Well-known radio talk show host Lowell Green retired from active on-air-duties last week but he hasn’t retired from the airwaves altogether. Rob Snow has taken over Green’s morning broadcast and Green will be calling in daily for a 15-minute chat giving his thoughts on events of the day.
Green arrived at CFRA in 1960 as a news and farm reporter. In 1966, he began hosting Greenline, a call-in show Monday to Friday at 1 p.m. I remember listening to Lowell on my transistor radio when I was working in the bush in the winter of 1967. Listening to music and the controversial Lowell Green was a real treat when working outdoors in those days. After a few years I grew tired of Green’s rudeness and seldom listened to him again. But I always enjoyed reading columns penned by his father.
How many Whitewaternews.ca readers remember Green’s father, H. Gordon Green? Henry Gordon Green was my favourite farm columnist. He had a column entitled The Old Cynic that was bold in its day. Brashness must have run in the Green family.
H. Gordon was a legendary columnist, broadcaster, teacher and author. He was born in Anderson, Indiana, in 1912 and grew up in Arthur, Ontario. He died in 1991. It’s interesting to note that he married a former student of his late in life. I recall that she was young and he was old.
Green was the magazine editor of the Family Herald for the last 20 years. As well as being editor, he was an author of numerous books. I have the Family Herald book Stories to Read Again. His work frequently appeared in such U.S. publications as Reader’s Digest and Farm Journal.
Canadian audiences also enjoyed his television programs on the CBC, several of which were filmed on his own 332-acre farm at Ormstown, Quebec. His radio program “The Old Cynic” was heard daily from coast to coast.
As one of Canada’s best known farmers in the 1950’s, Gordon Green’s agricultural career was equally noteworthy. Among his achievements was the introduction of the now famous Landrace swine into the U.S. in 1958. He also played a key role in restoring the almost forgotten Galloway beef cattle to the status of a major American breed. He was also national secretary for three breed organizations. He was a collector of rare poultry breeds. Green was a pioneer in the agriculture industry.
In 1948 he gave up a very comfortable teaching position at the University of Michigan’s English department to come to Montreal and became the editor of the Family Herald.
The Family Herald was a weekly magazine for country people. It ceased publication in 1968 after being around for 99 years. The Family Herald never appeared on news stands and made no attempt to sell subscriptions to city dwellers. Nevertheless, city writers sent in all kinds of fiction stories to editor Green.
I saved a few of Green’s Toronto Star columns from the 1980’s. He wrote that city writers thought it would be easier to make a sale to the Family Herald if their stories were suitably countrified.
Some of the tales never made the Family Herald. There’s the story of a spoiled city girl who finds herself the wife of struggling young farmer in some dismal backend of nowhere, who decides after a year or so to leave it all – her drab and faithful husband included.
She waits until the husband is sweating it out in the back forty, packs her bags, steals the egg money and goes toward the highway and where there always seems to be a convenient bus headed for civilization.
The runaway wife turns around to take one last look at the cursed old house she is about to leave forever, and sees that old sow has broken through the garden again and is sampling the dahlias. And instinctively this remarkable woman dashes back up the lane, raging at the sow in a language she never used before, and with her suitcase as a shield she backed the sow into a corner, put a bridle on it and led it back into the barn where it belonged.
Green, of course, knew you couldn’t put a bridle on a pig.
Maynard van der Galien is a farmer and an agriculture columnist.
