Alison’s brother learned history as he wrote

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/11/2001 (8960 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IN Toronto, where he lives, Don Gillmor is simply one of Canada’s most respected writers — a top-flight magazine journalist, author of an acclaimed family memoir and five children’s books, and the man hand-picked by publisher McClelland & Stewart to pen the book version of the ambitious CBC-TV series Canada: A People’s History.

But in Winnipeg, where he grew up, he is better known as the big brother of the Free Press’s outspoken film critic.

“It’s true,” Gillmor said earlier this week while in town to promote the newly released second volume of the handsome history tome.

“A couple years ago, when I was reading here at the writers festival, my parents overheard a woman saying, ‘He’s Alison Gillmor’s brother, you know.'”

To make matters worse, in Toronto, people are always confusing him with fellow journalist David Gilmour, a writer of slightly perverted novels and a former CBC-TV movie reviewer.

“The last time I saw David, he told me he was offered an assignment that was meant for me, so he turned it down on my behalf,” jokes Gillmor, who penned the 1999 book about his Scottish family’s roots, The Desire of Every Living Thing.

“At a bookstore once a women came up to me asked me to sign one of his novels, When Boys See Girls. I spelled Gillmor our way.”

A freelance working out of his home for virtually his entire writing career, Gillmor spent two years on contract to M & S to produce the People’s History volumes.

He lasted two days in his fancy office in the CBC’s headquarters on Front Street.

“For one thing, it cost me $15 to park every day,” says Gillmor, who resides with his television producer wife, Grazyna Krupa, and their two children, aged five and eight months, in Toronto’s trendy Riverdale district.

“Everybody stopped by to chat with me. I knew I’d never get a word written, so I moved back to my office at home.”

Most of the original research for A People’s History was handled by CBC producers and researchers, who provided him with boxes filled with paper. The second half of the TV series just ended.

With the accompanying books, Gillmor’s job was to provide the “narrative shape.”

Even still, this was a mammoth task for which he worked around the clock to meet each volume’s 12-month deadline.

“We really need 18 months per book,” says Gillmor, who left Winnipeg at age 17 when his architect father took a teaching job at the University of Calgary.

“If I would have known how much work it was when I signed on, I probably wouldn’t have done it.”

Prior to the assignment, he says, his knowledge of Canadian history was piecemeal at best.

“I learned a tremendous amount. It was fascinating to dig in to the opening of the West, which has a real epic quality to it.”

Gillmor played a small part in a bit of recent Manitoba history, which didn’t make it into the book.

In 1989, he penned a Saturday Night magazine profile of his boyhood friend from the Wildwood area of Fort Garry, Const. Robert Cross, the police officer who shot aboriginal leader J.J. Harper.

He was subpoenaed by the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry, where he had to reveal his source for several details in the story — Cross himself.

Today he sees Cross, who died in 1999, as a tragic figure.

“He wanted to be a policeman from a very young age but he was unsuited to the job,” Gillmor says. “He was a natural bully and he had a maturity problem.”