May 13, 2013 Veteran Journalist Peter Worthington, Dead at 86

The Korean War Veteran Internet Journal May 13, 2013 Editor’s Note: This article was published in the Montreal Gazette. The writer of this column served with Peter Worthington as a correspondent in Afghanistan – when Peter was 77! Veteran journalist Peter Worthington, dead at 86 By Matthew Fisher, Postmedia News May 13, 2013 Toronto Sun co-founder, columnist and veteran journalist Peter Worthington has died. He was 86. Photograph by: THE CANADIAN PRESS/The Toronto Sun/Jack Boland , Postmedia News BANGKOK — My friend and colleague, Peter Worthington, died early Monday morning in Toronto. Peter was one of the greats of journalism and the most intrepid and doughty Canadian I ever met. Mostly through my father, who had known Peter forever and had been a Day Oner with him at the Toronto Sun, I was broadly familiar with his war record as a platoon commander with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in Korea and how he had joined the Royal Canadian Navy as a 17 year old near the end of the Second World War. From the snippets that I had read I admired his bravery in reporting from Russia during the Cold War and from many other hotspots during his 15 years as a foreign correspondent. But we had really only been nodding acquaintances before we ended up being thrown together in a tent about a decade ago in Afghanistan. The week that we spent roaming around Kabul was one of the most interesting of my life. Peter was 77 years old when he dropped out of the Afghan sky in a C-130 Hercules transport in 2004, becoming by far the oldest Canadian journalist to embed with the troops in South Asia. He had had triple heart bypass surgery some years earlier and was somewhat hobbled by a bum hip that, if I remember correctly, had been replaced. But here he was sleeping on a cot on the far side of the planet. His wife, Yvonne Crittenden, was understandably anxious for him. But with that twinkle he often had in his eye, he said he had insisted on coming to Afghanistan because he had to see for himself what was soon to become Canada’s first shooting war since he had fought on the front lines himself against Red China half a century earlier. The Patricias were amazed and honoured to see Peter who was something of a legend within that storied regiment. Many much younger reporters often gave the impression that they had come out to Afghanistan to punch a ticket so that they could claim forever after that they were war correspondents. But not Peter, who had already seen more fighting than almost any other Canadian reporter of his generation. He was not there to be a tourist. He wanted to see and experience it all and tell people about it. One chilly moonlit November night we climbed into a 17 ton Light Armoured Vehicle for a wild mountain patrol southeast of the Afghan capital. In those days it was still allowed to stand up in the two guard’s position at the back of the vehicle so we did. Given the terrain this was something akin to riding on the back of a bull. To this day I don’t know how Peter, who was neither a big or a powerful man, somehow managed to hold on. I was seriously battered and bruised after the experience, only to have Peter laughingly tell me that it had been one of his most exhilarating experiences in years. Peter was effervescent, funny, handsome, always fastidiously groomed and dapper. When we met for lunch last summer in Toronto he was looking very sharp in a bright plaid jacket. Always prolific and fantastically hard-working, his obsession that day was young journalists who used Access to Information requests as a crutch rather do than traditional reporting based on sleuthing and contacts. What I liked best about Peter was that he was a sublime raconteur and always, always, always, a champion of the underdog. With only a little prompting he would talk all night about his many adventures and misadventures. One of his favourite yarns was about how he had been close enough to feel the shock wave from the gun used by Jack Ruby to murder Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been accused of assassinating US President John F. Kennedy in 1963. I was always fascinated by how Peter managed to find a way to file from troubled places decades before it became easy to do so through the Internet. The first years of his 60 years as a reporter were not only filled with days of high drama but of long nights spent waiting in usually decrepit telegraph offices for telex operators to punch out his copy and for government minders to decide whether it should be passed along. As he said, “if you can’t file, you might as well not be there!” In an email to me a few days before last Christmas, Peter wrote: “The patron saint of “good” journalists is or should be — a mixture on Don Quixote and George Orwell. Though often wrong, Don Quixote’s heart was pure and he was always noble.” He closed that note by saying that it had been his “fate” to “consistently swim upstream.” We should all be grateful for that. © Copyright (c) Postmedia News .

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