Robert Fulford in his office on Dec. 1, 1977.ERIK CHRISTENSEN/The Globe and Mail
Most of us have a work hero, someone who makes us think: I wish I could be as good as that guy. In my case, it happened to be my uncle.
Robert Fulford, who died this week at 92, was my mother’s brother. Uncle Bob grew up in the lakeside Toronto neighbourhood called the Beach. His father was a leading editor at The Canadian Press, making him part of a long line of journalists in our ink-stained clan.
Bob was an uneven student, so impatient and absent-minded that he failed Grade 10. The one course he aced was typing, which was to prove far more useful to him than geometry or Latin.
Prominent public intellectual Robert Fulford was a champion of Canadian arts
He finally dropped out of school to become a teenaged copy boy at this newspaper, the first step in what must be one of the longest careers in Canadian journalism: around 70 years. He soon wangled a job in the sports department, a fact that the family always viewed as hilarious given his complete and utter indifference to sports later on.
The rest (as he would never write, for fear of committing a cliché) is history. Uncle Bob would become a titan of his trade: an award-winning columnist, essayist and features writer; the author of books like Accidental City, an insider’s exploration of Toronto; the long-time editor of the premier magazine of its day, Saturday Night; a proud Officer of the Order of Canada – not to mention a loving husband, father, grandfather, brother and uncle who could be seen every Dec. 25 presiding over turkey dinner in one of those silly crepe-paper party hats that come in the Christmas crackers.
I admired many things about Uncle Bob. One was his output. He was the Niagara of journalism, churning out stories at a rate that exhausts me just to think about. He once wrote a daily – yes, daily – column on books and art for the Toronto Star. Yet nothing he wrote felt mass-produced or phoned in. His pieces read as if they were bench-made.
Another was his speed. I can picture his fingers flying across the keyboard, first of a big noisy typewriter and later of his computer. He was the go-to writer if you needed a quick essay on some luminary of the arts world who died in the night.
Another was his discipline. As far as I know he never missed a deadline. His editor at the National Post, his home in his later years, says that he would usually file his columns 12 hours early.
Yet another of his virtues was clarity. If, as Orwell said, good prose is like a window pane, his was as clear as the picture window of a Dutch farmhouse. He wrote in a way that someone who knew nothing about his subject could understand but that an expert could still appreciate. That must be the hardest trick in journalism: boiling down without dumbing down. He managed to be sophisticated and accessible at the same time, and readers loved him for it.
But what I admired most about Uncle Bob was his curiosity. Many who toil in this business become jaded – or pretend to be. They have seen it all and know it all.
That never happened to him. He was interested in everything. One of my favourites among his thousands of newspaper columns is about the origins of the @ symbol and how it came to be the “at” in e-mail addresses. Another was about the rise of “uptalk,” the habit of making the end of a sentence sound like a question.
He always had his eyes wide open, searching the horizon for something new to write about. Those fresh eyes were his greatest gift. Journalism gave him the ideal perch for using them. He called one of his books Best Seat in the House: Memoirs of a Lucky Man.
These are tough times for his “noble profession,” as he called it in his death notice (self-written, of course). In a distracted, divided, distrustful world, many people are losing faith in the purveyors of the news. With so many papers shrinking or dying, it is easy to believe we are at the end of something.
I doubt that Uncle Bob felt that way. He kept working into his late eighties, always eager to tell the next story and confident that, if he told it well, people would read it and come back for more. If there is a lesson in his brilliant career, it may be that. Tell it and they will come.