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This past weekend, I attended a memorial service for a former Free Press colleague who died on Nov. 22 at age 74. A crack editor, Buzz Currie was a beloved member of the newsroom for many reasons, not least of which was his quick wit.
I once sent out a mass email to the editorial staff inquiring as to the whereabouts of a sealed brick of Bothwell cheese that had disappeared from the newsroom fridge. About 30 seconds passed before I received his reply: “Honk if you love cheeses.”
His service was filled with remembrances of his withering insults and erudite comebacks, but it also cast a light on the way news gathering and editing has changed over the decades. Co-workers recalled Buzz stroking through copy with a pencil, physically cutting out paragraphs to move them around in the story and sending off the finished product via pneumatic tubes.
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My roots in this industry aren’t as deep as Buzz’s but I too recall when X-acto knives and pica poles were a vital part of the editorial process. When I worked at Stylus magazine, we employed a waxing machine to stick pages to dummies and a sizing wheel to convert printed photographs to pixelated versions (there is nothing like being on deadline and realizing that the hole you’ve left for a photo bears no correlation to the dimension of the picture that’s supposed to fit in it).
One of my first newspaper assignments was to report on a death at a music festival in Minnedosa. I wrote the story longhand in a notebook and dictated it to the city editor on a collect call via payphone from the site, with the sounds of Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show (insult to injury) threatening to obscure my words.
I can’t even imagine how laborious getting a paper out was 150 years ago, but that’s what the Manitoba Free Press’s founding publishers, William Fisher Luxton and John A. Kenny, did out of a small shack on Main Street in 1872.
Wednesday, Nov. 30, marked the paper’s 150th anniversary; a new exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Headlines: The Art of the News Cycle, launches this Friday at 7 p.m. in celebration.
An Apple laptop that was once used at the Winnipeg Free Press. (Mike Deal / Winnipeg Free Press)
Curated by Riva Symko, in addition to contemporary works by artists such as Dianna Frid, Myriam Dion and Ron Terada that explore the current state of news media, it contains artifacts and long-abandoned technology from the history of the Freep.
It also features a specially commissioned series of work by local printmaker Miriam Rudolph, Storied Land: (Re)Mapping Winnipeg, in which the artist reconfigured archival Free Press news stories to form a new narrative.
Headlines runs to May 23, 2023; I hope you’ll head to the WAG-Qaumajuq to check it out (Friday’s opening is free and features music from DJ M.C. LUV and a cash bar). In the meantime, I’d love to hear your fond Free Press memories.
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