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SOLWAY MEMORY
Wednesday Jan. 11, 2012
I used to operate a website e-magazine called 360boom (closed it last year year). 360boom hosted a daily article/essay by I wide range of guest authors.
One of my best recruits was Larry Solway.
He’d written a piece that was run by the Globe & Mail which included his email address.
We spoke on the phone a few times – his gruff voice reminiscent, albeit softer, than I remember from his TV days during the 60s and 70s when I often saw him guesting on TV shows like Front Page Challenge.
I wrote, he wrote back, I called, we talked. I knew him as a voice from TV. In previous lives he had been a print journalist, radio and TV personality. He’d acted on stage, for TV and movies and being a very well know guy-about-town in Toronto. Age, fatigue and feelings of irrelevance had dampened his enthusiasm – but I am pleased to say, he responded to encouragement.
Except for that Globe & Mail piece, he’d simply given up writing, after a long career in print and broadcast journalism, acting and generally being a guy-about-town in Toronto. He’d quit because he was feeling too old and irrelevant.
But he got his second wind. Larry wrote a number of pieces for 360boom which I happily published, and then he began his own BLOG called Looking Forward where he recounted stories of travels and trips, gripes about getting old, gripes about the state of leadership in our countries, gripes and the state of language usage, gripes about . . . just about anything including consumer trends, bad movies, pop-culture, the media or the ill-mannered kid in a store.
Early on, he was an avid blogger – but he found the lack of response and his difficulty building a broader audience frustrating. His frequency declined but without any loss of his acerbic wit laced with sarcasm and charm. And he would likely take me to task for using the word acerbic in this bit and lecture me that acrimonious or irritating might be the more appropriate word . . .
That was Larry. I enjoyed him so much.
In one of our chats about all the interesting folks he’d met and interviewed throughout his career – he regaled me with stories of spending several days with the novelist Kingsley Amis. His recollections were fascinating, funny and deep. I asked him to write a piece about it, expecting he could write pages and pages . . . but when it came in, 3 paragraphs long, it became clear that he did not have the enthusiasm to pour his memories in such great detail. It would have been wonderful, I thought, if he could have told some of those stories in writing, so they could live on beyond him but his enthusiasm for it was just not there.
Yesterday Larry’s daughter posted the sad news of his passing to all subscribers to his blog.
Larry is gone. He’ll write no more, but he won’t be forgotten anytime soon.
Mark Kolke
306,692
P.S.: Larry made mention of me with comments on his blog a number of times – giving in return, helping to promote my Musing column.
column written/ published from Calgary: morning walk: -13 C/8 F, clear and calm, normal seasonal temperatures but, given how mild it has been lately, a bit shocking . . . and Gusta thinks I can walk downhill at the same speed on snow/ice as I do on bare and dry. We’ll have to work on that.
Comments Received:
FINISH LINE
From Larry Solway’s blog yesterday: My name is Beth Savard, I am Larry's daughter. I am writing on behalf of my Dad who finally lost the battle to cancer on Monday morning at 8:55 am. He died at Toronto General. His funeral service will be held at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in the Visitors Center on Friday. People are welcome to come at 12 and the service will be held at 1. After the graveside internment people are welcome to join our family upstairs at the funeral home from 2-4pm, Sincerely, Beth Savard
KEEPERS AND TRADERS
I was sad to hear that Larry Solway passed away yesterday. He was a great character and a wonderful writer, CG, Oshawa, ON
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