Village Squire, 1978-04, Page 4It was a crazy idea...
...and it may still be but after 5 years it's
still going
There was little fanfare back in April 1973 when the first issue
of a new magazine went to press...with good reason.
If the publishers of the new publication had mentioned the
idea to many people before it became reality, they would have
laughed their heads off. A magazine in Western Ontario? What's
more, a magazine typed on an IBM typewriter and put together
in the livingroom of a house?
It was a crazy idea to be sure even if there had been a lot of
thought go into it. The idea for a magazine for Western Ontario
arose out of a college thesis at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in
Toronto. A young country boy looking for a way to get out of the
city and yet still do the kind of work he enjoyed in journalism
began to wonder about the possibility of applying the city
magazine concept to a wider area made up of several small towns
and cities. The research showed that it was a definite possibility.
The problem was money.
Starting a new publication is an expensive proposition. There
is probably no riskier business investment in the country than a
new magazine or newspaper. It's a race to see which will come
first, response from subscribers and advertisers, or the end of
the finances of the publisher. A fresh faced kid from college with
no financial resources is going to have a quick death in the
vicious world of publishing.
So after graduating in 1969 (that thesis earned an A) the young
journalist worked first in a Toronto office as a public and
employee relations officer until the frustrations of city life
became too much. With his wife they made a move back to the
hometown of Lucknow where they quickly learned about the
difficulties of starting a new publication: a short lived effort to
begin a sports newspaper.
The kind of coincidence that helps make success stories
successful occurred however when R.G. Shrier of the Signal -Star
Publishing chain offered a job as editor of the Clinton
News -Record at the end of 1969. For the next two and a half
years the idea of a Western Ontario magazine went into a bottom
PG.2. VILLAGE SQUIRE/APRIL 1978.
drawer while editing a v.eekly tncv.spaper took up time and
energy.
In November of 1971. however, the opportunity to buy the tiny
weekly newspaper in Blyth came up. With the kind
understanding of the Nev.s-Record management. the editor and
his wife bought the Blyth Standard and until June of 1972 the
wife ran the Blyth paper while the husband drove back and forth
along Highway 4 overseeing two newspapers because income
from the Blyth paper was not enough to keep the family going.
But in June the separation was made. For the next two years the
couple operated the business out of the living room of their house
because there was not office space available for rent in the
village. There. with two small children running in and out, the
Village Squire magazine was planned.
The idea of the magazine was to tell the people of Western
Ontario more about their own way of life. The publishers thought
there was a need for a publication that would cross community
boundaries to tell people more about the delights of living in the
whole area. Community weekly newspapers concentrated mostly
on their own specific towns and villages and even then mostly on
news. The daily newspapers seemed little interested in delving
very deeply into anything outside the major centres. Radio and
television was dominated by national issues.
The pleasures of the region seemed to be ignored. People went
to the city to find interesting little shops when often there was
one in the next town. They felt they had to head to Toronto to see
live theatre when often there was a touring theatre show in their
own area that was just as good.
The timing for the birth of the magazine probably couldn't
have been much better. Life in Western Ontario was undergoing
a great change. New intimate shops were opening up all over the
place. Theatre was becoming more a part of ordinary people's
life. Certainly Stratford had been around for a long time. but the
new Huron Country Playhouse in Grand Bend was offering a
different kind of theatre and Theatre Passe Muraille was winning