Evangelist to Editor
In its lusty heyday, the Toronto Star, Canada's biggest paper, once hired an entire railroad train to get its men to a story, invariably called liquor "booze," and interviewed heiresses and potentates around the globe. Last week Star readers might have wondered whether they were in for a new era of eccentric journalism: as new boss of the Star's news-gathering staff, the paper named Dr. (of Divinity) Charles B. Templeton, 44, who once cut a wide swath in Canada and the U.S. as a boy-wonder evangelist.
The Sawdust Trail. A Toronto boy, Templeton set pole-vaulting and track records as a schoolboy athlete, quit high school to take art lessons and play football for Toronto's Balmy Beach. At 20 he was a sports cartoonist for the Globe and Mail and syndicated in 18 papers when, as he later testified, "in the midst of my success I saw the futility of my life." That led Templeton to the further discovery that he had an electric touch with religious audiences, and he went off to spend three years on the sawdust trail as an itinerant preacher for the fundamentalist Church of the Nazarene. In California he met and married a Hollywood starlet named Constance Orozco.
In 1941 Templeton took his bride on a visit home to Toronto, noticed an unused church building on Avenue Road for rent, leased it, and within six months had a going congregation of 1,000. By 1946 he felt the call to evangelism again and led a "Youth for Christ" crusade through Europe with Billy Graham. His next stop was Princeton Theological Seminary; after three years he left the seminary to be ordained a Presbyterian minister. "He so evidently cares about people," said one of his teachers, "that every last man in an audience of 6,000 or 8,000 feels Templeton is speaking directly to him." He toured the U.S. as the first fulltime evangelist of the National Council of Churches, then as secretary for evangelism of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.; along the way he acquired an honorary D.D. from Lafayette College, Pa.
"I Questioned . . ." In 1956 Templeton overturned his life: he left both the ministry and his wife. "I questioned my own certitude about Christianity," he explained. When he came out of retreat, he had confirmed his decision to leave the ministry and went into television. Among Templeton's fans was Star Editor-in-Chief Beland Honderich, who hired him to edit the Star's news-background page.
Promoted to features editor, Templeton brightened the Star's travel, gardening and real estate sections—and even spruced up the church page. He still goes to church himself, but irregularly. He also has a new wife: CBC Thrush Sylvia Murphy, a divorcee whom he married 19 months ago. As news boss, ex-Evangelist Templeton has set a high goal for the Star: "We are not after sensation. We want to make the Star the most responsible and brightest newspaper in Canada."