LITTLE CURRENT—The Expositor Office sees a lot of drop-ins during the summer months, people with connections to the newspaper or Manitoulin in general, but one recent visitor had a particularly special bond with The Expositor, even though the soon-to-be 80-year-old had left Little Current at the tender age of four.
Dana Jarnel’s father was the late Borge Jarnel, The Expositor’s publisher from 1939-1947. In fact, it was Mr. Jarnel that created this newspaper’s well-known flag which appears atop Page 1 each week featuring the LaCloche Mountains and the words ‘fishing, yachting, camping, hunting.’ Ms. Jarnel was well aware of her father’s legacy in that regard.
“I remember the paper being closer to the (current) TD Bank,” Ms. Jarnel recalls during a sit-down with Expositor staff last week. Expositor publisher emeritus Rick McCutcheon said she was indeed correct as The Expositor office was once located in a rented space in a building (that no longer exists) to the rear of the now TD Bank.
Ms. Jarnel has Manitoulin in her blood. Her mother grew up in Manitowaning as Lillian Smeltzer; her grandmother was Lydia Hall before she was married. Ms. Jarnel (her married name is Zinser) explained that her mother had been the bookkeeper for Farquhar’s Dairy (the building is at the corner of Manitowaning Road and Campbell Street in Little Current) and the couple met and were married here. She was born in 1943.
In 1947, when Ms. Jarnel was four, the Jarnel family moved to Orillia and Mr. Jarnel, on the advice of the physicians at the famed Mayo Clinic following a spate of illness, was told he should seek a new profession. A lifelong printer by trade (having apprenticed in his native Denmark) it was feared he might have lead poisoning from the lead type and years of inhaling ink had also left its mark. Mr. Jarnel reinvented himself as a real estate agent in Orillia. He passed away the day after his and his wife’s 20th anniversary.
Ms. Jarnel cut her schooling at McMaster University in Hamilton short and graduated a year early. She spent a year at the Ontario College of Education and received her teaching credentials, eventually getting her designation as a French teacher. She would marry and she and her husband would eventually settle in a suburb of Philadelphia and raise a family. Her late husband had completed his PhD at University of Toronto and Queen’s University, “and we moved to Philadelphia because that’s where the job was.” She had taught school at Toronto and Kingston.
Manitoulin was always in the back of her mind and so, almost 76 years later, she came back to discover some of her roots.
Mr. McCutcheon took her on a tour of Little Current, pointing out some of the landmarks that she recalled from her little girl’s memory, including the home of “Mrs. Tindle,” Mary Tindle, mother of the late Joyce Bailey. She has a memory of the death of Rev. Tindle, who was the Anglican priest in Little Current at Holy Trinity Church at the time and of visits to the home of the late Cecil and Martha Stewart, friends of her parents. Another memory was of visits on the main street to Trimble’s Store, and to visits to the Trimble home on Robinson Street (now occupied by Trimble grandson Jake McHarg).
Mr. Jarnel was also an artist and Mr. McCutcheon told Ms. Jarnel that he recalled, during his early days on Manitoulin, ‘Borge Jarnel originals’ hanging on the walls of local homes.
Ms. Jarnel’s visit to Manitoulin came about in a roundabout way. Her late mother (who had remarried and moved to British Columbia) had purchased a print of an A.J. Casson painting of the entrance to Baie Fine in the north end of Georgian Bay. Ms. Jarnel, an only child, has the print now and it hangs in her Philadelphia-area home.
Her travelling companion and old family friend Bruce had decided they would like to see where the picture was painted so Bruce started to make enquiries and discovered they could take a boat trip there from Killarney but it would be an open boat and he thought that wouldn’t be a good idea in case of inclement weather. Further research revealed the North Channel Cruise Line out of Little Current has scheduled sightseeing trips to Baie Fine, in an enclosed boat and when he presented the idea to Ms. Jarnel, she exclaimed, “Little Current! That’s where I’m from!”
Ms. Jarnel has remained a proud Canadian. “At one point, to become a US citizen, I understood I would have to renounce my Canadian citizenship and there was no way I was going to do that.”
Ms. Jarnel and her friend stayed one night at The Shaftesbury Inn in Little Current, another night at Rock Garden Terrace Resort, spent an afternoon exploring the Island before leaving Manitoulin.
In 1939, on The Expositor’s 60th anniversary of publishing, the new proprietor Borge Jarnel had taken on the monumental job of producing a big, glossy commemorative issue of the paper, all prepared and printed at The Expositor’s own printing plant in Little Current. His photo is shown on the top right corner on the front page and Mr. Jarnel was able to successfully ask the founding publisher, W.L. Smith, to write about his pioneering experience starting a newspaper here 60 years before.
Mr. Smith’s entertaining yarn is also on that front page, as is his photo and a picture of printing press used to print the first newspaper in 1879.
The Expositor Office has a small stack of these 1939 special editions and Rick and Alicia McCutcheon were pleased to gift Ms. Jarnel with one of them. (She had never seen it before and was quite moved.)
In fact, the famous Manitoulin Expositor front page flag was designed and created by Mr. Jarnel for that very special issue (it was done as a lino-cut and so all the detail would have to had to be cut into the linoleum in mirror image to go on the printing press to reproduce the right way).
