Ron Pumphrey.Flanker Press
Ron Pumphrey, the broadcaster, author, politician and radio host who opened his show with the well-known salutation “Hello my lovelies and all the ships at sea,” died on Jan. 8. He was 87.
“He was the last of that generation of larger-than-life Newfoundland media stars,“ St. John’s-born comedian Mark Critch tweeted. “Nearly every house in the province listened to his Open Line.”
Mr. Pumphrey would book psychics and connect adoptees with their birth families. He gave regular callers nicknames and phoned the Vatican to try to speak to the Pope. “Pumphrey criticized the Roman Catholic Church, pointed fingers at politicians, ran bootleggers out of business and was talking about hash on [Memorial University of Newfoundland’s] campus before the RCMP admitted its existence,” according to a Newfoundland Herald profile in July, 2001. “His downtown office was wrecked twice, his life was threatened, he got obscene mail. … As the old line goes, ‘Nobody loved him but the people.’ ”
“Newfoundland has a unique radio open-line culture and in his heyday Ron was its star attraction,” historian Peter Neary wrote in an e-mail. “His intimate connection with his devoted listeners prefigured social media. Ron was perfect for VOCM, a station that became known as the Voice of the Common Man."
Off the airwaves, Mr. Pumphrey authored 15 books, including three autobiographies; released three spoken-word albums; and published, with his second wife, Marilyn (née Duffett), the Who’s Who and Why? series, containing biographies of more than 1,200 Newfoundlanders and Labradorians (who paid to be included – to Mr. Pumphrey, this made the volumes democratic).
He was peripatetic and work routines bored him. “I think he had more jobs than anyone else in the Guinness Book of Records,” former St. John’s mayor Shannie Duff, who served on city council with Mr. Pumphrey, told CBC Newfoundland. He was a surface-mines labourer, amateur boxer-wrestler, Salvation Army officer, salesman, editor, commercial investigator and worked in public relations. In 1950, he was briefly in the Air Force; in 1977, he spent about six months in Halifax performing as Dr. No, a psychic reader.
“He belongs to an in-between generation of Newfoundlanders,” Dr. Neary wrote. “They had to make their way in radically changed circumstances but missed the many educational opportunities that came through union with Canada.”
Mr. Pumphrey’s studies were also varied. Mr. Pumphrey enrolled in continuing education classes in beginner’s law, coastal navigation, writing and motivational science with institutions such as the University of Toronto, Saint Mary’s University and the Palmer Institute of Authorship.
Consequently, he could talk about anything. A frequent subject of interviews, he would riff about monarch butterflies, the colour spectrum, love and the occult.
“He said, ’If you want people to remember what you said, you have to tell it like a story,' ” Ms. Duff said.
And add a good sign-off. He bookended Open Line with the song What a Wonderful World, and sometimes could be heard singing along.
Ronald Oates Joseph Aloysius Pumphrey was born on Feb. 6, 1931, in Harbour Grace, one of seven children of Isaac and Mary (née Fleming). The Pumphreys were a successful family with a big house on Water Street, but their fortunes were adversely affected by the Depression. His father then found work on Bell Island, a short ferry ride from St. John’s and known for its significant iron ore deposits, first as a cook in the miners' mess hall, then promoted to special policeman for the mining company, Dominion Steel Corp., upon which he relocated the family.
At 15, Ron worked above ground with the mines corralling iron ore cars onto a running cable, while taking a course from the Newspaper Institute of America. (This led him to contact publisher Geoff Stirling at The Newfoundland Herald, and Mr. Stirling sent him a brown typewriter with a bright-blue ribbon.) In 1948, at 17, he left for Corner Brook with $17 to his name, arriving so broke he had to sell a suitcase and his clothes within. Fortunately, a former teacher, the poet and playwright Al Pittman, helped him get a job with The Western Star.
He then moved to the mainland, and married Helen (Nellie) Dwyer, with whom he would have seven children. In Toronto, he worked with the stock exchange, but, more to his speed, sold a lurid serial to the Toronto tabloid Flash.
He returned to St. John’s and wrote for The Newfoundland Herald and The Evening Telegram before embarking again, now to Jamaica with Nellie, their first two children and $25. He talked his way into a job with Kingston’s The Gleaner. After a year there, he returned to St. John’s and freelanced. His numerous credits over the years included a weekly business column for The Daily News, and he was briefly a stringer for The New York Times and British United Press.
Then, at the age of 39, he was hired by Joe Butler at VOCM for a trial run open-line show. In radio, he found success, but also stress, and his marriage to Nellie ended. Then he met and married Marilyn. It proved as good a working partnership – Marilyn was a journalist and playwright – as a romantic one. On the anniversary of their meeting, he and Marilyn would return to the apartment building where they first met, by coincidentally exiting adjacent apartment doors, and pin red hearts on the doors they had come out of.
In 1981, he won a seat with St. John’s City Council on the promise to “put a heart in city hall.” Among his concerns was preserving the heritage of Quidi Vidi Village, where he owned a house built into the side of a hill. In 1983, he announced he would leave city hall for Salvation Army missionary work. Although he was raised Roman Catholic, he and Marilyn trained as Army officers and worked with the Army’s family services division.
But in 1984, just several months later, the Pumphreys left the Army. “Neither Marilyn nor I were cut out for full-time service,” he told The Evening Telegram – they both wanted more time for writing.
Soon, full-page ads in local newspapers announced he was back on the air, with “Amazing but true Newfoundland stories” running on Saturday from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., and Sunday from 6 a.m. to noon.
Never a man content doing one thing when he could be at seven, he was also compiling what he first intended as a single-volume memoir, for family. It would grow into a popular trilogy.
“He was a powerhouse of energy, gregarious, an extrovert extraordinaire, pure alpha,” said Jerry Cranford of Mr. Pumphrey’s publisher, Flanker Press. "I loved the man.”
Predeceased by his parents and ex-wife Nellie Dwyer Pumphrey, Mr. Pumphrey leaves his wife, Marilyn; seven children; 18 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.