ETERNALLY TED

The Byfield family in 1955.

Had a beery Saturday lunch with Ted Byfield recently at Ray's sports bar on 111 Ave. Always a delight to dine with Byfield, a man who, at 80, seems to have lost none of the energy or optimism - or the capacity for booze - that have defined the Byfield brand in the 28 years I have known him. God knows he's had enough setbacks in recent times to discourage punier mortals. It was just over a year ago that his live-in daughter Phip, a manic-depressive 52-year-old in the final stages of lung cancer, decided to have a cigarette in the middle of the night in the vicinity of her oxygen inhaler. The resulting fire - to which the Edmonton Fire Department was slow in responding - razed Ted and Virginia's biggish Lessard Drive house and sent poor Phip to the hospital with burns that accelerated her deterioration and killed her within the week. Ted and Gin escaped injury, but lost all of their possessions and the house in which they had lived for a quarter of a century.

Such a disaster might have thrown you or me into a tailspin, but not, of course, Ted. I phoned him on his cell the day after the fire, and while his tone wasn't quite as ebullient as it usually is, neither was it gloomy.

"You know, Dolphin, when we were running the magazine we'd always be writing about these people called the 'homeless' and I never really knew what that the hell that meant. Now I guess I'm one of those 'homeless.'" And here he let out one of his trademark guffaws. "You know, it's a strange feeling."

He had been in final stages of accumulating copy for Volume 7 of The Christians, the 12-volume history of Christianity, from his office in the Lessard house. All of the accumulated copy was on the computer - now a melted blob among the ashes. But the book had been backed up on a memory stick away from the heart of the inferno and when the firemen eventually arrived, Ted had one of them go into the house and retrieve that stick. Although it, too, had been softened by the heat, the information for Volume 7 was retrievable and thus roughly $150,000 worth of labour was saved. Ted's swan song could go on.

Having been put up by friends from their church for a while, Ted and Ginger, with the help of another friend, negotiated a sweet deal with their insurer to put them up in a rental house until the Lessard House was rebuilt. The policy paid for the rebuilding of the 1980ish house to 2008 standards (2 X 6s instead of 2 X 4s, etc) at a cost of around $750,000, and replaced the contents to a cost of around $100,000. Ted rented some office space and, using the data from the memory stick, resumed work on Volume 7 of The Christians in November of last year. Phip's slightly premature death notwithstanding, things had worked out pretty well for the Byfields. Ted attributes such fortunes to the power of prayer - something he is always urging this atheist to do. I'd be more inclined to attribute Ted's rebound to positive thinking, but I suppose the belief that things will turn out well, whether sourced secularly or non-secularly, can be equally effective. Unfortunately I tend to be someone for whom the glass is not half-full, but rather about to shatter and spill hot liquid onto my crotch.

In late 2007, I was parting ways with the Crazy Fucking Frenchman, and Ted's resumption of Vol 7 provided me with interesting and lucrative work for a few months, writing ondo medieval Christian topics that included the Third and Fourth Crusades, Thomas Aquinas, the Magna Carta, and that fourteenth century Paris Hilton. Eleanor of Aquitaine. But by May the writing, editing and production of the volume was done and, as has so often been the case with Ted Byfield projects, the money ran out and the future of not just Vol. 7, but the remaining five volumes, was in jeopardy. I faced unemployment.

As it happened, one of Ted's co-parishioners at St. Herman's orthodox church - the son of Ted's main financial backer - had a senior position with a contracting company with a job for a carpenter's helper in Nunavut for around $100K a year. I figured what the hell, and signed up - only to see the contractor lose the contract in Nunavut and plop me into a lesser-paying carpenter's helper job in Sherwood Park working for the tyrannical Brian about whom I have whined far too much in previous blog postings.

Ted, meanwhile, was left to try to persuade the financial backer to come up with the $150,000 or so necessary to print and mail out the 10,000 or so copies of Volume 7 to the buyers of the first six volumes of The Christians. The theory is that a sufficient number of those 10,000 will keep Volume 7 and send cheques that will finance Volume 8. At $50 a book, it seems reasonable to expect that the requisite 6,000 or so necessary to raise the $300,000 to produce and mail the next volume is possible.

But things aren't quite so simple. The history book is now a registered charity (meaning all donations are tax deductible), but previously it was a business for which there were investors who are still claiming ownership, which complicates things for the latest investor, who is chary of fronting the $150,000. There is also the question of Ted's longevity. Although he appears hale and hearty, he is nonetheless 80 years old, and, since he is the heart and soul (and main editor and writer) of the books, there is the question of whether he will live long enough to complete the remaining five volumes. Given the money, he could produce the five volumes in four years. So if any of you rich old farts out there feel like removing $1.5 million from you estate, perhaps depriving your profligate progeny of that winter home in Maui, and ensuring the completion of this handsome, competent and worthwhile history of the most important shaper of history over the past 2000 years, email Ted at tedbyfield@pobox.com and tell him his prayers have been answered.

Meanwhile hope springs eternal, especially with Ted, as I discovered once more during our beery lunch at Ray's. He is now on the hunt for "12 Apostles," each of whom will donate $12,000 to the cause of getting Volume 7 printed and posted, and of producing the revenue that will enable Volume 8 to proceed and enable me to write about the Black Death. I guess he has had some luck in his attempts at raising these smaller amounts, as he was speaking hopefully of upping the apostle count to 24.

After lunch we went over to the resurrected house on Lessard Drive into which Ted and Virginia moved last month. It was slightly eerie to enter what was essentially the same house that I remember from all those Boxing Day parties, magazine editorial meetings, and other various occasions through the 25 years since the generous terms of the last will and testament of a prematurely deceased Alberta Report backer enabled Ted to buy the slightly upscale house. The decor had changed. Carpeting had been replaced with hardwood, and the brass accenting had disappeared. But all the rooms - including the study with a wet bar well stocked with Ted's favourite Canadian Club rye - were of the same size and configuration. It was as though the house had never burned down, simply been redecorated. And Ted and Ginger, although somewhat more aged (he now wears a hearing aid, she, a former chain-smoker, uses an oxygen breather) are still sitting at the round, paper-cluttered table in the middle of the study, schemes and plans forever in the offing, the glasses of CC eternally half full. I once asked Ted what he thought Heaven might be like. He said he imagined it to be a convivial sort of place where one is reunited with all the friends and loved ones whose company one most treasured. Probably something like the study in Ted's eternal Lessard Drive home.

* * *

Cleaning out my garage the other day, I came across a few boxes of The Book of Ted: Epistles from an Unrepentant Redneck, the hardcover collection of Ted's best columns that my little publishing company Keystone Press put out in 1997. 

The Canadian-American conservative pundit David Frum, whom I was just watching on CNN bitching about Sarah Palin and a Republican Party he believes is threatened by barbarians and Philistines, very kindly wrote the foreword to the Book of Ted. Here's excerpt:

For a quarter of a century, Mr. Byfield has put one of the most artful typewriters on the continent at the service of the conservative cause. Thanks very much to him, that cause is thriving. That seems to me to demand some token of gratitude. If may be impractical to rename one of the Rockies, Mount Byfield, although I suspect he'd like it, for Mr Byfield ain't the bashful type. But if we can't get him a mountain, we ought to read, reread and keep learning from his work. And whatever our point on the political compass, to salute it as some of the finest journalism ever published in this country.

Rereading some of the 70 columns in the book - most of them having originally appeared on the back page of Alberta Report over a 25-year span - it's hard to pick a favourite. The one from September 1997 that lampooned the hagiography of the recently "martyred" Princess Diana is a good one:

... Diana legitimized our yen to escape responsibility. If the Princess of Wales can walk out on her kids, so can I. If the Princess of Wales can flaunt her adulteries, so can I. If the Princess of Wales can tell morality to go to hell, so can I. She liberates me and is therefore my idol. But an idol only to those on the near side of that great societal gulf, those of whom she was so thoroughly representative - spoiled, naive, foolish, pitiful. She was tragic indeed, both in how she died and how she lived.

Here an excerpt from one of his columns decrying the public schools for their policy, especially pronounced in 1986 when this was written, to reward all students regardless of their performance or abilities, on the somewhat shaky premise that all are created equal:

All men, avows the Christian church, are in the sight of God born equal. God, however, was not a popular concept among advanced thinkers of the eighteenth century. The concept of the equality of man, however, was their most treasured them. So they abbreviated the formula. All men, they said, are born equal - period. It sounded so compelling a proposition, so visionary, so just, so altogether liberal, that its devotees became blinded to its one besetting disability, namely that it is plain nonsense. In no worldly sense are we born equal. We are decidedly unequal in physical strength and coordination, in mental capability, in natural virtues, in mental stability and nerve, in mechanical aptitude and in a hundred other ways. Yet the lie of our supposed equality continues to deceive us with amazing tenacity. It has proved particularly alluring to the modern educator, in fact is the basis of much of the mischief he has wrought.

Ted waxes with similar erudition on a host of familiar topics, including abortion, western alienation, the sexual revolution, crime and punishment, feminism, homosexuality and the insufferable narcissism of we baby boomers. He also gives us a few glimpses into his personal past, notably a portrait of his mother Caroline, whom I remember as a slightly dotty octogenarian who threw Christmas parties for Alberta Report staff, called everyone "lamb-y", staff and used to mock punch me on the shoulder and say, with a coquettish wink, "Oh, you're a bad one, you are." Here's Ted on his mum:

One of six children of an English house painter, she grew up in small-town Ontario. At 20, she was blonde, beautiful, inadequately educated, unquenchably ambitious and working in Toronto as a clerk. Though courted by many, she fixed her sights on the dubious Vernon Byfield, a news reporter and nephew of the city's longtime mayor, Tommy Church. Their relationship was explosive from the start. He said she talked too much, she said he drank too much; they were both right. After one terrible fight, apparently to spite him, she left town and married an automobile worker in Toledo. Following that, he persuaded her she'd made a serious mistake. So she divorced the automobile worker, returned to Toronto, and married him. Their first child was born a year later, namely me.

* * *

The construction work looks like it might run out soon (more on that in a later post) and I'm looking to raise a little extra money to tide us through Christmas. So I'm selling off the couple of dozen Books of Ted I have left. If you'd like one, send me a cheque for $50, along with your address, and I'll mail you a copy of the book and a receipt. Send it to:

Ric Dolphin

15916 Patricia Drive

Edmonton, AB

T5R 5N4