Lewko Hryhorijiw was a student journalist and photographer at U of T from 1979 to 1983. From 1982 to 1983 he was the editor of The Strand newspaper. He is now a freelance photographer who can still be found photographing events on campus from time to time. This interview began with one question: “Tell me your stories from your university journalism days.” These are Lewko’s answers.
On U of T’s surprising honorary degree:
I believe in ‘82, U of T gave an honorary degree to a very left-wing, very radical gentleman from Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe.
It was at Convocation Hall. I got him to myself in a room, and it was just the three of us: Mugabe, myself, and his foreign minister. Then I photographed him.
Mr. Mugabe was funny. He was charming. He was gracious. He was kind. And things changed, I guess, over the course of almost 30 years.
On painting the SAC [now UTSU] dome:
I remember a time a bunch of us decided to find some ladders and go up to paint the SAC dome. Word to the wise: have a beer afterwards; because when you’re up there, there’s a little bit of vertigo. It’s quite a few feet down and you don’t want to be hurting yourself that way.
It was right before Vic convocation so we decided to paint the dome scarlet and gold, appropriately enough. So we’re up there, doing our thing, and the U of T police show up. I guess it was a slow night, because all five or six cars showed up. We must have had seven or eight constables waiting down on the lawn for us.
Have you ever painted the SAC dome, yourself? Well, put it on your to-do list because it is a U of T thing. You get a ladder, and you put it up to the lower platform. Everyone climbs up to the lower platform, and then you pull that ladder up against the tower and then you climb up to the dome with all your paints and paintbrushes—don’t use rollers, because the dome itself is curved and you’d be there forever.
So anyway, the U of T police showed up. They said, “You guys come on down!” We weren’t done yet, obviously. It was a warm summer night just before June convocation, and the orchestra was practising at Hart House, so there was this beautiful music wafting through the warm summer air. And we continued our painting.
When we were ready, we took the ladder and climbed back down to the lower platform and put the ladder back on the ground, at which point one of the junior officers kicked down the ladder and it fell to the ground with a noise that must have woken the dead. Then he said to us: “Jump down!” Now, we were crazy but we weren’t insane, and 10 feet is 10 feet and that’s broken legs. We didn’t want that. So, the other officers who were there had to help this young fella put the ladder back up.
Now you’ve got to remember, we’ve been up and down this ladder with scarlet and gold paint. So these poor guys, they’re getting this paint off the ladder onto their hands, onto their uniforms, onto their pants. Needless to say, they weren’t really happy. And the rookie who had knocked the ladder over, they weren’t too happy with him.
So down we climbed and he’s got to make a really good showing. He’s got to be very intimidating. So he whipped out his flashlight and there’s the eight of us—three women and five guys, and everybody was into this—and he’s shining the flashlight in our eyes and saying [in gruff voice] “Look! I’m going to look in your faces and I’m going to remember those faces, and if I ever see any of you guys on campus just stepping on a crack in the sidewalk, I’m gonna write you up!”
He gets to the last two guys in our group, and they got a little silly upstairs so they put on dabs of paint to make themselves look like they were wearing warpaint. So, the constable gets to these two guys and says “I’m gonna remember these faces!” and we all broke out laughing. Of course, the U of T cops—the senior guys—they’d seen this all happen before, and they were back in the car just rolling with laughter. It was a lot of fun.
On the great newspaper rumble:
One day in the springtime, when it was just getting nice and warm, we happened to be reading the UC Gargoyle, which we always called “The Gargle” to be mildly insulting. You know, because gargoyles are cool but you gargle when you have a sore throat or bad breath. Things that are, you know, icky.
Anyway, I forget the exact wording, but they had done an ad hoc survey of college newspapers at U of T and somehow they had not done The Strand justice, and we felt slagged. We took that as a challenge, so we decided to respond to that challenge with a very friendly duel on Philosopher’s Walk, which we thought was very poetic. We weren’t allowed to duel with pistols, but we figured if we showed up with a couple of antique rapiers and clanked some swords around it might be fun. So they accepted our challenge to do that, and we showed up with some rusty old poking things.
The folks from The Gargoyle showed up with a golf bag and they were ready to rumble. The least innocuous thing in that bag was a baseball bat with nails driven through the end of it. They had nunchuks and steel bars and chains and stuff that you’d find in your local torture chamber.
So our first dueller went out there with his little sword and they, you know, smashed the tip off of it. Now my plan was that we’d clank a few swords around and then find a bar that was open and drink ourselves silly by noon—because we were crossing swords at dawn—and I thought it would be a nice way to socialize. They thought it would be a nice way to SPILL BLOOD!
We, of course, wrote it up in our own fashion: we were the victors because we were the classier bunch. But they said they were the victors because they showed up with more hardware than the sixth fleet. What a hoot.
On getting started in student journalism:
U of T is a very big place. For your own sanity, you’ve got to try and carve out your own niche. I decided to come to Vic because they had The Strand, an outstanding newspaper, and they had a yearbook, and they had a darkroom. I knew people that were working on this very bold upstart publication called The Newspaper. The guys who started this were very gutsy, and they’re still doing things in journalism.
I did a lot of stuff for The Newspaper and The Varsity. I tended to switch between them from year to year depending on who had the higher film budget, you know, the money to spend on a bulkload of black-and-white film and whoever had a snazzier darkroom. Back then, The Varsity’s darkroom was in a back room on the main floor and it was kind of icky. Whereas, at The Newspaper, I actually helped them build a darkroom that was big and had a nice big sink. So The Newspaper wasn’t a tough place to hang around in and take pictures for, and then do a ton of darkroom work afterwards.
On the perils of the pre-computer newsroom:
I walk into The Newspaper office or The Varsity office now and people are sitting at screens. For us, there used to be so many more intermediary steps. For instance, you had someone called a typesetter, and he or she would sit at this machine which would spit out these long, narrow columns of copy, and you would have to lay it down on a board. And you were trimming the white edges off the stuff and you’d have to be careful not to cut into the copy, and you were using exacto knifes, so every now and then someone would slice off the tip of a finger. I sliced off the end of my left index finger. The rule was, don’t bleed on anything important.
