This Week In History, 1961: The Sun has fun with the Big Switch

July 5 1961. Penny Wise (Evelyn Caldwell), reports from the B.C. Lions' training camp at Courtenay. Photo by Brian Kent /Vancouver Sun

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On July 4, 1961, Vancouver Sun consumer columnist Penny Wise lost a bet to sports columnist Dick Beddoes in a competition to raise funds to send aid workers to Ghana.

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Although Wise initially led in fundraising, Beddoes secured the win the way such matters were often decided back then — with a midnight handshake between men and the delivery of a plain brown envelope from someone who believed a male should win.

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To anyone who knew Wise, whose real name was Evelyn Caldwell, the loss in this particular battle of the sexes was an upset.

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Caldwell was a fierce competitor in a man’s world, both in and outside the newsroom. Women who wrote for newspapers at that time were often consigned to covering “soft news” — such as fashion, food, and how to support one’s husband by running a tight ship at home.

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As the loser, Caldwell had to write Beddoes’ sports column for three days. Beddoes agreed to cover her shopping column. While Beddoes mulled over produce at the local grocery store, Caldwell visited the B.C. Lions’ training camp in Courtenay, where she proceeded to do what she did best: take the piss out of any self-importance her male counterparts may have had.

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The players wore “panty-girdles, two-way stretch and falsies,” she wrote, with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

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July 5 1961. The Vancouver Sun advertises the “Big Switch” when Penny Wise and Dick Beddoes switched writing beats for three days. Photo by Vancouver Sun

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Going along with the joke to preserve a hard-won career was part of the game for women in male-dominated professions of the era. Caldwell knew how to play it for laughs … and when something was worth fighting for.

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As a cub reporter in the 1930s at the Vancouver News-Herald making $7.50 a week, she chased city editor Jack Scott into the men’s washroom after he neglected to put her byline on a front-page story. With a pot of glue in her hand, Caldwell dragged a chair and climbed over the cubicle door to dump the glue on his head.

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She earned her byline.

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Still, when granted a consumer affairs column with The Vancouver Sun in 1945, her editor insisted she take on a sort of practical mom persona: Penny Wise.

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“He told me, ‘We’re going to call you Penny Wise.’ I didn’t know what the devil he was talking about,” she said.

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The cutesy name stuck, but Wise made the most of her platform. “When I started to write about shopping, I was nice to everybody. Then I decided that was useless. I began to look for what was wrong in stores, how customers were being cheated. And that’s the way I did it until the day I died.”

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In between advising readers on where to get the best deal on bok choy or the price of cake mix, she formed a consumer advocacy group that fought for change in Ottawa, leading a successful campaign to get margarine — then a highly-regulated product — back on tables in B.C.

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Caldwell found clever ways to land better assignments by pitching her editors on free trips that would take her closer to international conflict zones.

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She ended up covering the Berlin Airlift in the late 1940s, and spent six weeks on the Korean frontlines, were she quipped that she “prayed fervently for a set of bulletproof undies.“