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McMartin wrote the column to mark the Jack Webster foundation honouring Fotheringham with the Bruce Hutchison award for lifetime achievement.
Webster, a broadcaster on radio station CKNW and BCTV, was a friend of Fotheringham. Together with another Sun columnist, Marjorie Nichols, they formed a merciless triumvirate that ruled political opinion-making in B.C. from the 1970s into the 1990s.
Hutchison was the longtime editor emeritus of The Vancouver Sun. Here’s Fotheringham describing one of Hutch’s briefings to the paper’s editorial board following a “safari” to the eastern capitals of Washington, D.C., and Ottawa.
“Hutchison tilted his chair back, hooked his thumbs in his trousers, gazed at the ceiling and talked for about 20 minutes on the prospects for war, the fate of the dollar, the mood of the capitals — right, left, sideways — sprinkled with the asperity of his views on certain leaders.
“As he spoke you could hear not only the sentences and the paragraphs but the punctuation: not only the commas and the periods but the semicolons and the quote marks.”
Yes, there were giants in those days. When I started at the Sun almost a half-century ago, Fotheringham was already one of them.
One of his particular arts was attending meetings of Vancouver city council and demolishing reputations with nothing more than verbatim quotes and the occasional biting aside.
We also used to wait for Fotheringham’s annual April 1 column, where he would profile a fictional MLA who was mockingly emblematic of the party in power. Unsuspecting archivists sometimes filed these pieces without recognizing why the individuals in question were never mentioned in the paper the other 364 days of the year.
The Link LonkAugust 20, 2020 at 06:58AM
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Vaughn Palmer: Dr. Foth could be funny … and devastating - Vancouver Sun
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Funny
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