Writing is my favourite pastime. I’ve written over 400 newspaper columns and articles, more than 500 blogs, and have had sixteen books published, some in five languages (English, French, Chinese, Portuguese and Czechoslovak). And it all began with a twenty-five-dollar bet.
In 1971, while serving on the public relations committee of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario, I befriended their PR manager, Dave Scott, a former Globe and Mail reporter. One day Dave and I were having a friendly argument about writing. I said that writing fiction is an art with which people had to be born, whereas non-fiction writing is a skill that could be learned. Dave’s position was that although the quality of writing could be enhanced by honing skills, all writing was art.
I bet Dave twenty-five dollars that within a year I could develop sufficient non-fiction writing skills to have an article published in his beloved Globe and Mail. Dave took the bet, and I started to look for non-fiction writing courses. The only ones I could find were parts of full-time journalism programs, which were of no use to me.
Then one day while riding the subway I noticed a full-page ad on the back of a comic book a kid sitting across from me was reading. It was an ad for a correspondence course in writing from an organization called Famous Writers School. When I got off the train I went straight to the comic book section of the station’s newsstand. It probably looked odd to see a businessman in a three-piece suit, briefcase by his side, looking at the back of every comic book in the rack.
I had checked out most of them before I found the ad. Because it emphasized the course covered both fiction and non-fiction writing, it seemed to be exactly what I wanted. The course consisted of a number of text books, each accompanied by an assignment to be evaluated by a panel of well-known writers. Bennett Cerf, a co-founder of the publishing firm Random House, was on the panel, which was good enough for me. I bought the comic book and enrolled.
The texts contained examples of superb writing augmented with practical tips, and the assignment critiques were enormously instructive. After completing the course, which took about six months, I was ready to submit an article to the Globe and Mail.
I wrote one about a card game called “Forty-five,” which is very popular in the Maritimes. The Globe liked it, titled it “Count the Cards” and ran it on the op-ed page. (It’s reproduced below.) I received fifty dollars from the Globe and twenty-five dollars from Dave.
Flush with this success, I carried a stopwatch for a couple of weeks and kept track of time wasted through no fault of my own, such as being kept on hold on the telephone, waiting for elevators, waiting for subways and street cars, being stopped at red lights, and watching TV commercials. I turned the results into another article. The Globe titled this one “Time’s A-Wasting,” and sent me another fifty dollars.
The day this column appeared I received a call from Martin Goodman, the managing editor of The Toronto Star. He said he enjoyed both columns and asked if I had a deal with the Globe. I told him I didn’t. He said he’d like me to become a regular columnist for the Star, writing three light-hearted columns a month which he’d run on the op-ed page and pay me seventy-five dollars per column. I joyfully accepted.
I wrote the Star column for about two years, giving it up when I began writing a weekly financial column for the Financial Times, which I did for about five years. I also wrote articles for Executive Magazine and The Financial Post. After I retired in 2003 I began writing a weekly executive coaching column, again for the Star, but after a few months they decided to drop freelance writers.
There are three highlights of my columnist years. The first was when Martin Goodman informed me that one of my Star columns had elicited a record number of letters – all negative. I’d written a spoof column about hunting in which I said, “anyone who gets shot being mistaken for a moose is probably better off dead anyway.” The second was winning a national business writing award. The third was when Reader’s Digest asked me to write an income tax article for them.
Here is that first article, “Count The Cards.”
What Canadian game inspires sweet little old ladies and clergymen to unabashedly cheat, can last for hours or 90 seconds, and thrills and enrages players from nine to 90? It’s “Forty-five,” and unless you’re from the Maritimes you’ve probably never heard of it. You don’t know what you’re missing.
Hoyle calls it “Spoil Five” and states the requirements for a game to be 2 to 6 people and a deck of 52 cards. But every Maritimer knows that the requirements really are: a deck of 52 cards, more or less, a supply of nickels, 2 to 8 people and (more about this later) a very sturdy table.
I’ll never forget the 11-year-old farm girl in Morell, PEI, explaining the game to a bewildered American tourist who was about to be separated from a supply of nickels. “It’s easy,” she enthused, “the five of trumps is the best card, the jack of trumps is next, the ace of hearts is always the third best and the ace of trumps next.” She paused for breath as she skilfully riffled the deck, then continued, “from the 10 down in black, low cards beat high and in red high beats low. OK?”
She dealt two hands of five cards each and turned one card up on top of the remaining deck. The cards are dealt in two rounds: three cards to each player and then two. The turn-up determines the trump suit.
The girl took up the explanation again, “You don’t have to follow suit if you trump; if you don’t trump you have to follow suit if you can; you can hold off a trump if it’s the five, jack, or ace of hearts but you can’t hold the ace off the five or jack, or the jack off the five.” The tourist offered to give the little girl a quarter to forget the whole thing.
The rules seem complicated, but most Maritimers know them by heart before the age of ten. However, what really makes the game so intriguing is how it’s played.
Games of Forty-five are sometimes planned, but the best often take place 15 minutes before supper or five minutes before leaving for somewhere.
There are traditions. The five or jack of trumps is always played with a house-shaking smash of your fist on the table. Frail, octogenarian ladies have been known to rattle the dishes next door when slamming the five of trumps (always worth 10 points) down on an opponent’s jack.
And everybody cheats. The strange thing about cheating in a game of Forty-five is its acceptance. If you’re skilled enough to do it with infrequent detection, you’re looked upon with respect. As alluded to earlier, I’ve seen clergymen cheat.
One time, while holidaying in Morell,, I was embroiled in a wild, dish-rattling, table-thumping game which had been going on non-stop for hours. A late-arriving kibitzer noticed a card on the floor and called it to our attention. “Wait a minute,” I yelled – you always yell in a game of Forty-five–“let’s count the cards.” The Islanders (which included an elderly matron and a Minister of the Crown) fixed me with a stare reserved for former Maritimers now living in Toronto, but they let me count.
The deck had 49 cards and I was down 75 cents.