The General Star

Whatever happened to Beth Manley? She worked the overnight shift at (formerly) bilingual Montreal radio station CKVL. Here’s a story about her from a local paper. I like the reference to drunks. And what was that traveler up to, hooking up with not one but three female tourists? To all those with a torch (or a highball) to carry, I dedicate this recycled feature story to you.

City Like Montreal Is Lonely Place, Beth Tries to Make It Friendlier

The Herald, Montreal, Wednesday, August 1, 1956

by GEORGE ABBOTT

No loneliness can match that bred on solitary confinement in a big city apartment and Montreal, like all big cities, harbors a huge throng of lonely hearts which couldn’t be more unhappy were they banished to the solitude of a prairie, a desert or an Arctic waste.

Maybe it’s the presence of so many people who remain total strangers. Or maybe it’s the shock of finding yourself friendlss in the place where you least expect to be lonely.

But the lonesome ones — the small town folk who knew only homes filled with voices and laughter, the old and infirm banished away in rooms and basements, the torch carriers and others who are here in their untold hundreds.

Top authority for this is Beth Manley, Montreal disc jockey who caters to the lonely hearts with a program that runs midnight till 4:30 am five mornings a week from Radio Station CKVL.

“This town harbors hundreds of victims of worry, despair and insomnia,” Miss Manley says. “Hundreds more are just plain lonely.

“They phone in night after night, not necessarily because they want something, but frequently just because they need someone to chat with.

“They’ve got to get it off their chest, and I gather some pretty grim tales in consequence,” she says. “But I’ve always maintained a strict rule of forgetting everything they tell me.”

Montreal’s overnight disc jockey has doubled as a personal adviser, an authority on domestic problems and ailments, frequently as a philosopher, sometimes as a diplomat and at least once as a matrimonial counsellor.

Hundreds of Miss Manley’s callers are night shift workers. Hundreds more are the wives sitting up for them to come home. Lonely wives, she reports, donate many of the prizes offered on CKVL’s lonely hearts show.

Then there are the torch carriers, served up with special discs at 4 am nightly — “Torch Time.” They show appreciation by phoning in to say the tunes and sentiments havce brought them solace. Many send small gifts, too.

Most of them Miss Manley has never met and doesn’t ever expect to meet. It’s the same with other lonely folk, the widows and widowers, the lone tourists and the travelers.

There was the lonesome serviceman from St. Petersburg, Fla., who had a memorable vacation in Montreal because he met three lonseome girls from Philadelphia, thanks to an interchange of messages over the torch carrier’s mike.

Miss Manley remembers Gordie and Jo-Anne. Jo-Anne liked Gordie up the street and wanted to date him. It all worked out after CKVL beamed a dedication tune at Gordie. The couple subesquently became engaged, finally married.

Beth Manley says she gets much fun from drunks who phone up in the dim hours calling for some fast music because “they wanna live a little.”

“Usually I tell them to have a drink for me and then I play something sweet and soft,” she says. “That makes them maudlin. But they call me back and tell me amid sobs just how much they liked it.”

A big number of the night session discs are dedication numbers and sometimes they’re directed at a distant loved one on the other side of the country.

But there was one dedication number that didn’t make the grade. An excited fan called up one night and asked Miss Manley to play a disc for Tony.

“By all means, but who is Tony?” she asked.

The breathless one: “She’s my German Shepherd dog. She’s just had four pups!”

Miss Manley doesn’t believe dedications are much consolation for German Shepherds.

But in the human realm, those overnight discs used to enliven lonely heards do an important job.

And she gets stacks of letters, countless messages and expressions of heartfelt thanks to prove it. For a big city can be one of the loneliest spots on earth.

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Montreal’s own William Shatner was making headlines for his acting chops 50 years ago this month. According to the online Canadian Encyclopedia, it was the year of his big break, “when he replaced Christopher Plummer on three hours’ notice in the role of Henry V, after Plummer was hospitalized.” (Plummer — who grew up in Montreal, attending the High School of Montreal — now called MIND High FACE, an arts-intensive public school (thanks for the correction, Kate M) — and learned his craft here, had made his big splash two years before in New York.)

You’ve got to hand it to him: he did very well for himself over the years — a Golden Globe award, a couple of Emmys (as well as three Emmy nominations in ‘06), plus his induction into the Television Hall of Fame. And he’s still going strong.

This Canadian Press item comes from the Montreal Herald, Wednesday, August 1, 1956.

His co-recipient of a 1956 Guthrie Award, Marie Day, is the daughter of a former Toronto mayor. She won for costume design. She is also a published author of children’s fiction.

Fittingly, the man who handed out the awards — Vincent Massey, who was the first Canadian-born vice-regal (i.e., the ceremonial representative of the British monarch to Canada) — just happened to be the brother of Raymond Massey, one of Canada’s greatest movie stars.

Tyrone Guthrie (after whom the award was named) was a pretty interesting chap, too. A legend of the British stage, he accepted an unlikely posting to Canada and helped build the Stratford festival into one of the world’s great Shakespearean attractions.

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Well, can you blame them for leaving the bird in the car? What with all the folks scarfing down fowl of every description, it’s an owner’s duty to spare his beloved falcon that. What appeals to me about this story is the sheer filler-ness of it all. And the idea that life in the fifties — and that goes for the 1850s and 1750s, etc., too — was every bit as colourful as it is today. From the Gazette, March 24, 1953.

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