John McCallum was a professor of newspaper journalism at Ryerson University until he retired in 1989. He was responsible for overseeing the production of the student paper The Ryersonian. He attended the London School of Journalism after his degree at McGill University. His career as a journalist began in England at the Wolverhampton Chronicle. After working on both regional and national daily papers in England, he returned to Canada where he served two years on CBC Television News before becoming one of the four founding scriptwriters on the CBC children's show, Razzle Dazzle. He launched, published and edited the Independent Businessman and in 1981 he started a feminist newspaper, Breakthrough for Women. In 1982, UNESCO sent him to China to help improve the standards of English-language journalism at Xinhua, China's national news agency, where he worked during a sabbatical year from Ryerson. Following his retirement from Ryerson, he returned to China and worked on all of the English- language media in Beijing, including China Daily, Beijing Television, Foreign Languages Press and others. He fell in love with China and lived there for 11 years. He also wrote and published a book about his experiences there, titled Where Do You Park Your Elephants Now? McCallum spent the final years of his life in a veterans’ long-term-care facility at Sunnybrook Hospital.