Larry Zolf, the offbeat nationally prominent journalist, political pundit and one-time reporter for the CBC current affairs show This Hour Has Seven Days, died March 14 in Toronto at the age of 76.
Zolf began working for the CBC in 1962 and once teamed with a little-known Pierre Trudeau to interview Quebec separatist René Lévesque. Later, when Trudeau was prime minister, he hired Zolf to write two speeches for him for business groups. Both speeches were laden with Zolf’s trademark barbs and comic wit.
After Trudeau retired, Zolf wrote Just Watch Me: Remembering Pierre Trudeau, in which he boasted that he was “the only mischief maker that Trudeau approved of or respected.”
During the same era, he trashed the institution of the Canadian Senate in a book called Survival of the Fattest: An Irreverent View of the Senate. Several years ago he mentioned the book in a National Post newspaper column in which he jested that Prime Minister Stephen Harper appoint him to the Senate. Another book, Scorpions For Sale (1989) was short-listed for a Stephen Leacock Award.
Zolf won an Anik Award for a documentary film he made about computers in 1965. The National Film Board rated it as one of its 100 best documentaries. He also wrote for Maclean’s magazine, was a lecturer at Carleton University and contributed political articles to a CBC blog until 2007.
At the height of the Gerda Munsinger scandal of the 1960s, This Hour Has Seven Days dispatched him unannounced to the home of a Quebec cabinet minister who had been implicated in the affair. Despite the presence of a camera crew, the cabinet minister began beating him angrily with his cane, and Zolf responded by kicking him in the leg hard enough that his wooden leg fell away. Zolf later wrote an essay about the farcical episode titled “Citizen Cane.”
The CBC once fired him as part of a larger house-cleaning, but later rehired him as a reporter in the Ottawa press gallery.
Born in Winnipeg in 1934, Zolf grew up in a secular, Yiddish-speaking home in the city’s North End and learned the philosophies of Hegel and Marx on his father’s knee. He attended the I. L. Peretz Folk School, where his father was a teacher and principal, and where he read Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick and other classic works in Yiddish translation. He won an early essay contest with an essay on Emma Lazarus.
Eventually he switched to Machray Public School and dropped his Jewish name, Leibele, in favour of Larry. He attended the University of Manitoba and took graduate courses in law and history at the University of Toronto.
Acerbic and zany, and blessed with the ability to poke fun at himself, Zolf wrote in his autobiographical book The Dialectic Dancer (1973) that on a couple of occasions, he wore large plastic glasses-and-nose to political press conferences, only to remove them to reveal his own genuinely oversized proboscis, declaring himself “the nose that knows.”
In one essay he styled himself as the “Jaded Observer,” a man “who could see two sides to a question with singular firmness” and who had the capacity “to yield to laughter at the most seriously stentorian times.” Although he leavened his strong political opinions with humour, he still became known (as one commentator put it) as “irreverent, opinionated and sometimes outrageous.”
Donald Benham, reviewing a new edition of The Dialectic Dancer in the Winnipeg Free Press in January 2011, commented: “What Zolf does tell us is that nothing – not even the War Measures Act – has to be so darned serious.”
Despite his strong socialist and pro-labour sympathies, he seemed to migrate to the right along the political spectrum, a shift that might have begun when he started working for federal Progressive Conservative Dalton Camp. He would later describe himself politically as “a Diefenbaker, Bill Davis, Dalton Camp Red Tory.”
In The Dialectic Dancer, he wrote of the collapse of his marriage to Patricia, a non-Jewish woman with whom he had two children, David and Rachel. His daughter, Rachel Zolf, is a Toronto poet.
