It was a
few years ago that as I was driving through a back alley in East Vancouver I
noticed a gull thrashing on the ground in its final moments of life.
I felt sad
in that I could not comfort the bird and that the bird was going to die alone.’
Can anybody
relate to those Hollywood films with the dying man (more often than not a man)
on a hospital bed or on a war zone area about to breathe his last? Is the dying
man getting any comfort from not being alone? Will it make any difference on
the other side?
As a
product of my age (75) I often look at the Vancouver Sun’s obituary page. The little
photographs of people that I know are all dead (all smiles or in their best
WWII uniform best) remind me of the dying gull. They died alone as we all die
alone. Hand in hand two dying persons go their separate ways.
In the 19th
century photographers using the new invention of photography believed that if
they parked their camera, bedside by a dying man (many children, too) they
might capture that moment between here and there. Of course that never
happened. We will all die not knowing.
Today I
read the little box in the Sun informing that radio personality Barrie Clark
has died.
I was not
there when he died but somehow my portrait of him taken in the early 80s for a
Vancouver Magazine article on radio announcers (they were all men) makes me
think that I was and am a witness to a man who few will ever get to know.
In those
80s Vancouver Magazine and its editor Malcolm (Mac) Parry was Vancouver’s Ukraine.
Why
Ukraine? I have been told that Ukraine has mountains but I believe that they are not high enough to stop
invading armies going west or east. It seems that Ukraine was a carpet for
invading armies. In the same way Vancouver Magazine and Parry’s office was such
a carpet. Prostitutes, actors, actresses, journalists, politicians, hoods,
illustrators, photographers, wrestlers, boxers, real estate tycoons,
businessmen, policemen, detectives, comedians, musicians, chefs, all visited
and sat in Parry’s office.
In this
year, 2018, the local media has withdrawn and I have my doubts that I will read
an informative obituary anywhere about Barrie Clark the man.
I consider
myself lucky that in my portrait I can see intelligence and humanity. That it is
gone is a shame but then that is an irrevocable path that I, too, must travel.
From Wikipedia there is this:
Barrie Aird Clark (27 November 1932 – 16 March 2018) was a Canadian politician and broadcaster.
He began his broadcasting career in 1949 in Kelowna, and served brief stints in Ontario and London, England before settling in Vancouver. He was a popular radio personality and parlayed his popularity into politics, beginning in 1963 as an alderman in the District of North Vancouver.
In 1966 Clark was elected to the B.C. Legislative Assembly as a Liberal in the riding of North Vancouver-Seymour, and was re-elected in 1969. He was defeated by Colin Gabelmann in the 1972 election. [2] The following year he was appointed B.C.'s first Rentalsman by Premier Dave Barrett; he served in that position until 1976.
Clark then returned to radio as a talk show host in Vancouver, and in 1988 he returned to Kelowna to host a show on radio station CKOV. In 1999 he was elected to Kelowna city council and served there until his retirement in 2008.
Sometimes in my magazine assignments my subjects would ask to be photographed with someone. I found this negative in my Barrie Clark file. I have no memory as to who it was.
