A lot has changed in 55 years on the North Shore. A lot has changed in five years.
But then again,a lot has stayed the same.
In 1969, the North Shore News was created, under a different name, with founder Peter Speck forging connections with readers and community partners that remain to this day.
In 2019, we celebrated our 50th anniversary with an absolutely massive special section. It was a big honkin’ unit, and it darn near killed us putting it all together. But it was also incredibly touching to see that all those community partners were still there with us – that’s why the section was so big – and it was a joy to put it all together.
Little did we know that just one year later, the media industry, and nearly every other industry except for the toilet paper and hand sanitizer industries, would get punched in the gut by a global pandemic.
The North Shore News is not the same as it was five years ago, but we’re still standing, as are so many of those community partners, including those that have been here since Day 1.
When it came time to celebrate our 55th anniversary, we brought on one of those cherished community partners to help us dig into the past, tracing a path from where it all started to where we are now.
And we happen to know some expert diggers. The good folks at the North Vancouver District Public Library stepped up in a huge way, with staff members lending their time and expertise to help us dig through the archives of the North Shore News – libraries are the best places to find those archives these days – and come up with some gems from our past.
In a special section that is in print today, we show you what they found, including covers from all 55 years of our existence, give or take a few stragglers, demonstrating stories both big and small, serious and silly from more than half a century in print. (You can flip through all of the covers in this digital edition of our 55th anniversary feature.)
To curate the covers, three library employees spent the summer scanning through their digital holdings, spinning through the microfilm, and jumping into a new digital collection made in partnership between the North Shore News and North Shore libraries.
So how did the digging go?
“It was sometimes tedious, mostly fun,” said library services advisor Nilusha Garbharran. “[It was] eye-opening, particularly as someone who has not grown up on the North Shore, flipping through 55 years of history. It offered a wonderful snapshot of the community and how much growth has occurred. It was also great to see what was relevant at the time through the adverts and classifieds.”
Program and outreach co-ordinator Josh Hamlett, another relative newcomer to the area, said it was a “crash course in North Shore history.” Hamlett also discovered some of the rhythms of the newspaper business.
“I enjoyed watching the news go in cycles,” he said. “It really is noticeable when speed reading headlines this way. Every January there’s a photo of the cold-water plunge.”
The librarians also had to manage some tricky technology, old school and new, as they navigated the archives.
“The 2001-2024 [issues] are newly digitized and not uploaded yet, so those files were on an external hard drive,” said Hamlett. “I had to make promises to our head of collections that I wouldn’t lose the hard drive!”
Communications and events co-ordinator Meghan Crowe said she also had some nervous moments with the technology.
“I got to learn how to use a microfilm reader!” she said. “For a technology that has been around for such a long time, it was new to me. I am sometimes known to be clumsy, and I just kept thinking, ‘This might be one of the last copies of this microfilm, so you better not break anything.”
Digging through the archives was also a little different for Crowe than it was for her colleagues. She grew up on the North Shore, so the headlines hit a little closer to home.
“I was born and raised in the community so I found it super interesting to flip back in time and see how much has changed and at the same time, how much has stayed the same,” she said. “I really enjoyed seeing stories I had forgotten about or featuring people I know. I found myself saying ‘Hey, I know them!’ or ‘I remember that’ a lot. It’s like there are these invisible strings tying generation to generation, and it’s all outlined in this community paper.”
That’s such a lovely way to put it: “invisible strings tying generation to generation.”
As this section proves, those invisible strings have never been stronger. Thanks again to our incredible partners, particularly our heroes, the librarians, and all of our readers who have been with us for any or all of our 55 years.
The strings may be invisible, but those connections are very real.
Andy Prest is the editor of the North Shore News. This column originally appeared in a Sept. 18 special print section celebrating our 55th anniversary. You can view the entire anniversary section as a digital edition here.
