Former Sun editor named to Order

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/07/2023 (1069 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When former Brandon Sun managing editor Charles Gordon found out a few weeks ago that he was going to be made a member of the Order of Canada, it was totally unexpected.

Gordon, who worked for the Sun from 1964 to 1974 before moving to the Ottawa Citizen, was one of 85 people Rideau Hall announced last week would be invested into or promoted within the order.

“I didn’t know that I’d been nominated,” Gordon told the Sun by phone from Ottawa on Wednesday. “So I was quite surprised. Pleased, obviously, but it wasn’t like I was spending my days saying, ‘I wonder when I’m going to get the Order of Canada.’”

When Gordon was hired at the Sun, he was in the process of finishing a degree at Queen’s University.

He’d never worked in the news industry before and had applied first for a position at the Kingston Whig-Standard. That application wasn’t successful, but someone at the Whig-Standard knew someone at the Sun who had told them the Brandon paper had just lost an editorial page editor.

Out of the blue, Gordon received a letter inquiring if he was interested in interviewing for a position.

From there, he arranged a dinner meeting with then-owner and publisher Lew Whitehead in Montreal. Whitehead offered to fly Gordon out to Brandon at the company’s expense to try working at the Sun for a week.

With his father originally coming from Winnipeg, Gordon took a chance to explore another corner of Manitoba.

On the day he arrived in Brandon, Gordon walked into the Sun’s old building on 10th Street and saw a flurry of activity as reporters worked to get the final score of a World Series game for the paper’s final edition of the day going out at 3 p.m.

“It was all this kind of newsroom stuff,” he said. “It just seemed really romantic to me. And I really liked it.”

Being the editorial page editor meant not just assembling layouts, but writing editorials as well. After assembling a page in his early weeks at the Sun, he would send them to the composing room two or three floors lower in the building using a dumbwaiter.

Just a few weeks into his tenure, the Sun moved into a building at 501 Rosser Ave., which served as the paper’s home until 2022.

In 1969, Gordon was made the paper’s managing editor, a position he held until he departed in 1974.

The chance to work for the Ottawa Citizen was appealing because both his parents lived in Ottawa and were getting older, but it was a tough decision to leave the city where he had gotten married and his children were born.

At the Ottawa Citizen, Gordon wrote editorials for a couple of years before a brief stint as city desk editor. When that didn’t work out, he was given a column.

Apart from a one-year leave of absence in the 1980s to help produce a short-lived television show based on his first novel, “The Governor General’s Bunny Hop,” for the CBC, Gordon worked for the Citizen as a columnist, feature writer and editor of a couple of different sections until his retirement in 2005.

Gordon’s columns often had a humorous bent dating back to his time at the Sun. Three of his satirical books received nominations for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.

For a while after retiring, Gordon wrote freelance columns for the now-defunct Metro daily free newspaper chain. Though he hasn’t published anything recently, he said he has been working on a seventh book.

Otherwise, his retirement has been spent enjoying playing tennis and golf as well as volunteering in Ottawa’s jazz scene.

After decades in the news industry, he said he has seen it change for both the worse and the better.

When it comes to ethics, he said standards are higher than in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when journalists were too willing to accept freebies and get too cosy with politicians.

On the other hand, the economic situation for a lot of newspapers is worse, with frequent closures and layoffs. It also seems to him that the tone of public debate has become more acrimonious over the years.

“I think it makes it difficult for people to do courageous journalism these days when you have this kind of an environment,” he said.

Brandon University gave Gordon an honorary doctorate in 1994, 20 years after it bestowed a similar honour on his father, J. King Gordon. Gordon’s father was also appointed to the Order of Canada in 1977.

“I guess it makes me take them a little bit more seriously,” he said of receiving the same honours. “It would be nice if he was around and we could have a chat about it.”

» cslark@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @ColinSlark