Letting the days go by - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

As anyone who has talked to me out on the street or over a drink in a backyard will tell you, it’s common to hear me extolling the virtues of the newspaper - more specifically, our work here at The Citizen. Well, if my enthusiasm for it is at, say, an eight in those interactions, it’s up to an 11 after the past few days I’ve had, combing through 50 years of archives and sharing what I’ve found.

 

For our Blyth Festival 50th anniversary retrospective, which can be found as part of this week’s issue, I scoured the archives from the 1970s until the present day. There were the old issues of The Blyth Standard, chronicling the advent of a new Blyth Summer Festival, followed by the earliest issues of The Citizen as 1985 turned into 1986 and Katherine Kaszas began her historically-successful time as the artistic director, the tumult of the early 1990s and the heroic rescue effort of Janet Amos in the mid-1990s, all the way up to the mid-2000s, when I started with The Citizen, up to the present day.

 

Along the way, I found plenty of material on the Blyth Festival - its characters (both written and real), its shows and its off-the-stage work and fundraisers within the community - more than enough to fill a few retrospective issues. Along the way, I also found plenty of archival stuff of interest to people who are still living and active in the region.

 

There were 40th birthday greetings, wedding announcements, new pastor introductions and plenty of pictures of young members of the community who aren’t so young anymore - in fact, many are engaged, married or now have their own young members of the community. 

 

To be able to look back on those memories through the eyes of your community’s newspaper of record is such a blessing and you, dear readers, are lucky to have it.

 

I grew up in a larger city centre and I wasn’t lucky enough to have what you have. My newspaper of record covered two towns, - Ajax and Pickering - with a combined population of over 220,000 people. I popped up in the paper once or twice, sure, but I don’t have the kind of lineage that many people in this area can claim thanks to the work of The Citizen staff. I have a clipping from a baseball game here or there, or a picture of me getting back to first base after a pick-off attempt, but that’s about it. Oh, and there was the time, in Grade 8, that my St. Anthony Daniel basketball team won the regional championship and a photographer took a team picture. I even remember the caption... “Court Kings”. Awesome.

 

Enough about my left handed skyhook - let’s get back to Blyth and Brussels. Seeing people grow up in the pages of The Citizen was a real joy and a testament to why we do this. Seeing people get married and have children and then seeing those children grow up in their schools or local sports, graduate and then volunteer, work jobs and have children of their own is an amazing history to behold. And it’s all being done by your own neighbourhood journalists.

 

The day-to-day work being done here, and, to a degree, the week-to-week stories being produced may not move the needle beyond an eyebrow raise or an exhausted head shake (North Huron Council - I’m looking in your direction), but when those stories, especially those about the people of this community are collected over generations, the body of work and its importance is astounding. 

 

Next year, The Citizen will mark its very own 40th anniversary. Not stealing any of the Blyth Festival’s thunder here, but the telling of local stories, in all forms, has to be preserved. They’re too important to fall by the wayside.