Atkins

My friend died a few weeks ago battling for life the way he lived it: full throttle. I met Ron in the fall of 1973. I was the editor of the Manitoulin Expositor. I didn’t know anyone in Sudbury and needed an accountant. Someone recommended Ron.

My love affair with Northern Ontario started in a small dingy office in the Port Arthur Post Office next door to Michael Gravelle, our current minister of Northern Development and Mines. It was 1971.

When I was in my teens in the 1960s, I used to steal away from Don Mills, Canada’s first completely planned and boring community, and go downtown to Yorkville, in Toronto, where something really seemed to be happening.

It’s been a long time since I took a little time out waiting for the old swing bridge at Little Current, Manitoulin Island, to grant me access to this fantastic “largest freshwater lake island in the world.

It was a modest start, but my fabulous career at the CBC began at the old Parliament Street radio studio in Toronto where each Friday night the Nimmons “N” Nine Jazz Trio played a fantastic live jazz concert.

A couple of weeks ago the Laurentian School of Architecture held an auction — for fish huts. I can’t tell you much about it because as of this writing, it hasn’t actually happened.

I have been extraordinarily lucky. When I was 22 years old I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. When I was 23 years old, I fell into a journalistic job in Thunder Bay and knew that was it.

It’s hard to avoid the question of Rob Ford wherever you live in this country. He brings a larger-than-life “wince” seldom achieved in this highly contested category of public service. He can take you from rage to compassion in an afternoon.

It’s a complicated time to consider the matter of leadership.

It began as many things do. I didn’t have a clue what I was getting into.