We haven’t had that spirit here since 1984: The zeitgeist of self improvement and The Learning Annex

The Learning Annex is an American education company based in New York City. It was founded in 1980 by Bill Zanker in his New York City studio apartment with a $5,000 investment.

It is hard to exactly recapture the zeitgeist of that era, but in 1984, I moved to The Bain Apartments Co-operative Inc., the oldest housing co-op in Toronto, located at 100 Bain Ave. in the Riverdale area of Toronto, where it provides affordable housing to mixed income people.  Our neighbourhood was a rectangle formed, give or take a few blocks, by Broadview Avenue in the west, Danforth Avenue in the north, Withrow Park in the east, and Gerrard Street in the south.  My good friend, Ron Graham, from university days a few years earlier at Trent University, who has lived in Vancouver for more than three decades now, lived around the corner on Logan Avenue near Withrow Park at the time.

It is easy to poke fun at Toronto’s sense of self-importance; we did it more than 40 years ago. But truth be told, the Riverdale, Broadview/Danforth area was one of the most beautiful areas I’ve lived in anywhere, including lots of small cities and towns in Canada and the United States, as well as larger cities such as Ottawa, Halifax, Boston, and Durham, North Carolina.

In 1984, I was writing for Ontario Lawyers Weekly, and perhaps as close as I’d ever come to being a “young urban professional,” albeit minus the money and upward-mobility, as this was still journalism after all.

A big part of the mid-1980s’ zeitgeist was self improvement: mind, body and soul. The Learning Annex, with its ubiquitous street boxes, filled an important niche, providing continuing adult education for all kinds of general interest and hobby courses and workshops, often in the evening or over a two-day weekend. If you wanted to learn about tax planning strategies or how to deal with stress, for instance, The Learning Annex likely had a seminar on the subject. While I took several offerings in the autumn of 1984, the one I recall best was a bicycle repair workshop weekend at a bike shop, the name of which I’ve long forgotten, on King Street. I think I still recall it best because I was a pretty unlikely participant. I have been an avid cyclist for most of my life; avid bike repair guy, not so much. From 2007 to 2014, Ian Graham, then sports editor of the Thompson Citizen (now editor), was my go-to-bike repair guy. I’d grab a few Allen keys at home, and deliver my bicycle to the newspaper’s abandoned pressroom at the back of the building on Commercial Place for Ian to work his magic in about 30 seconds on my latest handlebar fiasco. These days, my bike gets dropped off at Doug’s Source for Sports as needed.

Zeitgeists change, of course. While The Learning Annex still exists as a shell of its former self in some larger American cities, it decamped from Toronto some 15 years ago in 2007.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

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.

-30-

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

Donna Wilson: True stories, some names withheld to protect the guilty

Donna Wilson decamps from Paint Lake and Thompson to Sanford on the LaSalle River, 15 minutes southwest of Winnipeg, this Sunday, where her lovely parents, Dorothy and Jack Dyke, have lived for several years now. After more than six years at the helm, today marks her last official day as general manager of Quality Inn & Suites Thompson, although she gave up her office a couple of weeks ago for her longtime number one, assistant manager Destinee Perry, to move up to the big chair as general manager.  Both have been with the hotel since 2013.

Donna Wilson. She knows everyone in Thompson. True fact, or pretty darned close.

Now, you’ve probably heard a lot over the years about Donna’s decades of volunteerism and service on what sometimes seems like every community service not-for-profit board in Thompson, including her signature annual cancer-fighting event, Relay for Life every April, followed closely in recent years with her involvement in Thompson Playhouse, as president,  and sometimes in the director’s chair, after making her directorial debut in 2011 with Dixie Swim Club, and since 2009, her Old Fashioned Christmas Concert every December in R.D. Parker Collegiate’s Letkemann Theatre Her “Out & About” column, summed up pretty much in the name, has run occasionally in the Thompson Citizen since 2007.

For years, Donna, and her good friend, Wally Itson, who retired as principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate in 2014, and then wound up running Thompson Gas Bar Co-op, would emcee many community events together annually, as well as providing sideline coverage for Paul Andersen’s Shaw Cable TV coverage of the Nickel Days Parade in June and Santa Claus Parade in November.

“Growing up I hadn’t heard much of cancer other then my mom mentioning her friend Daphne who had died of it,” Wilson said in connection with her Relay for Life involvement on her Canadian Cancer Society personal web page in 2012. “Then that word came around again when my best friend Cindy’s mom was diagnosed. It was pretty traumatic for us. Cancer took over her life. Years later my mom lost another friend, Regina.” Started in 1985 by Dr. Gordy Klatt, a colorectal surgeon in Tacoma, Washington, Relay for Life was first held in Canada in 1999. Relay for Life made its debut in Thompson in 2001 and has been held since then annually, with the exception of 2008 when it was postponed for a year because of extensive renovations to the C.A. Nesbitt Arena.

But many local readers know these things. Some will also have noticed Donna very gradually scaled back on sitting on some of those board and other public gigs she would do in recent years, knowing moving day was only a few years off, and giving the various boards plenty of time to recruit. I also saw a somewhat quieter, more reflective Donna, after her younger brother, Eric, was paralyzed after falling off a roof in Palm Springs, California in February 2017. Eric survived, but it was far from a given he would at the time. Today, he has made an amazing recuperation through lots of hard work by himself and with dedicated therapists, the support of family and friends, and God’s abundant grace, but becoming a paraplegic is a life-changing event for Eric and his family and friends. And for Donna Wilson, her family is EVERYTHING. Has been since the day she first became my boss and soon friend way back on July 4, 2007, and long before no doubt. Since Eric’s accident, Donna has become a fierce advocate for wheelchair users; want to know why you should observe painted lines and signage in a parking lot? Donna will tell you, probably on her Facebook page, what it means to wheelchair users when drivers don’t. She’s all in.

Donna has been an outstanding boss for seven of my almost 12 years to date in Thompson at two different jobs, and a friend for the entire dozen years. Through whatever quirk of fate, I may have worked for Donna longer than any other employee in Thompson over the last dozen years when you total both the newspaper and hotel jobs. No one, and I mean no one, throws a Christmas staff party like Donna! And no one, but no one, I suspect, has stories like those of us who have worked in both the newspaper and hotel industries in Thompson. Most of which, of course, aren’t suitable to be re-told publicly. To protect the guilty.

Donna, as I have said publicly many times, is the best boss I have worked for. People work for people, not positions, at least if they stay long, just like they leave bosses, not jobs, although I have joked with Donna more than once at the hotel, please don’t move next-door to Minute Muffler on Moak Crescent because I’m not sure I’m up to working in a muffler shop. But I did work for Donna for more than three years as editor of the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News when she was general manager (we started within weeks of each other in June and July 2007). I arrived knowing a lot about print journalism across the country, but next to nothing about Thompson. Donna was my remedy for that. She could unfailing predict in our meetings which story was going to explode when we published it, even if I thought it was innocuous, and which stories would fly OK, even if I thought they might be controversial. The amazing thing is she always had my back. If a hard story needed to be published in the public interest, we published it. Always. She never spiked stories even when she knew local advertisers were going to be sending her into damage control mode, ringing her phone off the hook first thing the morning the paper hit the street.

Mind you, after I wrote a fairly hard-hitting editorial in October 2008 about Spirit Way and delays in Phase 2 of expanding the 27-foot wide rockface sculpture to see five more wolves mounted, making it an additional 80 feet wide, which would have meant the largest rockface sculpture in Canada, Donna limited my vacation starts to leaving after my editorials were in print. You see, Jeanette and I had conveniently enough hopped on a plane for a short vacation, as she was running in the Prince Edward County half-marathon in Southern Ontario, after the editorial was written but yet to be published in print (the paper didn’t go online until the following year in June 2009.) When the paper hit the streets, it was a case of, as the late singer-songwriter, Warren Zevon, once so appropriately put it, “Send lawyers, guns and money. The shit has hit the fan.”

Lesson learned: Never, ever criticize a volunteer effort in Thompson unless you are prepared to delay the start of your vacation.

“You are one stubborn man but we always managed to work it out and I’m so happy to have you as my friend” Donna wrote several weeks ago. “Donna wrote that you are stubborn,” Jeanette laughed, thinking it an amusing and not untrue statement. While I never changed my mind about the rockface editorial, and continue to stand by it almost 11 years later, I did come to have a bigger picture view of Spirit Way in general over the years, and in particular Volker Beckmann, who might well be considered kind of a stubborn guy himself at times. I would go onto write several editorials praising Volker as a “visionary,” and suggesting Thompson could use a few more visionaries like him. As recently as May 25, I wrote on Facebook, “While we don’t see eye-to-eye always, or agree on some issues, Volker is a much needed and often under-appreciated visionary (“Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown”: Luke 4:16-30). Well-deserved recognition in the Manitoba Legislature from Thompson PC MLA Kelly Bindle, causing me to do what I might have otherwise thought unlikely; share a YouTube video from the Manitoba PC Caucus.”

Before I met her, Donna had done a good-length stint as a morning show host for Tom and Sue O’Brien over on Cree Road at what was then Arctic Radio CHTM-610 AM. She also ran Ducky Promotions, and later, Beautiful Plus Fashions, on Fox Bay.

Between leaving the paper in 2010 and becoming general manager again, but this time of a hotel, Donna indulged her love for all things Newfoundland and Labrador, her home country (oops … province) serving up her own signature dish of “Uptop Fries,” featuring French fries, topped with dressing, onions, bologna and gravy, at Nanny’s Diner-Baking Catering at Westwood Shopping Mall. “Back home in St. John’s my father used to always talk about being on the boat called the Uptop, so I named the dish after the boat,” said Wilson. She also once worked as a cook at the old Highway Inn here, and wrote her own cookbook, which she sold for charity in 2010 to help raise funds for A Port in the Storm in Winnipeg.

She operated Nanny’s between December 2011 and May 2013, when she was recruited by Dr. Alan Lagimodiere, a veterinarian, and since 2016 PC MLA for the provincial constituency of Selkirk, and Al’s wife Judy, to run the Quality Inn & Suites Thompson. The Lagimodieres are among the Accommodations North ownership group which owns the Choice Hotels Quality Inn & Suites Thompson franchise.

Discretion is of paramount importance in the hotel business, so alas no juicy hotel stories to share here. Not that they don’t exist, just not here. Donna calls them our “headshaker” memories … like that time a guest stepped off the elevator at 5 a.m. and was … ah, yes, you can’t work together at a hotel and a newspaper and not have a few headshaker memories.

But newspapers are a bit different, as tell-all beasts, so I suppose one  brief remembrance of things past wouldn’t be too far out of line perhaps.

We needed one of our reporters one morning for a deadline story. He was a talented reporter, but he liked to stay very late at the paper most nights, obsessing over multiple drafts and rewrites of his stories before turning them in, making sure they were just right. More like a novelist then your typical first draft of history type journalist. This, of course, sometimes meant he was very sleepy. Too sleepy to make it into the office the next day for 8 a.m., 9 a.m. or even 10 a.m. Unable to raise him on the phone, we drove over to his apartment, and tossed pebbles at what we figured was his upper-floor window to rouse him, which we did eventually. This was a career first for me. In 25 years of journalism, I had never before tossed pebbles at a reporter’s window to rouse him or her from sleep. He indicated he’d be ready shortly, and buzzed us through the security door into the building. So far so good. Except in the lobby we somehow mixed the apartment numbers up, and wound up banging on the wrong door it turned out.  That’s odd we both thought. No answer. Surely he couldn’t have fallen back to sleep after just buzzing us in. And that would be right about the time the door slowly opened, and we were looking into a very darkened apartment. And a woman, unknown to me, standing in her doorway looking very sleepy and confused.

The woman, of course, was not unknown to Donna Wilson. “I’m sorry,” Donna gasped. “We’ve got the wrong apartment.” Without missing a beat, the woman stepped out of the shadows into some hall light. “Would you both like to come in for a cup of tea, Donna?” the woman asked. Turns out she was a police matron for the RCMP holding cells, and had just recently gone to sleep after working an overnight shift. But she had known Donna for years, and thought maybe we were just drooping by, although Donna hadn’t known until that moment the woman lived there at the time. Or we wouldn’t be waking her up.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

The shorthand on Marcia Carroll’s life: From the White House of LBJ to the Precambrian Art Centre

Marcia Carroll was to my mind a Thompson “original.” Now that’s a bit different than perhaps a Thompson “pioneer” as Marcia didn’t live in Thompson quite from the beginning, marked by those halcyon days that closed out the late 1950s, although she did live here a long time. Marcia was original more in the sense of the unique personal back story she brought with her to Thompson, Manitoba, and the equally unique contributions she made for more than 25 years to minor hockey, through the sponsorship, with her husband, Dave, of the Carroll Aeros Atom “B” minor hockey team, where she incredibly knit or crocheted scarves for all the team’s players for years, and the arts in the North through her unfailing encouragement and patronage of Northern artists – be they indigenous, Métis or white.

So when I read of Marcia Carroll’s Sept. 27 passing at Thompson General Hospital in a 137-word Oct. 9 online obituary in the Thompson Citizen, I thought there might be a few more words to say beyond that about the woman who was my next-door business neighbour for the first five years I edited the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, from 2007 to 2012.  Our office was at 141 Commercial Place, while Marcia’s Precambrian Art Centre was adjacent at the same address, occupying space she rented from our corporate owner. Being Marcia’s landlord meant newspaper staff were dispatched on occasion over to her premises, summoned by her to perform some landlord-like task, such as changing commercial grade fluorescent lighting tubes, a task that often fell between 2007 and 2009 to lanky production newspaper page designer Garrett Wiwcharuk (now a colleague at UCN), who was sometimes ably assisted by the paper’s production manager, Ryan Lynds. I suspect now editor Ian Graham and myself may also have been pressed into service the odd time as well.

Marcia owned and operated Precambrian Art Centre for 18 years. But it was her husband, Dave, I actually first heard about from Steve Ashton, our former Thompson MLA, who I had just met on a tour of the then newly-upgraded Canada Safeway in July 2007. Marcia and Dave have two grown sons, Matthew and Morgan, as well as grandchildren Carter and Jerzie.

Ashton told me about Dave’s prowess as a butcher and the demand for his products at Carroll Meats at 20 Nelson Road, where he worked with veteran Thompson meat cutter Joan Monuik, who died two years ago at the age of 76.

Dave Carroll was married to Marcia for 50 years. Finding himself in declining health, he sold Carroll Meats, which had been closed for a time, to Kelly Bindle in 2013, and trained the civil engineer, who had no previous experience in the field, about the meat business as part of the sale. Bindle changed the name to Ripple Rock Meat Shop and still works as its proprietor, although dividing his time between Thompson and Winnipeg since April 2016, when he ran for the Tories and defeated Ashton for the local MLA seat.

Marcia one time told former Thompson Citizen general manager, and still occasional “Out & About” columnist Donna Wilson, that she said she always has three rules for her Carroll Aeros Atom “B” minor hockey players: Learn the rules of hockey, learn to enjoy the fun; learn to lose gracefully, because there may be years that they’ll never win a game, and as far as she was concerned, she said she didn’t care, as long as they all had fun.

Marcia worked with many artists showcasing their work and supporting their talents at critical career points. A short list of such artists would include Jasyn Lucas, Gerald Kuehl, Murray McKenzie, Angus Merasty, Jeff Monias, Ron Disbrowe, Alan Chapman, Tom Dubois, Dr. Ron Zdrikluk, Dave Cadwell, Gene McCarthy, David Williams, Leonard Bighetty, Bruce Ecker, Judy Waldner, Anne Snihor, Desmond Raymond, Marijo Ready, Jan Bain, Cathy Therrien and Michael Spence.

As her health declined noticeably seven or eight years ago and she spent more and more time away from work, with the Precambrian Art Centre often closed only to reopen again briefly and irregularly, those artists and friends became increasingly concerned for her wellbeing.

My first conversation with Gerald Kuehl about half a dozen years ago wasn’t primarily about his famed Portraits of the North pencil portraiture, but more about how Marcia had been a big booster of his work. Kuehl didn’t know me at the time, but knew I worked next door to Precambrian, so he telephoned to check on her wellbeing after being unable reach her on the telephone there on several occasions.

Marcia Carroll may have been best known in Thompson for her long and loyal support of both minor hockey players and artists, but she had been a witness to history before her arrival in Thompson.

An American by birth, originally from Greene, New York, northeast of Binghamton, she was living in Toronto and attending university when JFK was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, but later wound up using her machine shorthand and note taking reporting skills to work in the White House of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, best known as LBJ, Kennedy’s vice-president and successor. Very good stenographers using machine shorthand on a specialized chording keyboard stenotype can write American English at speeds up to 375 words per minute. 

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald did it but I believe there was a second shooter based on what I was told by witnesses,” Carroll told the Nickel Belt News in an April 23, 2010 story. “I suppose one will never really know because there’s no way of proving it now.”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22