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He Was a Legendary Newsroom Colleague. Turned Out He Had a Secret Past

How an unexpected email led me to crack the mystery of Charles Saunders

The call to adventure came from a stranger in July 2020. It was a regular day in that plague year. Amid the mix of work emails came one from an address I didn’t know but with a subject line that immediately pulled me in: “Charles Saunders.”

Hi Jon, I am hoping you might know or know about the writer, Charles Saunders, who lives in Dartmouth, the message opened.

Reading his name conjured up strong images of the towering newspaper editor I’d worked with a decade ago. Built like a heavyweight boxer, but he moved like a cat. A genius with words and a wealth of writing wisdom, Charles was the senior editor on the Halifax Daily News and had written an iconic column on Black issues. The Daily News was a scrappy newspaper that broke a few noses in our city. Politicians feared us and regular folks cheered us.

I’d started working there as a night-shift copy editor in 2006. One colleague said working on the news rim was like doing your homework with friends late at night. We’d fall into a studious silence as we cleaned up the writing, checked the facts, and crafted the headlines, then burst into laughter when someone—occasionally Charles—made a pun too rude to publish but too delightful not to share.

Often, as the laughter faded, one of us would look over to the centre of the rim, where Charles sat with his back to us, facing the harbour window, to ask him if we’d accidentally split an infinitive, only to find his empty chair spinning. He’d disappeared once more.

People would work with Charles for years before hearing a rumour that he hadn’t always been a Canadian.

But Charles always popped up again to split the lips of the fat cats who ran the city with a blistering editorial that put their foolishness in plain English. He loved Canada, loved writing—and was well loved by his adopted home. People would work with Charles for years before hearing a rumour that he hadn’t always been a Canadian, that he’d started life elsewhere—in America, if you could believe it—but had moved north decades ago.

Charles had been a legend but, like all of us at the Daily, took a knock-out blow on February 11, 2008, when the fat cats got the last laugh. The world Charles and I shared blew apart that day, and it ended our work friendship. Our newspaper had been bought by a media chain, then sold, then sold again. We tried to ignore the latest new owners and their plans to “turn this ship around.” We journalists dreaded to think what they meant by that. We were already sailing on open waters. Did they see an iceberg they wanted to hit?

Usually, the newest owners soon forgot about their little east coast tabloid. We liked it that way. But the people who bought us that last time didn’t forget about us. They kept sending in smiling professionals in fine suits who talked about the future and how better days were ahead for our newspaper. We kept quiet. Our better days would begin as soon as they left.

But they didn’t leave. Instead, a few months into the big turnaround, they ordered staff to gather on a Monday morning. We formed a scrum around the slick big-city suit they’d flown in from Montreal to teach us how to do our jobs. He’d promised us sunlit uplands but now stood before us with a frozen face. You can’t BS a room full of journalists, so we stared at him coldly. He told us it was over. The latest new owners had pulled the plug. We were all fired. The newspaper was dead.

It was about then that we noticed the grey-suited sympathetic smilers lurking in the corners of the newsroom. They told us layoffs were hard, but they would educate us about our severance packages. And then they would escort us off the property.

A pointless rage built up in the disbanded news corps. We were tempted to burn the place down. Instead, we gathered our notebooks and family photos and were escorted out. Somehow reporters from our rival newspaper, the stately Chronicle Herald, found out what was happening, and their photographers shot a couple of us as we came down the front steps of our building one last time. It was humiliating—we couldn’t even break the news of our own demise.

In the drunken bacchanalia that followed, many of our reporters, photographers, and editors left Halifax for jobs out west or in the States. We partied to celebrate their leaving. Others gave us a shiver up the spine when they took jobs on the Dark Side—working in public relations. We roasted them, got drunk, and hoped we wouldn’t be next. Most of us moved on. A smaller........

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