Kimber Aphrodisiac

Sex, Politics, Power and Gerald Regan
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4835-8688-5
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Before there was Bill Cosby, or Jian Ghomeshi, or Bill Clinton, or Donald Trump, there was Gerald Regan, a former Nova Scotia premier and Canadian cabinet minister accused in 1995 of having sexually assaulted close to three dozen women over a span of forty years. 'Aphrodisiac: Sex, Politics, Power, and Gerald Regan' (originally published as 'NOT GUILTY: The Trial of Gerald Regan') tells the shocking story of the police investigation into his behaviour with young women, the string of criminal charges filed against him and his explosive 1998 trial on the most serious charges of rape and attempted rape. We have come a long way in our understanding of the sometimes subtle, sometimes sledgehammer differences between what happens inside the legalistic, beyond-a-reasonable-doubt confines of the courtroom and what we understand about the real world in which we live. At some level, this book is about history. But there is a link to the present too. The Regan case marked an important public psychological turning point. For the first time in Canada, a group of women had come forward to hold a powerful man to account for his behaviour toward them.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kimber, Stephen

Leseproben

CHAPTER II: “A lot of crust…”
  Gerald Regan was only four years old when he made his first solo entrance at a sporting event, a local baseball game being played at a field about a block from his home on Stannus Street. His parents were at the game too, along with his older sister Maureen and brother Walter. But they weren’t sitting with Gerry. They didn’t even know he was at the game until one of them noticed that everyone else in the bleachers was smiling at a little boy in pyjamas who was cheering wildly from the baseline. His parents had assumed little Gerry was where they’d left him an hour before: at home in his bed asleep.   By the time Gerry was seven, he was a well-known neighborhood salesman, peddling greens “liberally spiced with not-too-edible dandelions” door to door. By the time he was fourteen, he had expanded his market to include the larger Windsor community, teaming up with a neighborhood friend to launch a pirate radio station featuring Regan’s play-by-play broadcasts of local baseball and hockey games. By the time he was in his early twenties, he was cockily telephoning the owners of National Hockey League teams to smooth-talk them into allowing players on teams that had finished out of that year’s Stanley Cup playoffs to barnstorm the Maritimes playing against the hometown favorites. As his older brother, Walter, Jr., once put it, young Gerry had that mix of confidence and persistence Maritimers often refer to as “a lot of crust.”   The problem for Regan was that some of his most obsessive ambitions — like playing competitive hockey himself, or attracting the interest of girls his own age, or actually getting elected to political office — required something more than just a lot of crust.   Gerald Augustine Regan was born on February 13, 1928,12 the third of the seven children of Walter and Rose Regan.   Though Regan would later joke about Windsor’s puffed-up self- image — in speeches outside Nova Scotia, Regan was fond of quoting Mark Twain’s description of Windsor as a unique town: from the Latin unus meaning one, he would say, and equus meaning horse — the Windsor in which he grew up was, like Regan himself, a proud, self-confident place.   Residents there are quick to brag about everything from the fact that, as one local writer put it, “Windsor and Hants County are blessed with a greater prevalence of sunshine than any other town or county in Nova Scotia” to their rather dubious claim that their town’s tides are “world famous.”   Windsor’s most impressive claim to fame, however, may be its idyllic beauty. “It is a striking characteristic of Windsor,” the young Joseph Howe wrote in The Novascotian in 1828, “that you can examine it from twenty various points and find each view materially different from the others; every one beautiful, but every one having some leading feature, or agreeable combination, peculiarly its own.”   Members of the British colony’s eighteenth century governing council in Halifax must have thought so too. They were so enamored by Windsor’s lush beauty, by the richness of its soil and by its convenient, well-fortified location just forty miles from Halifax that — after kicking the Acadians off their farms in 1755 — these colonial worthies awarded themselves choice lots of land in what is now called Windsor.   Most of the community’s early landowners — who also included some of the colony’s most powerful justices and merchants — didn’t ever settle permanently in Windsor, but they did establish magnificent summer homes there and set up farms that were cultivated for them by tenant farmers. Windsor, as one local history explains it, “was not ‘founded’ but instead grew from an influential collection of politicians, merchants and officers from Halifax, some New Englanders from Falmouth and Ulster Irish and Acadian tenants.” The Loyalists joined that mix after the American War of Independence.   Though the prediction that Windsor would someday become a “residential suburb for the business men of Halifax” never came to pass, the town, by 1825, had earned a reputation— in the words of the Acadian Recorder — as “the Athens of Nova Scotia, the abode of elegant hospitality and polished society.”   That’s not to suggest Windsor was without its lower classes. Besides the tenant farmers, the community’s underclass included factory workers lured to the community by the promise of jobs in the many textile mills and furniture factories, quarrymen who mined the area’s rich gypsum deposits and, of course, blacks, many of them Loyalists from the American revolutionary war, who were forced to live on the outskirts of Windsor, out of sight of the “elegant hospitality and polished society.”   Thanks to the area’s abundance of natural resources, including gold, gypsum and timber, and its proximity to the bountiful apple orchards of the Annapolis Valley, Windsor was a centre for shipbuilding and shipping, and a major exporter. By 1840, in fact, Windsor was the third busiest seaport in Canada.   That was ironic because Windsor’s harbor was only really a harbor for a few hours each day. As one visitor from the southern United States acidly put it: “When the tide is not in, the mud is in.” The ocean tides of the North Atlantic enter the broad mouth of the Bay of Fundy between Digby and Saint John, building up water pressure as the passage narrows through the Minas Channel and into Minas Basin, finally whooshing up the Avon River and into Windsor harbor in a rush that raises the water level by thirty to forty feet. But almost as soon as it arrives, the water begins to recede, leaving an “ugly gash” of mud flats from one bank of the river to the other. Shipping success, therefore, depended not only on superb navigational skills and a thorough knowledge of the tides but also on more than a little good luck.   Perhaps not surprisingly, Windsor’s pre-eminence as a shipbuilding and shipping port did not survive much beyond the Golden Age of Sail. The end of Windsor’s own golden age, in fact, was sealed in 1897 when a fire13 , whipped along by gale force winds, swept through the town, reducing much of it to cinders.   As Windsor was rebuilding after the fire, a young man named Walter Regan arrived in town to take a job as a bookkeeper at the Wentworth Stores, the company store for the Wentworth Gypsum Company, the leading gypsum exporter in mainland Nova Scotia.   Walter Regan, who’d been born and raised in Dartmouth of hardy Irish working class stock14, was an ambitious young man who wasn’t quite a patrician but not an ordinary worker either. He climbed the Wentworth corporate ladder from bookkeeper to store manager before eventually saving enough to buy his own general store in nearby Falmouth in the early thirties. His success with the store allowed him to buy several rental properties around town, which he rented out, mostly to poor families. Although some in Windsor considered him a slumlord, others say he treated his tenants well.   Like his brother John who served for a time as Halifax’s deputy mayor and was a Conservative power broker during the Borden era, Walter Regan soon became an important figure in Windsor politics, joining the local Conservative association and becoming its president. In 1913, he won a seat on town council. He was a town councillor for twenty-seven years.   “He was a good councillor,” says Windsor historian L. S. Loomer. “He was very community conscious and seemed to be especially interested in the welfare of those who had little or nothing.” During the Depression, Regan looked the other way as many of his customers ran up bills he knew they might never be able to repay. “He kept people eating as well as he could,” says Loomer, who adds he once interviewed the owner of another general store in Windsor who had had to write off over fifty thousand dollars in uncollectable Depression-era bills. “I’m sure Walter had to do the same. He seemed to have a good understanding and sympathy for people,” Loomer says. “I give him a lot of credit.”   Walter Regan was already well established in Windsor when he married Rose Marie Green, a pious Newfoundlander, in a ceremony at Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Halifax on a July morning in 1921. Rose, who’d been living in Halifax at the time of her wedding,15 was given in marriage by the groom’s brother John. She was described as looking “very lovely” in a gown of white satin worn with lace overdress and “piquant” white tulle hat. After a New Brunswick honeymoon, the couple settled in Windsor and began raising their family.   They would eventually have seven children, two of whom, a son and a daughter, died in infancy. Maureen, the oldest of the surviving children, was born in 1923 and eventually became a nun. Walter, Jr., the eldest son, was born in 1924, served overseas as an intelligence officer in the army during World War II and later became a lawyer in Ottawa. Gerry’s younger brother, Jim, who shared Gerry’s passion for sports and broadcasting, began his career as a broadcaster, served for a time as an aide to Prime Minister...