End of an era for Thompson, Manitoba as Nickel Belt News to cease publication April 22

By now it is no big surprise to read or hear that a newspaper is ceasing publication. That’s been old news now for a very long time. Still, when a newspaper’s birth very much mirrored the birth of a community, I think it is worth noting before it (the newspaper) passes into history forever.

Both W.H. “Duke” DeCoursey’s Thompson Citizen, first published on Friday, June 3, 1960, and Grant and Joan Wright’s Nickel Belt News, which came off the press for the first time less than a year later on March 24, 1961, have played an important, indeed vital, role, in chronicling Thompson for more than 60 years.

DeCoursey, who was based in Dauphin in 1960, through his Parkview Publishing Limited, formed in May 1960, first produced the Thompson Citizen from there. Grant Wright himself described DeCoursey as “the pioneer publisher in Thompson.” DeCoursey would become proprietor of the Northlander, Thompson’s first confectionary store, and located both the candy and newspaper operations originally in the basement of the Strand Theatre building.  Wright’s Nickel Belt News was first published out of The Northern Mail in The Pas, and later on Kelsey Bay here in Thompson, underneath what is now the front entrance of the City Centre Mall.

The two families merged ownership of their weeklies in 1967 as the Precambrian Press Ltd., with the Thompson Citizen becoming a paid circulation daily for a time, while the Nickel Belt News remained weekly but became free distribution. DeCoursey served as the first editor of the combined publications. The papers moved to their current Commercial Place home in 1970. DeCoursey had retired in 1969, selling his interest in the business to Joan Wright, who repaid him within 20 years, and moved to British Columbia.

Glacier Media Inc. of Vancouver bought both publications from the Wright family in January 2007.

The Northern Manitoba newspaper pioneering DeCoursey and Wright families had American roots. Duke DeCoursey was born in Montana. Grant Wright was born Flin Flon to Molly and Orson Wright, who were lawyers. Orson Wright was Crown Attorney for the Northern region. He was born in Dayton, Ohio. As well as serving as Crown Attorney, he was a prominent local Liberal Party member, who also served as mayor of Flin Flon between 1941 and 1943, and became a district coroner in 1942.

Grant Wright attended Brandon College and the University of Winnipeg where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He then moved to Columbia, Missouri to study journalism at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, founded in 1908, and one of the oldest and best formal journalism schools in the world. But Wright dropped out a few credits short of obtaining his degree, and came home to Manitoba to marry his childhood sweetheart, Joan Brownell. After their marriage, the couple moved to The Pas, where Grant became editor of The Pas Herald. After a year, they moved to Thompson in 1961 to make their millions on the “three-year plan,” like so many other Northerners who have stayed and raised their families in the North.

As a teenager, Grant, who died in 2002, contracted polio. He wore braces and used crutches for the rest of his life, remaining fiercely independent – perhaps even cantankerous at times – some might say. He was a proud Rotarian.

There were several key dates in Thompson’s early history: Borehole 11962 – the so-called “Discovery Hole” at Cook Lake, a diamond drill exploration hole – was collared Feb. 5, 1956 and assayed positive for nickel. The City of Thompson and the main orebody of Inco’s Manitoba operations (now owned by Vale) were named after John Fairfield Thompson, the chairman of INCO when Borehole 11962 was collared and assayed. There’s also the Dec. 3, 1956 signing of the founding 33-page typewritten double-spaced agreement creating Thompson between the Province of Manitoba’s F.C. Bell, minister of mines and natural resources, and International Nickel Company of Canada Limited’s Ralph Parker, vice-president and general manager, and secretary William F. Kennedy. And there was Manitoba Liberal-Progressive Premier Douglas Campbell driving the last spike in the Canadian National Railway (CNR) 30-mile branch line from Sipiwesk to Thompson Oct. 20, 1957.

Thompson, originally a townsite within the newly-created 975-square-mile Local Government District (LGD) of Mystery Lake, within the Dauphin Judicial District, from 1956 to 1966, became a town on Jan. 3, 1967 and a city just 3 years later on July 7, 1970.

The Nickel Belt News came into existence on March 24, 1961 – one day before Manitoba Progressive Conservative Premier Duff Roblin “cut the nickel ribbon to officially open the town” of 3,800 residents, Wright wrote a few days later on March 29, 1961 in only the second edition of our sister paper. Roblin and a who’s who of government and mining crème de la crèmes – opened the $185-million smelter and refinery, the world’s first fully integrated nickel operation and second in size in the “free world” only to Inco’s Sudbury operations. Coincidence? Hardly. Without the smelter and refinery and its 1,800 employees on that long ago day in 1961, there would likely never have been a Nickel Belt News – ditto for a lot of other businesses that would arrive in Thompson in the years to follow.

The newspaper, the City of Thompson, many businesses, and mining in Northern Manitoba have all fallen to various degrees on hard times in recent years. In 2007, nickel briefly sold on the London Metal Exchange (LME) that May for a then record high of $25.51 per pound. And in November 2007, Vale announced a $750-million expansion of its mining, milling, smelting and refining operations here, aimed at boosting Thompson production by about 36 percent over the coming decade. The cost of the refinery modernization project over five years was estimated to be about $116 million.

The Thompson Citizen had 11 full-time staff in the Summer of 2007.

Rather than expanding smelting and refining operations here, Vale would wind up closing both the smelter and refinery in 2018.

The Thompson Citizen now has three full-time staff. When the Nickel Belt News ceases publication April 22, the free-circulation Thompson Citizen will move from its Wednesday publication day to the Nickel Belt News‘ old publication day of Friday. The two papers have been publishing a merged edition on Wednesdays since 2020.

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Farewell, Keith MacDonald: A proud New Brunswicker, but also a proud Thompsonite, who helped make us a better community to live and work in

Keith MacDonald died a couple of days ago. That’s a big loss for his family and friends, of course, and my condolences to them, but it is also a very big loss for all of us here in the wider Thompson community, as Keith was tireless in both his work and many volunteer efforts in helping to make Thompson, Manitoba a better place to live. And he did it in a sort of low-key way with considerable humility.

I moved to Thompson in July 2007, a couple of years after Keith had arrived, and my first memories of him were serving as general manager of both the Burntwood Hotel and Thompson Inn (TI) for Winnipeg’s Manfred Boehm, who owns both hotel properties. These were nickel-fueled economic boom years for Thompson, and planned new hotels were on the drawing board. By 2010, Keith was also president of the Thompson Chamber of Commerce, and combined with his hotel management experience (which dated to back home in Moncton, New Brunswick and working as a young man for Keddy’s Motor Inns, and later for Inns of Banff), he shared valuable on-the-record insights with me about market dynamics at a time when Thompson would get 150 new hotel rooms and two brand-new hotels between 2011 and 2013.

Back in 2010, in addition to the Burntwood Hotel and Thompson Inn, guests could find accommodation at the Days Inn, Meridian Hotel, Country Inn and Suites (now known as Thompson’s Best Value Inn & Suites), Interior Inn, Mystery Lake Motor Hotel and Northern Inn & Steak House. The Interior Inn, which had burned down while under construction in October 1967, but was rebuilt, burned down again on New Year’s Day 2018, but is being rebuilt again. Choice Hotels’ 70-room Suburban Extended Stay Hotel, now known as the Quality Inn & Suites Thompson, opened in May 2011, followed by the 80-room Best Western Hotel, less than a year later in April 2012.

Another memory I have of Keith from that period is in his role as Thompson Chamber of Commerce president, as well as general manager of the Burntwood Hotel, barbecuing some choice steaks for a dinner to mark the chamber’s 50th anniversary year, out on the asphalt parking lot of the hotel, on a summer day so hot you could have fried eggs on the pavement. Such summer days are pretty rare in Thompson, so you perhaps tend to remember them. Keith, sweating over the flames, while getting smoked a bit himself in the grilling process, was, as always, the genial host. Having spent a good part of his working life in the hospitality industry, Keith was the consummate hotelier.  I also recall being at a Spirit Way gala with Jeanette about a year earlier on Nov. 12, 2009, at the North Star Saloon in the Thompson Inn, where Keith  bartended himself that evening, and had the place shipshape for the event.

Keith left the hotel business and became the property manager for the City Centre Mall in May 2011, a position he held until April 2018. While I had a number of interesting chats with Keith on any number of local issues during those seven years, one that stands out was from just after he left mall management. There were quite a few retail store vacancies at the time, so I asked him how close he thought City Centre Mall was to the tipping point where it becomes a so-called “dead mall.” Keith replied that he thought the two anchor stores, Wal-Mart and Sobeys/Canada Safeway, would both be fine, but said he worried about the future of the smaller bricks-and-mortar retail stores, national, regional and local, that fill up the space between the anchor stores in the mall. With such a competitive online shopping environment, Keith said he thought the future of such space in City Centre Mall and many other similar malls across North America, would be more about storefront government offices, along with dentists and perhaps other healthcare professionals, than it would be about retail stores and shopping.

While Keith spent most of his working life in the hospitality and retail service industries, he also studied civil engineering at New Brunswick Community College (NBCC) in Moncton between 1980 and 1982, and worked as a hydrographic surveyor for what was then Public Works Canada, and is now known as Public Services and Procurement Canada.

His volunteer service was considerable and diverse. It ranged from serving as treasurer of Spirit Way; active in leadership as president with both the Lions Club of Thompson and Rotary Club of Thompson; acting chair of the Thompson Zoological Society, and a passionate advocate for the Boreal Discovery Centre; serving as the Thompson Chamber of Commerce representative on the Thompson Regional Airport Authority board of directors; and serving as a board member of the Addictions Foundation of Manitoba (AFM).

Keith’s final gig pretty much brought him full circle as he became, as he described it, the inaugural “non-executive director” of the new Thompson Hotel Association in April 2018, a not-for-profit entity managed by a board of directors and ordinary members of the corporation, who are any proprietor who is actively engaged in the operation of the business and pays accommodation tax to the City of Thompson, acting as a lobby group for local hotels, with a mission to develop a stronger tourism presence in the area, and to get “heads on pillows.”

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Abandoned dreams: The empty Power store supermarket and its lone Vendorama ballpoint pen dispenser

Power store photos courtesy of City of Toronto Archives

The lone and lonely chattel: My morning walk from my house a few blocks away at 537 Nipigon Street to Oshawa Catholic High School in 1973 meant a walk by the empty Power store supermarket at Rosslynn Plaza at the corner of Rossland Road West and Stevenson Road North, which stood empty except for a perhaps forgotten 1960s-era Vendorama ballpoint pen dispenser. Such is the stuff of abandoned dreams.

Urban landscapes change, sometimes almost imperceptibly, sometimes suddenly and dramatically. Any visit to a city photographic archive will tell you that. Sometimes it’s the physical landscape; old buildings are demolished or altered through exterior renovation or addition; or empty spaces are in-filled with new buildings. At other times, the change is more subtle. Physically, the building may well look pretty much the same, but its use and signage may have changed. Or just the latter perhaps if a competitor buys up a property to carry on the same type of business.

Right here in Thompson, while the larger signage may still say Canada Safeway at City Centre Mall, if you look at the smaller legal fine print, Thompson’s largest full-line grocer has indeed been owned by Sobeys West Inc. since Nov. 4, 2013, supermarket banner notwithstanding. Safeway has been in Thompson since 1964.

Canada Safeway, with about 29,000 employees and based in Calgary, was a wholly owned subsidiary of the American parent company Safeway, headquartered in Pleasanton, California, making it the second largest supermarket chain in North America, surpassed only by the Kroger Co. of Cincinnati, started in 1883 by Barney Kroger with his life savings of $372.

Safeway got its start in 1915 in American Falls, Idaho when Marion Barton Skaggs purchased a tiny grocery store from his father for $1,089. By 1926 he was operating 428 Skaggs stores in 10 states. Skaggs almost doubled the size of the business that year when he merged his company with 322 Safeway (formerly Los Angeles-based Sam Selig Company) stores. In the 1930s, Safeway introduced produce pricing by the pound and open dating on perishables to assure freshness some of the first parking lots for customers.

A well as Safeway banner stores across Canada and the United States, Safeway also operates under other multiple banners as Vons stores in Southern California and Nevada, Randalls and Tom Thumb stores in Texas, a Genuardi’s store in Audubon, Pennsylvania, as well as Carrs stores in Alaska. None of the Safeway-owned stores in the United States were included in the Sobeys purchase of Canada Safeway.

John William (J.W.) Sobey started in 1907 with a horse-drawn cart as a meat delivery business in Stellarton, Nova Scotia. In 1924, his son, Frank H. Sobey, persuaded his father to expand the family business from meat and a few local vegetables to a full line of groceries. Sobeys tripled its size and became a national company when it acquired The Oshawa Group – a Toronto-based supplier to Canada’s IGA stores – in 1998, although it had opened a grocery store outside Atlantic Canada in Guelph, Ont. as early as 1987. It is now Canada’s second largest grocery chain, sandwiched between industry leader Loblaw Cos. Ltd. of Brampton, Ont. in top place and third place Metro Inc. of Montreal.

Loblaw, the largest food retailer in Canada, was started in Toronto in June 1919 by Toronto grocers Theodore Pringle Loblaw and J. Milton Cork. Bread salesman George Weston started George Weston Limited, also in Toronto, in 1882. Other Loblaw banners include Extra Foods, Shop Easy Foods, OK Economy, No Frills, Valu-Mart, Real Canadian Superstore, Provigo, SaveEasy, Fortinos, Zehrs Markets, Dominion, Red & White Food Stores, Atlantic Superstore, SuperValu, Lucky Dollar Foods, Freshmart, Maxi and Your Independent Grocer.

Before Sobeys Inc. was allowed to complete its $5.8-billion purchase of Canada Safeway, the federal Competition Bureau on Oct. 22, 2013 ordered in a consent agreement with Nova Scotia-based Sobeys that they sell 23 stores in Western Canada to preserve competition in certain markets in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

In the 1960s, growing up in Oshawa, Ontario, my parents liked to shop at the Power store supermarket in the Rosslynn Plaza the corner of Rossland Road West and Stevenson Road North. Power’s slogan was “More Power To Your Food Dollar.”

The origins of Power store supermarkets date to 1904, when Samuel and Sarah Weinstein opened a grocery store named after themselves in downtown Toronto. The family’s first store under the low-cost Power banner opened at Coxwell and Danforth avenues in 1933 with the slogan, “Why Pay for Fixtures?” Power was purchased by Loblaw Groceterias in 1953, but continued as a distinctly separate budget brand until 1972, when its parent company decided to spend $10 million improving its image. Leon Weinstein, the cigar-smoking son of founders Samuel and Sarah who oversaw the company’s expansion years, was briefly president of Loblaw from 1968 to 1970.

And what of that left behind building after the demise of Oshawa’s Power store supermarket in Rosslyn Plaza close to 45 years ago now? The plaza is essentially still a small strip mall more than four decades later and the old Power store has become a subdivided combination of several stores, including a Coffee Time outlet, part of a privately-owned Canadian coffee-and-donut chain started by Tom Michalopoulos in Bolton, Ontario, just northwest of Toronto, in 1982. The company is now headquartered in Scarborough, in the east-end Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Also in the mix is a Lovell Drugs pharmacy, one of the largest, independent drug store chains in Ontario with 12 locations now in Whitby, Oshawa, Kingston and Cornwall, started in Bowmanville, east of Oshawa, by David Stott in 1856 (the business was later joined over the next century by family owners and partners including A.W. Gregory, John H. Jury and generations of Lovells – Edwin, Stan, Everett, Arthur and Diana Lovell. Pizza Pizza and Subway round out the old Power store tenants.

And what of that abandoned Vendorama ballpoint pen dispenser in 1973 in the front window of the empty Power store in Oshawa?

In a Nov 16, 2013 Daily Kos post (the blog started by Markos Moulitsas in 2002) headlined “History 101: Pens and Ink,” the blog editor known as Ojibwa writes,  “The idea of using a rotating ball to distribute the ink to the paper was developed by the American inventor John H. Loud. His first patent for a ball dispenser pen was issued in 1888. This first design was intended for writing on rough surfaces, such as cardboard. Loud’s designs – he was issued several more patents – never reached the point of providing the user with the flow of ink needed for good penmanship.

“It was up to László Biro, a Hungarian living in Argentina during World War II, to use a spin-off of war technology to create a pen which could write on paper. In 1943, Lazlo Biro and his brother
György form Biro Pens of Argentina. Their design was licensed for production in the United Kingdom to supply the Royal Air Force who had found that the ballpoint pens worked better than fountain pens at high altitude. In 1945, Marcel Bich bought the patent from Biro and the pen became the main product of his Bic Company.”

In 1960, Victor Vending Corporation of Chicago moved into full production of its Vendorama ballpoint pen dispenser, known as the Pen Vendorama, which revolved and could dispense up to 168 ballpoint pens for a dime each. Different models of Vendorama ballpoint pen dispensers sold pens for either a nickel, dime or a quarter.

Alas, no word on the final dispensation of the Vendorama ballpoint pen dispenser in the window of the Rossland Road Power store, circa 1973.

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End of an era for gadget and gizmo DIYers as RadioShack to file for bankruptcy

I still remember trying to build my first crystal radio set as a kid. Or should I say more truthfully watching my dad build it for the most part. A crystal radio set is a simple radio receiver, popular in the early days of radio. It needs no other power source but that received solely from the power of radio waves received by a wire antenna.  All you need are a few a few inexpensive parts, such as a coil of copper wire for adjustment, a capacitor, a crystal detector, and earphones. Crystal radio sets are are distinct from ordinary radios as they are passive receivers, while other radios use a separate source of electric power such as Alternating Current (AC) wall power electricity or Direct Current (DC) battery power to name a couple.

Crystal radios can be designed to receive almost any radio frequency band, but most receive the amplitude modulation (AM) broadcast band, although some receive the 49-meter international shortwave band.

It wasn’t so much that as a kid I was what would today be known as a member of the “maker community” or DIYer (Do it yourselfer) or tinkerer (a word we did have back in the 1960s and 1970s). No, it was more my Uncle Ab (Abner Barker), my dad’s older brother, who was an electrician and lived in St. Catharines, Ontario when I was growing up in Oshawa. Uncle Ab didn’t visit often but when he did arrive for a few days now and then, he’d do things like bring me a radio or my first-copy of Popular Electronics magazine, a publication for electronics hobbyists and experimenters published from October 1954 until December 1999. Uncle Ab was such an enthusiast himself he seemed willing to overlook that even when interested his nephew had … err … a very limited aptitude for mathematics, physics or any other applied science that might have proved useful for an electronics hobbyist to possess.

Some may also recall Heathkit, the brand name of electronic test equipment, high fidelity home audio equipment, television receivers, amateur radio equipment, robots, electronic ignition conversion modules for early model cars with point style ignitions and other kits and electronic products produced and marketed for assembly by the purchaser by the Heath Company of Chicago from 1947 until 1992.

Edward Bayard Heath, an early monoplane pilot and aircraft engineer, had founded the company in 1926, after purchasing the Chicago based Bates Aeroplane in 1912, and then going on to found the E.B. Heath Aerial Vehicle Co., which later becoming the Heath Airplane Company.

I hadn’t thought about building crystal radio sets for years. Or Heathkit. Just like I hadn’t thought about RadioShack for years. Not until I stumbled upon a  Feb. 2 news story yesterday from Bloomberg Business that  RadioShack, founded in 1921  as a mail-order retailer for amateur ham-radio operators and maritime communications officers on Brattle Street in Boston by two London-born brothers, Theodore and Milton Deutschmann, who named the company after the compartment that housed the wireless equipment for ham radios, is about to declare bankruptcy. Circuit City bought the stores formerly known as RadioShack in Canada in 2004, re-branding them as The Source by Circuit City. In 2009, Circuit City’s U.S. parent company filed for bankruptcy protection and BCE Inc. bought the stores, re branding them once again as The Source. There is a store here in Thompson, Manitoba in City Centre Mall.

Bloomberg Business reported that RadioShack has lost $936 million since the fourth quarter of 2011, the last time it was in the black, and its shares have lost 99.6 percent of their value since peaking 15 years ago. On Feb. 2, the New York Stock Exchange said it had suspended trading on the stock and started the process of delisting it.

RadioShack has been based in Fort Worth, Texas since 1963 when Charles Tandy, who ran a successful nice market chain of leather stores, acquired the struggling-then chain of what was nine RadioShack retail stores in Boston and area, for about $300,000 as a favour to its major creditor, First National Bank of Boston.

From the early 1960s until the early 1990s, RadioShack, with its own private brand manufactured accessories, batteries, transistors and capacitors, had plenty of success going after customers “looking to save money by buying cheaper goods and improving them through modifications and accessorizing,” writes Joshua Brustein, referencing Irvin Farman’s 1993 book, Tandy’s Money Machine: How Charles Tandy Built RadioShack Into the World’s Largest Electronics Chain, in his Feb. 2 Bloomberg Business story, “Inside RadioShack’s Slow-Motion Collapse.” The target audience was people who needed one small piece of equipment every week.”

And then in November 1977, in its boldest move, Tandy had RadioShack launch the TRS-80, one of the first mass-market personal computers with about 16K of memory and a 12-inch-square monitor with one shade of gray characters and no graphics, using software designed by a still obscure start-up named Microsoft, founded 2½ years earlier in April 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

Why bold? There was no known market for personal computers in 1977. With a $600 price tag it was going to be the most expensive product RadioShack had ever sold. Tandy mused about the initial order of 1,000 TRS-80 units that his RadioShack stores could always use them for inventory management if customers weren’t interested in buying them. However, in its early years, the TRS-80 was more popular than Apple’s computers.

Early last year, Steve Cichon, a writer for the website Trending Buffalo, sifted through the back page of the front section of the Saturday, Feb. 16, 1991 Buffalo News with a RadioShack ad for items such as  voice recorders, GPS devices, answering machines and camcorders that RadioShack was selling 24 years ago. Cichon found that his iPhone had cancelled out any need for 13 of the 15 products then being sold by RadioShack, which had a combined listed advertised price of $3,054.82 in 1991. That amount is roughly equivalent to about $5,100 in 2012 dollars,” Cichon wrote in his Jan. 14, 2014 post, adding, “The only two items on the page that my phone really can’t replace: Tiny Dual-Superhet Radar Detector, $79.95. But when is the last time you heard the term ‘fuzzbuster’ anyway?” and the “3-Way speaker with massive 15″ Woofer, $149.95.”

Near the end, RadioShack was showing signs it was becoming self-aware of its stuck-in-the-past image problem, witness this 1:12 YouTube video from an ad they did for the 2014 Super Bowl, which is pretty  priceless, if too little too late. Clerk number one answers the phone and says to clerk number two: “The 80’s called. They want their store back,” featuring the spot-on perfect music of Canadian rockers Loverboy’s 1981 anthem Working for the Weekend blaring in the background. If you can honestly say you danced on the roof of one of your Loyalist College print journalism classmate’s orange Toyota Corolla at Lake on the Mountain, just outside Picton, Ontario, to the tune in 1981 and she still remembered the incident with some fondness, if continuing disbelief, almost 30 years later, it probably helps. You can catch the RadioShack 2014 Super Bowl ad on YouTube here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpkixVDFpcI

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Empathy and compassion are the gifts of our shared human experience

A stranger smiled at me as we came around a corner and met at the end of an aisle in Wal-Mart yesterday at City Centre Mall. I smiled back. As I carried on just a few steps beyond, I heard him say, “Excuse me, can you help me?” I turned back thinking that maybe in spite of my cart, he thought I was an employee and he was looking for help finding merchandise. He wasn’t. He was simply a man hoping I could spare him some change. I did. Whatever change I had in my pocket became his. “Merry New Year,” he said, which made me smile again, thinking how he had blended the Christmas and New Year’s greetings. The whole encounter took less than a minute. But it left me thinking. What kind of world would we live in if our default position was always (or even usually) to simply do the right thing? Ask if we need, give if we can without mentally applying some means or character test to instantly determine for ourselves  the worthiness of the recipient. Not to give out of guilt. Not to give, but give begrudgingly because we all know we have to mind our nickels and dimes. But just do what we know is intuitively the right thing to do. I certainly don’t pretend I do this all the time. I don’t. And I know if the same man had approached me not in the store, but perhaps aggressively panhandled me in the parking lot just outside the doors of Wal-Mart, quite likely even intoxicated, I’d have been far less likely to give him anything. I know that’s true because I’ve done it.

The thing is this. On a macro scale, I have penned many editorials and columns over the years where I quoted U.S. Civil War Republican president Abraham Lincoln famously saying, “It is a sin to remain silent when it is your duty to protest.” Or a century later, Martin Luther King: “From every mountainside, let freedom ring.” And also another former U.S. president, a Democrat, Bill Clinton, in his first inaugural address in 1993: “By the words we speak and the faces we show the world, we force the spring … now, we must do the work the season demands. In serving, we recognize a simple but powerful truth – we need each other. And we must care for one another … but for fate, we – the fortunate and the unfortunate – might have been each other.”  Or even, “Hell no, we won’t go” Massachusetts Institute of Technology  (MIT) emeritus profess of linguistics Noam Chomsky’s famous Vietnam War era dedication in his first book in 1967, American Power and the New Mandarins: “To the brave young men who refused to serve in a criminal war.”

Writing in 1978 in his book, Robert Kennedy and His Times, the American historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, commenting in the foreword, just a decade after the New York senator’s assassination in Los Angeles, said Kennedy “possessed to an exceptional degree what T. S. Eliot called an ‘experiencing nature.’ History changed him, and, had time permitted, he might have changed history. His relationship to his age makes him, I believe, a ‘representative man’ in Emerson’s phrase – one who embodies the consciousness of an epoch, who perceives things in fresh lights and new connections, who exhibits unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries.”

The thing is this also. On a micro scale in day-to-life, those very large ideals of the likes of Kennedy, Chomsky, Clinton and Lincoln for most of us can be best lived when we feel real empathy and compassion for someone who is no longer the “other.” It’s something a man like Jean Vanier, son of Canadian governor general Georges Vanier, has spent his life living.

Take AIDS for instance.

The AIDS epidemic officially began on June 5, 1981, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report newsletter reported unusual clusters of Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) caused by a form of Pneumocystis carinii in five homosexual men in Los Angeles.

I wrote about AIDS some in the 1980s. And I remember the climate of fear in 1986 that reporters were not untouched by when we were assigned stories that meant going inside provincial reformatories and federal penitentiaries to interview HIV-positive prisoners in Ontario. The high callings of journalism are to speak truth to power, as well as comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But exactly how AIDS was transmitted in terms of morbidity and mortality was not completely understood 30 years ago. So I watched with surprise and unexpected admiration as C. Everett Koop, an evangelical Christian, who served as surgeon general under U.S. Republican president Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1989, and was well known for wearing his uniform as a vice admiral of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, had the singular political courage to speak the truth about the science of AIDS as our knowledge increased. According to the Washington Post, “Koop was the only surgeon general to become a household name.”

I also read San Francisco Chronicle reporter Randy Shilt’s landmark book on the early years of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On, published in 1987. Three years later in 1990, Campbell Scott, son of the legendary actor George C. Scott, a 28-year-old actor at the time, playing the character “Willy” in the movie Longtime Companion, captured the poignancy of those days in the early 1980s when he observed in the movie’s final scene, “it seems inconceivable, doesn’t it, that there was ever a time before this, when we didn’t wake up every day wondering whose sick now, who else is gone?” as Cecil County, Maryland bluegrass singer Zane Campbell’s haunting Post-Mortem Bar is heard in the background. If you read the comments from viewers on a YouTube clip linked to here you get some idea of the power of the ending and how some 25 years on it resonates with people still as the moment that AIDS was brought home for them and was no longer just a problem for some queers in San Francisco. You can listen to it and watch it on YouTube here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dukIb4UU094

By the time Jonathan Demme, Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington and Bruce Springsteen brought Philadelphia to the screen in 1993, with Hanks’ haunting performance as AIDS-infected lawyer Andrew Beckett, which netted him the Academy Award for Best Actor, along with Springsteen, whose song Streets of Philadelphia won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, AIDS was no longer an abstraction to many of us. We knew people who had Hepatitis C. We knew people who were HIV positive or had full-blown AIDS.

And that’s when empathy and compassion arrive. At the same time Philadelphia was being released in December 1993, I remember the main Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) outlet on Sherbrooke Street in Peterborough letting the Peterborough AIDS Resource Network (PARN) collect donations alongside the Salvation Army bell ringers with their kettles that Christmas of 1993. While I was a graduate student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario at the time, I remember being back in Peterborough one December Saturday morning before Christmas and working the PARN donation time slot with a friend who was a member of PARN.

Changes come.

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