Date: Sep 29, 2003
Source: Canadian Business Magazine
In Memo-rium
By Joe Chidley, editor, Canadian Business
Like a lot of relationships, it began in a bar. Three years ago, executive editor Scott Steele and I were sitting in a downtown Toronto local with Trevor Cole, a magazine writer of no small repute, who at the time had the misfortune to be working for a competitor but the good sense to be considering his options. In other words, he was looking to go freelance, and we were looking to get him to write for Canadian Business. I was also trying to find a regular voice for the back page, Memo, and Cole, it turned out, had an idea for a column. He was sketchy on the details but promised something never tried before, something that would be funny. Let me write a few and see what you think, he said. So I said yes.
When Cole filed his first column — a mock cry from the bug-riddled TSX's IT department to Barbara Stymiest ("We're running the whole of the Toronto Stock Exchange on a Mac Plus!") — it was clear his Memo, which first appeared in November 2000, would live up to its billing. It was, like all good satire, entertaining, often prescient and always damned original.
Over 58 columns, Cole gave fictional voice to some of Canada's best-known business figures (John Roth, Robert Milton, Gerry Schwartz, Heather Reisman, Leonard Asper and David Dodge, among others) as players in, and often as authors of, his satirical communiques. He also introduced his own characters, who embodied the foibles of an era marked by the bursting of a market bubble, accounting scandals, mega-bankruptcies and governmental absurdity. There was Bill Smale, phony CEO of phony Specter Corp., who in one Memo jitterily asked staff to fawn over Teachers' Pension Plan head Claude Lamoureux when he came for a visit. (Suggested greeting: "Mr. Lamoureux, those glasses you're wearing are particularly attractive.") And there was John "Guppy" Sloan, the research analyst who, in a column that appeared while US congressional hearings about Enron were under way, enthusiastically gave nonsensical testimony about his firm's role in the scandal. (Asked if a report on Enron stock was his, Sloan replies: "Does it have my happy-facey thing on the bottom?")
Undoubtedly, some of Cole's real-life subjects were not amused. But readers were. And Memo raked in more than its share of honors, winning an internal Rogers Publishing award for best column and nabbing silver in two categories (Humor and Columns) at this year's National Magazine Awards.
Neither Trevor nor I, however, planned on the relationship lasting forever. (Another similarity with most bar-born relationships, I imagine.) By this summer, I was toying with a new idea for the back page-the editorials that began appearing last issue. As for Trevor, he wanted to devote more time to his first love, writing features, and he needed a break to put the finishing touches on his first novel. And so Memo ran its final installment in the Sept. 2 issue of Canadian Business.
The good news is that readers haven't seen the last of Cole. He remains a contributor to the magazine, and his book, Norman Bray, In the Performance of His Life, will be published soon by McClelland & Stewart. But for now, it's goodbye, Trevan Fotheringhole. It was fun while it lasted.