The Editor Who Called My Parents, Christy McCormick Never Stopped Editing Me

By Howie Silbiger

I was sad to hear about the untimely death of Christy McCormick.

Christy was more than just a friend. He was a mentor during my first years in journalism and, more importantly, one of the people who gave me my start.

I first met Christy when he was the editor of The Suburban. He had already had an illustrious career before joining the weekly, and in 1988 he engaged me as a 14-year-old unpaid columnist covering high school happenings. At the time, I would send my copy in by fax and, inevitably, Christy would call my home, usually while I was in school, and explain to my parents how crappy my copy was and that if I wanted to be a columnist, I had to step up my game. I would get home from school and my parents would simply tell me to call him, at which point he would repeat everything he had already told them in no uncertain terms.

His constant pressure for me to be better made me better, and it didn’t take long before the calls stopped and the pieces started running pretty much as I wrote them.

It took a while before Christy trusted me to cover actual stories. The first one he sent me to was the March to Jerusalem, the kind of reporting assignment an editor would normally give a rookie. I wrote the standard report, Christy was happy, I was happy, and I was off to what would become a long career in journalism.

In 1995, Christy asked me to write a story about The Gazette’s coverage of the Rabin assassination. I wrote a piece criticizing the paper for speaking only to a Reconstructionist rabbi while ignoring the other rabbis and Jewish movements in the city. The piece was fairly generic. My point was simply that opinions about Rabin varied considerably within Montreal’s Jewish community and that The Gazette should have presented a broader cross-section.

Christy decided the story needed a little more spice and rewrote part of it, particularly the opening paragraph, referring to the Reconstructionist movement as “fringe.” While the word fit the context of the article in its literal definition, the way it was interpreted caused a huge controversy and generated hundreds of letters to the editor.

The fallout eventually led to me leaving The Suburban and joining the NDG Monitor under then-editor Julien Feldman, who is now an EMSB commissioner. Christy felt bad about what had happened and we remained in constant contact, with him repeatedly trying to convince me to return to The Suburban fold. I eventually did come back, but not long after my return Christy left, and I did too. I would only return to The Suburban briefly under editor Jim Duff in the early 2000s.

Christy and I eventually lost touch, but we reconnected a little over a year ago when he messaged me on Facebook and sent me a link to his memoirs. Not long after that, he started reading the Montreal Jewish News and would sporatically message me either complimenting or criticizing something I had written. I last communicated with him a few months ago.

There was something oddly appropriate about that. More than 35 years after he first hired a 14-year-old kid to write a high school column, Christy was still reading my copy and telling me exactly what he thought of it. The difference was that now he no longer had to call my parents first.

I am going to miss those messages. I am going to miss the criticism as much as the compliments, because that was always Christy. He gave me an opportunity when I was a kid, pushed me when I wasn’t good enough and, whether he realized it or not, had an enormous influence on the journalist I am.