Dave Broadfoot on the origins of the Member for Kicking Horse Pass

One of the great privileges in being asked to work on Air Farce: 40 Years of Flying by the Seat of Our Pants was getting to spend a few hours with Dave Broadfoot. As Rich Mercer wrote on the back jacket of Broadfoot’s 2002 autobiography, Old Enough to Say What I Want,”If the comedy business was a railroad, Dave drove the first spike and the last. The rest of us just rode the rails.”
This is the first of two short excerpts from our conversation last May conducted at his home in mid-town Toronto. The 86-year-old Canadian comedy legend explains the origins of one of his most memorable characters: the Member for Kicking Horse Pass. Turns out he’s a combination of three people, one a famous Canadian politician, one a TV evangelist and one Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the Catholic bishop who for a time in the ’50s was more popular than “Mr. Television” Milton Berle on TV.