About Me

There's a rumour about journalists that no matter how long they're retired, how old they are or how fading their memory, they just can't stop writing. Well, I'm a retired journalist who just can't stop writing. Having just tipped over the edge into my 70s and seven years into a chosen retirement, those 50 years I've spent in the media can't be drained from the blood stream.

My career began as a late teenager in 1965 at the Nelson Daily News where, somehow, I found it quite easy to read what is called "hot type" upside down. And easy to have the typesetter lift off a word here or there to make stories fit into the holes where they had to go.

It was an incredibly fun five years, both professionally and personally (to find out more about that you'll have to read my book).

This was a typical game-day evening. I would take in the Nelson Maple Leafs hockey game where, never having owned a camera, I had to take game action pictures as well as following the game. Then it was run (and I mean run) several blocks to the newspaper office. Dash upstairs to the photo dark room, remove the film from the camera, wind it onto a metal canister and put it into a vat of developing fluid (trying doing that in a pitch-black room).

Run down to the my desk in the newsroom to write the headline and begin writing my story.  Hand the headline to Doris, our copy editor, run back upstairs to move the film from the developer to the fixer. Back to my desk to continue writing the story, giving the first part to Doris to edit. Upstairs to look at the negatives, pick out one or two pictures to use in the paper, do a couple of quick prints, throw them into the print fixer and back to writing. Do the picture cutlines and finish my story. And this is all on an old Remington typewriter, not some fancy computer. Hand it all to Doris. Upstairs to get the prints and run them into the backshop for them to do their magic.

Take a deep breath and begin the upside-down reading and editing. All of this done usually in less than an hour to meet the paper's deadline.

So dealing with the next five decades of changing technology that made the job easier and easier, was about as tough as enjoying that first beer after game nights in Nelson.

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