Inside Vancouver
Mac's World
By Sean Rossiter published Sep 2, 2007
One day in the mid-1950s, Malcolm Parry and Cheezy Chadbourne, lads in Staffordshire, England, were on a pub crawl in Cheezy’s newly restored MG-PA. At each roadhouse stop around the countryside, while Cheezy visited the loo, Mac—a lover of automobiles—relieved himself into the MG’s gas tank. After half a dozen stops, Cheezy noticed the difference in his car’s performance. “This Esso,” he yelled over the mechanical cacophony coming from the MG’s engine, “is nothing but piss.”
“And he was right!” Parry says, laughing incredulously. “He was absolutely right!”
We’re gazing out the huge picture window of his Deep Cove house. Though he’s best known as the Vancouver Sun’s ubiquitous society columnist, Mac Parry was the founding editor of Vancouver magazine, and he’s been giving me a tour of the Vanmag artefacts on the walls, such as a print of the famous painting of George Vancouver’s rendezvous with the ships of Galiano and Valdes off Point Grey. It hangs near the huge picture window that captures everything south of here from the North Shore to Ioco to the hills behind the Barnett Highway. In all he spent 16 years editing Vanmag, during 14 of which I wrote a column that he at first didn’t want in the magazine. I was lucky to work with him—he gave me almost total freedom to write what I wanted and kept me afloat by paying me advances on work he hadn’t seen yet.
