Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - January 31, 2022, Winnipeg, Manitoba B3MONDAY, JANUARY 31, 2022 C M Y K PAGE B3 NEWS I CANADA / WORLD ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM Actor earned two Emmy nominations for Johnny Fever role NEW YORK — Howard Hesseman, who played the radio disc jockey Dr. Johnny Fever on the sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati and the actor-turned-history teacher Charlie Moore on Head of the Class, has died. He was 81. Hesseman died Saturday in Los An- geles due to complications from colon surgery, his manager Robbie Kass said Sunday. Hesseman, who had himself been a radio DJ in the ’60s, earned two Emmy nominations for playing Johnny Fever on CBS’ WKRP in Cincinnati, which ran for four seasons from 1978-1982. The role made Hesseman a counterculture icon at a time when few hippie charac- ters made it onto network television. In the first episode, Dr. Johnny Fe- ver announces the station’s changeover from elevator music to rock ’n roll with a record scratch and a proclamation. “All right Cincinnati, it’s time for this town to get down! You got Johnny, Dr. Johnny Fever, and I am burning up in here. We’re all in critical condition, ba- bies, but you can tell me where it hurts because I got the healing prescription here from the big KRP musical med- icine cabinet. Now, I am talking about your 50,000-watt intensive care unit, babies!” As he readied for one of three Satur- day Night Live hosting gigs, Hesseman told The New York Times in 1979 that the character made network executives nervous. In one episode, Johnny Fever is given an on-air sobriety test after be- ing given alcohol, only his reaction time keeps improving. “I think maybe Johnny smokes a little marijuana, drinks beer and wine, and maybe a little hard liquor,” Hesseman said. “And on one of those hard morn- ings at the station, he might take what for many years was referred to as a diet pill. But he is a moderate user of soft drugs, specifically marijuana.” Hesseman played a hippie in one of his first roles, on Dragnet, in 1967, and also in the 1968 Richard Lester film Petulia. Born in Lebanon, Oregon, Hes- seman wasn’t so disconnected from some of the characters he played. In 1983, he told People magazine that he had conducted “pharmaceutical exper- iments in recreational chemistry.” In 1963, he was jailed in San Francisco for selling marijuana. Initially performing under the name Don Sturdy, Hesseman started out as a member of the San Francisco improv group The Committee, which regularly performed at antiwar and civil rights protests. At the time, he also moonlighted on Saturdays as the disk jockey for the San Francisco rock-and-roll station KMPX. Later on WKRP in Cincinnati Hesse- man often ad-libbed his on-air banter. “Impossible to overstate Howard Hesseman’s influence on his and subse- quent generations of improvisors,” said the actor and comedian Michael McK- ean on Twitter. He recalled first seeing Hesseman in 1971 with The Committee. “I saw that he was the real deal.” Hesseman appeared briefly but mem- orably with McKean in the 1984 rock- umentary This Is Spinal Tap as Terry Ladd, manager to the rock superstar Duke Fame. He frankly ends a conver- sation: “We’d love to stay and chat but we’re going to sit in the lobby and wait for the limo.” In the ABC sitcom Head of the Class, which debuted in 1986, Hesseman played a teacher to a diverse group of students in a classroom where the dia- logue was often notably progressive in the 1980s of Ronald Reagan. Hesseman was sometimes critical of the show — co-created by political activist and writ- er Michael Elias — not being as adven- turous as he had hoped it would be. He departed it after four seasons and was replaced by Billy Connolly in the fifth and final season. “Part of me says, ‘Is that all there is? A television series?’ Obviously not. I could go on stage or scratch my way into the movies,” Hesseman said in a 1989 inter- view. “But how many movies are made that you want to be a part of? And how many want you? There is a certain kind of ‘for-rent’ sign on my forehead. I’m an actor and I like to work.” A prolific character actor, Hesseman’s credits also included The Andy Griffith Show, One Day at a Time, The Rockford Files, Laverne and Shirley and The Bob Newhart Show. More recently, he made appearances on That 70’s Show, Fresh Off the Boat, House and Boston Legal. Films included Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment, About Schmidt, This Is Spinal Tap and The Rocker. Hesseman is survived by actor and acting teacher Caroline Ducrocq, his wife. — The Associated Press JAKE COYLE Howard Hesseman died Saturday. He was 81. HOWARD HESSEMAN OBITUARY Former restaurant workers don’t plan to return to eateries Quebec eating establishments reopening, but not everybody wants their jobs back MONTREAL — Restaurants in Que- bec will be allowed to reopen today for the first time in more than a month, but some former workers say they won’t be looking for new jobs in the industry. Milovan Danielou said he decided to start looking for a new job during the province’s second closure of res- taurant dining rooms in the fall of 2020, when his then-employer, taco restaurant Grumman ‘78, closed its main location permanently. With dining rooms closed and no tourists in the city, there was little work to go around. “Everybody was fighting to find even part-time jobs,” he said in a recent interview. Danielou, who now does data entry, said his new job is less inter- esting, but the $30-an-hour pay is better, and he’s not worried about losing his job if the COVID-19 situa- tion worsens. “Nothing compares to restaurant work, the rush, the drive, the energy, the team, the people you meet. Noth- ing compares to that,” he said. But it’s not enough to draw him back. “You have to pay your rent, you have to survive.” Quebec restaurant dining rooms were ordered closed starting Dec. 30 as the number of COVID-19 cases in the province shot up. Under the new rules, restaurants will be able to open Monday at 50 per cent capacity and there will be limits on how many people from different households can share a table. Liam Thomas, 32, said that while he decided to leave the industry last summer,when restaurants were open, it wasn’t a choice he would have made if he hadn’t already lived through two lockdowns. “I was being yelled at for the mil- lionth time in my cooking career and I just walked out and I never went back,” Thomas, a former line cook, said in a recent interview. “It was precipitated by the lockdowns and the knowledge that could hap- pen again, and the instability of the work.” Thomas, who said he started work- ing in restaurants at 18, now works as a transport attendant at a Mont- real hospital, helping patients get to X-rays and other appointments with- in the hospital. While Thomas said he still some- times misses the rush of the kitchen, his new job is less stressful, better paid and offers more vacation time. “The issues that the pandemic ex- posed were always there for restau- rant workers,” said Kaitlin Doucette of the Canadian Restaurant Workers Coalition, a group that advocates for better working conditions in the in- dustry. She said workers have long lacked health benefits and paid sick days, and that the precarious nature of work in the industry can lead to abuse and sexual harassment. One of the biggest challenges of the latest closure in Quebec, Doucet- te said in a recent interview, is that workers were only eligible for $300 a week in federal aid. Montrealer Michèle Martel, who worked in bars for 25 years, said she started looking for a new job be- cause that wasn’t enough to live on. “I had no choice. With the amount of money they’re giving us, my sav- ings would have disappeared for a third time. It’s hard to save money, and when the closings come, the money melts away,” she said. “And it’s not just financial, I also need to work for my morale, to see people.” When bars and restaurants re- opened for the second time in June 2021, Martel said she was confident it would last — most Quebecers were vaccinated and businesses had been following public health orders. But this third closure has left her afraid that it could happen again. While Martel said she plans to look for a job as a bartender, she also in- tends to keep working at her new job, in a senior’s residence, part-time. Martin Juneau, the owner of Past- aga, a restaurant in Montreal’s Little Italy neighbourhood, said he’s wor- ried about finding staff for a reopen- ing that he said feels more like open- ing for the first time. “We had a lot of employees who finally moved on to something else, who wanted to go in a different dir- ection, in a different industry,” he said in a recent interview. While Juneau said he closed his dining room before he was ordered to by the provincial government, he’s worried that he’ll have to do it again. “We’re afraid for next fall, and we’re afraid of not having the energy to get to next fall,” he said. He was forced to close some other businesses, including a restaurant and wine shop, a corner grocery and an ice cream shop, early in the pandemic, and he said they won’t be coming back. “We’re exactly the op- posite of expanding,” Juneau said. Benoit Dessureault, the owner of Chez Delmo in Old Montreal, said he was able to keep paying longtime employees with the help of a food truck. While some of his workers did get laid off, he said he found projects to hire them to work on during the closures. Still, he said the reopening means the restaurant — which had attracted a lunchtime crowd of lawyers and businesspeople — now plans to focus more on dinner. “The office towers are still empty, so we can’t keep the same business proposition as we had before,” Des- sureault said in an interview. Dessureault said he hopes that customers will be more patient — and understanding — when they return to restaurants that still face strict public health rules. — The Canadian Press JACOB SEREBRIN Prime minister takes aim at Tory ‘obstructionism’ O TTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is counting on the Bloc Quebecois and the NDP to help his minority Liberal government get things done in the face of what he antici- pates will be systematic obstructionism by the Conservatives. In an interview with The Canadian Press ahead of Parliament’s return to- day after a six-week break, Trudeau made it clear he doesn’t just want the smaller, more ideologically compatible opposition parties to support the pas- sage of Liberal bills. He wants them to support measures to cut off debate and force votes on bills if the official Opposition Conservatives resort to procedural tricks to stall prog- ress on the legislative agenda, as they frequently did during his first minority mandate. “We know and we’ve seen it, the Con- servatives are going to continue to try and play whatever partisan games they can, regardless of the consequence on Canadians. They’re much more focused on their own interests right now than they are on the interests of Canadians,” he said. “We will be very, very open to work- ing with the other parties, hearing their priorities moving forward because it’s not just about saying, ‘OK, we can agree on the things that need to happen.’ We have to help make them happen as well in a House where the Conservatives are choosing to block as much as they pos- sibly can.” During the last Parliament, all par- ties came together to swiftly pass legis- lation creating hundreds of billions of dollars worth of pandemic benefits to help individuals and businesses stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. But on other business, the Conserva- tives routinely talked out the clock dur- ing debate on bills and used other pro- cedural manoeuvres to delay or prevent progress on legislation. The Liberals complained about obstructionism but the Tories blamed the government for failing to manage its own agenda and the other opposition parties, generally loath to be seen helping the government cut short debate, tacitly went along. Eventually, however, even the NDP and Bloc became frustrated with the Tory tactics and, towards the end of the session, they supported closure on a couple of bills they considered prior- ities in a bid to finally get them passed. Their support came too late to get the bills — a ban on conversion therapy for LGBTTQ+ Canadians and a bill regulat- ing online streaming giants — through the Senate before the summer break. They eventually died when Trudeau dissolved Parliament in August for an election. Trudeau sees some hope that the smaller opposition parties will be less likely to let the Conservatives system- atically jam the legislative agenda in the new Parliament. He notes that in the brief four weeks that the new minority Parliament sat before Christmas, the Liberals set out three priority bills they wanted enact- ed before the holiday break: a new bill banning conversion therapy, another creating targeted new pandemic aid programs, and a double-barrelled bill implementing paid sick leave for fed- eral workers and cracking down on ha- rassment of health care workers. All three were expedited through both the House of Commons and the Senate at what for Parliament was breakneck speed. Along the way, the NDP supported closure to cut off debate and force a vote on resuming hybrid sit- tings of the House and again to cut short debate on the sick leave bill. “The fact that we were able to work so collaboratively with two of the oppos- ition parties to get big things done is a really positive sign,” Trudeau said. In fact, it was the Conservatives who moved to pass the conversion therapy bill without debate or a vote, a surprise given that a majority of them had voted against the previous version of the bill. But it was a strategic move designed to avoid a second losing fight on an issue that had opened the Tories to charges of being anti-LGBTTQ+ — not what Liber- als consider a harbinger of a more col- laborative official Opposition. During the last Parliament, some of the most fractious relations among the parties and the longest filibusters, in- cluding those conducted by the Liber- als, took place at Commons committees. But Trudeau is hopeful that, too, will change in the new session. Shortly before the Christmas break, the Liberals won support for a motion that changes the rule for triggering an emergency meeting of a commit- tee. Instead of any four members of the committee being able to insist that a meeting be held, it must now be four members from at least two different parties. That, said Trudeau, will help prevent Conservatives from acting alone to tie up committees with topics of their choice — usually ones designed to em- barrass the government and inflict maximum political damage. “We made it so that Conservatives can’t be as obstructive on their own. They’re going to need to find active partners to call committees,” he said. “That will minimize the amount of disruption and toxicity that unfortu- nately we saw very much at commit- tees that prevented us from doing a lot of things that Canadians really cared about.” Unlike the brief pre-Christmas sit- ting, the Liberals are not laying out a specific number of bills they want to pass by the end of June, when Parlia- ment will break for the summer. But Trudeau broadly outlined his pri- orities between now and then: getting through the pandemic, rebuilding the economy, more aggressive action on climate change, strengthening the of- ficial languages act, reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, measures to create more affordable housing, support for the cultural sector, tackling online hate, and requiring online streaming giants like Netflix to promote and financially support Canadian content. — The Canadian Press JOAN BRYDEN JUSTIN TANG / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES Justin Trudeau says the Tories ‘are going to continue to try and play whatever partisan games they can, regardless of the consequence.’ Trudeau seeks NDP, Bloc help in order to cut off debate, force votes on bills B_03_Jan-31-22_FP_01.indd 3 2022-01-30 9:36 PM ;