He Was a Legendary Newsroom Colleague. Turned Out He Had a Secret Past

Photo granted by the estate of Charles R. Saunders / design: Emery Forbes

This story was originally published on thewalrus.ca

By Jon Tattrie

The call to adventure came from a stranger in July 2020. It was a regular day in that plague year. Amid the mix of work emails came one from an address I didn’t know but with a subject line that immediately pulled me in: “Charles Saunders.”

Hi Jon, I am hoping you might know or know about the writer, Charles Saunders, who lives in Dartmouth, the message opened.

Reading his name conjured up strong images of the towering newspaper editor I’d worked with a decade ago. Built like a heavyweight boxer, but he moved like a cat. A genius with words and a wealth of writing wisdom, Charles was the senior editor on the Halifax Daily News and had written an iconic column on Black issues. The Daily News was a scrappy newspaper that broke a few noses in our city. Politicians feared us and regular folks cheered us.

I’d started working there as a night-shift copy editor in 2006. One colleague said working on the news rim was like doing your homework with friends late at night. We’d fall into a studious silence as we cleaned up the writing, checked the facts, and crafted the headlines, then burst into laughter when someone—occasionally Charles—made a pun too rude to publish but too delightful not to share.

Often, as the laughter faded, one of us would look over to the centre of the rim, where Charles sat with his back to us, facing the harbour window, to ask him if we’d accidentally split an infinitive, only to find his empty chair spinning. He’d disappeared once more.

But Charles always popped up again to split the lips of the fat cats who ran the city with a blistering editorial that put their foolishness in plain English. He loved Canada, loved writing—and was well loved by his adopted home. People would work with Charles for years before hearing a rumour that he hadn’t always been a Canadian, that he’d started life elsewhere—in America, if you could believe it—but had moved north decades ago.

Charles had been a legend but, like all of us at the Daily, took a knock-out blow