Paper Trail

Eric Reguly, the Globe and Mail’s European bureau chief since 2014, grew up in a newspapering family. So did I. Our fathers had the good fortune to work in print journalism during its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s, when papers turned a handsome profit and newsrooms teemed with reporters, most of them male and the best of them whip-smart and hyper-competitive.

My father worked on the nuts-and-bolts side of newspapering, as the publisher of small-market dailies in southern Ontario. He was good at his job but harboured a barely concealed jealousy of the reporters he employed. They had all the fun, got all the glory. The Graflex Speed Graphic press camera he kept in the family car bore witness to his hankering to get in on the action.

It was in the pages of the Toronto Star that my father’s spurned inner newshound found solace. Every evening after dinner, he would crack open the paper and read every word of it — as if it were a reward for his day...