Robert Fulford (journalist)

Not to be confused with Robin Fulford.

Robert Fulford
Born	Robert Marshall Blount Fulford (1932-02-13)February 13, 1932 Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Died	October 15, 2024(2024-10-15) (aged 92)
Occupation(s)	Journalist, magazine editor, essayist

Robert Marshall Blount Fulford OC (February 13, 1932 – October 15, 2024) was a Canadian journalist, magazine editor, essayist, and public intellectual. He lived in Toronto, Ontario.

Background

Fulford was born in Ottawa, Ontario, the third of four children, to Frances (Blount) Fulford and A. E. Fulford, a journalist and editor at Canadian Press, who had covered the Dionne quintuplets and the 1939 royal tour of Canada of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. He grew up in The Beaches neighbourhood in Toronto and was a childhood friend of Glenn Gould. In 1952, he and Gould founded New Music Associates, which produced and promoted Gould's first three public performances, including the Gould's debut performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations.

Fulford met his first wife, writer Jocelyn Jean Dingman Fulford (1930–1976), while they were both working at the Globe and Mail. They had two children, Margaret and James. Margaret Fulford is the University College Librarian at the University of Toronto and is married to Professor Jeffrey Rosenthal.

Fulford's second wife was writer and former CBC Radio producer Geraldine Sherman, with whom he had two children, Sarah and Rachel. Sarah Fulford became editor-in-chief of Maclean's magazine in February 2022, after serving as editor-in-chief of Toronto Life magazine for 14 years.

Fulford died on October 15, 2024, at the age of 92 in Toronto at Meighen Manor, a long-term care facility in Toronto where he had lived for three years.

Career

Fulford's media career began at the age of 16, while still in high school, when he worked for Toronto radio station CHUM reporting on high school sports and producing a weekly radio show for teenagers.

Through his father's connections, he began working for the Globe and Mail as a part-time copy boy while in high school. In the summer of 1950, Fulford left high school and went to work for the newspaper full-time as a sports reporter, despite the fact that later in his memoir, he wrote that of his disdain for sports and that he “didn’t like to watch people play games.” Two years later, he became a general assignment reporter. In 1954, Fulford moved to Maclean-Hunter, a magazine publisher, where he wrote for Canadian Homes and Gardens and Mayfair magazines. He also wrote on jazz for the Globe and Mail and becoming a freelance contributor to DownBeat magazine. Moving to The Toronto Star, he became literary editor and a daily arts columnist (1959–1962). From 1963 to 1964 he was a columnist and editor of the Reviews section at Maclean's magazine before returning to the Star (1964-1968). He covered Expo 67 for the newspaper and wrote a book on the world's fair, This Was Expo.

From 1968 until 1987, Fulford was the editor of Saturday Night magazine and also wrote both a general column for the magazine under his own name, and, from 1965 until 1987, film reviews under the pseudonym "Marshall Delaney". Under his stewardship, Saturday Night won five gold medals at the National Magazine Awards. He also returned to the Star as a weekly arts columnist (1971-1987) and then wrote weekly columns for the Financial Times of Canada (1988–1992), The Globe and Mail (1992–1999) and the National Post (1999–2019).

Fulford was critical of David Cronenberg's films and the usage of funding from the CFDC and wrote the article You Ought To Know How Bad This Film Is Because You Paid For It. Michael Spencer, the head of the CFDC, contacted Cronenberg about Fulford and Cronenberg stated that "only 100 people read Saturday Night magazine", but Spencer replied "Yes but it's the wrong hundred people".

On CBC Radio, he hosted a weekly program, This Is Robert Fulford from 1967 to 1972, where he met his second wife, who originally produced the program. In 1999, he delivered that year's Massey Lecture on the network, "The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture" in a series of five programs.

Fulford worked as the co-host with Richard Gwyn of Realities, a long-form interview show on TVOntario (1982–1989) and as a regular panelist on CBC Radio's Morningside (1989–1993). In 1984, Fulford was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.

In his 1988 entry for The Canadian Encyclopedia, Douglas Fetherling described Fulford's politics as being on "the more conservative end of the liberal spectrum".

Fulford was also a critic of literature, art and films. He wrote extensively about the Canadian abstract art group Painters Eleven, its members (particularly William Ronald, Tom Hodgson, and Harold Town), and the Saskatchewan abstract artist Mashel Teitelbaum.

Selected bibliography

• This Was Expo – 1968
• Remember Expo: A Pictorial Record – 1968
• Crisis at the Victory Burlesk: Culture, Politics and Other Diversions – 1968
• Harold Town Drawings - 1968 (editor)
• Read Canadian: A Book about Canadian Books – 1972 (co-editor with Dave Godfrey and Abraham Rotstein)
• Marshall Delaney at the Movies – 1974
• An Introduction to the Arts in Canada – 1977
• The Fulford File – 1978
• The Beginning of Vision: The Drawings of Lawren S. Harris – 1982 (co-author with Joan Murray)
• Canada: A Celebration – 1983
• Best Seat in the House: Memoirs of a Lucky Man – 1988
• Accidental City: The Transformation of Toronto – 1995
• Toronto Discovered – 1998
• The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture – 1999
• A Life in Paragraphs: Essays – 2020

See also

• List of newspaper columnists

Works cited

• Cronenberg, David (2006). David Cronenberg: Interviews with Serge Grünberg. Plexus Publishing. ISBN 0859653765.

External links

• Official website
• Robert Fulford at IMDb