FLASHBACK TO A BETTER (?) TIME

It’s been a while. I’m still not back to full energy. I spend a lot of time between brooding about not having written anything and wishing the fatigue would come to an end.

I nearly wrote a piece about “productivity.” A piece I read in the Globe and Mail last week set me off. “Productivity” usually means that you have to sweat your workers. But I am more and more coming to realize that everything seems to “set me off.”

Then I walked by an enlargement hanging on the wall in my office. I seldom look at it, but today I did. It made me wonder about myself. It made me wonder, as I did many years ago, about why I seem to thrive on being angry. Nothing wrong with being a critic, but I find myself carping, often about the same things. The election didn’t help. Rob Ford doesn’t help. Trash in the streets doesn’t help.

The photograph is one of a series of painted billboards I paid for in, I think, 1969. I mentioned it in passing in “The Day I Invented Sex,” the story of my fall from grace, In November 1970.

I had turned 40. I was doing a look at myself and at the reputation I had built (a profitable one) by being radio’s reigning curmudgeon. It was not dramatic enough to be an epiphany. It was simply my sense that I might enjoy things more if I reduced the amount of vinegar and replaced it with honey. I was realizing that I had been rude and unyielding to thousands of phone callers for the preceding nearly ten years.

The idea surfaced when I realized that I had become part of the “every-man-for-himself” society. Don’t give an inch. Push and elbow your way to what you believe to be your “place.”

I did a series of programs talking about being “nice.” Nothing was very profound or difficult. You are in line to get on a streetcar so you crowd in to grab your place in line. I said that perhaps we should try stepping back and allowing someone else to go by a welcoming wave of the hand. It cost nothing. I went to easy things like driving in traffic and seeing someone trying to enter the flow from a side street. Slow down and wave them in. I also tried a little more please and thank you. Nothing was very profound, but people started phoning about caring behaviour. The phone lines were full of people who wanted to show some humanity. Who wanted to talk about their own venture into “being nice.”

What came from all this was a campaign. I used my own money. The station did not pay and the call letters of CHUM never appeared. All that appeared were these large painted billboards, yellow with upper case black type “DO SOMETHING NICE"’ and underneath was my signature. I drove around and felt good.

The station then undertook to pay for simple “Do Something Nice” stickers that could be placed in the rear widows of cars. The day I announced it, hundreds of cars drove to the station for their little stickers. Cars all over Toronto were saying “Do Something Nice.”

It was not a total turnaround for me. I enjoyed it but then reality came flooding back and I reverted, at least partially, to my old self.

People were saying: “Larry – you’ve mellowed.” Maybe I did. It sure didn’t stick.
Maybe I ought to revisit it. Maybe I have.

P.S. Several years ago someone wrote about the campaign and attributed it to “some deejay somewhere in the States.” Sic transit gloria mundi.