GHOSH o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-03-27 published
Pat PATTERSON,
Broadcaster And Writer (1921-2005)
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation pioneer hosted Trans-Canada
Matinee, launched Polka Dot Door and wrote umpteen documentaries,
plays and musicals but always turned down accolades
By Sabitri
GHOSH,
Special to The Globe and Mail, Page S9
Kingston -- Even in the form of a disembodied voice, Pat
PATTERSON
turned heads. Her firm yet supple contralto, one Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation listener wrote, was "the most beautiful speaking
voice" she had ever heard. Furthermore, said the fan letter,
Ms. PATTERSON's show Trans-Canada Matinee "has helped me raise
my children, kept me informed on world affairs, and acquainted
me with the little but interesting people in the world -- and
always with a chuckle." Added the Sturgeon Falls, Ontario, writer:
"Your audience has always felt that Matinee was you, Pat."
For Ms. PATTERSON, there was no higher compliment. As striking
in person as her radio voice insinuated, the prolific broadcaster,
author and composer wanted her work to speak for her; she was
merely the transmitter. "She was very retiring and very unassuming,"
said her partner, Sheila
GILBERT. "
Her attitude was, 'I don't
want anything. No fuss, no muss.' "
In later years, she recoiled from public attention, even failing
to show up at the 1986 Gemini Awards to pick up the John Drainie
Award for lifetime achievement in broadcasting. Orphaned amid
the festivities, the plaque was eventually retrieved from a garbage
bin (so the story goes) and delivered in private.
The lifetime it celebrated was rarely discussed by Ms.
PATTERSON.
All she would reveal of her early years was her birthplace, Victoria,
and the fact she earned a licentiate in voice and violin. A precocious
only child, she co-wrote her high school's anthem with next-door
neighbour Lucy
BERTON, a sister of writer-historian Pierre
BERTON.
At 21, she joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and drove ambulances
in Britain for the Red Cross. Returning to Canada in 1944, she
moved to Toronto, where she hoped to have a career in advertising.
An agency man referred her to a friend, who referred her to another
friend who worked at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. There,
she landed jobs in the record library and continuity department.
"It was strictly the understudy in the wings department," Ms.
PATTERSON
told Peter
GZOWSKI on a Morningside interview in 1986. "An announcer
by the name of Frank Herbert was doing an afternoon concert hour,
and I planned that program -- I planned the music and so on.
One day, he was ill, and no one could be found to take his place.
And the boss said, would I like to try it? So I did. And that
was it: I was hooked."
In 1948, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation gave Ms.
PATTERSON
her own nationwide show, Pat's Music Room, half an hour of her
diverse musical selections. She also lent her voice, programming
skills and writing talents to a host of other network enterprises,
prompting one columnist to dub her a "Jill of all trades."
When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation joined the television
revolution in 1952, the poised and telegenic Ms.
PATTERSON led
the charge. She often served as a pitchwoman for live-to-air
commercials; writer June
CALLWOOD remembered seeing her in one
for electric stoves, "the kind that she just stands there and
says she just loves her stove."
As Ms. PATTERSON's reputation grew, Ms.
CALLWOOD's husband, Trent
FRAYNE, was sent to interview her for Chatelaine. "You two would
be great Friends," he told his wife. When the women met through
a mutual friend, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Dorothy
(Dodi) ROBB, they did indeed get along famously.
"We had the same sense of humour and the same ethics about behaviour
she was a little more Victorian than I was, but we were both
very proper women," Ms.
CALLWOOD said.
When the still-single Ms.
PATTERSON became pregnant and decided
to raise her child herself, she turned to Ms. Callwood for support.
"That was very unusual, to keep a baby in those days," Ms. Callwood
said. "What people did was hide out and give the baby up for
adoption, but she was not going to do that. At the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation, which was more broad-minded than most places, it
was still a bit of a shocker."
Through resourceful time management and the help of close Friends,
Ms. PATTERSON managed to rear her son, David, while working on
three radio and two television shows at the same time. It was
a remarkable feat that she divulged to no one but the most trusted
of intimates.
She found sanctuary, as well as creative satisfaction, in her
profession. "You sit in that booth and you are quite private,"
said fellow Canadian Broadcasting Corporation employee Liz
FAWKES,
who befriended the older woman and later babysat her son.
In the pinnacle of her Canadian Broadcasting Corporation career,
Ms. PATTERSON was chosen to host Trans-Canada Matinee in 1961.
Aimed at a daytime audience of women -- even as that audience's
perceptions of itself and its role were shifting -- the public-affairs
program offered interviews with the likes of W.H. Auden, George
Balanchine, and Laurence Olivier.
"If and when women achieve that mythical status they keep fussing
about, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Matinee should deserve
some of the credit," wrote Toronto Telegram columnist DuBarry
CAMPEAU in 1968. "It is lively and literate and any woman or
man listening to it will be both entertained and informed."
Though upset by the abrupt cancellation of Matinee in 1971, Ms.
PATTERSON
smoothly segued into children's entertainment, arguably the love
of her professional life. In the 1950s and '60s, she had collaborated
with Ms. ROBB on a children's musical fantasy, an after-school
television program, and three children's musicals. Now, the partners
set to work on a new children's program, The Polka Dot Door.
Besides composing the buoyant theme song -- still hummed on schoolyards
and playgrounds across Canada -- Ms.
PATTERSON also co-wrote
the first 60 shows. "She had a sense of play, she had a sense
of fun," said Ms.
CALLWOOD, citing these as the cues for Ms.
PATTERSON's
approach to writing for children.
In a 1973 interview, Ms.
PATTERSON also spoke of her strong sense
of responsibility. "I think we're so conditioned, so tuned into
the fact we're writing for children, we have to take care." She
wanted her plays and programs to act as "good influences," she
said, "if not in a moral sense, at least in a getting-along sense."
Ms. PATTERSON's words and music were behind many of the most
durable children's shows of the 1970s and '80s, including numerous
Sharon, Lois and Bram specials and Fred Penner's Place. She also
developed and hosted short-run Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
radio series, and wrote plays and documentaries for radio and
television. Her proudest achievement -- a docudrama on the life
of landscape painter and war artist David Milne, A Path of His
Own, which she also narrated -- won seven Canadian Film and Television
Awards in 1980.
A scrupulous craftswoman, she was a critic of her own work, too.
In a 1990 letter, she asked the editors of The Encyclopedia of
Music in Canada to drop all references to her musical Henry Green
and the Mighty Machine, "as it had a very brief life, while the
three musicals previously mentioned have continued to get productions
after more than 20 years."
But real life allowed no such revisions. In the late 1980s, Ms.
PATTERSON
had a permanent falling-out with Ms.
ROBB, which affected her
personally as well as professionally. Even more devastating was
her son's death in 1994 from cancer. "That was a disaster," said
Ms. FAWKES. "
You don't want your children to go before you."
Pat PATTERSON was born in Victoria on December 4, 1921, and died
in Toronto on December 19, 2005, of cancer. She was 84. She leaves
her partner, Sheila
GILBERT.
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