Toronto Mike'd: The Official Toronto Mike Podcast - Remembering Peter Herrndorf: Toronto Mike'd #1207

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

In this 1207th episode of Toronto Mike'd, Mike and Steve Paikin pay tribute to Peter Herrndorf, who passed away Saturday at the age of 82. Toronto Mike'd is proudly brought to you by Great Lakes Brewery, Palma Pasta, Canna Cabana, Ridley Funeral Home and Electronic Products Recycling Association.

The Toronto Maple Leafs used to be a Canadian institution, but no more. The Leafs are stumbling through the hockey season in 12th place, and the big crowd pleasers like Darryl Sittler and Mike Palmatier are wondering when they'll be traded. Morale may be low on the ice, but in the front office it's business as usual, and that means big deals, big profits, and outrageous talk from a man who boasts that he's one of the great con artists. Harold Ballard has hung around rinks and hockey teams since he was a boy. Now he's the absolute boss at Maple Leaf Gardens, and he revels in it. For Ballard, the gardens and the Maple Leafs hockey team are like big expensive toys. The toys may not be working as well as they used to, but Ballard still thinks he's on top. You've got to

win. That's the only thing I know. At any cost? At any cost. Kill the other guy? Why not? Get him out of the road. You'll never have to compete with him again. There'll be somebody else come up in his place. I'll take a shot at him too. Peter Herndorf passed away Saturday at the age of 82. He had a lengthy career at the CBC where he helped develop such shows as The Fifth Estate and The Journal. He later took on roles as publisher of Toronto Life magazine and then chairman and CEO of TVO. That's where FOTM's Steve Paikin enters the conversation. I chatted with Steve Paikin today about his friend and mentor, Peter Herndorf. Steve Paikin, when did you first meet Peter Herndorf? I think I met him for the first time when he was still at CBC,

but I really got to know him, of course, after he took the helm of TV Ontario, as it was then called, in 1992. And I think I was one of the first people that he hired to come on over and basically give life to a new vision that he had for the place. So tell me a little bit more about that, you know, that happening. Did he just approach you? You're working at CBC News or you're working for CBC and he approaches you and says he has a vision for TVO? Yeah, pretty much. I was hosting the six o'clock news on CBC at the time, CBLT, Channel 5, Cable 6, I think as we called it back then. And as I say, I bumped into Peter, I guess, a few times when we were both at CBC. We were just acquaintances, didn't really have a friendship.

And then he basically sent word through a guy who had hired me at CBC named Howard Bernstein. And Howard Bernstein had moved from CBCc to tvo and he called me up and he said you know i think you ought to have a meeting with um peter herndorf here he's got some ideas and you could be part of them and i loved loved and love harold bernstein he gave me my first really huge break in television and so uh off to the fifth floor corner office i was to have my meeting with peter now i must admit to you, I only learned about Peter when he passed away. And like many, you know, imported people in the zeitgeist, I have to do catching up here.

And as I'm learning about him and what he did at the CBC, I think he was at CBC for like almost three decades. Yes. But then, you know, you start to pull up these threads, which I like to do, and you see, okay, Steve Paikin hosts, you know, the agenda was created by Peter, right? And poaching you from CBC, that was his initiative.

Well, the poaching me from CBC was his initiative. The agenda was not. Okay. Let me give you the chronology here. All right. He comes over in 1992. I show up later in the year, August of 1992, and ostensibly he says to me,

we need to do three things. I need you to host an existing show called Between the Lines, which was sort of a weekly town hall show that Howard Bernstein was producing. He said, secondly, you and Howard need to create a new weekly current affairs show whose focus is provincial affairs, Queen's Park. He says, we're TV Ontario. We need a show about

Ontario politics. So I want you two guys to create that, which I would again be the host of. And he said, but this is the short run. The long run is TV Ontario needs a nightly live public affairs show, and this place has never done nightly before. And I need somebody who knows what it takes to put on a nightly broadcast. And Howard, of course, had done that at CBC at the time. He was the executive producer of the 6 o'clock news, so he knew what that was like. And I, as the host and a news so he knew what that was like and i as the host and a previous reporter knew what that was like so he said that's my vision

and then he said to me something i'll never forget he said three things that um well that have stayed with me for lo these 30 years he said steve you really should come to tvo because you'll get a chance to do stuff here that you'll never get to do if you stay at CBC. And then he said, you'll never regret leaving CBC to come to TVO. And then he drew on his own experience, because remember, as you said, he'd been at CBC almost three decades. Then he said, but I have to be honest with you, you will miss CBC. As much as I want you to come here and I think you'll get to do stuff here you'd never get to do at CBC, you will miss working for the National Public Broadcaster.

So I didn't really have to think about this very hard. I wanted to come. I liked his vision. I really loved his leadership chops. And Peter was wrong about one of those three things. I went to TVO, and within a week, I didn't miss CBC at all. Wow. Wow.

Lucky me. Well, okay, clearly a visionary. I'm speaking of Peter, and maybe yourself too, Steve. No, him. For sure, him. So clearly a visionary. Sounds like a tremendous leader. But I'm curious, what was he like as a man, as a human being?

Well, one of the things that we all loved about Peter is that, you know, in some respects, there's two different kinds of leaders. There are people who really don't want to get to know, quote unquote, the help. And that's what I am and all of my friends. We're the help. and that's what I am and all of my friends. We're the help. They tend to want to stay in their offices and take care of administrative things and deal with Queen's Park and all of that. And that's fine.

It's a perfectly fine way to do business. Peter was not that way. Peter loved to manage by wandering around, and he would always poke his nose into the control room. He'd poke his nose into your office. He'd wander around the building. He knew everybody on a first name basis. When he took over the job, he was chair and CEO. The job was all in one back then. It's two separate jobs now, but back then it was all in one. And he made it a point to have weekly breakfasts with everybody. He'd invite seven or eight people to those breakfasts in his office.

with everybody. He'd invite seven or eight people to those breakfasts in his office, and it would be a mix of everything. Guys from the technical crew, his hosts, his managers, his people who staff the master control, everything. He got to know everybody. After, I guess, seven years of being the chair and CEO there, he did know everybody. As a result, we all loved working for him and really bought into his vision for the place. You know, the vision, Mike, I got to tell you, the vision was different. You got to know when TVO, when he took over TVO, I mean, it was a respected organization, but it was a very pedagogical organization. You know, a lot of what TVO was about was teachers videotaping, or I guess recording,

recording on their VCRs the programming that we did and then playing it in their classrooms the next day. And that was a lot of what TVO was about. Peter thought, yes, I love the educational mandate, but let's make it lifelong learning. Let's broaden it. Let's define education in as broad a way as possible. And that meant public affairs. And that meant Between the Lines and Fourth Reading, which was the Queen's Park show we created. It meant Studio Two, which was the daily show that we eventually created in 1994, which lasted until 2006 when the agenda took over. Peter, of course, long gone by then. And these were the kinds of shows that he wanted to be his calling card. When was the last time you saw Peter?

Peter and I and one of the producers who worked for him as well back in the day named Vodick Schemberg, who is still an agenda producer to this day. We got together last September for beverages and we just loved it. Peter's been, he had been fighting bad health for a while and it was the first time we'd been able to see him in a while. And we got together and he was feeling pretty good and enjoying the hell out of our company as we did his.

And we talked about, you know, we talked about broadcasting. We talked about media. We talked a little bit about sports, although Vodick is absolutely useless in that conversation. It's funny, Mike, you know, Vodick's brother is the director of communications for the International Ice Hockey Federation. He knows a ton about hockey.

He's probably forgotten more about hockey than I'll ever know and yet vodick knows nothing about sports this reminds me of norm and mike wilner ask norm about baseball that's that's a great analogy so we had this great get together last september and as we were all leaving after our wonderful schmoozy gossipy conversation uh Peter said to both of us, he said, you know, that was great fun. Let's do it again soon. And unfortunately, he got sicker after that and there was no next time.

Well, it sounds like Peter Herndorf would have made a great FOTM. Oh, you know, I'm kind of shocked that you never got him on your show because he would have been a perfect. Now, mind you, a lot over the last 10 years, a lot of his professional life was in Ottawa because after he left TVO, he went to the National Arts Center and completely redefined the mandate of that place and breathed life back into that place,

put the national back into National Arts Center, did a lot of programming that he had never done before. back into National Arts Centre, did a lot of programming that he had never done before. So I guess, unless you wanted to be Ottawa Mike, he wasn't likely to show up on your radar. But I remember the last time I interviewed him, which was about nine years ago. We'd known, obviously we'd known each other very well, but I'd never interviewed him until he left TVO and went to the National Arts Centre. And I remember asking him, Peter, where is your heart? Is it in Toronto or in Ottawa? And, you know, he had to sort of acknowledge that as a Winnipegger originally, his heart was now sort of in three

different places. You know, he'll always be of Winnipeg. He loved Toronto and the cultural scene in Toronto and the sports scene in Toronto. But Ottawa was where he was planting his flag at the time I talked to him. So he had a foot in all three camps. And I'll tell you, the smartest thing he ever said to me, and this actually had nothing to do with anything professional, we love baseball. We went to baseball games together. We both had a soft spot for the Red Sox in our hearts because he went to Harvard. So we

both went to school in Boston. I went to Boston University. And I remember asking him during, after the interview was over that I just referenced, I said, what do you do with your kids that you enjoy the most? And he said, well, I like to take my son to the Raptor games because it's a two-hour assault on our senses. It's like a big, long rock and roll concert, and it's really very exciting, and I love the energy of it all. And then he said, but if I want to know what's going on in my daughter's life, I take her to a Blue Jay game. And to me, that just summed up everything that we loved about baseball. We loved the drama. We loved the history. We loved those exciting moments.

But we also loved the space around those moments when we could talk. You really can't talk to people when you go to sporting events nowadays. It's too tough. But you can at baseball. And we loved that about baseball. And we loved our talks when we went to Blue Jay games. Steve, thanks for this. And I'm very, very sorry for your loss here. Not just mine, Mike, but, but so many people across the country who loved him and who owe their careers to him. And I'm one of those guys. I owe my career to this guy. He's so right. I've had a chance to do things that I never would have been able to do had I stayed at CBC. And I, I love him and I can't thank him enough for poaching me away. I hope I vindicated his decision to steal me away.

I'll miss that big booming laugh, but I'm glad I got to work for him for a while.