“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner

Op-Ed Commentary

As newspapers continue to close their doors – 250 in Canada the past decade and 2,500 in the US since 2005 – it’s time for a little walk down memory lane. A nostalgic, but sometimes-depressing walk.

Back in the early 1960s I was a paper boy, the kind of a job you’d expect a teenager to have in those halcyon days. I delivered the Trail Daily Times, a six day-a-week broadsheet and occasionally I’d deliver the one day-a-week Toronto Star Weekly which was sold all over Canada.

The Star was a class act. Big broadsheet. Colourful articles with a national focus and big colour pictures which you seldom saw in newsprint in those days. Certainly not in the small-town Trail Times. As students, we’d often cut the Stars’ pics out of the paper and use them in our school reports. They were that good.

Well, time and technology have come a long way from those innocent days in the 1960s and I’d completely forgotten about the Star Weekly when I stumbled into Pages Book Emporium on Baker Street a few days ago and there on the rack was about a dozen copies of Star Weekly from 1969 all neatly wrapped in sealed plastic envelopes in mint condition for sale. Well, some temptations in life are not meant to be resisted and I bought one and no doubt I’ll buy a few more the next time I visit Pages.

Talk about a walk down memory lane!

First the comics: Li’l Abner, Little Orphan Annie, Mandrake the Magician, Terry and the Pirates, Prince Valiant, Dick Tracy, and of course, Blondie and Dagwood, not to mention, Believe It or Not. Almost all of them in glorious colour, full size and no advertising. My eyes were close to burning when I read them again and as far as I’m concerned you can have your small screens and super-heroes. You don’t know what a good comic is.

After devouring the comics, I dove into the Match 29, 1969 Star Weekly articles. One about a North Bay, Ontario barber who was cutting hair for a dollar a head to protest the trend to long hair. How times have changed.

Another article was about the first female “postwoman” in Canada. She was hired to walk a temporary route in Victoria but “let go” when all-male letter carrier unions protested all across Canada. Oh, haven’t we come a long way!

Mind you, there was another article, and a few salacious pictures of women’s skirts becoming shorter and shorter. No male protests reported then. And buildings in Canada were reaching for the sky in the 1960s with the Toronto Dominion Centre topping 56 storeys. Big then, but today you’d probably have trouble finding it with a sea of skyscrapers as high as 95 storeys in Hog Town and the CN Tower topping them all.

The Star Weekly was comprehensive in its coverage, too, with a busy executive explaining why he needed a “quiet scotch” after putting in 16-hour days for his company.

Another article focused on a group of downtown hipsters who opened an underground “soul food” restaurant, the first in Canada. In other pieces a janitor explained his innovative ways of deterring vandals from splashing graffiti on apartment walls and a pool shark explained how he “hustled” in dingy Toronto pool halls to make a living.

But the Star Weekly by no means catered solely to urbanized Torontonians and small-town Ontarians who’d never seen Yonge Street.

One article featured an aboriginal grandmother who managed an Okanagan cattle ranch close to the American border. As well as running 250 head of cattle, she “broke” wild horses, fought off rustlers and wrote poetry in her “spare” time.

And on the editorial page there was a letter to the editor from a woman who explained why she “stood up” for hippies. Another cited the running battle in education between teachers who believed in “rigid discipline” and those who supported the new wave of “permissiveness” in the classrooms.

Reading this 54-year-old page from the past made me realize that society’s issues today are endless and will probably remain that way. But there was a time when society moved at a slower pace and there were newspapers like the Star Weekly that kept things in perspective.

Today I feel we’ve lost that and everything is moving at warp speed and hyper-energized by the forces of the Internet and social media. Newspapers, as we once knew them, seem to be destined for the ‘dust bin of history.’ Where will that lead us? I don’t know, but I fear it will be to a polarized place that we’ll soon regret.

It has been said that the role of the media is to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” That’s a critical role in any society as bits and bytes increasingly take over from ink and newsprint. I’m not saying this is wrong. But I earnestly hope that newspapers don’t completely disappear. They did a great job in the past and some still do it now.

Take all the newspapers away and it will be a lesser world. You can count on that. Perish the day.

– Gerry Warner is a retired “print on paper” journalist and doesn’t regret it.

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