was the first edition of the newsletter since Nov. 15, 1963 and boldly says "Today's edition brings fast, fast, fast relief to all our fans who are miserable from lack of Socials to read."

There is an article on Transportation to P.E.I. accompanied by Mike's drawing of the Abegweit, one of the large ferries moving people to and from the island. Today it has been replaced by the Confederation Bridge, the longest bridge in Canada at 12.9 kilometres. It's the longest bridge in the world over ice-covered water. The Abegweit was an ice breaker as well as a ferry.

Another short article noted that I renamed one of my cartoon characters, something I had long since forgotten.

My friend Mike and I saw the Beatles together in Montreal later that year and I wrote an edition of T.A.S. with the headline Fab Four in Montreal. Man, I wish I still had that piece of memorabilia. It was my first ever rock concert.

Through university I free-lanced a bit at The McGill Daily. And as a commerce student in a very radical left-wing milieu, I ended up writing one of the longest letters to the editor ever published in the McGill Daily – a page and a third as I recall. That was in 1971.

Then there was a period of transition after I moved from Montreal to Vancouver when I read a lot but did not write much. In 1978, a libertarian group formed in Vancouver and I got involved in editing and writing for a variety of libertarian newsletters until the end of the 90s.

From 1997 to 2001 I was one of the early writers for the Internet when I wrote for a company called The Mining Company, which later became About.com. I wrote a weekly column on investing for Canadians. That led to a book deal and I wrote two books for mainstream publishers – The 50 Best Science & Technology Stocks for Canadians – 2002 Edition and 2003 Edition. From 2003 to 2008 I published a financial newsletter called The Break Out Report. During this period I also contributed to financial whiz kid Lesley Scorgie's newsletter Rich By Thirty.

From then until I retired I did not write a great deal. I dabbled in fiction and joined a writers' group in Maple Ridge, BC. And on the day after my retirement in 2014, I wrote a novella for the annual Three Day Novel Writing Competition. I didn't win but self-published Jokk Vete's Diary on Kindle.

On August 30, 2015 I started my blog The Jolly Libertarian which now has over 350 essays and 130,000 page views. In January 2016 I started my travel blog The Destinations Guru. I also started an economics blog called Now and Then comparing the prices from an old 1962 Eaton's catalogue to today in inflation adjusted terms. And I became an occasional contributor to The Guardian's music web feature Reader's Recommend. After that was discontinued, one of the writers started the Song Bar to carry it on and I have contributed music columns there as well. I'll be writing my 30th music column in a week or two.

And it all started with a friendly rivalry between my friend Derek and I when we published our own little private newspapers, the forerunners of today's blogs!

Links of Interest

• Geyser From the Fountainhead - possibly the longest letter to the editor ever published in The McGill Daily (actual archive here)
• My Vocal Profile Page – all of my other Vocal features including short stories and poems are linked here.