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PAGE FOUR ONTARIO TODAY Four-Star Challenge Two controversial columnists, a gigging beauty and an announcer combine talents BY WILLIAM DRYLIE RONT Page Challenge, the television panel show that's been panned and praised for some years now, is really four success stories in one. Five, if you count the originator of the show, John Aylesworth, who has gone on to big television writing jobs in the United States. But the four people who took Aylesworth's idea and made it work are Fred Davis, the moderator, and three permanent panelists," Gordon Sinclair, Toby Robins and Pierre Ber- ton. Only two of these can claim to be all- time Challengers and they're Sinclair and Toby Robins. Fred Davis came in after Win Barron and Alex Barris (who started out as a panelist) icouldn't hold the moderator's job. Davis proved to be a natural. Berton filled in the Barris seat on the panel and stayed. Top dog on Front Page Challenge is still Gordon Sinclair, although Berton is the Big- dome of the trio. Berton may probe and dig as much as he likes but he can never manage to overshadow Sinclair, who is Peck's Bad Boy even now although he's not as protective as he has been in 38-year newspaper, radio and TV career. He started out as a reporter on The Toronto Star in 1922, was fired a number of times he admits, travelled the world three times, wrote three books and finally ended up as a news broadcaster on Toronto's CFRB. There was a time when Sinclair wrote the radio column for The Star and when television came in he chose to ignore it. He had to be forced to write about television and gradually radio dropped out of his column. At first he was a harsh critic of CBC-TV, but today he's a mild-mannered reviewer when it comes to the CBC. He explains it this way: "I used to hammer away at them but that was before I met the actors and performers. They're only people trying their best to get ahead and now that I know them I don't want to hurt them." Sinclair is known as Canada's wealthiest -newspaper man and is the target of more jealous barbs than anyone in the business. But some of the needles hit home because Sinclair is not known as Canada's most accurate. re- porter and his radio comments on an item, which he may have wrong in the first place, irritate and sometimes enrage his listeners. But they seldom turn him off. He wears loud but expensive clothes, a gim- mick he picked up from Gregory Clark, and Sinclair admits he deliberately aped Gregory to make people notice him. Although he's nudging sixty he hasn't indica- ted yet that he plans to retire. He works a ~ full day on news, mazazine and newspaper writ- ing, does four broadcasts a day, two on news, one on personalities and another on show- business. Pierre Berton is a fellow columnist of Sin- clair. He stands six feet, three inches, weighs 220 pounds and is 39. In that time he's become one of the biggest writing names in Canada. He raps out books as quickly as he produces a half dozen columns, columns which range in subjects from breakfast recipes to political scandals. He was once editor of Maclean's mag- azine and youngest city editor in Canada at the now defunct Vancouver News Herald. Like Sinclair, he is envied by other news- papermen because of his iron-bound contract with The Star which allows him more freedom CONTINUED ON PAGE 8 SATURDAY, MAY Challenger stands behind panel, guest Alex Barris. Sinclair (top) is still Peck's Bad Boy; Berton admits he's a ham; and Fred Davis (bottom) got stardom as a moderator.