Morley Safer

 

    Many people will remember Morley Safer as a reporter who was often on the CBS program, 60 Minutes. Fewer know that he also had been a war correspondent and that he passed through the University of Western Ontario. I was aware that he attended Western and that he had worked briefly at the Woodstock Sentinel Review and The London Free Press.  That is confirmed by an interview that I happened to stumble upon. It is provided below.

At the University of Western Ontario

   On September 13, 2012, Brian Lamb interviewed Morley Safer and it is available on C-Span. A portion of the interview relates to his experiences in Southwestern Ontario and that part of the transcript is provided here. The bolded Q & As relate to Western, but there are additional remarks pertaining to London and Woodstock.

LAMB: Let me go back to your upbringing. You - how much schooling did you get in Canada?

SAFER: I was not a great student. I got through high school; there were five years of high school. So the fifth year; fifth form, as it was called, was kind of like the first year of college. So I - and it was - you had to matriculate. It was like a baccalaureate exam that you had to pass and I scraped through. I was a pretty good athlete and I got sort of recruited by University of Western Ontario. I mean it was not an athletic scholarship.

LAMB: What sport?

SAFER: Football. I...

LAMB: What position?

SAFER: I played halfback. It was not an athletic scholarship. I was encouraged to come and what they did, which was important to me at the time, was that during the football season, you got full board, so that was one way of ...

LAMB: How long did you stay?

SAFER: I think three months.

LAMB: So you didn't get a college degree.

SAFER: I did not; I did not, no. I did not even finish freshman year.

LAMB: So how did you get into the information business?

SAFER: I knew exactly what I wanted to do. That was how I got into it. I knew I wanted to be a journalist. I had - I was, like a lot of people of my era; I was Hemingway bit. I'd read a - I was always a great reader, my whole family was a family of readers, and I read everything of Hemingway's up to that point. And he had been a foreign correspondent, Kansas City Star; also the Toronto Star. He covered the Spanish Civil War I think for the Toronto Star.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do and tried to get a job here, the you know all of the - all of the big metropolitan papers would just laugh me out of their offices. Ended up in a place called Woodstock, Ontario; it was a daily newspaper, Woodstock Sentinel Review. And the - my editor there was a wonderful man named Alf Berman and he said to me on my first day, "Safer, you have no experience at all at this; do you?" And I said "Yes, sir; I have no experience."

"You can't even type; can you?" I said, "Sir, I can't type." And he said "Well you'll learn to type here. And once you are typing in any kind of proficient way, do you know what the first thing you're going to be typing is?" I said, "No, sir; I don't know." He said "A letter of application to a bigger newspaper." And he was almost right.

So I moved on from the Woodstock paper to the London Free Press in London, Ontario. That was a major metropolitan, morning and evening. We had I think five or six editions of the paper, back in the days when papers were actually putting out five and six editions, and did everything. They had police beats; they had feature stories, breaking news, crime, overnight shifts. I really got a lot of really good experience there.

Sources:

 In early 2022 the interview with Morley Safer is available on C-Span. 

 Wikipedia provides a good profile of Morley Safer, along with additional references. He was buried in Toronto. His papers, like the papers of many other famous people, are at the University of Texas. 

The Bonus:

   Note that London used to have a local newspaper and that it put "out five or six editions, and did everything."

   The Wikipedia entry indicates that: 
He was the longest-serving reporter on 60 Minutes, the most watched and most profitable program in television history.