To my surprise, this is my 85th year on the planet, and this is the 55th anniversary of the launch of the North Shore News. How time flies!
The present publisher of the News is Matt Blair, and he has very kindly asked me to write a bit more of the early days of the News.
As some older readers may remember, the newspaper came from my attempts to get going again after my fledgling radiator business went broke and dragged me down with it, age 26, along with my first marriage. It was 1966. I had no money and no credit.
I am a North Shore boy, and all of this took place here. Three years of hard scrabble and unemployment followed. I worked as a labourer in a mill up the coast, dug ditches here, repaired oil stoves, fixed plumbing and did whatever I could to keep body and soul together. I lost a lot of weight. There was time to think.
A new thought came to me. “Ask for advice.” I wish it had come a bit earlier. I saw people in a new light.
One gem of news was that in the newspaper business one could make a living selling advertising. This fired me up to change careers. I ended up working for West Vancouver’s Lions Gate Times (commission only), and publisher Claude Hoodspith taught me the basis of newspaper advertising sales.
I liked the newspaper business right away. Even when business was slow I could joke that, wherever the new business was going, it was a lot cleaner and drier than the radiator trade and some of the other manual jobs I did in between. “Clean, dry and indoors” was my new comfort in a somewhat barren world.
I got the idea to do a North Shore-wide free paper, and took it to Claude. He didn’t want to do it. At the time when the two North Shore papers vied with each other, their total circulation was perhaps 1/3 of the addresses here. I theorized that the circulation revenue didn’t really matter, in this “new day.” It was small change, and awkward to collect.
Our publication was to be resoundingly free – that is, to the readers – and would be paid for by the advertisers. It was sort of a new idea at the time. That’s what turned out to be the case, and when Claude turned me down I did it on my own.
It took seven years to break even. That was a world of struggle with finance, my inexperience, very long hours of pasteup and typesetting, and of course most daylight hours dedicated to prospecting for advertisers, and typesetting and pasteup done in the evenings, and once a week an all-nighter and a drive to our printer in Abbotsford with the “flats” at about 6 a.m.; a few hours of sleep, and then a truck arrived with the bundled press run.
And for the first few months, I was also the person who delivered some of the bundles to the homes of the carriers (we had about 400 carriers) from Deep Cove to Horseshoe Bay. That process began at an early hour. It doesn’t take long to print a newspaper.
It was scary, and exhausting, but when you are on the bottom, there’s no place but “up.” The market received us very kindly. Advertisers were on the main pretty happy, and both they and the readers were gracious with our crude first efforts. Things grew more and more easy as the News began to come to life. It outgrew my rented house, and then its first rented office (a little house off Pemberton Avenue) and “Mother” ended up renting a three-story building on Lonsdale, where it published for years before an arsonist destroyed the lovely building, which had a large garden atrium on the top floor, open to the skies, a real morale booster.
I sold my interest in Mother around 1990, to the Southam corporation. One of my theories of the time was that the decline in paid circulation newspapers was largely due to the onset of national and regional television news programs, but I maintained that there was a large thirst for really localized information, and there is. It turns out that may have also been Southam’s idea at the time, but the winds of change were swooping down. That long standing venerable company was soon overtaken (a story in itself).
I stayed at the News for another 10 years after the deal, but my heart was (I thought) on Pender Island and I spent a lot of time there, developing a retreat/resort facility. The News had many friends and connections. We hosted seminars and instructional courses, and of course, tremendous parties. But the writing was on the wall. Each alteration of ownership of “Mother” brought another head office and their cost cutting review, and soon that resort facility, known as Clam Bay Farm, was living out of my pocket, and the parties were history.
My friend and resort manager died, suddenly and unexpectedly, while playing tennis. This shook me. I put Clam Bay Farm on the market after it became clear to me that, without Karl Begrich, the farm was no longer fun.
For the two years it took to sell, I did Karl’s job, and my own at the News. It was hard, sad work on the Island, and the newspaper business began to shrink. I parted with the News in 2001, at about the same time as the airliners began being hijacked in New York. I sold the Farm in 2004.
It turns out what I really love is living on the North Shore, and I hope to continue living here until the big bell rings.
The North Shore News has had several owners in the years following me, now in the capable hands of the Glacier Media Group. Thank you to Matt and the rest of the North Shore News crew for giving me the chance to kick off this 55th anniversary edition. Thanks for reading, and partying, and buying ads, and all the rest. Here’s to 55 years, and many more.
Peter Speck is the founder of the North Shore News. He graciously wrote this intro for a Sept. 18 special print section celebrating our 55th anniversary. You can view the entire anniversary section as a digital edition here.
