Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  He disappeared until 1983, when the FBI found him living with a girlfriend in a suburban bungalow near Orlando, Florida. He was tried and sentenced to seventeen years in the Arizona State Prison system. After serving only two years, he and two inmates escaped by slithering to freedom through overhead air ducts. They pulled a robbery, brandishing a .22 revolver that one of the three had bought in a bar for a hundred dollars. Apparently the gun was in such poor condition they had to twist an elastic band around the barrel to keep the bullets from falling out.

  Mitchell’s luck held for more than a decade. He fled to the Philippines, where he married a local woman named Imelda who believed the tale he had spun about being a wealthy American named Gary Weber. Together they had a son, Richard.

  All was sweet until the television show America’s Most Wanted began flashing Mitchell’s mug on the small screen in the early 1990s. That’s when his Filipina wife knew she had been had. Neighbours reported him to the FBI and he fled the country, bizarrely going back to the U.S. for one more score that he hoped would set him up for the rest of his days.

  He stole $160,000 from a bank in Southaven, Mississippi, several weeks later, but the small-town sheriff took him down. He was again convicted and sentenced, this time to sixty-five years in Leavenworth prison in Kansas, with no possibility of parole. Escaping from Leavenworth was not an option. The 1906 prison has walls that go twelve metres below grade and tower equally high above the ground. This was where Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, spent thirty years enhancing his knowledge of ornithology.

  Mitchell tried three times to get a transfer to a Canadian prison, writing appeals every two years. After the final rejection he settled down to follow the model established by his friend Reid, who had written an autobiographical novel, Jackrabbit Parole, while in prison. After taking a creative writing course, Mitchell eventually produced and self-published his own autobiography, The Bank Robber’s Life: The Life and Fast Times of Patrick Mitchell.

  In the final chapter of the book he admitted that he had allowed another thief, Ron C. Gaskins, to take the rap for a 1980 robbery of $65,000 in cash and cheques from a Sears store in St. Petersburg, Florida. Mitchell said he confessed to the crime in 1994 but it took prison authorities at least a decade to process the information. By then Gaskins had died of cancer, handcuffed to a hospital bed in Jacksonville, Florida. Right up to his dying breaths in 2004, Gaskins was desperately trying to clear his name of the one crime he hadn’t committed.

  In a series published in the Ottawa Citizen in June 2000, Mitchell described his life as a bank robber. “Our number one rule was: nobody gets hurt,” he wrote. He also confessed his fear of dying in prison. “I think about it constantly,” he said. “It’s a horrible fate.” And it turned out to be his destiny. In 2006 he felt a lump under his ribcage. Tests indicated that he had a large malignant tumour in his lungs that had already metastasized to his brain. Nobody ever determined whether it had any connection to the nicotine cocktail he had imbibed back in 1979 to escape from the Joyceville Institution.

  He was airlifted to the Federal Medical Center, a high-security hospital for convicts in Butner, North Carolina, where the brain tumour was surgically removed, although with some impairment to his cognitive abilities. The doctors decided that the illness had progressed too far for any further chemotherapy or radiation to be effective. “He just wanted to be near his family, near us,” his older brother Pinky Mitchell told the Ottawa Sun. “We did everything to try and get him back here.”

  As he was dying, Mitchell continued to write letters to his pal Reid, “but every passing month the envelopes grew thinner” and the letters less frequent. The last one, on a scrap of yellow paper, was delivered from Mitchell’s U.S. prison to the institution where Reid was then doing time in Canada. “We’ve had a life, haven’t we,” Mitchell wrote. “God bless . . .”

  Chris Haney

  Inventor of Trivial Pursuit

  August 9, 1950 – May 31, 2010

  ON A BITTER December day in 1983, journalist David Cobb was strolling down Yonge Street in Toronto when he stumbled into a queue of people stretching back from a Toys “R” Us store to around the corner of a midtown cross street.

  “What are you guys lining up for?” he inquired idly.

  “We’re waiting to buy a copy of that new game, Trivial Pursuit,” somebody replied.

  Ah, thought Cobb, with the equivalent of that dumbfounded look that appears on the faces of lottery hopefuls the moment they realize that the numbers on their ticket might actually be worth something.

  For once Christmas had come early, not only for Cobb but for the rest of a circle of small investors. About eighteen months earlier they had ponied up some not-so-ready cash to take a flyer on a board game invented by Chris Haney and Scott Abbott, a couple of unheralded Montreal journalists. Cobb won’t say how much he has made in the ensuing decades, but he does allow that it was “one of the very few investments where I have ever made my money back.” And then some.

  That was the beginning of the Trivial Pursuit phenomenon, one of the most successful board games in history — ranking up there with Scrabble and Monopoly. Consumers have bought more than 100 million games in its myriad editions, generating sales of more than a billion dollars. In 2008, multinational toy company Hasbro bought the rights to TP for US$80 million.

  Why Trivial Pursuit was such a hit is the stuff of pop-culture theses, but its popularity probably has a lot to do with the times and the people who played it so avidly. By the 1980s the early boomers were in their late twenties and beginning to settle down with steady partners and jobs. The recession had curbed free spending, but boomers had delayed child-rearing, so they had lots of leisure time. They had grown up with sassy educations, so their memory banks were stuffed with general and arcane knowledge that they delighted in spouting — this was the era when The Book of Lists by Irving Wallace and his offspring became a bestseller. The Internet existed, but Google was not yet either a noun or a verb, so it was not possible to look up everything, anywhere, all the time. Testing one another’s information base was a pleasurable and time-consuming pastime. Throw in chance and a set of dice, and bingo! — Trivial Pursuit was the next big thing.

  If TP was good for its investors, it should have been a fairy tale for the founders and the small coterie of friends and family who helped to develop and market the game. And it was for all of them, except Chris Haney, the driven creative visionary who grew up poor and was a millionaire by the time he was thirty-two.

  “He spent most of his life, even when he was young, being a good buddy and a friend, and once the game got going, helping and looking after everybody,” said his younger sister, Shaw Festival actress Mary Haney. “But he forgot to look after and love himself. That is what saddens me more than anything.”

  Somebody once asked Haney how Trivial Pursuit had changed his life and he replied that he now had the opportunity to choose his own miseries. “He just didn’t enjoy his good fortune like I have and the other partners have. It was the oddest thing and a very sad waste,” said his older brother, John Haney.

  “He was the most charming person to be around, constantly telling stories and surrounded by a group of people,” but he also had a “very dark” streak. “He didn’t tolerate fools much, he drank too much and he smoked too much and it wore him down. As Chris once said about himself, ‘His best friend was a bar stool.’”

  CHRISTOPHER FREDERICK HANEY, the middle of three children of broadcaster Jack Haney and his wife, Stratford Festival actress Sheila Haney (née Woollatt), was born in Welland, Ontario, on August 9, 1950. His parents had met at a dance in England during the Second World War; Jack Haney was serving overseas as a sergeant in the Canadian Army and Sheila Woollatt had the corresponding rank in the British forces. They married early in 1945. At war’s end he was shipped home to be demobilized, and she arrived late the following year on the Queen Mary, as a war b
ride with a babe in arms, the Haney’s eldest child, John.

  The Haneys lived a peripatetic life because Jack Haney’s career as a news editor took him to radio stations in Welland, Cornwall, Saint John, and Hamilton before he ended his working life at the Canadian Press’s Broadcast News Division in Toronto. Although Chris was smart, curious, and well-read, he was also bored by school and quit in Grade 12. His father helped get him a job at CP in Toronto as a “gofer,” running errands and delivering copy from reporters to editors. Within a few months he was an assistant editor and by his late teens he was a photo editor.

  Journalism was a natural choice for a boy who had grown up hearing his father lead discussions around the kitchen table about breaking news and world events. The senior Haney was a wit and a jokester, but he was also a heavy drinker and a “hard liver,” traits his son inherited along with the family tendency to heart disease. Jack Haney died of a stroke in 1972, at age fifty-three, leaving his widow $32,000 in insurance money. Encouraged by an actor friend, she spent $30,000 of her inheritance on a small villa in Nerja, Spain, near Malaga on the Costa del Sol, planning to recoup the purchase price by renting it to tourists. That never happened, but the house did nurture her younger son’s love affair with Spain.

  A year before his father died, Haney met a nurse named Sarah Crandall. “He was the handsomest, most intelligent and funniest man I have ever met, bar none. The party began when Chris entered the room,” she said. Together they moved to Ottawa in 1972, where she nursed and he worked in the CP bureau earning money to go travelling. He left for Europe in the fall of 1973, she met him up with him the following February, and they set off in a Volkswagen to travel “from Stockholm to the Sahara Desert.”

  They returned to Ottawa in the spring of 1975, recouped their resources, and drove across the country, eventually pitching a tent at the Robert Service Campground in Whitehorse. That summer he picked up a job from the Canadian government, setting up darkrooms to process photographs from Prince Charles’s royal tour of the Northwest Territories.

  Haney had an acute fear of flying that dated back to his teenage years, when the plane carrying his junior hockey team to a game in Quebec City suddenly plunged five thousand feet. But for this government job in the Arctic, he quelled his nerves and flew aboard a Hercules. That was one of the very few times he travelled by any means other than train, ship, or automobile.

  After the trip to the Arctic, he worked for CP on photo coverage of the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. Haney and Sarah Crandall married in September 1977. Chronically short of funds — especially after their first child was born, in November 1978 — they used his mother’s place in Spain as their home base until they returned to Montreal in 1979, where Haney took a job as a photo editor with the Gazette. To reduce expenses, the Haneys began sharing a place with Scott Abbott, another journalist at the newspaper.

  On a sleepy, wet December day — the fifteenth, to be exact — the three of them and baby John were hanging around the house when the two men decided to have a competition to crown the best Scrabble player of all time. Alas, six tiles were missing from the set. Haney ran out to buy a new game and returned bemoaning what he had spent on Scrabble over the years and suggested there was money to be made in board games. Abbott said they should invent one about trivia. A few beers later, Scrabble forgotten, they had sketched out the idea for what would become Trivial Pursuit.

  The next morning Haney came downstairs brimming with ideas, found a cardboard box and some construction paper, and within forty-five minutes had produced a skeleton of the board, with its design based on the six spokes of a ship’s wheel — even then Haney must have been thinking of cruise ships. Players moved around the game board by rolling the die and winning different-­coloured pie pieces for correct answers to trivia questions in each of six categories. When players had filled their tokens with all six colours, they moved to the centre of the ship’s wheel and answered a final question to win the game.

  Designing the folding board and the ingenious player tokens, which eliminated scoring pads and pencils, was the easy part. Coming up with the questions and the seed money to manufacture the game was something else. Haney quit the Gazette in the spring of 1980 and moved to his mother’s place in Spain, with every reference book he and his wife could cram into their suitcases. The next two years were an arduous slog of writing questions — they needed ten thousand from which to select six thousand keepers — making prototypes, and finding investors. Some of the questions were hard, some easy, and some quirky. What is the biggest diamond in the world? Answer: a baseball diamond.

  The banks weren’t interested in lending money for a start-up board game invented by a couple of journalists, so Abbott’s father offered to mortgage his own house. Working full-time on the game and with no money coming in, Haney began suffering from anxiety attacks. His older brother remembers sitting in bars that winter and reading the backs of gin and vodka bottles to come up with arcane facts that could be turned into questions. His sister, who also dreamed up questions, remembers getting the princely sum of twenty-five cents for every question that her brothers accepted.

  The first 1,200 games were put together in Niagara-on-the-Lake in 1981, just as the recession that had begun in the U.S. hit hard north of the undefended border. The manufacturing cost was about sixty dollars per game because of the heft of the box and the quality of the board and the cards, but the inventors could wholesale it for only about fifteen dollars. Money was so tight that Sarah Haney, who recalls cashing in beer bottles to buy food, went back to work as a nurse after their second child, Tom, was born in November 1982.

  Eventually they sold shares at $1,000 each to thirty-two small-time investors, including the copy boy at the Gazette, journalists in Toronto and Montreal, and childhood friends — although not Haney’s widowed mother. He refused to let her risk her meagre savings. And so it went until they had enough money to produce twenty thousand games, which they began shipping to stores early in 1983. Everybody was tense, especially Chris Haney.

  And then suddenly, Trivial Pursuit took off. Sarah Haney can remember receiving the first welcome returns in the form of a cheque for $5,000 in April 1983. The lineups began in the pre-Christmas rush that year. The following year, twenty million TP games were sold, “one every second, twenty-four hours a day, we used to say,” recalls John Haney, who along with lawyer Ed Werner was a partner with his brother and Abbott in a company they had formed in January 1980, called Horn Abbott Ltd.

  The annual general meeting, which had always been a drab, low-key affair, was shifted to the upscale Deerhurst Resort, just outside Huntsville, Ontario. From the surroundings alone, shareholders must have been thinking that prospects were improving, but the four partners appeared grim-faced as they handed out envelopes and announced that one of them contained a winning ticket for a custom-made Trivial Pursuit gaming table. Instead the envelopes held dividend cheques: $50,000 for each lot of five shares. One of the shareholders, an actor, who had two lots of shares, was sitting in the front row. He expressed the general mood in the room by yelling, “Holy fuck!”

  Life should have been golden for Chris Haney. Instead he was as driven as ever. After the sale of TP to Hasbro in 1988, he needed a new challenge. He built a palatial home in Caledon, Ontario, sailed on a luxury cruiser to Spain every winter, and helped several friends build dream houses. With Abbott he built two magnificent golf courses, Devil’s Pulpit and Devil’s Paintbrush, on the Niagara Escarpment in Caledon. He began working on new electronic board games and studied photography, creating some stunning images and reaching Level 8 in Photoshop expertise.

  By 2007, Haney’s genetic predisposition to heart disease, along with his chronic drinking and smoking, had caught up with him. He suffered from serious circulation problems that culminated in crippling pain in his legs and eventually kidney failure. In late May 2010 Haney decided he wanted to come home from Spain, but he was too ill to travel by a
nything but air ambulance. His sailing days were over. Even then, he didn’t think he was going to die. “He was always an optimist that way,” said his brother. “Every time he survived a medical crisis he would say, ‘I just dodged another bullet,’ with his typically black sense of humour.”

  On landing, he and his second wife, Hiam, were taken immediately to St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto as his children and siblings rushed to his bedside. “Over the years, he suffered anxiety attacks, but he chose that self-destructive lifestyle, and that is what eventually killed him,” said John Haney, who added the plea “May he finally rest in peace” as the final line in the death notice he wrote after his younger brother died on May 31, 2010, of heart disease and kidney failure. He was fifty-nine.

  Lindalee Tracey

  Filmmaker and Writer

  May 14, 1957 – October 19, 2006

  THE CHILD OF an alcoholic father and a chronically poor mother, Lindalee Tracey ran away from home as a young teenager, made a living as a stripper and an exotic dancer, and then forged an award-winning international career as a writer and filmmaker. Driven to make her mark, almost as though she had a presentiment that her time would be short, Tracey had an uncanny ability to document her own life in print and on film.

  She could turn her gaze outwards as well as inwards, by connecting with her interview subjects on a visceral level in hardcore journalism that was as controversial as it was memorable. This approach — working at a story from the inside, from the perspective of a participant rather than the viewpoint of a detached, “objective” observer — is the signature of her work.