Drivers are the worst passengers, doctors make terrible patients, and journalists hate to be interviewed. But since I decided to retire after nearly a dozen years as host of Calgary Eyeopener, I decided I owed you all an explanation. It’s just time.
I love this job. In my opinion, this is the best job for a journalist in the city, and to express my bias (I grew up in Calgary and feel connected to our foothills and mountains like grizzlies in the spring), I would say it’s the best job in the world. the country.
David Gray and Dana Peirce, then CEO of Calgary Stampede, at the 2019 Calgary Show and Clash (CBC)
I have been working as a journalist for 33 years. I started with The National in Toronto (a great first concert), took a job as a reporter in my hometown in 1990, moved to become head of the Edmonton Legislature two years later, and after several memorable adventures with Ralph (I was with him when I met Yasser Arafat at a beach house in Gaza), returned to Toronto to take a national reportage concert with the now-defunct CBC Venture business show.
Those were a good seven years. I submitted reports from Cairo to Beirut, from London to Jerusalem. On this continent, I chased corporate gamblers in Vegas, tech dreamers in New York, double doctors in New Orleans, and white-collar crooks in Houston (does anyone else remember Enron?). It was a great concert. I lived on a plane, told stories from every Canadian province and two of the three territories, and somehow got married and started a family along the way.
When our second child was born, we decided to raise our children where my heart was, in Calgary. I’m home.
David Gray in Lebanon in the 1990s. (CBC)
Then I fell on a host chair. The first five years were spent at Newsworld, when there was a national presence outside of Central Canada. This is where I really developed my interviews, learning from Kathleen Petty, the late Henry Champ and other veterans of the game.
Michael Enright gave me the best advice, “the second question is always in the first answer.” He was right. This is primarily a job to listen to.
In 2008, I was given the opportunity to go to a “senior service” and host a radio show. This show was The Homestretch and I was addicted. Eyeopener’s work opened two years later, and I’ve been here ever since.
Like most presenters, I have a long list of “most memorable interviews.” I had every prime minister after Mulroney on the other side of my microphone, movie stars and musicians, prime ministers and self-promotions. I’ve spent time on other shows (As it Happens, Sunday Edition, Cross Country Checkup), but Eyeopener has always been where I feel I belong the most. And honestly, it’s because of you.
Let’s face it, there’s a lot of oatmeal in the daily news; our job is to find the raisins. Again and again, ordinary people are the ones who illuminate the air with their stories. I will always remember the Yukon plant food entrepreneur in the midnight sun, the farmer who rescued a wounded antelope and broke his arm by doing so, the women who tirelessly volunteered to help strangers clean their yards after the 2013 flood.
Angela Knight, David Gray and Alan Alpaca for Social Distance at CBC Calgary in October 2020 (Paul Karchut / CBC)
After all, Canadians who tell other Canadians the stories they are most passionate about make radio worth listening to. This wakes me up in the morning. The tales that make you sit in your driveway with the engine still running to hear the end before you bring in the groceries. The ones you like to tell your children or your mother. I eavesdrop on our stories being told by taxi drivers and CEOs. This is the purpose of public broadcasting.
And I love the radio. Ever since I was a child. CBC Radio is the country’s cultural railway and floats through windows and lakes and over mountain ranges like streams of smoke from a summer breeze. Technology and the journalistic profession seem to be constantly shrinking and changing, but somehow the radio has survived. Thank God for that. It was a privilege to be allowed into my cars and homes. I will always be grateful.
Speaking of gratitude, I thank all the technicians and producers, cameramen, editors and dreamers who come together to build shows every day. I have to be at the end, but they made it possible. Special thanks to my wife Kim and my grown children Jackson and Emma for enduring all the early hours.
David Gray and his (work) better half. Angela Knight. (CBC)
Last but certainly not least, thanks to my colleague and friend Angela Knight, with whom I shared more than a thousand sunrises. I will miss that. She will continue the show forward, as capable and talented as ever. Maybe “One Gray Knight” coffee will become “Only One Knight.” It would be appropriate.
So why am I leaving Eyeopener? Well, a little sleep would be nice. I just know it’s time to do something else. And no, I don’t know what that will be, but I’m looking forward to finding out. For now, I’m retiring to look for new adventures. Thank you for listening. Let’s talk again soon.
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