Sixty years ago, on 1966 June 29, I typed up the earliest known edition of my first newspaper. I covered family news, a seaman's strike in Britain, a coup in Argentina and the selection of Governor Spiro Agnew as the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate. Just a few years later a chance encounter led me to submit a story about a rock concert to a weekly paper. They paid $5 a story. The highlights of my time with the Belleville Times including having the mayor elect kicking me out of his campaign headquarters on election night (he hated the paper, I was 16 so I doubt he knew who I was), conducting a long interview with the new, out of town, director of education who made wildly optimistic predictions about future enrolment levels and being the editor of the paper for the last issue it published. I also helped put out a student newspaper in high school and got threatened with a libel suit by the principal over one article. Even as a student, I knew there was not much point in suing me so it was not much of a threat. In the years that followed I published articles in three different newspaper at university and dreamed of getting something in a "big paper". I didn't do much for many years and then the Timmins Daily Press decided to start a monthly paper for the James Bay Coast. I was primarily interested in photography but supposed I could write too. One of the first stories I covered was an emergency exercise. I took a picture of a bunch of students dressed as victims and suddenly remembered that I was expected to get all of their names. No wonder I preferred photography but I got them. It only lasted a few years but I got a lot of pictures and stories printed. One month they paid me $350 but mostly a lot less. I got a few calls from other papers asking for photos. I lived in Moosonee so there were not a lot of reporters on the ground in the area. The Globe and Mail asked me for a few things including photographs of the oldest survivor of residential school, Marguerite Wabano, and the Toronto Star used me to cover the first Cree language opera, Pimooteewin by Thomson Highway, when it came to Moosonee in 2009. I had a few pictures and stories in the Timmins Daily Press; I suppose it was a lot cheaper to use me than to fly someone up. I think 2013 was the last time I had something published in a newspaper. Some of my pictures from Moosonee and area got used in various school textbooks; at $50 or $250 a shot that was easy money from pictures I had already taken. My focus these days is on enjoying retirement and photography but I had a good time during my brief forays into journalism. I learned a few things: to conquer my fear of approaching older and more important people, the importance of getting the correct spelling of people's names and to be aware of the hidden issues that people didn't talk about. Of course I met some great and a couple of not so great people. On the whole I am reasonably glad that I didn't pick journalism as a career. I suppose that I would have found it stressful especially when I got involved in "controversial" stories where there were influential people who did not want to see things become public. Of course, that is really journalism is all about at a serious level, anything else is just public relations. For me it was a hobby, a chance to write about generally positive things and to see my name in print once in a while. I had a full time job that was stressful enough.

A few views of the same part of Belleville

I wrote yesterday about figuring out the viewpoint/direction of one postcard by looking at another. To do so I went through a bunch of old cards of Belleville. Interesting to see how many come from similar viewpoint. the most recent one could be aerial but wonder if the others done from the top of the city hall clock tower?
The first one shows the lower (Bridge Street) bridge shown in the postcard I posted earlier, the last two show the current arched bridge.

Solving a postcard mystery with another postcard

I have a few old postcards of Belleville, Ontario (and other places). For most of them, it is easy to figure out what area they cover, there are obvious and persistent landmarks that I can pick up. Sometimes I am confused.

One postcard that confused me for a while was called Birds Eye View, Looking Down the bay, Belleville. I thought this must be looking south, towards the Bay (of Quinte). But I could not place it. One building that seemed very distinct was the reddish one with curved window tops in the lower right. It made me think of Belleville's gothic City Hall but, the City Hall has a tower on the street side.

Then I looked at another postcard, Front Street and the Moira River. This one is clearly taken looking north past the intersection of Front  and Bridge streets. And I saw the same building on the right side of the picture. So, now I know the first shot was taken looking away from the Bay, up Front Street towards the north.

Two things I am curious about about Belleville, Ontario

Two things I wonder about related to Belleville, Ontario...there are a lot more of them....

anybody got any ideas about:

The Trillium 2000 Senior Citizens Centre is on St. Paul Street. It used to be a store called the Houston Company. I remember it as a hardware place. Somebody told me it used to be a train station. Now, that makes less sense to me. I know the train station in Belleville (VIA ex CN) and I remember the CPR (ex joint station with Canadian Northern) station (see picture below from Library and Archives Canada) and I know there was a station on Pinnacle Street but I cannot imagine that this place was a station. Does anyone know anything this or even anything about the Houston Company (something tells me it had a different spelling..Huston?).
2009 December 28th: It was the Houston Company.

The second thing is that I have a memory of a cemetery in the East part of Belleville. Somewhere around Pine Street / MacDonald Avenue, not a big place, just a small graveyard. Have never been able to find when I looked and could not find any record of it being moved. There was no church nearby which seems odd for an old cemetery.
2009 December 28th:  Reading a history of Belleville written in 1943 by Mikel. The author mentions a Catholic cemetery near the Grand Trunk (CN) station that operated until 1904. I wonder when the tombstones were removed from it?

A haunted place?

During my first years at public school, much of the school yard was not fenced. There were interesting things off one corner, in particular the Old Folks Home. I mean the Old Old Folks Home because the residents had long since moved to Hastings Manor on the other side of town. What was left was a derelict building with a caretaker who would chase students away when they went close to explore. The building looked fascinating, all kinds of nooks and crannies (not that I ever had the guts to go in). I took a picture of it in 66, when I was in high school but it looked as inviting as when I was younger. Not sure how much longer it lasted.

In 1992 I was visiting someone in the hospital and she had another visitor who turned out to be the son of the man who used to run the Old Folks Home. He gave me a post card showing the building in all of its glory. Half of me thinks he was the man who chased the kids away but not sure.

Hastings Manor itself is now gone, replaced by a much fancier facility in the same location.

I called this posting a haunted place because somebody said that she would take me to a haunted building some day and this is the one that came to my mind but I don't think that any of us thought it was haunted, we just knew there was someone there who would chase us away if we went near it.