Pierre Berton, Canada's foremost popular historian, 1998. Thies Bogner/Random House

Pierre Berton, who died in Toronto on November 30, spent his formative years as a journalist on the Pacific Coast. As a result, although he was not a native son - he was born and raised in the Yukon - British Columbians may legitimately claim him as a favourite son.

Berton arrived in Victoria in August, 1932, when his parents moved there from Dawson City, and he spent his teenage years in the provincial capital. "I look back on my years in Victoria with great nostalgia," he wrote in his first book of memoirs, Starting Out. "And yet as the years rolled on, I longed to get out. Vancouver in those days was the mecca. To a teenager, Victoria was a backwater, a dead town of titled Englishmen and former army officers who wore pith helmets and khaki shorts in the summer, of majestic Englishwomen in Victorian hats and voluminous dresses, of private-school youths in flannel blazers and little peaked caps."

Berton attended Oak Bay High School where he was a classic underachiever: bright and completely unmotivated. "The principal had gone out of his way, in front of my classmates, to announce loudly that I would never make anything of myself," he recalled, in the tone of someone who enjoyed getting the last laugh. After graduating from school, he attended the University of Victoria when it was still a two-year college holding classes in Craigdarroch Castle, the old Dunsmuir mansion and then, in 1939, he achieved his ambition of moving to Vancouver.

While at Victoria College, Berton got his start in journalism writing for the student paper, the Microscope, and when he arrived at the University of British Columbia he naturally gravitated to the offices of the Ubyssey (where, on his first visit, he met his future wife, Janet Walker). "I saw myself as Scoop Berton, a hard-drinking, hard-driving reporter with a hat on the back of his head in the band of which was inserted a large white card bearing the magic Open Sesame: PRESS." Opportunity knocked in the shape of a chance to become UBC correspondent for one of the downtown dailies, the News-Herald. He also spent his summers working for the paper and he graduated from university directly into a job in its newsroom.

Within months Berton was installed in the city editor's chair; at 21 years of age, he was the youngest in the country. But he didn't keep the job for long. There was a war to fight and early in 1942 he joined the army. Berton ended up as an instructor at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, but he returned to Vancouver after the war and resumed his newspaper career, this time with the Vancouver Sun. Under editor Hal Straight, the Sun was carrying on a spirited competition with its rival, the Province, and to gain readers it filled its columns with what Berton described as "stunts, eccentricities, wild, imaginative schemes, and a colourful style."

This was the era of headline shorthand and the all-purpose newspaper cliché... People never fell out of windows or off cliffs; they hurtled or plummeted. They didn't jump; they plunged. They didn't flee from a burning building. They simply fled it. And they always fled in night attire.

Prices didn't just go up: they spiralled or soared. When they dropped, they tumbled. Restaurant proprietors were always genial; lifeguards were always bronzed; anybody over fifty was aged, and if he lived alone he was 'an aged recluse'. Anybody in skirts under the age of forty was automatically pretty. Pretty blonde cashiers foiled holdups; pretty divorcees were held as material witnesses; pretty mothers of three awaited word about lost aircraft. Any aircraft, lost or otherwise, that carried a sick person aboard was automatically making a 'mercy flight.'

This was the atmosphere in which Berton honed his skills as a storyteller. It was the era when reporters tried hard to make themselves part of the story, and Berton tried harder than most. His big break came in January, 1947, when the Sun flew him into the South Nahanni River in the Northwest Territories to investigate lurid stories about headless corpses in a tropical Shangri-la. The articles he sent back about the "Headless Valley" landed him on the front pages of newspapers as far away as New York City and earned him a job offer from Maclean's magazine in Toronto. Berton and his wife packed their bags and in May 1947 headed East where he spent the rest of his life, forging a remarkable career as a journalist, broadcaster and the most successful author of books on Canadian history that the country has ever known.