I have watched the Citizen grow from a weekly paper in the 1940s, to a bi-weekly, to a five-day and then a six-day-a-week daily and then reverse that process back to a weekly print addition.
During the Second World War, my dad was a printer/linotype operator at the paper. Towards the end of the war, when I was nine or 10, one day after school I was hanging out at the paper office on Quebec Street, getting in the way so my dad handed me a paper and told me to go and sell it.
I didn't even get out the door and I had sold it. At that time a paper boy bought two papers for five cents and sold them for a nickel each for a tidy profit.
So I bought four papers and went out and sold them. Then four and so on. I started going to the paper each Thursday, buying papers, then picking a downtown corner and hopefully selling them all.
Occasionally I was too optimistic and had unsold papers when my stomach was telling me it was time to go home for supper. I quickly learned that I could slip into one of the many beer parlours and sell two or three papers before being booted out by the bartender.
This worked well until one day I tried selling papers at a table where my dad and the other printers at the paper were having an after-work beer. I was told to leave in no uncertain terms. So I moved up the ladder from on street paper vendor to an established route which took in most of the Crescents area of the city.
Thus started my career in the newspaper business. When I was about 15 or so, the foreman of the printing department, Nestor Izowsky, gave me a part-time job which graduated to full time when I completed school. I stayed with the paper for nearly 10 years through its transition to a daily. I worked as a compositor, linotype operator and pressman.
Compositors and linotype operators have gone the way of the dodo bird and, from this latest transition at the paper, pressman may meet the same fate. In those early days, the printing staff at the paper exceeded all of the other staff combined and that has shrunk to near nothing.
I have subscribed to the paper for many, many years and will miss that paper in my hand in the morning. My 84-year-old brain is trying to grasp how to read the darn thing on the line, pun intended. So far not well.
I have enjoyed writing the occasional letter to the paper when I felt strongly enough about something and appreciate that the paper published most of them. The paper has had many excellent journalists over the years, not the least of which are Mark Nielsen and Neil Godbout.
I am saddened and a little frightened by the demise of paper newspapers but we have survived many other changes in what is a changing world. So I hope this new technology will find a way to provide us with unbiased, investigative, inquiring journalism so we can properly assess what is going on around us.
John Warner
Prince George
