THE RIMMER HATED COGNAC. RUM AND Coke, stingers, gin and tonics, whiskey; now those were drinks. But as a reporter on assignment in Paris in 1967 at a sidewalk cafe; on the Champs-Elysees, Rimstead dutifully followed in the path of his idol Ernest Hemingway and ordered cognac. In fact, Rimstead often found himself doing things Hemingway had done: fishing off the coast of Bimini, reporting for The Toronto Star, fighting a bull in a bullring. And after the action was over, he, also like Hemingway, delighted in portraying his manliness. For example, after a bull gored him in the leg, Rimstead told an observer, "I kept picking at the scab to try and get a real good scar. But the damn thing kept healing up." Even on paper, the clear, short phrases of Rimsteadese resemble classic Hemingway. No wonder, since both men came of age in an era when women were wives not journalists, when drinking with the boys was serious business and when reporters hunted for good times as hard as they hunted for scoops—sometimes harder.
The Rimmer was a classic, old-style newsman who had a gift for the craft of journalistic storytelling. When he took notes—which was rare—it was on a matchbook, which he'd lose or absently toss in the trash. His violin-shaped briefcase carried a bottle of scotch, not paperwork. If there was a deadline to miss, he'd miss it; a round of drinks to buy, he'd buy it; an excuse to be irreverent, he'd take it. At the Toronto Men's Press Club, his adventures were spun into the boozy folklore hard-living reporters loved. Unfortunately, he didn't have Hemingway's self-control whenever he had an opportunity to try to write a novel, which was something he claimed he always wanted to do. He could not restrain himself or be restrained. That was both his blessing and his curse. The upside was that he became a respected sportswriter, a magazine writer and a columnist the likes of which Canada has rarely seen. The downside was that he could never toast to his success with just one drink.
Fred Ross says that if Rimstead were alive today, there'd be no one like him. An old friend and former Toronto Starsenior editor, Ross worked with the Rimmer at The Kingston Whig-Standard and The Globe and Mail. He believes Rimstead, like Hemingway, had a special gift that would transcend any era. Never mind that today's newsroom is drastically different from that of Rimmer's heyday. Never mind that his work habits would no longer be accepted. Never mind that most of his supporters are no longer in positions of authority. "If you're a painter of pictures with words, you're always going to be a painter of pictures with words," Ross says. While this may be true for Hemingway, Ross is wrong about Rimstead. If he were still with us, he might still be able to paint colourful pieces, but he'd have trouble finding an art dealer.
In the early days, however, there was always someone to write for. By the time he was 30, Paul Rimstead's words had appeared all over Ontario. As a young reporter he'd zig-zagged from The Elliot Lake Standard to The Sudbury Star to the Whig to The Toronto Star. By 1966, he was at the Globe. At that time, ties were four and a half inches wide, the help wanted ads were divided into male and female positions and Paul was specializing in sports stories. Very good sports stories;ones that were getting noticed. There was never an ordinary game summary or dry trade update with his byline on it. No sir. Paul Rimstead wrote about the crowds at different stadiums. Or he wrote about the home-cooked food a sagging hockey team was served. Denis Harvey, former editor at The Toronto Star, says the story of the game was minor to Paul. He looked for the people stories, the characters, the strangeness. Then clearly, cleanly, he wrote so that their personalities climbed off the paper. "Without question, he is the greatest sportswriter this country's ever seen," Harvey says.
Which is why when Harvey took over The Canadian Magazinein 1966, he recruited Rimstead to be sports feature writer. Rimstead was rewarded with pieces like "The Goal That Death Was Watching," about a dying minor-league hockey player who left his sick bed to score a last heroic goal.
"March 4, 1967—It was 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, January 11, and in a few minutes the Hershey Bears would skate out on the ice to warm up for their game against the Providence Reds.
They sat there now waiting, shifting uneasily as the tension built. Coach Frank Mathers paced nervously, wondering, perhaps, if he had made the right decision.
The game itself wasn't worrying them. The Bears, storming along in first place in the American Hockey League's Eastern Division, didn't figure to have much trouble with the last-place Reds.
Yet, even the hardest veteran felt soft inside. Some of them said a prayer in silence
"Hey, you guys!" boomed Bruce Cline, an assistant captain, "Looks like we got a rookie with us tonight."
Bruce Draper, wearing number 21, smiled, embarrassed, as his teammates laughed with the release of tension.
It was a preview of one of the most dramatic moments I have ever seen in sport—the night Bruce Draper came back. It is a story of courage and a young man's faith in God."
Rimstead's tale of the young man's brave fight before he succumbed to cancer wasn't just a reader-pleaser, it made Harvey cry. "You could just see that person," he says. "He had a wonderful eye for drama." Of course, getting the Rimmer to actually produce his stories was another matter. Next door to the magazine's office on Toronto's lower Yonge Street was the Victoria Hotel. Harvey would book Paul a room, close the door and say, "Paul, you're going to sit there until I get a copy out of your hands."
Paul just didn't have it in him to be concerned about deadlines. They were for the Serious, the Organized and the Reliable. He was an Adventurer. When the Rimmer was born in 1935 in Sudbury, his grandfather misunderstood his mother's orders and registered him as "Napolean Rimstead" in the church and government logs. It was quickly corrected, but it started him off on a fittingly comedic foot. His family would later move to a farm in Bracebridge, where Rimstead would spend three years in the 10th grade because he couldn't stop disturbing the class; he says the teacher eventually passed him because he "printed good." He never bothered finishing Grade 11. At 16 he fled Bracebridge in search of adventure. A series of short-term jobs followed, one of which was as a Fuller Brush man when Hurricane Hazel hit southern Ontario in 1954. A few years later, he landed at his first job at the North York Enterprise.
By the time he landed at the Canadianmore than 15 years later, he was an accomplished pro. He told vivid, uncomplicated sporting tales about regular joes doing extraordinary deeds. They were the Monopoly champions, the matadors and the pool hustlers. He made them feel special and they trusted him. Rimstead had a broad definition of sport and while on the lookout for fresh stories he'd befriend athletes, painters and even the odd hit man, always calling them "sir" and offering a drink. When he wrote, he'd let us hearthe voices of his subjects;for example, the young cowboy who attempted to woo the woman on the saloon stool next to him: "Yore shore purty and sweet. Ya smell good too." And he'd help us seehis characters, for instance, this washed-out boxer: "He drank whiskey, stayed up late at night, gambled and cheated at cards. He was profane. He ruined fast cars and he hated to train. His haircut was homemade, his fisherman hands calloused and his Acadian accent as thick as pea soup."
GIVEN THE CHOICE, RIMSTEAD WOULD always concentrate on words, not the practical things like keeping track of his expenses or telling his boss where he was. While Denis Harvey could tolerate his irresponsibility, the Canadian's new editor, Michael Hanlon, now a Toronto Star reporter, couldn't. Hanlon says he had trouble getting mad at the Rimmer, but in 1969, the situation had worsened. He had to fire him. The fateful phone call was sad but calm. "Are you going to fire me?" Rimstead asked. "I'm afraid so," Hanlon replied. Unless Paul could promise to change, he had no choice. Paul Rimstead told him that change was not an option.
But in those days you could be let go from one publication one day, pack your desk into a brown paper bag, walk over to another and be hired the same day. That day in 1969 Paul Rimstead walked over to the old Toronto Telegramto be a general columnist. The newsroom he walked into looked like this: there was liquor in the desk drawers, cigarette smoke in the air, men pecking at their copy with two fingers and women tucked away in lady-ghettos working on the obituaries. Reporters climbing the newspaper ladder drank at the press club with the boys, put their jobs ahead of their families and perpetuated the newsman image. A tough journalist could drink until 3 a.m. and stroll into the newsroom three hours later, supposedly fresh and sober. The toughest took risks, thought fast, got arrested.
What the newsroom saw when Paul Rimstead walked in was this: a mild-looking, soft-spoken joker with a round belly and a round-the-clock drinking habit; a 34-year-old man who had begun his journalism career at age 11, reporting on farm births for the tiny paper he created and circulated to neighbours; a high school drop out who got his education in Toronto as a wannabe pool hustler and burlesque house usher; an amateur jazz drummer and a seasoned press-league softball pitcher; and a married man who preferred a good party over spending time with his wife and daughter.
Life at the Telywas full of parties right up to the paper's death in 1971. Surprisingly, the parties just got better when Rimstead and a handful of other editors and reporters went over to help start up The Toronto Sun. The adventure, begun by its new publisher, Douglas Creighton, its editor, Peter Worthington, and its general manager, Don Hunt, was just offbeat enough to excite an otherwise unemployed Rimstead. In his day-one column, the Rimmer wrote a declaration that's still beloved at the tabloid today: "If, indeed, the world likes an underdog, then Toronto should have a love affair with this one." He was talking about the paper, but he could just as easily have been talking about himself. The Rimmer was like the Wizard of Oz; a little guy behind a lot of big things. For the first month of the paper's existence, he detailed its struggles and made characters out of the people involved and the building itself, from the switchboard operator to the landlord to Fanny, the building's tired old elevator. The Sun'searly success was due in part to the Rimmer's knack for capturing character; he made the staff real for readers, personifying the paper.
At the Sun, Rimstead had found an environment that encouraged his zaniness and allowed him to glorify his faults. Even at that time, there weren't many newsrooms that would tolerate a star columnist who would invite 2,500 readers, a Dixieland band and a Playboy Bunny to a last-minute afternoon tour of the building. There also weren't many newspaper executives who would have allowed a columnist to leave for Mexico and wire in his copy in so he could take a stab, unsuccessfully, at the book he'd always wanted to write. But Rimstead was a star because there were many readers who loved his honest accounts of money woes, failed relationships and offbeat people, even if he did write that a female co-worker "jiggled" when she walked, that his wife was "the Missus" and that a secretary was "a shade over a sheep." So much of himself; even the demise of his marriage soon after his Suncareer began, was on daily display that even casual friends would swear, "I knew him better than anyone."
Nick the Needle, a Toronto tailor and tuxedo shop owner, was one of them. They'd share an Italian sausage sandwich, Nick would set Paul up with a nice powder blue suit and a ruffled shirt, they'd chat. To this day, Nick keeps bits of the Rimmer in a dusty brown attache case in the back room of his shop. In it he stores the articles that mention him. One asks him not to be mad that Paul used one of his top hats as a chamber pot for a horse, another thanks him for putting up with Paul's constantly changing body size. In Nick's opinion, it was his friend who made the Sun what it was.
In the paper's early days, Nick wasn't the only one who thought so. Everyone in Toronto knew the Rimmer. If the Canadianwas the pinnacle of his writing career, as many believe, then the Sun was the peak of his fame. He still dreamed of writing a great novel, but in those days he was content to go on adventure after adventure. In 1972, he ran for mayor of Toronto, finishing fourth with 8,000 votes. He had better luck with his TV commercials for Carling O'Keefe Ale; the first was named one of the world's best commercials in 1974. As for Rimstead!,the 1975 late-night TV show he did for Global, it didn't win any prizes but it was vintage Rimmer. Rather than tape the show each day, Rimstead would tape all five half-hour segments for the week over the course of one day. Peter Worthington, an occasional guest, remembers Rimstead drinking from a mug filled with scotch. "So the Monday show would be quite normal, the Tuesday a bit further out," he says with a laugh. "By Friday it was off the wall!"
RIMSTEAD WAS SO BUSY ENJOYING HIMSELF that he didn't notice that things in the newsroom had begun to change. There isn't a year or an event that can be singled out, but the late seventies newsroom, like the world around it, was maturing. The desk-drawer bars were thinning out, women were slowly being accepted outside of the life section and a new kind of journalist was emerging: the university graduate. The new-style reporters didn't share the coarse, hard-drinking habits and values of their predecessors, nor did they idolize the same sorts of people. They were more serious, their rules of conduct more rigid and their social activities centred more around home than local watering holes. The progress women were making in the workplace would slowly force chauvinism into hiding. The glory days of booze and broads was fading fast.
As the new decade began, Paul Rimstead was fading too. In 1980, after a quarter of a century spent charging a bottle of whiskey a day to fate's bar tab, it was payback time. In Edmonton to help out with a new mini-SUNhis employers had established, Rimstead met a big, ugly, black cloud. That February, he was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and given some prophetic words: stop drinking or die within seven years. Sobriety became his new adventure, though one he didn't embrace wholeheartedly. "If I can't live the way I did before and feel comfortable doing it," he wrote, "then I will probably start drinking again. I'd much rather live happily for a few years than hang around, bored out of my skiffer, for another 20 years." Fourteen months of boredom were all he could tolerate. Then he poured himself a glass of wine.
It didn't cure the boredom, though. For most of the eighties, with a few high points here and there, Paul was restless and unhappy. He'd enthusiastically start a book project, only to drift away from it and start something else. His quest for a quiet place to think and write usually became a quiet place to sit and drink. Rimstead once told Joanne Gordon, one of his five sisters, that he knew the Rimmer had talent but he also knew he was a guy who just couldn't get his act together. As for his Suncolumn, it had become a burden he bore for the money; his salary was bigger than that of many of his new young bosses. Sure, he still turned out a few gems from time to time, but most fell as flat as old beer.
In the past, his storytelling outweighed his unprofessional conduct, but no more.
This infuriated the new middle management at the Sun. Douglas Creighton, the former publisher who was ousted from the paper in 1992, says these managers had another problem: Rimstead had never been good with authority figures, but at least they'd been more like him in the past. These eighties people didn't appreciate his disregard for their deadlines or his insistence on minimal editing. For their part, they knew he was a Sunlegend and still a draw, so they let him be. But new cultural attitudes made it increasingly hard to tolerate Rimstead comments like: "I have never trusted a man who doesn't drink, or a woman who does," or referring to his new spouse, Myrna, who has Asian features, as "Ms. C. Hinky," or then Suneditor Barbara Amiel as "Honey Amiel." Although they made him some enemies, statements like these were embedded in his well-loved character. A managing editor once tried to move his column from its page five spot, further back into the paper, but he was soon checked by Rimstead's loyal readers. Toward the end, Peter Worthington says, "Readers knew him better, I think, than people at the paper knew him."
But what those fans saw less and less of in his later columns was Rimstead's gift as a story artist. Where he'd once delivered tales that were so simple they were extraordinary, his column subjects became dull and repetitive, relying too much on the ol' Rimmer charm, which wasn't as charming anymore. In 1985, former Suneditor John Downing had been invited to talk about writing on a local radio show. He cited Rimstead as an anomaly. Unlike most writers, Downing explained, Paul never had to struggle or reach for words, they just flowed. He could sit silently for a few minutes, then pick up the phone and dictate a wonderful column that had just been composed in his head. Writing came so easily that Rimstead took the talent for granted. If he had to work harder at it, Downing felt he may have been able to gain some self-control.
But he never did. "Dammit, I like to drink," he wrote. He'd bring a freshly poured Cointreau, "A drink to be savoured at any time of the day"along for a cab ride. Or in a bar with a friend he'd pull a yellow paint swatch from his pocket and say, "Stop me when I turn that colour." Denis Harvey remembers meeting a drunk Rimstead at The Toronto Starbar in 1986. When a concerned Harvey said, "You've got to stop this, you're going to kill yourself," the former editor of the Canadian saw Paul's temper for the first time. "If I want to kill myself, that's up to me!" Rimstead shouted.
THE END BEGAN IN MAY 1987, THE DAY after Mother's Day. The Rimsteads were in an apartment in Fort Lauderdale so Paul could take another shot at writing a book; nonfiction this time. Myrna was in their bedroom when she heard her husband call, "Hinky," from the living room. She continued talking, assuming he was having trouble finding his socks or something. "Hink, Hinky!" he yelled again, more urgently. Rushing to him, she found he'd thrown up a pool of blood and was pale and sickly. In generous Rimstead fashion, he insisted on cleaning up the mess, while she called his doctor. He also insisted on walking to the cab that would take them to the hospital.
For three weeks, Myrna prayed Paul would escape the fate predicted by his doctor seven years earlier in Edmonton, but the old sports reporter knew the game was lost. On May 26, the proclamation came true. Paul Rimstead died at age 52. Massive internal bleeding was the cause. His face, round, impish, half-smiling, graced the cover of the Sunthe next day under the headline: "A Legend Dies."
Nineteen years earlier, on the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Paul confided to a friend that he knew he'd someday take his own life. And in the end he did. Just not like Hemingway, who put a gun to his head in 1961. Would he have been able to slog on if his insides had held together for 10 more years? The new generation of Sunmanagers might have kept him on because he came with the place, like an antique roll-top desk in a lawyer's office, but they wouldn't have been happy and neither would he. He knew what his habits were, he knew what his limitations were and he knew what his talents were. He also knew that his place in the newsroom was going the way of the standard typewriter. If he'd refused to change for The Canadian Magazine in 1970, how could he be expected to change himself for today's standards. Besides, as Michael Hanlon says, "I don't think he'd want to work in today's newsroom. It's incredibly dull."
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