It takes a community newspaper to raise a village
In person, June Callwood was soft-spoken in speech and polite in manner, more matron than literary giant. But beneath that kindly sweet exterior was a force of nature, with the beating heart of a great humanitarian, and the steely soul of a warrior for social justice.
It was 1987 and as a cub reporter working at the North Essex News in Belle River and The Tilbury Times, I was fortunate enough to interview Callwood. She was in town to receive the Quill Award from the Windsor Press Club, and we were sitting in a hotel room, chatting about her roots in both Belle River and Tilbury. An award-winning Globe and Mail reporter at the time, she was already leaving her mark as an author and social activist. Yet the strength of her local ties was mostly unknown, except to the editor who assigned her story to me.
Callwood, like so many other great journalists, started small, at a community-oriented daily known as the Brantford Expositor. That newspaper, a fixture in the county of Brant, Ontario since before Canada was a country, is still publishing under Postmedia Network Inc. However, its much younger competitor, the Brant News, is at death’s door.
The Brant News is one of 41 community newspapers that Dave Bidini, a rock musician, author, former newspaper columnist and now publisher of the West End Phoenix in Toronto, writes about in his hard-hitting response to Postmedia and Torstar Corporation’s “eviscerating” of most of the publications they swapped earlier this week. He points out that many excellent journalists started out working on such papers. He argues these “breeding grounds” for the likes of Callwood and Stephen Leacock have become “bereft.”
Thirty years ago, long before Callwood or I or anyone else could see this evisceration coming — not to mention what Bidini describes as the hacking off of limbs throughout the corporate-owned larger newspapers— this Canadian Newspaper Hall of Famer was praising journalism as a weapon to fight social ills like poverty.
“It’s a good craft. It’s an honourable craft. It’s an important craft,” Callwood told me. “I have an enormous respect for the craft.”
By this time, Callwood had already left her mark as a social activist. She had established Casey House in Toronto, the world’s first residential hospice for AIDS victims that she named after her son, who had been killed by a drunk driver. She set up Digger House for homeless kids and Nellie’s for women in crisis. At the time, Nellie’s took care of about 400 pregnant teenagers a year who wanted to give birth rather than have an abortion.
Callwood was nevertheless strongly pro-choice and a founding member of the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League. An outspoken feminist, she was also blunt in her opinions about the Catholic Church she was raised in, and of its practices. When discussing how she restored the Belle River gravesite of her grandfather, Judge Harold James Callwood of Tilbury, she mused about being buried next to him then quickly shrugged off the idea.
“I don’t want to be buried anywhere. I just want to be thrown away,” is how my story on Callwood ended.
She was also shrewd and sensitive enough to set the record straight, especially if she knew it would rankle the good people still living in her hometown. Callwood was gracious enough to send me a note on Globe and Mail letterhead praising the “wonderful” profile I wrote about her, but took issue with my reference to the Callwood side of her family as warm-hearted, unlike the Lavoies on her mother’s side. That bit of family lore came from another profile in the Globe and Mail by Judy Steed who noted Callwood’s mother was “mean.”
“She wasn’t,” Callwood wrote me. “She had a temper, as I do, and she could be fierce when addressing something that she didn’t approve — another quality I share — but she was never mean.”
Callwood also wrote books, a lot of them. Her subjects ranged from ghostwritten autobiographies of former Canadian Auto Workers president Bob White, film director Otto Preminger and American surgeon and medical pioneer Dr. Charles Mayo, to works on history and psychology.
After her death on April 14, 2007, a National Post editorial lauded Callwood as one who “didn’t require the judgment of God or reward of heaven to exist like a secular Mother Teresa.” A Kingston Whig-Standard columnist called her “Canada’s social conscience” and noted her answer to CBC-TV host George Stromboulopolos’s question about whether she believed in God:
“I believe in kindness,” said Callwood who pointed out that the tiny act of holding a door open for a stranger changes that other person just a little. “Great consideration for one another. That’s what’s going to save the world.”
After my interview with Callwood, in addition to the kindness she showed in sending me that letter, she also accepted my invitation to serve as a parade marshall in her hometown of Belle River the following summer. I was a member of a committee that organized the parade and thought she would make a great hometown celebrity hero.
So what’s all this reminiscing about Callwood have to do with Bidini and journalism and the pending closure of most of those 41 newspapers that, face it, the majority of Canadians have never heard of?
The answer is one word: Community.
The roots of Callwood’s activism, of her passion and good works, were deeply buried in the rich soil of her beloved Belle River. In Margaret Fraser’s 1986 book Twelve Weeks in Spring, she told the story of how a group of friends’ supporting someone who was dying of cancer was an example of “the human tribe functioning at its best.” In our discussion Callwood expanded on that, saying Belle River was the first place she saw that phenomenon:
“People were so good, they took care of each other and took responsibility if someone was sick or had died. People had a sense of being a tribe, a human tribe.”
She added her mission was in “trying to make the whole world a village and it all comes from Belle River.”
Those quotes were gold to someone like me who was making his way into the ink-stained trade. I graduated from university a year earlier and started my career at the two newspapers that were run by mentors and heroes of mine — publisher Terry McConnell and editor Don Button — and whose history (before and after me) included many journalists I have admired.
It was at The Tilbury Times and North Essex News I learned how to write, interview, take photographs and develop them in a darkroom, write headlines and lay out the newspapers. I waxed columns of type through a machine and lined them up on the page. I remember using Rubylith, the red masking tape we laid down that was sensitive to blue and green light but was insensitive to red light. (There was also Amberlith, a yellow film, but no Greenlith so the stoplight analogy ended there I guess.)
We also broke ground at those two papers, and at subsequent community newspapers I worked at in British Columbia and back again in Ontario. We covered town hall meetings and broke scoops while reporting on local hockey and baseball results. Once, we got a tip about a report on a local landfill site — a red-hot topic in the long-suffering host community of the dump in Maidstone Township, next to Belle River. The tip came after we printed that week’s paper. We pulled an all-nighter and produced an ‘EXTRA!’ edition that we printed on a broadsheet of paper and hand-inserted into that week’s edition the next day.
Sleep-deprived and suffering hayfever at the time, and with an infant son at home, I slept that day while the paper was delivered to subscribers. They awoke to discover their community was on the short list for a new landfill, learning about it from us before the “big” city daily next door, the Windsor Star, would tell its readers.
Today, I ply my trade at the Windsor Star, feeling fortunate to still be working at the paper and in an industry that, to use Bidini’s word, feels like it’s being eviscerated. I’ve heard the metaphor “vaporized” used too but you get the picture.
The hundreds of people at the community papers that will be closing, and those already shuttered like the Guelph Mercury and the many colleagues I have worked with who have left (mostly unwillingly) the Star, represent the human face of a tragic story being told using words like “synergies” and “legacy” costs, corporate euphemisms to describe and justify what’s going on.
I think synergy is a concept that was covered in a chemistry course I never studied in high school, so its relevance here escapes me. And although I’ve always thought legacy was a positive word, in my case as a long-time employee it’s a very bad thing, like cancerous tumours: remove the damn things and quick, the corporate media titans demand, or risk killing the whole body of the newspaper!
Most people probably have trouble sympathizing with the plight of journalists. After all, the craft that Callwood praised is reviled today and put in the same category as politics. Besides, people are losing their jobs all over. And maybe our trade is antiquated like buggy whip making and it’s time to move on to other, better things. Digital things.
I’m sure the last buggy whip maker had a sad story to tell and left his mark. Why is journalism different?
Except that it is different. Especially community newspapers.
We are a mirror to the communities we serve. We are read by people like June Callwood. We hired the likes of Callwood and Robertson Davies and others who would go on to create better worlds for all of us, who helped sustain and improve on the human tribe.
Community newspapers hired people like me, too. The communities we serve are made up of people like George Birch, one of many appreciative readers and contributors to the North Essex News. (Oh, we had our fair share of critics and haters too but that’s okay; our tent was large enough for everyone .) He would faithfully feed me results of his baseball team’s scores every Monday.
On the weekend Callwood served as parade marshall in Belle River, I ended up missing her return to her hometown and the event. My gallbladder exploded and I was laid up in hospital. Among the cards and gifts I received was a baseball signed by Birch and his entire team.
“That’s community,” I said to myself, tossing the ball in the air, the same community I served when I held in my hand that EXTRA! edition about the landfill.
It’s the village Callwood lovingly modelled her world after, the same one that’s being razed to the ground before our very eyes.
Claudio D’Andrea has been a journalist for 30 years, writing and editing for newspapers, magazine and online publications. You can read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Twitter.
