Obituary: Journalist Courtney Tower, dean of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, 1932-2024

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The son of a Saskatchewan farmer, Courtney Tower walked into the hurly-burly of the Parliamentary Press Gallery for the first time in 1955 and promptly fell in love with the place.

For the next 64 years, he would work on-and-off in the “Hot Room” — the gallery’s third-floor Centre Block office — with Reuters, Time Magazine, Maclean’s, Reader’s Digest and the Journal of Commerce.

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At 83, then a freelance journalist and the gallery’s elder statesman, he wrote about the place that defined his life:

“I work today in the same press gallery where I started 60 years ago. However tenuous it is, I like to be at the fringe at least of the political action. That’s the main reason. The extra money is fine, and I love walking through the buildings. There’s something about this place, there truly is.”

Tower, who continued to work into his 90s — he wrote profiles for his Alta Vista community paper — died in October in Montfort Hospital in the aftermath of a fall. He was 92.

“Dad was the original Google: I always came to him with my questions,” said his daughter, Amanda Tower. “He had these vast stores of knowledge. Even in his everyday life, he was always the consummate reporter.”

“He was thoughtful, observant, and a good listener,” said his friend Doug Small, a journalist with The Canadian Press and Global News. “He always believed reporters had a duty to write things that were fairly presented and balanced. He was more kindly than fierce, and he wrote like that.”

Robert Lewis, the former editor-in-chief of Maclean’s, became Tower’s friend after replacing him as Ottawa correspondent for Time Magazine in the late 1960s.

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“He had an iconoclastic streak, which made him very engaging as a friend,” Lewis said. “And, as a journalist, it meant he didn’t always follow the crowd. He brought to his work an ability to avoid conventional wisdom when it didn’t make any sense.”

Courtney George Tower was born April 17, 1932, in Norquay, Sask., where his father was a farmer and his mother was a schoolteacher. He was one of six children.

Tower’s father, Courtney Leigh Tower, a First World War veteran, had fought at Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele, which instilled in him a profound sense of stoicism. He was a man of few words.

It was why Tower had vivid memories of their exchanges. Once, he said, during the Depression, they drove past a gang of relief workers tearing out brush from the town’s ditches. “Do you want to do that, or do you want to go to school?” his father asked him. It was an admonition more than a question.

Young Courtney applied himself in the town’s one-room schoolhouse and demonstrated a talent for writing, which his mother, Hope, encouraged.

A family friend, Ottawa Citizen columnist Austin F. Cross, recommended that Courtney attend Carleton University’s fledgling journalism program if he was serious about writing. So it was that, in September 1949, a 17-year-old Tower boarded a train for the first time in his life and headed for the nation’s capital.

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“I sat up the whole way,” he said.

At Carleton, Tower distinguished himself by becoming editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, then known as The Carleton, and by winning a national editorial prize. He worked as a hotel bellhop to help finance his education.

Tower landed his first journalism job at the Financial Times in Montreal, rewriting briefs and decoding the office’s stock-ticker tape.

At 23, he was hired by British United Press, an international wire service, and became the youngest member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. In 1959, Tower moved to Reuters, one of the world’s leading news services, and for the next six years worked in London, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and South Vietnam.

In London, he met his future wife, Celine, while they were both taking Spanish lessons. Celine would tell friends she kept staring at Tower because he asked so many “annoying questions;” he would tell friends she was flirting with him. They would have two children, Amanda and Courtney.

Tower returned to Ottawa in 1966 as Canadian correspondent for Time Magazine, a publication then with a worldwide circulation approaching four million.

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It was a time when magazines and newspapers were at heart of the information marketplace — broadcasters had only recently been admitted to the Parliamentary Press Gallery — and money flowed as freely as drink. The Hot Room was so crowded that desks overflowed into the hallway.

“It was a great time for journalism and journalists,” Lewis said.

Tower moved to Maclean’s and then, in 1973, joined the Prime Minister’s Office as Pierre Trudeau’s assistant press secretary. Tower spent four years in government. He liked the prime minister — “Trudeau schooled himself to be composed in all circumstances,” he said — but came to be wary of the centralization of power in the PMO.

In 1979, Tower rejoined the press gallery as Ottawa editor of Reader’s Digest magazine, and he spent the next 40 years on Parliament Hill.

Despite his penchant for hard work, Tower was an attentive father, Amanda Tower said, and became involved in all of his children’s activities, which included highland dancing, cub scouts, horse riding and judo.

“Dad was happiest when he was working,” Amanda said. “He was a huge reader, and, when he wasn’t working, he was reading.”

In retirement, Tower wrote a column for the Alta Vista community newspaper, Vistas, called “Our People,” about local personalities.

“He was always trying to figure out the nature of a situation, what made people tick,” Amanda said. “He never once stopped asking questions.”

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