Didn't you use to be … Vaughn Meader

On 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, a look back at Vaughn Meader, a JFK impressionist who never again performed his act after Nov. 22, 1963.

Vaughn Meader holds a copy of his smash comedy LP, "The First Family." 

By Tom Hawthorn
The Globe and Mail
February 10, 1989

Vaughn Meader was an overnight success whose rise was made the more memorable by his rapid return to obscurity.

An unheralded singing comic from Lowell, Mass., he was performing a nightly monologue at a Greenwich Village club in the summer of 1962 when his uncanny impersonation of fellow New Englander John F. Kennedy caught the attention of a talent scout.

The scout had Mr. Meader and a troupe of actors record a parody album that poked polite fun at the foibles of the popular, young U.S. president and his family.

The album, called The First Family, was rejected by four major record labels before being accepted by Cadence Records. It was the best-selling U.S. recording to that time, more than five million copies being sold within a few months.

Its success was spurred in part by the good-humored response of the target of Mr. Meader's gentle gibes. Mr. Kennedy delighted reporters at a press conference that year when he acknowledged he had played the album.

"I have listened to Mr. Meader's record," he said with a smile. "I thought it sounded more like Teddy than me."

The singer seemed destined for a long career making light of the Kennedys. But on Nov. 22, 1963, his brand of humor went out of style.

Mr. Meader went into seclusion after the assassination. But even after purging his act of Kennedy material, he was seen only as a reminder of tragedy. A fickle public turned an overnight success into an overnight flop.

Like many of his younger compatriots, the singer spent much of the 1960s exploring North America. He lived in teepees, houseboats and log cabins.

A 1971 comedy album about a visit to Harlem by Jesus called The Second Coming proved unprophetic. Mr. Meader could not shake his reputation as an oddity from another time and the record received little attention.

His wandering ended 12 years ago, when he settled in sleepy Hallowell, Me., where he lives with his fourth wife, Sheila.

Mr. Meader, 52, plays the piano with his five-piece bluegrass band Gone Fishin'. They perform weekly at the Speakeasy bar, which he calls "the biggest new-happening joint in central Maine."

"I'm still rockin'," he says today. "Gone Fishin', that's our attitude when we all sit down to play. It's a good time, man."

Mr. Meader is considering moving toward a harder rock sound by adding a horn to his band, but he resolutely refuses to cover modern tunes.

"People request a new one, I give them a quarter and they can go play it on the jukebox," he said.

Still writing songs, he managed to pen just one last year. It's called I'm Still Rockin'.

Mr. Meader is well known among residents of Hallowell, a tourist town about three kilometres south of Augusta, the state capital. Joyce Walters, a bartender and Mr. Meader's former neighbor, said the singer is often asked by visitors about his fall from fame.

"Abbott's pretty well cool about the whole thing," she said. (Vaughn is the singer's middle name, which he used on stage.) "He won't play any Kennedy stuff, though."

For his part, Mr. Meader is content to be a major celebrity in a minor town.

"You can send a letter to me: Abbott, Hallowell, Maine, and I'll get it," he said. "If any Canadians come to Hallowell, they can walk up to the first person they meet on the street and say, 'Where can we find Abbott Meader?' They'll find me."

The barbs of The First Family are tame by today's standards, although Mr. Meader had one brush with Washington officialdom.

A Washington radio station once aired a short promotional blurb in which Mr. Meader told listeners the Kennedy clan listened to station WWDC "with great vigah." The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission was so enraged by the commercial use of a presidential impersonation that he drew it to the attention of the Kennedy White House.

By the time press secretary Pierre Salinger complained, the station's owner had ordered the plug off the air.

Mr. Meader long ago abandoned any wish to return to the big time. "That's like asking Ted Williams to play for the Dodgers," he said during last fall's World Series. "He couldn't hit the ball past first base."

Happy Jack

Legendary British Columbia labour leader Jack Munro died on Nov. 15, aged 82. Here's a 1992 profile of the blustery, profane and likeable character.

The face of Jack Munro.

By Tom Hawthorn

The Province
January 12, 1992


Jack Munro looks like a mighty ornery wrestler.

His hands are as big as hams and — at six-foot-four and 264 pounds — he matches a young fir in height and girth.

Like all rasslers, Munro's act comes with a patter. It goes something like this: "She was talking all the goddamn time, answering everybody. So I bawled her out. It was the first time we met. I didn't know I was going to marry her."

Later this month, Munro will end an era by walking away from the presidency of IWA-Canada, the largest private-sector union in B.C.

"I can't visualize waking up in the goddamn morning and not worrying about what the hell the world looks like through the eyes of the IWA," he says.

Munro, 60, has lived a life of seeming contradiction.

He is a labor leader respected by the bosses, a champion of the workers whose Ambleside home can be said to be in the working-class district of West Vancouver.

He has signed Cadillac contracts (in 1975, a 26-per-cent wage hike over two years), and he has signed dogs (in 1983, zero, four per cent, and 4.5 per cent over three years).

Even his final act is a doozy. Munro is leaving the union to become the salaried chairman of the B.C. Forestry Alliance, a lobby group financed by the same companies with which he is currently bargaining.

In his 18 years as president, the Munro Doctrine has been a staple of nightly newscasts. B.C.'s best-known labor leader has always been quick with a quip and good for a quote, which usually had to be laundered of expletives. Munro's English may be weak, but his Anglo-Saxon is strong.

The lasting image of Munro will likely be a television clip captured during one particular tense bargaining session. Jack can be seen rolling up the sleeves of his shirt before punching both fists on the table as he leans forward in full-throated yell.

Munro has a reputation for gorilla tactics.

"I remember one time when Jack really uncorked on them, read the Riot Act, called them chisellers and ordered them out of the room," retired IWA vice-president Fernie Viala recalls.

"After a few minutes, their spokesman came back. He said, 'What the hell do you mean us get out? You get out! This is our building!' "

His enemies — and there are many — figure it was all an act, that Munro spoke loudly and carried a soft stick. Jack was like a tree, they said, all bark, no bite.

"I think the employers have been happy to see him there," says longtime Munro foe Jess Succamore of the Canadian Auto Workers. "I think that speaks a lot."

The suspicions of many were confirmed in 1983. As the province teetered on the brink of a Solidarity-led general strike in opposition to a Social Credit restraint plan, Munro flew by government jet to the premier's Kelowna home — hardhat in hand — to negotiate a truce.

He got a deal, but it wasn't a written one. Premier Bill Bennett later reneged on the Kelowna accord.

"It had to be done, whether it was me or somebody else," Munro insists. "The f------ thing was falling apart before it even started. We were supposedly going to get our guys out of logging and the f------ mills to support the teachers, who were already going back to work."

He regained some of his blue-collar credibility three years later, when he led the costliest strike in provincial history, a $2.5-billion, 18-week-long walkout.

That dispute nearly ended his friendship with Keith Bennett, the smooth-talking company negotiator from Forest Industrial Relations. The two men, who still share a hotline telephone between their offices, were renowned for smoothing wrinkles on their own over drinks.

"He's a tough bargainer," Bennett says. "He prepares himself, does his homework, flies off the handle on a regular basis, but does it with a sense of humor."

In 1987, the Canadian arm of the International Woodworkers of America split from the union, and, for the most part, Munro's job was done.

John James Munro was born in Lethbridge, Alta., in 1931, the eldest of two children born to Scottish immigrants. The Munros lived on a farm in Seven Persons, Alta., until his father, Jim, a butcher, was sent to a tuberculosis sanitorium in Calgary.

The rest of the family then moved to a relief farm — "a godforsaken hole," Munro recalled in his autobiography, "Union Jack."

"You were really subject to the f------ whims of the establishment," Munro says today. "I guess that's where you get things inside of you that develop into what you really are."

His father died when Jack was 11.

No scholar, Munro only got as far as Grade 10.

In old family snapshots, six-year-old Jack flashes the grin of a devilish scamp. He would grow up to be a handsome young man with wavy, jet-black hair and an all-business stare.

The years have not been kind to Munro, whose daily regimen once included three packs of Sportsman cigarettes, a 26-ouncer of Canadian Club, and burned steak.

Today, his face is meaty, his complexion florid. The lower lip hangs loose to reveal a row of teeth crooked as graveyard headstones. His hairline looks as if it's been clear-cut. The whole package is bracketed by bushy Charley Pride sideburns.

After Kelowna, poet Tom Wayman expressed his feelings of betrayal in a work titled, "The Face of Jack Munro." It was a face, Wayman wrote, "puffy with greed and fright and satisfaction."

Munro's feuds with the pulp unions are legendary. He accuses them of always waiting for the IWA to settle, so they can piggyback better agreements. He calls them "cake-eaters." And he does not understand why pulp unions don't defend tree-choppers from tree-huggers.

"The pulp unions never seem to support anything outside the pulp-mill fence," he says. "So, if there's no logging, I don't know how the hell they expect to get the goddamn pulp mills to run."

Of one pulp rival, he once said: "I can't stand the cheerless son-of-a-bitch." The feeling is mutual.

"If I commented, it would be entirely negative," says Norm MacLellan, national vice-president of the Canadian Paperworkers Union.

While he was always backed by the bulk of his members, Munro has been accused by Will Offley, an IWA steward, of treachery and of feathering his nest with lucrative government appointments. The IWA under Munro, Offley once wrote, was like the Soviet Union under Brezhnev.

A machinist by trade, Munro got an exemption from picket duty in 1950 during his first strike because he was also working on a farm.

Munro's first marriage, troubled from the start, lasted 18 years and produced three sons, Terry, Dale, and Scotty, who died in a traffic accident at age 13.

In 1966, he ran for the New Democratic Party in Nelson-Creston against Wesley Black, who was premier W.A.C. Bennett's right-hand man. One campaign stop brought him to an afternoon tea. "All these old girls and I can't swear," he sighed. Black whipped him.

Munro turned down an offer from prime minister John Turner to run as a Liberal in 1984, although he later said he was flattered by the overture.

In recent years, even as his membership shrank from technological change in the industry, Munro trained his sights on environmentalists and their pet causes. After encouraging his members to shoot spotted owls on sight, his office was flooded with stuffed owls and owl photos.

"Relaxing is a problem," admits Munro, who used to unbend by bending his elbow. He no longer drinks.

Munro owns a blue Harley-Davidson Classic touring bike ("I've touched 150 klicks, which is 100 miles an hour, but, f---, that's really f-----' dustin' 'er and I'm getting old and chickens---"), but spends more time aboard the 10-metre (33-foot) Green Gold V moored in Eagle Harbor.

He had to sell a battered but beloved '48 Mercury pickup truck because he owned so many vehicles "you needed a parking-lot attendant around on weekends."

Munro and his second wife, Connie, a lawyer with the Workers Compensation Board, recently bought a condominium at Secret Cove.

He does not like the thought of retirement.

"Wandering around the streets looking for someone to have a cup of coffee with?" he says, grimacing. "I can't do that."

Why Jack quit @#%&*! drinking

Jack Munro, the larger-than-life president of IWA-Canada, is tossing in the towel.

In 18 years as president, he became renowned for his goddamn abusive language. He also built quite a reputation for abusing the bottle.

In an interview to mark his pending retirement from the union, he told Staff Reporter Tom Hawthorn about the boozy doozy that persuaded him to sober up.

"I hit a @#%&*! curb on the way home. So [the tire] went flat. I thought, @#%&*! it, I'm gonna get caught, I may as well keep @#%&*! driving. Christ, I got home!

"I thought, I shouldn't park in the driveway behind the boss's car, because she leaves pretty early in the morning. So I parked in front of the house. I was p-----.

"When I turned around, this @#%&*! tire came off the @#%&*! car in the @#%&*! driveway. The next morning she got up to get to work.

"I pretended I was asleep until she got up and @#%&*! off.

"As soon as she @#%&*! off I had to go to @#%&*! work, so I was peeking out the @#%&*! window to see if she'd @#%&*! off.

"I was looking and here was this @#%&*! tire in the middle of the @#%&*! driveway. She threw that sonovabitch across that front- @#%&*!-lawn like Jesus Christ and my @#%&*! car was sitting on the @#%&*! rim.

"@#%&*! lucky. I had to quit drinking. @#%&*! hell, I would have killed myself or somebody else."

Veterans come from all generations

Myles Mansell, KIA (1980-2006)

By Tom Hawthorn

Boulevard Magazine

November, 2013

On Remembrance Day, the old men stand again in pressed uniforms, medals gleaming in the mid-morning sun. They snap sharp salutes, aged muscles repeating what was once so long ago part of daily routine.

The aged warriors gather at the cenotaph on the Legislative Grounds and at the war memorial in Oak Bay. The annual ritual is comforting in its familiarity — the raising of the flag, the placing of wreaths, the bugle sounding “Last Post” and “Reveille,” as though each lonesome note was calling to mind a fallen comrade.

The old men wipe tears, though if you ask them about it they will cite the wind, or a speck of dust. Their generation remains uneasy about speaking of loss.

It is natural to think only of the old-timers on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. We are such a great distance from the Great War, whose horrors were ignited a century ago, less a year. The Second World War ended 68 years ago, and the war in Korea, whose veterans never received the attention they deserved, ground to a stalemate 60 years ago.

The veterans of the First World War are all gone, the last Canadian among them, Jack Babcock, having died three years ago, aged 109. The Second World War vets are in their 80s now, so each passing year the soldiers at the ceremonies seem that much older.

They cry silently for lost friends and brothers, and it is easy to forget how young they all were at the time.

Our war dead are not all from a generation ago. We have lost peacekeepers and, more recently, we have lost 154 members of the Canadian Forces (as well as a diplomat, a reporter and two aid workers) in action in Afghanistan.

On Remembrance Day, my thoughts turn to Myles Stanley John Mansell, a bombardier killed with three comrades in 2006 when his lightly-armoured vehicle struck a roadside bomb on a dusty road outside Gumbad. He was 25.

He died with men named Turner and Dinning and Payne. Even in their sharp grief, the Mansell family sent notes of condolence to the other families.

He had been born a few months after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the beginning of a war whose outcome is still not settled. The boy, known as Smiley Myley, played soccer and lacrosse in the Victoria suburbs, but disliked swimming despite having sailors in the family. Myles came home once in tears because the teacher had said kilometres were replacing miles and he thought he'd have to change his name, too.

As a young man, he worked in the family business and joined the reservists of the 5th (British Columbia) Field Regiment, firing cannons at Ford Rodd Hill on Canada Day and at the Legislature to greet a new lieutenant-governor. When Canada agreed to fight the Taliban, Mansell volunteered for service. He was not an expert on the subject, but thought the people of Afghanistan deserved the same life and freedoms he enjoyed in Canada.

If you go to the Veteran's Cemetery off Colville Road in Esquimalt, you will find a small chapel surrounded by a squat stone fence. This is known as God's Acre, a tidy garden of grave markers. Only songbirds interrupt the silence. You will find a granite marker on which has been etched Mansell's name, rank, serial number, regiment, date of death, and age. Forever 25. He rests between plots holding his maternal grandparents and great grandparents, the men having served in the Royal Canadian Navy.

In Langford, a leafy cul-de-sac was the scene of an impressive display two years ago. A pair of 105mm howitzers flanked the entrance to the street. Artillery shells lined the roadway. A bugler played, as did a bagpiper, while a military padre intoned a prayer.

Of the 200 in attendance, only one wore a Memorial Cross. She was Nancy Mansell and it was her son after whom the quiet suburban street was being named. It was a modest gesture for so grave a sacrifice, but it meant more than one could image to a mother who wore her son's name on a medal no one ever wishes to receive.

“It's important for us to know that others think of Myles. And remember Myles. We don't want him to be forgotten,” she told me then. A mother contemplated what it would mean if her son was not remembered by name. “Just a number.” She need say no more.