THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WARREN BARKER

March 3, 1967. In the cramped newsroom of CKNW, the clock ticked towards 12 o’clock and the radio station’s noon newscast. With a minute or two to go, the phone rang. A young Cameron Bell picked it up and a voice said: “This is GS. Tell Warren: ‘Bennett convicted.’” Bell passed on the cryptic message. Warren Barker, the station’s news director/news reader, shot into action. He leapt up on his chair and onto the desk. Reaching behind a stack of tape recorders, he grabbed a particular file and raced out of the room. CKNW’s familiar news intro went on at the stroke of noon, followed by a brief silence, as Barker settled into his seat. Whereupon, mere moments after the verdict came down, he told listeners: “WAC Bennett has been found guilty in high court of the slander of George P. Jones, former chair of the BC procurement commission.” As Bell looked on in astonishment, Barker proceeded with a note-perfect recap of the trial, reconstructed on the spot from his meticulous file.

A few years later, in the wee small hours of Nov. 9, 1971, a stripper was finishing her “bottomless” act at Vancouver’s Club Zanzibar. Under cover of the final drum roll, someone in a false wig and moustache went up to a patron and shot him through the head. The same bullet wounded two other patrons. When the lights went up, three bodies lay on the floor and the killer was gone. While most of the city slept, Warren Barker was already at work, preparing the coming day’s news coverage. He heard the police radio calling every available car to the Club Zanzibar.  Barker got on the phone to reporter Scott Dixon, sleeping peacefully at home. “Are you doing anything?” Barker barked. “Not really,” the groggy Dixon replied. “Would you mind heading downtown to the Club Zanzibar?” Dixon arrived in time to see the place crawling with cops and ambulances carting away the victims.  His on-the-spot report left all media outlets in town playing catch-up on what remains one of the city’s most sensational – and still unsolved — killings.

During those golden days of journalism, with its vast newsroom of crack reporters and editors, the Vancouver Sun was far and away the best paper in Western Canada. Yet “every hour on the hour” the Sun’s assignment editor dutifully switched on the paper’s tinny, transistor radio for the regular news report on CKNW. With only a handful of reporters, ‘NW covered the city so thoroughly that the resource-rich Vancouver Sun relied on its newscasts to help keep tabs of everything that was happening. Woe to the editor who forgot to tune in.

The person linking these three accounts was, of course, the  legendary news director of CKNW, Warren Barker, who died a few months ago at the age of 92. For 32 years, working ungodly hours, with an infallible knack for hiring talent, Barker masterminded a system of his own making and a small but mighty newsroom that dominated hard news coverage in Vancouver and made CKNW one of the best local news stations in North America.

Not much known to the public beyond the authoritative voice that once read the news and subsequently, his regular business commentaries, Barker was recognized by his peers as the best in the business. Indeed, he set the standard for the entire broadcast industry. Acclaimed BC Broadcast Performer of the Year in 1985, he received the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993, and in 1998, he was inducted into the Canadian Broadcasting Hall of Fame.

Warren Barker at home, in his newsroom

Barker might have stepped out of a radio version of The Front Page. Pounding the keys on an old typewriter (reporters learned to recognize angry memos by the keys cutting right through the paper), phone receiver cradled on his shoulder, a cheap Old Port cigarillo in his mouth, surrounded by files, he set the city’s news agenda every morning. His only concession to sartorial resplendence was a loosely-knotted tie he hung on the door handle. He would slip it on, whenever he had to meet the station’s “suits”.

Few realized CKNW managed all this with just a small fleet of reporters — two on days, one on nights, plus the incomparable George Garrett. And it was out in New Westminster, far from the pulse of Vancouver. But Barker had a system. It involved endless phone checks (“Anything new?”), cubbyhole newsrooms at city hall and the cop shop, tips from carefully cultivated sources, and the pièce de resistance, a filing system like no other.

In the words of Cameron Bell, who went on from his Barker tutelage to revolutionize local TV news at BC-TV: “In an era before computers, in a newsroom the size of a sedan, Barker would carefully construct ongoing files for ongoing stories. They’d be put away in files for instant recall. Barker could retrieve information faster than the most computerized databases today.”

Garrett, who spent nearly 20 years working under Barker, said his boss kept files on everything. Fire deaths, traffic deaths, court cases, labour stories, status of the Mission River Gauge that measured the annual Fraser River freshet…In fact, just about every story reported on ‘NW found its way into Barker’s extraordinary filing system, in chronological order. “And all before computers,” marvelled Garrett.

Garrett was a prime example of Barker’s eye for talent. He started on the station’s news desk in 1956, doing phone checks in the days of “Dollar a Holler” that enticed listeners to call in news tips. Then it was onto afternoons in a CKNW news station wagon with loafs of Sunbeam Bread depicted prominently on the sides. Garrett got sidetracked into radio sales and an ill-fated five months managing a radio station in Trail. Barker quickly hired him back as a reporter, with the insight to take him off regular assignment. “Just go and dig up whatever you want,” he told him. Left to himself, not bound to specific hours, the intrepid Garrett, who, like his boss, never seemed to sleep, broke story after story. “I never recall him asking what I was working on,” said Garrett.

While Garrett remained the station’s mainstay, a raft of others hired and tutored by Barker passed through the newsroom, paving their way to lustrous careers elsewhere. Harry Phillips spent 6 years at ‘NW, before moving on to CBC-TV and a 30-year career as a top producer for ABC News. TV reporter, anchor, Journal co-host and award-winning documentary maker Russ Froese was there five years. Other well-known CKNW alumni include Brian Coxford, Scott Dixon, the two Ted’s, Field and Chernecki, Paul Heaney, John Daly, briefly Pamela Martin, Belle Puri and Doriana Temolo, with her melodious signoff.  

Barker also believed in hiring women. Longtime CBC journalist Belle Puri began her career at CKNW, working a 12-hour shift on Sundays. She was green as a grasshopper, but Barker was patient. “I didn’t even know how to type! But I managed,” Puri recalled a few years ago. “(Warren) taught me how to be a reporter….He was the best boss ever. We never wanted to let him down.” Barker also gave her a chance to fill in on weekend sportscasts, setting the stage for the pioneer hiring of Laura Ornest as a full-time member of CKNW’s sports team.  Yvonne Eamor and Marlaina Gayle were other prominent women reporters Barker brought to the station.

Warren Earl Barker was born into a farming family near Okotoks, Alberta, a year before the onset of the Depression. He got the radio bug early, with stints at CJCA in Edmonton and CKRD in Red Deer. He abandoned Alberta for the West Coast in the early 1950s, dashing his father’s hopes he would one day take over the family farm. Barker began working at CKNW in 1952, doing the multi-task gavotte that one did at radio stations in those days. He backed up owner Bill Rae on his radio show, “Ranger’s Cabin”. He hosted a radio quiz show “Fiesta!”, and, best of all, he helped write and voice “Just For Fun”, a homespun comedy show starring Wistful Warren Barker and Hallucinations P. Davis, aka the stations’ longtime program director Hal Davis.

(Barker had a droll, understated wit. Garrett recalled playing penny crib with Ed McKitka,  Surrey’s unforgettable former mayor, during down time of his breach of trust trial. When McKitka was convicted, Garrett ended his report with “and I lost 50 cents to him playing crib”. Barker quickly reminded him: “I’ll have you know, Mr. Garrett, that gambling debts are not a legitimate expense.”)

Barker soon found his forte in the newsroom, where he resided until 1991. He worked relatively normal shifts at first, but regular hours were not his thing. He soon expanded to overnights and well into the morning.

Barker also expected his reporters to work hard, but he treated them well. If, say you worked three hours overtime, Barker would often put you down for six hours in order to receive the double-pay union reporters got, said Scott Dixon.  “And once he hired you, he trusted you. He left you alone to do your work. He was such a pleasure to work for. We all worked hard, because nobody worked harder than he did.”

Eventually, however, the times began to catch up with Barker and his beloved newsroom. With the advance of the Internet, radio ceased to be the force it once was. Distant owners nursed the bottom line more than they cared about people. Investigative radio reporting gradually disappeared, replaced by ever-shorter, quick hits. At the still young age of 63, Barker was put out to pasture by “the suits”, although he continued to do a trenchant, daily business commentary for a few more years.

At the packed reception to mark his heading off into the sunset, well-wishers gathered under a large banner that read: “Our Boss. Our Friend. Our Mentor.” Ever the newsman, Barker reminded them: “I did not retire. I was fired!” We will never see his like again.

A celebration of Warren Barker’s long, good life will be held Thursday, Sept. 23 from 1-4 p.m., at the Burnaby Mountain Golf Course Clubhouse, 7600 Halifax Street.

He leaves his son Brian (Diana), Lee (Wendy), daughter Karen, four grandchildren, three great grandsons, and stepsons Bruce (Trish), Brent (Peri). He was predeceased by his first wife Ronnie, second wife Norma and his sister Betty.