It is great to have The Courier back.
The Saint Croix Courier was a central part of my life in my childhood years and early adulthood. Since then, it was something that I happily took for granted in the 40-plus years since I left my childhood home in St. George – until it dwindled and then wasn’t around anymore.
As I child, I have vivid memories of my maternal grandmother Della Maxwell lovingly rolling and packaging past issues of the then-once-weekly paper to mail to her daughters who lived with their husbands and families in Ontario. I also have vivid memories of what made The Courier so vital and real.
It was the one place to get breakdowns of local news – the local perspective on provincial and national issues and the vibrant local communities of a couple of generations ago when few travelled from town to go to work and most spent the majority of their hours living, shopping, playing, learning, and being together in the same place.
As a child, a visit to “the city” (Saint John), “the capitol”, or “the states” (Calais) was not routine. We learned about community events from The Courier. It was also the place where you got all the local “news” of social activities in columns like the Woodland News (penned by the legendary Grace Ober).
The column that was most directly linked to my childhood experience was the St. George Shorts. That column was written by Helen Rubin, an energetic septuagenarian who stopped at nothing to get the news. She even brought a pad of paper to the Communion rail at St. Mark’s Anglican Church to get a scoop from members of the choir as she entered the chancel before arriving at the Communion rail. (I do not make this up.) As teenagers who witnessed all of this, a group of us silently dubbed her “Scoop” and some witty adults renamed the column Helen’s Dirty Shorts.
Here is an entry from the late 1960s:
Wilfred Langmaid of Canal entertained 10 of his school friends recently, the occasion being his seventh birthday. The children were accompanied by Wilfred’s father. Following the movie, the children gathered at the Langmaid home for a birthday supper.
From a couple of years later:
Mr. & Mrs. W.R. Langmaid and son Wilfred, accompanied by Mrs. Leroy Maxwell of Canal, have returned home after a motor trip through the Cabot Trail and the Annapolis Valley. While on their trip they also visited Mr. Langmaid’s aunt, Miss Corona Nelson of Truro, NS, as well as the Alexander Graham Bell Museum at Beddeck and Fort Beausejour National Historic Park at Aulac.
My personal involvement with The Courier team began in 1976, when high school English teachers and sports coaches encouraged me to try my hand at writing local sports news for Eastern Charlotte Regional High, which morphed in to the then brand-spanking new
Fundy High School in 1977. I also covered other local sports events, as well as one sad scoop – assigned to me by the editor Phil Johnson since full-time staff members were living in St. Stephen and St. Andrews – a news story on the fire that destroyed the original St. George Legion Hall in the late 1970s. The pay was scant — $25.00 per month in total – but I had an open canvas as I gave back to the school while researching and writing reports to give a public eye to local student athletes.
When I left St. George to attend UNB, the junior high basketball coach Bruce Eagles wrote a very kind letter to the editor which included these words:
(Wilfred’s) reporting has been a great benefit to all the sports programs, especially at the school age level. He has provided the athletes of these programs a chance to be recognized by their family, friends, and communities. On numerous occasions, I have seen athletes run out on Wednesday to buy a Courier so they could be placed on the bulletin board.
The tabula rasa I always enjoyed at The Courier with Phil Johnson and his successor Julian Walker led to the beginning of a music review column in 1978 (called On The Record) and an opinion page op-ed column in 1979 (dubbed Impressions). In hindsight, neither were that great at the time, but I now had a venue for writing, a reason to hone my skills, and eventually the moxie to bring some tear sheets of record reviews with me to the Fredericton daily paper.
My time at The Saint Croix Courier led to a 37-year run as a freelancer for The Daily Gleaner in Fredericton, writing music columns for all of these years and penning an opinion page column for over a decade. I became, dare I say, a very effective music journalist with a unique voice, and an opinion page columnist who had a blog before there were blogs.
Meanwhile, I always read The Courier over the years, whether it was home visiting my parents in St. George, as a graduate student in Toronto visiting my paternal aunt, a faithful subscriber who had moved to Toronto in the late 1940s, or having a break at The Harriet Irving
Library at UNB over these past two decades. I am thrilled as can be that The Courier is back.
Why? The reason is simple. There is a real place for home-town journalism exploring local interests – in fact, a huge void – and there are people still hungry for a touch of home – even if it comes in the form of dirty shorts.
Long may you run, The Saint Croix Courier.
Wilfred Langmaid is Student Advocate in Student Affairs and Services at the University of New Brunswick and Lecturer in Biology at St. Thomas University. He was a freelance journalist for The Daily Gleaner for 37 years and for The Courier for 11 years.