by Gordon Pitts
Graham Day’s career as a lawyer, troubleshooter, and global executive hung on a choice. He was twenty years old and running out of options. Three alternative paths formed in his mind. He could try to grind on in a ho-hum arts program, he could quit school and work full-time at Simpson’s, which was eager to employ him, or he could go to law school. He did not have great marks, but he fulfilled the bare minimum requirements to get into Dalhousie Law School, benefiting from the then-prevailing philosophy that you put bums in seats first and then weeded out the ones that didn’t fit. He filled out the forms, and was admitted. Thus, a great career was born—in desperation.
Chapter 2
Turning Point
Graham Day, first-year law student at Dalhousie University, was angry. He had failed his course in property law, and he was certain he should have passed. It was another chapter in a long-running series: the System v. Graham Day. He might have mellowed a bit, but the anti-authority fervour was still raging below the surface. He had finished the year at law school with marks down in the fourth quartile of his class, but the property mark of 45 was particularly galling.
He went to see the professor, a tall awkward-looking man named Graham Murray, to plead his case. Murray, an air force veteran of the war, said he didn’t deserve to pass. His overall work didn’t warrant it, and he explained why. “He went on to verbally kick my ass,” Day says. The interesting thing was Day’s response. A light went on, and he agreed with that judgment. It was an important moment in the making of the man. He wrote the supplementary exam, he passed, and he spent the summer thinking about life. His marks got a lot better the second year, and he had a great third year. Today he is asked why this transformation happened. “I think I grew up.”
He took every course Graham Murray offered, and he kept getting better. Murray was not just a fine professor, a gentle man in the true sense of the words; he also became a quiet champion of this fiercely brilliant, sometimes angry young man. In fact, Day says, “I didn’t think I had a bad teacher in law school; all were competent, some were inspirational.” But what truly made the difference was that “Graham Murray cared.” Murray became a force in Day’s intellectual development. One of the professor’s courses dealt with the law of evidence, which goes through constant transitions in terms of what is admissible in court. It can’t be defined neatly by saying “this is admissible by this law or this regulation”—the law continues to grow. “I thought his course on evidence was inspirational,” Day says. He saw the law not as a fixed canon, but as a living thing, and that appealed to the lover of history and the classics.
It helped, too, that Dalhousie Law School (now the Schulich School of Law) was the top incubator of legal talent in eastern Canada and going through a fertile period. In the early 1950s, it helped mould men and women who would change Canada. One of those in Day’s class was John Crosbie, a brilliant student and multiple medal winner, but shy and withdrawn. In the future, he would find his voice as an eloquent, slashingly biting Newfoundland politician who was a giant in federal Conservative cabinets. Purdy Crawford, a year ahead of Day and a poor boy from rural Nova Scotia, would become Canada’s pre-eminent corporate statesman and governance pioneer. (Indeed, Crawford and Day would have parallel careers, moving from law to operational business leadership and as formidable figures on corporate boards.)
Graham Murray, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, played a role in many of their lives—none more so than that of Bertha Wilson, a young Scottish-Canadian who came to Halifax with her husband, a naval chaplain. Enrolling a year after Day, Wilson would face resistance as both a mature student and a woman. It was the era. The law school dean at the time, Horace Read, recommended that she go home and take up crocheting. But, like Graham Day, she persevered, and found Murray’s classes inspiring. She graduated as one of six women in a class of fifty-eight and went on to a stellar legal career, capped by being named the first female justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.
Graham Day was twenty-one when he got serious about the law. In his second year, he moved up into the second quartile of marks, obtaining four firsts, including one in Murray’s course. In the third and final year, he finished in the first quartile, eighth in a class of forty-four. For a while he entertained the idea of applying at Dalhousie for a scholarship for a master’s degree. The school administration did not seem to encourage him, however—perhaps there was still some scepticism that he had truly reformed—and he let it ride. He was proud that he had graduated from law at only twenty-three, the youngest in the province. This is a lesson to every teacher who has grappled with an underachieving student: sometimes the situation requires just quiet support until the person matures. When the light finally goes on, it is a transcendent moment. Professor Murray must have loved to watch his young protegé blossom.
Meanwhile, Simpson’s offered a good job that paid money. In addition, Day got paid fifty cents an hour putting books away in the barristers’ library, and he helped train the choir for a local production of the opera Faust, for which he also sang in the chorus. It was a chance to observe the celebrated Czech-born opera singer and actor Jan Rubes. In one scene, Rubes would leap up on the table and land on his toes. “That impressed me to no end,” Day recalls. Rubes explained to the younger thespians how to cushion the landing. It is interesting to envisage young Graham’s six-foot, two-inch frame flying through the air and landing gracefully. But one thing was clear: while the study of law was teaching him discipline, music was giving him the élan of a performer—and both were vital in the making of a leader.
There was a moment when his life almost took another course. At Dalhousie he was able to spread his wings in music. He got to know other young men with musical interests, people such as Jim Bennet, a fine singer, and Manny Pittson, a trombone player. In 1951 he auditioned for a role in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta produced by a Dalhousie professor, and he was successful. He began directing and producing. He loved Gilbert and Sullivan, and was an avid member of any production that would have him.
Then he got an inquiry from an agent of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in London, the renowned specialist producer of Gilbert and Sullivan. It was a tempting offer, with the chance to move to London, become part of the arts community, and learn from great teachers. But Frank Day took his son aside and told him to look in the mirror. Just how good did he think he was?
He thought about it. At the time, he was still studying with Teodor Brilts. He was a baritone with lots of register down but not much up. Could he really stack up against the best voices in the world? He could see that Jim Bennet, for example, whom he came up against at Kiwanis music festivals, had a superior voice and was better equipped for a professional career. So he concluded the Gilbert and Sullivan career was not for him. But music would continue to be part of his life—an instrument of personal growth, a distraction from frustrations, and a source of pure pleasure.
And yet Day was still incorrigible, tilting at windmills. He had continual run-ins with the university administration, but the saving grace was that he truly liked his teachers at the classroom level. And after the French class incident, the administration was clearly still taking a wait-and-see approach to Graham Day. In 1956, his last year in law school, he had been training a small girls’ choir, and there were plans to take it to high schools to encourage students to come to Dalhousie. Then, without explanation, Alexander Enoch Kerr, the president of Dalhousie, cancelled the trip. Day, indignant, drafted a letter to various parents explaining why they would not be doing the trip, referring specifically to Kerr. The president told him to withdraw the letter. Once again, the choice confronted him: fight or withdraw. He knew his parents would be shattered by the affair, even if he could prevent his degree from being withheld. So he choked back his pride and repudiated the letter. Again, more maturity. But there was perverse satisfaction when, that autumn, the administration asked him to return to produce and direct the 1957 university musical. And he wa
s paid for it.
Even when things were hard, Day continued to find solace in his extracurricular life. According to a Financial Post profile, his lifelong motto, “I never lie and I never bluff,” had its origins at this time. He told the interviewer about a poker game at Dalhousie with three other students—none of whom has the foggiest recollection of it, the article pointed out. Day’s loss of five dollars because of a failed bluff later guided his approach to business, because, he explained, “to lie, you have to be able to bluff.” One of those poker players was Roland Thornhill, later deputy premier of Nova Scotia. Interviewed for the Financial Post article, Thornhill said he had long forgotten that game, but distinctly remembered Day. “If you were going to choose some guy in the class who was going to be knighted by Maggie Thatcher as the arch Conservative economic czar, Graham Day probably would have been the last one you’d have chosen. When someone’s up on the stage in tights, you don’t visualize them as having that kind of a career.”
Day left Dalhousie in 1956 with a good feeling generally about the university. He did not realize it then, but he would keep circling back to the institution, which would continue to be his intellectual base camp. The law school had propelled him on his way to a legal career. Then he enrolled in the school of real life. In Nova Scotia, it was possible to complete three of the required nine months of articling between the second and third years of law school. Day had been fortunate to gain an unpaid articling position with a young Halifax lawyer named Len Pace, himself only a recent member of the bar and striving to establish a practice. During the summer and in the period after graduation, Day was involved in everything the office did, and became close to Pace, a future attorney general of Nova Scotia and later a justice of the province’s Supreme Court. He learned a lot about law, but it was an experience outside the offices that left the biggest impact: he learned the importance of sacrifice for an important cause.
One day, as Day arrived at work, Pace told him he was closing the law office for a couple of days. The practice needed revenue, but there was a more important job to do: “We’re going to get Len Kitz elected mayor,” Pace explained. Kitz was that same young Jewish lawyer who faced the prejudice of wartime Halifax as he went off to serve in Europe. He had returned to Halifax after the war and opened his own law firm. In 1948, Kitz decided to enter politics, and he was an alderman for seven years before seeking the mayor’s job.
In those days, there was an unwritten rule in Halifax municipal politics that the mayor’s job would alternate between a Protestant and and a Catholic. There was nothing in this rotation to include other religions until Len Kitz and his supporters decided to break the barrier. Day was part of the team that mapped out the city in a grid; he and Pace then took on canvassing of blocks in the North End, knocking on doors and introducing themselves, explaining why the city should elect a Jewish mayor. Kitz won the election, and the religious compact was broken. “I thought, ‘This is a great thing we have done,’” Day remembers.
In his life, Day would have a lot of jobs, and some would pay him very well. But he always needed to know there was a greater cause than his own remuneration—whether working for a nation-building company such as Canadian Pacific or doing volunteer assignments for the British government in advising the National Health or setting teachers’ pay-for-performance.
When Day graduated from Dalhousie in 1956, some of his class went west to Alberta, which was just exploding as an energy powerhouse. A number of classmates were members of legal families, and could count on a career in an established local firm. But Day would end up in a two-man practice in Windsor, in the Annapolis Valley, less than an hour’s drive from Halifax. It was Len Pace’s idea. In the Pace law firm, Day was the ever-available errand-runner, as he went through the hoops of articling for the Nova Scotia bar. One morning, Pace waved him into his office. As he sat down, he heard Pace on the phone telling someone “I think Graham will go to Windsor, sure.” Day thought he would be doing a run to Windsor, where a friend of Pace had taken over a law practice. But the friend actually wanted to leave Windsor and practise in Cape Breton. There was an opening for a lawyer; all Day had to do was go. It wasn’t a great practice, but it paid the rent. Although he hadn’t yet been called to the bar, he could perform certain legal tasks—for example, becoming a commissioner of oaths to deal with documents to be sworn. Pace said, “I will take responsibility for everything you do. So if you can’t cope, give me a call.”
Day had no savings, and his days at Simpson’s were over. He needed a car to get around the valley. The Royal Bank of Canada lent him $500, which in 1956 was a lot of money, and a sympathetic Halifax car dealer, Frank Zebberman, sold him a new basic Volkswagen, insured, with a full tank of gas, and the understanding Day would pay what he could in instalments. It was the beginning of a lifetime love affair with the tiny Beetles.
At twenty-three, Day became a lawyer in Windsor, population three thousand. He found a place to board with other men at Miss Marion Dill’s house on College Road. Because Day was not yet a full-fledged member of the bar, he was limited in what he could do. It was part of his apprenticeship. And his attitude had changed. He got better every year, and became a very good small-town lawyer. He acquired a partner, Bud Kimball, who shared his love of music, and the two set up shop. He kept busy, and with Halifax just an hour away he could keep up his contacts in the musical world.
Day now realizes it was serendipity. But he also understands that serendipity demands action: here is the opportunity, but will you take the risk? You have to be open to change, imbued with the courage to move on and the willingness to experiment, especially early in life. Serendipity is a transferable thing: you try to create happy surprises for the young people who follow you. Some have a talent for serendipity, some don’t.
This idea was explored in a New York Times essay by Pagan Kennedy. The term comes from an old Persian tale about three princes on the Isle of Serendip who possessed strong powers of observation. As eighteenth-century British essayist Horace Walpole described it, they were making discoveries through accident or sagacity that they were not necessarily looking for; Walpole called this skill “serendipity.”
Day had the adventurous spirit and observation powers that made him an artist of serendipity. A lawyer quits, another leaves to join the judiciary, a shipyard hovers on the edge of bankruptcy, a prime minister is desperate for help, and he is standing there, open to change and ready to act. Serendipity is no accident. In the words of the great baseball philosopher Yogi Berra, when you come to the fork in the road, take it.
Graham Day took it, time after time, seizing the opportunity when it presented itself. He quotes Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
Tides of opportunity and tides of water: they would both play a huge role in Day’s life. But he knew that such tides had human enablers and that personal relationships matter. After graduation, he kept in touch with Graham Murray. After the death of his old professor, Murray’s daughter was going through her father’s things when she happened upon a copy of a letter written by her father to Canadian Pacific recommending his former student Graham Day for a job in the legal department. Day never knew the letter had been written. He accepted it as a gift and had it framed—an enduring memory of a man who cared.
Chapter 3
Of Courts and Courtship
She was a nineteen-year-old fresh out of high school, living at home in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, taking a few college business courses and recovering from a bout of mononucleosis. He was an older man—at twenty-four, all of five years her senior, but still a wet-behind-the-e
ars lawyer trying to learn the ropes of his profession in a small Nova Scotia town. Theirs was a whirlwind romance.
It started out as a lark on a June night as six young people poured into Graham Day’s Volkswagen Beetle, off to see the sights in the Annapolis Valley. The son of Day’s office landlady in Windsor had phoned Graham earlier that day to ask what he was doing that night. Windsor was home to two private schools, King’s for the boys, Edgehill for the girls—and it was graduation weekend at Edgehill. A number of the recent “old girls” had come back for the round of events. Day had a car, so he got invited along on a group outing.
Day folded his lanky frame into his Beetle’s front seat. His blind date, Sandra, sat beside him, while another young woman named Ann Creighton somehow squeezed in next to her. As the evening went on, he became more interested in the willowy brunette across the seat than in Sandra. He asked Ann if he could take her to lunch the next day. It was a busy weekend—her younger sister was graduating from Edgehill—and her mother was appalled that she would desert the family for a date with this overeager young lawyer. But they relented. The date went well, and he was deemed acceptable to her parents. Her father Jake quipped to her mother Ruth, possibly in jest, that “maybe we can get rid of her.”
Day would later joke that the mono had left Ann in too weakened a condition to resist his ardent pursuit. “I drove down to see her [in Dartmouth] on Monday and proposed on Wednesday and we married a year later.” The distance between “Can I have lunch with you?” to “Will you marry me?” was alarmingly short, but Graham Day, the king of serendipity, was not one to let an opportunity slip by. He was a consummate planner in business, but he made his most important life decision in a wink of an eye. In affairs of the heart, he knew what he wanted and he pursued it. In Brutus’s words, “we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”