Before I lived in Estevan, decades and decades ago, I was a Pembrokean. Or a Petawawan. Whatever the term is.
With Dad in the military, we had a four-year posting at CFB Petawawa, which is nestled in the forest a couple of hours northeast of Winnipeg in beautiful Renfrew County.
One of my first sporting memories was when I was five and my dad was taking me to see the old Flying Fathers, a group of Catholic priests who play hockey against locals to raise money for local and national causes. I don't remember much about the atmosphere or the on-ice action at the game. When we came back home, Mom asked if I'd liked it and Dad shrugged his shoulders.
“He just kept staring at the clock.”
In my defence I'd never seen such a huge digital clock counting backwards.
But we wouldn't have known about the event had it not been for the local newspaper providing a small preview for it the day before. We were subscribers to the Pembroke Daily Observer, which is where my first love of reading about the days' events first started. It's a love affair that's lasted longer than anything else in my life other than family.
Postmedia, a collection of hedge fund brokers who bet their money on companies failing, has decided that the Daily Observer and several newspapers like it is too much of a burden for them to carry any longer. By the end of July, newswriting staff, sales staff, editorial, management... all of them will be looking for work in an industry that's taken far too many hits from big conglomerates looking for tax breaks.
As I grew I was able to catch the highlights of World Series games that had been too late for me to stay up to watch. I'd be able to follow the Pembroke Lumberkings Junior A team, and way more important I'd be able to see if our minor baseball team's 30 word summaries would mention me (they never did).
I'm apparently of the last generation that believed in the power of ink, the finality of what was in the newspaper. It was a collection of news, opinion, sports and grocery store deals in one compact deliverable bundle of paper. It is still an ingenious way to deliver and disseminate information if done properly.
Websites on tablets and smart phones are fun and quick and all that but it's ether. Quickly forgettable and forgotten about and buried beneath the next thing every minute. There's something about a printed word you can hold in your hand that is an extension of finality. This is the permanent record; this is the story as we saw it. Is it perfect? No, but is anything?
No wonder as I grew up I appreciated the information presented and eventually learned the way to write.
We in the southeast have seen the loss that communities have suffered with the loss of their newspapers. People in rural areas are often too busy to update official town or minor sports websites or Facebook pages to make their information as up to date as possible, and what they do have is often only thanks to volunteer labour. There will come a time when that also isn't the norm, and how will people know when the
As we celebrated Canada Day by going to a ballgame or playing hoops out at the schools, or going to the fireworks here in town or at Bienfait, remember how many Canada Days past we looked to the newspaper to figure out what was happening. And think of the communities surrounding us that no longer have that luxury.
