Mabel O’Brien was the best teacher I ever had, and I’d made her angry. This being back when teachers could really discipline pupils, I knew there was punishment in the offing, but she just stood there with her hands on her hips glowering at me. I finally mustered enough nerve to ask, “What’s going to happen to me?” She replied, “I can’t decide right now; I’ll have to wait until I get over being mad at you.” Mabel’s wisdom included knowing that decisions shouldn’t be made based on how angry we are.
I asked my always-cheerful colleague, Dick Cappon, what the secret of his cheerfulness was. He replied, “Every morning when I get up, I pretend there’s a clothes rack of characteristics at the side of my bed, any one of which I can choose to wear that day. I always pick a positive attitude.”
When I was about eighteen I was working with Brian Williams, a young man with a common name but whose character was anything but common. Brian, from Liverpool, England, was a relatively new driver with a relatively old car. One winter day we were inching down a slippery hill in an isolated area just east of Toronto when he lost control and skidded into a car parked on the shoulder of the road. There was no damage to Brian’s car, but the door on the driver’s side of the other car was badly dented. The car he hit was the only one in sight and there wasn’t a person to be seen anywhere. No house was close enough to the road for anyone to be able to read a license number. Even so, Brian left a note with his name and telephone number on it; an example of outstanding character that I’ve obviously never forgotten.
I had never recorded a radio commercial, and yet there I was in a studio about to record five of them. I did the first one, and the producer told me to keep going. I did the second one and he told me it was fine, and so on until all five were recorded. Then he played the first one back for me and it was obvious I hadn’t done a very good job.He said, “Let’s do this one again.” When I asked him why he didn’t have me re-do it right away he explained, “Had I done that we’d probably be re-doing all five of them now, not just one.”
As a teenager working for the CPR in Toronto I shared an office for a month or so with a middle-aged man named Slim. Slim was the crankiest, most ill-tempered, fault-finding person I’ve ever encountered. Yet every morning Frank would come into our office and chat with him for a couple of minutes. One day I followed Frank out of the office and asked him why he bothered. He replied, “I like to start my day listening to Slim whine and complain for a little while because from then on my day will only get better.”