Four years ago, Allan Fotheringham survived a brush with death. A routine colonoscopy at a Toronto hospital went awry and the self-styled Dr. Foth – one of Canada’s most respected journalists – developed a serious infection.

“Somebody pushed the wrong button” during the operation, says Allan. After four months in hospital and a month in a rehab centre, he had shed 60 pounds (27.2 kg) and almost lost his life. He spent another year in rehab before a knee replacement lead to still more rehab. It took him more than a year to return to the tennis court. “A long haul,” says Allan, “I could not have done it without my wife.”

But the man who made the back page of Maclean’s magazine a must-read for 27 years is back, as opinionated and feisty as ever. Not only is he playing tennis again, he has been travelling the country touting his ninth book, The Boy from Nowhere, the memoir of a small-town boy who grew up to hobnob with Canada’s political elite.

Born in 1932 in Hearne, Saskatchewan - population 26 - Allan came west with his parents at age 10. His father died when Allan was two, leaving his mother with four children in the middle of the Great Depression. She took in washing to make ends meet and later taught the violin for 50 cents a lesson. When Allan was still in elementary school, she remarried an army man who brought the family to Chilliwack where he had been posted.

At Chilliwack High School, Allan played basketball and was a star half-mile runner with a scholarship to a university in Washington State and a future in the Olympics. But a knee injury put paid to those plans. He recalls that as captain of the school’s championship basketball team, he wanted to go to Trail to play an Alberta team. The principal forbade this. Never one to bow to authority, Allan and his buddies commandeered a hearse and drove to Trail anyway. Unfortunately, Allan’s knee paid the price.

After graduating from UBC, where he worked on The Ubyssey, he was hired by The Vancouver Sun. He grew famous fulminating about the death throes of W.A.C. Bennett’s Social Credit party (Allan named Phil Gaglardi, Bennett’s minister of highways from 1955-68, “Flying Phil”) and the early days of Pierre Trudeau’s reign in Ottawa.

Trudeau, he recalls, was “a strange person, but the most interesting politician I have ever met.” On the way out of each press conference, Allan says, the P.M. would punch him in the chest. “It didn’t mean he liked my column, but it did mean he had read it.”

As for Brian Mulroney, Allan takes credit for his rise to prime minister. “I invented Mulroney,” he says, with just a touch of regret. Robert Stanfield had resigned as the Conservative Party’s leader as Allan was writing his second column for Maclean’s. “I looked over the field and thought Mulroney would be the man - a bright young lawyer, handsome, fluently bilingual.” He nailed it, of course, but in later years would taunt the Tory P.M. as “the jaw that walks and talks like a man.”

That sobriquet is known among fans as a “Fothism.” There are many more: “Lotusland” for B.C. and especially Victoria; “the Natural Governing Party” for the federal Liberals; “Coma City” for Ottawa; “the Excited States of America” for the U.S. and “the Holy Mother Corporation” for the CBC.

Before he retired, Allan wrote a column for The Globe and Mail. Previously, he’d been posted in the U.K. and Washington, D.C. for Southam newspapers.

In 1998, Allan married his second wife, Anne Libby, an art dealer, and quickly persuaded her to sell her share of the business to her brother, so she could travel with him.

Allan loves to travel, and has visited every country in the world except New Zealand: “From the top to the bottom of Africa, the top to the bottom of South America,” as well as all over Europe, Asia, Australia and everywhere in between. “Why? Because it’s interesting.” Besides, he says, on the lecture circuit, he travels on someone else’s dime.

The experience has made him a patriot. “Everywhere you travel, you compare what you’ve seen with your own country,” says Allan. “And that’s why I know this is the best country in the world.”

The Boy from Nowhere is available at Chapters/Indigo. It is also available at Amazon.ca and Indigo.ca for those who purchase their books online.

FEBRUARY 2012 SENIOR LIVING MAGAZINE VANCOUVER & LOWER MAINLAND