Obituary: John Gradon, journalist - Obituaries - Scotsman.com Born: 17 September, 1943, in Scunthorpe. Died: 2 March, 2013, in Vernon, British Columbia, Canada, aged 69. JOHN Gradon, who has died suddenly following a heart attack while chopping wood at his home in British Columbia, was one of Scotland's best exports to Canada. Technically, he wasn't Scottish - born in Scunthorpe, to parents who were both from the north-east of England - but, from the day his dad Frank arrived in Cumnock with his three-year-old son, he enjoyed an Ayrshire upbringing. He blossomed at Cumnock Academy, as a fine scholar, a tenacious scrum-half in the rugby XV and as off-spinner, middle order batsman and captain of the cricket XI, before, at the end of his fifth year, leaving to take up a journalism apprenticeship with the Kilmarnock Standard, replacing another Ayrshire boy, one Hugh McIlvanney, who had moved on to The Scotsman. Gradon soon moved to Glasgow to join the Evening Citizen. These were the wild 1960s years of intense circulation battles in Glasgow, and Gradon and the other Citizen reporters had to be sharp, inventive and determined. Here he finessed his journalistic skills by covering some of the biggest Scottish stories of that or any era, including the Cheapside Street and Ibrox disasters, where his on-the-spot reports won him high praise. He also showed a talent for descriptive feature writing which would serve him well in Canada later in his career. He partied with the Beatles at the height of Beatlemania. A keen golfer all his life, he played a round with and interviewed Bing Crosby, and, later in his career, he would interview the great and the good such as Margaret Thatcher. By his own admission, he enjoyed these wild days, when newsrooms were filled with hard-drinking, hard-smoking newsmen. Only the tough survived and Gradon would later remind young Canadian journalists of how his failure correctly to spell "accommodate" resulted in an irate news editor throwing a typewriter at him. He also wrote for the Sunday Express and, after the Express group closed the Citizen and cut back its Scottish operation, he went south, where he worked on local papers and for the Daily Mail, before deciding to move to Canada. After an initial spell in Ontario, he found his final journalistic home in Calgary, initially with the Calgary Sun, which took on the hitherto omnipotent Calgary Herald, known as "The Grey Old Lady" in the Alberta city. Gradon's exclusives so worried the Herald's management that they hired him. He rose to city editor (news editor). He would later become correspondent at large for the Herald, travelling round the world to cover the big stories - the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, the war in Bosnia, African massacres and famine, the drugs war in Columbia and, hardly surprising for a golf fanatic, all the big tournaments such as the Masters and the Open. Gradon also covered the big Canadian stories, interviewing every Canadian prime minister from Pierre Troudeau on, covering Stanley Cup finals and, on home ground, 24 straight Calgary Stampedes. White stetsons are de rigeur at the Stampede, and typically when he first covered the event, Gradon sported a black one, with eagle feathers. By the end, however, the organisers had given him his own white stetson. His best move, in his Citizen days, had been to woo and marry Doreen (Jones), the editor's secretary. The story goes that he took her out over 14 consecutive nights, proposed on the fifth and was accepted on the 14th. She never quite tamed a man who, from his teenaged days at Cumnock Rugby Club was one of the great party animals. One weekend-long shindig ended with the re-papering of his parents" front room. But, she did house train him over their 42 years together. He retired from the Herald in 2005, by which time his son Stuart had followed him onto the paper as a photojournalist. From the thousands of front-page "splashes" which he had accumulated over his long career, he had just one framed in his retirement home overlooking Lake Okanagan. It was a Herald front page: words by John Gradon, picture by Stuart Gradon. John Gradon loved Doreen, Stuart and his partner Jamie, his grand-daughter Raina, life in general, journalism and golf. He also suffered as a fan of Newcastle United and Scotland. He was the caricature of the gruff veteran journalist, hiding a soft heart beneath his stern outer shell; many a young journalist grew up grateful for his wise counsel and guidance. In his final column, published on his 62nd birthday, Gradon wrote of never thinking of journalism as being "a real job," but instead "a lifelong privilege, one which has afforded me a magical gateway to experiences, places, events and, above all, to people from all works of life, in all sorts of situations." He signed off with these words: "A great friend once kindly told me journalism wasn't what I did but who I was. Well, if that's even half true, I'll take it as the ultimate compliment.