It was 50 years ago this week, the first issue in October 1974, when Julia and I took over the reins of The Expositor as resident publishers.
It’s an easy date to remember because that week’s lead story and front-page photo was the first crossing from Tobermory to South Baymouth of the brand-new Chi Cheemaun ferry that this season is celebrating a half-century in service.
We had been here before, of course, when I worked at the paper as editor/general manager, a job that meant writing the news, selling the ads, laying out the paper, hiring staff, dealing with the post office, addressing the papers and a few more tasks. A great learning opportunity for a 22-year-old! Julia had come here after responding to an ad in the paper for a teacher whose job it would be to establish a kindergarten for the old Little Current Elementary School Board. (We’d met in Grade 13.)
That fall of 1967, a newly minted teacher, she’d been teaching Grade 2 class at a Toronto school where she had 35 pupils, no teacher’s aide and at least three of the children spoke no English!
I’d been sending her help wanted notices for teachers at Island schools and she liked the idea of starting something from scratch, so the Little Current one was the one she applied for and received a job offer. She gave her notice to the Toronto School Board effective January 1, 1968 and moved here and began setting up the new program. Another great learning opportunity.
Julia had always planned on going to university so, after three years’ teaching, she applied to Lakehead University for the Bachelor of Science Nursing (BScN) program and off she went in the fall of 1969.
The Expositor, then owned by four Sudbury businesspeople, came up for sale in early 1970. I was asked if I was interested in buying it, I said I certainly was and managed to get a bank loan unsecured by anything other than the paper’s last couple of financial statements and suddenly I was a newspaper proprietor.
The problem was, I was here in mid-Canada and Julia was in the Northwest of the province in Thunder Bay.
At the end of her first year of the four-year program, I took some summer holidays and went to Thunder Bay to look for a job there, leaving resumes and applications at both daily newspapers.
A couple of weeks later, I had a job offer from the Fort William Times Journal, which I accepted.
So now, who was going to manage The Expositor, with all of those myriad tasks?
John Low, a university friend, was looking for an employment change so I asked him to come and look at this job. He came and accepted the challenge immediately. John became interested in environmental issues while he was here, an interest that led to post-graduate work in the environment and the law, a career that took him as far afield as Papua, New Guinea and finally back to Ontario where he worked for many years as a self-employed environmental consultant.
When John left to begin the education in his field that would launch his career, we brought Mike Atkins aboard. Mike quickly learned the newspaper business while he was here on Manitoulin and when the opportunity came for him to take over the faltering Sudbury Life newspaper, he jumped at the chance, re-branding it as Northern Life and then also launching Northern Ontario Business, both of which he published for nearly 50 years.
The third person we brought aboard, when Mike left for Sudbury, was Ian Gibb who had been working at the paper as a reporter. Ian met his wife Mary here (she was teaching at the new Manitoulin Secondary School) and when he left, he also returned to university, completing a second degree, this one in mathematics, with a view to a career as an actuary. This was also a good move as Ian had a long career with the federal government and had many international experiences.
We were in Thunder Bay during these busy years, connecting with John, Mike and Ian a few times every week by telephone.
We were married during that time and our son Duff was born in Thunder Bay (conveniently during the summer between Julia’s third and fourth years at university!)
Then came 1974: Julia graduated from Lakehead and wrote her Registered Nurse exam.
What were we going to do then?
Well, of course, we had this newspaper on Manitoulin Island, we’d both enjoyed our time here and so it was then that we became the resident publisher of The Manitoulin Expositor a half-century ago this week.
How time, as they say, flies!
Ours, like everyone’s lives, is marked by milestones. Our daughter Alicia was born and this necessitated enlarging the home we’d bought in 1977 (and where we still live) a year after her birth.
The paper purchased and squeezed into the former Musil shoe repair shop on Little Current’s front street. This worked out well because, while we were still in Thunder Bay, the lone vacant lot in the downtown area of Little Current came on the market and the paper bought it (thanks again to the bank!), thinking of one-day building an office there. Coincidentally, that was right beside the Musil building so we were able to expand across the width of that property in 1985 with a brick facade to tie it all together.
There’s another Expositor office milestone coming up: in the fall of 1974, we advertised in the paper for someone to help every week with addressing, bundling and getting the papers into mailbags for postal delivery.
A couple brand-new to Manitoulin, Kerrene and Chris Tilson, applied.
We quickly learned that Kerrene was familiar with the newspaper industry as she had worked for several years at the Toronto Star as a classified ad salesperson. She’s been working at The Expositor ever since so in a little more than month, Kerrene will have been at the paper for a half century as well. People also know her for her work in the community (most recently) organizing Café in the Woods musical events at the ski chalet in Honora Bay and for persevering to found the busy community fitness centre in Little Current, located in the basement level of the Welcome Centre by the swing bridge.
Our daughter Alicia took over the publisher’s role at the paper about six years ago and she, as with her parents, has been blessed with exceptional staff in every department over these five decades. I’m not going to name names because so many people have cycled through The Expositor and who have left their very positive marks and because I don’t want to leave anyone out.
I will, however, name Peter Carter who was our editor from 1981 through 1983 and who has a piece in this week’s edition.
While Peter was editor, The Expositor was nominated for… and won… the Michener Award for Meritorious Public Service Journalism.
hat was in 1982, 42 years ago. That is Canada’s equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize in the US and this newspaper was the first community newspaper to win it for reporting on the unpleasant topic of a rash of Manitoulin suicides and suicide attempts. This led to a class taught by Mary Nelder, then a teacher at Central Manitoulin Public School, sending letters of concern to the paper to be published and then Ms. Nelder was instrumental in linking Manitoulin to a Sudbury-based helpline where people could call if they were depressed and, in some instances, suicidal.
There were verified examples of the help line discussions intervening with and preventing suicides and it was this series of events, all happening within a 12-month period, that led the late Fred Soplet, then director of education for the old Manitoulin School Board, to nominate the paper for the Michener Award.
The conditions of the award are that a news media must bring something to the public’s attention that sparks a response and a solution to the issue. The Expositor qualified that year, was named one of five finalists, we were invited to a ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa (the Governor General’s residence) where the placements were announced. We were just honoured to be in that company, with no thought at all of winning the award, but we did.
It actually took, for me, several years to realize how significant that moment had been because, the next day, we were all back at work putting out that week’s paper.
Peter is back in the paper this week because last Thursday, there was a book launch in Toronto for a book titled ‘Journalism for the Public Good: The Michener Awards at 50’.
The author is veteran journalist and professor emerita of journalism Kim Kierans. She is also a Senior Fellow at Massey College at the University of Toronto and Julia and I were at Massey College where the launch was held.
Ms. Kierans, who has been a Michener judge and chair of the judging committee, felt strongly that the good journalism, making Canda a better place as represented by the winners and finalists of the fist 50 years of Michener Awards (it was stablished by then-Governor General Roland Michener in 1971,) should be recorded as examples for future reporters and for the Canadian community. Ms. Kierans interviewed both Peter and myself about two years ago, part of a process that took her over half a decade to compile, write and publish the book.
We asked Peter to cover the book launch and he and his wife Helena as well as Julia and I, attended it. Interestingly, we four (Helena was at that time Peter’s girlfriend, soon to become his fiancée) attended the Rideau Hall banquet and presentation over 40 years ago, presided over by then-Govenor General Ed Schreyer, (although retired Governor General Roland Michener was in attendance.)
Last Thursday’s event was a pleasant one and in her opening remarks, author Kim Kierans’ first reference was the The Expositor and Peter and and I.
Peter modestly leaves this out of his report, as he does any mention of his role in this newspaper’s nomination and win. But he shouldn’t have as it was his stories that received public attention. And it was Peter who accepted the award on behalf of the paper and ad-libbed his acceptance speech.
So here we are, 50 years as resident publishers with another generation at the helm.
Julia remarked that, when we came back in October of 1974, someone (she thinks it was the late Jack Ashley, Mary Nelder’s dad and at that time the administrator of the Manitoulin Centennial Manor) commented, “I knew you’d be back.”
From Rick McCutcheon
Long-time publisher of The Manitoulin Expositor
