A RADIO GUY

My father was my first competition. He got the words down fast. Stories would spin from dad’s brain, dusting our dinner table with whimsy and adventure. The children of writers talk about the sanctity of the study, the private magical terrain of the parent’s imagination. I guess I experienced some of that, but it also felt ordinary. Writing was Dad’s occupation and he went to work like I supposed other parents did, except he was around. He found the job lonely, so when he carried his brown leather briefcase into the car and drove the hour to Toronto for rehearsals or meetings, those were good days.

I interviewed my father when he was eighty. The old cassette tape surfaces in a box in the basement as I’m writing this book. His voice, after almost twenty years. He is talking about his mother Laura Goodman Salverson. She was the first woman to win the Governor General’s Award, and won it twice:

“My mother soaked into my head an instinct of what to do with words. She held salons to talk about ideas and writing and would sit up all night reading three books. I was six years old learning about curtain lines. Live radio was exciting. Stimulating. You couldn’t make a mistake. They drilled it into me that every word had to go on the air. For much of my life a producer would say, 'give me an idea and I'll give you a contract'”.

Dad often had to come up with ideas in a day or two. Once he walked into a producer’s office in Toronto, “I’d like a few days to develop this idea some more.” The man looked at him for a moment. “Oh, come on George. You know you just write it.”

Radio dramas in Canada by the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) had a one-week incubation period in the 1940's and 50's. Every Tuesday, Dad drove to the studio and pitched his idea to the producer. Wednesday through Friday he wrote the script. Saturday, he drove back for rehearsals, a read through in the morning and rehearsal with full orchestra in the afternoon, conducted by Lucio Agostini or Morris Surdin. Sunday, they broadcast live. Monday was his 'day off’ when he puttered around the house musing story ideas, and Tuesday it began all over again. He would have been astonished at our astonishment at this level of achievement. To him it was a job. He said he was a journeyman not an artist, but I don’t think semantics mattered to him. He was dismissive of notions like ‘writer’s block’ or ‘finding the muse’. He had bills to pay and storytelling did the job. My father was the proverbial bum on the seat, words on the page kind of guy. I wish I had learned his talent for routine.

Early television was also live. Dad was one of the first to write for the medium. It was a new art form; nobody in the world was ahead of them. My father told of an ACTRA meeting (Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists) where five members sat around a table and a writer from Halifax asked, "Shouldn’t we wait until everyone is here?" The ACTRA rep replied, "You are.”

My neighbor has lived in Canada most of her adult life and teaches renaissance drama at Queen’s University. I send her a photo of my mother with actor Lorne Greene of the American western Bonanza fame; it's a publicity shot for Othello at CBC sometime in the forties. Greene is in ‘dark’ make-up. It is shocking now but was normal then. My neighbor writes: “I don’t know a thing about Canadian culture before the 70’s except what my mother remembered. She used to talk about Christopher Plummer because he acted in Ottawa and Lorne Greene - one of them had a Queen’s connection, right?”

I text back, “It was Greene who went to Queen’s. He was born a Russian Jew in Canada, and called Chaim at home in Ottawa.” I tell her the books piled on my desk are full of people who were at our dining room table. Lots of Scotch. Late nights after shows. “Mom…and the CBC Stages…did Shakespeare, Ibsen and adaptations of classics. In the 40’s my mom played leads, usually opposite John Drainie. She had too much success too fast. That and other things undid her, but she was famous for a while. In that world and on the air.”

In the 1920’s Canadian radio was virtually indistinguishable from everything American, and the drama relied primarily on scripts from traditional theatre. Audiences listened to touring American and British companies. It took an ardent group of visionaries – in particular Graham Spry and Alan Plaunt - to rally for the establishment of the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Corporation (1932) which four years later became the CBC. Immediately the corp, as people continue to call it, was caught between a philosophy of educating and uplifting. Lord Reith in Britain thought of audiences in terms of a church congregation, but others prefered fast-paced commercial entertainment, meaning American. In the 1996 book A Dream Betrayed, former CBC President Tony Manera writes: "For commercial broadcasting, audiences represent consumers to be delivered to advertisers; for public broadcasting, audiences are made up of citizens whose interests must be served."

The drama department was established in 1938 and for three decades enjoyed an international reputation, winning rave reviews in the New York Times from critic Jack Gould and at home from the likes of Nathan Cohen and Herb Whittaker. With the depression and then the outbreak of war in Europe, live theatres were closed or turned into movie houses, and radio became the main professional outlet for Canadian dramatists and actors. At one point CBC Stage was second in popularity only to Hockey Night in Canada.

My neighbor grew up in America but Canadians don’t know about this history either. Where would we learn it?

One day, CBC director Esse Ljungh was told by his girlfriend, actor Beth Lockerbie, "Guess what they’ve got over at CKRC. A playwright!" Ljungh commissioned Dad to write a show for New Year's Eve. Fletcher Markle from Vancouver was on his way to Toronto and stopped by to watch the live recording. He said to my father, "You’re the first writer to have his first play performed in evening dress!”

Esse called my father into his office one morning. "You can stay here, but you won't get anywhere. Go to Toronto, buy yourself a thousand dollars worth of furniture and wait for the phone to ring." In 1948, he took the plunge to try his hand in the big leagues of national radio. His first show for producer Andrew Allan was an adaptation of Dracula. "I was fresh from commercial drama," Dad says in an interview I found at the National Archives of Canada. "You learn not to upset anybody. I wrote a draft and Andrew said, "It's okay. But. Isn't it supposed to be a horror story, George?" "Well, yes." "Then let's make it horrible!"

***A Necessary Distance: Confessions of a Script Writer's Daughter*** by Julie Salverson.

About A Necessary Distance: Confessions of a Script Writer's Daughter :

George Salverson had written over a thousand radio plays for the CBC before he became the first television drama editor for the corporation. He wrote scripts for such beloved series as The Beachcombers and The Littlest Hobo, but he kept very little of his writing, being decidedly unsentimental about his work. So when his daughter Julie found a series of notebooks from a round-the-world trip he’d taken in 1963 to work on a documentary about world hunger, she knew she’d found something important. But the writer of these notebooks is not the father she thought she knew. From there Julie Salverson traces a fascinating web of personal and political history, of storytelling, of culture and it’s shaping and of a man caught in a time of great change.

About Julie Salverson:

Julie Salverson is a nonfiction writer, playwright, editor, scholar and theatre animator. She is a fourth-generation Icelandic Canadian writer: her father George wrote early CBC radio and television drama and her grandmother Laura won two Governor General Awards (1937,1939). Julie's theatre, opera, books and essays embrace the relationship of imagination and foolish witness to risky stories and trauma. She works on atomic culture, community-engaged theatre and the place of the foolish witness in social, political and inter-personal generative relationships. Salverson offers resiliency and peer-support workshops to communities dealing with trauma and has many years of experience teaching and running workshops. Recent publications include the book When Words Sing: Seven Canadian Libretti (Playwrights Canada Press, 2021) and Lines of Flight: An Atomic Memoir (Wolsak & Wynn, 2016).