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Village Squire, 1975-01, Page 4Art Carr, accepting C.C.N.A. Newspaper Man of the Year award. Art Carr The kind of guy who keeps the small town newspaper going .. , even if he has to invert the machinery to do it 2, VILLAGE SQUIRE/JANUARY 1975 BY KEITH ROULSTON The huge convention dining room at the Four Seasons Sheraton Hotel in Toronto was crowded with newspapermen from all over North America. It was the joint annual meeting of the Canadian Community Newspaper Association and the National Newspaper Association from the United States. My wife and I pushed our way through the dense crowd and found empty seats at a table occupied by three Americans from Oregon among the many Americans who were crowding into the room to hear Father John McLaughlin who as usual was defending Richard Nixon, only short days before he finally admitted guilt and flew the coop. We'd been sitting there for a few moments when three more people joined us. They were complete strangers but as they introduced themselves, there was a ring of familiarity in the name. The older couple were Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Carr of the Palmerston Observer and with them was one of their employees. Arthur Carr of Palmerston: the man is something of a legend in the small, close-knit world of Ontario Weekly Newspapers. An innovator, a bit of a rebel, and definitely a free spirit. The rest of the meal was a mixture of fried chicken with wry wit as Arthur Carr provided entertainment for the strangers from the United States and the two strangers from closer to home. With all his ranting and raving, Father McLaughlin couldn't quite match up to the quiet banter of Arthur Carr. My wife and I left the convention early, right after that meal and were quite surprised when later in the month we received the semi -regular newspaper put out for the weekly newspapers across Canada. There, in a full page article, was the story of Arthur Carr, who the evening of the same day we'd met him, had been named Newspaper Man of the Year by the C.C.N.A. I met Art Carr again this month as I dropped in at his office in Palmerston in a house that grew into a crowded newspaper printing shop. There, in the front office, was the plaque he was presented at the convention. He showed it to me, but he also showed me another plaque which had been presented to him: from the Palmerston Lions Club for service to his community. This plaque, he said, made him more proud than the other, because it was from his own townspeople, and because he was not even a member of the Lions Club anymore, (although he was a founding member). That says something about Arthur Carr. He's different. While to others, the nation-wide award from fellow professionals might be the highest award they can seek, to Art Carr, the award from his own peers in Palmerston is the most important. He's a man who has an uncanny ability with mechanical things, and has invented contraptions that have other newspaper men shaking their heads at the ingenuity, but he'd rather be known as an editor whose editorials have at times caused him to need police protection, who received threatening phone calls so much that Bell Telephone refused to put any late night calls through to his home unless it could be proven there was a real emergency involved. Try to say Art Carr is this or that, is like trying to catch a handful of wind. He's a rebel in a way. In these days when nearly all newspapers are printed in large, centrally located web offset plants, he still puts out his newspaper every week on a small, sheet -fed press in his own crowded shop. While many publishers own chains of newspapers, or at least more than one, Art Carr is content to produce one newspaper, and not a large one at that with between 12 and 16 tabloid size pages a week for the people of Palmerston and surrounding district. Yet, lest one think him backward, it should be quickly recalled that Art Carr was the first man in Ontario to foresee the offset printing revolution in newspapers. While other newspapers, weekly and daily, were continuing to use the cumbersome, time- consuming, lead -against -paper letter press method of printing, Art Carr was exploring the intriguing field of offset, using photography and light metal printing plates rather than the heavy lead. As a result, in the late 1950's Art Carr made the Palmerston Observer the first offset newspaper in Ontario the second in Canada and only the eighth in the world (by his own figuring). For several years he was so much a leader in the fields that people came from all over Canada to look at his operation. Because he was such a leader, he had to invent much of the equipment used in this new technology. The field was so new, that some things just hadn't been invented, and others were too expensive for this small town newspaper to be able to afford. Thus, even now when you walk through the shop, you get the idea maybe you've stumbled in on a convention of inventors. An old vacuum cleaner is turned into part of an offset camera. The remains of a deceased clothes dryen provide a film dryer. Assorted belts and pullies are pieced together into a home-made newspaper collator and folder that has served the operation faithfully for many years. It's all a manifestation of the fascination with machinery that first got Art Carr into the newspaper business in the first place. He recalls growing up in Sudbury and watching, nose pressed against the glass, as the Sudbury Star was printed. He watched the old sheet -fed printing press and wondered what the other machines were. His sister, who worked in the office of The Star got her brother a job helping out around the office during the summer holidays.