My name is Allen Pizzey. I’m Cana­di­an born and bred, but set off on the rol­lick­ing ride of a forty-plus years career in jour­nal­ism in South Africa, as a gen­er­al assign­ment reporter on The Argus in Cape Town.

In those ‘good old days’ before cell phones, lap­tops and the Inter­net, we banged out sto­ries (mak­ing three car­bon copies) on man­u­al type­writ­ers, one of the many reput­ed rea­sons reporters were dubbed ‘ink-stained wretches’.

That tran­si­tioned into four years of roam­ing south­ern, cen­tral and west Africa for the Argus Africa News Ser­vice, fil­ing by telex.

For those who’ve nev­er seen one, a telex is a large (and noisy) com­bi­na­tion rotary phone and type­writer. Each let­ter typed makes a set of holes in a nar­row paper rib­bon that spits out of a box on the side. For­eign cor­re­spon­dents call it “punch­ing copy”. To trans­mit, the rib­bon is locked into a sprock­et next to the key­board. You dial a telex at the copy’s des­ti­na­tion, hit a but­ton, and away it clatters.

From 1978 to 1980, I cov­ered the bush war and polit­i­cal machi­na­tions that tran­si­tioned white-ruled Rhode­sia into Zim­bab­we as a free­lancer for a client list that includ­ed; the Toron­to Globe and Mail, the York­shire Post, the New Zealand Her­ald, the Lon­don Free Press, Win­nipeg Free Press and back-stop­ping for a wire service.

I also shot stills for UPI. Trans­mit­ting an 8x10 glossy print (devel­oped in a con­vert­ed broom clos­et) to Brus­sels on a rotat­ing drum appa­ra­tus hooked into a rotary dial phone took 45 min­utes. I made $30 a picture.

Fil­ing radio for Mutu­al News and BBC Focus on Africa required attach­ing a lead from a tape recorder to a dis­as­sem­bled tele­phone mouth­piece with croc­o­dile clips.

Dead­line time could be hectic.

For the fol­low­ing thir­ty-six years I was an on-air for­eign cor­re­spon­dent for CBS News, based in Johan­nes­burg, Athens and Rome. The tech­nol­o­gy went from satel­lit­ing video on tape from the near­est TV sta­tion with a feed point, to dig­i­tal image trans­mis­sion from a lap­top, and going live from just about anywhere.

In the com­pa­ny of tal­ent­ed col­leagues, I col­lect­ed a DuPont Colum­bia Sil­ver Baton and a Sig­ma Delta Chi Bronze Medal­lion for cov­er­age of the Per­sian Gulf tanker war, four Over­seas Press Club Awards (for Lebanon, the Per­sian Gulf and Koso­vo) and two Emmys, one for the “Tro­jan Horse” killings in South Africa, the oth­er shared for cov­er­age of the bomb­ing of the Marine bar­racks in Beirut.

Apro­pos to none of that, I hold a Bach­e­lor of Com­merce degree from Sir George Williams Uni­ver­si­ty (now Con­cor­dia) in Mon­tre­al, know noth­ing about account­ing or any­thing else relat­ed to it, and worked var­i­ous­ly as a Pull­man porter, rock driller and blaster, puta­tive soap sales­man (actu­al­ly I couldn’t sell water in a desert) and an adver­tis­ing rep.

I’m offi­cial­ly retired, and live in Italy, which is a fine place to perch…and of course wine and dine.

But my favourite place in the world is our lake­side cot­tage in Ontario where I pad­dle my kayak, smell the pines, and sip sin­gle malt Scotch while the loons call as sun­set slides into deep, dark, peace­ful night.