Denny Boyd, 76, longtime Vancouver newspaper columnist
Matthew Kruk
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Longtime Vancouver newspaper columnist Denny Boyd, who wrote wry, highly
personal observations of the city, its sports and its characters for more than
40 years, has died.
The former Vancouver Sun columnist and author of several books passed away early
Friday from bladder cancer in Lions Gate Hospital at the age of 76. He was
diagnosed with cancer in July 2005 and entered the hospital's palliative care
ward on Sunday.
Boyd received the Order of B.C. in 2005 for telling the "true stories of British
Columbians for posterity, with kindness and generosity," and for sharing with
the public his own struggles with illness.
Boyd is probably best known for his frank columns about his battle with
alcoholism, a 1982 column he devoted to urging Eleni Skalbania to return to her
husband, high-flying developer Nelson Skalbania, and -- to Boyd's great
disgust -- a whimsical column he once dashed off about the joys of new potatoes,
along with a recipe for cooking them with nothing but butter and unpeeled garlic
cloves.
Denny Boyd started as a sports writer, but spent most of his career as a
columnist, writing on sports, cooking, city gossip and city news.
"He was the voice of the little guy," former Vancouver Sun assistant managing
editor Mike McRanor said in an interview. "His writing was very elegant but
always pitched at the ordinary reader. You never had to reach for a dictionary
when you were reading Denny Boyd."
Boyd wrote from his heart, rather than his mind, and would often include
references to happenings in his own life.
"He liked to write about people. You never knew where it was coming from,"
former sports department colleague Jim Taylor said. "One time, he didn't have a
sports column, so he sat down and wrote a column about Oscar Peterson, the
pianist he just heard in the bar down the street. It was great stuff, but we
struggled to find the sports connection."
A good number of his columns were about nothing much at all, but nevertheless
fabulous reads, said Archie McDonald, another one-time member of The Sun sports
department. "He was an Everyman."
Denny Boyd was born on June 18, 1930, in a bleak little B.C. mining town called
Anyox. A family friend drove his mother to hospital in a garbage truck -- a
beginning Boyd recounts in his 1995 autobiography, In My Own Words, as less than
auspicious. His father had trained as a shipwright but worked wherever he could
during the Depression years. His mother worked as a caregiver, waitress and
apartment cleaner.
Boyd joined The Sun in 1957
Boyd got his first newspaper job with the Victoria Times sports department at
the age of 21 and joined The Vancouver Sun as a sports writer in 1957.
The Sun was located then in the Sun Tower on Beatty Street and was known for its
popular columnists, writers like Jack Scott, Jack Wasserman and Barry Mather.
Boyd recalled that the news department was spread through the Sun Tower "in
little nooks and crannies where some of the writers began to display
unmistakably batty behaviour, like princesses imprisoned too long in a castle
tower.
"Drinking went on up there. There were bottles in the desk drawers, bottles in
the urinal tanks," recalled Boyd. "There was sex too, I have been told."
In his autobiography, Boyd described The Sun in the late '50s and early '60s as
something out of The Front Page.
"Competition with The Province for a headline that would sell on the street that
day was ferocious. Often the first man getting to a telephone would rip out the
wires to prevent the opposition man from using it," recalled Boyd.
"The tension needle in The Sun newsroom was constantly in the red, just short of
boiler explosion. Telephones were ripped out and thrown. Typewriters and paste
pots were smashed against walls. Reporters were fired for being two minutes
late."
Seven years later, with Sun publisher Stu Keate as mentor, he became a sports
columnist.
"I didn't plan and make such bold moves," Boyd wrote in his autobiography. "I
sort of hung around and got caught up and sucked along by the changing tides. By
treading water, I survived."
He briefly took over Jack Wasserman's city gossip column in 1967 when the
celebrated gadfly columnist signed on with radio station CJOR as a hedge against
what he mistakenly predicted would be a long newspaper strike.
Boyd set out to become Mr. Vancouver, but it turned out to be a rocky period in
his life. His marriage ended, he returned to sports writing and began his
lengthy battle with the bottle. One day he got up and quit the newspaper.
Over the next few years, Boyd was a CJOR sportscaster, wrote a sports column for
the Georgia Straight, authored a cookbook, Man On The Range, and wrote a history
of the Vancouver Canucks for which he received a royalty cheque for $5.67. He
even hosted Vancouver's first phone-in sex show, The Female Forum. It was a
disaster.
After Wasserman died, Keate invited Boyd to return to The Sun, which he did in
1978. The Sun newsroom was a quieter place than the one he had known before.
Computers had replaced typewriters. Reporters didn't bellow "Copy" any more.
For several years, Boyd wrote a high-flying nightclub and celebrity gossip
column. He played tennis with the Skalbanias and went fishing with former prime
minister John Diefenbaker.
He became a bit of a loner
But health troubles threatened again. Boyd had a heart attack in 1980 and in
1982 he was charged with impaired driving when his car struck a parked vehicle.
He wrote about his rehabilitation in his columns.
His columns then took a turn and became more reflective, deeper and more honest,
McDonald said.
For a time, one editor criticized Boyd as not having enough of an "edge" to his
writing, former Sun copy editor Harrill Bjornson recalls.
"Denny didn't espouse any great cause except sobriety in his later years,"
Bjornson said.
And he became a bit of a loner.
"I think he lived through his columns," said McDonald. "I think he's one of
those guys who expressed himself through his columns. That's how he
communicates. I think people are sometimes disappointed in him because they
expect this witty, learned man to come out, but he doesn't. He largely stays
within himself then goes home and writes a smashing column about it."
A few months after a federal election, Boyd wrote about Liberal MP Art Laing
being slow to remove campaign signs. "I wrote the item straight and then added
the suggestion that since New Year's Eve was approaching the general public
might want to haul one of them home because on New Year's, everyone wanted an
old Laing sign."
He once went spectacularly AWOL. Against his editor's wishes and goaded by
buddies at a bar, Boyd hopped on a plane to Atlanta when Martin Luther King was
assassinated in 1968.
"The guys took up a cash collection," Boyd wrote in his autobiography. "I called
my travel agent and booked a flight and a room. I tore home, packed a bag,
picked up my portable typewriter, told my roommate to cover for me for as long
as possible and, quite drunk, was on the midnight plane to Georgia."
He got the story.
One of his favourite career coups was stumbling into an exclusive interview with
Pierre Elliott Trudeau during the 1968 federal Liberal leadership campaign.
While everyone else was complaining about lack of access to Trudeau, the
politician not only asked for Boyd, he spent 30 minutes interviewing the
columnist about Canada's performance in international sports.
In the newsroom, Boyd was renowned for his speedy writing.
Writing seemed effortless for him.
"He would come back from a sporting event, say a football game, and he would sit
down and in a matter of minutes, literally, he'd have his story done and be on
the bus by the time we were halfway through our stories," McDonald said.
"He'd throw out a phrase in the middle of the column that didn't seem to relate
to anything, but wouldn't you know, at the end of the story, it was repeated as
a tagline to his column," friend and former colleague Jack Lee said. "He knew
how to tie up a column like nobody I ever met."
"He would write this column in about 20 minutes then he'd sit with his arms
crossed again waiting for us young people who were poring over our copy trying
to make it the next Gone with the Wind. He would wait until we finished so we
could give him a ride home."
"He wasn't too good on facts, but if you supplied him with the facts, then he
could weave those facts into fascinating pieces of prose," said Alex
MacGillivray, a former assistant managing editor at The Sun.
"Wasserman was a news columnist and [Allan] Fotheringham was a political animal.
The writer among all of them was Denny Boyd."
Mike McRanor, who sometimes edited Boyd's column, said: "I always remember one
phrase where he likened a case of peaches to rows of bruised knees. It was
perfect."
It's telling that B.C. Lions president and CEO Bob Ackles remembers Boyd -- not
for a sports column, but for one in which he wrote about growing up in Vancouver
and walking to elementary school.
"It was kind of a nice story about the people he grew up with, his family and
that kind of thing," Ackles said.
Boyd's reputation was stellar enough that he was offered jobs in Toronto,
Seattle and Atlanta -- offers he turned because he loved his hometown.
"I'm still in the town I love," Boyd recalled in his autobiography. "My office
at The Sun was just four blocks from 1250 West Broadway, where I grew up in the
late '30s. I like the narrowness of that circle of life.
"I can sit on the balcony on the West Vancouver waterfront and look out at the
tethered deep sea freighters, turning on their anchor chains like range cattle
facing into a blizzard.
"On summer Sunday nights I watch the cabin cruisers heading into the harbour,
sterns down, bows up, like fat little boys hurrying home before dark."
As his former editor McRanor put it: "Denny was a B.C. guy and he never wanted
to be anything else."
Radio host Rafe Mair knew Boyd for 25 years.
"He's given Vancouver a chance to look in the mirror. He had a marvellous, deep
love for Vancouver and all that it represents, no question about it," Mair said.
"Denny never hits you with a two- by-four. Often times, after you finished and
thought about it, you smarted a little bit."
To him, writing was 'pure fun'
He officially retired at age 65, but continued writing a weekly freelance column
for The Sun; for North Shore Outlook, and magazine articles, and published two
books after his 65th birthday. In 1997, he was honoured with the Bruce Hutchison
Lifetime Achievement Award.
When Boyd retired from his full-time columnist job at The Sun in 1995, he told
Sun writer Pete McMartin that his passion for the newspaper life took a toll on
personal life, including his two failed marriages.
"Yes, I think the marriages were casualties of the career; I think there's a
columnist's personality where everything you do is subordinated to work. You
don't really see things as they are; you see them in print."
About how he kept his column going for so long, Boyd told McMartin: "It's been
too much fun. I honestly get up in the morning and go 'Boy, oh boy, I get to go
into work and write a column.' It's like being a kid sitting on the floor, with
the biggest Lego set in the world -- the set being words. For me, the fun part
of the column is putting the sentences together."
These were among the reasons why Boyd excelled at what he called the Dead Beat.
He wrote a fine obituary. On the passing of Woodwards' head Chunky Woodward in
1990, Boyd touched on the corporate icon's love of his Douglas Lake Ranch.
"Chunky Woodward gave a good half of his heart to the privilege and pressures of
the executive office. But panelling, carpets and corporate action have their
limits," wrote Boyd.
"You can't see the great, broad sky from the executive suite, or feel the
nourishing promise of the bunchgrass under your boots and those were the
assurances the other part of Chunky needed from the time he was a boy."
In 1993 Boyd wrote about the horror of the death of Jamie Bulger, a two-year-old
boy from Liverpool who was killed by two 10-year-olds. Boyd later called the
column the best he produced in the '90s.
"We can absorb, and learn to block out the murder in Bosnia, to set ourselves
apart from the casual murders of children and babies in drive-by shootings in
the gang-ruled and drug-fuelled ghettos in the United States," wrote Boyd.
"But we have nothing, nothing at all, with which to compare and perhaps
rationalize, even superficially, Jamie Bulger's murder. It is as if a whole new
box of hell has been opened and the imps and demons overwhelm us."
Looking back, Boyd wrote in his autobiography:
"Despite my efforts to screw it up, I've had a hell of a good life, more pure
fun than anyone should expect from a career that kicks back a cheque every two
weeks and pays the dentist bills and lets you decide every morning, on your own,
what particular kind of widget you are going to invent that day."
In his autobiography Boyd offered up his own vision of Heaven: "Free breakfast
will be served every morning -- broiled bratwurst with Triple-O sauce. Lena
Horne will sing while you munch."
He concluded that in Heaven: "I will write one column a week for the Heavenly
Herald -- if I feel like it."
Profile of Denny Boyd. Obituary of Denny Boyd.
Š The Vancouver Sun 2006