By Sean Conway
Special to the Leader
Renfrew — The holiday season is fast approaching and for those of you looking for a great Christmas gift for a family member, a friend or simply for your own enjoyment, I would highly recommend the recently-published memoir of Roy MacGregor, ‘the proud grandson of Eganville‘ and one of Canada’s most accomplished writers.
Many readers of The Leader will know Roy MacGregor as the son of Duncan MacGregor, an Eganville lad who spent his entire working life with the McRae Lumber Company in Whitney where he gained a reputation as one of the most colourful characters in and around Algonquin Park in the last century. Dunc’s story was wonderfully told in 2007 by his son Roy in that most engaging book entitled A Life in The Bush. It will surprise no one that with a father like Dunc, Roy developed a keen ear and a sharp pen for capturing and writing great stories.
In addition to writing about his father, Roy MacGregor has written over 20 books covering a wide range of people, places and activities. He has written about the mysterious death of the great Canadian painter, Tom Thomson; he has written a compelling biography about Chief Billy Diamond, the dynamic leader of the Quebec Cree nation; he has written about his roots in the Ottawa Valley; he has written about canoes and canoe makers; he has written extensively about hockey ranging from the National Hockey League to the beer leagues across Canada including ones in which he has played; with two of his daughters, he has written books for young readers including the very successful hockey series about The Screech Owls; and he has written two novels, Canoe Lake and The Last Season.
Mr. MacGregor’s latest book is a memoir which covers his life from early days growing up in Huntsville to a time not long ago when he was quietly advising former Prime Minister Stephen Harper about his book on Canadian hockey. For my money, the pages in this memoir dealing with Mr. MacGregor’s early life on Lorne Street in Huntsville are among the most captivating. For anyone – especially young boys who grew up in communities like Eganville, Killaloe, and Barry’s Bay — his tales of his early years and adolescence will surely resonate. Hockey in the winter, canoeing and ‘hot-rodding’ in the summer, and of course, pursuing the young ladies of Muskoka were the staples of a lively and often rambunctious growing up. His boyhood friendship with Lorne Street pals Eric and Brent provides ‘the narrative arc‘ that ties much of this memoir together through good and bad times.
One of the most remarkable stories in this memoir concerns young Mr. MacGregor’s time in Grade 12 at Huntsville High School in the mid-1960s. Incredible as it will seem given his later success in life, Roy MacGregor failed Grade 12. He failed history, algebra, chemistry, French and Latin and barely passed English with a grade of 53. As he tells the story, the ‘hard-ass‘ principal of Huntsville High, D.C. Stone, summoned the ‘failing‘ student to his office where “he chewed me out about lack of effort, laziness and hurting my parents.” Principal Stone clearly saw no future for this unfocussed young man and hoped he would leave school voluntarily, perhaps for a job in some local hardware store or lumber yard.
It was at this precise juncture in a very difficult conversation in the principal’s office that ‘MacGregor luck‘ intervened to save the day. The English teacher, Mr. Armstrong, happened to join Principal Stone at the very moment the principal was advising Roy to leave school when Mr. Armstrong suggested that a better alternative might be to bring Mr. MacGregor back in the coming fall and make him editor of a new school magazine that being launched at that time. All parties agreed to this suggestion and thus began, in most inauspicious circumstances, the 50-year journalistic career of Roy MacGregor.
As it happened, there was another lifetime benefit arising from Mr. MacGregor’s surprise appointment as editor-in-chief of The Pundit as the new high school magazine was called. Among the staff of the magazine was a business manager, Ellen Griffith by name, who, with her family, had recently arrived in Huntsville where her father was the new chemistry teacher and guidance counsellor at the local high school. As he was failing Grade 12, Roy was seriously smitten by this attractive young woman “with the long, straight, blond-brown hair, the long neck and the most intoxicating laugh I had ever heard.” His romantic pursuit of the woman he would marry in 1972 was somewhat complicated by the fact that his future father-in-law, the new chemistry teacher and guidance counsellor, was only too well acquainted with Roy’s academic failures and his not too impressive IQ which was easily available to Mr. Griffith in the guidance office. How Roy MacGregor navigated these complicated waters as he successfully sought to gain Ellen Griffith’s hand in marriage seven years after first seeing her at Huntsville High is one of the most endearing stories in this memoir well subtitled as “A life in Stories“.
From editing a high school magazine in his late teens, Mr. MacGregor, now having found real focus in both his personal and academic life, went off to Laurentian University in Sudbury and then on to the graduate journalism program at the University of Western Ontario. He is scathing about the journalism program at Western calling it “completely bizarre “ with nothing in that program more useless and strange than the magazine-writing course he so looked forward to taking. His portrait of Professor Wilson Bryan Key who taught that Western course in magazine journalism and whose speciality seems to have been “Subliminal Seduction” is unflattering to say the least and absolutely damning to tell the truth.
‘MacGregor luck‘ returns again in the late summer of 1972 to smile on the now married couple when Ellen’s employer, Jack Pearse, owner of Camp Tawingo in Algonquin Park, gave us a remarkable wedding gift.” That gift involved connecting the young couple to a friend of Pearse’s from his University of Toronto student days, Senator Keith Davey who had recently chaired a Senate Special Committee on Mass Media. Pearse told Ellen and Roy that Davey was very well connected in Toronto and knew many influential people in journalism and the creative arts and they should get to Toronto as soon as possible to take a meeting with Davey that Pearse would arrange. With Davey’s help, both Roy and Ellen soon landed jobs in Toronto, in the beginning both with the publishing conglomerate Maclean-Hunter, publisher of Maclean’s magazine.
It was nor long before the 24-year-old MacGregor was meeting with the flamboyant and controversial Peter C. Newman, the 43-year-old editor of Maclean’s magazine. ‘MacGregor luck‘ had apparently struck again as the mercurial Newman seemed to take a liking to his newfound employee who was soon assigned some plum feature articles including a first feature about the current state of Canadian music. When that article appeared in Maclean’s, it was clear that someone had mistakenly confused the Canadian band The Guess Who with the British band The Who and the many music fans reading Maclean’s jumped all over the magazine for such an obvious mistake. As the offending article carried the by-line of Roy MacGregor, there seemed no doubt as who had made this mistake. But when a horrified Mr. MacGregor was confronted by his boss, Peter Newman with the published article, he protested vigourously that he knew the difference between these two bands and he had sent the proper band name to his editor for publication. Upon further review, Mr. MacGregor was able to find the hard copy he had sent to his editing desk proving that he had indeed submitted the proper band name and that the mistake was actually made elsewhere, likely up in the editing office. Upon realizing that the mistake was not that of his new recruit, Mr. Newman invited a much relieved Mr. MacGregor back to his office saying “he was sorry that such a thing had happened to him, especially on his very first piece.” Then, Mr. Newman said, “Get to work on your second piece for us,” that story about Tom Thomson. By June 1st, 1973, a mere six months after his near disaster with his first feature article for Maclean’s magazine, Roy MacGregor saw his name proudly displayed on the masthead of the magazine as one of its two assistant editors.
Paper Trails takes the reader and Roy MacGregor from Maclean’s magazine to the Toronto Star to the Ottawa Citizen back to Maclean’s and then to 17 years at The Globe and Mail where the author was given wide scope to write not just about the famous and the powerful but more often about ‘ordinary Canadians‘ and the struggle of their daily lives.
And what stories he finds. He takes us to a very rowdy interview in Montreal with the well-known Canadian author Mordecai Richler, a story which nearly drowned in rudeness and strong drink. We travel to rural eastern Ontario to share in the pain and suffering of Fred and Ethel Stein as they try to eke out a living on their family farm that can’t adjust to the new world of supply management. We share in the re-birth of the Ottawa Senators in 1992 as a once hockey mad national capital tries to resurrect its Stanley Cup glory of the 1920s. We share in the explosive journey of the Spicer Commission on Canada’s future established after the failure of the Meech Lake Accord in the early 1990s and a growing sense that Canadians had lost faith in their political leaders and increasingly in the future of their country which seemed to have lost its faith in itself.
And at the end of these 400 pages, we have an extended profile of Ellen Griffith MacGregor, for 49 years the wife and life partner of the author and mother of their four children. In a final chapter that is both poignant and revelatory, after all the miles travelled and all the interviews, the author gives us an insight into the person who made so much of ‘the MacGregor luck’ possible. There is a moving account here about how Ellen was finally able to join her husband on a major story he was writing about the great rivers of Canada – the Ottawa, the St. Lawrence, the Saint John, the Fraser and a dozen more. An avid outdoorswoman, a first-class canoeist, an accomplished painter, Ellen “finally got to see the huge majestic country I had been running off to write about for nearly four decades. Now we were seeing it together. We planned to see so much more of it once I retired.”
Tragically, Ellen was diagnosed with serious cancer in March 2021 and died a few weeks later.
Luck was once described at the point at which opportunity meets preparation. After a reading of this warm and wonderful book, one certainly gets the impression that Roy MacGregor is truly a lucky man given his life, his work, his family and his impact on the telling of the Canadian story. As readers and as Canadians, we have been blessed to have had someone like him who was ‘incubated‘ in Algonquin Park where he clearly imbibed the spirit of the land and was able to find a life’s calling that allowed him to intuit and project that Canadian spirit across this vast, beautiful and complicated country.
