Writer George Mortimore was early proponent of native rights – The Globe and Mail
A newspaperman through most of the last century could have done worse than to pitch questions to Richard Nixon, Tim Horton and the Three Stooges.
That last one did not diminish the seriousness with which George E. Mortimore took his craft. He was an early proponent of native rights and his series The Strangers, a searing appraisal of aboriginal life in British Columbia, won a National Newspaper Award in 1958. It ran in Victoria’s Daily Colonist across 52 instalments – a length unheard of today – and described in wrenching detail the miseries and injustices inflicted on First Nations.
In a journalism career that spanned three-quarters of a century, Mr. Mortimore tackled such diverse topics as violence in hockey, environmental advances and myriad social issues. He interviewed comedian Bob Hope aboard entrepreneur Max Bell’s yacht and Louis Armstrong while the jazz great shaved, asked Albert Einstein for a personal favour, scrummed Mr. Nixon (before he was U.S. President) and rode the Toronto Maple Leafs team bus alongside Mr. Horton for a booklet titled What’s Happened to Hockey? distilled from his Globe and Mail articles about violence in the game.
“He wrote morning, noon and night,” his son Michael told an interviewer this month. “That was his passion.”
