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facts & arguments

There it was in the mail one July morning - a thing of beauty. It was an essay from a reader about his immigrant Italian father and his fig tree, which had been brought to Canada from the Calabrian hills when it was a sapling.

It was about new beginnings, about nurturing ties with the past, about the passages of life and the inevitable passage of time.

It was a wonderful piece, and, as I recall, it marked the beginnings of what became something unique in Canadian journalism - the Facts & Arguments essay.

The Facts & Arguments page (or F&A, as we call it at The Globe) had been launched a few weeks before - on June 12, 1990 - but it was taking a while finding its feet.

All week, to celebrate Facts & Arguments' 20th anniversary, we'll be publishing audio interviews with past editors, along with their favourite essays. Listen to Philip discuss his favourite F&A submission, Memoirs of a Short Bouncer:

I was the page's first editor, but Facts &Arguments was the brainchild of William Thorsell, then editor-in-chief of The Globe and currently director and CEO of the Royal Ontario Museum. Mr. Thorsell had commissioned a total redesign of the paper, wanting a cleaner, more classical look. But he also wanted new content, and the most radically different piece of new content was Facts & Arguments, whose centrepiece was to be a daily piece of personal writing quite unlike anything else in the newspaper.

Read Philip's other two favourites: 'A grandfather's tree of life' and 'Shedding tears and shedding a uniform'

"The idea for this page wasn't immediately popular in the newsroom," he recalled recently. It didn't fit in with the traditional news mindset. (For the first 17 years of its life, F&A resided on the back page of the news section.) "What I wanted to get at were the sort of things people talked about with great passion at dinner parties," he said.

The name was inspired by Argumenti i Fakti, the weekly Soviet newspaper. In 1990, the Soviet Union was in turmoil and Mr. Thorsell thought the Facts & Arguments title gave the page a kind of revolutionary, "underground" feel.

So, in keeping with the "arguments" part of the name, I and my department head John Cruickshank, now publisher of the Toronto Star, initially tried to assign articles of an argumentative or opinionated nature about the stuff of everyday life. We commissioned pieces from freelancers and twisted the arms of staff writers, but our efforts produced less-than-stellar results. The problem was, Mr. Cruickshank said, "many of the argumentative pieces just came across sounding cranky."

As a result of our uneven success, the early articles for F&A were something of a mixed bag. We did get some personal viewpoints, but we also had Peter C. Newman writing about the feud between popular and academic historians; we had a Globe editorial writer looking at whether the Canadian jury system should be reformed; we had a piece on the legal battle over the plight of the northern spotted owl. Fine articles all, but not the sort you'd now expect to see on the Facts & Arguments page.

And there were days - which I'd rather forget - when I came to work wondering what the heck we were going to use to fill the page.

What's your favourite Facts & Arguments essay? As the section celebrates its 20th year, share your memories of great F&A submissions.

There were, of course, other elements to F&A. The Fifth Column featured five columnists, each writing on a different topic on their allotted day. John Allemang, who wrote about family matters, caused quite a stir with his first offering - whether your children should see you naked. The Fifth Column was replaced by Lives Lived in April, 1996.

Then there was Social Studies. Mr. Thorsell wanted a daily feature made up of snippets of information about society, trends and the interesting (and sometimes bizarre) events that so often flew under the newsroom radar. "I wanted a sort of Coles Notes on where society was going," he remembers, and says that at the time he kept recalling the line from the Simon & Garfunkel song about the words of the prophets being "written on the subway walls and tenement halls."

But where do you find a writer for such a task? Mr. Thorsell remembers walking through the entire newsroom looking for a prospective candidate and seeing Michael Kesterton's desk plastered with all manner of clippings and objects of a weird and wonderful nature. That's when he knew he'd found the Social Studies columnist.

These other elements held the side and the bottom of the page, but the centrepiece essay was still a work in progress. Then, a couple of months after F&A's launch, something wonderful began to happen. Readers started sending in essays about their lives - their loves, their losses, about how an everyday occurrence had become something exceptional. About, in short, the things that mattered to them personally.

First, the submissions came in a trickle, then a flood. Before too long, we were receiving up to 100 essays a week - and this in the days before e-mail. I think readers sensed that here was an opportunity for them to tell their own stories.

That, to my mind, was when the concept behind Facts & Arguments became fully realized.

So that's how the F&A page came into being. It has been resonating with readers for 20 years now and has, in its various ways, presented a unique portrait of our picture-puzzle society, one piece at a time.

And that's a fact, no argument.

Philip Jackman was editor of the Facts & Arguments page from June, 1990, to November, 1993.

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