Kimber, Stephen 1949-

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KIMBER, Stephen 1949-

PERSONAL: Born August 25, 1949, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; son of Edward Grey and Marion Eva (Roome) Kimber; married Jean Steinbock (a costume designer), June, 1976; children: Matthew, Emily, Michael. Education: Attended Dalhousie University; Goucher College, M.F.A., 2001.

ADDRESSES: Home—2533 Beech St., Halifax, Nova Scotia B3L 2X9, Canada. Offıce—School of Journalism, A&A Building, Third Floor, University of King's College, 6350 Coburg Rd., Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 2A1, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer, educator. CTV field producer, 1977-78; Maclean's, correspondent, 1979-80; Atlantic Insight, managing editor, 1979-81; Today, correspondent, 1980-81; King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, professor of the School of Journalism, 1982—, director, 1996-2003; MariMedia Associates Ltd., president, 1983-89; Halifax Daily News, columnist, 1985-2002, 2003—; Optipress, Inc., columnist, 2003—. Cities, editor and publisher, 1987-89; Poynter Institute of Media Studies, St. Petersburg, FL, research fellow, 1998-1999; television producer, storyteller, writer, and host.

AWARDS, HONORS: Dan MacArthur award, 1970; Atlantic Journalism award, 1982; Centre for Investigative Journalism award, 1987; Canadian Food Writers' award, 1987; Dartmouth nonfiction award and Evelyn Richardson prize, 2003, both for Sailors, Slackers, and Blind Pigs: Halifax at War.

WRITINGS:

Net Profits: The Story of National Sea Products, Nimbus Publishing (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada), 1989.

More Than Just Folks: Thirty-one Remarkable NovaScotians, Pottersfield Press (Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia, Canada), 1996.

"Not Guilty": The Trial of Gerald Regan, Stoddart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1999.

Flight 111: The Tragedy of the Swissair Crash, Seal Books (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1999.

Sailors, Slackers, and Blind Pigs: Halifax at War, Doubleday Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2002.

Contributor to The Spirit of Africville, 1992; contributor to periodicals, including the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Maclean's, Canadian Geographic, Financial Post, Canadian Business, Elm Street, Chatelaine, En Route, and National Post.

ADAPTATIONS: Flight 111: The Tragedy of the Swissair Crash, was made into a television movie, Blessed Stranger, 2000.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Reparations, for Harper-Collins.

SIDELIGHTS: Canadian Stephen Kimber came to be an associate professor and head of the King's College School of Journalism without ever earning a degree. He began by teaching a course, then was assigned more, and he has since taught every type of media course except television.

Kimber has written a number of books, including More Than Just Folks: Thirty-one Remarkable Nova Scotians, whose subjects are high achievers born after World War II. The main theme is community, and Kimber's choices have been influential in stabilizing race relations and improving education in Nova Scotia. Edward L. Edmonds wrote in the Canadian Book Review Annual that "Kimber's style is easy, colloquial, and chatty. . . . He has the happy knack of bringing people to life."

"Not Guilty": The Trial of Gerald Regan is Kimber's account of the facts surrounding sexual assault charges made against the former Nova Scotia prime minister, who was accused by a considerable number of women of sexual crimes over a period of decades. Kimber, who had covered Regan's first term in the early 1970s, eventually interviewed his accusers. The 1998 trial ended with a verdict of "not guilty," following which more women stepped forward with their stories. Eventually, the decision was made not to conduct another trial.

Flight 111: The Tragedy of the Swissair Crash is Kimber's history of the Geneva-bound jet that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, one hour after leaving New York on September 2, 1998, killing the 229 people on board. The book reflects the reactions and stories of survivors, recovery workers, medical personnel, and investigators and how the lives of these people were forever changed by the disaster.

Halifax was the Canadian city most impacted by twentieth-century conflicts. It was an important port during World War I and was nearly destroyed in December, 1917, when munitions-laden warships collided in its harbor. During World War II, German U-boats torpedoed ships offshore, and the people were on constant alert. Living spaces were overcrowded, the result of the population doubling during wartime years as servicemen and others necessary to the war effort came to the city. The 20,000 servicemen stationed there were exploited by merchants, bootleggers, landlords, and prostitutes between trips out to sea to fight the enemy. When the end of the war was in sight, the sailors looked forward to a celebration that they felt was theirs. The city fathers felt differently. When Germany surrendered, the town that had restrictive drinking laws and few bars decided to close them altogether, along with movie theaters and transportation from the bases, as plans were made to celebrate with parades, fireworks, and musical events. The young sailors who had been raw recruits with little training, and who hated the city that had treated them so badly, rebelled in a forty-eight-hour riot, which began on May 7, 1945, and continued into May 8, V-E (Victory over Europe) Day. The events leading up to and including the riot are the subject of Kimber's Sailors, Slackers, and Blind Pigs: Halifax at War.

The "slackers" of the title were the civilians who saw an opportunity to join the sailors who looted liquor stores and breweries and destroyed public and private property. "Blind pigs" refers to illegal drinking establishments. "The book is a panorama of the wartime city that unfolds from portraits of a dozen or so people who lived though those turbulent years," wrote Jeanie MacFarlane in Canadian Geographic. "They are a wonderful array of real-life characters: naval brass and newspapermen, a cheerful 'guest child' evacuated from Yorkshire, tense servicemen, waiting lovers, a young woman whose too-brief stint filling a man's job in the wartime workforce proved to be the time of her life."

Kimber drew from diaries, letters, interviews, public records, and newspaper archives in constructing his account. MacFarlane concluded by saying that he "sweeps away the cobwebs to remind us how a mighty effort ended in a shameful shambles." Quill & Quire's J. L. Granatstein remarked that Kimber "has told Halifax's story well. There are few who remember these events, and the shining city of today happily bears almost no comparison with that of 1945."

Kimber wrote a column for the Halifax Daily News from 1985 to 2002. One installment, in which Kimber criticized the editorial policies of the parent company, CanWest Global, was pulled. He wrote that the owners, the Asper family, "consider their papers not only as profit centres and promotional vehicles for their television network but also as private, personal pulpits from which to express their views." The company's response was that the newspaper did not run opinions critical of management. Kimber declined to continue writing for the paper over the dispute.

On his Web site, Kimber says that CanWest Global of Winnipeg "had begun forcing all its journalists, including freelance opinion columnists like me, to toe the company line on issues ranging from the Mid-East conflict to who should be prime minister of Canada." The pulled column was subsequently run in a variety of other publications and online. After ownership of the paper was transferred to the Transcontinental Group of Montreal, Kimber's column returned to a Sunday spot, and he wrote a second that appeared in eight community papers.

The incident led to a number of international interviews, including a segment for National Public Radio in the United States. Kimber has testified on the issue of cross-media ownership and media concentration before the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Washington, and the Australian Senate Committee. Kimber quipped that if he had known "it would turn into a media circus and would give me all these frequent-flyer points, I would have quit a long time ago."