It was the spring of 2021, and I was inside Moses Znaimer’s office at the ZoomerPlex in Liberty Village for the first time, both of us wearing masks, him seated at his desk and me pulled back as far into the room as the space allowed.
Getting to that office meant walking past a small shrine to the man himself: photos and press clippings across the decades, a preview of the vintage radios and televisions in his own museum elsewhere in the building, and a framed poster of him sitting in a bathtub full of bubbles. His office had folders and papers everywhere, shelves of magazines and books, a bank of monitors on one wall I assumed let him keep an eye on the news and channels he owned, and a sign for CARP, the national seniors’ advocacy organization he also ran.
I had never met Moses before that day, and in all my years running blogTO, our paths had never crossed. And now here I was, sitting a careful distance from a man who had done as much as anyone to shape what Canadian television looked and sounded like.
I researched Moses before our first meeting. He grew up in the same Montreal neighbourhood as my father, on the same street, and was born in 1942, on a train passing through Tajikistan during the war, roughly two years younger than my dad. We’d also graduated from the same university, McGill, 34 years apart.