Congratulations. THE EQUITY has made it to 125. That's great.

We celebrated big time when it was 75 years old, and that was way back in the previous century, at a time when we wondered if we would survive into the 21st. And, wonder of wonders, some of us did.

If I ever find the time, I will write a book about the invincible people who were intrinsic to this weekly newspaper in its early days. But life keeps us so busy, there's little time to reminisce, and even if we do you never know who would rather not have their incidental adventures brought back to life between the covers of a book. Only way to be sure I won't step on anyone's toes is to outlive them all; and I'm working on that.

But now I am tasked to write my "memories of THE EQUITY back over the years." That's the way the request was phrased over the phone from Shawville, yesterday.

Everyone who lived in the Pontiac during the years when I was there will know that those were the best years of my life. Producing a new issue of THE EQUITY every week for 32 years was not only a livelihood, it was a labour of love in every sense of the word.

When David and I arrived on the scene, the equipment was archaic, even for that time in the history of printing. When it first came into our hands we gazed upon it in wonder, figured out how to use it, and set about keeping THE EQUITY going. Over time we updated the system, donating much of the original machinery to Upper Canada Village where visitors now gaze on it in wonder. Then we indulged in the pleasures of keeping up with the rest of the publishing world, which meant buying an endless line of new machinery, which sometimes became obsolete before it was paid for. Printing is a demanding business.

In line with the needs of the community, we kept enough of the old stuff around to publish books, posters, receipts and ledgers, funeral cards, Christmas cards, maple syrup labels, voters lists, ballots, and other essentials, but even those procedures changed from letter-press, to offset, to computers, and dear knows what comes next.

Serving the community was our way of life. In those days it was not just a matter of getting the paper out, it was being a "mother hen" (as one early colleague once put it) to the whole County. There were groups to deal with from Eardley to La Verendrye, (yes, Pontiac included the big Park in those days when it was the largest County in Canada) and even up to the Swisha. We had the WI, the WA, the PTA, Curling Club, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, Pony Club, Fair Board, and so forth ad infinitum. Everyone, including Town Council, County Council and all the Mayors needed attention, all the time, and that included the Court House, the County jail, and the QPP.

When David took his turn as President of the Hospital Board, he got them started on becoming accredited, a major step for the County. When the new school was built, I chaired and nurtured the first Home and School Association in town. When the Shawville Fair needed a new attraction to compete with all the other seasonal attractions, we brought a full fledged rodeo to town which, with good publicity by Frank Ryan and his new brand new radio station (CFRA), packed the arena. For weekly editors in those days, these energetic pursuits were all in a week's work.

I never had a problem finding topics for editorials. Advice was always available from Peden Wilson, Harland Rowat, Jack Argue, Jack Tolhurst, Evans Schwartz, Phoebe McCord, Norma Telford, the Drs. McDowell, Powell, and Horner, Orla Young, Hosmer Turner and his kind, hospitable sisters who ran the ice cream parlour where David and I used to meet everyone in town, slurping old style ice-cream sodas and milk shakes, and generous bowls of home-churned ice cream.

But what memories of THE EQUITY does the young reporter want me to recall? There are none by themselves that can be transferred into words here and now. It wasn't just an adventure, it was a life which could never possibly happen again, to anyone, nor even be understood by anyone. The only people who could even believe what I might write would be the very few who have outlived most of the main characters and were there when it all happened. Among that group, those who read this now will be having a lovely, and very private, chuckle.

With apologies to readers who have no such recollections, I must conclude with these few hap hazard "memories of THE EQUITY" - messages from the past from an old-school variety Canadian Weekly Newspaper editor.

In our days, you WERE what you did. People delivered coal, people delivered ice, people delivered babies and people delivered newspapers, and they all were essential to the whole, and took their responsibilities to heart, along with teachers, councilors, nurses, carpenters, repairmen, notaries, merchants Ð everyone who delivered goods and services to the neighbours and whose names always turned up in THE EQUITY. Children's names were always accompanied by the names of their parents, or their grandparents, so readers would know who they were.

Hearkening back to the "old days" requires time, true affection, and an open mind. The "new days" are upon us and need all our attention. I'd really rather be tending to the daily problems of Shawville and the Pontiac than struggling with the exigencies of keeping a National Press Club in Canada. But today is as pressing today, as yesterday was yesterday, and my current preoccupation happens to be with the National Press Club.

Dreaming about writing the stories of Pontiac people, and their horses, babies, gardens, celebrations; flying around in the little two-seater airplane with Iverson Harris, taking aerial potos of lakes, farms and forests; helping Wyman McKechnie sort out the chapters in his great series of books - What Men they Were, Well Remembered, and Weathering the Thirties; solving copyright problems for the Rusty Leach collection of Songs of the Pontiac; and the golden hours that David and I spent together, morphing what was happening all across the County into a weekly newspaper. That was a good life.

Those are my memories of THE EQUITY.

Rosaleen Leslie Dickson

(This article was first published in THE EQUITY, August 6, 2008)

(One more "memory," to put the record straight, is of building and installing a dark room in a corner of the printshop the day we took over the newspaper, May 15, 1953. We needed it to develop film and print the photos we took with our big old 4X5 cut film Busch Press camera. In our first issue, we published a picture of a two-headed calf that had been born that week at Iverson Harris's Jersey farm, just outside town. The next week's big news was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, and that issue was loaded with pictures, contributed as lead blocks by friendly news services.)