Fisherman's Road

The following article by Susan Bourette was published in the Report on Business Magazine in December 2004.  ••• Geoff  Stirling pioneered TV in Newfoundland and FM rock across Canada. The next goal for the last media maverick Reincarnation. The lights are up, the cameras are in place and a microphone is clipped  to the sweater of the man who is at once mogul, mystic and prankster. Geoff Stirling is ready for his close-up. It's the latest take in The Geoff Stirling Story, starring Geoffrey William Stirling, produced, directed, written and lived by the selfsame Geoff Stirling. The show has been in production for almost a half century, ever since Stirling erected Newfoundland's first television broadcast tower and  began transmitting shows like Hopalong Cassidy. Here in St. John's, they joke that Geoff Stirling is 4 million years old and 17 feet high.  But in person, he's utterly human.  Standing 6 feet tall, he's thin,...

Brilliant sunshine Thursday cast tree shadows on this white house on the edge of Government House property and the yellow house on Forest Road, both in east end St. John's.

The following letter to the editor is published in today's Weekend Telegram (Dec. 21st). Dear editor, What would Captain Abram Kean — the most successful Newfoundland seal hunter, the ‘Admiral of the Fleet’ — think of Pamela Anderson and her million-dollar tease? No doubt that kind of cash would have went a long way back in the 1920s, when Kean, in his 70s by then, was a living, sealing legend. A sealer lucky enough to sign on aboard a ‘wooden wall’ such as Kean’s (the Australian convict vessel  Success  was described as ‘luxurious by contrast’) earned $10 to $12 a week, if they were ‘helbows in de fat’ long enough. I imagine Kean would turn his back on Anderson and the offer, once he realized the Canadian beauty sees him, and his outport ilk, as baby killers. What would Kean, with a half-century of seal killing and a million pelts under his belt, think of militant activist Paul Waston for elevating the harp seal to “lamb of God?" I im...