George Finstad, 72 first Marketplace, longtime news reader
Dan Say
He would play the audition tape over and over and call people
into his office to listen,"
CBC news anchor was 'meticulous, an announcer of the old school'
One of the last news readers hired by the corporation for voice alone and not
for their reportorial skills, he broke the news to English Canada that Pierre
Laporte had been murdered by the FLQ
F. F. LANGAN
Special to The Globe and Mail June 25, 2008
George Finstad was the CBC announcer who broke the news to much of English
Canada that Pierre Laporte had been murdered by the FLQ.
On the night of Oct. 17, 1970, the body of the Quebec Labour Minister was
found in the trunk of a car near Saint-Hubert Airport on Montreal's South
Shore. Mr. Laporte had been kidnapped from his home in nearby Saint-Lambert
six days earlier.
Mr. Finstad had just started as the backup and weekend newsreader for The
National News. It was the first political assassination in Canada in more than
100 years and although Mr. Finstad made the announcement in his calm, trained
voice, the event had a profound affect on him.
"George was really shaken by the incident," said Lloyd Robertson, then the
main newsreader at the CBC, who was called in to work after news of the
Laporte murder became known. "I remember him coming out of the studio and
saying 'Wow, this is something that I never thought I'd see happen.' "
At first, Mr. Finstad went on without a script and read bulletins as they
came in to the television station. He updated events as the night unfolded,
introducing reports from the field.
"He was meticulous, an announcer of the old school. It made things easier that
night since we had been working day and night for weeks on this story before
the body was found," said Peter Daniel, a CBC reporter in Montreal who spent
long hours on the air during the October Crisis.
By then, George Finstad had spent almost two decades in broadcasting. The son
of Norwegian immigrants, he grew up in Edmonton. His father, Carl, was often
away from home, working on oil derricks, as a cook in lumber camps and later
on ships in the merchant marine. His mother, Anna, worked in a factory in
Edmonton during the war.
Young George had a great singing voice and there was some talk of him
attending a music conservatory but the family couldn't afford it. Instead, he
picked up a couple of other skills: golf and pool.
"My father was a something of a pool shark," said daughter Laurie
Finstad-Knizhnik. "He was shy and sweet-looking, so people thought they could
hustle him, but he could clear a table in minutes."
After graduating from Strathcona High School, known to its students as
"Scona," he went to work at CKUA, a 250-watt radio station run by the
University of Alberta and the provincial government. He did everything there,
from reading the news to putting out the garbage. For a man who later became
known as a dignified newsreader, one of his first announcing jobs was on a
children's program in which he played a fish.
The money wasn't great, so he took a year off to operate a dredge at Great
Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories. He then returned to the typical career
path of a young announcer, working in a number of Western Canadian radio
stations from Lloydminster to Victoria before joining the CBC in 1964.
He first worked in Toronto as a summer replacement in 1965, and then moved
full-time to the network headquarters in 1968. Along with reading The National
News, he worked on a number of other programs. One of them was Lifestyles, a
consumer-oriented show he co-hosted with newspaper reporter Joan Watson. It
later morphed into a full-time network program called Marketplace. At the
time, there was nothing of its type on television. Private stations couldn't
run anything like it since they were in danger of alienating sponsors. Mr.
Finstad was nominated for an award for his work.
"He was very focused, hard-working, driven in the sense that he wanted to
ensure everything he did was right and proper on air and it always was," said
anchor Peter Mansbridge, who was a reporter in Western Canada at the time. "I
think back to watching George, I can never remember him making a mistake. He
was always right on with everything, not only just the simple act of reading
but ensuring he pronounced everything right. That can be a challenge in some
newscasts."
Mr. Finstad's enunciation skills were in demand elsewhere, too. He provided
voiceovers for many TV productions, including the documentary Who Owns the
Sea?, which he narrated with Gordon Pinsent. A specially edited version of
this program was later shown at a series of environmental meetings held in
Stockholm, Geneva and New York that led to the Law of the Sea Convention being
reached at the United Nations.
By the mid-1970s, things have begun to change at the CBC. The broadcaster
wanted reporters who had worked in the field, not professional announcers, to
read the news.
There was also a bizarre union jurisdiction, with the announcers being in one
union and the reporters and news writers in another. In theory, the announcer
of the newscast wasn't allowed to change so much as a comma in the news copy.
It frustrated announcers such as Mr. Robertson and Mr. Finstad, who considered
themselves journalists, not just newsreaders.
In 1976, Mr. Robertson left to go to CTV, where he still reads the nightly
newscast. Colleagues say Mr. Finstad expected to be promoted to be the main
newsreader, but the job went to reporter Peter Kent.
Mr. Finstad stayed until the following year. At the time, he was 42, and his
daughter said his departure could have been the combined result of frustration
and an urge to do something different. In any event, he went to Montreal,
where he auditioned at CJAD radio for the job of morning news reader, the top
job at the city's top English-language station.
"The program director, Ted Blackman, just loved the sound of George's voice.
He would play the audition tape over and over and call people into his office
to listen," recalls Stephen Phizicky, the news director at the station and
another former CBC employee. "The station wanted traditional great voices, and
George had one of those voices."
Several years later, he and Mr. Phizicky both returned to the CBC, where Mr.
Finstad read the local news. He stayed on as a CBC announcer in Montreal. In
September, 1988, he was driving home from work, listening to radio reports
that Ben Johnson had just been stripped of his medal at the Seoul Olympics,
when his car was struck by a large truck.
He was taken to nearby Queen Elizabeth Hospital, where he was pronounced dead,
only to be revived by a visiting trauma specialist. His injuries were severe:
Both lungs had collapsed and the rib cage was shattered.
"When he woke up four days later, he thought he had been injured in the
Olympics," said daughter Kathy. "The accident had a real effect on his work.
He couldn't finish a sentence without taking a breath."
In 1990, he retired from the CBC at 56. He and his wife, Betty, went to
Vancouver for a while but moved back to Toronto after their first grandchild
was born.
Mr. Finstad loved the spoken word and the written word. He was forever working
at crossword puzzles, cryptic, acrostic and regular, and played word games
with all his children.
"He drilled all five of us in homonyms and definitions so we knew the meaning
of both enigma and conundrum," said Ms. Finstad-Knizhnik, the creator and
writer of the TV series, Durham County. "He was obsessed with language. There
were vocabulary and grammar tests, Scrabble until midnight and more
dictionaries than you could count. He had a true love of language and what
could be done with it."
GEORGE FINSTAD
George Finstad was born in Edmonton on Oct. 7, 1934. He died May 30, 2008, of
a heart attack in hospital in Toronto. He was 73. He is survived by wife
Betty, children Laurie, Rob, Mark, Kathy and Kim, a brother and four sisters.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080625.
OBFINSTAD25//TPStory/Obituaries
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George Finstad - CKUA Edmonton 1953; CKSA Lloydminster 1950s; CFAX Victoria
early 1960s; CJOR Vancouver 1963-64; staff and news announcer CBC Radio
Vancouver 1964-68; special feature reporter BC centennial year celebrations
CBC Vancouver 1967; CBC Toronto 1968-77; weekend anchor The National News
CBC-TV Toronto late 60s-early 70s; co-host Marketplace CBC-TV national
1972-77; narrator public affairs series Elements of Survival CBC-TV national
1974-75; private radio Montreal 1977; CBC-TV Montreal 1980s; retired from CBC
1990. Died in Mississauga ON May 30, 2008.
CBC Biography [ http://www.cbc.ca/consumers/market/mp30/hosts/finstad.html ]