Accentuate the positive

Terry Culbert ends a nearly 60-year broadcasting career

Terry Culbert seems to have a permanent twinkle in his eye—so pronounced, so uniquely his, that if you listen closely you might hear it through his voice on the radio. The popular County FM host is stepping back from the microphone later this month, capping a 59-year long career in broadcasting. He is eager to begin writing the next chapter in his story.

Culbert grew up in the apartment over the dry goods store his dad operated in Lucan— the town made famous by another notorious family of Irish immigrants, five of whom were killed, after years of brawling and feuding, by members of the hastily assembled Vigilance Committee in 1880. No one was ever held to account for the crimes. Unsurprisingly Terry wrote a book recounting the history his home town and the how the Donnellys has coloured its story every since.

But Culbert’s story unfolded many generations later. From a very early age, the young Culbert was driven by a need to create. Initially he was tasked with creating the scenery around the model train set displayed at Mel Culbert’s Dry Goods each Christmas. Drawing came naturally. Then a keen interest in photography.

At sixteen, when others were thinking about cars, Terry purchased a Yashica medium format film camera. The Yashica was a Japanese version of the German Rolleiflex favoured by the famous photagraphers in 1960s such as Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon.

He submitted some of his early images to the London Free Press photo contest. He won. The hook was set.

While attending London’s H.B. Beal Secondary School focused on the arts, Terry apprenticed at local TV station, CFPL, in the art department. He landed a job on the Romper Room show illustrating the set and operating a boom mic.

Thus began a 42-year long career in TV. He soon found a camera on his shoulder and was thrust out into the world to bring back stories. A 16-millimetre black and white film camera at first. He would process and rough edit his footage before handing it over the the news writers and editors.

In 1972 he was recruited to work for the CBC affiliate in Toronto. Then to Ottawa where he was first non-reporter voted as a Director into the Parliamentary Press Gallery.

But Culbert’s head wasn’t into hard news, and he found the grist of the parliamentary mill “boring as hell”. Culbert was drawn more to human stories, to happy stories. Of achievement, or overcoming hardship.

He took a job with Global TV as their first news cameraman-reporter. Largely self-directed, Culbert crisscrossed the province in search of stories—of interesting people.

He has vivid memories eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches hundreds of metres underground in a salt mine in Goderich. Or climbing the ladder through the needle to the very top of the CN Tower. He then climbed out of a porthole suspended by a harness and rope with nothing but air between him and the pavement far below. He did this to get the shot of the on-camera person peering through the port he had exited.

He spent the next 24 years with the network. But at the age of 60 his shoulder gave out—too many years lugging a heavy camera.

In 2003 Terry and his long-time partner Barb Hogenauer decided to get out of the city. They built a home on Amherst Island. Soon enough he joined the island radio station as a volunteer and on-air broadcaster. He felt the pull of community connection.

He recalls neighbours of the station housed on a former dairy farm—the booth situated in the milk room—would prepare breakfast for him and his colleagues.

But by 2013 the battle over wind turbine development on the wee island had irreparably divided the small community. He and Barb had visited the County frequently. They made the move, buying a house on the top of the escarpment a Mountain View. An old school chum, John Mathers, invited Terry to the County FMs annual meeting.

And just like that, Culbert was back on the air. This run, too, has come to end—as all things must.

Along the way their were a couple of books—one about his hometown the other called County Roads: Around Ontario with Global Television’s Terry Culbert.

Through it all was art. It’s a passion he enjoys and shares with Barb. He hopes to use his newly freed time to do more writing and painting. And cutting grass. Terry maintains about four acres of lawn and gardens on the top of the escarpment at Mountain View. He has carved out a three-hole golf course on his patch of green.

Spending time with Culbert confirms he was never cut out for hard news, or political reporting. His life, his art, his outlook is optimistic. Not naïve—but decidedly choosing to see the charming, the amusing, the positive.

Had he not escaped the grips of hard news, it seems plausible he might have risked extinguishing the twinkle from his eye, the joy in his soul.