Charlie Camilleri, football player and record executive (1923-2011)

Charlie Camilleri befriended Tony Bennett and many other artists in the CBS Records stable.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
January 16, 2012

Charlie Camilleri romped with Ronnie Hawkins, sang along with Mitch Miller, got rhythm with Johnny Cash.

Camilleri, who has died, aged 88, spent 30 years with CBS Records in Canada, proving so adept at promoting artists that many professional relationships became personal.

He befriended a roster of performers reflecting the record label’s vast stable. Pop singer Bobby Vinton, country singer Ricky Skaggs and jazzman Wynton Marsalis all made a point when in Toronto of seeking out Camilleri. He got along famously with members of the group Chicago, as he did also with the groups Boston and Kansas.

Camilleri often found common ground with the artists by talking sports. Once, while tossing a football to Jimmy Dean, he unwittingly sent the country singer tumbling backwards into a fountain.

Camilleri had a fireplug physique, so it undoubtedly surprised many to learn he had once been a professional athlete, winning two Grey Cup football championships with the Toronto Argonauts. He also won a national title as a slugging softball player.

With Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) in 1963.

He was born in Toronto on April 3, 1923, to Mary and Joseph Camilleri, immigrants from Malta, who named their third son Charles Emmanuel. His father and older brothers Michael and Vincent worked as labourers at a Dominion Tar and Chemical Co. (later Domtar) plant in Toronto.

After studying at Parkdale Collegiate, Camilleri enlisted in the wartime army, soon after moving to the Royal Canadian Navy. He served in the radar room aboard HMCS Gatineau, a destroyer that escorted convoys in the Atlantic. On one mission, a torpedo fired by a German U-boat narrowly missed the warship.

“One thing I can tell people is that it makes a man out of a boy in a hell of a hurry,” he told the Toronto Star six years ago.

While stationed at HMCS York in Toronto, Camilleri played for the navy football team coached by Teddy Morris, who had been an all-star running back and flying wing with the Toronto Argonauts.

After the war, Morris became head coach of the Argonauts and Camilleri earned a spot on the roster for the 1946 campaign. He stuck with the Big Four club for three seasons, winning the Grey Cup alongside the likes of star players Royal Copeland and Joe Krol.

The Ottawa Citizen judged Camilleri to be a “clever little quarterback” who was “a smart performer and a good team handler.”

The backup pivot, who carried the nicknames Red and Chick, also played as a back, catching a key pass from Krol in the 1946 Grey Cup game, a 28-6 victory over the Winnipeg Blue Bombers,

At only 145 pounds, Camilleri proved susceptible to injury in the hard-hitting Big Four, a precursor to the Canadian Football League. He suffered a separated shoulder in 1946 and a fractured pelvis in 1947.

In summer, Camilleri patrolled right-field for a fast-pitch softball team sponsored by People’s Credit Jewellers. The Toronto team claimed the Dominion championship in 1951 by sweeping the Vancouver Girodays 2-0, 2-1, and 17-1 in a three-game series played at Calgary.

After retiring from the gridiron and the softball diamond, he took a position with the federal government aiding fellow veterans. In 1958, he joined Columbia Records of Canada (later CBS Canada), eventually becoming national promotions director before being named national director of artist development in 1977. He retired in 1988 as a vice-president.

One of his odder responsibilities included promoting a long-playing record featuring a brash, young American boxer named Cassius Clay, soon to change his name to Muhammad Ali. The 1963 album featured the pugilist’s spoken-word recitations backed by music. The disk was called “I Am the Greatest!” Considering the performer, the title carried with it not a hint of irony.

Camilleri was an indefatigable promoter, earning a reputation as a stalwart defender of country music even as rock became the dominant genre. He successfully encouraged concert promoters seeking a rock audience to bill harder-edged acts with crossover potential such as Charlie Daniels and Larry Gatlin.

After the singer and keyboardist Burton Cummings left the Guess Who, Camilleri flew across Canada armed with boxes of a debut solo single to ensure Cummings got radio airplay. “Stand Tall” became a Top-10 hit in both Canada and the United States.

A sampling of the list of performers whom he met includes Heart, Donovan, Tom Jones, Tony Bennett, Roy Orbison, Carlos Santana, Lou Rawls, Andy Williams, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, Willie Nelson, Blue Oyster Cult, and Bob Dylan. Camilleri also attended the Canadian debut concert of Bruce Springsteen on Dec. 21, 1975, at a field house at Seneca College in Toronto. About 3,100 tickets were sold to the gymnasium show, though those who claim to have attended now number in the tens of thousands. (The performance got panned by the Globe’s critic, whose review declared “Bruce Springsteen is not god” before concluding with the suggestion the rocker was “really just a one-man Sha Na Na.”)

A suit-and-tie man, Camilleri was a mature presence on the pop music scene. One of the young radio station music directors who heard his pitches recalls him “looking more like a bank manager than a record rep.” The executive dressed in looser styles when attending concerts, including wearing a Hawaiian shirt while promoting Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.

With his music connections, he was sometimes mistaken for Charles Camilleri, a world-famous accordionist regarded as Malta’s national composer, who also lived for a time in Toronto. The men were not directly related.

Even in retirement, the executive remained an active supporter of such charities as the Variety Club of Canada and the Tony Stacey Centre for Veterans Care.

A prominent member of the Argos alumni group, he took special responsibility for assuring his old teammate Joe (King) Krol, a shy and modest man, received the accolades due him. On Krol’s death at age 89 in 2008, Camilleri pronounced him “the greatest Argo ever.”

The players from those great post-war Argos teams were so poorly paid they took as their reward the honour of knowing they were the best in the land.

“We played for a box of beer,” Camilleri once said, “and got our brains beat up.”

Camilleri died of congestive heart failure on Dec. 23. He leaves his wife, the former Margaret (Peggy) Larsen, whom he had met while she worked on the order desk at the record label; sons Ron, a former record-company executive who now performs an Elton John tribute, and Rick, a former president of Sony Music Entertainment (Canada); and, a grandson, Spencer. A celebration of his life is to be held at 2 p.m. on Jan. 28 at the Royal Canadian Legion at 150 8th Street in Mississauga, Ont.

Charlie Camilleri (No. 73) won two Grey Cups with the Toronto Argonauts after serving in the navy in the Second World War. 

Fergie Jenkins completes his longest road trip

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
March 1, 2011

VICTORIA

Ferguson Jenkins gripped a baseball in his left hand before signing his name in tight script. He added the notation, “HOF 91.”

Twenty seasons have passed since he was named to the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y., the only Canadian so far to have entered the pantheon of baseball immortals.

At 68, he has known his share of honours, having won a Cy Young Award as a pitcher and an Order of Canada for his athletic prowess and community works. Now he has one more — he is depicted on a Canadian postage stamp.

Mr. Jenkins completed a month-long, cross-Canada tour on Saturday, an odyssey that was surely the longest road trip of his career. He made 41 appearances in 23 cities in nine provinces. The audiences ranged from 867 at a junior hockey game in Summerside, P.E.I., to 600 at an event in his hometown of Chatham, Ont., to the 40 who attended a brief talk and autograph session at the Gordon Head Recreational Centre in suburban Victoria.

He signed baseballs and sold paraphernalia to benefit his eponymous charitable foundation. The son of a Barbadian immigrant father and a mother whose family came to this land along the Underground Railroad as escaped slaves, Canada’s greatest ballplayer has been placed on a postage stamp to mark Black History Month.

Ferguson Jenkins in Victoria.

His reception in Victoria was considerably warmer than that afforded the pitcher early in his career as a professional.

His introduction to segregation — to Jim Crow laws — came during his first spring training in Florida in 1962.

“We didn’t eat in the restaurants, couldn’t stay in the same hotels,” he said.

At Miami Beach, black players were barred from enjoying the sands for which the town got its name. The restriction did not bother him.

“I didn’t need a tan,” he quipped, “so why go to the beach?”

He was aged 20 when assigned to the Arkansas Travelers, a minor-league team based in Little Rock. Only six years earlier, an angry mob of violent whites confronted nine black students seeking to attend Central High School.

Those same elements did not welcome black athletes. On Opening Day in 1963, white supremacists picketed the ballpark with signs reading, “Don’t Negro-ize baseball.” Other signs included foul epithets.

“At the airport,” Mr. Jenkins remembered, “there were a couple of banners that said, ‘We don’t want black players.’ ”

Only those banners did not use the word black.

“It was a shock at the beginning. But I’d read about it in the paper, so I was used to it. We knew it was going to happen. They told four of us in spring training that we were going to Little Rock and could we handle the pressure.”

He was joined in integrating Arkansas baseball by the slugging Dick Allen, of Wampum, Penn., and fellow pitchers Marcelino Lopez, a Cuban, and Richard Quiroz, a Panamanian.

“The pressure was not on the field,” he said. “It was off the field.”

The “idiots” responsible for the banners became less obvious once the team began winning. “They embraced us after awhile,” he said.

(The Travelers also included another British Columbian on the roster in Gerry Reimer, whose son, Kevin, would spend six seasons in the majors.)

Mr. Jenkins survived the test and graduated to spend 19 seasons in the major leagues, most notably with the Chicago Cubs. He won 20 games or more in seven seasons, earning a reputation for pinpoint control.

In Victoria, Mr. Jenkins was introduced by Doug Hudlin, 88, a longtime umpire who was the first non-American invited to work a Little League World Series game at Williamsport, Penn.

Mr. Hudlin, a descendent of the Alexander family, pioneer settlers on the Saanich peninsula, remembers when black residents of Victoria could not freely attend events in the city. Dance halls were barred to blacks, as were some hotels.

His father worked as a shoeshine man in the basement of the Empress Hotel. He was not permitted to pass through the lobby.

Like others, Mr. Hudlin found on the baseball diamond a place where the only colour that mattered was the one on his uniform.

“Everything was baseball,” he said, “once you were on the field.”