I started at Dumont in 1973 having lived with or been friends with most of the people who set up the shop. I was probably more of a hippie than hard-core revolutionary and I liked the anti-authority non-hierarchical vibe the folks there engendered. I liked being able to learn all the various skills and jobs around the shop, with the exception of the bookkeeping, which I deliberately and carefully avoided. More on that later.

The thing that stands out most for me about my time at Dumont (and in K-W in general) is how non-judgemental I found people to be. We may have had differences of opinion but there was an atmosphere of acceptance and tolerance that made working there easy and enjoyable despite the pitifully low wages. Fifty years later and I still feel a warmth and comradeship towards so many people I came to know in those days.

Since I left Dumont in 1977, my life has seen many changes in direction. I moved to Regina where I still live. I spent the first few years here working in printing and publishing but I was soon drawn to the world of arts and culture. As in K-W, there was a thriving counter-culture in Regina which shared the same accepting, tolerant attitudes. The focus was less on changing the world through politics than on creating change through art, music, theatre, etc. The wages were just as pitiful, however. 

Regina proved to be a haven for a number of friends and colleagues from K-W, at least 10 of us by the early 80s, many of whom had worked at Dumont. Those that remain are still my closest friends. All are well-respected for their competence and willingness to share both their expertise and wisdom. 

Eventually I found myself working as manager of a small theatre company. Feeling the need to improve my managerial skills I enrolled in the Banff School of Arts Management. A prerequisite for the course was bookkeeping experience. Oh, joy! Oh, shit! My youthful indiscretion coming back to bite me? But bookkeeping practices had changed since my days of indifference. Mainly, it was all done on computers and I could handle computers. By the end of the course I was miles ahead of my classmates. When I returned home I had a skill that few of my friends had which soon translated into a full-time job which in turn lead to a home-based bookkeeping business which I still maintain part-time in my well-deserved retirement.

If there is one thing I learned from my time at Dumont it is to get involved, to try new things, to never stop learning. Even though we may not have overthrown the establishment, I believe we helped change the world in profound and significant ways and many of the causes we supported are now common-place if not main-stream. Feminism, environmentalism, inclusiveness, human rights, workers’ rights. We were/are on the right side of history. The challenge now is not to achieve these victories but to defend them.

This story is about me, but it is more about how profoundly the people of Dumont changed me. I can look back now and see how markedly the course of my life altered, and it took place in and because of Dumont and for that I shall always be grateful.

In 1976, I returned to Ontario after three years overseas with absolutely no idea of what I wanted to do … worse what needed doing. The world seemed smaller than when I’d left KW, smaller and more like the planet James Lovelock would describe to me in later years. Somehow, I got a job at Global Community Centre, not that I had any particularly useful qualifications to work in Development Education, but I had a camera and I had been in Australia at the time of Gough Whitlam, a prime minister who had talked about a just society and who convinced me that we all had to work towards that goal. As PM, he had committed himself to finding a way toward social justice, including a path for the indigenous people of this nation to resolve the crimes of invasion. Keep in mind, this was not long after the last of the British nuclear tests of their nuclear weapons; I think ten of these bombs were exploded on Maralinga Tjarutja country, in what is now South Australia, and at the time few efforts were made to ensure that those people on country were safe.

Australia was not … is not unlike Canada in its relationships with our respective indigenous nations. I had travelled to Grassy Narrows while working for Imprint, and had interviewed the school principal and some of the kids and mums in the community, and the injustice I saw there (and read about before and after) branded me. Such injustice seemed beyond comprehension, and it seemed that way here.

Whitlam also took Australia out of Vietnam and it was a time when unions imposed green bans to prevent rogue developers from destroying green space in the cities. 

Suddenly, this ended. I was teaching at a catholic high school in the suburbs of Melbourne, and my principal, imagining Nixon’s resignation would be significant for me as a Canadian, called me out of my class, but he made no remark to any of the students or teachers when Australia’s own Prime Minister was removed by a coup. Odd, n’est-ce pas? For his egregious sins, Whitlam was removed from government through the duplicity of the opposition, governor general and rupert murdoch. This was the time of the Club of Rome’s dire predictions about the planet’s future. 

So perhaps my work of assisting with the production of ‘The Tomato Papers’ for Global’s development education program was the next step for me, the one just before Dumont, for when the funding ran out at Global, I was able to apply and joined a large intake of five including Kay Elgie, Lake Sagaris, Barb Droese and  Kerrie Atkinson. 

My eyes were opened further at Dumont. I can’t begin to tell you how wondrous were the steps involved in producing a publication, all of the steps, the Merganthaler computer, the fantastic Robertson graphics camera, with its lens lens in one room and the vacuum plate that held the negative in another. And mostly the human touch, the care that was taken to proof and double-proof the text. I can still see Moe and Alison going through the text, word by word, comma by comma. There was a care and a dedication present in that old building that was new to me. 

These skills, which I learned and which are still valuable to me, and the importance of the written word I found at work in that old warehouse, have shaped me over the past forty-five years, as did my colleagues, who all seemed to have a better understanding of politics and life, nuance and design, editing and purpose. I have no hesitation in claiming that those I worked with over those two years at Dumont nurtured the seeds planted during my three years outside of Canada. There have been many times in my life when I felt like I was swimming in murky waters, but Dumont was not one of those times. On the contrary, it was an institution of purpose and commitment, and the many hours we spent collectively helping other groups, Hysteria and Between the Lines, to name two, in producing important publications were part of my journey. 

As context, I went to Michael Power, a Catholic high school in Etobicoke for five years (I even taught at a similar school in the suburbs of Melbourne) and, in a way, my two years at Dumont was the first time I had the experience of collaborating with women, and let me say, the women at Dumont were intelligent, creative, purposeful and wiser than the boy I was back then … probably wiser than the old fart I am now … and they were exceptionally dedicated. I couldn’t be more grateful for the experience. I’m not downplaying the men I worked with back then … not at all … but, given my background, it was the Dumont women who stood out for me. 

It is important for me to say that now, for this is a time of push-back, a time when way too many men have become noisy and angry, when here in Australia cabinet ministers are commonly accused of bullying women, where the minister for justice has been accused of rape, where male government advisers get drunk and, on one occasion at least, rampaged through the parliamentary offices and masturbated on the desk of a female cabinet minister. It’s hard to believe … or rather, sadly, it is not hard to believe this, for we know that we live in a time of entitlement where the powerful are sociopaths. This is not a time, ironically, when we entitle the native people and learn from their wisdom, but when we entitle well-connected knuckleheads and pay them egregious amounts of money. We allow this … we consider it natural and we fawn over these people. Here it is often the result of private schools and old boy networks where such things appear to be nurtured … often but not exclusively. The good news is that women, indigenous people and the gender diverse are fighting back, but we are all struggling against this world of injustice and impenetrable obfuscation, where the entitled consider power to be their birthright.

For example, in my 30 years in Australia, there have been 495 Aboriginal deaths-in-custody and not once has there been a conviction. There have been five more of these deaths in the past fortnight. There have been many royal commissions and many, many recommendations, but none of these have been implemented by governments of any stripe. Children of eight, nine and ten are arrested without legal reason, for cursing, for looking like they might be up to mischief, hauled away and introduced to the criminal justice system, which subsequently changes them, draining them of everything but anger or despair. Sorry, that’s not fair. There are remarkable indigenous people here, certainly more intelligent, more compassionate, more knowledgable than the knuckleheads filling the benches of government. Knuckleheads is not my expression, but one used recently by a white journalist. And now, the government is planning to turn the Northern Territory, the last remaining symbol of Aboriginal country, into a gas field. Not long ago, on the day in the USA when the killer of George Floyd was convicted, a police conference was held in Queensland where some speakers were encouraging the police to surveil children as young as five, describing them as budding problems for society. Increasingly, the police in this country look and feel like a military force from some mean country. 

I won’t even go into climate change. I imagine the reputation of Australia is common knowledge. Frighteningly, Canada’s is not any better. I became a climate leader when I traveled to Manila for one of Al Gore’s training sessions and I love this work and will continue with it, but it’s up to the young now. My generation (and possibly the one following it, and the one following that) has done the damage. We must do what we can to help, but only the young can undo our laziness and complacency.

In Australia, rupert murdoch’s empire has a stranglehold on 65 percent of the media and hardly anyone is concerned. And now, we find ourselves on the threshold of unfathomable change. As I said on my profile, I ran for the Greens in the state election in 2018. It was a hopeless cause in this rural area of Australia, and I’m not Don Quixote, but I did it because I’ve been trying to at least get people thinking and discussing climate change, but so few were listening, and there was nothing in the media about climate change. I’m considering running as an independent in the next state election with only two policies: lowering the voting age to 12 and removing the right to vote for everyone over 60. Of course it’s silly, but how can we wake up the complacent, how can we even get them to think, to reflect, to struggle with contradictions, to face up to dissent, to really THINK and to reason and not be afraid … and even when we are fearful, to move forward anyway?

Action will be taken in time, but it will be action that protects the entitled and screws the poor … of that I am sure. The class warfare is ongoing.

I know I should be casting back my memory to Dumont in the seventies, and not shouting from a soapbox, but my memories from Dumont are now vague, and out of all that time I have been left with a smattering of details, but there are many times that do stand out clearly: late nights proofing and pasting two line corrections, darkroom work with the large negatives, meetings, lots of meetings, the rich vocal range of the Merganthaler, taking the plates to the Record for printing, talking to old typesetters there, examining the racks of hot lead type. I remember the first time I looked at the tape punched out by the Merganthaler and realised I could read it: amazing, even as I realised I was far from fluent. I remember good people, people I looked up to, wise and serious. Details? No there are few. I remember very little from the two retreats I went on. I’ve always disliked meetings, and I’ve attended a life-time of them, but what comes back to me from the retreats was the bonding, the music and fun, and once, at some lake, north of the city, I lay on a dock and watched the strangest creature climb up out of the water to get in the sun; it took few minutes to dry itself and then its shell split open and the dragonfly emerged, still larvae-like, but in thirty minutes it took on the full imago form, its wings glistening and it was gone. I was a city kid and this was a wonder. 

So here I am, 73 years of age, unmarried and a fabulously unsuccessful novelist of 20-odd offerings, missing my homeland with an ache, but with two beautiful daughters, five grandchildren and many good friends. I am watching the planet go to hell in a handbasket, the rich folk using snow shovels to push the wealth their way, the middle class up to their ears in debt, but supping on complacency, shopping and sport, the poor getting poorer every year, the government and opposition in lock-step in treating asylum seekers like cockroaches, locking Aboriginal children up, literally for no crime whatsoever, trying to open new coal mines for export and appropriating the places of beauty for their friends. And the women? At every step of the government’s response to Covid, men were given a helping hand and women (and children) were not; and while so many were doing very well and buying second and third homes and investment properties, all of which lessen the tax they pay, the young and unemployed were slipping further behind. What kind of people punish their own young? Last weekend the PM told a conference he was doing god’s work, laying hands on the people and doing god’s work. I want nothing to do with any such god.

I don’t understand any of it: maybe Dylan was right about not trusting anyone over 30, and maybe I should amend my policy. 

Nevertheless, I continue to resist, a foolishness inculcated in my being by those good people of Dumont.

With me are two of my grandsons, Oliver and Thomas. 

Onya Gabe!  Merci mille fois.

The Dumont Nexus

Reflections by Jim Harding

I came to the K-W area in the fall of 1970 when Dumont was a twinkle in the eye. For me, as a prairie boy adapting to living in the Golden Horseshoe, there were always blurred boundaries between Dumont, the Chevron, Integrated studies (IS), Environmental Studies, and OPIRG. But entering this nexus changed the direction of my life.

This is where I met my lifelong partner, Janet Stoody, who was a typesetter and proofreader at Dumont. Our first son, Joel, spent his formative years going back and forth with us between Thunder Bay and K-W, and, with his younger brother, Dagan, took regular trips to K-W to see the Stoody grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins after we moved to Saskatchewan.

I made lifelong friends and activist colleagues in K-W. Being hired in the pioneering Environmental Studies (ES) program transformed me into a militant political ecologist. Trying to help avert the climate crisis, and it going from the frying pan (of fossil fuel GHGs) into the nuclear fire, became a very personal commitment after my time with ES (1972–76). And I have had to learn to deal with my gnawing outrage that this steadily worsening global catastrophe is taking so long to sink in.

Integrated Studies

I came to K-W because I was hired as a Resource Person in Integrated Studies. I had done a multidisciplinary doctorate at SFU, entitled The Ideology and Logic of Scientism (on-line if you are interested). My last chapter was on how the scientism of the compartmentalized university serves the corporate society.

I had been part of the Political Science, Anthropology and Sociology (PSA) department, which spearheaded university democratization, including student parity, but was finally dissolved after being placed under administrative trusteeship. In 1968, Students for a Democratic University (SDU) activists won daycare through one sit-in, and won equitable transfer credits, for working class and racialized students, through the mass student occupation where 114 of us were arrested. But in 1969 we lost the big battle after our strike failed to overthrow the PSA trusteeship.

It was a political purge. Some faculty and several of us TAs were fired. I was blacklisted, could not find work in BC, and no social science department across Canada would consider me. Peter Warrian, a colleague from SUPA and CUS, informed me about IS and so I applied. (I had some connection with the University from SUPA, which held its Xmas gathering there in 1966.) Howard Petch asked some very pertinent questions during our lengthy one-on-one interview. I was pleasantly surprised at his interest in critical studies of education and the university. I also “passed” the informal student interview.

I thought I was entering Integrated Studies, which are so desperately needed in our dangerous times of compartmentalization, fragmentation, polarization, and conspiracies. But I soon found that it was going to be Independent Studies. I recall some students, like Dave Palmer, being particularly keen while others seemed caught in their developmental anomie. There were some mental health challenges. I was happy working in a farm house on the edge of the campus, where we could hold discussions around a campfire. And I felt more personally grounded after I discovered the Grand River. But after my second year I was enticed over to Environmental Studies by Colin De’Ath, who sometimes hung out at IS, and by George Francis, who had witnessed, through UN work, what was happening to the global environment and had a strong vision of a multidisciplinary environmental curricula. It was the perfect learning-teaching environment for me. I entered the huge world of planetary co-evolution and biodiversity under threat from the ever-accumulating impacts of industrial society. It was overwhelming. I focused on occupational and environmental health, which was to reshape my life commitments.

I prefer to forget about the toxic, dead-end CPC-ML “politics” occurring on the campus at this time.

My relationships with people in the Dumont Nexus deepened. I had many a discussion, especially with Steve Izma, also an IS student at the time, about the history of religion, philosophy, technology and science, which went into the wee hours of the morning. The reified categories of traditional ideologies were crumbling. Events around the Telos journal enriched the critical discussions taking place.

Through Janet I have stayed in touch with many valued friends formed at that time, including Winnie Pietrykowski and Liz Janzen, who also worked at Dumont. Many, many people from coast to coast, from the K-W network, have visited us in the Qu’Appelle Valley over the decades.

Imagination

The revolt of Paris students in May 1968 unleashed the imagination of a new generation. The liberation of imagination was going to become a foundation of the liberation of the species. We desperately needed to break out from living under the threat of nuclear war and neo-colonialism. The emerging generations struggled to move towards anti-authoritarianism, along with anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, but the stumbling blocks of neo-liberalism and identity politics were still to come. Liberation was to become fragmented into libertarianism, though the COVID pandemic may start to turn this around.

We were all trying to overturn inherited historical narratives. No one in K-W was a buffalo hunter or a guerrilla warrior but Gabriel Dumont’s name nevertheless rose to the top. (Janet and I gave our youngest son, Dagan, the second name “Gabriel,” also in deference to the Métis struggle.) At SFU we had tried to change the university’s name, “Simon Fraser,” a European who got his rivers mixed up, to Louis Riel University, after the Métis father of Canadian Confederation. However, when the SFU SDU briefly held student government, its president was a British grad student and the two of us who were VPs were both from Saskatchewan. Perhaps if we’d known more about West Coast political economy and labour history, we might have considered renaming the university after “Ginger” Goodwin, the strike leader and draft dodger who was murdered in 1918.

Networks

Networks grew along with the Dumont Nexus. Janet brought publishing skills to Thunder Bay, which helped us launch the community paper The Black Fly in 1974. Our land in the boreal forest became a stopover for many counter culture people travelling across the country. We had regular visits from people from K-W; Steve Izma and Peter Lang came once and Peter never left the north. Sandy Cameron and Linda Hudson would stop enroute to or from Regina.

Special things happened because of the network linking Ontario’s metropolis and hinterland. I was teaching environmental health, which included case studies such as on the devastation of Indigenous communities and habitats from mercury poisoning from pulp and paper plants in Northern Ontario. The Black Fly did some of the first coverage of this ecological disaster. OPIRG was forming at the time and I got to know Terry Moore, who continues to do such good work. We ended up bringing Ralph Nader as the keynote speaker for an activist Teach In organized in Thunder Bay. We showed films from Minamata, Japan, which had also been struck by corporate mercury poisoning. The network between north and south helped facilitate the trips of Indigenous people from Kenora to Japan and of a Japanese delegation back to Canada. Interregional networks were turning into international ones.

Later, a similar thing happened when Dene from the NWT, who had endured uranium mining for the Manhattan Project, visited victims of the A-Bomb attacks on the Japanese. Global consciousness grew with these international activist networks.

My activism to expose asbestos in Lake Superior or to combat uranium mining in Saskatchewan was inspired by the integration of knowledge occurring around Environmental Studies.

I got to know Ralph Torrie and Bruce Steele through Environmental Studies. Ralph was my physics tutor, especially on the nuclear fuel system and spent fuel, and these conversations were invaluable when I returned to Saskatchewan and Janet and I joined the non-nukes who were resisting the NDP government’s expansion of uranium mining. (My book, Canada’s Deadly Secret, grew out of this activism.) Bruce Steele introduced me to some of my earliest conversations about how information technology was going to transform “human community.” He later joined the notorious Regina community of K-W ex-pats.

Huston House

Many unexpected benefits accrued from the Dumont Nexus. When my father, Bill, retired back to Regina from his UNDP work around the globe, he hooked up with several CUSO-OXFAM returnees. The collective we formed (Edna Curren Society) bought and upgraded Huston House as a centre for development education. Because it was maintained by volunteers, we could lower rent for activist non-profits. The Sask Council for International Co-operation (SCIC), which survived many cuts from Conservative governments, has been housed there from its formation in the 1970s. The Open-Door Society, still providing support to new immigrant families in 2021, was launched there. The Greens have used the facility as a base. I was involved with the Regina Committee for World Development, the Regina Group for a Non-Nuclear Society, or RGNNS, and Briarpatch Magazine, which were all housed there. Briarpatch is still operating out of there in 2021.

A decision was made to create a co-op print company, called First Impressions, to provide income for Briarpatch. Rosco Bell, who had worked at Dumont and graduated from IS, was one of the original staff. Gary Robins brought his publishing and photography capacities to Regina, which benefitted many organizations including Briarpatch. With his help in production, RGNNS Publishing was able to complete several small books that have challenged the rigid technocratic mindset about energy and environment in the province.

Communicart, Little Red Hen Theatre, the Exchange and the Club, important outreach and community-building projects, all grew out of a blending of friendships, talents, and visions among Saskatchewan activists and K-W ex-pats. Ross Taylor was always game and his home was always welcoming. Liz Willick and Ron Colpitts, also a prairie boy who returned home, were always in this strong circle. Liz brought her many CUP-honed skills to her work on rural women and development.

Deeper connections evolved: Ross Taylor became my mother, Bea’s, personal handyman. Gary Robins is partner with Lisa Brownstone, whose father, Meyer, was a personal mentor, a close colleague of my father, who also went on to do important international development work heading up OXFAM international.

There have been many positive outcomes from the rich nexus. When Steve Izma was at WLU Press, I worked with him to publish a book on social policy and social justice. BTL carries on publishing material that would, otherwise, never see the light of day. BTL published the magnus opus, New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness, which came out of the Queen’s conference on the sixties, held in 2007.

Similar things happened elsewhere; in BC, New Star Books also carries on. It, too, evolved out of the student activism and communal living of the sixties. And remember another important organization, and network, coming from those times, that is celebrating its 50th. Many people still do not know that Greenpeace originated out of the anti-nuclear demonstrations against US testing of nuclear weapons in Alaska, during the Vietnam War. The organization first linked the peace and ecology movements. We still have a lot of dots to connect to enable the new convergence of activism to maximize its effects.

There is a rich history of friendships, loves, creativity, comradeship, and vital outcomes coming from the Dumont Nexus. So, huge congratulations on the 50th. Keep the stories coming; it is now or never if there is going to be valuable documentation from these watershed times.

www.crowsnestecology.wordpress.com

Qu'Appelle Valley Envrionmental Association (QVEA.ca)

How has my association with Dumont Press Graphix Influenced the rest of my life ?

A difficult question. What have I done with my life, really? Sounds grim: called to account by the Ghost of Christmas Past.

I only worked for Dumont for a few weeks, building light tables. My wife, Kae, worked there for a couple of years 1978/79. She was employed at Dumont when I first met her. I was able to sympathize with Kae and the challenges she faced working there. My other association was that my shop was at first on the same floor and then below Dumont on the ground floor for nearly twenty years (1975 to 1994).

My strongest association was with the people, in the years leading up to Dumont’s founding in 1971. I knew Eddie Hale from high school in Galt and I began university at U of W in 1967, immediately meeting Ken Epps and Gary Robins. Soon I had made a large group of friends. I like to say I got mixed up with the wrong crowd, but I might have been the wrong crowd. My father was a steadfast socialist, having grown up in east London (England) amid considerable poverty during the depression. Though less vocal, my mother was too. So it was natural that I gravitated to the RSM (Radical Student Movement) and the Chevron, and generally left-wing politics.

In 1970, I was one of the group that moved to 192 Strange Street and produced the left- wing community paper On the Line until October 1970. There my path diverged: I attempted to resurrect my faltering university career in the Integrated Studies program. However by the spring of ‘71 I was playing the bass guitar with a fairly good group, Kit Carson. So university didn’t seem to matter. I also had a desire, like many others, to live in the country, which I did for a few years. But it was hard to make a living. In the end I returned to Kitchener and worked as a house painter until my brother Richard also returned with some woodworking equipment, some experience, and the hope of manufacturing small wooden products.

My son Chris was born July 30, 1975; and December 5, 1975, I rented some space from Dumont for a woodworking shop. So there I was — a parent and an entrepreneur. For a few years Richard and I joined the Dumont lunch plan, and I generally kept in touch with many people there that were old friends.

I have continued to play the viola as an amateur, and occasionally play the fiddle professionally in a ceili band.

I have maintained my interest in photography which began at the Chevron, having had a number of gallery exhibitions of photographs over the years. And I have had published two books of photos of the Region of Waterloo: Evolving Urban Landscapes (Fountain Street Press, 2016) and Through a Changing Landscape (WLU Press, 2022). The theme of my photography has been urban spaces and the buildings which frame them.

As time has permitted, I have been involved in municipal affairs, and to a lesser degree in provincial politics. Since 2006, I’ve served on the Waterloo Municipal Heritage committee. My passion for many years has been urban planning for people, rather than for profit.

I never worked at Dumont Press Graphix, so to me the “spirit” doesn’t have anything to do with a worker-run co-op.  But living at 192 King and 192 Strange St., working hard with On the Line, and participating in events like the Peterborough Examiner Strike and the Dare Cookie Strike, not to mention endless meetings of RSM (Radical Student Movement) – before we learned that the usefulness of a meeting is not proportional to the amount of time it takes out of your life – did teach me about working together, and that the ultimate goal is the defeat of capitalism.  Defeat of capitalism, as you are no doubt aware, didn’t happen; but it is the ‘working together’ lessons of my Dumont years that carried forward through my life.

I’ve always enjoyed working on volunteer endeavours – for the friendships that are built as well as the goals that are accomplished.  My most satisfying projects were the establishment of the Community Resource Centre (CRC) in Killaloe, and subsequent development of the Toy Bus.  Toy Bus brings support to parents of young children in many communities of our area, even the more isolated ones.  In the guise of a mobile toy and book lending library; it arrives in a big blue bus to host a playgroup in a local venue.  Established in the latter part of the 1980’s, both CRC and Toy Bus are still going strong.  These days, many of the Toy Bus parents used to participate as pre-schoolers.  The program has worn out at least three buses, and now boasts two mobile units.

CRC started as an information and referral centre, with seed funding of $15,000 annually.  It has grown to provide services to all ages, from babies to seniors – a pre-natal nutrition program, day care centre, youth programs, a used clothing shop, a community garden – and it helps to support other community organizations.  Not least of its accomplishments is the number of people (mostly women) it has employed over the years.  In the early days, our greatest skill was researching what funding was available and developing a program that did what we felt was needed, but also fit the requirements of the funders – not to the point of deception, but sometimes stretching the truth just a tiny bit.  The CRC experience let me work with an amazing team of (mostly) women and I learned through it that even the most annoying team member could prove invaluable – sometimes you need someone who isn’t afraid to be obnoxious.

I’ve worked on many other projects through the years:  The Killaloe Craft and Community Fair, Railway Station Park in Barry’s Bay and innumerable Business Development committees.  Currently my major involvement is with Green Burial Ottawa Valley.  We’re working to develop Natural Burial Grounds in our area, because natural burial lets your body give its nutrients back to the earth, while conventional burial practices pollute and poison the ground, and cremation consumes large amounts of energy (usually fossil fuels) and releases nasty by-products into the atmosphere.  As a community, we have tried throughout our lives to live in harmony with the earth so natural burial has a strong appeal.  We’ve experienced many deaths where none of the options available fit with the deceased’s values in life.

The years leading up to Dumont Press Graphix also taught me a lot about innovating and improvising – using what you have to get things done.  Some might call it bullshitting.  I made good use of those skills in my 35 years in business in Barry’s Bay.  It started with computer sales, service and training; with daughter Kelly adding her awesome abilities to the team in the early 90’s.  The government (probably provincial, but who remembers any more) was funding computer literacy classes for unemployed people, and we taught hundreds of people that they didn’t have to be afraid of the computer – using one could be fun; and how to use a word processor, spreadsheet, and basic accounting software. 

But when the training funding dried up, and Walmart started to sell computers, it was obviously time to move on.  We leased a colour digital printer from Xerox, figured out some web technologies and started to provide colour printing and website development.  Kelly ran the printing end of things, and I did the websites – and we both flew by the seat of our pants often enough.  But with the help of a very capable office assistant we grew the business to the point we could sell the printing end in 2017, Kelly could take over the website end of things, and I could more-or-less retire.

At one of the Dumont reunions, I was chatting with Rosco, and lamented that we hadn’t accomplished the defeat of capitalism, nor, I felt, much of anything.  Rosco assured me we had.  “Take food, for example,” he pointed out.  “Our influence had a lot to do with changing the way people eat.”  True enough.  Possibly the greatest contribution of our generation (can’t think of a better way to put it) is the refusal to just do what we’re told.  And while we’re not as active as we once were, we can hope the example we set has helped to pave the way for today’s young activists.

You’re welcome, Greta.

What is “The Spirit of Dumont” anyway? Some might say it is living a caring life, cooperating with others and helping facilitate positive change going forward. Perhaps this means constantly questioning conventional wisdom and applying critical thinking to everyday decisions and events. Certainly it will mean something different for everyone, both while involved with Dumont and afterwards. One variation on the theme follows:

One afternoon in a previous century, John Stafford paid a short visit to 53 Roy Street. This fine mansion, first erected by one of Kitchener’s entrepreneurs in an even earlier century, housed an ever-changing group of people and animals, with a large walk-in safe in the basement. One of the dogs barked at John, who quickly leapt back while exclaiming, horrified, “Even your dog is a social democrat”.

September, 1966: A young 17 year old, naive student started his career as an aspiring Electrical Engineer at UW, happy to be out on his own. It is extremely likely that he had never heard the phrase “social democrat”. The next several years followed the normal pattern of a co-op student. His first work term was with Power Corp. in Montreal followed by three more with the CBC, both highly regarded Canadian firms. The future seemed exciting.

September, 1971: Five years later, this same fellow was in the first group of people hired at Dumont Press Graphix. How did this happen? What could explain such a rapid decline from a promising, productive member of society, hopefully a faithful husband and good father to someone who understood that being a social democrat was an insult? What did the future hold now?

The decline started when he switched from Engineering to Sociology during the last half of his third year. It accelerated during the summer of 1970 living in the West Quad of Village 1 where Henry and Betsy Crapo were the dons. A gig as a turnkey in the Campus Centre introduced him to more strange people with strange ideas. Yippies, hippies, music and concerts, Black Panthers, communists, socialists, drinkers, smokers, tokers and general rabble rousers. Somehow this resulted in a move to a large house outside St. Agatha with 5 other people, including Brenda Wilson and Elaine Switzman. They knew other strange people, some of whom were busy setting up a workplace where everyone was both a worker and a boss. This sounded like a good way to work especially after his time spent at two Canadian mega-corps. Abandoning Sociology, he spent some time in the summer of 1971 hanging around and helping at Dumont, threw his hat in the ring and somehow was hired. Obviously the hiring process needed a lot of improvement but everyone involved was on a steep learning curve. That learning curve probably remained steep throughout the existence of Dumont. There are many stories about this in the “Life at the Shop” and “Workers’ Control” sections.

September, 1971: A small family of 2 moved from Ontario’s Big Smoke to the little smoke to further Mum’s education. They lived in Married Students’ Residence at UW and shared their apartment with several other students. At some point they moved to downtown Kitchener and eventually (mostly through the women who lived on Ahrens St), the Mum (and the Kid) became involved with the crowd in and around Dumont

September 1974. The Mum started working full time at Dumont while living on Roy St. Some Dumonters lived in the other half of the house along with some non-Dumonters (but fellow travellers). This continued for several years until the Mum left Dumont in December of 1979. She stayed somewhat involved, participating in the wind-up discussions of 1986 and ended up at a Waterloo copy and print shop. Some years went by, with various other jobs, during which she and her partner became actively involved in local politics.

At some point in those years he had become that partner. He had left Dumont in March, 1978, planted some trees and spent hours driving James Allen’s taxi. The lure of again being the boss as well as the worker resulted in taxi ownership and many more years behind the wheel. Gainfully employed, they were able to buy a house in downtown Kitchener, where they still live.

They became more involved with the NDP riding associations (both provincial and federal) and were members of the executive in many different capacities for several decades. Even though Waterloo Region is now home to 2 large universities and one large community college, it has been a very conservative area. The bank accounts of the Federal and Provincial riding associations combined was often under $100. After many elections and many learning experiences, they were happy when Kitchener finally elected a Black woman as their NDP MPP in 2018 (they resigned after she was elected in order to go out on a winning team!). Several months later, their ward councillor won her seat and joined a council with as many women and men (another campaign they worked on). Both women were recently re-elected and the next generation has hopefully taken over.

Since leaving Dumont those many years ago they have been involved with the majority of the Dumont reunions and kept in touch with many Dumont workers and allies. They feel their lives have not been very remarkable and they certainly didn’t live up to Gabe’s legacy of militancy. They tried to raise The Kid as best they could, occasionally with her cooperation. They tried to carry on the DIY spirit of Dumont by continuing to use the carpentry, cooking, electrical wiring, bookkeeping, communication and cooperation skills that were learned to keep the shop operating. Trying to tread lightly on the land resulted in efforts at gardening, composting, water conservation, etc. He still some 30 year old blue jeans that he hopes to fit into again. They have tried to be supportive of various Labour initiatives, strikes and marches as well as events like the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. They were and are involved in the Heritage planning for their downtown area, helping with the Neighbourhood Association and, most recently, fighting the greed of the many high rise condo developers overwhelming our cities.

They are now retired from gainful employment, still living in downtown Kitchener and involved in the Dumont web site and the Dumont Archives. Going forward they will no doubt keep involved with their community and their city. They recently delivered Christmas hampers to some people who need Christmas (or whatever) help because of no wages, low wages, or the rising cost of inflation. Take that Doug Ford!

What does all this have to do with The Spirit of Dumont? We’re not really sure. We may have ended up as fairly run of the mill, productive members of society with some sense of social injustice, for whatever good that has done. We have met many people doing the same things we do who didn’t work at Dumont. We are happy for such fellow travellers and hope for more from the future generations.

Many years ago a large group of progressive people organized and attended an event in Toronto called “Who’s Left”. One of the last speakers was Judy Rebick. She basically said that we were all relics of the past and her main hope for the future lay with our children. That is always the way.

However, what’s with man buns!?!

As for John Stafford, we would like to tell him (if we could) that we may not be social democrats but we are, at the very least, New Democrats! We are sure he would have been disappointed, but not surprised, had he known at the time that we had reached the pinnacle of our political development. As a committed believer in the CPC-ML he would have argued that NDPers were the true enemy. But perhaps they are only the best of a bad lot.