Citizen at 40: Hakkers takes up her mother's mantle in Blyth

BY SCOTT STEPHENSON

Sometimes, a correspondent for The Citizen is carrying on a family legacy.

 

The village of Blyth boasts not one, but two local writers who contribute to its section of the paper, and Deb Hakkers is one of them. Hakkers has been officially sharing the Blyth beat with Sarah Malpass since Jan. 31, but before formally stepping into the role, she had already been filling in for her mother, Marilyn Craig since late 2023.

 

“This is kind of a family tradition,” Hakkers explained. “My mother was the correspondent before me, and I took over when she got sick… it was kind of nice that I could keep people up to date as to what her status was, and all that sort of stuff. That was handy. And I just like the idea of telling people what’s going on. But sometimes I don’t hear about it till after the fact!”

 

Alternating writing weeks with Malpass may keep the workload manageable, but it also occasionally causes a little bit of confusion with local folks looking to contribute their newsworthy tidbits to Hakkers in a timely fashion. “It’s not that much of a time commitment; it’s just trying to get people to understand when my deadlines are! If you want to put something in the column, you have to get it to me two weeks before if you want me to get it in there for people to see it,” she elucidated.

 

Craig’s weekly column, From Marilyn’s Desk, was a fixture of The Citizen for more than two decades, running from Sept. 5, 2001, to Nov. 17, 2023. While Craig covered local news of all sorts, she returned time and again to the stories of her own family, immortalizing their many small triumphs and occasional trials in print. “My style of reporting is more of a personal, family-based one. Hers was too,” Hakkers told The Citizen. “And a lot of it was things she was involved in. Or people would call her and tell her something was going on. I think when she originally started doing it, she was running the store on Main Street. That was a big source of information, because she was right there.”

 

This summer, Hakkers faced the difficult task of reporting on her own mother’s passing. Two weeks later, she also wrote about the death of her uncle. “I’ve been a part of this community my entire life. So, basically, I know most of the people in it. And it’s just a part of life.”

 

Like her mother before her, Hakkers also likes to keep an eye on the weather. “Just the seasons passing - watching things change,” she said. “I grew up farming, so I know how the weather affects farmers around the area. What’s going in, what’s coming off - all that sort of stuff…. Today, we needed the rain.”

 

At her mother’s visitation, Hakkers was reminded just how far a story in The Citizen can travel. “It’s funny… people were telling me, ‘Oh, I read your column all the time.’ And there was one man who came with his wife - she was part of the [Take Off Pounds Sensibly] organization that Mom went to in Wingham - and he came to tell me how much he liked the column when Mom had done it,” she said. 

 

Sometimes, the reach of a small-town paper surprises even her. “My brother-in-law in Goderich got a birthday card from one of his neighbours, and he said, ‘How did you know it was my birthday?’ And the guy said, ‘Well, I read about it in The Citizen.’”
Hakkers also has another community chronicler in her family’s history. “My great aunt, Helen Stonehouse, did a column for Blyth, for Wingham, for Brussels, for Belgrave… I can’t remember whether she ever did Clinton,” Hakkers recollected. “But it’s just kind of neat,” Hakkers reflected. “My aunt started out well, she started out with The Blyth Standard, and The Brussels Post, and the Wingham Advance-Times - and she would submit her column to all those different places on Belgrave. You can look her up in the archives. She’ll be there.”

 

Stonehouse was a roving correspondent for many years, her byline appearing across local papers. She reported on the comings and goings of visitors all over Huron County, and also frequently filled her column with news of her own family. Stonehouse also made the news herself from time to time, like when The Huron Expositor reported that she had taken the most points overall in the flower section of the 1965 Brussels Fair. 

 

For Hakkers, the best part of the Blyth beat is covering the ways people care for one another. “The church does a lunch for anybody who has to eat alone - they can come and eat with a group. They started doing that to help people who were struggling with being alone,” she pointed out. “And the Lions Club does so much for the community. And I’ve been involved in the Threshers pretty much my whole life. And there’s all kinds of other groups. This is a fairly tightly knit community, and they try to help each other out when they can. Like, there was a fire across the road, and this neighbourhood helped. They gave what they could to help.”

 

Though Blyth lost its local school during the province-wide closures of 2009, Hakkers believes the community remains as strong as ever. “It’s still a very close community. People say hello. People know each other. If somebody’s got a problem, people will try to help them. In a bigger community, you don’t know your neighbours and don’t know what’s going on.”

 

Hakkers never formally trained as a writer, but she understands the importance of local storytelling. “People need to realize what’s going on, and how people are working to help one another,” she asserted. “They can’t help out if they don’t know about it.”
Helen Stonehouse, Marilyn Craig and now Deb Hakkers herself have all shared one simple truth through their columns in The Citizen and other local papers - that family news is news worth sharing.