Hustak, we have a problem!

Jim Withers

“Hustak, we have a problem!”

That was a common cry of copy editors dealing with Montreal Gazette reporter Alan Hustak.

Alan, who died May 21 in Saskatchewan at age 82, was legendary when it came to leaving a minefield of typos throughout his news copy. Misspelling names – especially in obituaries – was his specialty.

In one obit, he’d spelled the name of the deceased three ways, something I only noticed when it occurred to me that the dearly departed appeared to be listed as the same person delivering the eulogy. Another time, Alan wrote a news brief about a 118-year-old man being stabbed while hanging around a pool hall when it actually turned out to be an 18-year-old. Easy catch, but I missed others. Copy editors referred to this as “being Hustakked.”

Whatever exasperation I felt, especially when Alan cheerfully brushed off my complaints with a breezy “that’s what editors are for,” I couldn’t help but like him. Sure, he was a sloppy writer, but Alan was a newsman through and through, and he could tell a story – in print, on TV and radio, and in person. Especially over a beer or two.

Alan was a captivating raconteur, and I kept urging him to write a memoir using the tales he told while holding court in bars about rubbing shoulders with John Diefenbaker, partying with Péquistes in Old Montréal (with René Lévesque sleeping in his bathtub), and having an unspecified actor’s ashes in a filing cabinet at work.

One such occasion took place at the Brutopia pub in 2011, when Alan learned he was sitting next to the son of pioneering TV journalist Norman DePoe:

 “It was minutes before the gruff, no-guff broadcaster was supposed to conduct an interview and DePoe appeared to be passed out, with his face on the table. Then, as a producer counted down, ‘three … two … one,’ DePoe lifted his head, sat back in the chair, adjusted his tie, and launched into his usual coherent, incisive interview, sober as a judge – albeit a gravelly voiced one.”

DePoe’s son not only didn’t take offence, he remembered a similar incident involving his dad.

Alan was just getting started, pouring out war story after war story from his TV and newspaper reporting days. One concerned the late Réal Caouette. A federal election campaign was under way. Reporter Alan found the firebrand Créditiste leader in an airport and asked him for an interview. Time was short because Caouette was soon to board a plane and, even more pressing, needed to take a leak. The interview did take place, Alan said, because he promised that the TV camera would focus on Caouette’s upper body while he simultaneously relieved himself and fielded questions.

Alan told us how, as a reporter from Saskatchewan (for the Moose Jaw TV station, I believe), he managed to scoop the national press on an interview with John Diefenbaker on a train during an election campaign in the early 1960s. Eschewing reporters from the major dailies and TV networks, Dief treated Alan like an old friend.

Alan’s Diefenbaker stories always included his imitations, in peculiar the way Dief began sentences with an “Ahhhh,” like someone clearing his throat.

Alan and Dief had many dealings over the years, until the mid-’70s. Alan suspected that the friendship had cooled as a result of the Dief learning that he was a Catholic.

But shortly before the former PM went to the big parliament in the sky, Alan was surprised to get a call from him. “Ahhhh …,” Dief began in his distinctive way, “you’re a Catholic, right?”

“Yes,” Alan replied.

“According to your beliefs, when I die, will I spend eternity with my first wife or my second?”

Thrown by the question, Alan hesitantly replied, “Well, since it is heaven, I think you’ll spend it with the one you want to be with.”

“OK, that goes in your memoir, too,” I told Alan, although, with his bad hearing, I don’t think he caught that.

Before leaving, Alan bought me a beer, and told everyone he was searching for the right words in which to toast his 70-year-old senator cousin (Rod Zimmer), who was about to marry a 20-year-old woman (Maygan Sensenberger). Then, perhaps to head off any bad jokes from the pub crowd, Alan said, “Oh, I know, how many times does 70 go into 20?”

I last saw Alan eight years ago when he flew in from his native Saskatchewan, where he’d moved to work for a weekly newspaper, after a messy departure from the Montréal Gazette in 2009.

Alan was doing research for a book. He had a passion for history, resulting in close to 20 books he penned on subjects as varied as the 130 Canadians who were aboard the Titanic, a biography of former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed, and the history of Montreal’s St. Patrick’s Parade. On this get-together, he gave me a copy of the Justin Trudeau biography he’d written. The fact that a British company had published it made it impossible to sell it in Canada, Alan explained, but he hoped an updated version would be published here in time for the next federal election. (I later gave it a read and sent him a list of some of the most egregious errors.)

Of course, I razzed him about all the names he misspelled, and recalled the time he was working on the obituary of a 104-year-old Armenian woman with a long, difficult-to-spell name. “You were more concerned about getting a photo than getting her name spelled right.”

“We had a picture of her,” Alan said, “but I called her daughter to see if she had one in which her mother looked more Armenian, more peasant-y.”

Alan told me how he came to Montreal for Expo 67, and through a chance encounter with a CBC-TV boss in the Jamaican Pavilion, he landed a job here. Because they wanted an anglo, and not an ethnic, his on-air name was Alan Houston. Later, when he went to CTV, where they wanted an ethnic and not an anglo, he switched back to Hustak. (His actual first name, he discovered when he checked his birth certificate late in life was Allan. He not only produced typos, he was one.)

When he told me how happy he was to be back in the West, where his late mother had been a beloved elementary school teacher, I asked him how his long-time partner Stéphane was adapting.

“He loves it even though he’s a Québécois through and through.”

Stéphane, I learned, was a currency trader, 25 years Alan’s junior, and did virtually all the cooking. It was a relationship built to last.

I recalled overhearing a phone conversation Alan was having at his desk in the newsroom a few years earlier, involving him talking about his partner.

“So Stéphane asks the vet if the dog will feel any pain, and the vet – I don’t know if he’s an idiot or was just being brutally honest – says, ‘Well, he’s old and ... .’ Stéphane starts crying like a baby. I start crying like a baby ... . That was the last of my beautiful cocker spaniel, and I’m never going to have another one.”

Then, after a pause, Alan said with a chuckle, “Until Christmas.”

Alan was a true newsman, whether writing for a big-city daily or a small-town Prairie weekly. As his final employer, the Fort Qu’Appelle Times, wrote:

“Working in a community where everyone knows everyone, Alan never lost sight of the responsibility journalists have to inform, question and hold others accountable. He covered the news right until the very end. To those who knew him, Alan was a larger-than-life figure in journalism – intelligent, determined and passionate about the craft. Yet beyond the bylines and deadlines, he lived a quiet life with his partner of 38 years and found meaning in the simple moments away from the spotlight.”

Alan Hustak, a newsman to the end, no matter how you spell his name.

 Oh, we’ll remember Alan.