Article content

Halfway through my 25th birthday dinner, Jan. 9, 1991, as my mum was lighting candles on my cake in the kitchen, I received a phone call from Vancouver Sun assistant managing editor Shelley Fralic.

She told me gently that the series of brief, temporary contracts that had kept me employed long after my summer internship ended — I left a full-time job at the Kamloops Daily News to join The Sun — had expired and there wasn’t another one available.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Iain MacIntyre: It's so hard to say goodbye Back to video

It turned out all right, because I was hired back in February and began covering the Vancouver Canucks that fall.

Anyway, I hung up the phone, made a wish and blew out the candles as my parents, Janet and Neil, and brothers, Ken and Gordon, applauded.

When someone asked about the phone call, I said I’d been laid off. So this is not the first time.

But this is the first time I have asked to leave.

Our digital library shows that I have written 6,765 stories for The Vancouver Sun.

This is my final one.

With our industry challenged and layoffs threatened, I applied for a voluntary layoff.

I am proud that our union and owners found a way last month to compromise and save the jobs of a couple of dozen younger and talented journalists who possess the ability and idealism necessary to carry The Sun and Province through this time of unprecedented media upheaval. Those of us who volunteered to leave were told we were each saving someone else’s job.

It’s a nice thought, but I am doing this for me.

I have spent my entire working life doing what I’ve wanted since my Grade 7 teacher at Quilchena Elementary in Richmond told me I’d make a good sportswriter. I volunteered at The Richmond Review when I was still in high school, was the only 18-year-old in my journalism program at Langara, and by age 20 was working in Kamloops. I was 24 when I walked into the old Sun newsroom on South Granville on May 1, 1990.

For 27 years, I have been blessed to write sports for readers of the newspaper I delivered as a kid. To this day, when I drive through the Seafair neighbourhood near where I grew up, I still remember the houses where I dropped The Vancouver Sun, thick and worldly, through rain, sleet and sun. But mostly rain.