This is what the Montreal Gazette is running today, July 25:
WHOMPH!
That was the sound my dad, Bruce Taylor, made every time I swung at and missed a ping-pong ball hurled at me by a plastic pitching machine that sat on his dining room table in his apartment.
I was eight or nine and it was the greatest toy I ever had because it gave me one of the happiest and most vivid memories of the old man any kid could ever want.
Because while his face was plastered to billboards and buses across Montreal of the late-1960s and early ‘70s, as he wrote a daily column for the Montreal Star and hosted his own TV show, all I wanted him to do was to stop making that damn sound because I laughed so hard every time he did it I couldn’t swing properly. We had a serious game of apartment baseball going on, you know. I can’t remember all the rules, but I do recall the small space between the top of the curtains and the ceiling was a home run. Joy rang out upon the earth whenever a ping-pong ball smacked the wall there, I’ll tell you.
The things a father and son will do together for fun.
Dad died July 23 in Purmerend, Holland, where he had been living for 12 years. He was 81.
In his three-decade career from the old Herald to the Montreal Star to the Gazette and the Sunday Express, with forays into television and radio, most notably as the morning newsman on CKGM during its heyday with Ralph Lockwood, Bruce Taylor was arguably the voice of Montreal. Always dressed immaculately with a barrel chest on his six-foot-two frame, he was a larger-than-life figure who the average guy felt would fight for him. And he did. With his column The Target is Trouble, he gave the term “crusading reporter” a good name.
To my brother Brett and me, he was Aquaman in the pool and Rusty Staub when we played catch every endless summer weekend. He shared his love of the Montreal Canadiens with us, took me to the first Canada-Russia game in the old Forum, and, I believe, passed on to us his hunger for life and insatiable curiosity for all things real or imagined.
To his siblings, Lynda, Brenda and Richard, he was a big brother. To others, a dad, a stepfather, an uncle, and a proud grandfather to Brett’s kids, Autumn and Chase.
After leaving the news industry, he started his own public relations firm in the city, but, like many others, left for good shortly after the Parti Quebecois came to power in 1975.
He moved to Fort Lauderdale, where he took over a struggling bakery with his second wife Mary. True to form for this man of action, the business thrived, but the marriage, in the end, did not.
His later adventures took him to the far reaches of the world. One day he would be phoning from Uruguay, the next saying hi from Hong Kong before he finally met the woman who would become the true love of his life. He had a wonderful son with Chandra, and both she and Richey were by his side when he died.
Bruce Taylor was a hell of a reporter and columnist in his day. He was an original bon vivant, a boulevardier and a groundbreaking writer. He could, and very often did, tell story after story as a true raconteur, his whiskey-voice rising and falling on every word.
That voice is now silenced, but the man will never be forgotten.
‘Bye, Dad.
