Dr. Tomorrow

Dr. Tomorrow. That’s the title Frank bestowed upon himself. He was, of course, not a real doctor of anything.

He was what people commonly referred to as a “futurist.” Did a lot of corporate gigs. Motivational speaking, conferences, promotional events—that sort of thing.

He’d get his audiences all jazzed up on some amazing new technology. One that would, no doubt, change the very landscape of the the future. Once he had them worked into a real frenzy, imagining a brave new world with endless possibilities and universal spandex jackets, he whip some device out from under the lectern. “But this in not the distant future I’m talking about,” he’d declare. “This is here right now. Today! Sony will have this in homes with months.”

It was admittedly a great shtick. He got a lot of mileage out of it.

Frank and I had this sort of connection that nobody would ever know about. That is, unless I told them.

Frank and I each got our start in the same place, albeit twenty-five years apart.

Maisonneuve Broadcasting in Montreal belonged to Geoff Stirling. Stirling, a Newfoundlander who first worked as a stringer for Time and The Chicago Tribune, and eventually blossom into a bit of a media magnate—owned several broadcast properties in Newfoundland as well as Maisonneuve in Montreal.

Back in 1959, he hired Frank to manage CKGM, a popular Montreal AM radio station. Frank and Stirling used to hang out and trip on acid. Together they’d launch CHOM FM, one of the first FM operations in Canada. Like so many other FM stations, CHOM FM started as a bit of an underground attraction that became the voice of the hippy revolution. Its cultural influence persisted in Montreal until the late 1980s, before the station was cannibalized by proliferating specialty stations along the dial. That, and a decision by the CRTC to prohibit the use of French on CHOM owing to the fact its license specified English broadcast. What had been the characteristic patois of Montreal, constantly heard on CHOM, the “Franglais” spoken everywhere, was forbidden. Not a word of French could be spoken on CHOM.The station would never be the same after that.

Anyway, that’s what Frank and I had in common, to start with. My first real job came in the form of writing copy for CKGM AM and CHOM FM. Hundreds of thirty-second commercials for jeans, supermarkets, and greek restaurants.

Frank and I would eventually cross paths in Vancouver in the late 1980s when I used to visit him on his geodesic dome houseboat, festooned with satellite dishes and packed with all the latest gizmos. Frank’s wife, writer Carole Baker and I both contributed regularly to Paul Andrews’ publications, Media West and Media Wave magazines. I served as editor for Media Wave, a bi-monthly magazine that focused on the emerging Internet and related new media concerns.

The little circle grew when I met and married the eventual mother of my kids. After finishing a philosophy degree at Memorial University in St John’s, she worked a summer for Geoff Stirling on a TV documentary about German philosophers. We connected after that, when I hired her to to work as a junior writer at Vancouver’s Business Report where I held down the job of managing editor.

We fell in love, married, and had two kids. But only months after our second child came into the world, she presented as a paranoid schizophrenic. Things got clinical. Her mental illness left a huge blast radius.

Stories, they say, are supposed to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Writers are supposed to weave order and meaning from raw chaos. I guess that’s why I go back to the Frank Ogden thing, back to my radio and magazine days, and the pathway of connections winding through the decades. I see symmetry. But this time there’s no ribbon to tie a moral bow around the story.

Frank and Carole are both gone. So is Geoff Stirling, years past. My wife and I divorced and the children went their own way. We never speak.

I moved on. Worked as a freelancer for decades, remarried, found a new path.

Funny now I look at it. Frank and his sparkling future and all of the ties that bound us, all just fading memories. Dr. Tomorrow has become nothing more than a part of my past.