Mac's World

The best way to gauge the significance of a party, opening or charity event? Check whether Malcolm Parry's there

By Sean Rossiter

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.

He’s lived here since 1973 with his third wife, Nancy Goodrich—what is it with tall men and petite women?—when the modest cottage that preceded the present house was the home of Goodrich and her newborn son, and she and Mac were on their way to divorces. I’d been at the house previously, but only at night, for parties. This mellow, daytime, Grandpa Mac comes as a revelation. He’s wearing an immaculate white XXL T-shirt and khaki chinos, an outfit that would look ridiculous on almost any other man of his age—he’ll be 71 next month—but on him looks as if he’s been wearing it all his life.

Mac’s one of those Englishmen who belonged in Canada all along. At age nine he announced to his parents that he’d one day live in B.C. after a schoolteacher described the dense red carpet of spawning salmon in the Adams River (a spectacle he enjoys to this day). He never lost sight of his goal to get out of the British Midlands; otherwise he just might have followed his father into the Walsall police department, where Fred Parry eventually made sergeant.

When Mac was 10, his father rigged up a darkroom. Young Mac was entranced by the faint red light and the spectacle of a print clarifying itself in a chemical bath—thus was born his lifelong love of photography. In his teens he became a professional jazz musician (tenor and alto saxophone), good enough to lead his own band, Mac Parry Music. By 1957, at 21, he’d completed the civil and mechanical engineering courses at Wolverhampton and Birmingham, and a three-year internship. Engineering was not his first choice of occupation; architecture was, but an architect friend of his father advised, “There’s no money in it.”

With his prodigious memory for detail, Parry clearly recalls his arrival in Canada. Air travel was not simple in those days, and his itinerary from Birmingham included stops in Dublin, Shannon and New York before he touched down in Montréal, where he was declared a landed immigrant. The Trans-Canada Air Lines North Star that brought him to Vancouver was a notably Canadian craft: an American DC-4 airliner powered by four hellishly loud British Rolls-Royce Merlin propeller engines. It took 15 hours of tooth-rattling vibration and deafening noise—as well as stops in Toronto, Winnipeg, Regina and Calgary—before the plane touched down at the airport in Richmond. He was met by friends in a baby blue Buick Special.

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