Remembering Joe Flaherty

Starting in my second year of high school, I was the president of the Computer Club. In the computer room at WDHS, right opposite the main office, there was a nascent computer lab, overseen by Mr. Shields, a chemistry teacher by day, but shepherd of the computers extracurricularly (and, later, when there was actually a computer course, formally). The lab had a fleet of Commodore PET 4032 computers, networked together with a (very fragile) MUPET system.

You could play Space Invaders on the PET, which seemed amazing. When I first started high school, before the lab was created, there was just a single PET in a second floor classroom. Some of the older kids had figured out a way to jimmy the door to that classroom in the early morning hours, after our buses arrived but before the teachers did, and they allowed grade niners to watch them play (but never to play ourselves).

Simon Coles was the vice-president of the Computer Club with me. I can’t recall much of what our activities were (I do recall that we brought in David Williams from the Toronto PET Users Group once to talk about machine language programming). What I do recall are the morning announcements that Simon and I made, using our cassette recorders at home.

Our inspiration for a lot of the announcements — we thought of them more as commercials — was this sketch from SCTV, featuring Joe Flaherty and John Candy.

Flaherty played Guy Lafleur, from the Montreal Canadians, and Candy played Darryl Sittler, from the rival Toronto Maple Leafs:

Flaherty: I’m Guy Lafleur, and I use a Darryl Sittler hockey stick.

Candy: I use a Darryl Sittler hockey stick.

Producer: CUT!!

Don’t ask me how, but we built those lines into a lot of Computer Club morning announcements, always finishing with the tag line:

The Computer Club… where the future is TODAY!

(Delivered in a stentorian voice).

That commercial—and SCTV in general—were the epitome of what Simon and I thought was funny back in the early 1980s. Our attachment to their schtick was powerful enough that we had almost no awareness of the social risks associated with both being officers of the Computer Club and making goofball announcements was (or maybe we owned our nerdy and figured we had nothing to lose)?

Our productions increased in complexity, characters, and length over the years: we’d often rush into the office and hand cassette tapes to Mr. Japp, the vice-principal, seconds before “airtime,” and he generously abided way, way more than he needed to from us. Eventually, if memory serves, we went too far: too much complexity, too many characters, 3 or 4 minutes long. He didn’t cut us off, but we were gentle instructed to rein things in.

I can’t think about high school without thinking of Flaherty, and how influenced I was by the characters he created, and the brave buffoonery he engaged in publicly.

Joe died on April 1, 2024 — could he have planned the date better if he tried? — and he will be missed.