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ONE FEBRUARY NIGHT in the mid-1960s, as Gordon Winch nursed a glass of ginger ale in one of Toronto's decidedly down-market taverns, a man at his table patted his pockets and realized he couldn't pay for the beer a waiter had just placed in front of him. "Leave the beer," he said to the waiter, and, to Winch, "I'll be back." Several minutes later he returned, laid down a dollar for the drink and carried on talking to the United Church minister whose highly publicized beer parlour rounds had earned him the sobriquet "Padre of the Pubs."
"All of a sudden, I got a sense of what he had done," recalls Winch. "He had sold his coat. And I said, 'But you'll be cold when you leave.' He told me, 'That's then, this is now, and now I need to talk.' It was highly emotional. And he did need to talk – he talked himself out." This encounter, and so many others like it during his four years in Toronto's taverns, gave Winch a profound appreciation of people's need simply to be heard and of the balm that listening provides. "The people I met wanted somebody to know who they were and what they thought, and they trusted me to hear them."
This foray into nontraditional ministering set Winch on a new course. To take up his work in the pubs, Winch had left his congregation in Oak Ridges, Ont., north of Toronto, filling a void left by Arthur Packman, a United Church minister from Stirling, Ont., who had served as a chaplain in the British army during the Second World War and who had started visiting bars in 1960. After Packman's death in 1964, the United Church set up a committee to explore the possibility of continuing his work. Winch, who was on this committee, volunteered to step into Packman's role. "Actually, I was frantic to have the job," the minister states.
A GRADUATE OF the University of Toronto with degrees in arts and theology, Winch was ordained as a United Church minister in 1952. For the next 12 years, he served as a traditional minister, first in Saskatchewan and then Ontario. In 1964, he began his work in the beer parlours.
Until Winch took up this work, he had never been in a tavern or even tasted a beer. "The first time I went into a beer parlour I was terrified," admits Winch, who had been raised in a family of teetotallers (his mother was president of the York County branch of the Women's Christian Temperance Union) on a farm near Keswick, Ont. "I went anticipating problems, but there were never any. The major difficulty was leaving, because there was always somebody else who wanted to talk."
Through his work in the pubs, Winch came to realize that there was a serious lack of places for people to turn to when they needed a listening ear. From this realization came several groundbreaking initiatives.
The first was the Distress Centre, which started as a 24-hour helpline in Toronto and now includes community outreach programs. Winch, along with Jim Fisk, rector of Toronto's Church of the Holy Trinity, Bill Kilbourne, one of the founders of York University, and several others, started the Distress Centre in 1967, modelling it on Britain's Samaritans organization, which had been founded in 1953.
The centre logged its first call on November 1, 1967. But for several months the phones were mostly silent, which is all but unimaginable to today's Distress Centre volunteers, who in the Toronto area alone (where there are now three centres) collectively handle about 80,000 calls annually. "The help-line concept was new to Canada," says Winch, "and although there was a great need for it, it took a while for people to get to know and trust it."
As executive director of the Distress Centre from 1967 until his retirement in 1993, Winch nurtured the style of listening he calls "befriending."
"Callers don't want their problems taken away from them," he explains. "The fundamental element of befriending is being emotionally supportive, saying 'I know this hurts' without agreeing with, or justifying, behaviour."
While initial funding for the Distress Centre came from the Anglican and United Churches, Winch was adamant that it should have no "church-based theology, other than basic caring about people."
Winch went on to help start Distress Centres in other regions of Ontario (today, there are more than 20 in the province). He also helped found the Ontario Association of Telephone Distress Centres (now known as Distress Centres Ontario), which he describes as "a networking organization that allows member centres to discuss issues and learn from one another."
In 1979, Winch was instrumental in establishing a program that was to have a huge impact on suicide prevention. While at a conference in Jerusalem, he heard about a program for people recognized to be at great risk of attempting suicide: the family members and friends of people who had taken their own lives. Back in Toronto, he formed a committee made up of several staff members from the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry and the Distress Centre to establish what was to become the Survivor Support Program, which functions as an adjunct of the Distress Centre. Karen Letofsky, one of the few people in Canada with experience in grief counselling at the time, was hired as executive director of the new organization. (After Winch retired, Letofsky also became executive director of the original Distress Centre.)
Since its inception, the Survivor Support Program has counselled more than 10,000 people and has helped lessen the stigma surrounding suicide. In 1998, the Council on Suicide Prevention bestowed the Douglas Lear Memorial Citation on Winch in recognition of his outstanding dedication and leadership in the area of suicide prevention. Says Winch: "Helping to establish the Survivor Support Program was one of the most rewarding things I did while I was with the Distress Centre."
In 1985, Winch and his Distress Centre colleagues also turned their attention to helping abused women, joining forces with the Community Information Centre of Toronto and a group of women's shelters to set up the Assaulted Women's Helpline. "My prediction was that the helpline wouldn't get used because it was specific to only one problem and only half the population," comments Winch. "I was wrong. The first year, it had 2,500 calls. Last year, it had 25,000."
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