Last week our local summer student, Presley Johnston, wrote her farewell column as she is left for school to study journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU).
Her departure brought back memories of my first year in journalism in 1973. Back then, TMU was known as Ryerson Polytechnical Institute.
Back then, print journalism was at its peak. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed what was called the Watergate scandal. This led to the resignation of then-U.S. president Richard Nixon in 1974.
Google Photo
Today, most breaking news is posted online. When I went to school, the computer chip wasn’t invented until 1975 and page layout was cut and paste with photos developed on film negatives in a dark room.
I remember walking around school campus taking photos with my Pentax camera and conducting interviews by writing down every spoken word with a pencil and steno pad. I took a typing course, too!
When I graduated in 1976 with a degree in journalism, I worked for the Ontario Ministry of the Environment that summer. By late August, I packed a hockey bag and hitched a ride to Calgary in just one car. I dropped by the journalism department at SAIT and they gave me three job openings in Alberta along Hwy. 2.
School is out
I was hired as the editor of The Record in Fort Saskatchewan on the final stop and was off to the races at age 27.
I was amazed the stories I wrote at Ryerson and for the government. It sunk in and I discovered I could actually write news.
Since then, I’ve worked for newspapers all over the country, the B.C. Forest Service, the Ontario government, again, a private company in Kitimat B.C. and Espanola Ont. and as a magazine editor in Bracebridge Ont. and Cranbrook B.C.
I figured I lived in well over 30 addresses and four provinces over the years. The year I went to Ryerson, I hitchhiked to Alaska with a dental hygienist from Los Angeles that summer. Next was to Quebec City with a French woman I met on a beach on Vancouver Island.
Look for my bare-all journalism novel, titled, C’est La Vie!
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