Over Easy:Cap’n Highliner
When my Covid beard came in white, I was reminded of when my Aunt Betty took to referring to my Uncle Bill as Captain Highliner, when his did the same. To be clear, she didn’t mean the hot new Kenny Rogers type Captain, but the original old salt with the cap and turtleneck. While Bill’s beard looked bohemian, mine was kind of ‘Bad Santa 2’.
My uncle was always the coolest guy in the room. Bill Daniel was an ad man, before there were mad men, and he handled big accounts like Coke, Skidoo and Levis for McCann Erickson. You’d find him in his office with a couple of young writers on the couch, pads on their laps, or at Toronto’s legendary Pilot Tavern strategizing over a 3-martini lunch . In the interest of accuracy, I should say that Bill’s beverage of choice was Johnny Walker.
When I was a kid, I loved going to Bill & Betty’s place. Raucous dinner parties with lots of laughing, singing and imbibing were regular affairs. They drove a VW Beetle and once went on a 3-month trip to Mexico; on another trip they went to England and France by boat, in case you were wondering if Billy “ever went to sea”. You can see how my uncle had life figured out from where I sat – he was a painter, he smoked, listened to jazz, drank scotch before dark and wore corduroy pants to work.
My dad wanted to be cool, but when he got the gold #1 necklace, we winced. When we heard Chuck Mangione and Nana Mouskouri on the living room stereo we headed for the rec room. Meanwhile my uncle, in a cardigan that Dick Cavett would have coveted, was digging Thelonious Monk. It was no contest.
When I was in High School in 1967, Bill took me to Montreal and we went clothes shopping. He let me pick whatever I wanted so I came home with a pair of blue and white checked bellbottoms, a belt the size of the passing lane, and a maroon paisley shirt. The mockery from my classmates was worth it.
Bill loved it when I became a songwriter and realized his own ambitions in that world when a campaign that he wrote turned into a song written with Dr. Music, Doug Riley, and sung by Salome Bey, called “I Like Your Company”. It’s lovely (Here’s the link: https://open.spotify.com/search/%20i%20like%20your%20company )
I miss Bill and Betty, but our families are close now and I realize what a gift it was to have someone I could look up to who made a creative life seem possible. He did that for his granddaughter Britt, aka DJ Blush (check out her Brittpop radio show on Barrelhouse Radio, and he did it for me.
Here’s to the coolest guy in the room.
