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an intervention by my mother played a hand in my professional fate. Mom was cruising for taxi fares down at the docks one day when a yacht anchored out in the harbour. A small tender made for shore and delivered Bing Crosby and his inseparable buddy, Phil Harris, to the wharf. Crosby was perhaps the biggest music celebrity in the world at that time, with record sales, movies, and an unprecedented multi-million-dollar television contract making him the very definition of a star. His congenial public persona aside, Crosby guarded his privacy and was an elusive character who kept the media at a distance.
    That day, he and Harris were sailing up the coast on a salmon-fishing trip. They needed to make an urgent call to Hollywood, but the radio phone on the yacht was broken. My mother coolly offered to contact an acquaintance at the local telephone company, and in no time she had the two men fixed up. An appreciative Crosby asked if there was anything he could do for her. Mom informed him that her son was a local disk jockey. Would the famous crooner give her boy an interview? This struck Crosby as a hilarious idea. Perhaps he enjoyed the thought of being quoted on the wires by a virtual unknown when he consistently refused interview requests from the leading entertainment journalists.
    The staff at the studio was astounded when Crosby and Harris strolled through the door—and open-mouthed when Crosby said he was looking for Craig. Sadly, my big chance was not to be: I was enjoying a day off, far from the station. Told this,Crosby did not miss a beat. “Tell Craig his old pal Bing dropped by to say hello.” In their astonishment, none of the staff thought to ask for an interview or a photograph. The incident bolstered my reputation as someone who knew a few things about the music business, or at least as someone to whom the unexpected and interesting might happen. I credit it with securing me a permanent position not long after.
    For all its quirkiness, CFPR set me on my professional path and fostered my ambitions beyond Prince Rupert. It was natural to look for wider horizons, but there was too the insistent inner voice of my eight-year-old self, the child who had been taught to be wary of depending on others, who resisted any ties that might bind. We have to escape this town , he told me; we’ll be trapped if we stay. Let’s move on and re-create ourselves.
    Ironically, he had an unintended ally in the first woman with whom I fell seriously in love, Evelyn Carpenter. She was regarded as the most beautiful girl in Rupert and, like all the women I would become deeply involved with thereafter, she possessed a reticent and reserved nature that disguised a keen intelligence. Although we shared intimacies, Evelyn held out on me sexually, not wanting to make the mistake that unhinged the lives of so many young women and their boyfriends in small towns. In those days, marriage was the only possible outcome of an unwanted pregnancy, and I could never have left Evelyn or Rupert in those circumstances. For all the trouble sex would get me into in the future, its absence at that crucial moment proved to be enormously important.
    After two years I had almost worn out the office copying machine, producing resumés and application forms that I sent to radio stations all over North America. No station was toorinky-dink to hear from me, yet there was nary a bite. The CFPR crowd was not encouraging and predicted only disappointment and frustration.
    Then one day in the early spring of 1959, I was summoned to Hankinson’s office. I feared that my efforts to abandon him had tried his patience, and he intended to sentence me to the night shift forever. Instead he told me that the CBC radio station in Regina liked my audition tape and was prepared to offer me a job. Was I interested in a transfer to Saskatchewan? Apparently there was no resistance on his part: No one in living memory had been promoted out of Rupert to another