Dear Editor:
As an election comes close, an old newsman such as I can't resist tottering onto the battleground for one last look at the combatants. During my 40 years as an inkstained wretch with a Vancouver daily, I was assigned at times during elections to venture out and predict the outcomes.
In half a dozen such efforts, I always had it right! I must point out that my boasting goes all the way back to the 1960s and 1970s, to the cobwebbed era of Lester Pearson, John Diefenbaker, W.A.C. Bennett and Bob Strachan, and my assessments involved the lesser lights fighting it out in the small town ridings.
The idea was to hit town without warning, visiting each campaign headquarters just to anonymously chat and eavesdrop. Then I talked to cab drivers, business managers, restaurant employees, bartenders, postal workers, school teachers, doctors, high school students - anyone who showed some interest in the election.
I would read the community newspapers, listen to local radio (and, later, TV), check out the lawn signs and advertising. You might think it was boring, but it wasn't. I found it fascinating to uncover so much of the political, social and economic fabric (and the gossip, of course) of a community in the space of a day or three.
I could claim that my remarkably successful predictions were the result of my brilliant mind, but I think it was because I was like an extraterrestrial visiting Earth - I didn't know the people and their problems; I had no pre-formed opinions of the candidates; aside from a reporter's instinctive wariness of politics, I looked and listened with an open mind.
And now, because my political observing in New Westminster goes all the way back to the reign of Toby Jackson, I must resist the impulse to predict that our next mayor will be James Crosty. Oops.
Tony Eberts, New Westminster
