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This story was originally published April 17, 1993
She is a beautiful young woman, working as a model in Winnipeg. She remembers 10 years ago when Max judged a beauty contest she was in.
One of the woman’s friends comes to Max’s table. She reminds him about the talent show and asks if he would mind coming over to say hello — only for a minute. Her friend the model is too shy to ask.
Max obliges. He always obliges.
Max, still wearing his makeup from the evening newscast, has an instant rapport with the women. They talk loudly and happily like old friends reacquainted. The women are clearly thrilled to bits and lay familiar hands on his jacket sleeve as they talk.
Max returns to his table, hails the restaurant owner, who is never far away, and sends white wine over to the women’s table. It happens all the time. Eat out with Max and you eat with Max and everyone else in the restaurant.
The 51-year-old CJOH anchorman is a star — the biggest star around these parts. He is the most influential journalist in the region and, if you include personal appearances and charity work, the hardest working. It is only a minor exaggeration to suggest he has met most of the people who watch him. He has certainly been to all their towns and villages.
He’s much the same in person as on television but like most stars, everyone recognizes him but few know him. He’s immensely popular, yet has been excruciatingly lonely. Only recently has he been able to tolerate his own company.
Max Keeping, a creature of the public spotlight, has drifted in and out of personal darkness. Complex is a word commonly used to describe him.
He says he kicked the rum habit he brought to Ottawa from the Maritimes five years ago. But at the height of his drinking 15 years ago, he was packing away 40 ounces a day and was prosecuted twice for drunk driving. Now, he drinks mostly beer.
He spends all the money he earns, much of it on other people, and lives from paycheque to paycheque. He loves young people (“they have a lot to say”) and rock concerts. He has seen the heavy metal group Metallica four times in the past year. It is, he says, all part of his personal campaign to stay young and belatedly live part of the youth he never had.
Marriage and family life have eluded him: “I guess I was close when I was much younger and then I realized that I was married to the job and not prepared to sacrifice my career.”
“Kids and parents who live in difficult circumstances call it the family of choice. When I was growing up I chose the family next door as my closest family. When I came to the Ottawa Valley, (late country singer) Mac Beattie and Mac’s family were my family of choice.”
Over the years, he has taken several disadvantaged youths under his wing. One, George Sigouin, 28, lived with Keeping for five years from age 15. Keeping refers to him as “my son” although he hasn’t officially adopted him.
Max Keeping in a 1993 photo with the two young girls he affectionately calls his “granddaughters,” Tabetha and Lisa.
Sigouin, who has married and separated, is the father of two young daughters, Tabetha, 7, and Lisa, 3, who are Keeping’s “granddaughters.” They visit with him every week and are, he says, the most important people in his life. He clearly adores them.
“George will tell you that his payback to me were these grandchildren. He just glows when he sees them with me — it’s the only way he can say thank you.
“It is the one time each week when I’m not the guy from television. I suppose there are people who say I wanted to show off because I have grandchildren but actually, I’m oblivious to people around me most of the time because I’m having so much fun with these two little girls, witnessing their joy of life. Other than at ball games, it’s the only escape I have.”
Keeping, now in his 21st year at CJOH, dominates his local opposition at CBC. Keeping’s Newsline has an average 216,000 viewers nightly compared with Newsday’s 57,000.
Keeping believes local television news has to keep in close touch with the community, particularly as the competition for viewers increases. Fellow journalists scoffed when he began his “Happiness File” — seniors’ birthdays, anniversaries and the like. Now, it seems, happiness is everywhere in the news.
Newsline’s success is by no means totally due to the anchor’s personal appearances and charity work. Keeping’s newsroom has won numerous awards for television journalism and produced an impressive list of alumni, including former co-anchors Linda MacLennan, who is now making half-a-million dollars a year as an anchor in Chicago and CBC Newsworld’s Nancy Wilson and Kathryn Wright as well as “scud stud” Arthur Kent, Global anchor Jane Gilbert, CTV news chief Henry Kowalski and Eric Morrison, vice-president CTV news.
Former colleague Brian Goff says Keeping is a “merciless boss” not averse to publicly lambasting his staff: “You don’t mumble and shuffle away from Max if he thinks you’ve screwed up. He looks upon people who work with him as family and if there’s been a screw up he wants everyone to know.”
Goff tells a revealing story about Keeping. Two summers ago, Goff, also a Newfoundlander, was interviewing Brian Mulroney’s oldest son Ben on the CHEO telethon.
“Ben was on the kids’ line. I went over to interview him and said something like ‘Ben, you’re still on the kids’ line, when are they going to give you an adult phone?’
“He gave a superb, perfect answer which was something like: he didn’t mind what phone he was on so long as he could help. I thought of the Newfoundland expression ‘you lie like a rug’ but I said ‘ah, you lie like your dad.’ It just came out. Mila was with Max about 15 feet away and she was visibly taken aback. Max quickly explained that it was just a bit of Newfie humor.”
Goff later apologized to Ben Mulroney and wrote a letter of apology to Mila. But that wasn’t the end of it. Doug Bassett, owner of CJOH and son of Brian Mulroney’s friend John Bassett, wanted “a full accounting” says Goff.
Goff’s gaffe got him banned from appearing on future telethons and banned from doing CJOH news commentaries. He left late last year to work in Tampa.
“Max could have thrown me to the wolves because he was under
tremendous pressure to do so. He didn’t.”
Yet as a journalist, Keeping has made some odd choices. In 1972, he took leave after six years as a CTV Parliamentary reporter to run for the Progressive Conservatives in his home riding of Burin-Burgeo.
He lost by 9,000 votes to the late Liberal cabinet minister Don Jamieson who had built and paved far too many roads to be beatable. Keeping returned, in debt, to Ottawa but CTV wouldn’t have him back. He was tainted.
CJOH took him on as news director in November 1972 and, shortly thereafter, anchorman. Today, as vice-president, news and public affairs at CJOH, he is the boss and firmly in control of the station’s news operation.
Keeping also raised a few eyebrows recently when it became known he was serving on the board of directors of the Ottawa Congress Centre and being paid a per diem by the provincial government.
Many journalists consider this an ethical breach, denying CJOH at least the appearance of objectivity in what became a major local story.
Of the Congress Centre job, he says: “It was never a conflict of interest but if I’m asked I probably won’t renew my Board membership because of the discomfort I have felt during the past few weeks.
“Being on the Board taught me a great deal about tourism in this area. It was a valuable lesson I couldn’t have learned anywhere else and, as far as I’m concerned, it is part of my involvement in the community. I was paid about $3,000 a year. I can’t be bought for $3,000. I can’t be bought for $300,000.
“People complained that (former Ottawa Mayor) Jim Durrell and I were friends and said how could we possibly cover him objectively. Well, we broke the story about his expense account troubles. That was our story. It didn’t affect our friendship because he knew I would never compromise myself.”
After 35 years in the business, he is relentlessly competitive, hates to miss a story and loves to scoop everyone else. When he’s off-camera during the newscast he watches the CBOT evening news on a small television by the anchor desk.
Keeping attends about 130 to 160 events a year, clocking more than 1,000 km, driven in his company Lincoln (CJOH 1) to a public function by his driver, general helper and protector Gary MacDonell. MacDonell, who combines a genial demeanor with an interest in martial arts, was hired 16 years ago when Max was banned from driving.
MacDonell has shared a lot with his boss. In the drinking days, it wasn’t unusual for Keeping to decide suddenly he wanted to go on vacation — that day — and rent a plane to fly him to a baseball game or a hockey game. He has also flown to Halifax to satisfy the urge for a fish dinner.
Max Keeping, the journalist, is an easy study compared with Max Keeping, the person. To get a handle on the person, you have to begin at the beginning, in Grand Bank, a small fishing community on the south coast of Newfoundland. There, everyone knows at least something about everyone else and people get by helping each other out.
Everyone in the community remembers Keeping’s father, Heber, a schooner captain who was away from home for long stretches. He died eight years ago at 82.
A three-year-old Max Keeping in Grand Bank, Newfoundland.
Reuben Ralph, a neighbor of the Keeping family, remembers a bright boy, perhaps destined to become an radio announcer.
“I remember Max going to his grandmother’s house for milk. He passed our house and you could hear him talking into the empty container — a kettle we’d call it here. Max would be saying ‘Do you hear me Heber, do you hear me Heber.’ He was talking to his dad who was away at sea.”
His mother Polly, who was 42 when Max was born in 1942, died nine years later of cancer. His only brother Bert was in his late teens when he was washed overboard while working at sea. That was in 1952.
Keeping was raised by his sister Margaret, a disciplinarian who was only 22 years old and newly married at the time.
“I was neither a mother nor a sister to him,” says Margaret Foote, now 64 and living in Truro, N.S. “I was overly strict and overly protective because that was the way I was brought up and the way he would have been raised if our mother had lived. Mind you, he didn’t have to be disciplined. He was a good, ordinary little boy and did very well in school.
“It was a hard life for a little boy — he was sort of in limbo and I always felt it wasn’t a normal upbringing. I think he missed out on a lot. Our father was at sea but they were close — as close as they could be anyway.
“I don’t know if Max has peace inside. I haven’t asked him and he hasn’t told me. I know he has difficulty at Christmas and it pulls on his heartstrings. It’s a time he doesn’t know what he wants. It’s a time he seems lost.”
(“I’ve always had difficulty with Christmas,” he says. “The best times I’ve had at Christmas have been the nine times at Disney World.”People say I’m the only person they know who goes to Fantasyland to get in touch with reality,” he says.)
Margaret and her family moved from Halifax to St. John’s and then back to the mainland. Max stayed in the Newfoundland capital and, at age 14, started work for $20 a week at the St. John’s Evening Telegram where he rose quickly to become sports editor while still a teenager.
Says Dee Murphy, 57, who was rival sports editor on the now-defunct Daily News : “Max was brash, confident, ambitious and the fastest one-fingered typist I’ve ever seen. He could string words together as well as anyone I’ve seen in this business.
“Both newspapers were about three blocks apart on Duckworth Street and we both worked nights. Max used to wander down to the News office at about 2 a.m. and we’d sit around and talk. Occasionally, we’d have a drink or two. We weren’t teetotallers if the occasion demanded it.”
Keeping worked briefly in radio in St. John’s before moving to the radio and television station CJCH in Halifax, owned by the now-Tory senator Finlay MacDonald.
When reporters and announcers weren’t working at the station, they were often running in elections for the Tory party.
Retired judge and former Tory MP Robert McCleave was Keeping’s news director at CJCH.
“He always did a spectacular job,” recalls McCleave. “I remember during one snowstorm Max appearing with a big snow removal vehicle. He was covering the story from the top of this thing — where the hell he got it from, I don’t know.”
Keeping was fired from the station for, he says, sticking with a story MacDonald didn’t like. Nor did it help that young Max had crashed four company cars in his short time as an employee.
He came to Ottawa in 1965 and worked at CFRA, then Ottawa’s leading radio station, for a year before taking the CTV post.
Keeping worked and partied hard on the Hill. He became friends with the Newfoundland MPs, most of whom were Tories, and used to help them write stories for the St. John’s newspapers.
Finlay MacDonald Jr., a former CJOH and CTV reporter, calls Keeping ‘a true original’: “The camera doesn’t lie and for an hour a night it was humbling watching him work. He’s totally exposed when he’s on camera and when he was boozing, you could see the loneliness in him.
“Max isn’t the type who stands at a party looking over your shoulder to see if someone important is coming in. More than likely, he’ll be sitting in the kitchen talking to the mother of someone who watches him on TV.”
Several years ago, Keeping’s helping of disadvantaged youth brought him into contact with his own family and, ultimately, tragedy when his second cousin Rodney Keeping was jailed for murder. He was later murdered at Millhaven Penitentiary.
Max Keeping sat through the trial of both Rodney and Rodney’s killers. It was, he says, a bad year. Nobody criticized CJOH’s coverage of Rodney’s trial.
“Here was a very bright young man who became a victim of the penal system. He got a good job at the Department of Finance and was doing extremely well when along comes the parole service and says ‘Rodney, your brother is coming out of jail in November and we don’t want both of you in Ottawa so you’re going back to the Maritimes.’ He was back in jail by February.”
Al Cormier is probably Keeping’s oldest and closest friend in Ottawa. They speak and meet regularly and have done for nearly 30 years.
Cormier talks guardedly about Keeping but says the two spent a lot of time together when Max was going through booze-induced depression.
“Max knows a million people,” says Cormier, “but there are few he can open up to. I guess I probably nagged him off the booze. We’ve helped each other out a lot over the years.
“Max lets people take advantage of him,” adds Cormier, “and sometimes I give my opinion about that whether it’s asked for or not. Mind you, he always knows when he’s being taken advantage of but he’s too much of a gentleman to say anything. He’s unique. Max is trying to make the world a better place for people. He really believes in that.”
Keeping says his personal life has improved during the past five years.
“I haven’t had the loneliness or been depressed by loneliness. I am very much at peace with myself but I can’t pinpoint the reason why. Maybe it was the year of Rodney’s murder and all of the awful publicity but I’ve been more tranquil in the past four or five years.”
“And I’m incredibly lucky to get well-paid for something I’d do for nothing.
“I love meeting people. If I can bring a little happiness into someone’s life, why not? People always seem happy to see me — happy that someone has taken the time.
“I spend all my money but I don’t regret that. I’d hate to die tomorrow having not used today well.”
Max at a glance
Age: 51
Birthplace: Grand Bank, Nfld., 1942
Marital status: Single
Job: CJOH anchorman
Interests: Community work, young people, rock concerts
Honorary chairman: Ottawa Heart and Stroke Foundation; Children’s Wish Foundation, National Capital Chapter; Juvenile Diabetes Foundation of Ottawa Carleton; Children’s Aid Society of Ottawa Carleton
Member: Board of directors, Ottawa Congress CentrePatron of: Alzheimer Society of Ottawa Carleton; Elizabeth Bruyere Health Centre; Upper Canada Playhouse, MorrisburgAmbassador at large: Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario
Awards: Order of Canada 1991; Canada 125 Medal, 1992; Ontario Medal of Good Citizenship, 1983; Paul Harris Fellow, Ottawa Rotary; Cadaceus (Sword of Hope), Ottawa Cancer Society; Distinguished Service Award Ontario Heart and Stroke Foundation; Howard Caine Award, Canadian Association of Broadcasters; First Annual Max Keeping Award, Juvenile Diabetes Foundation; First Annual Max Keeping Award Help the Aged; Nominated to Advisory Council of Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Foundationm
© 1993 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
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She is a beautiful young woman, working as a model in Winnipeg. She remembers 10 years ago when Max judged a beauty contest she was in.
One of the woman’s friends comes to Max’s table. She reminds him about the talent show and asks if he would mind coming over to say hello — only for a minute. Her friend the model is too shy to ask.
Max obliges. He always obliges.
Max, still wearing his makeup from the evening newscast, has an instant rapport with the women. They talk loudly and happily like old friends reacquainted. The women are clearly thrilled to bits and lay familiar hands on his jacket sleeve as they talk.
Max returns to his table, hails the restaurant owner, who is never far away, and sends white wine over to the women’s table. It happens all the time. Eat out with Max and you eat with Max and everyone else in the restaurant.
The 51-year-old CJOH anchorman is a star — the biggest star around these parts. He is the most influential journalist in the region and, if you include personal appearances and charity work, the hardest working. It is only a minor exaggeration to suggest he has met most of the people who watch him. He has certainly been to all their towns and villages.
He’s much the same in person as on television but like most stars, everyone recognizes him but few know him. He’s immensely popular, yet has been excruciatingly lonely. Only recently has he been able to tolerate his own company.
Max Keeping, a creature of the public spotlight, has drifted in and out of personal darkness. Complex is a word commonly used to describe him.
He says he kicked the rum habit he brought to Ottawa from the Maritimes five years ago. But at the height of his drinking 15 years ago, he was packing away 40 ounces a day and was prosecuted twice for drunk driving. Now, he drinks mostly beer.
He spends all the money he earns, much of it on other people, and lives from paycheque to paycheque. He loves young people (“they have a lot to say”) and rock concerts. He has seen the heavy metal group Metallica four times in the past year. It is, he says, all part of his personal campaign to stay young and belatedly live part of the youth he never had.
Marriage and family life have eluded him: “I guess I was close when I was much younger and then I realized that I was married to the job and not prepared to sacrifice my career.”
“Kids and parents who live in difficult circumstances call it the family of choice. When I was growing up I chose the family next door as my closest family. When I came to the Ottawa Valley, (late country singer) Mac Beattie and Mac’s family were my family of choice.”
Over the years, he has taken several disadvantaged youths under his wing. One, George Sigouin, 28, lived with Keeping for five years from age 15. Keeping refers to him as “my son” although he hasn’t officially adopted him.
Max Keeping in a 1993 photo with the two young girls he affectionately calls his “granddaughters,” Tabetha and Lisa.
Sigouin, who has married and separated, is the father of two young daughters, Tabetha, 7, and Lisa, 3, who are Keeping’s “granddaughters.” They visit with him every week and are, he says, the most important people in his life. He clearly adores them.
“George will tell you that his payback to me were these grandchildren. He just glows when he sees them with me — it’s the only way he can say thank you.
“It is the one time each week when I’m not the guy from television. I suppose there are people who say I wanted to show off because I have grandchildren but actually, I’m oblivious to people around me most of the time because I’m having so much fun with these two little girls, witnessing their joy of life. Other than at ball games, it’s the only escape I have.”
Keeping, now in his 21st year at CJOH, dominates his local opposition at CBC. Keeping’s Newsline has an average 216,000 viewers nightly compared with Newsday’s 57,000.
Keeping believes local television news has to keep in close touch with the community, particularly as the competition for viewers increases. Fellow journalists scoffed when he began his “Happiness File” — seniors’ birthdays, anniversaries and the like. Now, it seems, happiness is everywhere in the news.
Newsline’s success is by no means totally due to the anchor’s personal appearances and charity work. Keeping’s newsroom has won numerous awards for television journalism and produced an impressive list of alumni, including former co-anchors Linda MacLennan, who is now making half-a-million dollars a year as an anchor in Chicago and CBC Newsworld’s Nancy Wilson and Kathryn Wright as well as “scud stud” Arthur Kent, Global anchor Jane Gilbert, CTV news chief Henry Kowalski and Eric Morrison, vice-president CTV news.
Former colleague Brian Goff says Keeping is a “merciless boss” not averse to publicly lambasting his staff: “You don’t mumble and shuffle away from Max if he thinks you’ve screwed up. He looks upon people who work with him as family and if there’s been a screw up he wants everyone to know.”
Goff tells a revealing story about Keeping. Two summers ago, Goff, also a Newfoundlander, was interviewing Brian Mulroney’s oldest son Ben on the CHEO telethon.
“Ben was on the kids’ line. I went over to interview him and said something like ‘Ben, you’re still on the kids’ line, when are they going to give you an adult phone?’
“He gave a superb, perfect answer which was something like: he didn’t mind what phone he was on so long as he could help. I thought of the Newfoundland expression ‘you lie like a rug’ but I said ‘ah, you lie like your dad.’ It just came out. Mila was with Max about 15 feet away and she was visibly taken aback. Max quickly explained that it was just a bit of Newfie humor.”
Goff later apologized to Ben Mulroney and wrote a letter of apology to Mila. But that wasn’t the end of it. Doug Bassett, owner of CJOH and son of Brian Mulroney’s friend John Bassett, wanted “a full accounting” says Goff.
Goff’s gaffe got him banned from appearing on future telethons and banned from doing CJOH news commentaries. He left late last year to work in Tampa.
“Max could have thrown me to the wolves because he was under
tremendous pressure to do so. He didn’t.”
HHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Yet as a journalist, Keeping has made some odd choices. In 1972, he took leave after six years as a CTV Parliamentary reporter to run for the Progressive Conservatives in his home riding of Burin-Burgeo.
He lost by 9,000 votes to the late Liberal cabinet minister Don Jamieson who had built and paved far too many roads to be beatable. Keeping returned, in debt, to Ottawa but CTV wouldn’t have him back. He was tainted.
CJOH took him on as news director in November 1972 and, shortly thereafter, anchorman. Today, as vice-president, news and public affairs at CJOH, he is the boss and firmly in control of the station’s news operation.
Keeping also raised a few eyebrows recently when it became known he was serving on the board of directors of the Ottawa Congress Centre and being paid a per diem by the provincial government.
Many journalists consider this an ethical breach, denying CJOH at least the appearance of objectivity in what became a major local story.
Of the Congress Centre job, he says: “It was never a conflict of interest but if I’m asked I probably won’t renew my Board membership because of the discomfort I have felt during the past few weeks.
“Being on the Board taught me a great deal about tourism in this area. It was a valuable lesson I couldn’t have learned anywhere else and, as far as I’m concerned, it is part of my involvement in the community. I was paid about $3,000 a year. I can’t be bought for $3,000. I can’t be bought for $300,000.
“People complained that (former Ottawa Mayor) Jim Durrell and I were friends and said how could we possibly cover him objectively. Well, we broke the story about his expense account troubles. That was our story. It didn’t affect our friendship because he knew I would never compromise myself.”
After 35 years in the business, he is relentlessly competitive, hates to miss a story and loves to scoop everyone else. When he’s off-camera during the newscast he watches the CBOT evening news on a small television by the anchor desk.
Keeping attends about 130 to 160 events a year, clocking more than 1,000 km, driven in his company Lincoln (CJOH 1) to a public function by his driver, general helper and protector Gary MacDonell. MacDonell, who combines a genial demeanor with an interest in martial arts, was hired 16 years ago when Max was banned from driving.
MacDonell has shared a lot with his boss. In the drinking days, it wasn’t unusual for Keeping to decide suddenly he wanted to go on vacation — that day — and rent a plane to fly him to a baseball game or a hockey game. He has also flown to Halifax to satisfy the urge for a fish dinner.
HHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Max Keeping, the journalist, is an easy study compared with Max Keeping, the person. To get a handle on the person, you have to begin at the beginning, in Grand Bank, a small fishing community on the south coast of Newfoundland. There, everyone knows at least something about everyone else and people get by helping each other out.
Everyone in the community remembers Keeping’s father, Heber, a schooner captain who was away from home for long stretches. He died eight years ago at 82.
A three-year-old Max Keeping in Grand Bank, Newfoundland.
Reuben Ralph, a neighbor of the Keeping family, remembers a bright boy, perhaps destined to become an radio announcer.
“I remember Max going to his grandmother’s house for milk. He passed our house and you could hear him talking into the empty container — a kettle we’d call it here. Max would be saying ‘Do you hear me Heber, do you hear me Heber.’ He was talking to his dad who was away at sea.”
His mother Polly, who was 42 when Max was born in 1942, died nine years later of cancer. His only brother Bert was in his late teens when he was washed overboard while working at sea. That was in 1952.
Keeping was raised by his sister Margaret, a disciplinarian who was only 22 years old and newly married at the time.
“I was neither a mother nor a sister to him,” says Margaret Foote, now 64 and living in Truro, N.S. “I was overly strict and overly protective because that was the way I was brought up and the way he would have been raised if our mother had lived. Mind you, he didn’t have to be disciplined. He was a good, ordinary little boy and did very well in school.
“It was a hard life for a little boy — he was sort of in limbo and I always felt it wasn’t a normal upbringing. I think he missed out on a lot. Our father was at sea but they were close — as close as they could be anyway.
“I don’t know if Max has peace inside. I haven’t asked him and he hasn’t told me. I know he has difficulty at Christmas and it pulls on his heartstrings. It’s a time he doesn’t know what he wants. It’s a time he seems lost.”
(“I’ve always had difficulty with Christmas,” he says. “The best times I’ve had at Christmas have been the nine times at Disney World.”People say I’m the only person they know who goes to Fantasyland to get in touch with reality,” he says.)
Margaret and her family moved from Halifax to St. John’s and then back to the mainland. Max stayed in the Newfoundland capital and, at age 14, started work for $20 a week at the St. John’s Evening Telegram where he rose quickly to become sports editor while still a teenager.
Says Dee Murphy, 57, who was rival sports editor on the now-defunct Daily News : “Max was brash, confident, ambitious and the fastest one-fingered typist I’ve ever seen. He could string words together as well as anyone I’ve seen in this business.
“Both newspapers were about three blocks apart on Duckworth Street and we both worked nights. Max used to wander down to the News office at about 2 a.m. and we’d sit around and talk. Occasionally, we’d have a drink or two. We weren’t teetotallers if the occasion demanded it.”
Keeping worked briefly in radio in St. John’s before moving to the radio and television station CJCH in Halifax, owned by the now-Tory senator Finlay MacDonald.
When reporters and announcers weren’t working at the station, they were often running in elections for the Tory party.
Retired judge and former Tory MP Robert McCleave was Keeping’s news director at CJCH.
“He always did a spectacular job,” recalls McCleave. “I remember during one snowstorm Max appearing with a big snow removal vehicle. He was covering the story from the top of this thing — where the hell he got it from, I don’t know.”
Keeping was fired from the station for, he says, sticking with a story MacDonald didn’t like. Nor did it help that young Max had crashed four company cars in his short time as an employee.
He came to Ottawa in 1965 and worked at CFRA, then Ottawa’s leading radio station, for a year before taking the CTV post.
Keeping worked and partied hard on the Hill. He became friends with the Newfoundland MPs, most of whom were Tories, and used to help them write stories for the St. John’s newspapers.
Finlay MacDonald Jr., a former CJOH and CTV reporter, calls Keeping ‘a true original’: “The camera doesn’t lie and for an hour a night it was humbling watching him work. He’s totally exposed when he’s on camera and when he was boozing, you could see the loneliness in him.
“Max isn’t the type who stands at a party looking over your shoulder to see if someone important is coming in. More than likely, he’ll be sitting in the kitchen talking to the mother of someone who watches him on TV.”
HHHHHHHHHHH
Several years ago, Keeping’s helping of disadvantaged youth brought him into contact with his own family and, ultimately, tragedy when his second cousin Rodney Keeping was jailed for murder. He was later murdered at Millhaven Penitentiary.
Max Keeping sat through the trial of both Rodney and Rodney’s killers. It was, he says, a bad year. Nobody criticized CJOH’s coverage of Rodney’s trial.
“Here was a very bright young man who became a victim of the penal system. He got a good job at the Department of Finance and was doing extremely well when along comes the parole service and says ‘Rodney, your brother is coming out of jail in November and we don’t want both of you in Ottawa so you’re going back to the Maritimes.’ He was back in jail by February.”
Al Cormier is probably Keeping’s oldest and closest friend in Ottawa. They speak and meet regularly and have done for nearly 30 years.
Cormier talks guardedly about Keeping but says the two spent a lot of time together when Max was going through booze-induced depression.
“Max knows a million people,” says Cormier, “but there are few he can open up to. I guess I probably nagged him off the booze. We’ve helped each other out a lot over the years.
“Max lets people take advantage of him,” adds Cormier, “and sometimes I give my opinion about that whether it’s asked for or not. Mind you, he always knows when he’s being taken advantage of but he’s too much of a gentleman to say anything. He’s unique. Max is trying to make the world a better place for people. He really believes in that.”
Keeping says his personal life has improved during the past five years.
“I haven’t had the loneliness or been depressed by loneliness. I am very much at peace with myself but I can’t pinpoint the reason why. Maybe it was the year of Rodney’s murder and all of the awful publicity but I’ve been more tranquil in the past four or five years.”
“And I’m incredibly lucky to get well-paid for something I’d do for nothing.
“I love meeting people. If I can bring a little happiness into someone’s life, why not? People always seem happy to see me — happy that someone has taken the time.
“I spend all my money but I don’t regret that. I’d hate to die tomorrow having not used today well.”
Max at a glance
Age: 51
Birthplace: Grand Bank, Nfld., 1942
Marital status: Single
Job: CJOH anchorman
Interests: Community work, young people, rock concerts
Honorary chairman: Ottawa Heart and Stroke Foundation; Children’s Wish Foundation, National Capital Chapter; Juvenile Diabetes Foundation of Ottawa Carleton; Children’s Aid Society of Ottawa Carleton
Member: Board of directors, Ottawa Congress CentrePatron of: Alzheimer Society of Ottawa Carleton; Elizabeth Bruyere Health Centre; Upper Canada Playhouse, MorrisburgAmbassador at large: Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario
Awards: Order of Canada 1991; Canada 125 Medal, 1992; Ontario Medal of Good Citizenship, 1983; Paul Harris Fellow, Ottawa Rotary; Cadaceus (Sword of Hope), Ottawa Cancer Society; Distinguished Service Award Ontario Heart and Stroke Foundation; Howard Caine Award, Canadian Association of Broadcasters; First Annual Max Keeping Award, Juvenile Diabetes Foundation; First Annual Max Keeping Award Help the Aged; Nominated to Advisory Council of Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Foundationm
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