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Many grassroots alternative publications emerged from Dumont Press Graphix, but one important community newspaper actually preceeded it. On the Line, one of the early Canadian alternative newspapers, was established by a volunteer collective from the Gabriel Dumont Memorial Commune in Waterloo, started publishing ion June 23, 1970. Within two months, the editorial and production staff had determined that the paper needed to establish its own typesetting and production resources in order to become sustainable. Nine months and a whole lot of labour later, Dumont Press was born, opening its doors in May 1971.
The Archivist
One of the early treasures of the current People's History project, this half-forgotten and mostly unknown document was discovered in the Dumont Archives just a few months ago. It was written around March 1971 and scanned from the original document in August 2020, and then digitally remastered, edited solely for spelling and punctuation and reformatted for Web publication in October 2020. The Need to Print is a foundational document outlining the process and the vision which guided the establishment of Dumont Press Graphix that same year, and many more after that. The writing of the document was probably a collaborative effort. Gary Robins was one of the co-authors, but beyond that we are just not sure. What we do have here, however, are the roots to the whole Dumont Press adventure.
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I have wondered what this Dumont group has to do with me, since I never worked at Dumont and have not kept in touch with many people that I knew then. I’m as fond of nostalgia as the next person but this didn’t seem to be my nostalgia. Still, I did feel something and now Ken and Steve (by way of Ken) have convinced me that it is more about the politics of the time and what people have done since, so …
I began at UofW in September 1967 and was not involved in anything much that year other than discovering dope and playing guitar with Phil Elsworthy. I started to become more aware of the world with the riot in Chicago at the Democratic Convention and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and so was ready to hear something the next Fall. There were a lot of speakers and other stuff but my first political involvement was at the occupation of the Campus Centre. I remember Stuart Saxe saying that if you agreed that it should belong to the students then you should stay for the occupation. I had never been challenged to make word and deed agree before and decided to stay. Thus, I became part of that rag-tag group known as the RSM. We signed up with the Wobblies as we certainly weren’t Marxist-Leninists and wanted some form of organization. Roddy bugged everybody for decades to pay their back dues. I still have my little red book somewhere. I’m lucky to have known those people and have lived those years.
From some influence, we adopted a slogan each year or so to orient our actions. Perhaps they came from OUS or CUS I don’t know. The first that I can recall was “class struggle in the classroom.” We were encouraged to confront professors and attempt to influence the students toward more radical thinking. I remember confronting Jan Narveson in a class of over 200 students with my knees shaking and making it all up as I went along. Scott Arnold told me later that he would have supported me if he’d known what I was talking about. Cyril came in to the final lecture by a McLuhanist communications prof and a bunch of us followed along. The prof was talking about the distribution of finite resources and Cyril built his case on the Marxist notion that resources could be expanded and so it wasn’t a zero-sum game between classes. All in all, a half-century later the environmentalist zero-sum game seems closer to the truth. Lots of others confronted their professors. There were radical caucuses in most departments, but I don’t recall any other stories any more. It culminated in a sit-in at the library. One of the demands that we achieved and which I still think is important was access by the community to the university library.
After that, it was the rather pretentiously named “student-worker alliance” which mostly consisted of strike support at Continental Can and other places that always seemed to require getting up at 4.00 in the morning and driving off into the dark. This laid the basis for the energetic support of the Dare and Peterborough Examiner strikes a bit later. I think that we can say that we made a difference there.
The RSM women formed a separate caucus—which caused a lot of debate pro and con. Then, in coordination with others from Toronto organized the 1970 protest at the Miss Canada pageant at Waterloo Lutheran University (as it was then) in front of national tv. The women’s caucus was in charge and us guys were only allowed to be foot soldiers. They bought a few tickets and were going to rise inside to sing Solidarity Forever when a candidate was moved (by prior arrangement) to defect to the protest. The rest of us were to make enough noise outside to be heard inside. I was outside when Betty Burcher came out. The ushers had taken note of the tickets but not collected them, so she collected up the tickets and came outside to redistribute them. That was done a few times and so we ended up with quite a lot of people inside so that when we rose to sing they had to stop everything and wait. There’s a panel in SFU’s downtown campus that commemorates this event as part of the background of the SFU Women’s Centre to this day.
By then a lot of people had decided to leave the university and take their activism elsewhere, though some stayed on and many were involved in the debates that surrounded the founding of Integrated Studies. The worker-oriented newspaper On the Line took up a lot of our planning, writing, and distributing. It probably lasted only a few months but taught a lot of lessons that led to the founding of Dumont. Mainly, that the high cost of typesetting was difficult for us to raise. I tried selling the paper outside several factories and had little luck. I had worked in a factory and could relate to how they felt coming off a long shift. It was a shower and a beer that they wanted not a long studenty analysis of capitalist power dynamics. I gave a lot of papers away and so did others. How to pay for it was the big issue and some bright sparks came up with the idea to set up a typesetting shop to support the paper. From an outsider’s perspective it seemed as if the energy for political activities was then mostly drained off by internal issues at Dumont. Though I know that Dumont supported many good left-wing publishing activities afterward. It’s surely the most long-standing institution that the RSM effected.
I was away travelling and working abroad for most of 1973 and into 1974. When I had left the local political scene seemed overcome by a sense of malaise—except for the overwhelming work and debates going on at Dumont. I was fed up with organizing meetings for lots of new projects where very few ever came to fruition. It seemed to have become all talk. When I left I swore to myself that I wouldn’t be involved with any more projects that I didn’t think would actually happen.
The last hurrah was in summer 1974. I was involved with an OFY-funded project on temporary farm workers. Terry Moore, David Robertson, David Cubberley, Mel Rotman, and more of the usual suspects were involved. 12 of us I think. Finally we split into 2 groups: I was with the one on the political economy of food in Canada—which produced a corporate map of the ownership structure of Weston’s that was suppressed by the Montreal Gazette. I remember a consultation with Leo Johnson where he generously shared his method of estimating surplus value with me. The other was a photo-journalism project on the farmworkers themselves. The last was published in The Chevron and a local paper called The Kitchener-Waterloo Free Press that we started up that summer.
Then, in early September 1974 I left KW and began graduate school at York. It was an intense few years in which I learned a great deal that has stayed with me in broad outline ever since. As Ken often says, we were lucky to have been young in that time.
A Moral Imperative
Ah, yes, I remember it well - but not so very well (it seems) without the helpful prodding of girlfriends with a shared history from the early 1970s. Back then, if you didn’t work at Dumont you knew someone who did.
For some, Dumont was the embodiment of “praxis” or “theory put into practice.” For others, it was this funky co-op typesetting shop on the second floor of the old Mitchell button factory on the corner of Weber and Victoria Streets in Kitchener. From the very beginning (for me) Dumont Press Graphix had this air of spent enterprise, Depression-era politics, and mysterious past encounters. Its musty wood smell, rickety unreliable freight elevator, high-beamed ceilings, exposed piping and tall multi-paned windows (some of which were cracked or broken) hinted at something more durable and larger than me.
In the early 1970s, we were all searching for something. The world we grew up in (when we learned more about it) proved not that attractive or inviting. Our studies at university provided insights but not necessarily answers. How might we begin to make sense of the world we inherited? How might we reshape it or improve its systems to better reflect our deepest heartfelt values? Isn’t this both the challenge and the burden that every new generation faces? At the time, it wasn’t so much a choice as a moral imperative.
Bridging Two Silos
I arrived at Dumont by way of the Eby Street commune, a political collective composed of two separate houses that lasted less than a year (perhaps a little over 6 months). The commune was an ambitious venture, an experiment into shared living that went beyond co-op housing. We pooled our financial resources, scheduled household responsibilities, cooked and ate together, and met as a collective at least once a week to discuss possible actions that might reflect our commitment to change.
There were, if I remember correctly, 12 of us altogether. The individuals I remember well are those I grew closer to while at Eby Street or those I had met on campus at University of Waterloo: Betty Burcher, Vicki Mees (a frequent visitor), Randy and Joy, Wally, David Monoogian, Peter Warrian, Heather Webster.
While at Eby Street I met Bill Aird, perhaps through Peter Lang (my partner and husband) or perhaps at RSM (Radical Student Movement) meetings on campus. One of our ongoing, recurring topics was how to bridge the gap between the two silos of university and community. We were all in some way connected to university either as teachers or students and we debated ad infinitum how we might share what we were learning with the community at large, how we might work to bridge the gap between the privileged and working classes.
I remember asking Rod Hay, when I was very new to the RSM, why were we so preoccupied with the working classes when so many universities did not question their “ivory tower” status. I remember his smile and simple response: We are the children of working class men and women. We are numerous. There are more of us than there are jobs. To keep us off the street (so to speak) the “powers that be” made it easier for us to enter university. We are learning about ourselves and in the process we are learning about privilege. And because we are the children of working men and women we see things differently. The balance seems uneven.
Rod may not have used these exact words. But, this is what I retained. There were large numbers of we so-called “baby boomers” at Waterloo and we did not come from wealth. Our loyalties lay elsewhere. Outside the universities, Kitchener-Waterloo was largely a working class city.
On the Line
I remember Bill Aird as one of the key players in the community newspaper On the Line. I liked Bill, his thoughtful way of speaking and his passion for the underprivileged. I decided to help distribute On the Line in downtown Kitchener. I also participated in the Dare Strike (front page news in On the Line) as one of many students showing their support for the Dare factory workers. I became friends with one of the families involved in the strike and later rented an attic apartment from them.
As has been described in other articles on this website, On the Line was inspired by the insight that information is powerful and that the press plays a key role in sharing and disseminating information. It didn’t take long to carry this insight one step further: Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one! Owning the means of production was also one way to reduce costs for creative and independent journalism.
Dumont – A Precarious Tolerance
When I started at Dumont in 1971, I knew nothing about photocomposition, perforating machines, punch-hole tapes, paste-up boards, layout tables, waxing machines, proofreading, editing, photography, organizing payrolls, scheduling, and shift work. But I did know how to type (and yes to this day I believe I can type faster than Nick Sullivan, aka Nicky Savage) and I was a seasoned worker.
By the time I arrived at Dumont I already had several years work experience. I graduated from high school in Montreal when I was 16. Instead of immediately going to university I enrolled in Business College (the former Mother House at the corner of University Avenue and Sherbrooke Street West) and for two years afterwards I helped send my brothers to university. Mine, was a working class household from the Montreal East End: Catholic, dominated by a widowed war bride whose modest hope for her daughter was that she marry well.
I think that the black and white photos of Dumont’s early days capture some of my fondest memories of Dumont. It was a difficult place to work at times – not everyone shared the same work ethic or “praxis.” But, it was a world where creativity and best efforts were respected and encouraged, where we struggled to learn and to improve our skills, where techniques were shared and judgments (for the most part) withheld. Bit by bit, we were learning from each other and sharing – no matter how difficult or painful.
This precarious tolerance applied to our personal lives as well as our daily tasks at Dumont. We were all in and out of relationships, trying to make “head or tail” of marriage, couples, sexuality, commitment, personal freedom, individualism and collective growth. We took on so much!
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