The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: ‘According to a legend of the Chippewa tribe, the lake they once called Gitche Gumee never gives up her dead’

It started as a shipwreck, followed by a newsmagazine story in the still-golden age of newsmagazines like Time, U.S. News & World Report and Newsweek. And then a song.

“According to a legend of the Chippewa tribe, the lake they once called Gitche Gumee ‘never gives up her dead.’”

Forty-four years ago today on Nov. 10, 1975, 18 kilometres off Coppermine Point, and 60 kilometres north of Sault Ste Marie, Ont., the 222-metre iron ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald, with a crew of 29 aboard, sank. All were lost to the depths of Lake Superior. The laker, the pride of the American side, was still bigger than most, and had been the largest freighter to sail the Great Lakes when it was launched in 1958.

“The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy.”

Some of the most famous lyrics in Canadian music history, anchored to what would soon become the most famous shipwreck on the Great Lakes, first appeared as the lede of the bylined story “Great Lakes: The Cruelest Month” by James R. (Jim) Gaines, national affairs writer, and Jon Lowell for a Nov. 24, 1975 Detroit-based story in Newsweek magazine. Gaines, who began is career at the Saturday Review, the storied American weekly magazine that had started out as The Saturday Review of Literature in 1924, is now a Paris-based writer, would go onto become the first editor in chief of People magazine, as well as the editor of Time magazine, and also to serve as regional editor for the Americas, and then global editor-at-large for Reuters.

Lowell, who died in 2016, started out as a journalist in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, and had already covered politics, and civil rights events and disturbances, for the Detroit News, then Newsweek; including events like the 1967 Detroit Riot, the May 1970 Kent State shootings in Ohio, and the September 1971 Attica Prison riot, as well as covering organized crime, labour, and the auto industry, by the time the Edmund Fitzgerald sunk in November 1975. In July 1979, he would go onto co-author the book Great American Dreams: A Portrait of the Way We Are with the Washington Post’s Robert Kaiser.

Inspired in large part by reading Gaines and Lowell’s Newsweek story, Gordon Lightfoot recorded “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” the following month in December 1975 at Eastern Sound, a recording studio made out of two Victorian houses at 48 Yorkville Ave. in downtown Toronto. Ed “Peewee Charles” Ringwald and the late Terry Clements, a Detroit native who had played guitar for Lightfoot since the early 1970s, came up with the haunting guitar and steel riffs. The studio was, yes, indeed, later torn down and replaced by a parking lot. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was released as a 7-inch 45 rpm A-side single in August 1976, taken from Lightfoot’s album “Summertime Dream” released that July. The B-side on the single was “The House You Live In.”

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was also the first commercial early digital multi-track recording tracked on the prototype 3M 32-track digital recorder, a novel technology for the time.

The Headstones – originally hailing from Kingston, Ont. – released a very fine and very different tempo  cover of Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” last March 15. You can listen to it here at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8LBkYjniTU

The final voyage of the Edmund Fitzgerald began Nov. 9, 1975 at the Burlington Northern Railroad Dock No.1 in Superior, Wisconsin, Sean Ley, a development officer at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point Light Station in Whitefish Point on the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan, wrote in a blog post for the museum titled “The Fateful Journey” (https://www.shipwreckmuseum.com/edmund-fitzgerald/the-fateful-journey/?fbclid=IwAR33M-6_G0X15ab73z4KkAIM3owr3GaVpRsHdaE5n_OIbSP3PzX7_FTMIGo).

Don McIsaac observed last July that “Gordon Lightfoot, who wrote ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ is from my hometown, Orillia.” McIsaac, executive vice-president and chief financial officer of Cirrus Aircraft, based at headquarters in Duluth, Minnesota, added, “From where I sit now, I can see the port the ship last left.”

The Edmund Fitzgerald was bound for Zug Island, a heavily industrialized island in River Rouge, Michigan at the mouth of the River Rouge, where it spills into the Detroit River, near Detroit, and where it was set to unload a cargo of taconite iron ore pellets before heading onto Cleveland, her home port, to wait out the winter.

Capt. Ernest M. McSorley had loaded her with 26,116 long tons of taconite pellets, made of processed iron ore, heated and rolled into marble-size balls – 26,116 long tons more than the great iron boat weighed empty. Departing Superior about 2:30 p.m., she was soon joined by the Arthur M. Anderson, which had sailed from Two Harbors, Minnesota under Capt. Bernie Cooper. The two ships were in radio contact. The Fitzgerald being the faster took the lead, with the distance between the vessels ranging from 10 to 15 miles.

McSorley and Cooper agreed to take the northerly course across Lake Superior to avoid a storm that was developing to the southwest, so they would be protected by highlands on the Canadian shore, taking them between Isle Royale and the Keweenaw Peninsula.

They passed several miles offshore from Split Rock Lighthouse, on Minnesota’s North Shore. They would later make a turn to the southeast toward Whitefish Point.

“Weather conditions continued to deteriorate,” Ley wrote. Gale warnings had been issued at 7 p.m. on Nov. 9, upgraded to storm warnings early in the morning of Nov. 10. “While conditions were bad, with winds gusting to 50 knots and seas 12 to 16 feet, both captains had often piloted their vessels in similar conditions. In the early afternoon of Nov. 10, the Fitzgerald had passed Michipicoten Island and was approaching Caribou Island, steaming toward Whitefish Bay at Superior’s east end.. The Anderson was just approaching Michipicoten, about three miles off the West End Light.

Cooper later said he watched the Edmund Fitzgerald pass far too close to Six Fathom Shoal to the north of Caribou Island. He could clearly see the ship and the beacon on Caribou on his radar set and could measure the distance between them. “He and his officers watched the Fitzgerald pass right over the dangerous area of shallow water,” Ley wrote. “By this time, snow and rising spray had obscured the Fitzgerald from sight, visible 17 miles ahead on radar.”

The last radio communication between the Fitzgerald and the Anderson was at 7:10 pm. The Fitzgerald was disappearing and reappearing on the Anderson’s radar – the height of the waves was causing interference.

Cooper asked McSorley how they were doing. McSorley replied, “We are holding our own.” A few minutes later, the Fitzgerald disappeared from the radar screen for the last time, sinking without giving a distress signal.

George Stegner recalled last year how he was on duty that night: “I was on duty this night. Stationed at K.I. Sawyer AFB in the UP of Michigan, crew member on a rescue helo. Never could have found any survivors in that storm but we sure tried hour after hour. Was a bad night. Still remember it after all this time.”

Every year since the sinking, the Episcopal Mariners’ Church – the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral – on East Jefferson Avenue in downtown Detroit, along the riverfront, has held a memorial service for the Edmund Fitzgerald crew. This year’s service was held at 11 a.m. this morning, with the bell tolling 29 times for each man on the Fitzgerald.

Dave Sproule, a natural heritage education and marketing specialist with Ontario’s Department of Environment, Conservation and Parks’ Land and Water Division in Sudbury, has written Lake Superior is a “weathermaker … so big it creates its own weather…..”

By late autumn, writes Sproule (http://www.ontarioparks.com/parksblog/edmund-fitzgerald-40-years-later/), the “Gales of November” have usually set in on Superior, creating hazardous conditions for even large modern ships.

The cause of the sinking is still a matter of much historic debate, both Ley and Sproule note.

On April 15, 1977 the U.S. Coast Guard released its official report on “Subject: S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, official number 277437, sinking in Lake Superior on 10 November 1975 with loss of life.” While the Coast Guard said the cause of the sinking could not be conclusively determined, it maintained that “the most probable cause of the sinking of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald was the loss of buoyancy and stability resulting from massive flooding of the cargo hold. The flooding of the cargo hold took place through ineffective hatch closures as boarding seas rolled along the spar deck.”

However, the Westlake, Ohio-based Lake Carriers’ Association, representing U.S.-flag vessel operators on the Great Lakes, responded in a letter to the National Transportation Safety Board in September 1977 disagreeing with the Coast Guard’s suggestion that the lack of attention to properly closing the hatch covers by the crew was responsible for the disaster. They said, however, they were inclined to accept that the Fitzgerald passed over the Six Fathom Shoal Area as reported by Cooper.

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War of Words: Battle of Nova Scotia resumes as mediation breaks down in 20-week Chronicle Herald strike

Today is Day 135 of the strike by journalists from Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 against the Dennis-family owned Chronicle Herald, which for years was the paper of record in Nova Scotia. I wrote elsewhere on Jan. 25 that the strike, which had been launched two days earlier, was a “battle that already has all the makings of an epic struggle.” Sixty-one members of the newsroom staff initially walked off the job Jan. 23. Since then, that number is down to 57, as some have moved on to other jobs.

Remaining newsroom management, along with the numerous contract freelance journalists and recent journalist graduates, working without bylines for the most part, often from home, on everything from an occasional to full-time basis, have kept the paper going.

Replacement workers. Scabs. Same thing. The terminology depends on your perspective. Hiring temporary or permanent replacement workers during a work stoppage is legal in Nova Scotia. The union has called repeatedly on Liberal provincial Premier Stephen McNeil and Labour Minister and Bedford MLA Kelly Regan to introduce an “anti-scab law now.” The pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

Several days of talks, guided by a provincial mediator appointed from the Nova Scotia Industrial Relations Board, which began May 27 – the first substantive discussions between the company and the union since the strike began 20 weeks ago – broke down June 1. During the five days of mediation the union agreed to a news blackout and suspended secondary picketing, at places such as Steele Subaru, which have refused to stop advertising in the paper, leafleting, boycotts and social media criticism of the company at the insistence of the mediator, but have resumed the tactics now talks have fallen apart and they are now longer bound by that commitment to the mediator.

How far apart are the two sides? “Talks between the Chronicle Herald and its striking newsroom workers broke off today when the company tabled a position worse than the one that forced workers to strike in January,” the union said in a news release June 1. “The company wants to lay off almost half the 57 newsroom workers,” the union said last Wednesday, “and drop the hourly pay rate by 20 per cent. It would move the work of 18 senior editors outside the union with an annual salary drop of $20,000 to $40,000 with no guarantee of continued employment. Most editors have more than 25 years of service with the Herald.”

“David Wilson, lead negotiator for the union, said the stance taken by The Chronicle Herald is ‘unworkable and insulting.’ He said the Herald’s position is “unlike that of any other newspaper company in the country.

“The employer says it needs to get the concessions that our union has given at other newspapers across the country and I say, ‘What concessions?’ “Outside of a few tweaks to allow for more flexibility, there have been no concessions at other newspapers,” he said.

“We presented a concessionary offer to the employer last week that should have piqued the employer’s interest. It had concessions we never anticipated we’d give, and yet it was still rejected.” Frank Campbell, Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 vice-president, reportedly told rabble.ca: “We changed direction on the pension plan – we had a defined benefit pension plan with the company and we made some suggestions about moving into a different plan, which they basically wanted from the start.” Defined benefit pension plans are considered the gold standard and pension plans under which a member’s pension is determined with reference to the member’s remuneration for each year of employment, or for a selected number of years of employment, or is expressed as a fixed amount for each year of employment, or as a fixed periodic amount. A defined benefit pension is just as it sounds. The payout, when it comes time to collect, is fixed to a certain formula.  The formula is typically a combination of years of service multiplied by a percentage of your average salary over the last several years of service.

More popular with private sector employers in recent years are defined-contribution plans, which are retirement plans in which a certain amount or percentage of money is set aside each year by a company for the benefit of the employee. The biggest downside to defined contribution plans is there is no way to know how much the plan will ultimately give the employee upon retiring. The amount contributed is fixed, but the benefit is not. In a June 2 statement, CWA Canada, headquartered in Ottawa, urged the striking Halifax newsroom workers to stand firm in the face of an “insulting” contract offer that “torpedoed mediation talks on Wednesday.”

President Martin O’Hanlon said he shares their “anger and bitter disappointment.” The Halifax Typographical Union’s bargaining team, he said, did everything it could to break the stalemate and get a deal. It “went well beyond its comfort level” in presenting a “major concessionary offer that addressed the company’s key demands. Members of Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 unanimously endorsed their bargaining committee at June 2 meeting.

“Any fair-minded employer would have jumped on the offer,” said O’Hanlon. Instead, the Herald’s response was a “worse offer than previously, lowlighted by even more layoffs” which proves “beyond doubt” that CEO Mark Lever is not “interested in an agreement unless the union is emasculated.

“This may be a long, hard battle,” said O’Hanlon, “but it is a battle we cannot afford to lose. We are fighting the good fight for quality jobs and quality journalism and you have the full support of the national union, the international, and all your newsroom colleagues … across the country.”

On the company side last week, Ian Scott, chief operating officer for the Halifax Herald Ltd., told CBC News he didn’t expect union members to walk away from the bargaining table last Wednesday.

“We were actually quite surprised,” Scott said, adding the company offered union members “the richest deal in Atlantic Canada in the newspaper industry, without question.”

On the Saturday morning of Jan. 23, when the strike began, management of the privately-owned Herald issued layoff notices – later suspended – to 18 members of the bargaining unit, including 12 editors, four photographers and two page technicians. One of those photographers was Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 president Ingrid Bulmer. Some of the striking editors were offered new non-union jobs in the company’s centralized production centre, while other workers were offered a year’s severance pay. However, all 18 layoff notices were quickly suspended.

“The result of a work stoppage, in this case a strike, suspends various aspects of the employment relationship, including the layoff notices,” Nancy Cook, confirmed in an email at the time to CBC News.

On June 3, after mediated talks broke down earlier in the week, the company issued a second list of names to be on future layoff notices to eight additional newsroom reporters and columnists, including veteran restaurant columnist and features writer Bill Spurr, making for a total of 26 intended layoff notices over the two rounds Jan. 23 and June 3.

While the first round of notices included some employment reoffers, the latest eight layoffs the company signalled Friday are intended to be permanent and do not include any work reoffers.  Add in the four newsies – Mike Gorman (political reporter), Dan Arsenault (crime reporter), Gordie Sutherland (web editor) and David Jackson (web editor) who have left voluntarily since the strike began, and you come to a grand total of 30 of 57 remaining unionized positions you have the company wanting to eliminate – or expressed another way, at 52.63 per cent – more than half the remaining unionized news staff. The company wants to eliminated the web desk and outsource that work to Toronto.

On Jan. 30, a week after the strike began, the striking Halifax journos launched their own online strike paper, called the Local Xpress (https://www.localxpress.ca/), registered in Nova Scotia as a non-profit – and upped the ante even more May 19 when they re-launched it as a full-service online news site to compete with the Chronicle Herald by partnering with Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.-based Village Media, using their digital content management platform. It seems in this war, both sides have turned to the come-from- aways of dreaded Upper Canada for help with their digital content management platforms. “This is an important partnership and launch for Village Media,” said Jeff Elgie, chief executive officer of Village Media in a May 19 statement. “Local XPress’ launch is a testament [to] the power of our digital platform and the flexibility we have in launching new communities quickly and effectively.”

Village Media was “born digital” with its first online news site, Elgie said, with SooToday.com, over 15 years ago.

Local XPress is completely independent from Village Media, Elgie said, although the partnership provides them use of the platform.

In addition to local news, the revamped Local Xpress website now offers weather, events, obituaries, and a wide range of community information, as well as national news feeds. After the venerable Guelph Mercury, known to generations simply as the “Merc” closed Jan. 29, laying off all 26 staff, Elgie moved up a planned expansion into Guelph by Village Media by about seven months to launch GuelphToday.com Feb. 8 – just nine days after the Merc’s demise – hiring reporters Rob O’Flanagan and Tony Saxon from the Guelph Mercury for GuelphToday.com, as its only full-time reporters, while former Merc columnists Scott Tracey and Owen Roberts agreed to write regular opinion pieces, while Village Media builds a roster of freelancers in Guelph.

“Our growth is directly linked to our focus on local stories written by local journalists and this is a belief we share with Local Xpress,” Elgie added.

Local Xpress is also accepting donations through a Patreon campaign (https://www.patreon.com/localxpress?ty=h). Patreon, a Palo Alto, California company, is a type of crowdfunding website that allows content creators to make money off the work they create. So far, they have attracted 188 patrons and $1,412 – with their goal being $1,000 per month.

The striking journalists working for the Local Xpress do not draw a salary from the website, but they do receive about $600 a week in strike pay through their parent union, the Communications Workers of America Syndicat des communications d’Amérique (CWA|SCA Canada), and can work at the Local Xpress in lieu of some of their picket line duties. Advertising revenue or donations will go toward expenses incurred by news gathering such as parking, mileage and website hosting costs.

“So far, we’ve paid all our own expenses,” Local Xpress said May 19. “The photographer or reporter you see at an event paid for the gas to get there, parking costs, etc. – right down to their camera and tape recorder batteries. And we receive no salaries other than our regular strike pay, which we’d get even if we didn’t work on the Xpress. “Our union local and our parent union, CWA Canada, have also shouldered all the costs so far of starting up and maintaining our site. And while our news is free, Internet start-up costs aren’t – helping to fund us will mean that over time we can make our site better (the under-the-hood stuff) and add more content.”

If the strike is resolved, Local Xpress will be shut down.

That’s looking like a big if right now with no new talks between the sides planned. “Keep your eye on the strike that started Saturday in Nova Scotia when Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 struck the Chronicle Herald at 12:01 a.m. AST, the minute they were in a legal position to do so,” I wrote Jan. 25. “While most of the recent attention has been on Postmedia, management proposed more than 1,232 changes to the now expired old contract. All the big issues are in play here. The CH wants to eliminate its digital deskers and outsource the work to Toronto. Other work is being outsourced to Brunswick News in New Brunswick (i.e. Irving). Scab journalists are now producing the local CH news. The Communications Workers of America (CWA), the Newspaper Guild sector’s union parent in Washington, D.C. have very deep pockets, but whether this is the fight they want to stand or fall on in terms of newspapers, which is only a small part of their representation, is hard to say. Sometimes those type of choices are forced on you. As for the CH, it is controlled by the Dennis family, and has been for years, making it the last independent daily of any note in Canada. This is not Postmedia or Glacier or Transcontinental chain ownership. What it is though is a battle that already has all the makings of an epic struggle in an industry where I wish I could say I’ve seen some successful newspaper strikes. Truth is, I haven’t, I’m sorry to say.”

I was working at the Peterborough Examiner when Chicago Typographical Union No. 16, Chicago Web Printing Pressmen’s Union Local 7 and Chicago Mailers Union Local 2 struck the Chicago Tribune on the evening of July 18, 1985 when their contracts with the Chicago Newspaper Publishers’ Association, a collective bargaining association to which the Tribune belonged, expired. The unions were fighting the introduction of new technology and changes in work rules the company sought, including demands for more control of hiring and assignments. In response to the strike, the Tribune began hiring permanent replacement workers. “Violence ensued shortly thereafter,” wrote the Chicago-based United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in a March 1996 decision related to enforcement of a National Labour Relations Board order. “Incidents ranged from the relatively benign, such as unsolicited orders for food deliveries or magazine subscriptions, to more dangerous activities such as the slashing of tires, death threats, and the stabbing of a Tribune delivery driver.  On one occasion, mounted police were called to disperse a mob that had obstructed the path of the Tribune’s delivery trucks.  Stones thrown by the mob injured one of the truck drivers, a policeman, and other Tribune employees.”

The striking Chicago Web Printing Pressmen’s Union Local 7 unconditionally offered to return to work on Jan. 30, 1986.

The printers’ strike, however, continued and lasted 40 months.

Little more than a decade later was the Detroit newspaper strike of July 1995 to December 2000.  Teamsters Locals 372 and 2040 and allied AFL-CIO unions, including the Newspaper Guild of Detroit Local 34022, making up the Metropolitan Council of Newspaper Unions (MCNU), struck the Detroit Newspaper Agency (DNA), as it was known in 1995, which ran the non-editorial business and production operations of the Detroit Free Press, owned at the time by now defunct Knight-Ridder, and the Detroit News, owned by Gannett, under a Joint Operating Agreement  (JOA), on July 13, 1995, with about 2,500 members of six different unions going on strike. Joint Operating Agreements came about as a result of the federal Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970, which allowed for the formation of JOA’s, as they are commonly known, among competing newspaper operations within the same market area. It enshrined in law special exemptions, dating back to 1933 and the E.W. Scripps Co.-owned Albuquerque Tribune in New Mexico, to antitrust laws that ordinarily prohibit such co-operation between competitors, based on the theory it would allow for the survival of multiple daily newspapers in a given urban market where circulation was declining. In practice, however, noble their origins may have been, JOA’s haven’t had that intended result in many cases, especially by the time the 1990s rolled around.

By the seven-week mark of the strike in early September 1995, about 40 per cent of the unionized editorial staff had crossed the picket line to return to work, including Mitch Albom, the Detroit  Free Press sports columnist, who was the newspaper’s best known and most popular writer, and who two years later in 1997 would go onto publish the landmark bestseller, Tuesdays with Morrie, about his dozen or so Tuesday visits in the fall of 1995 in suburban Boston with Morrie Schwartz, a former professor of his at Brandeis University, who Albom had lost touch with until he saw him interviewed about his Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, by Ted Koppel on ABC News Nightline. Schwartz died on Nov. 4, 1995.  Albom began his Sept. 6, 1995 column about the newspaper strike with one word: “Enough.” But he also wrote that he would remain a member of the Newspaper Guild and “give much of what I earn to the people still on strike.” Albom said in an interview, “Newspapers are fire stations, they are police stations, and they should not be shut down.” Albom, “who tried to broker an agreement that would return strikers to work during negotiations,” reported James Bennet of the New York Times on Sept. 6, 1995 in a story headlined, “After 7 Weeks, Detroit Newspaper Strike Takes a Violent Turn,” said that he “thought both sides in the dispute were wrong and that he did not want to be seen as supporting either. ‘I didn’t want to be waved as a flag,’” Albom said.

Ten years later in 2005, Albom and four editors who had read the column and allowed it to go to print were briefly suspended from the Detroit Free Press after Albom filed an April 3, 2005 column that stated Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson, two former Michigan State basketball players, who had gone onto the NBA, were in attendance at an NCAA Final Four semi-final game on, when they were not.  The players had told Albom they planned to attend, and filing Friday before the game, Albom wrote as if the players were there, including that they wore Michigan State green. But Cleaves and Richard’s plans changed at the last minute and they never attended.  Albom was in attendance at the game, but failed to check on the two players’ presence.

Nineteen months after it began, the union leadership said it would call off the strike on Feb. 14, 1997, if the two papers would rehire striking union members. The companies rejected the offer for the most part, saying they would only rehire a fraction of the striking workers, as new vacancies allowed, because they wouldn’t let go of they any of their replacement workers hired during the 19-month strike, resulting in the strike being transformed into a lockout, which continued for years. On July 7, 2000, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. overturned earlier decisions by the National Labor Relations Board that the unions and their members were the victims of a series of unfair labor practice actions committed by the newspapers during the labor dispute. The last of the six unions settled in December, 2000, and, more than five years after it began, the Detroit newspaper strike was over.

And the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild Local 37082 49-day strike against The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2000-2001 took place at a time I sat on the Newspaper Guild’s Washington-based international sector council as vice-president for Eastern Canada. At the time of the strike, the two papers had been operating under a JOA since May 23, 1983, with the Seattle Times owned by the Blethen family’s Seattle Times Co., and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer owned by Hearst Corp. When the dispute ended, the Seattle Times newsroom employees wound up settling in terms of wages for what the company was offering when the strike began, but the two-tier pay system was eliminated as a result of the strike, and the amount the company paid toward health insurance premiums went up from 66 percent to 75 percent, so one might argue the union won at least a marginal victory. The Hearst Corp.’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer, or P-I, as it is known in Seattle, ceased print operations on March 17, 2009, becoming an online only publication with a vastly reduced news staff of about 20 people rather than the 165 it had, and a site with mostly commentary, advice and links to other news sites, along with some original reporting. The JOA ended with the cessation of the P-I print edition.

Parker Donham’s March 9 post on his Contrarian blog (http://contrarian.ca/2016/03/09/why-the-herald-workers-are-losing-and-how-they-could-win/), headlined “Why the Herald workers are losing – and how they could win,” where he writes the “notion that 1940s-style industrial union tactics can win the day for journalists in 2016 is delusional,” was probably a hard analysis for the striking HTU workers to read, as I’ve noted here and elsewhere before, but still not without merit, in my view.  A look outside the box is often a good thing even if you don’t see the box.

Wrote Donham in part in his post: “The striking journalists have also picketed various Herald advertisers – as if driving revenue away from a business whose problems stem from an industry-wide hemorrhage of revenue somehow served their interests.

“The frustration and fear workers feel as they watch their livelihood – their calling – slip away is understandable. But the notion that 1940s-style industrial union tactics can win the day for journalists in 2016 is delusional.

“Whatever faint hope the strikers have rests in part on public opinion. It does not help their cause to construct artificial tests in the form of secondary picket lines, then condemn as enemies anyone who fails these tests. It would make much more sense to court Herald readers, including the mayor and the members of the Greater Halifax Partnership, by demonstrating what journalistic craft and talent means to a modern city.

“Chances of a six-day-a-week print edition of the Chronicle-Herald existing in 2020 are next to nil. Everyone involved – workers, owners, readers, community leaders – must adjust to this new reality.

“That’s the one shining light in this dispiriting conflict. When they aren’t wasting their time on picket lines and posting gratuitous insults, the striking journalists have been producing a creditable daily news website.

“News stories in Local Xpress (http://www.localxpress.ca/) have consistently set a higher journalistic standard than the strike-breaker copy that fills the Herald’s pages. No surprise there. The best Herald writers and editors are very good at what they do.”

Perhaps with a touch of prescience, writing more than two months before it happened, Donham suggested the “Local Xpress could be so much more. A professionally produced news website aimed at the interests and temperament of traditional Herald readers poses a bigger threat to the Herald’s owners than pickets at the local Ford dealership, or Facebook insults directed at the mayor.

“As a condition of receiving strike pay, Herald workers walk the picket line 20 hours a week. The requirement is reduced, but not eliminated, for workers who contribute to Local Xpress. The strikers’ smarter course would be to abandon picket lines altogether and throw their hearts, souls, and talents into the task of beating the Herald at its own game.

‘The strikers can report news better, faster, and more accurately than the desperate substitutes struggling to fill their dead-tree shoes.

‘Instead of picketing advertisers, the strikers should be luring them to their news site – with irresistible copy and advertising opportunities. Sell ads. Sell subscriptions. Offer supportive readers a chance to contribute to the survival of good journalism in Halifax. Lobby civic leaders in grownup conversations, not by shouting at them from picket lines.

‘I don’t know what will become of the Herald,” Donham wrote in March, “or its striking workers. But a top-notch local news website run by capable journalists seems a far better bet than hoping for a return to good old days that are gone forever.”

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Who shot the video store and how did Glenview, Illinois-based Family Video survive to thrive and still rent movies (and now sell pizza)?

While I well remember moving back to Peterborough from downtown Toronto in 1985 and living on Union Street in Peterborough, Ontario, some of the technological markers and milestones that came with the 1980s, were novelties at first; their impact on the popular culture, I only came to fully appreciate a bit later.

Take VCRs and the notion of renting videos for home movie viewing for instance. As a print journalism student at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario, writing for the college paper, The Pioneer, I had written a bit about the landmark prosecution under the old federal Copyright Act of Kawartha TV & Stereo at Park Street South and Lansdowne Street West in Peterborough in 1983, after an RCMP investigation involving allegedly bootleg videotapes. And I had also casually followed the analog videotape format cassette contest over the preceding decade between Sony’s Betamax video cassette, launched in 1975, and JVC’ s rival VHS cassette, which debuted a year later in 1976 – and eventually became the market leader after a long battle between the two (Sony announced last November it will stop selling Betamax video cassettes in March. Most studios stopped releasing videos in VHS format in 2006 and the last videocassette recorder (VCR) was manufactured in October 2008). But I hadn’t followed it all that closely since I didn’t own a VCR at the time that would play either of the incompatible formats.

Ted’s Place on Charlotte Street in downtown Peterborough changed all that for me in 1985 when I moved back to Peterborough, Ontario after a five-year hiatus living in Peterborough, New Hampshire, Boston, Belleville, Kingston, Cornwall, Oshawa and Toronto. You didn’t need a VCR renting movies from Ted Leveck. Ted would rent the machine to you also, along with the movies. As I recall, the rental VCR machine came in a bright radioactive Yellow 3 hard carrying case (sure to deter to theft by customers, I suppose, or perhaps a crime-of-opportunity mugging from a passerby, albeit not a common occurrence in mid-1980s Peterborough).

The VCR machine and yellow carrying case weighed, oh, I don’t know, about a ton combined, I suspect, as you struggled bravely to carry them either down the street home, or back to your vehicle, depending where you lived in relation to Ted’s Place, which you then set up when you got home to perhaps watch Back to the Future, Witness or The Breakfast Club for the first time. Picture, if you will, carrying the VCR in its yellow Ted’s Place case, as being in an admittedly less discrete way, due to its vibrant yellow colour, something like a White House military aide carrying the so-called “nuclear football,” more properly known as the president’s leather emergency satchel, which got its nickname because an early version of the SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan), the United States’ nuclear war plan code-named “dropkick,” and you’ve pretty much got the picture of both the mid-1980s VCR rental carrying case and geopolitics in the Age of Reagan.

At its zenith in the late 1980s, Ted Leveck had 100 VCR machines on any given day for rent going out the door and a backroom chock-a-block full of 10,000 VHS movies. Ted rented movies for almost 35 years from his location at 290 Charlotte St. in downtown Peterborough with his rental price of $2 each or three for $5 remaining unchanged. He closed his doors in the fall of 2013, two years after his wife, Brenda, died. Ted told Lance Anderson of Peterborough This Week that he wanted to retire while his health was good, and that he had other things he’d like to focus on, such as disc jokey-karaoke business, which he’d been operating as a sideline for years. “I like doing that and will have more time to do what I want to do,” Leveck said (http://www.mykawartha.com/news-story/4186863-ted-s-place-closing-down/).

When I found myself living and working in Yellowknife in 2001, Choice Video at 4915 48th St. was a good and loyal friend through many a January winter night in the Northwest Territories. When the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission visited Thompson, Manitoba at Riverlodge Place at 351 Jasper Ave. for two days of hearings on Sept. 25 and 26, 2012, I found myself during a break chatting with Commissioner Marie Wilson, a well-known former CBC broadcast journalist and manager from Yellowknife, who spent most of her career in the North, and has been married for 40 years to former NWT premier Stephen Kakfwi, who is Slavey and from Fort Good Hope in the Sahtu in the lower Mackenzie Valley. Stephen was premier when I lived in the NWT and we joked about how in Yk 15 years ago, it wasn’t at all unusual for a journalist to bump into the premier on a Saturday night at Choice Video as they both browsed for a video to enjoy at their leisure. Perhaps not so likely in Toronto. Sadly, Choice Video closed its doors in 2013.

What killed the video movie rental business over the last five years with the exception of a handful of interesting and exceptional outliers such as Chicago-based Family Video is still a matter of some debate. Netflix, the California company founded in 1997 and famous for riding the tide from its original core business model of mailing out DVDs to customers for rental to becoming a huge provider of video-on-demand via the Internet when the DVD business died one day in 2011, is often blamed as a major culprit, but really all Netflix was doing was adapting to at-home movie watchers trending toward video-on-demand; a trend that impacted their old business model just as negatively as bricks-and-mortar video stores chains, such as Blockbuster, which operated internationally in the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Ireland, Japan, Peru and the United Kingdom.

Blockbuster’s major competitors in the United States and Canada included Wilsonville, Oregon-based Hollywood Video, founded in 1988, and Dothan, Alabama-based Movie Gallery, founded also in 1985 like Blockbuster. Movie Gallery eventually took over the larger Hollywood Video 10 years ago in January 2005, but all three entities – Blockbuster, Hollywood Video and Movie Gallery all ended up in bankruptcy proceedings.

While Netflix and video-on-demand via the Internet is routinely proffered as the explanation for Blockbusters demise, other observers blame the company’s penchant for negotiating top-of-the market expensive leases at many of its locations that it was locked into and unable to renegotiate with its landlords when everything went south, combined with its infamous “late fees,” which were deeply unpopular with customers, as other important factors in killing the chain.

Truth is the drop in demand for DVD rentals, combined with an ill-timed price increase in 2011, also resulted in a heavy hit for Netflix, which lost 800,000 U.S. subscribers in the third quarter of 2011, while its stock price plunged 35 percent and the company lost more than $11 billion in value, before rebounding.

Blockbuster closed its doors here in Canada in the fall of 2011 because Grant Thornton Ltd., the court-appointed bankruptcy receiver of Blockbuster Canada Co., couldn’t find a buyer for the rental retailer’s remaining 253 retail stores and related operations.

In Canada, Blockbuster was also competing against Rogers, which closed its Rogers Plus corporate store in the Burntwood Plaza here in Thompson, across the street on Selkirk Avenue from where Blockbuster was in Thompson Plaza, in December 2011, less than four months after Blockbuster closed on the other side of the street, and just as the Blu-ray optical disc format, which has more than five times the storage capacity of traditional DVDs and can hold up to 25GB on a single-layer disc and 50GB on a dual-layer disc, appeared for one brief moment to matter before video-on-demand left both formats on the shelf.

Mark Matiasek, then general manager of Thompson Community Development Corporation, better known as Thompson Unlimited, the city’s economic development corporation established in 2003, called what was happening to video chain stores in Thompson and elsewhere at the time an example of “globalization at the local level.” By mid-April 2012, Rogers had exited the video rental market across Canada at its remaining 460 locations. With the video business making up less than one per cent of the company’s annual revenues, Rogers said it had been planning its exit since 2009 from what it also said was a money-losing rental business for them. A big part of Rogers’ strategy to meet and beat that competition was Rogers On Demand Online, offering premium produced video entertainment on the web with on-demand access to hit TV shows, movies and clips along with web-only exclusives and more, “anywhere, anytime,” Leigh-Ann Popek, senior manager for media relations for Rogers Communications Inc. in Toronto, said in an interview Dec. 5, 2011. Members could watch their favorite shows and discover new ones, whether at home, at the office or on the go. Rogers Communications Inc. operates Rogers Wireless, Canada’s largest wireless voice and data communications services provider, Rogers Media and Rogers Cable. In September 2010, Rogers Communications Inc. announced it had nearly 250,000 Rogers On Demand Online customers, 10 per cent of its cable customer base at the time, and was ready to roll out Rogers On Demand Online rentals Canada-wide as of October 2010.

Englewood, Colorado-based market research firm IHS said in April 2012 the number of video stores had been in contraction since lower cost movie rental kiosks and online streaming offerings, such as on-demand movies and services such as Netflix entered the mainstream. According to statistics from IHS, 2012 would mark the first year that the number of TV shows and movies legally streamed and downloaded from online sources would surpass the demand for those films and shows on physical discs, such as DVDs.

IHS said at the peak of popularity for movie rentals in 1989 there were more than 70,000 stores, including grocery stores and local rental shops, offering movie rentals in the United States. Just 11 years later in 2000 that number had already dropped dramatically to 27,882. The number comes from a  study that included stores that offered more than 100 copies of movies for rent and derived at least half of their incomes from video and DVD rentals.

Blockbuster was once the king of movie rental stores. At its peak, it had about 60,000 employees and more than 9,000 stores. On May 24, 2011, Blockbuster announced that that 146 stores, accounting for approximately 35 per cent of the company’s stores in Canada, would be shut down effective June 18, 2011, resulting in the loss of about 1,400 employees jobs.

On Aug. 31, 2011 Blockbuster announced that no buyer could be found for the remaining 253 stores that were acceptable to the court-appointed bankruptcy receiver, and that it would wind down operations and liquidate all remaining Blockbuster stores by Dec. 31, 2011, allowing it to benefit from the holiday shopping season in markets that warranted it.

Blockbuster opened its first store in Dallas in 1985 and in Canada in 1989. The formerly profitable Blockbuster Canada was an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of the long-troubled American parent company Blockbuster Inc. On March 31, 2010, Blockbuster Canada provided an unlimited guarantee toward the financial obligations of Blockbuster Inc. to Hollywood movie studios to ensure the continued supply of DVD product to Blockbuster stores in both countries. Blockbuster in the United States, however, filed for bankruptcy protection less than six months later on Sept. 23, 2010 and Dish Network, another Englewood, Colorado-based company, purchased its American assets on April 11, 2011. Through mid-January 2011, however, Blockbuster Inc. racked up some US $70 million in unpaid obligations to the studios, for which they demanded payment from Blockbuster Canada in February 2011, sealing the demise of the Canadian operation.

Blockbuster’s store here had good enough revenues that when 146 stores, accounting for approximately 35 per cent of the company’s stores in Canada, were closed on June 18, 2011, Thompson wasn’t among them. But when on Aug. 3, 2011 Blockbuster announced that no buyer could be found for the remaining 253 Canadian Blockbuster stores that were acceptable to the court-appointed bankruptcy receiver, and that it would wind down operations at the rest of the stores by Dec. 31, 2011. The Thompson Blockbuster, located in Thompson Plaza, closed in September.

Believe it or not, there are still about 35 Blockbuster video stores converted from franchises to cheaper-to-operate Dish Network licensees that lived on after the parent company shut down in January 2014, becoming what are often called “zombie” stores in Alaska and Texas, where 19 of them are owned by Alan Payne of Austin, Texas-based Border Entertainment. He is still running  10 Blockbuster stores in Texas along the United States-Mexico border, one each in Mission, McAllen, Edinburg, Harlingen, Weslaco and five in El Paso, and another nine stores in Alaska, including in Sarah Palin’s hometown of Wasilla.

Rentrak Corporation, a Portland, Oregon-based global media measurement and research company serving the entertainment industry, reports the U.S. video rental business has collapsed from more than 19,000 brick-and-mortar stores at its peak to 4,445 as of last month. But Chicago area Family Video has added stores in recent years, “attracting customers who don’t like the selection at Redbox or who don’t want to commit to a digital subscription with Netflix,” Indianapolis Star staff reporter James Briggs notes in a fascinating story published Dec. 30, 2015, which you can read here in its entirety at http://www.indystar.com/story/money/2015/12/30/you-can-still-rent-movies-indy-family-videos-ceo-explains-why-wont-change/77475656/

Redbox Automated Retail, LLC, headquartered in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois, was founded in 2002 by McDonald’s – as in the hamburger folks from Illinois also –and its distinctive bright red kiosks, which take up less than 12 square feet of a retailer’s space, are within a five-minute drive of nearly 68 per cent of the population of the United States, says Outerwall Inc., of Bellevue, Washington, which now owns Redbox. The company’s signature red colour kiosks are located at convenience stores, fast food restaurants, grocery stores, mass retailers and pharmacies.

The company test-marketed the Redbox concept in Canada for three years from February 2012 to February 2015 before pulling the plug on its Canadian operation, citing low demand.

In 1946, Clarence Hoogland started Midstates Appliance & Supply Company, a wholesale distribution business, which would eventually lead circuitously to the founding of Glenview, Illinois-based Family Video in 1978. Clarence’s, son, Charlie Hoogland, began to run the company in 1953. It was under Charlie that Midstates Appliance & Supply Company, a distributor for Magnetic Video Corporation, which became the first corporation to release theatrical motion pictures onto Betamax and VHS that year, found itself stuck with a bun of unwanted videos in 1977. After some legal maneuvering, Family Video set up shop to rent the videos out in 1978. Today, Family Video has 777 stores and more than 7,000 employees in 19 U.S. states and Canada. Most are in the U.S. Midwest, with about 80 video stores in Indiana, including eight stores in Indianapolis. Family Video also has nine stores in Canada, all in Ontario and all but one in southwestern Ontario, after expanding into the Canadian market in 2012. There are stores in Burlington, Hamilton, LaSalle, Sarnia, St. Thomas, Tecumseh, Welland, Windsor and Sault Ste. Marie in Northern Ontario. The stores are open seven days per week from 10 a.m. until 11 p.m. American locations are open also from 10 a.m. until 11 p.m. or midnight.

There are more than 30 Family Video stores, with their evergreen-coloured awnings, fronted by tall glass obelisks and a slanted orange logo, in the suburban Chicago area. In 2012, privately owned Family Video, surpassed Blockbuster as the largest movie and game rental chain in the United States.

Family Video owns its own real estate and has shrunk the retail space of its stores from 7,000 square feet to 5,000 square feet in recent years as more compact DVDs replaced bigger video boxes and he stores didn’t need as much space. Legacy Pro is the real estate division of.

In the early 1980s, Legacy Pro began buying old gas stations and converting them to house Family Video stores. Legacy Pro has more than 800 properties across 19 states, primarily in the Midwest. With build-to-suit locations, shopping centers, and pre-existing retail space, it has a diverse collection of tenants from Fortune 500 companies to local community retailers, usually anchored by a Family Video store in high-traffic, high visibility neighborhood locations.

The current company president, Keith Hoogland, grandson of the founder, has headed Family Video since 1994, and told the Indianapolis Star last month, “If you ever go by our stores on a Friday night, at 6:30 or 7, you’re going to see a lot of people in our stores. It’s cranking. And it’s fun.”

He went onto say, “What happened is people stopped thinking it’s cool to go to brick-and-mortar video stores. But the reason they stopped is Blockbuster and Hollywood closed, and Movie Gallery, so there’s this void on the East Coast,” Hoogland said. “We were the third-largest chain and now we’re the largest. If we were all over the country, I think people would still be going to brick-and-mortar stores and renting videos.”

Hoogland argues people never stopped loving the experience of browsing in their neighborhood video store. Most just ran out of options to do that.

With at least 1,500 square feet of excess retail space in many of its stores as DVDs replaced bigger video boxes on the shelf, Hoogland brainstormed about how that space might used in some of the locations. His solution. Teaming up with Marco’s Pizza of Toledo, Ohio. Marco’s Pizza, founded in 1978 by Pasquale “Pat” Giammarco, is one of the fastest-growing pizza franchise operations in the United States. The Toledo-based delivery pizza franchisor opened 116 stores in 2015, and is expecting to open another 150 this year. Pizza is a $46- billion market in the United States that continues to grow at a rate of about one to two per cent per year.

Marco’s Pizza has more than doubled its national footprint since joining forces with Family Video in 2012. It operates now in 29 U.S. states from California to Florida and outside of the United States has locations in the Bahamas and Panama.

In 2014, “the duo experienced phenomenal growth with the opening of 52 locations,” says Bryon Stephens, president and chief operating officer of Marco’s Pizza, which has an order window inside most Family Video locations for easy pizza carryout service. The cut-through window between the two stores let’s the pizza smell waft into the Fmily Video side from the Marco’s Pizza size and perhaps inspire movie video browsers to order a pizza without ever leaving the video aisles.

Delivery customers benefit, too, because Family Video offers delivery of movies with online pizza orders, and people can give their movies to pizza delivery drivers to take back to the store.

As a privately held company,  Family Video doesn’t have to disclose exact numbers, but the company says they opened around 18 video stores in 2012 and more than 10 in 2013. In October 2014, Family Video’s same-store sales rose 4½ per cent over the year before. According to Hoogland, the company’s same-store sales, which indicate that a retailer is growing without opening stores, have gone up in 29 of the past 30 years, with 2004 as the only exception.

IBISWorld estimated in 2013 the average storefront video rental shop has a razor-thin 3½ percent estimated profit margin.

Family Video uses low prices and forgiving late-return policies to build a loyal base of customers who live within three miles of a store.

“In Chicago or New York or LA, we kind of have this assumption that everybody’s using on-demand and iTunes and Netflix,” Russ Crupnick, video industry analyst for Port Washington, New York-based NPD Group Inc., told the Chicago Sun-Times two years ago. “The reality is that the majority of people don’t. I always thought the experience of being in the store, browsing, getting recommendations from a clerk that knew what they were talking about were very valuable experiences. Frankly, I don’t think they’re experiences that digital has replicated quite as well.”

As for the Hooglands, they have always been entrepreneurial, going right back to the beginning in the mid-1940s with Midstates Appliance & Supply Company. As the Chicago Sun-Times noted in its Jan. 17, 2014 story headlined, “If you saw Family Video’s profits, you’d open a video store too” the Hooglands have sold dial-up Internet service, commercial coffee machines, mood rings, 10-foot satellite dishes and microwave popcorn, among other things. The also own a fibre-optic network near Peoria, Illinois and a chain of fitness centres.

“We said, ‘Boy, when the video business ends, if it ever does, what are we going to be left with?’” Hoogland told the Chicago Sun-Times (http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/7/71/790445/if-you-saw-family-videos-profits-youd-open-a-video-store-too). “Let’s say we were leasing a store. We moved the store down to the corner where the gas station was. And guess what happened? Our business went way up.

“McDonald’s flips burgers to buy their properties,” Hoogland says. “We rented movies to buy real estate.”

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