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TREVOR LAUTENS shudders at such painful clichés as “he has ink in his veins.” The fact is that his journalism work began as a proofreader – excellent grounding – at the Hamilton Spectator on Oct. 9, 1953, and, except for three years off for good behaviour when he served as speechwriter and communications consultant for the premier of British Columbia (Bill Bennett) and his cabinet, especially the education and intergovernmental relations ministries, the latter under later lieutenant-governor Garde B. Gardom, he is still in the family business.
That began in 1920 when his father, Joseph Lautens, joined the Canadian Press news agency in Winnipeg at age 15 as a teletype operator and mechanic – high-tech stuff of its day – retiring in 1970 as the Canadian Press’s longest-serving employee.
Trevor’s brother Gary was a much-awarded and widely-read columnist and sometime news executive for Canada’s biggest daily, the Toronto Star, author of several books, writer for a few years for the perennially popular television program Front Page Challenge, and two-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Award. Gary’s sons Stephen, a lawyer, Sun papers columnist and part owner of a gold mine in China (a lifelong ambition), and Richard, Toronto Star photographer, are carrying on the tradition (or foolishness) into the third generation, and Trevor’s daughter Kate holds a writing degree from the University of Victoria and is in the publishing business.
Then there’s cousin Morley, retired Midwest advertising manager for People magazine, cousin Joyce Lautens O’Brien, also retired from the Time-Life organization and still writing and consulting for one of the biggest American conglomerates … and have we mentioned Bertha Irene George, born in Morden, Manitoba, who went to work in the circulation department of the Winnipeg Free Press as a teenager and gave it up to marry the aforementioned Joe Lautens and give birth to Gary and Trevor, thus the unchallenged matriarch of a poor but honest journalistic family?
Trevor long ago genially accepted that he’s the runt of the brood, though he spent more than 35 years with The Vancouver Sun – in its golden days under wonderful publisher Stuart Keate and iconic editorial director Bruce Hutchison – as opinion-page editor, columnist and editorial writer, made appearances in Maclean’s, Saturday Night, and a dozen Canadian newspapers including the Toronto Sun and the Ottawa Citizen. In recent years he’s written 60-odd columns for the Winnipeg Free Press, a favourite outlet for reasons obvious above.
In 2007 he won a Ma Murray Awards silver for column writing – at age 72, the oldest ever to do so, perhaps? – for Vancouver’s suburban North Shore News, perennially judged one of B.C.’s and Canada’s best community newspapers. In 2010, he got a Canada-wide Paul Cadogan Award for columnists (third) under the aegis of the Canadian Community Newspaper Association for several columns in the North Shore News, where his words have now appeared regularly for 20 years. He was granted a Journalism For Life Award by the North Shore Pro-Life Society in 1998. He was also a CBC Radio public affairs program host and commentator for a dozen-odd years and a lecturer in the seniors program at Simon Fraser University.
Don’t be fooled by his grey hair: Other than 25-year-old Kate, he and his wife Elizabeth Robertson, who retired from teaching in 2009, have children Daniel, 21, whom T.L. amusedly accuses of being a café intellectual, and Berta, 20, attending the University of Guelph. His older children are Mark, 50 (son of his marriage to the late Audrey Lane Lautens), a distinguished chemistry professor, holder of two academic chairs, Fellow of the Royal Canadian Society and leader of a research group at the University of Toronto, and Stephan Gudmundson, 33, a computer science graduate of the University of B.C. who, after employment by a small computer company in Vancouver, Seattle and San Diego, works in Mountain View, California, for a company “you may have heard of” (as he told his father), Google. Even his almost computer-illiterate father had heard of it.
Trevor’s far more modest record includes birth in his beloved Hamilton in 1934, writing boys’ book reviews at age 11 (bless you, Rhys Crossan) for the Hamilton Spectator, graduation from McMaster University with UBC and Queen’s University credits, and Spectator reporter and copy editor for seven years before moving to Vancouver in 1963. He’s a member of the National Conference of Editorial Writers (U.S.-based) and the Union Club, Victoria. The family home is in West Vancouver and family members don’t find enough time for their getaway cottage on Saturna Island, B.C. For more than 30 years his zoo – several dogs and a cat — have entirely and pitilessly run his life.