Frank Howard's Style Suggestions

When my father was a young man (in the 1950s) he became the editor of a small newspaper in Quebec. These are his style suggestions to a junior colleague at the paper.

1. use short sentences ---15 words

2. use short paragraphs--- 3-4 lines

3.drop articles when possible, but not if it is required for the sake of grammar

4. use full stop rather than semi-colon

5. avoid colon before a list of items whenever possible

6. keep lead brief and active---avoid use of passive---try to make the time element --"today"

7. avoid negative leads

8. avoid dependent clauses

9. avoid conjunctions at the start of sentences

In His Own Words (part one of dad's story)

My first coherent memories are from the year 1936. By that time we
had moved from a flat in proletarian Rosemount to a small bourgeois
town at the eastern-most tip of Montreal Island, Pointe-aux-trembles.
I was five and still English and English-only in a French
environment, but making friends with local boys and girls
in a tentative way. I also hung around a nearby school-yard
trying to get the attention of teachers with my toy blackboard.
We lived in a solid two-storey brick house owned by a local grocer
who occupied the second floor. I suspect that his name is buried in some of the older first-colonized neurons of my ageing think-box. But try as I might I cannot remember where. He was a man of some means in those depression years. I don't think he drove a car, but he had a boat with an outboard motor. I know this because there is a memory of a trip to a small island in the placid branch of the St. Laurent that flowed by placid Pointe-aux-Trembles (PAT). It was more like a sand-bar overgrown with grass than the rocky islands that I (much) later explored east of Quebec City. This excursion is one of my fondest memories of that fine year. The island must have belonged to somebody at some time. But it had been abandoned in those depression years. It had a very primitive ecology, sparse grass, hundreds of tame field mice, red-winged black birds and asparagus as far as I could explore during our hour on this little land apart. I think it was spring or early summer, because the asparagus was only a few inches tall and tender as new grass. We filled the boat's spare space with these lovely little sprouts and shoved off to the homeward shore.

M. X kept most of the crop, and he may even have sold it, but we had
more than enough for ourselves-- me, my parents and two young sisters.
Our surplus went to my father's extended family. They lived downtown in Montreal's English quarter and we visited them often in our car, an opulent luxury in those days.




Pointe-aux-Trembles was a relatively prosperous suburb. Our next door neighbour had a Pomeranian that bit me and a fancy green car--an Auburn, I think. I had an electric train. But there was poverty nearby.
My friend Gilles Rocheleau who lived on a downscale side street within my six-year-old roving range had a father who was laid off from an oil refinery a few miles away. Because we had a car he thought my father must be a ''boss''. He asked me to ask my father if he knew
about any jobs. My father said no. Sometimes men came to the door asking for work or food or both. Sometimes my mother gave them
a sandwich. A young woman came to the house once a week to help with cleaning. I would go to the butcher shop with a quarter from
my mother and return home with a pound of hamburg, a pound
of butter and dime in change. I was sent to l'Academie Roussin less than a block away from home for two reasons: there was no English school very nearby and I had already spent a lot of time talking to some of the teaching brothers in the school-yard trying to get them
interested in my efforts to read and write. Once in school I got to speak French and write within a few months. I tried writing to Pere Noel that December. What a little smart ass!

From Peter Cowan

Then there was Frank the problem solver. In the mid 1960s when we were both in the Quebec Press Gallery, they [his paper?] and others were at their wit’s end with an aggressive UPI reporter who liked to steal stories. In the days of the typewriter, correspondents made blacks or dupes (carbon copies) of their stories using extra sheets of carbon. The top sheet went to CNCP for transmission to their papers. The reporter in question grabbed dupes off desks and filed to UPI. He was stealing stories. It’s a simple as that. One day Frank announced: “This will end.” He then returned to his desk and started writing. A little later, he came by and said to me: “Your desk may ask you to match a UPI story about how a Bourbon Restoration movement had made Quebec City the place where it is setting up its bid to re-establish the French monarchy. If they do, tell them you checked it out and it’s wrong.” Frank then explained how he’d crafted a wonderful imaginary piece on the Bourbon Restoration movement and party, leaving the dupes on his desk. Sure enough, they disappeared a little later. Frank left the planted story stand for a couple of hours. Then told the guy that the story he had stolen was bull and that he’d better retract. The guy was quite incensed. But Frank, as promised, had solved the problem.

What would FEH have said?

What I miss most about Dad is his conversation, his clever, caustic take on world events. When I come across news about the Vatican's effort to update and expand the list of grievous sins, I immediately wondered what FEH would have said. In recent talks with two of Dad's sisters, Inez and Cathy, I was reminded of the huge impact the RC Church had in Quebec and especially on the lives of women. I'm going to invite them and others in FEH's circle who have had the Catholic experience to post their take on the new sins, with perhaps some channelling from Dad.
Virginia Howard

Bob Lederman re: FEH in 1957

FRANK COVERS THE 1957 FEDERAL ELECTION FOR THE QUEBEC CHRONICLE-TELEGRAPH

Based on Bob Lederman’s possibly fantastical and undocumented memory

I was with Frank and Pat in Quebec City in June of 1957 on the day of the federal election. I was with them often since our days at Queen’s University after which Frank and Pat had progressed to the marriage state, the possession of a home and an automobile, the very things that always attract a roustabout and periodically jobless bachelor as I then was. But not a layabout bachelor as some are! I pitched in with dishwashing, babysitting and entertaining evenings of readings I proffered of our favourite humourous writers. Frank and I had shared a common student affliction of becoming writers. We had both contributed poems to the first issue of Quarry, founded as an experiment in 1950 by the Writers’ Workshop at Queen’s which has succeeded in surviving over the years without our further participation, not surprisingly, as we were followed with more famed contributors such as Earle Birney, Miriam Waddington, and Raymond Souster.

While some three years younger, Frank was ahead of me in choosing a career. He would be a writer as a journalist in which he certainly succeeded.. And I must have been the first to reckon he was going to make it OK when I watched his first major journalistic assignment reporting of the 1957 federal election when John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives broke a 22 year hold on power by the Liberals. The remarkable aspect of his reporting was that he almost failed in knowing that Diefenbaker had won due to the absurdly primitive communications facility made available to him by the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph which John Gray correctly described as a “modest daily barely clinging to survival.”

The equipment Frank had to hand to tell him the voting results was a rabbit-eared television whose images were shaky to say the least and at times totally blanked out. I believe we were watching the results at the Howard’s home so the TV may well have been their own or perhaps rented. I recall that we had at times to slap or kick the damn set to straighten it out which allowed me to help with communications! Through about half the night after the polls closed in Quebec Frank had determined that the Conservatives had done poorly in Quebec thus making it highly unlikely they could get a majority of the seats. He began typing his report for the paper on that assumption but as results began coming in from the rest of Canada it seemed possible, as we desperately tried to catch whatever we could on the shifting TV screen, that Diefenbaker may have gotten a few more seats than the Liberals. And so it was. Frank tore up what he had written and began his report again. A Conservative minority government was the result and Frank was saved from making a horrendous error as a journalist. Not that anyone would have noticed outside the small English readership of the Chronicle-Telegraph in Quebec.

Rest well, old friend, your chores are over.

Bob Lederman

March 5, 2008

Lewis Seale Remembers FEH

MEMORIES OF FRANK HOWARD

The last time I saw Frank was over breakfast at the Elgin Street Diner. It had been quite a while. Living then in Toronto, I was only an occasional visitor to Ottawa. But he was the same old Frank I had always known, ablaze with righteous indignation over the ruination of everything we had ever held dear in public life and newspapering.

I had turned aside by then onto quieter paths, my own small fire reduced to a flicker, and so we drifted apart.

It was not the first time we had done so. Our footloose ways had always been a factor. From the mid-60s until the mid-90s, we saw a lot of each other when our jobs brought us close but little if any between times. It never seemed at all hard picking up where we’d left off.

I’m sorry now, of course, that we weren’t in touch in the closing years of his life. What a fine afternoon we might have spent together just weeks ago, when our mutual friend Boris Celovsky died. How we might have shaken our heads between laughs, straining to believe our recollections of all the improbable adventures and misadventures, great and small, we shared with Boris ’way back when.

Boris was with us the winter’s day we trekked though deep snow to the cottage, packing giant sausages that we boiled up in melted snow and ate in giant buns. Jennifer, then aged 10 or 12, was with us and so was the family dog . . . Comet by name? Boris discovered that Comet had an acquaintance of sorts with terms like “heel” and “stay.” Tail wagging at the double, head cocked, wearing as perplexed an expression as the bone structure of a dog’s face allows, Comet clearly recognized these as words of deep meaning. Equally clearly, she had no idea what that meaning might be. When we all went onto the frozen lake for a stroll after lunch, Boris, with his restless energy, set out to get Comet back up to speed

“Never a dull moment with Boris,” I remarked to Frank as we walked apart while Jennifer played nearby in the snow.

“Never a quiet moment,” said Frank.

It wasn’t the first time he had found occasion to correct me. John Gray has written about Frank’s life’s works in journalism, first to help francophone and anglophone Canadians know each other better – hoping perhaps that tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner – then to make all of us all more attentive to the part that bureaucrats and bureaucracy play in government.

But Frank had at least one other life’s work. It was to complete the education I abandoned when I became a reporter at age 17. Can it really have been mere chance that the Globe posted Frank to the press gallery in Quebec City so soon after I joined the Montreal Gazette bureau there? I can’t shake the belief that a kindly Providence had a hand in the Globe’s decision, for it gave me the chance to sign up at the University of Frank.

At a succession of small newspapers in the previous five years, I had learned much about the likes of snow removal and zoning bylaws. But I was sadly ill-prepared for big-picture reporting at the provincial and national level. Frank detected, one after another, the gaps and outright deformities in my understanding and he was quick, sometimes in tones just a hair short of exasperation, to explain what he thought should be obvious to any dimwit.

It was these occasions that so often led this particular dimwit to the “Lit and His” (Literary and Historical Society of Quebec library) on rue Stanislas or to the English-language bookstore that still clung to life on the rue St. Jean, eager for supplementary reading to be absorbed in utmost secrecy so that next time I could enter the conversation with a more plausible semblance of knowing a thing or two. Though much un-read of late, a dog-eared copy of Wheare’s Federal Government is with me still, a reminder of the time Frank set me straight on the principles of federalism. Henri Pirenne’s Medieval Cities and Crane Brinton’s Anatomy of Revolution were assigned reading.

It may be that the beard I’ve sported since the summer after I met Frank is also a legacy of his influence. At the time, my rationale for the beard would have been a hope of looking older. But my bureau chief, who seemed to regard Frank as a rival for pre-eminence in Anglo-Quebec reporting on the Quebec scene, very poorly disguised his suspicion that I grew it in emulation of the bearded Frank. In retrospect, I can’t honestly say he was wrong.

As the years passed, our conversations took place on a more equal footing, always remembering that Frank’s intellect was more equal than mine, and sometimes we had to agree to disagree.

Politics and the bureaucracy were, of course, bottomless pits of subject matter. We both had experience in both spheres to draw on besides the ever-changing scene unfolding around us. But the educational content always remained high. We commonly read the same books, sometimes two or more on a single theme over a period of weeks. I remember especially a long bout with paleoanthropology when we exhausted the popular literature of the day and dipped our toes in a little of the less formidable scientific press. If I remember nothing else in my dotage, I will surely remember how to distinguish the jaw of an ape from that of our own kind (on paper, at least . . . we never got hold of any actual jaws), and I don’t doubt that Frank cherished this special knowledge to the end.

Paul Johnson’s History of Christianity set off another one of our “seminars.” Frank was interested in religion though he had little patience with its claims. His faith was in science. It was from him I first heard the idea that by the times science had made this planet uninhabitable, science would have found the means of colonizing others. I like to think I took him aback with the observation that room might be found on the getaway rocket only for a self-appointed elite. If so, it served him right . . . he’d always encouraged me in critical thinking.

Apart from righteous indignation, grim determination was one of Frank’s characteristic stances. It was never better shown than the day when, fighting a mind-numbing cold in the head, he followed de Gaulle’s progress along the Chemin du Roi from Quebec City to Montreal in 1967. Driving the faithful “Bug” while I flew ahead to be on hand for the speech at City Hall, Frank had ample opportunity to observe the stage management behind the acclaim that greeted the General at every stop. No doubt there has always been a measure of stage management in politics and it now seems to be accepted as la bonne guerre, but in those innocent times it was still regarded as a bit of a dirty secret. Needless to say, Frank was outraged. It didn’t help that the perpetrators were people he considered closet separatists. It was some satisfaction when they let him know afterwards that they didn’t think it was very nice of him to share their secrets with readers of the Globe.

The de Gaulle visit was only one of many stories that Frank and I double-teamed as colleagues at the Globe and the Citizen. The first would have been the burial of Georges Vanier at the Quebec Citadel early in 1967. The last was the night of the 1980 Quebec referendum . . . the next day’s line story in The Citizen was a Howard-Seale collaboration.

In between came the death and funeral of Daniel Johnson. Frank did not like Daniel one little bit and the first reports of his death launched Frank on a writing marathon. The implications for constitutional negotiations, for Quebec’s political landscape, for its drive towards an independent role in foreign affairs, for the Union Nationale and its leading lights . . .on and on. Frank’s typewriter must have grown hot to the touch as he banged out copy right up to the last deadline, in the wee hours of the next morning.

His editors were astounded, not only by the quality of his work but by its sheer volume. “He can’t keep it up at this pace,” they said – “send Seale down from Ottawa to lend him a hand.” But by the time I got to Quebec City there was nothing left to do. Frank had completely exhausted the subject in a day. The Star and the Telegram also sent in extra bodies, and they were still catching up to Frank days later while he rested up and I loafed.

The Star did steal a march on us during one of the constitutional conferences. I don’t remember the exact terms of the Star story, but it was something like “Daniel Johnson’s four-step plan to gain associate state status for Quebec.” It was a speculative piece that might have been equally at home on the op-ed page, but the Star gave it the full treatment on the line, leaving us looking a little flat-footed. “What we have to do now,” said Frank through gritted teeth – “What we have to do now is think of the thing so obvious that no one’s written it yet.”

At this conference or another, the day’s task Frank set for the two of us was to chat up all our contacts to get a handle on the federal proposal, which was being kept under the tightest of tight wraps. At the end of the day we found that, taken together, the hints we’d gathered added up to a reasonably full and coherent package. And so, throwing caution to the winds, we wrote it the way we saw it and the Globe ran it on the line. Next morning, it was our story that was the talk of the town – well, the talk of the media corps at least. I think that may have been the occasion when Pierre Trudeau, mobbed by reporters as he entered the conference room, deflected questions about the federal position by advising us all to “go home and have a bath.”

Leanings to righteous indignation and grim determination notwithstanding, Frank could also be funny, not in a thigh-slapper way but with a dry, penetrating wit. He once described an up-tight bureaucrat as the sort whose shoelaces were always neatly pressed. When someone or other failed to take the disagreeable course that reason seemed to dictate, Frank speculated that the argument for this course was flawed by the fallacy of the unwelcome conclusion.

This has been slow in the writing; time grows short before I must get on then road. I must not close without adding an “amen” to the observation in other tributes that Frank was the most loyal of friends. More than once he gave me a hand up in the most practical way. It was through him that I went to the Globe and later, when, in a second round at the Gazette, I quit in the proverbial huff with no alternate employment in prospect (it’s only fair to say that the Gazette was as huffed with me at that time as I was with them), Frank had me working at the Citizen in no time.

But more than anything he was among my best teachers. What he succeeded in teaching me will live as long as I do.

Lewis Seale

March 5, 2008

Frank's Humor by Charles Gordon

(Charles Gordon was a fellow columnist at 'The Ottawa Citizen')

March 7, 2008

Let me get the serious stuff out of the way first. I respected Frank for many things, including his work, his dedicated attempt to cover serious subjects in an unserious time. I appreciated his fierce loyalty to his friends. And I especially admired what he did in his later years, when reinvented himself, going from being a problem drinker to a man who helped other people stop being problem drinkers.

Having got that out of the way, I want to talk about Frank's sense of humor. I knew Frank for almost 35 years and understood him for most of that time. The first few years we were friendly enough and I used to smile and nod at him when he said something that I recognized was supposed to be funny.

Then suddenly, I don't know exactly when it was, but it was probably in the late 70s, he tossed off a joking remark in that understated and incomprehensible way he had — and I understood it! It might have been when he said: "There's always more water than there is forehead." And other people looked away, and I said to myself: Wait a second, I get it.

It's quite a moment in one's life, the moment one discovers that one gets Frank Howard's sense of humor. You realize that you are part of an elite group — well, not exactly elite, but at least small. We all thought Frank was the funniest guy around, even if he didn't.

Most of this took place in the downtown office of the Ottawa Citizen, 151 Sparks Street, where Frank and I worked together for 10 years in the 70s and 80s. I was supposed to be writing the funny column and he was supposed to be writing The Bureaucrats column, although the distinction got blurred every once in awhile. Frank would write something funny in his column and then go back in the next column to explain what he meant.

John Gray was there and Orland French and lots of other fun people who came and went. John, Orland, Frank and I would spend just about every lunch hour in the Century Club near the corner of Bank, playing snooker. There was a sign in the Century Club that said "No swearing," which was not observed. Our game was the source of much merriment, most of it at Frank's expense. He took it very well, although he pretended not to. One of Frank's great qualities was how good a sport he was. I can't tell you how many jokes about his height he endured. One day his assistant, Mary Bland, called a senior public servant's office and identified herself as from The Bureaucrats. "Oh, yes," said the senior public servant. "That's Howard Johnson's column."

Well, we all thought that was the funniest thing, and so did Frank, although that might have been the time he asked: "Does buffoonery constitute harassment?" And somebody wrote it down.

People who worked in this office often said memorable things, which were written down and pinned to the wall. When the office was vacated, those little pieces of copy paper were given to me, as de facto curator, and I have saved them. Digging through the envelope the other day, I discovered that the great majority of the sayings are from Frank, although the stone-hearted ace reporter Jim Robb is represented with such remarks as: "The readers are scum."

And I shouldn't overlook Jane Taber who worked with Frank about 15 years ago and one day said: "I'm in a bad mood today, but that's because my dress is too tight."

But mostly, the stuff on the wall was Frank's. In 1987, he commented on the developing movement to segregate smokers and non-smokers. "I sometimes think the price of being social animals is too high," he said.

In 1985, Nov. 22 to be exact, the Citizen launched a new horoscope and Frank observed: "My sign is Yield."

"Cheap shots are the only kind I can afford," he said once. I don't have the date, but anyone who knows Frank can recognize its authenticity.

"You'll never catch up if you don't start." Dec. 10, 1984

"If you stick around an asshole, you're going to get some shit on you." Nov. 15, 1984

"I don't know what is worse — greed or envy." Dec. 4, 1980

One of my favorites: Jan. 26, 1981: "He who says his body is a temple has a fool for a congregation."

As many of you know, Frank kept this up, discovering the wonders of email to pronounce in similar vein on people like Stephen Harper, George Bush and Conrad Black. None of them would get it, of course. The rest of us, those who "got" Frank Howard, were fortunate indeed.

Virginia's Toast

Here's a toast that I gave towards the end of the Wake:

For five winters I made the road trip to Lake Chapala, Mexico and back with Frank. But in a larger sense, I’ve been “Going down the Road” with Dad all of my life. When we drove through the southern United States, the red-neck radio personalities and fundamentalist preachers took over the dial and we just couldn’t escape their bizarre take on the world. So Dad and I would imitate them and send them up, making each other laugh all the way to the Mexican border. I had such a good time cutting through that headwind of bigotry with him!

Ride 50,000 kilometers with Frank Edward Howard and this is what you’ll learn:

· Don’t take any wooden nickels from Daddy Warbucks.

· Stay on the outside looking in at the mob scene of “Vive le Quebec libre!”, because from that vantage point you can easily unravel the notion of “pure laine” anything.

· The individual is far too valuable to be used as landfill at the dump, so don’t lie down for the bulldozer!

· If you’re ever caught in a snow squall, breathe through your third anus.

· Always lean into a curve but watch out: the emperor not only has no clothes, but you have to keep him that way.

· And always go ‘round and ‘round until you find free parking… It’s the Holy Grail, that free parking.

I don’t know whether I can keep all this in mind, Dad. So why don’t you become the ghost in the machine for me now. I want to be able to tune the radio to F.R.A.N.K., so that your grandchildren can hear you. Give me the wiper fluid that’s laced with your W5. Please haunt the GPS so that we’re no longer tied to the road, but can pull out and out… And out in that ultimate crane shot, way out in deep space with its painfully clear view of our mortal connivance on earth.
My fondest hope is that you’re eating the most artery-hardening eggs-sausage-spam-on-spam breakfast in a Diner on the edge of Saturn’s rings, with Carl Sagan at your table, wanting to know if quantum physics could ever make good TV? And you can bet that Marshall McLuhan wants to horn in on that conversation with you!

Free at last, Dad…
Que le vaya bien!

VirginaHoward March 7, 2008.

We decided to hold the Wake at the Wakefield Mill, Quebec, because the auberge is set in a landscape that generated a shared love of nature in our family.
We formed a gathering of about 27 family and friends, who stood before the old mill fireplace to tell stories, laugh and sing, all in honour of that fiercely intelligent individual - Frank Edward Howard.

Here's the link to Le Moulin's website: http://www.wakefieldmill.com/home/index_e.php

Boy in the Garden

My mother Patricia Howard wrote a song for the occasion, set to the tune: "They Can't Take that Away from Me". Her four daughters linked arms with her to sing the following lyrics:

He wouldn’t take a bribe

He wouldn’t make a fuss

He was a splendid scribe

No, no, they can’t take that away from us.

He could demystify

The most ambiguous

He wouldn’t tell a lie

No, no, they can’t take that away from us.

If we ever, ever meet again on a planet far from here

Our ensemble jokes will fill an atmosphere.

And when we feed him lines

He’ll act the omnibus

To show us how he shines

No, no, they can’t take that away from us,

No, they can’t take that away from us!