83 Facts About Pierre Berton

Pierre Berton wrote critiques of mainstream religion, anthologies, children's books and historical works for youth.

Pierre Berton was a reporter and war correspondent, an editor at Maclean's Magazine and The Toronto Star and, for 39 years, a guest on Front Page Challenge.

Pierre Berton was a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, and won many honours and awards.

Pierre Berton was born on July 12,1920, in Whitehorse, Yukon, where his father had moved for the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush.

Pierre Berton's family moved to Dawson City, Yukon in 1921.

Pierre Berton's mother, Laura Beatrice Berton, was a schoolteacher in Toronto until she was offered a job as a teacher in Dawson City at the age of 29 in 1907.

Pierre Berton met Frank Berton in the nearby mining town of Granville shortly after settling in Dawson and teaching kindergarten.

Pierre Berton later wrote that "The Scout Movement was the making of me".

Pierre Berton credited Scouting with keeping him from becoming a juvenile delinquent.

Pierre Berton spent his early newspaper career in Vancouver, where at 21 he was the youngest city editor on any Canadian daily, at the Vancouver News-Herald, replacing editorial staff that had been called up to serve in the Second World War.

Pierre Berton himself was conscripted into the Canadian Army under the National Resources Mobilization Act in 1942 and attended basic training in British Columbia, nominally as a reinforcement soldier intended for The Seaforth Highlanders of Canada.

Pierre Berton spent the next several years attending a variety of military courses, becoming, in his words, the most highly trained officer in the military.

Pierre Berton was warned for overseas duty many times, and was granted embarkation leave many times, each time finding his overseas draft being cancelled.

Pierre Berton volunteered for the Canadian Army Pacific Force, granted a final "embarkation leave", and found himself no closer to combat employment by the time the Japanese surrendered in September 1945.

On 1 February 1948, an article by Pierre Berton appeared in Maclean's under the title "They're Only Japs", which was the first account of the internment of Japanese Canadians to appear in the Canadian media that provided interviews with some of the interned people.

Pierre Berton was quite critical of the decision made by Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King to order the internment on 24 February 1942 that saw all Japanese Canadians interned, regardless if they were immigrants or Canadian-born, unlike the case-by-case policy with interning German Canadians and the partial internment of Italian Canadians that saw all Italian immigrants interned.

Pierre Berton's article was the first to note that greed was a major factor behind the demand for the internment as many of the people in British Columbia who agitated for total internment of all Japanese Canadians were very interested in seizing their assets for themselves.

In 1951, Pierre Berton covered the Korean War as the war correspondent of Maclean's.

In late 1950 Pierre Berton wrote profiles in Maclean's of the two commanding officers of the all-volunteer Canadian Special Brigade, namely Brigadier John Meredith Rockingham and Colonel Jacques Dextraze, which were highly flattering to the subjects of his profiles and led the Canadian Army to expect that Pierre Berton would take a pro-war line in his reportage.

In February 1951, Pierre Berton's profile of Rockingham was published in Maclean's under the title "Rocky" noted that Rockingham was a highly decorated Second World War veteran who had won the Distinguished Service Order at Dieppe in 1942 who was much liked and respected by the men who served under him.

Pierre Berton arrived in South Korea in March 1951 at a critical moment as the Chinese had just taken Seoul and were preparing for a spring offensive that was launched in April 1951 that was aimed at winning the war by driving out United Nations forces of Korea.

Pierre Berton reported that the average Canadian soldier in Korea hated their Chinese enemies, but had a grudging respect for their fighting abilities while holding their South Korean allies in complete and utter contempt as the South Koreans always broke under Chinese assaults.

Pierre Berton noted, but was prevented by censorship from saying that though the Canadian soldiers respected the British, Australians and New Zealand soldiers they served alongside, but held a lower opinion of the US Army.

Pierre Berton was to later to write in the 1990s that all of the problems that the US Army had experienced during the Vietnam war such as morale issues, racial tensions, drug use, and a wide gap between officers and the other ranks he had seen first-hand in Korea, led to his conclusion that the US Army had failed to learn anything from the Korean war.

Pierre Berton complied with the requests of the military censors during his time in Korea, altering one story about the killing of 60 black American soldiers in a Chinese raid that began with the line "Killed in their sleeping bags with their boots on" to instead say that the 60 American soldiers were heroically killed in battle resisting the Chinese raid.

Pierre Berton came to deeply dislike the censorship that he was faced during the Korean war, complaining that he was writing reports that were full of lies and half-truths.

Pierre Berton was later to write that though he had much respect for the Canadian veterans of Korea, he felt that Canada's involvement in the Korean war was a major mistake.

The book had only modest sales, but it led to Pierre Berton being perceived within the Canadian media as an expert on the far north, causing him to appear on television as the resident northern expert.

Pierre Berton traced the appalling hardships faced by the thousands of people who came from around the world to seek their fortunes in the Klondike, the vast majority of whom failed to achieve their dreams of riches.

Pierre Berton covered the rise and fall of Dawson City, a boomtown that was full of bars, brothels and gambling halls that catered to the gold prospectors, giving it a disreputable reputation both at the time and since.

Pierre Berton joined the Toronto Star as associate editor of the Star Weekly and columnist for the daily paper in 1958.

Greatly shaken by the massacre, Pierre Berton used his column to criticize the apartheid system in South Africa, writing: "The time has come for this country to finally take a stand on South Africa".

Pierre Berton argued that Canada should side with the nonwhite bloc and use its influence to have South Africa expelled from the Commonwealth and not be permitted to return until apartheid ended.

Pierre Berton compared the replies he received, noting there was a frosty tone to the replies to the Cohen letters while there was more warmth in the replies to the Douglas letters.

Pierre Berton expressed much sadness in his columns about the fading of traditional Japanese culture as he noted the most popular form of plastic surgery for Japanese women was making their eyes appear Western; that Western music was being played everywhere including Shinto shrines; and the "this typical Japanese family [that he had stayed with] was about typical as John David Eaton's would be in Toronto".

Pierre Berton called the beating of Bluestein a "semi-execution" brazenly committed in the front lobby of the popular Town Tavern nightclub of Toronto, and demanded that the police bring Papalia to justice despite the unwillingness of nearly 100 witnesses to testify.

Pierre Berton's overcoat, torn and slashed, was literally drenched in his own blood.

In 1961, Pierre Berton wrote a children's book, The Secret World Of Og based on the whimsical stories he told his daughters in the 1950s.

Pierre Berton always answered the fan mail he received from children who liked The Secret World of Og right up to his death, which was the only fan mail that he consistently answered.

Berton left the Star in 1962 to commence The Pierre Berton Show, which ran until 1973.

In January 1963, Pierre Berton started to work as a Maclean's columnist, where the other writers such as Robert Fulford and Peter Gzowski wanted to have him fired because the often frivolous and trivial nature of his columns were felt to be embarrassing.

Pierre Berton always felt that being fired was unjustified, especially because the editors of Maclean's had wanted him to write provocative columns about contemporary issues to boost circulation.

Pierre Berton was able to persuade famous people to appear on his television show; in September 1964, during a visit to London, Pierre Berton interviewed the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the actress Vivien Leigh, the singer Noel Coward and the actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

In November 1964, Pierre Berton devoted an episode of his show to the youth culture of Britain, which had attracted worldwide attention following the success of the Beatles.

When Pierre Berton asked Jagger about the charge that he was a bad influence on young people, he replied, "I don't feel morally responsible for anyone".

In 1964, an episode of The Pierre Berton Show attracted national controversy when Berton examined the subject of homosexuality, which was illegal in Canada at the time.

Pierre Berton interviewed several American homosexuals about their lifestyles, but the CBC would not air the episode again after receiving a flood of complaints.

Pierre Berton called for the Anglican Church to accept what he called "real Christian love, in all its flexibility, with all of its concern for real people rather than for any fixed set of principles".

Pierre Berton is in the book section, the religion section, the TV section of our daily newspapers; he is the subject of feature articles and gossipy items in the national magazines; he is interviewed by every disc jockey, advice to the housewife dispenser, numerologist and pitchmen on every radio station in the land; he is on every television program, on every Canadian television channel, not just once in a while or two or three times a day, but all day, everyday-or so it seems.

In 1968, Pierre Berton became concerned that his books dealing with contemporary issues would become dated and forgotten with the passage of time.

Pierre Berton noted that Klondike, his account of the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s, had a more timeless quality since it covered a subject that would not become dated, and indeed was the subject of enduring popular fascination.

For reasons of pride and Canadian nationalism, Pierre Berton set out to become a story-teller historian who would write books for a mass audience.

Pierre Berton defined the building of the railroad as a struggle of man against nature, seeing it as a triumph of human ingenuity and willpower, as the builders defeated the harsh landscape of northern Ontario, the seemingly endless Prairies, and the imposing Rocky Mountains.

Pierre Berton became one of the principle spokesmen for this new nationalism, as he argued that Canada could stand alone as a great nation.

The Pierre Berton Show was a popular television show owing to famous guests from Canada and around the world.

In early 1969, Pierre Berton's show aired a five-part series called The Indian Revolution, about the emerging Red Power movement.

Pierre Berton interviewed several First Nations people in support of his thesis that indigenous peoples had been "beaten, starved, and otherwise punished by church and federal schools".

In July 1969, Pierre Berton had the telephone removed from his house in Kleinburg, and claimed he was leaving for Mexico.

Pierre Berton spent the summer of 1969 writing his railroad epic, which came to be divided into two volumes owing to its length with his work finally being finished in December 1969.

In 1971 Pierre Berton interviewed Bruce Lee, the famous martial artist's only surviving television interview.

Hidy stated that though Pierre Berton broke no new ground in his railroad saga, his work was very "lively" and carried "the reader through one cliff-hanging situation after another".

Hidy wrote that as a work of narrative popular history, Pierre Berton succeeded admirably in telling the story of the construction of the CPR over daunting odds, and in impressing the reader as to why the building of the CPR, which was completed five years ahead of schedule, was considered one of the great engineering feats of the 19th century.

Michael Bliss felt that Berton's picture of the Prime Minister, Sir John A MacDonald, was too colored by hero-worship as Bliss in a critical review stated that Berton went beyond even Creighton in portraying MacDonald as the heroic prime minister.

Pierre Berton chose to interpret the War of 1812 as not a war between the United States and Great Britain which just happened to be fought in North America, but rather as the beginning of a Canadian national identity.

Pierre Berton set out to debunk the heroic image of the colonization of the West by focusing on the hardships and suffering of the farmers who could be easily ruined by crop failures.

Pierre Berton focused instead on the tenacity and sheer determination of the settlers and provided a new heroic image of the settlement of the West.

Pierre Berton noted that 1 out of 10 Canadians who stormed up the heights of Vimy Ridge on 9 April 1917 were either killed or wounded, leading him to the conclusion that it would be better if the battle had not been fought at all.

Pierre Berton almost seemed to acknowledge the decline of the "new nationalism" in his 1997 book 1967 The Last Good Year, arguing that the Centennial year of 1967 was the highpoint of Canadian history and everything that had happened since 1967 had been a story of decline and decay.

That vision of the past as an interconnected whole has shattered over the century about which Pierre Berton writes, as if hit by a mammoth artillery shell, but there's no sign of this in his account.

Pierre Berton served as the chancellor of Yukon College and, along with numerous honorary degrees, received over 30 literary awards such as the Governor General's Award for Creative Non-Fiction, the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and the Gabrielle Leger Award for Lifetime Achievement in Heritage Conservation in 1989.

Pierre Berton is a member of Canada's Walk of Fame, having been inducted in 1998.

Pierre Berton was named Toronto Humanist of the Year 2003 by the Humanist Association of Toronto.

In 2004, Pierre Berton published his 50th book, Prisoners of the North, after which he announced in an interview with CanWest News Service that he was retiring from writing.

Pierre Berton had lived in nearby Kleinburg, Ontario, for about 50 years.

Pierre Berton attracted attention in October 2004 by discussing his 40 years of recreational use of marijuana on two CBC Television programs, Play and Rick Mercer Report.

Pierre Berton died at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, of heart failure, at the age of 84 on November 30,2004.

Pierre Berton's cremated remains were scattered at his home in Kleinburg.

Pierre Berton was survived by his wife and their eight children, along with 14 grandchildren.

Pierre Berton was the first recipient and agreed to lend his name to future awards.

In October 2007, the deed to Pierre Berton House was passed to the Writers' Trust of Canada; the literary organization now oversees the program as part of its roster of literary support.

The Pierre Berton family visited and had an official opening of the school in front of the students.

Pierre Berton received many honorary degrees in recognition of his work as a writer and historian.

All of Pierre Berton's writings, including finished books and articles as well as manuscripts, drafts, and research material are now held in the Pierre Berton fonds at the McMaster University Archives.