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.

Ten years and 117 crises later, the collective at Dumont Press decided it was time for a break, time to pause and reflect, time to breathe in some clean country air and count those previously hatched chickens. Yes, it was time to celebrate a significant anniversary and catch up with long-time friends, colleagues and extended family. Late June seemed appropriate for the occasion. Sunday the 28th was chosen, with a raucous kick-off party the night before in town.

Again, folks trekked in from across the country to a scenic rural setting just north of Waterloo, rolling hills, fields and woods. As usual, the day was marked by music and volleyball, great food, visiting and political discussions. We were a chatty crew, and the weather was perfect for celebration. No decisions were made, no one got lost in the bush. It was just what we all needed. Happy anniversary, Gabe!

About 150 people, from Newfoundland to British Columbia, made the trek to the farm at Chicopee (just outside of Kitchener) in June 1976 to help celebrate Dumont Press and the community of activists, writers and publishers it fostered and supported throughout southern Ontario. This is part of a photographic portfolio created that day by Brian Cere.

The specially-constructed anniversary cake was baked and assembled with loving care by Brenda Wilson, who used 14 carrot cakes to put it all together. The official welcome, and reflection on Dumont's five years of existence and adventures, was made by John Dufort, making it up as he went along, pretending to expound with poetic grace and profound insight from an imaginary script that was actually a child's colouring book. He did a great job, and we were all in awe!

It was an eclectic crew that came together to establish Dumont Press Graphix. A worker-controlled co-op, tools to publish community-based alternative newspapers and magazines, a resource to offer to progressive groups and publications around southern Ontario, and of course, an opportunity to put theory into practice. What dreamers we all were!

Here are some of the folks who facilitated that dream.

Two years after the first Dumont reunion in 1985 (a rousing success, as we all agreed), we decided to do it all again, back at Elaine and Michael's farm just north of Bruce Mines. It was centrally located, with lots of room for camping, great feasting and assorted shenanigans. Eddie even built a three-hole golf course! Good times all round.

Photos here by Gary Robins, Doug Epps and David Cubberley.

After four months of set-up and initial operation, the workers at Dumont Press prepared to move into the next stage of production with an expanded publishing workload. This of course would require additional staff and a set of guidelines for anyone interested. Not quite a Help Wanted ad, but much more than your regular job description, Dumont's very first hiring criteria was published in August of 1971.

After a series of biannual Dumont reunions in 1985 and '87 in Bruce Mines, then 1989 in Oxbow and the big 20th anniversary gathering in Waterloo in 1991, folks weren't sure where (or when) to go next. 1993 slipped by quietly, socially ungathered, an empty void in the fabric of time. Remember, in those dark days, nobody could afford email or even cellphones, and texts were to be found only on carefully-bound and correctly-spelled type on pieces of paper. Even long distance phone calls were expensive.

At that point, Elaine Switzman was alone on the farm at Bruce Mines. Even the goats had wandered off. Always up for a good visit, Elaine welcomed the opportunity to host another gathering of the Dumont crew, their associates and fellow travelers. We all welcomed the opportunity to get together again... long weekend in August, 1994.

For better or worse, I post here the link to the blogspot:  http://dumontpressgraphix.blogspot.com

There can be found some photos of the 40th reunion, among others.

Roderick Winston Hay: 1948 – 2008

Up until his death in 2008, I had known Rod Hay longer than anyone else that I still kept in touch with (not including immediate family of course). We had both commenced our not-so-remarkable studies at the University of Waterloo in September of 1966. Roddy lived next door to me at the student village during our first year, and we often went to math classes together.

We shared other pursuits as well, from our opposition to the war in Vietnam to our shared interest in discovering new music and new musicians. We both liked Dylan, but Rod took me further into his lyrics and poetry. He introduced me to a world of contemporary and traditional folk and blues musicians, from Phil Ochs to Joan Baez to Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot and Leonard Cohen, as well as all the old blues legends from the American South.

I remember the day Roddy came back with a new album, a picture of a hippy sitting hungrily at a dinner table on the album cover. We sat back and listened to the first song on side one, all twenty-three minutes of it. That’s when we came to know Arlo Guthrie’s Alice's Restaurant, and of course, the legendary Group W Bench.

The music of the late ‘60s held enormous power and influence within the emerging counter-culture and the growing political awareness of the times. Music, its forms and its lyrics, meant something in those days, and helped us to understand and feel the world. From Pete Seeger to Pink Floyd (whom Roddy used to refer to as Floyd Pink, a kind of lost country singer), the music was such a big part of our lives. Mind you, the drugs certainly helped...

Though our student paths diverged, we continued to spend time together. We both got involved in student journalism and social justice movements, on campus and off. We even got arrested together once (I think it was just the one time) one sunny October afternoon, and subsequently charged (along with Larry and Fast Eddie and a couple other folks) with trespassing on public property. Fortunately, we had a good lawyer, who later went on to become the mayor of Kitchener.

In early 1969 I was living in a two-bedroom apartment just off campus, Apt. 1009 in Waterloo Towers, with Phil Elsworthy, Fast Eddy, Mike Corbett and Jim Klinck. It was an enchanting and sociable little abode, top floor, lovely view, people dropping by regularly. I was working at the Campus Centre at the time, and I believe Phil was too.

Years later, Phil and I recalled the day in early May of '69 when Roddy showed up at the apartment (unannounced, as usual) with a big case of fireworks under his arm. He had liberated them from the Milton Fireworks factory where he had been working. We used those fireworks a couple weeks later to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Winnipeg General Strike (May 19, 1919), and various other relevant social/political events. Roddy stuck around and lived with us out on the balcony for the summer. It did provide adequate shelter, and Roddy and his wooden crate of fireworks seemed quite comfortable out there. Alas, this same balcony later served as the launch pad one evening for an assortment of firecrackers and other incendiaries that, coincidently, happened to get us evicted from that delightful little gathering spot. I was working that evening – missed the whole darn thing.

So that's when we rented the big house at 192 King Street South in Waterloo, that soon became the Gabriel Dumont Memorial Co-op and later, a commune. It was a good move on many levels, as I believe there were about nine of us stuffed into that two-bedroom apartment at that point. The house had previously been a doctor’s office, with many rooms to accommodate fourteen of us that first winter, plus one dog, assorted fellow travelers passing through, and a fairly regular assortment of dinner guests. There was always room to set another plate.

None of us could afford social media in those days, so there were many conversations throughout the house, both philosophical and political debates, and more mundane arguments over who had the best chicken fricasee recipe.

Roddy was right there in the thick of things, except perhaps for domestic stuff. As Joanne Kennedy recalled, “When it came Roddy’s turn to cook, he stood his ground that it was going to be PBJ or hot dogs…  I think we short-sheeted his bed.”

We did a lot of things together at 192. And when hen we started making plans in early 1970 to establish an alternative community newspaper, Roddy was right there offering his support, doing whatever little task needed to be done. The result was On the Line, a little bi-weekly tabloid that we laid out and pasted up on the dining-room table and sold on downtown street corners for 15 cents a copy.

As it turned out, we didn’t really have a great business plan, and we lost money right from the start. It was this realization that led us to consider sustainable alternatives. Hoping to put theory into practice, we developed a plan to create a worker-controlled typesetting and publishing house, which ultimately led to the creation and establishment of Dumont Press Graphix. As always, Roddy was there as an eager all-purpose volunteer. In those days, Roddie truly believed the Revolution was just around the corner.

Time lapse and flashback:   In the spring of 2008 we learned that Roddy had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, which had metastasized to his liver, and was inoperable. He had received the diagnosis a week earlier and was near death. A lot of folks rallied to his bedside at the hospital in Kitchener-Waterloo. The rest of us kept vigil from afar, keeping vigil in our own way, sending good feelings and sharing fond memories.

Out here in Regina, my long-time pal Jan Stoody came by one evening and we sat out on my front porch drinking wine (Finca, a nice cheap dry red from Argentina) and telling stories. As we contemplated the news from K-W that Roddy might not make it through the night, we thought this could well be an appropriate commemoration, as that particular day was also the anniversary of that Saturday afternoon thirty-eight years earlier when (as some of you might recall) a small crowd of about 5,000 of us tried to storm the American Consulate on University Avenue in Toronto during an anti-war rally. Larry Burko had chartered a bus (or was it two?) to get us all there from Waterloo.

There were, of course, many, many protests against the seemingly endless Vietnam War, in Canada, across the U.S. and around the globe. The many gatherings held on this date in 1970 were especially significant because they came just five days after a group of U.S. National Guardsmen (yes, they were all men in those days) in Ohio opened fire on student protesters at Kent State University, killing four of them and wounding many more. The world was understandably a bit angry,

Roddy was one of the more enthusiastic participants that day in Toronto, and hey, he did manage to avoid arrest. There was a lot of excitement that afternoon and many of our friends will probably remember the moment when those horseback-riding Toronto cops managed to pry us away from the consulate’s front gates, and then the crowd just took off, surging past City Hall through Nathan Philips Square and on towards Yonge Street, passing by, as it turned out, the old Eaton’s store.

I remember Roddy and someone else (mighta been Eddie? – who knows?) picking up a big trash container, which I’m sure must have been impeding their path or something like that, and when they went to set it aside it happened to sail through a large plate glass window, causing a huge commotion and setting off some kind of weird chain reaction that saw a number of other trash containers just spontaneously leap off their sidewalk perches in a variety of interesting directions. I suspect adrenaline rushes were breaking out all over.

So on that evening thirty-eight years later, Jan and I felt it would be kind of appropriate to dedicate our memory of that little bit of history to Roddy, especially since he rallied to survive through that night in hospital, just as he managed to avoid legal entanglements back on May 9th, 1970. We can all recognize Roddy’s enthusiasm and dedication to social justice, whatever the challenges and environment of the day. Jan and I drank a toast to all of that, and then went on to finish off the entire bottle. Rod died about a week later.

I shared this story with a number of friends and the extended family from our Dumont days, and got a note back from Fast Eddie:  “Trudy Chippier and I were with Roddy that day but I remember that Roddy and I were actually trying to hold the trash container down to avoid it flying through the window. I'm surprised that it got away from us as Roddy was usually really stubborn and determined.”

I think Roddy liked to see himself as a regular working guy, and he was also a scholar with a keen interest in politics, economics and philosophy. However, I believe his first love was baseball. As Dumont Press became a regular (in its own unique way) established workplace, it didn’t take long for thoughts to turn toward spring and the upcoming ball season. Roddy found an eager crew of players among the staff at the shop, and in June ’72, the newly-formed Dumont Ducks took to the field as part of the university intramural league. Roddy played second base, but he was also a coach, trainer, cheerleader (in his usual quiet way) and mentor to the rest of us. Win or lose, the Ducks were a huge success, providing a kind of cultural glue to add an extra dimension to our co-operatives lives together.

When I left Kitchener-Waterloo to come west in 1977, Roddy made that journey along with me. We departed the very same day the Toronto Blue Jays played their first ever game. Roddy came along as far as Calgary and got a job, but didn't say goodbye (that was his way, close and distant at the same time). I went on to B.C. before bouncing back here into Saskatchewan.

I suspect it was major league baseball that eventually lured Roddy back to Ontario. Indeed, as Michael Rohatynski later recalled, “Roddy really appreciated baseball. His fondness for the Montreal Expos rubbed off onto so many people.”

After he returned to Ontario, Roddy settled in Toronto, resumed his academic studies, and went on to teach economics at a number of universities. Still quiet and reclusive, he spent a lot of time developing relationships with the kids of his old Waterloo and Dumont buddies. As Brian Iler explained, “Rod’s been a very important friend and mentor to many of our kids, certainly to my Andrew, Brendan and Kirsten, Eddie and Donna’s son Jonathan, and Michael and Jane’s Terrina. Rod and Andrew have spent a great deal of time together, particularly over the past year, as Rod has tutored Andrew in his first year at U of T.”

Arel Agnew also recalled, “One day in about ’84 he appeared at my front door. I had just come home from teaching and was working on supper with two kids running around. He sat down in the living room and read. I said hello and asked if he wanted anything. He said no, just to sit. Then he left without saying goodbye.

“Later on, he announced he would babysit, as soon as our son Brendan no longer wore diapers, and then Andrew too. Over the years he taught me about economics, repeating the basic principles while we walked until they sunk in. I taught him to knock when he arrived at my front door. He always had a key, but I taught him to phone before he showed up.”

Looking back over the years of my friendship with Roddy, I often return to Alice’s Restaurant and the epic lyrics of Arlo Guthrie towards the end of that classic piece, as Arlo noted, "If you want to end war and stuff you've got to sing loud!" For a quiet guy, Rod had a mighty voice. We've all felt it…

— Gary Robins, May 2008 and November 2020

Additional thoughts from other friends, colleagues and co-conspirators, gathered just prior to his death in 2008:

From Joe Goodman in Toronto:  I’m not sure why this particular image is so strong, but I truly loved having Roddy on the Dumont Ducks Baseball team. It was a special time with a special guy. I hope that all these names and memories provide a soft pillow for Roddy`s journey. Love and Peace.

From Jann Van Horne (Tennenbaum) in Boston:  When I think of Roddy. I think of a quiet man who always made me feel safe. I met him at Dumont Press and we did not spend much time together. When Roddy spoke, he said few words, but his eyes said to me that whatever I was doing, feeling or believed, it was okay with him. I always felt so accepted and never judged by Roddy. I can easily recall his face and his solitary walk. It is good to know that so many people are with him and that he is loved.

From Winnie in Ottawa: It’s hard to think of Roddy dying; in my mind’s eye he is as young as he was in your recollection, as silent and as brooding, with the same grin and grand sense of humour when up to something mischievous or out of the ordinary. I am keeping a vigil here in Ottawa, remembering Roddy and at the same time thinking of so many of my friends from Waterloo days who welcomed me in my youth and gave me shelter when I needed it most.

From Liz Janzen in Toronto:  It was always great seeing him, sitting together and catching each other up on who we each knew was doing what. Roddy was always a great connector (gossip can be good) that way. I'm thinking of the many nights at Ahrens St. with numerous pots of tea (Mary Holmes just kept them coming) that we talked away, with Roddy listening, throwing in the occasional joke or brief rant. Much love.

From Betty Burcher in Toronto:  I have two strong memories of Roddy. One is when I took Brendan to the Blue Jays game for his fourth birthday Roddy was quite concerned that I didn't know about baseball, so he spent time teaching me the basics! Much later he chuckled big time when Nick (my son) turned out to be such a jock and then I had to know the fine points of baseball and indeed every other sport!

And I also have a very foggy memory of going with Roddy to a strip bar in Waterloo. Yes, this is feminist Betty writing! Can't recall whose idea it was, but I do remember something about "knowing the reality”. Mostly I think of Roddy as an astute observer, gentle soul and decent human being, loved by all our kids and all of us.

From Liz Willick in Oxbow:  Years after we'd stitched ourselves temporarily into the already well-worn Waterloo social patchwork in the mid-seventies, Ron made the discovery that Roddy's quiet grew out of a noisy crowded family with a deaf mom... myth or fact? Ron says he was present when trash can met Eaton's window; but that was before he'd met Roddy and the rest of you lot. I remember the crowd, the cops on horses big, tall, pushing, pushing anger rising, running...

I think the last time I saw Roddy was at Brian and Arel's in Toronto. I was staying there while taking a gender and development course. Brendan had a rat and Andrew was a baby. Roddy was very involved with the kids and it seems to me a huge tribute that they should be so with him now.

From Ron Colpitts in Oxbow:  The first thing I noticed about Roddy was his silence. Unlike a lot of the New Left, in my experience, Roddy was not only comfortable with silence, he sought it out. He probably would have been better able to deal with the sometime isolation of rural Saskatchewan than I have. I gradually came to learn that Roddy always had something (usually thoughtful) to say. You just had to listen, or ask and listen.

Roddy also demonstrated that one could be a critical thinker and an unabashed sports fan and a bit of a jock without it being some form of contradiction. (Definitely not a notion that would have been entertained in the Toronto and Ottawa Leftie communities I was part of; prior to moving to KW.) I can't think of KW without thinking of the Dumont Ducks. I've played team sports all my life, I still do. The Ducks were the only time in my life that being a member of a sports team wasn't completely schizophrenic. (It was nice to have a somewhat common world view and actually like all of my teammates.)

Moving back to rural Saskatchewan brought with it a community of neighbours whom one could count on in an emergency whether you liked each other or not. The unfortunate trade-off, for me, was that I lost a day to day social and political community that I had become used to through the New Left, CUP, and most importantly our time in KW. Despite that, I always felt less isolated when I remembered how many wonderful supportive people I knew across the country, the continent, the world. Just a short trip or a phone call away.

As usual, I'm rambling. Roddy's illness and impending death is an emotional blow. I find I'm of an age that have trouble grieving in particular. The sense of loss and unfairness brings many memories of many people gone before us. It would be better if I could be with some of you to celebrate Roddy's life and your continuing lives.

Anyway, I miss you all. Take care of each other. I'd hate to be the last one standing.

Love, Ron

From Sara Switzman in San Francisco:  As I sit here at my computer and read all of these wonderful remembrances of times of fun, activism, and deep thinking I feel a connectedness to my childhood and a larger community of people who have spread across North America yet still live in one another's stories. My clearest picture of Roddy is of him hanging out on the front porch at 10 Young Street, his bangs falling into his eyes and a cold bottle of coke in his hand. I send my love out to everyone. 

From Alison Stirling in Toronto:  I always thought that Rod would be a constant and outlast the rest of us; grinning as he downed his cola, read a great book, scanned baseball games, and pondered the meaning of life, the universe and everything. I have many fine memories of long conversations, debates and quiet reflections on philosophy, politics and pulp fiction, as well as sharing our dreams, humour and dismay at the ways things sometimes worked out. I am still working my way through Rod's list of the 100 best books of the 20th century, and although I may never get to all those books, I always think of him as I look at it. Roddy is our scholar, our loyal friend, our quiet joy. As Joe said, may his journey be softened by our love and memories.

From Bruce Steele in Regina:  Roddy Hay. The Furry Freaks vs. the Cops. The Dumont Ducks. Grounder to second... hard toss to first... big grin. The Chevron or Dumont late, late at night. Printer chemicals and Karl Marx. Walking the railroad tracks from the U to King Street, cutting across 17 blocks with 7 words spoken. Drawn to full height, eagle eye at the edge of the party. The look of approval. Later, bent quiet over some political triviality, the look that let you know you'd crossed the line.

The campus centre hall, packed, issue du jour, Roddy appears by your side in a whisper, makes some ironic and very funny remark that stuns you into his private perspective – a line seemingly so out of character that the heart of the man is suddenly exposed – and then disappears into the crowd like a rabbit into the fog on a mission of mercy.

Dumont Press Graphix was not the only counter-cultural institution to emerge from the Gabriel Dumont Memorial Commune in 1970. Though far from politically correct, the band Running Dog and His Electric Lackey showed that having fun could be just as subversive. 

The band was the creation of Nick Sullivan (aka Nick Savage) and Rosco Bell, both of whom later worked at DPG. Their performances, infrequent and at times incomprehensible, provided comic relief to the otherwise serious business of overthrowing the state. Their satirical songs were as likely to provoke outrage as raised eyebrows and quizzical grins. 

A major breakthrough concert occurred at the 1970 CUP conference in Naramata BC where the band played to a crowd of enthusiastic student journalists, many of whom were high on LSD. Accompanied by the Red Wobbly Chorus, the band put on a show for the ages, highlighted by a reading from The Little Red Book: Quotations of Chairman Mao — in Swahili. Survivors of the event say it still made as much sense.

Another notorious gig happened in a church in Toronto at a benefit concert for striking workers. The band opened for the legendary folksinger and union organizer U. Utah Phillips. The show proved to be a lesson from the Better Know Your Audience school of musical endeavours. The band was barely into the first song of their set when they elicited loud booing from some audience members who took issue with the lyrics of “Come to the Orgy”. The booing and catcalls were so disruptive the band stopped playing and attempted to leave the stage only to be surrounded by a group of angry militant lesbians who were not in the least swayed by the band’s protestations that this was, after all, satire. Before things got too ugly, the ever-resourceful Phillips took the stage and calmed things down with a soothing  rendition of “Solidarity Forever”. Who knows how it would have turned out otherwise.

By the end of the 70s the band had dispersed to various parts of the country and never performed in public again, except for a few impromptu get-togethers over whisky and marijuana. This past year, however, the band celebrated its own 50th anniversary by releasing The Running Dog and His Electric Lackey Anthology of Scurrilous Songs. The songbook is available for download at http://scott-sullivan.com/dogbook. A YouTube video based on a 1979 concert by Rosco Bell is also available at https://youtu.be/8innp_mCrBo.

                       Year One of Dumont Press Graphix: 1971/72

                               From my perspective, by Peter Lang

High on LSD, I listened for signs of spring on a snow-covered field behind the University of Waterloo.  It was 2 am. and under my feet echoed the faint but distinct babbling of running water.  The winter had been a long one in which most of my energy had been spent coping with my confusing love life.  Any sign of hope was, therefore, quite welcome.

The vision which most impressed my mind-altered brain that night was the dome of light emanating from the University.  It obscured the stars; and the buzz and hum of its machinery overlaid the trickle I barely heard under foot. 

A fact which Leo Johnson had impressed upon me in his lectures was that in only one century the distribution of urban and rural population had completely reversed.  In 1870 eighty percent of people had lived in the country, and only 20 percent in cities.  If that was the case, I reasoned that the population reverse implied that people surely were losing the awareness of their place in the universe, and amongst the diversity of living things.  Given the momentum of population growth and technological development, how then could urban born decision-makers possibly safeguard the environment for our children?  For god's sake, the profit motive was alienating enough, and quite obviously a detriment to life.  But physically and spatially, from birth we were losing touch with life itself.  It was simply being erased from our consciousness.

Another life-changing insight was that I saw the university as not just an ivory tower, but an impersonal, amoral blight which, like cities in general, was greedily swallowing up all life around it.  In terms of my own past, this was Laurel Creek, the very area where my father had swam naked with his friends in "Shantz's hole", playing "last pickle on the plate" as he floated on his back, and rested on “bare ass beach”.  Previously my critique of the University was only social and political, but from that night I couldn't help but feel that another polluting, anti-life force was galloping out of control.  As an M.A. student I was only preparing to return to the classroom.  If I didn't soon leave, I too might be swallowed up.

                                                        * * *

A most exciting prospect saved me from my dilemma -- the birth of Dumont Press Graphix.  As a business it would be a base in the community from which we could make a living, as well as continue to practice our politics.  Our workplace, of course, was named after Louis Riel's military chief, Gabriel Dumont.

The venture was tentatively financed by three U. of W. professors* whose investment was contingent upon our winning the typesetting contracts of three local student newspapers: U of W's "Chevron”, Waterloo Lutheran's “Cord”, and Conestoga College's "Spoke".  But getting the contracts wasn't so easily accomplished… for the local K-W Record daily newspaper already did a competent, if not impersonal job of all three.  That it was a local monopoly situation likely worked on our behalf.

Without too much trouble we convinced WLU and Conestoga to give us a trial period of one year at the same costs charged by the Record.  However, the Chevron, whom we knew best, was another matter.  Alex Smith, its editor, was a very capable and careful technician who took serious pride in the appearance of his paper -- and appearance was all that typesetting was really about.  He was also a liberal leftist, not a flaming radical like ourselves.  He didn't trust our politics, and wasn't convinced he could depend on us.  Alex went so far as to involve the imposing presence of the Record's Circulation Manager at our negotiation meetings.

But we hounded Alex.  We wouldn't let him deny us.  In our favour, Alex also knew our capabilities.  Gary Robins and Steve Izma were artists who were more creative than anyone he knew at the Record, or on the Chevron.  Bottom line was that he didn't trust us to tow the line, and to meet deadlines, issue after issue.  He saw us as radicals, not to mention ‘dope-smoking hedonists’.  For a young guy he thought he was all growed up, that Alex Smith.

Who knows what other pressure was applied by our three professor-patrons, other Chevron staff, and the likes of President Larry Burko and his Yippie executive on Student Council?  Larry assured us that he actively supported us; but by Alex's measure that was probably a liability.  In the final analysis, I believe it was moral suasion which won us the deal.  He had to give us a chance.  While he may not have approved of our politics and behaviour, Alex could identify more with us than a large local monopoly.

What a coup!  Within three weeks we were set up for business on the second and top floor of the former Mitchell Plastics building, a button factory, at 97 Victoria St. North.  As it happened, this was diagonally across the street from the Station Hotel which my uncle Alec had inherited from his father. Somehow it was an appropriate, and ideal place to take a beer break after putting another issue to bed.

If anyone was responsible for the founding of Dumont, I would credit Gary Robins and Eddie Hale.  Gary taught us all to enjoy the achievement of excellent work, and scrupulously critiqued our individual performances.  Eddie, was the technological genius who had the nerve to jump into typesetting in the fall of 1971 when the first phototypesetting computers came on stream to revolutionize the trade.  Inspired by his obvious confidence and zeal, we probably outstripped the old apprenticed typesetters at the Record who, in order to learn the new technology, had to give up an age-old method of setting hot lead type.  We had nothing to sacrifice or to resent, and forged ahead.  In Marxist democratic theory, we cooperatively owned the means of production -- which made all the difference.  A group of equals had achieved their dream almost overnight.

In true newspaper tradition we worked day and night to meet our production deadlines.  It was not uncommon for us to have finished the page negatives at 4:30 am, and to jump into Eddie’s white Econoline van to drive to Webb Press in Toronto for 6 am in order to have the papers printed and on campus before noon.

As for the cooperative process, it was at times cumbersome and slow.  But we were keen.  As a number of us, I immediately taught myself to type -- having previously got my mother and Winnie to type my university essays.  We all learned every skill which went into the process, and took turns doing them.  We met regularly between jobs and during shifts to discuss the most efficient and best means to do a professional job.  Hard as it was, we were both friends and our own best critics. 

At times the job was gruelling.  None of us had ever really been responsible for something so important as maintaining our own living, but we knew that mistakes might add up to losing our contracts.  Pretty well on call around the clock, we would summon all hands at any hour to finish on time.  Perhaps, unlike Eddie, we weren't born with an entrepreneurial drive to succeed in business.  We were idealists.  On weekends, and in between our three contracted student newspapers, we also volunteered to assist and teach other alternate media groups to put out their own publications.

Yet we toiled that first year without serious complaint or setback.  Together we were a very hard-working and congenial group.  Dumont thrived -- and people lined up from across the country to apply there for work.   

• The three professors who each put up $3,000 to fund Dumont Press Graphix were Leo Johnson, Fred Kemp, and Henry Crapo .

Never ones to lose sight of a great idea, the planning committee for Dumont's sixth anniversary celebrations came up with a unique and allegedly easy-to-organize proposal: "Last year's party was such a blast! Let's do it all over again!"

And so, the plan for a new series of annual festve frolics was announced, and soon consummated. Memories are hazy and the records are spotted as to how many years these recurring, time-insensitive Fifth Anniversary gatherings actually took place (perhaps there are t-shirts out there that might reveal the truth), but we do know that by 1981, common sense had again prevailed, and that year's anniversary gatherings were duly and correctly acknowledged as The Dumont Tenth.

Any excuse to get together for music, great food, sofyball and political struggle!...

• 1969

  • June: I drop out of my third term in Engineering at U of W, and join The Chevron. The first person I meet is Carol [Stevenson? later Carol Verdun], who pointed out that she had babysat me in the early 1950s. She had grown up next door to us on Krug St. in Kitchener. I remembered nothing of that (to my embarassment).
  • August: I'm accepted into the first year of the Integrated Studies programme, where I meet a number of people who were later closely involved with Dumont Press Graphix.
  • December: I submit a letter to the CUP commission, chaired by Stewart Saxe, that is investigating the conflict between staff of The Chevron and its editor, Bob Verdun. Verdun resigns the editorship during these meetings, and a collective (more-or-less) takes over the running of the newspaper.

• 1970

  • January: At the end of the month I move into 296 Guelph St. (now demolished) with a number of students from Integrated Studies, including Marie Kennedy, Cynthia Campbell, and Rick Degrass.
  • April: [I think] I begin to take photographs for On the Line.

• 1971

  • May: I'm invited, probably by Ed Hale or Gary Robins, to join the collective at Dumont, especially because of the need for people with photography skills.
  • June: I start work on the first issue of The Chevron to be produced at Dumont.

During those dark foggy days at the end of the Twentieth Century (often referred to as Y2K), when a planetary panic set in as nobody could agree on whether the New Millennium would commence at the beginning of 2000, or 2001, but it didn't really matter anyway because all the world's computer systems would be crashing at the end of December 1999, it was a time of grave uncertainty throughout the land.

Fainter hearts might have faltered, but when the Dumont Organizing Committee, those faithful caretakers of the spirit of Gabe, initiated preliminary conversations on another celebratory event, the question of timing prompted a certain amount of contention. Should we gather in 2000 because it was a special year and we all survived Y2K? Perhaps we should wait until 2001 when the new millennium was truly upon us, and Dumont Press would be turning 30. It was a tough call, and discussions soon broke into the usual factions, between the mathematicians, the pragmatists and the anarchist. The Marxist-Lennonists had long since been banished from the village, as they didn't really like to party, unless it was their own Party, in which case they demanded loyalty and complete control.

Fortunately, solidarity prevailed, and a Dumont reunion was scheduled for the long weekend in August of 2000 at a secluded, yet well-appointed, camp in the woods just north of Waterloo. It had already been six years since the previous reunion, and we had lots to catch up on.

My memories of the Dumont collective are mixed up of caring and conflict.  I remember good times of laughter, play, trying new things, the delight and relief of getting a big job done well, and deep comradeship. I remember arguments, anxiety, and tension between specialization and collectivity. The years 1978-1981 were very difficult to keep the shop going as major contracts disappeared, bills piled up, deadlines and production suffered, and debates about direction, efficiency and commitment tore at the core of the Dumont community.

As said at a crucial meeting in December 1979 when discussing whether we’d restructure to stay alive, or dissolve the shop:

”We despair of ourselves and others to act efficiently and well without change....
We have to be careful to understand our past and how came here through energy of past Dumont workers.”
“It has been said that typesetting will be obsolete in 5 years. We should be planning ahead for our lives.”

My memory is not good of those turbulent times. Thankfully this Dumont People’s History project has unearthed the minutes of those debates, and a paper I wrote to try to describe what I was good at and could learn more about, what I could back-up and what would be a challenge to do, but needed attention.  I’ve attached it as a snapshot of life at the shop when we teetered between life and dispersal. 

What happened in 1980 for me, was a shift to part-time work at Dumont in  until 1983, job-sharing with Kae between Waterloo PIRG and Dumont.
In 1983 I moved to Toronto Island, where I still live.

by John Dufort

My first contact with members of the Kitchener-Waterloo community was at the 1967 Ontario Regional Conference of Canadian University Press (CUP), held at the Walper Hotel in Kitchener. I was there as an employee of CUP and as a resource person, having been a staff member for a number of years at the McGill Daily in Montreal.

The conference was put on by members of the University of Waterloo’s student newspaper, The Chevron, and I remember them as hard partyers. Later, I was pleased to discover that many of them were also politically progressive.

Over the next few years, through extensive travel and regular attendance at annual CUP national conventions, I got to make friends with others from progressive student papers across the country. I especially remember the CUP Conferences in Toronto in 1968 and Waterloo in 1969, where friendship circles widened and solidified.

In the late 60s and early 70s, I lived in a co-op house in Montreal, and received many a visit from these new friends, and I of course visited them in their co-op houses as well. I visited the legendary 192 King Street more than once, and marvelled at the ideas and joyfulness around the place.

I was really drawn to the Kitchener community, but when at one point I decided to leave Montreal, finance considerations led me to accept a job at UBC’s student newspaper in Vancouver. Contact was not broken, however, and I remember going to a Grateful Dead concert (warmed up by Commander Cody) with Gary Robins and several other visiting friends at the Vancouver Arena.

Vancouver too popular

Vancouver was becoming an impossible place to live, housing-wise, what with people moving in from all over. Having made and saved a little money, I yearned to go to Europe. But nobody in B.C. ever talked about crossing the Atlantic, so I thought I’d build up my enthusiasm by moving back east, and took the opportunity to join my friends in Kitchener-Waterloo.

Dumont Press Graphix had recently gotten going, started in part by ex-members of the Chevron staff. A few people were thinking of starting a community newspaper, and since I was on Unemployment Insurance and didn’t need a job, I started helping out with that, and as an unofficial member of the Dumont staff. The paper, The Kitchener-Waterloo Free Press, was short-lived, but wove me more into the fabric of the community.

However, my desire to go to Europe persisted. And in 1975, I had a ticket to go. After a cross-Canada farewell tour, I ended up back in Kitchener.

The morning I was to leave for the airport (driven by Gary Robins), I went to Dumont to make my final goodbyes, and noticed the latest copy of The Chevron (which had been put together at the Shop the night before, and couldn’t help but notice the headline: Dufort Goes to Europe (finally), with a picture of me coming out of my favourite snack bar in Montreal with a Pepsi in one hand and a May West in the other. There was also a story (fictitious), written by Rosco Bell. A photo of the front and back pages of the paper can be seen in another upload.

I, of course, was completely shocked that they had put this rather “in” story on a paper that would be distributed all over the University of Waterloo campus - just because they were the typesetters. Well, it turned out that it was just a special run of a few copies, done for my benefit. I was really touched.

I was even more touched when I was presented with sets of business cards, one in English, but three others translated (badly as it turned out) into three different languages, French, Spanish, and German. I was to be the Overseas Representative of Dumont World Enterprises. I also got a box of cards identifying me as a journalist, in case that might help. This amazing gesture cemented in my mind my desire and intention to return after my year in Europe to a life in Kitchener and a job at my beloved Dumont Press Graphix.

Europe and back

I spent ten months zig-zagging around Europe, and found an inexpensive passage home in early December on the SS Stefan Batory, a Polish ocean liner making its last trip of the season back to Quebec City. My plans were to spend Christmas with my mom and family in Montreal, and then proceed to Kitchener to see if I could get on staff at Dumont.

As it turned out, the annual CUP Conference was being held in Montreal over Christmas, so I dropped in to see who I knew. It turns out I knew lots of folks, including a contingent from Kitchener as well as one from Regina. I remember a great New Year’s Eve dance at the Students Union, followed by a “scoff” with eight or ten friends in Chinatown.

By that time, I’d already succumbed to the charms of an attractive woman who I had met at a previous CUP Conference, and she was working on me to go to Regina (where I had a number of friends) to “save the Students Union” from financial ruin and trusteeship at the hands of the University there. In the end, I promised her three months to go in, see what I could do, and turn things around if I could. So I went, and in three months, after having successfully turned the organization around, I was back in Kitchener.

I did indeed get on at Dumont, and also lived in a couple of interesting places during my time there. I am an alumnus of the House of Zonk and its city cousin, “Lanc”. But that’s another story…

I worked at Dumont for two years, during which several of my KW friends moved away, some of them to Regina, of all places. So when I got a call that my old job at the University of Regina was again available, and this time it would be “smooth sailing”, I decided to return to Saskatchewan, where I ended up living (both fulltime and later part time) until the present.

I have attended all the Dumont reunions I was able to get to. A few were not possible because of work. But they have been a good way to keep up with this wonderful community I have been so warmly welcomed into.

I am presently retired, and splitting my time between Regina, Montreal, and Puerto Escondido Mexico (which I have been visiting for over 25 years). My profile photo was taken on my 75th birthday at the Hotel Ben-Zaa in lovely Puerto Escondido.

In my life, when I got all riled up about a situation or issue (to the point of not being able to sleep at night), I often resorted to writing what would be likened to a “rant”, expressing the raw feelings I was having. Putting everything that was going around in my head down on paper allowed me to emotionally detach from it at least somewhat.

I present one such document (see below), garnered from the Dumont archives. As one can gather from reading it, there were philosophical divisions going on among the staff, and the direction and viability of the operation was centerpoint.

I was probably off-base in some of my assertions. For example, Dumont was able to continue to make a “contribution to progressive movements”, not least of which by being involved in the establishment of Between the Lines publishing house. But the need for the operation to become more productive continued to plague Dumont (see Alison Stirling’s “Remembering… 1979-80” and Cheryl Hendrickson’s “Class of ‘86”) to the end.

Though connected to Dumont for a long time previously, I became an actual staff member, I believe, in the fall of 1976. As stated in the document, I wrote the list of reasons why I did so in May 1977, and the rest of the piece in April 1978, after which I presented it to a staff meeting.

I was lured back to a job in Regina later that year.

In retrospect, I ended up getting a lot out of Dumont - technical skills, experience working in a collective environment, life-long friends. In fact, a couple of my friends, Gary Robins and Rosco Bell, had preceded me to Regina. I continued to be in touch with people from my days in Kitchener-Waterloo, and have attended as many reunions as I could. I’ve got to say the extended Dumont community molded my life.

Right from the start, the Dumont Ducks were a unique and enigmatic footnote in the history of community-based sports. To begin with, these softball legends didn't even play ball, but came together originally as a water-polo team. Clearly, the competitive confines of the institutional swimming pool, not to mention the ruthless style of play, were not appealing to the free-spirited crew from the recently-established co-op typesetting shop. Also, their joints kept getting wet.

Ultimately it was the lure of the open sky, the warmth of the sun and the green grasses of the ball diamond, that brought the Dumont Ducks to their true calling: softball. Perhaps it was the laid-back pace of the game, the non-confrontational style of play, or the opprtunity to engage in a wide range of political discussions in the outfield. Being "way out in left field" took on a new meaning in the lives of these merry jocks.

And indeed, a Dumont Ducks ball game was often more of a social event than a sports competition.

Throughout Dumont'd history, staff at the shop were engaged in ongoing discussions about how to create a workplace that was equitable, efficient, respectful, engaging, democratic and fulfilling. It didn't aleways work out. Differences in experience, technical skills, commitment, vision, a work ethic and personal situations all brought their own challenges into the collective. It wasn't always pretty, often reminiscent of your basic shared-housework debates, but on a somewhat larger scale.

Happily, Dumont's staffing complement included a number of innovative and energetic young activists hoping to put theory into practice in a worker-contolled environment, good people with a vision (or several, actually) who wanterd to build a strong community within a better world. This position paper, written by Mary Holmes in 1975, proses a process for crafting and building that greater vision.

In the beginning, there was hockey. Not that it precluded our collective interests in political activities, but in those days it was pretty much engrained into our psyche and our spirit... well, the male psyche for sure. When the sticks came out, it was time for mass struggle, it almost seemed intuitive.

Within the genre, road hockey had a long and storied tradition. Certainly it was much easier and more flexible to set up a pick-up game. Any quiet parking lot or back alley would do. By golly (to quote Howie Meeker), it was almost spontaneous, more egalitarian, and nobody seemed to mind that we often forgot to keep score.

Astute observer may note an eerie familiarity with some of the players on these rag-tag teams. Yes, more than a few of the Dumont Ducks got their start out on the asphalt. A team spirit was germinating, ready to sprout with the warm winds of Spring. These were indeed heady and happy times.

Although the early days of Dumont Press carried a lot of excitement, there was no shortage of challenges... not ever, really. This letter, written by Winnie Pietrykowski (Lang in those days) in Dumonts first year of operation, attempts to build and broaden the discussion of how to make it all work. It was written around March 1972 and scanned from the original document in January 2021, and then digitally remastered, edited solely for spelling and punctuation and reformatted for Web publication. PDF copies of the original document are available, from the Archivist. 

Many people worked at the shop over the years, some for just a few days, others for several years. This list is compiled from Dumont’s admittedly sketchy payroll records. Our apologies for anyone we missed. If you can provide further information, please add it in the comments.

I never worked at Dumont Press Graphix nor did I know anyone who did, prior to my first random encounter. as I explain later. I was merely a student in Mohawk College Journalism who wanted to take a bud fishing in my ‘hood.

So a warm spring day in 1972 found myself and Michael, my English prof/bud/house companion driving the back roads of Glenelg Township, looking for an access to the Rocky Saugeen River. This area of rocky rolling hills and cedar bush, about halfway between the town of Durham and the port of Owen Sound, was where I grew up. I thought I remembered a fine spot from times fishing with my grandfather. Grandfather Jim had spent his life on the Rocky, tending a hydro powerhouse that fed Durham, and later in life, just fishing his retirement upstream on the same river.

However, on that afternoon, the location of that particular sweet spot continued to evade my memory. I nudged Michael in the passenger seat. "Maybe these folks can help out," I muttered, as we rolled to a stop alongside two easy ambling bodies, all with plenty hair and akin to peers, I figured.

"Not sure of what river access you are looking for," was the cheery reply, "but come up to our house and you can fish the river from the back of our place."  So we did just that, which is how we first met Gary and Elaine.

Up at the mint green farmhouse we encountered times much more interesting than fishing, as it were. Not sure which came first, the home brew or home grown. Whichever, it did spur on conversations that seeded some lasting relationships for me, in particular with Gary whom I had just met on the road, and with Elaine as well.

As I recall, at the house we met Michael, Phil, Penny, Rosco, Joannie, Marty, Bowden (I think, though his name was spelled Bowdoin) several dogs, a horse and two goats. Eventually, I too came to live at the farm, which was known as Markdale, after a nearby village. I was there for the summer season, before embarking on a western road adventure with Corli, Moo and Janice Lee.

Thus began my acquaintance with Dumont Press and its extended family. As a student of journalism at Mohawk College, I had very little introduction to the various community and social activism print media, the likes of which Dumont Press published. I do know that I was impressed with Dumont’s role in what journalism could become, outside the scope of the daily papers I had worked on. I do recall some folks’ names, but not all I had met during my brief year between the farm and Kitchener/Waterloo.

As my attention and interests shifted to a more community-active type of journalism, I landed a job with the Chesley Enterprise. Bill, the publisher, had come out of Cape Breton originally, and educated me on life on the east coast. The west coast with its rugged beauty had proven to be too expensive and overwhelming for this rural
Ontario guy.

As I have already mentioned, those were heady times. The encounters with what Dumont Press was able to do helped to reset my thinking of my future in journalism. Not long after, I answered to the opportunity to work on a national award-winning weekly paper, the Eastern Graphic of Montague PEI. Led by the fearless Scotsman Jim MacNeil, it seemed to embody the voice of a community. Today, it is still afloat under the steerage of Jim’s son Paul, as capable and fearless as his father I believe. The Eastern Graphic continues as a respected active weekly on PEI.

Time would eventually find all these Dumont folk, farm friends and acquaintances scattered across the country east to west. I recall a trip to PEI by Gary Robins and Ken Epps in 1975 doing a history of community and alternative newspapers across Canada. They had unearthed the early ‘70s story of an Island activist paper called The Broad Axe, borrowed from a turn of the century paper of same name. Its motto banner read “Hew to the line and let the chips fall where they may”.

The Eastern Graphic under fearless Jim operated much the same. He would come to annually publish the earnings of every civic employee on the Island... public info but it did raise hell. We loved those days.

I did eventually get lured away from journalism and into renewable energy construction... spawned by Pierre Trudeau’s federal Liberal dollars. As a reaction to rising oil prices of the early ‘80s and his particular belief in renewable resources, it did seem that the social activism of the ‘70s was going to sprout real change here on PEI. But that, my friends, is another story.

After nearly 30 years here on PEI, I relocated back to my part of Ontario for a fifteen-year stint running Bikeface Cycling bike shop, first in Durham and then Owen Sound. One day in the shop I get a call from Gary... calling from the same road where we had first met… nearby the old Glenelg farmhouse. Another mint moment, I thought.

My partner Patty and I retired from the shop in December 2019 and moved back to PEI just ahead of the COVID crisis. These days, with plans for a Regina or anywhere else trip in virtual suspension, I have lots of time to reflect and ponder the road from Glenelg to here, and all those folks I try to keep close. Be well friends.

As the '70s were drawing to a close, the collective at Dumont Press found itself confronting an increasing number of significant challenges. On a financial level, some major ongoing contracts (most notably, the Chevron) had been lost, undermining economic stability, the new partnership with Between the Lines was unsteady, leading to additional cashflow pressures, and desktop publishing was looming as a new technological challenge.

In addition, staff turnover had led to inequities in both technical and organizational skills, the political landscape was shifting and factionalizing, and all of these things compromised working and interpersonal relationships, and ultimately eroded trust.

On the other hand, nobody ever figured it would be easy. The shop continued to hold a strong level of community support, and Dumont Press was seen as a valuable resource by activists and progressive organizations across the region and the country.

Solidarity may have faltered, and these were indeed difficult personal times for many of the Dumont staff, but a strong effort and extensive discussions to try to address the big issues. This report from a Dumont staff meeting in December 1979, along with related proposals and discussion papers, offers a handy overview of the challenges, and the options to be explored.

This story contains several digitally remastered documents, scanned from the originals in October 2020, and later edited solely for spelling and punctuation, and then reformatted for Web publication. Raw scans of the original documents are available on request from The Archivist.

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.

It’s been over 30 years since the doors were shut on Dumont Press for the final time. We might ask, why this current flurry of activity to examine our history together? Well, we can blame the pandemic to a certain extent. Our isolation has prompted many of us to reach out to old friends, colleagues, even former lovers. At the same time, we are coming to the growing realization that we’re not all still here on this mortal plane anymore. We have all lost good friends, and family too, and with that, their experience and knowledge, their wisdom, their values and dreams – and for all of us – cherished and important relationships.

Accordingly, many of us are noticing gaps in the collective memory banks. We can probably blame the pandemic for much of that as well, and now as we try to reimagine and rebuild our sense of a new normal, it becomes valuable and useful to draw on the lessons of the past. This 50th anniversary thing is merely a clever ruse.

Dumont Press had a huge impact on several hundred people and more. It allowed the assembly of resources, particularly around publishing, but also around community grassroots activism, and other related progressive issues. That’s all part of it.  

But Dumont was also an expression of the times, culturally and politically. It was one of those places where we were able to assemble a critical mass for a while, for a long while, for a number of years – all to be able to achieve our particular expression.

It was a place that attracted people who came from other parts of Canada because they wanted to become a part of it all, to work there with the rest of us, to learn and to grow. That continued, always shifting and evolving as the cast of characters shifted and evolved. As well, priorities shifted and moved in different directions as other opportunities presented, or as other realities confronted us.  

Hopes and Dreams

As I reflected on this Dumont anniversary project, I first envisioned a massive collaborative collections of photographs, but then quickly realized that there ought to be stories to chronicle people’s life experiences around Dumont and the informal extended family that sprung up around it. It should also include our collective social and political activities, and all the community-based initiatives that we supported and facilitated, both within our own community and throughout southwestern Ontario.  All of this is what lies at the core of a people’s history. 

Further to this are the questions: What did we learn? What did we contribute – and how has it shaped our later lives?

Certainly, Dumont gave us the skills, the tools, and the sense of where we wanted to go. It was that melting pot of activism, of new thoughts and new ideas, that carried so many people on to really interesting adventures that we just hadn't foreseen.  

All of those things became part of our collective and our collaborative history. What was the glue that stuck us together? Where were the ideas, whether it was how to paste up copy more efficiently and attractively, how to work more cooperatively – or the ideas and notions that eventually sent us off in different directions?

I am hoping that this collaborative history will be fun, informative and particularly valuable for rekindling that sense of solidarity, camaraderie, community and social justice that brought us all together at one (or more) point – and then helped to move us forward into a variety of professions, interests and initiatives to help make the world a better place.

It seems straightforward enough, eh. But I also think we all still have a lot we can learn from each other, and goodness knows, that’s more important than ever in these turbulent and chaotic times.

Just a few thoughts along the pandemic trail… I don’t think we have yet come to a full understanding of where we might go with this history project, and that, of course, will be shaped by all the participants eager to come along for the ride. I think we are all just trail guides pushing the bus uphill. We’ll have to see where it takes us all. Dumont was all about community and trying to change the world. We had lofty goals, and sometimes we screwed up.

We all know better now… Mind you, these are perilous times, and the task now is not just to change the world, but to save it. Storm clouds continue to emerge on the horizon, and I continue to feel there’s a tsunami of chaos and stupidity out there that will not subside anytime soon…

Paper trails: The Dumont Archives

Some of the information we recovered from the shop’s archives is tedious, and won’t be all that valuable to most of us, but much of the other material that’s been found and shared really helps put together a broader and more concrete picture of the kind of challenges that people were confronted with in a unique workplace. Some were resolved really well, some fractured relationships, and some resulted in people leaving

There may be situations where some of us made comments, and we look back on them now and think “What a goofball I was in those days”, or “how arrogant”, or perhaps at the time we just weren’t seeing the big picture.

As Phil Elsworthy often tells me, most of us continue to share the same values we always had. It's important to understand those values, how they evolved and adjusted and changed over the years, as we continued to do meaningful work in our lives. This is what keeps a lot of us going, to be engaged in meaningful work on whatever level, whether it's fighting racism or poverty, volunteering at the food bank, working with a local nonprofit, or participating with your neighbourhood community association trying to fight some self-serving and questionable development project.

We were cooperative. We operated collaboratively and collectively as best we could at the time, and our sense of decision-making, our view of what was going on around us certainly changed as the world changed…  and that continues.

How were we able to adapt to all of those different sociopolitical conditions and maintain a reasonable lifestyle, within a creative and supportive community? Sometimes that was really meaningful and relevant, sometimes it became less relevant or engaging, and some of us just moved on to other things.

Eventually, it all brings us back to that time-honoured, poetic and well-considered question, “Will the Circle be unbroken?” In these uncertain times, we’ll just have to see.

—Gary Robins (with Peter Lang)
April 2021

As the staff at Dumont Press continued to develop as a collective unit, as skilled workers and service providers within a unique environment of shared ownership and shared responsibilities, they attracted a lot of interest and attention.

Managing a cooperative workplace without bosses, offering technical and production support to a number of alternative and community-based publishing projects, working to build solidarity and trust and common values both within the shop and in our own community was a huge agenda. Even when things were going well there were massive challenges. New ideas, extensive dialog, long meetings, passionate debates continuing late into the night (or until Last Call at the Station Hotel). We were, after all, trying to change the World.

Dumont Press was a progressive social/political phenomenon, stumbling sometimes, but for the most part trying to be the change we wanted to see. It was no surprise then that a number of writers, political analysts and historians would be interested in telling the tale, and assessing the achievements. One of the earlier attempts to document and understand the nature and dynamics of the Dumont collective came from a good friend of the shop, Terry Moore in 1975.

Terry never worked at the shop, but his proposal to compile an analytical history of Dumont Press offered a sound and thorough framework of the life and times and debates we were engaged in. Terry felt he was close enough to the shop and the staff to appreciate the problems we were faced with, but "sufficiently removed from the day-to-day struggle to be able to place specific problems within an overall context."

Terry was well-known and highly regarded, staff at Dumont were happy to participate. Although several interviews were conducted over the following year, the overall work (like so many other good ideas in all our lives) was never completed, and unfortunately, has now been lost. The accompanying document here is the initial proposal, which we felt was valuable for what it attempted to accomplish.

Although Dumont Press operated as a worker-owned and worker-controlled cooperative, the official operating structure was much more complicated than that. Indeed, the actual working model changed several times over the history of the shop. The documents attached here refer solely to the formal legal authority within the entity known as Dumont Press Graphix Limited. More astute observers will note, however, that Dumont, while always striving to be professional and progressive, was anything but formal.

Minutes of meetings of the Dumont volunteers

26 September 1986

Present: Janice [St. Clair], Geo [Swan], Bill [Wharrie?], Ed [Halbach?], Annette [Beingessner], Moe [Lyons], Steve [Izma] [minutes recorded by Steve]

1. Money: the work available & to which Dumont is committed amounts to about $26K–$27K, but very little $ available in cash before Nov. Fixed costs range from $1100–$1500 per month. Total costs to close down roughly $11,000. There may be a dispute with Alternatives re: last issue printing. The only $ available in Oct. maybe $1000–$1500 cash at beginning of month, $1500 from BTL. Geo will talk to Ann Hodgins re: Alternatives.
2. Moe’s job: Moe feels too much responsibility re: organizing jobs & training people. She being the only skilled person remaining & the only full-time person, her stress level is high & it is difficult to concentrate on particular jobs. Moe wants a strict 8-hr day & not to be on UIC.
3. Money: Payroll needed:
   • 29 Sept.: $1000 from Steve
   • 10 Oct.: $1000 from Steve
   More money needed for 24 Oct. Steve will try to raise money from others in the community.
4. Janice will contact Heather Bradley re: working on Futures grant.

13 November 1986

Present: [reconstructed from other implications] Steve Izma [minutes], Eliza Moore, Moe Lyons, Becky Kane, Todd Schneider, Catherine Edwards, Terry [?], Bill Wharrie, Debbie Conners.

Agenda

1. nature of group; K-W Community Media Project; expansion
2. use of shop by which groups
3. general feedback on proposal
4. what kind of equipment; general use of resource centre for what purposes

Meeting

1. This group would constitute itself as KWCMP. Later we will clearly define exact membership rules & elect officers.
2. User of shop by which groups
   1. personal work for non-commercial reasons
   2. groups or organizations, non-profit, limited funds, doing the work themselves
   3. individuals using space or equipment for doing commercial work for personal gain (freelance)
   4. organizations requir[ing] commercial work done & and can’t do it themselves – volunteer groups
   5. teaching situation[s]
3. [general feedback on proposal]
   • goal is to have the centre support itself on a volunteer basis
   • user fee involve volunteer labour
   • responsibility for handling a commercial job; necessary caution in conditions for undertaking jobs
   • commercial as bottom priority
   • guard against overuse of equipment for commercial purposes
4. [who would use it for what purposes?]
   • Steve: [has various personal projects like posters and pamphlets ongoing; also works with other non-commercial groups; would probably continue to do BTL work; will do things for MKS, like ads and some documentation, for which Dumont would be paid full commercial fees]
   • Eliza: mostly organization interests & keeping it available
   • Moe: if she were here to use for various projects & to make sure it continues; helps marginal publishing
   • Becky: the idea of being able to produce own materials
   • Todd: agrees to proposal as being valuable; wants to see the centre be a resource
   • Catherine: wants to see Hysteria have access in future; if around, would be interested in personal access
   • Terry: such places need to exist in contrast to the rest of the way things work
   • Bill: not a great likelihood of doing personal work, but wants to see the place continue
   • Debbie: (WPIRG) has access to typesetting thru UofW but needs paste-up facilities; (Alternatives) again needs pasteup facilities on a freelance basis; also interested in organizational work to keep facilities available; wants a social workplace
   • others interested: Ed Halbach, Al Rimmer, Phil Elsworthy, Mary Spies; Catherine will talk to others at Hysteria meeting
   • make quotes & priorities for various groups, i.e., maximum amount of time used for commercial use;

24 November 1986

Present: Debbie Conners, Catherine Edwards, Sue Campbell, Moe Lyons, Lisa Wilms, Jane Harding, Bob Little, Eva, Becky Kane, Annette Beingessner, Steve Izma [minutes]

[Preliminaries:]

• This meeting accepts proposals
• will meet again in December to decide how assets will be disposed of
• tonight: some discussion to clarify for various groups what will be happening next

Info: Jane has been [...]

1. Purpose of this meeting: accept, clarify, expand, discuss proposals and various implications
2. Announcements: Jane has been checking at McMaster re: archiving; they are not likely to pay for anything and probably aren’t interested in Dumont’s material. Ken and Kae have taken some material away for [an] art show.
3. Discussion of proposals:
   • Becky asks why the comercial group is interested; Lisa: to keep a collective process going; Jane: originally looked at with rosy glasses; Bob: to preserve co-op jobs.
     • they have explored financing through plans for funding of technological upgrading; requires business plan and Dumont assets and history
     • need several months for this to get underway
   • Sue: concern (esp. re: Hysteria) that equipment continue to be available for non-commercial use; would like more reassurance
   • one issue is transitional time between finish of current work and start-up of commercial work
   • doesn’t seem to be practical to do commercial work during this period
   • proposed that non-comm group takes equipment to studio space at end of February, start-up group uses legal form [of company] and assets of Dumont to petition for grant
   • both groups share transition period costs
   • once status of start-up grant is known, equipment passes to non-commercial group, and title passes to start-up group if it continues
   • both groups will prepare cash plans to cover transition costs
4. BTL meeting
   • Geo [Swan]'s report of the BTL meeting was read
   • Jamie [Swift] has met with DEC and DEC is favourable to the plan
   • we need to propose to BTL what we want for share
5. Work in progress:
   • Alternatives is in print; camerawork for next issue coming in
   • Labour 18 is at printer
   • Labour 19 is being typeset
   • type for Film Guide is gone
   • Viet Nam book [BTL’s Quiet Complicity] is being pasted up
   • various small jobs
6. Meetings
• wind-down 2 p.m. this Wednesday
• next general meeting: 23 December 1986
7. Back wages
• Becky has calculated additional back wages between March 1985 to present for five people
• Steve will check figures in ledger

Comments by Steve Izma, May 2021

These minutes were originally taken by me and I have transcribed them with clarifications in square brackets.

At the time of the 24 November meeting, we had apparently asked the Development Education Centre to purchase our share in BTL, but I don’t think that ever happened—I may be able to find some reference to this in old BTL minutes. Eventually, Brian Iler worked out an arrangement for both of BTL’s parents to cede ownership to a non-profit corporation, Between The Lines Publishing Society Inc, which is the arrangement still in effect.

“How the media withheld the messages”
How Maclean’s obscured the issues

by Steve Izma
from King St. Works, issue no. 1, June 9, 1972

The June 1972 issue of Maclean’s magazine contains three articles grouped under the title “How the Media withheld the message in Kitchener.” The “Chronology of events” reveals an apparent conspiracy among the Kitchener media to keep silent the plans to sell downtown properties to Oxlea Investments, a land-development company contracted to tear down the Kitchener city hall, the farmers’ market, and other adjacent buildings. There is also a “criticism” by Senator Keith Davey who laments the sad conspiracy and applauds the efforts of a conscience-stricken [Kitchener-Waterloo] Record reporter and the student journalists of the University of Waterloo newspaper, the chevron. After these two articles appears a “defence” by the Kitchener media, who claim to have been acting as “good corporate citizens” in keeping the issue quiet.

This whole presentation is supposed to be a searing criticism of the local media. The Maclean’s editorial lends the sense of the articles when it reports: “The relationship between the men who make the news and the men who report the news is never easy. But seldom has it been more abused than it was in Kitchener.... Kitchener journalists made a bad decision when they withheld information vital to their community.”

Yet what is actually presented is a mere slapping of the wrists. By dealing with the wrong issues and sensationalizing much of the events last summer, Maclean’s ignores many questions never answered by the Kitchener media and as well covers up what may well be the underlying intentions of the media concerning the development project.

The presentation of the events together with the opinions of the writers hardly allows readers to deal with the real circumstances and make their own conclusions.

Much of the circumstances surrounding the breaking of the news to the community (before the time agreed upon by the established media) by the chevron is not only false but made into a ridiculous drama. The chevron did not get its story from Record reporter Castillo nor on Maclean’s reported date of June 23. The whole story is dealt with like an afternoon TV soap-opera, as if the only importance to what the chevron presented was the fact that it out-scooped the Record—Laura Secord warning the people in the nick of time.

The most important aspects of the whole situation are ignored—the questions that the chevron asked which both the media and the city council failed to deal with: Will the city be selling the property for less than its worth? Will the city lose money in paying for rent in new office buildings? How is this going to affect taxes in future years? Why does downtown redevelopment depend on the plans of this particular developer (Oxlea)? Were any other developing plans studied? What say do the people in the community have over these decisions?

Maclean’s articles do not deal with the problems Castillo had in trying to legitimately publish details of the development; that is, the connections of persons within city government, media, and the developers. These problems eventually caused Castillo to quit the Record.

There is no mention in the articles that the property values of the K-W Record building would be affected by the project. (The Record will be selling their downtown property soon.)

One of the major buildings of the project is a new Eaton’s department store. The articles did not deal with how the media felt about Eaton’s threatening to move out of Kitchener if the details of the project did not go through, or the loss of advertising revenue that would follow.

In fact there is no mention of any community response other than the actual referendum, which, presented by itself, can be interpreted in many different ways. Why did the media conspire to hide the plans until such time when the project was almost completely approved and when people in the community would have very little opportunity to discuss the above questions (which the media never asked)? Of course, the media gave answers to questions they thought were relevant, but their conspiring attitude towards the project is quite significant in discrediting their intentions. Who was going to allow the people to ask their own questions?

Senator Keith Davey wields a spaghetti-lash on the Record. He presents a few facts implying that those who control the Record have material interests in the development: that John Motz, publisher of the Record is a director of Canada Trust, which owns 10 per cent of Oxlea Investments, the developer (in another article it is mentioned that the chairman of the Urban Renewal Committee, C.N. Weber, is also a director of Canada Trust, and that the vice-chairman of the Urban Renewal Committee, Bill McGregor, is vice-president of Central Ontario Television Ltd., which owns Kitchener’s only TV station and two of its radio stations). Davey also states that the Record considered itself to be acting as a “good corporate citizen” in witholding the information of the project. Yet he discounts, in a rather feeble way, the importance of these connections by talking of his friendship with McGregor, and by merely accepting at surface value Motz’s supposed ignorance of the connections. He emphasises that as a “good corporate citizen” the Record was only identifying as businessmen in their minds and not in their bank books, which is not an easy, off-the-cuff conclusion to come to considering the other material connections suggested. Interestingly, Davey is quoted in the news-breaking issue of the chevron (from his report on mass media) as admitting that media serves those who pay for its services—not the readers.

Senator Davey suggested that Kitchener may have a paternalistic press, “a collection of journalists who can be seduced into the belief that their interests are identical with some congenial part of their community.” This probably applies to most of the staff of the Record, but Davey never asks the question: “seduced by who?” There is an apparent split between most of the staff of the newspaper and the various owners and editors who initiated the policy of secrecy. Whose ideals and values had the upper hand is quite apparent from the problems that caused Castillo to quit and from the efforts of the editors to cover up a phony letter to the editor (written by an editorial writer and signed by the editor-in-chief as “John A. Schmidt”), despite the dissatisfaction of the staff. By stressing Castillo’s role in the situation in an unrealistic way, the Maclean’s articles seem to be implying that there will always be someone within the established press who will make up for its errors—which is not too safe a bet.

In “A Defence by the Kitchener Media” the representatives of the Record and the various radio and TV stations involved claim through the analogy of a “soap bubble” that the project was fragile and had to be protected by secrecy. This again implies that the plan worked out by the “leading citizens” of Kitchener was the only feasible plan, while Oxlea is certainly not the only developer available for such a project.

Considering that it is the nature of the interests of the people who control media that these conditons of restrictive reporting exist, Davey’s solutions to the problems are hardly adequate: he suggests that the Canadian Radio Television Commission and the Ontario Press Council examine the issues and pass judgement on the local media. Since these commissions are comprised of the same sort of people who are involved in controlling the direction of Kitchener’s media it is hardly likely that their values are any different.

But Davey is probably quite correct in thinking that “it will be a long time before Kitchener can trust its newspaper and broadcasters again.” And what about Maclean’s? It happens to be owned by Maclean-Hunter who also own the other two radio stations in Kitchener.

In the editorial of the same Maclean’s issue appears the statement: “Democracy and freedom does not survive where public opinion has no channel through which it can find an outlet.” Very important words, but hardly sincere if Maclean’s purpose for presenting the Kitchener media article is to make itself look like a truly representative publication. By so seriously misrepresenting the situation it falls guilty of the same criticism that it has applied to the Kitchener media.

By 1973, the staff at Dumont felt it was desirable to unionize to show solidarity with the workers whose causes they espoused and supported through their efforts. As a worker-controlled enterprise, however, there were complications in the worker/employer relationship that conflicted with the rules governing traditional union organizing campaigns. 

Thanks to the legal acumen of Brian Iler, it was determined that an employees' association was a more appropriate vehicle to accomplish the staff's goals and on December 17, 1973 the Dumont Press Graphix Employees' Assocation was born.

Shortly thereafter, the staff decided that it was better to be affiliated with an actual union and sought to organize under the auspices of the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU). A union charter was issued on March 24, 1974.

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)

Staff meetings were a regular, if underappreciated, part of life at Dumont. As the accompanying minutes show, meetings dealt with a wide range of issues not found in more traditional workplaces, including the taking of minutes itself. There was no one person tasked with recording the meetings’ proceedings and the sample shown here was done apparently anonymously. One can only assume the attendees knew who the droll scribe was but he/she has not yet been identified by the website’s editors. Readers with better memories and fewer axes to grind are welcome to reveal their choice of culprit. Hint: it was someone at the meeting.

The dates below are gleaned from payroll books, attendance lists at meetings and from names mentioned in the meeting minutes. Many people had extended times away from Dumont and many others did essentially volunteer work which has not been and cannot be independently verified. A comprehensive listing of Dumont workers appears here.

1971

A group of visionaries and optimists are busy finding income producing work, a place to do it, getting that place ready for the work and navigating the business world. These people include Ed Hale, Trudy Chippier/ Harrington, Winnie Lang/Pietrykowski, Gary Robins, Bryan (Notes) Anderson, Ron Colpitts, Liz Willick, Rod Hay, Bill Aird, Peter Lang, and Brenda Wilson. Steve Izma warrants special mention. He is the only person who was actively engaged at both the beginning and at the end of Dumont, weathering all the waxing and waning of the optimism and changing visions over the years. He is still involved in this website, perhaps an indication that there will be only one way his involvement with Dumont will ever finally end.

June 6: Dumont Press Graphix is incorporated.

June 18: Trudy and Winnie become the first employees.

August 1:  The first Dumont Hiring Call. 

August 13: John Stafford leads the pack.

September 10: The first of the annual fall group of new staffers includes Rick Astley, Mike Canivet, Cynthia Campbell, Dan Chabot, Philippe Elsworthy, Ed Hale, Steve Izma, Liz Janzen, Peter Lang, Mike Mears, and Nick Sullivan.

October 8: Dan was having such fun that Diane Chabot joined us just after Phil left, having built all the light tables and other useful items.

November 26: Peter, John and Nick all go on sabbatical; we will see them again sometime in the future.

December 1: Rick departs after only a few months. 

1972

January: Short term employment for Gord Cassleman and Ken Hanley still leaves us short staffed.

February: Reinforcements arrive in the form of Bill Aird, Bob Driscoll, Rod Hay, and Bob Mason.

March: Mike Mears departs, replaced by Marty Pollack but only for a two week work term.

April: Trudy and Bob Driscoll depart while Liz Janzen and Bob Mason go on their sabbaticals. Bill Cino comes in to replace all four.

May: John Stafford rejoins the group.

August: Ed Hale moves on to the bright lights of Toronto.

September: Mass hiring for the upcoming year: Lesley Buresh, Ron Colpitts, Liz Willick, Mary Holmes, Evalina Pan, Gary Robins, Reevin Vinetsky, and Brenda Wilson comprise the bright-eyed group of eager workers. We did re-acquire a game hardened veteran in Nick (Savage) Sullivan to help show them the ropes. 

October: Having trained their replacements, both Dan and Diane Chabot leave along with Evalina who lasted only one month.

December: Cindy, Bill Cino, and Winnie depart while Mary goes on sabbatical.

1973

January: Candace Doff joins us and Liz Janzen returns.

February: More recruits in the form of Douglas Epps and Jan Johnson.

April: A cruel month sees Jan depart after only 30 days service, along with Reevin, Candace, and Nick Sullivan, while Liz also makes her final departure.

August: Rosco Bell, Janet Stoody, and Susan Phillips get hired while Mike Canivet goes on sabbatical. John Stafford says his final goodbyes.

September: The annual fall hiring brings in Ken Epps, Joanne Kennedy, Alice Mills, Alison Stirling, and Jann Van Horne. Susan leaves after only one month.

October: Murray Noll joins -- better late than never.

November: Bill Aird departs, replaced by the returning Bob Mason.

December: A cold winter begins with the departures of Rod Hay and Janet Stoody.

1974

January: Sue Calhoun comes in out of the cold.

February: Neither Joanne nor Jann fear the cold so both depart the warm but draughty shop.

May: Alison Stirling departs for a few years.

July: Ron and Liz depart.

September: The fall hiring flurry sees Mike Canivet and Mary Holmes return from their sabbaticals, joined by first timers Jane Harding, Doug Roberts, Carol Beam, and Michael Rohatynsky. Carol shows up in the minutes for the first time although she may well have been involved previously. The experienced Lesley Buresh and Alice Mills depart, leaving the new folks with big shoes to fill.

1975

March: Ken Epps begins a sabbatical while Mary Holmes departs.

September: Claire Powers is the only fall hire.

1976

January: Carol Beam and Doug Roberts leave for new adventures.

February: Ken Epps returns, joined by Linda Lounsberry.

March: Charlotte von Bezold brings in her unique style.

April: Sue Calhoun and Bob Mason depart.

May: Brenda Wilson leaves and is missed by all.

July: Murrray Noll departs for the nation's capital and continues typesetting for many more years.

September: The fall hire catches John Dufort, John Hofstetter, and Moe Lyons.

October: Not to be outdone, Bill Culp joins us.

December: Rosco Bell hears the call of the west and inexplicably heads to frozen Regina.

1977

January: Charlotte departs but is replaced by the returning Pete Lang and Kerrie Atkinson.

March: Pete and Kerrie depart after wintering at Dumont; Douglas Epps heads west.

April: Gary Robins begins a leave of absence.

September: The fall call for recruits brings in David Arnault, Barb Droese, Kae Elgie, and Lake Sagaris. Gary Robins ends his leave of absence but just cannot ignore the call of the west and heads in that direction.

1978

January: Another busy year begins with the departure of Claire Powers.

February: It continues with the departure of Lake Sagaris.

March: And the departure of Mike Canivet.

May: Then even more with the departures of Linda Lounsberry and John Dufort.

December: The final departure for the year is Ken Epps. A short term replacement arrives in the person of Jim Morton.

1979

January: Short term replacement Jim Morton leaves but Shirley Tillotson takes his place. Alison Stirling returns to the fold, after wandering awhile.

February: Michael Kelley joins the firm.

May: David Arsenault (better known as Jacob) leaves to become the renowned Australian author David Arnault.

June: Eliza Moore is hired. There is no September hiring spree but ...

December: The outflow of staffers continues with Michael Kelley, Jane Harding, John Hofstetter, Eliza Moore, and Michael Rohatynsky all leaving.

1980

January: Catherine Edwards joins us but Kae Elgie departs.

March: Pat Ferrin stays only this one month. Shirley Tillotson also departs, along with Bill Culp, but Barb Marshall bolsters the work force.

April: Diane Ritza is hired.

June: Barb Marshall ends a short three month stay.

August: Joe Szalai joins us along with Larry Caesar.

September: No hiring blitz this year, however Larry says goodbye after his month and Barb Droese ends her three years at Dumont.

1981

June: Ralph Reiner arrives.

July: Becky Kane arrives.

August: Alison Stirling departs for the second time and Karen Luks takes her place. Alison remains as a volunteer and frequent part-timer for several more years. 

September: Mary Spies is the only fall recruit. Ralph Reiner departs after only three months.

1982

January: Eliza Moore begins her second work term.

April: April Fool's Day sees the departure of Karen Luks ...

May: ... but Marie Koebel celebrates May Day in grand style by becoming a Dumonteer.

July: Diane Ritza becomes a part-time worker while Eliza ends her second work term.

1983

January: Bruce Andor rings in the New Year by getting hired.

March: Lisa Willms begins a short stint at Dumont.

July: Larry Caesar begins another period of employment.

September: Lisa's short time ends although she appears later as a part-timer.

December: Mary Spies switches to part-time for the foreseeable future and Larry ends his second go-round.

1984

March: Greg Meadows reverses the trend by starting as a part time worker and switching to full time in November.

July: Paul Hartford decides to spend the hot summer in the shop.

September: Paul leaves as the weather cools and is joined by Diane Ritza. Catherine Edwards hangs up her pica ruler but remains available to be called in whenever needed. This is also the last official month for Steve Izma although he remains a valuable resource and part-time worker until the end. 

October: Joe Szalai ends his full time employment but pops in occasionally afterwards.

1985

January: The paying work seems to be very uneven and unpredictable so people come and go as the work load changes. Mary Spies comes back part time until August and Catherine Edwards comes back, also part time, for January, February, March, and October.

March: Bruce Andor leaves after two years. Lin McInnes and Kathy Zinger sign up for full time work from March to August.

April: Greg Meadows leaves after only one year.

June: Pam Andrews gets part time work until August while both Debbie Connors and Madeleine Clin get to stay until October.

September: Lisa Willms comes back for three months of part time work. Cheryl Hendrickson gets hired full time.

August: Larry Caesar is hired a third time, possibly a record.

1986

The last year of the struggle. Work is intermittent and hard to schedule. By the fall, discussions have begun about winding up operations and disposition of the collective's assets.

Debbie Connors returns for some part time work in April. Annette Beingessner does some work in that month as well.

New part time workers include Leslie Millard (Feb., Mar., and April), Daryl Marquette (Mar., April, and May), and Rebekah Abra (May and June).

As for the remaining full timers, Larry Caesar's third work term ends in April.

Debra Elson is a new full time hire in May while Chris Bechtel works full time as a new hire only in September.

Experienced Kathy Zinger is back for a few months beginning in April and Joe Szalai comes back in August.

Guiding the ship all year long are Cheryl Hendrickson and long time stalwarts Becky Kane and Moe Lyons.

From September 1986 to April 1987 it is unclear whether people were paid for their work. It seems that those months were spent taking care of unfinished business and the income was used to pay operating expenses and back debts.

After April 1987, all work was essentially non-commercial, performed by volunteers without pay, but collecting money to pay for the overhead of the shop. We believe that such work continued until sometime in 1989, when the shop was converted to a photography studio by Steve, Brian Cere, and Paul Hartford. That arrangement continued until around 1996 when the lease was finally given up and all remaining Dumont property was moved out.

Some records of interest:

Steve's longevity, as previously noted.

Moe Lyons has the longest, mostly continuous tenure at Dumont. She began in September, 1976 and was there until the end. 

Annette Beingessner served the shortest amount of paid time at Dumont. On April 14, 1986 she worked 5 hours and made $25. However, the government stepped in and took 61 cents as her UIC dues so she ended up with $24.39 take home.

Jim Campbell owns another dubious record according to UIC. His period of employment as our shipper/receiver began in June 1970 and ended in September, 1979. We can hope he never had to explain exactly what he was shipping during his first year.  

Sometimes, with a little discussion and collaborative inspiration, a good idea can take root and blossom into a concept or a plan, and then grow into a tangible and valuable project. The Food Paper was just such an endeavour.

It was initiated as a collaboration between a couple Dumont staff members and several folks involved in setting up the Waterloo Food Co-op. We saw it as a kind of popular education tool not unlike the Ireland Paper which Dumont staff had produced two years earlier, designed to present a broad overview of the food industry, the changes in production, distribution, food quality and food security, and how independent local food co-ops could help consumers regain a greater level of control in obtaining better quality and less expensive meals for our tables.

That’s where we started, but of course it became a whole lot more than that. The volunteer group who researched, wrote and produced The Food Paper back in 1974 wanted to find the reasons why food had recently become a major public issue.

“When we first began plans for the paper, we also hoped to demonstrate the necessity for groups like the Waterloo Food Co-op as alternatives to present food industry structures. Although we still see such a necessity, we have come to realize that the difficulties would not end with a large-scale co-operative movement and proposing that everyone join a food co-op is too simplistic a solution to provide total answers. We can only hope that by reading the paper people will at least gain a clearer picture of the issues involved.”

Okay, so that part worked, The Food Paper was a huge success. We had to do a second press run. The National Farmers Union (NFU) distributed it to its members at their annual convention that fall. Oxfam Canada sent it out to their entire membership. It was initially distributed as a supplement to a number of university and alternate newspapers, and many nonprofit community groups and other food co-ops wrote to request copies for their own distribution.

But were we really all that successful? Forty-seven years later, all of the significant economic, environmental, corporate and social concerns we raised appear to have taken place. The family farm is essentially gone, agricultural soil quality is on life support, corporate consolidation and control has continued, international food sourcing threatens the sustainability of the planet. Yikes! It’s grim, but it’s not all bad. Local food security has become an important political issue. Some fights continue on…  We did a good job with this project, and much of what we wrote is still valuable and important all these years later.

As we wrote in our introductory statement back in 1974: “Food is a basic necessity for sustaining life. The quality of life is very much dependent on the availability of such basics as good food. For people to be in a position where they cannot afford to buy food grown in a country as rich in agricultural' land as Canada is perverse. Farming is one of the few remaining occupations that maintains a balance with nature. To find farmers leaving the land because they can no longer make a living and to see urban sprawl eating away the countryside left behind is equally perverse. If we are not to be confronted with, large, mechanized farms, using all the latest industrial and chemical techniques, providing low quality food to huge metropolitan centres at high prices, then something will have to be done about present food industry trends very soon.”

In the spring of ’71, I returned from Europe, broke, having travelled for 8 months and not knowing what was next. Back in Kitchener-Waterloo I found work at Camp Columbia for the summer. Reconnecting with friends and meeting new ones, I heard that Dumont was looking to hire in September. Yes!

I didn’t know anything about newspapers (other than reading the Chevron and having friends who wrote for it) or typesetting. But I could type and I knew I liked the proposed co-op/collective model of Dumont -- a fit with my values having grown up a Mennonite girl (United not Old Order) and definitely a fit with my developing feminist and left leanings. And then (luckily) Janet, Mary and I found a house to rent on Ahrens Street. Just a roll out of bed or a stagger home, either way Dumont was close by. The Station Hotel was an added bonus (greasy breakfast or late beers).

I learned a lot at Dumont. I never did become proficient at layout, and couldn’t match Winnie and Nick in the ticker tape contest of accuracy and speed, but I could organize the scheduling, figure out the finances, bring meetings to consensus and to an end, and be a worker bee, willing and dependable. I learned that although we might all agree about what had to be done, we needed to identify the different tasks to do them well; some people were a lot better at some tasks than others. So when there was a time crunch it made more sense for me to do the proofreading than to try to fit type onto a layout page when the text was too long.

I learned how to participate in a meeting, how to speak up, how to get the “agenda” done, how to work with a variety of personalities in various states of mind with different skills and interests in a sometimes tense, down-to-the-wire atmosphere.

Dumont meetings were often long and at times tedious. There were as many as 18 people working at Dumont in the early 1970s and meetings were deliberately non-hierarchical. We had neither set format nor designated chair. Often, leadership in directing or managing a meeting fell almost inevitably to the few more naturally inclined towards creating an agenda, taking notes, devising next steps and ensuring that everyone who wanted to speak were able to do so. Discussion was encouraged.

We often went around in circles, everyone having a say and then repeating once again to clarify or make sure that we were heard accurately. There was a dusty, over-stuffed couch with pillows that sank to the floor and a couple of large armchairs that were always taken before I arrived. Many of us pulled up chairs and stools and, if I remember correctly, most of our meetings were in the late afternoon.

A meeting that sticks in my mind was one attended by a large German Shepherd – at the time we had no policy on dogs or cats at work. The meeting had been going on for some hours with people coming and going, taking short breaks, and speaking sporadically. At some point the muscular and rather fearsome Shepherd was shooed off a chair to make room for humans. The Shepherd reluctantly stepped down from his position of comfort, slowly pacing around the room looking for another spot to sit (or so we thought). Much to our surprise, the Shepherd suddenly started to jerk off in the middle of the meeting!

Throughout my working career, I’ve been a keen observer of human behavior. And as I continued to fine-tune my meeting skills, maneuvering my way through difficult personalities and challenges, this event would often come to mind. What more could possibly astonish me!

I don’t remember there being much “to do” about the Shepherd’s bad behavior. In the early 1970s we were reluctant to voice feelings of shock or disgust when it came to sexual activity, canine or otherwise. But, the image of this shepherd and our shared personal responses over tea at Ahrens Street or beer at the Station Hotel remain with me to this day.

Ahrens Street was my base for three years, a long time in those years. Janet, Mary, Winnie, Jane, Lesley (and Sara) and David Monoogian are friends even now, 50 years later (although I have lost touch with David). Sitting at the Ahrens Street dining room table we shared many pots of tea, lots of laughter, passionate discussions, angst, tears, friendships, visitors, great meals, and some very personal growth.

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!

When the Dumont minutes of Tuesday September 7, 1971 were written, Peter Lang and I were no longer living together. I was living at Courtland Avenue with Trudy Chippier and Diane Mason. Trudy had separated from Eddie Hale and Diane had separated from Bob Mason. Although living apart from our former partners all six of us continued to work at Dumont.

When I look back now, some 50 years later, I am amazed that we dared to walk this delicate tight rope between the personal and the more public space of work. I’m sure scheduling became the art of the impossible. Fortunately, Dumont had people like Liz Janzen and Bill Aird creating the master schedule. We also had production managers for each 7-hour shift, overseeing continuity from one shift to the next, coordinating perforator and computer tasks, design and layout. At the best of times, selecting production teams and assigning tasks required a fair bit of sensitivity and ingenuity.

I remember Trudy Chippier from the “Trudy and Eddie Hale days” when both were obsessed with securing business contracts from the universities and Conestoga College, locating raw materials for light tables, massive hanging ceiling lights, second-hand perforators and a working Compugraphic photocomposition machine (about the size of a refrigerator). The two of them together were a force of nature. They also owned Dumont’s only van – a used, white, Ford Econoline. This crude box of a van had two front seats, with the engine serving as a heated third in between, a scuffed flat floor that stretched from the front seats to rear-end loading doors, perfect for hauling thousands of newsprint.

Trudy’s and Eddie’s farmhouse was memorable for its dancing parties: the Rolling Stones (I Can’t Get No Satisfaction, Gimme Shelter, Let’s Spend the Night Together), Janis Joplin (Me and Bobby McGee, Ball and Chain), The Grateful Dead (Keep on Truckin), Rod Stewart (Maggie May was one of Trudy’s favourites), Jefferson Airplane (White Rabbit, Somebody to Love), and last but not least Led Zeppelin (Stairway to Heaven).

Diane Mason was new to me at the time. I remember Diane and Bob fondly and when Diane and Dan Chabot discovered each other (he too worked at Dumont) I was just as pleased for the two of them. All three were delightful individuals and an absolute pleasure to work with. They were serious, compassionate, hardworking, and reliable. And as I remember it, all three had a great sense of humour. When times were bad, they didn’t dump on others. I remember sleeping on Diane’s waterbed while at Courtland – an added attraction until it sprung a leak.

I rather enjoyed reading the introduction to the proposal on “hiring and firing” dated May 29, 1972. This intro reads like a “treatise” on “form” and was written by Lizzie (Liz Janzen) and me. To this day, Lizzie and I remain good friends. When I read this archived document I could imagine the two of us deciding to put the “obvious” to print to ensure a shared footing when discussing “hiring and firing.” I wonder now if it was over pots of tea at Ahrens Street or drinks at the Station Hotel.

Preface, September 2022

In September 1976, members of the Anti-Imperialist Alliance engineered a takeover of the Chevron. A number of us from Dumont were contributing to the paper at the time and had a direct experience of the repercussions of this. But I think we were all surprised when the Federation of Students attempted to shut down the paper entirely and evict the staff from the Campus Centre. It didn’t go over well, and the struggle for control of the Chevron continued for a number of years.

A commission investigating these actions held hearings during the summer of 1977. I don’t recall who set it up, but it had the backing of the University administration. I made an oral presentation to the commission, but I suspect my typeset version of it never made it into the commission’s records. I typeset it because it was much faster for me to use Dumont’s keyboards and the VIP (and then photocopy the results) than to use a typewriter and litres of white-out. In any case, I recently found the paste-ups and scanned them, then ran an OCR program on them and corrected the results. I think this (admittedly very long) report gives a good perspective on all the hassles around the AIA coup and the subsequent Shane Roberts actions in an unsuccessful attempt to kick them out.

Introduction

One of the most unfortunate aspects of the closing of the Chevron in September 1976 was that it occurred at a time when the rejuvenation of the staff through input of new student volunteers looked very likely. For most of the previous year and especially during the previous six months, the staff had been wracked with arguments and sectarian political tension, often expressing itself in personal terms. The most serious result of this conflict was the inability of the staff to operate as a newspaper collective. Since for a large number of staff members this form of operation was a central reason for working on the newspaper, the tension (both political and personal) that existed at the Chevron office made working on the paper intolerable (especially in the case of volunteers, but even among members of the paid staff) and resulted in a much-depleted staff by early September.

The political tensions had external repercussions as well. The student readership made increasing complaints about the political nature of the paper, specifically, content attributed to the Anti-Imperialist Alliance (AIA). It became apparent to many of the non-AIA staffers that it was the paternalistic and dogmatic language of the AIA stories that angered the students more so than the political nature of the articles. Political features had survived in the Chevron since 1968 and had generally been an acceptable aspect of the paper. By early 1976, however, the AIA style had become identified with politics in general and this escalated the conflict between AIA and non-AIA staff members. (See Appendices for examples of student and staff complaints in this area). By the summer of 1976, it became clear to the non-AIA members of the Chevron staff—who found it increasingly necessary to confront the AIA members over their use of language as well as their political relevancy to students—that the AIA was not interested in working with the rest of the staff to alter the situation.

In the offices of the Federation of Students, where there were no AIA members, there was, just the same, political conflict developing around the apparent increasing influence of the AIA in the Chevron. Many council members, irritated by the AIA’s activities and their contributions to the Chevron, began to identify all left-wing politics as being linked to the AIA. A few other council members, clearly in the minority, were attempting to make distinctions between the AIA kind of politics and a broader, more multi-dimensional (not liberal) left critique. While Mike Ura’s efforts in this regard are the most notable (because his politics did not result in a dogmatic writing style; see his articles), the political situation of Shane Roberts is more significant to the events that followed. Roberts had direct contact with the Chevron during the summer by attending staff meetings, by contributing articles to the paper, and through personal friends of his who worked more frequently on the Chevron.

The AIA has accused Roberts and others of trying to suppress their voice on the Chevron. On the contrary, it was the intent of not only Roberts, but of the majority of Chevron staff during the summer of 1976 to prevent the AIA from gaining control of the editorial policy of the Chevron, a move seen as endangering open and varied political and non-political content in the paper.

However, even if Shane Roberts and others on Students’ Council had as their intention the prevention of a one-sided, constricted student newspaper, their actions in closing down the Chevron are, in my mind, completely inexcusable. Acting as they did, completely externally to the Chevron staff, they repressed any possible healthy collective developments within the Chevron even more effectively than a “takeover” by the AIA might have done. The representatives of the students refused to recognize that the AIA was definitely in the minority on staff at the time, and, although the AIA’s influence was extremely strong, one has to have a very dim appreciation of students’ intelligence to think that new staffers would be dazzled by them for very long.

Yet the closing of the Chevron gave the AIA more fuel for their dazzling fires: they were handed an issue out of which they could build a political bandwagon. The lack of any other conflict on campus that students showed an interest in made the Chevron closing very appealing to those yearning for political activity. Unfortunately, the AIA, having built the bandwagon, was the first to jump on it and supply it with slogans. The only aspect of the whole problem that they were willing to talk about was the fact the Chevron was closed down; all other details of the circumstances were irrelevant. So energetic was their espousal of this line that problems of staff dynamics and collective relations were quickly obscured.

For these reasons what needs to be investigated is not just the methods used by Students’ Council for dealing with an alleged “takeover” of a newspaper by a political group, but how certain working dynamics among the staff of a supposedly co-operative newspaper became so antagonistic as to cause a serious breakdown of participation.

Two models of collectivity

To begin an elaboration of these points, it is necessary to attempt a more detailed description of collectivity on the Chevron and why it is of central importance to the operation of the paper.

From about 1970 onwards, editors and paid positions on the Chevron have been mostly de-emphasized. After a collective had taken over the Chevron in January and February of 1970 an editor was casually acclaimed as a signing officer only. There was an enthusiasm in avoiding key authority figures that propelled a large number of volunteers into experimenting with the paper, resulting in a wide variety of topics, graphic effects and styles. One of the more noticeable characteristics of the Chevron during this era was its sense of humour. Also, at this time the salaries budgeted for certain positions were split up among a large number of people or put to other uses.

However, in times when the staff dwindled, as in the summer, or when serious disagreements broke out, this collective inertia slowed down. A more rigid division of labour was re-instituted and more responsibility was assigned to those in paid positions. Often these developments took place at the expense of variety and innovation in the paper.

Collectivity, then, is not merely common agreement on ideas or practice. If it is to be healthy at all it must primarily be a process of change and development. One could describe it as an activity of debate and experiment. Inexperienced people, possessing only an enthusiasm, should be able to join a collective newspaper staff, express their naïve opinions without shame or harassment, and learn the process of journalism and newspaper production through their own experiments and mistakes.

They would not have the more experienced people telling them outright what is correct and incorrect, nor would they have to work in isolation. The more smoothly a collective operates, the more everyone is willing to give and take advice, join with each other in shared projects, and re-evaluate everything they do in order to do a better job next time. The results would be, not necessarily an efficiently run newspaper with perfect grammar and consistent professional style, but rather a situation in which people are coming to grips with the complexities of print-media communication, in other words, a learning process. And because such a process will bring a large variety of opinions and perspectives into contact with each other, the content of such a newspaper is more likely to build a description of events that is relevant to a larger number of readers.

There is, however, another notion of collectivity that brings the opposite results. It is the notion that a collective must be completely unified, that nothing can be accomplished unless there is total agreement on issues. In this context the collective process must be a hammering out of various perspectives until they conform to one purpose. It is not the achievement of a synthesis whereby individual wills reach a common understanding of a variety of real experiences, but rather the reduction of reality to one “correct” experience. In this process the inexperienced do not proceed through mistakes and success on their own initiative, learning with help from others, but instead are initiated by the “wisdom” or “correctness” of others bypassing any real learning process.

This concept of collectivity is rooted in the assumption that there is one pure human nature and that deviations are perversions of one scale or another. Instead of the differences among individuals being on the order of variety or freshness, they are seen as part of a hierarchical order of more correct or less correct. No notion of equality can exist in this form of collective. Those in authority are those who are most convincing in asserting their own correctness, and they do this by whatever means necessary: eloquence, asserting seniority in practical experience, quoting from the texts of the “experts”, and temporary friendliness. What results from this is often a very efficient organization where everyone knows their place, but it does not engender the kind of knowledge that allows one to go out to a new experience and be capable of understanding the new variety of problems one will find there. It is a learning by rote and all that one takes elsewhere is a catechism from which to quote.

The latter notion of collectivity is more often than not characterized by its lack of humour (or lack of nondestructive humour) and its inharmonious relations as the people within it struggle to delineate their hierarchy. It is apparent to me, having been a volunteer member of the Chevron staff during the spring and summer of 1976 and as a close observer and occasional participant for five years prior to 1976, and as a staff member for two years prior to that, that the direction in which the Chevron staff was heading by the end of the summer of 1976 was toward this latter notion of collectivity. As people felt themselves losing control of this process they tended to leave the paper rather than be involved in the arguments and fights that were increasing.

The Anti-Imperialist Alliance

It’s questionable as to whether or not it’s fair to refer impersonally to the AIA. No organization ever consists of people so homogeneous that they think alike, act alike, and, in complete agreement, make all the same mistakes. However, the AIA has consistently put on this mask of unity to the public especially on important issues, for example, by signing its statements “Anti-Imperialist Alliance”’ instead of by the individual or individuals who actually wrote the statement. In this sense the AIA becomes almost an entity in itself, something much larger than the sum of its individual members. And because the actual membership of the AIA is kept a secret it becomes a somewhat ominous creature. Indeed to talk about a “member” of the AIA is misleading; there are, apparently, no membership cards to prove membership; a member can only be identified if he or she expresses affiliation.

Yet this mystification of the AIA is not the work of its critics but rather of its partisans.

Since it appears that the AIA wants to be seen as such a unified body, I feel justified in referring to the various statements, actions, and attitudes made by individual AIA members in connecton with their political position as AIA statements, actions, attitudes, etc.

While I worked on the Chevron during 1976, AIA positions were put forward most often by Neil Docherty, Larry Hannant, and Doug Wahlsten and to a lesser extent by Salah Bachir. Other staff members who were affiliated to or supported the AIA almost always agreed with the positions of these staffers. In the conflicts that developed over the summer of 1976 the three main AIA members taking part in the Chevron continually polarized arguments between themselves and the most experienced people on staff. The arguments that ensued were the most verbally abusive clashes that I had ever encountered on the Chevron since my first affiliation with it in 1969.

Conflicts within the Chevron staff

For reasons that are not very clear to me these conflicts were a somewhat abrupt departure from the way in which staff meetings and Chevron content discussions had occurred prior to the winter-spring of 1976. Perhaps the AIA had too little strength prior to that time to actually push the arguments very far. Non-AIA staffers had the tendency to ignore or just walk out of discussion that rose to such a level of antagonisms as the AIA preferred in their “vigorous debates.” Many people just did not take them seriously and laughed either openly or aside at the AIA’s rhetoric.

It may have been the seriousness of the AIA’s attack on Shane Roberts (see appendix 3), which was seen even by those staffers critical of Roberts to be overblown, or the increasing occurrence of AIA material both as articles (see Appendix 1) and especially in “Feedback” during the winter and spring of 1976 that led a smaller group of non-AIA staff members and Chevron supporters to confront the AIA during the summer. Or it may have been a conscious decision the part of the AIA to push as far as possible their lines on particular issues presented in the Chevron.

In any case, it was as if a gauntlet had been thrown. Each side seemed to be presenting articles to irritate the other. The AIA usually used “Feedback” to make a statement critical of an article written by political opponents. (see Appendix 2). But the non-AIA staff members preferred to have articles critical of AIA positions printed as features in the Chevron. This was done largely so that the paper could be seen as taking a stand either clearly critical of the AIA or having a much more sophisticated analysis (we felt) than what the AIA was presenting. Feedback submissions went into the Chevron uncontested (at least in respect to content; unsigned letters and those of dubious origins were usually questioned); however, feature articles—which traditionally were generated by a few people and accepted by the rest of staff as a contribution to the variety of content in the Chevron—became the main topic of discussion and voting at staff meetings.

Some examples of conflicts in staff meetings

There were three particular staff meetings where this conflict escalated nearly to the point of absurdity, and yet, even a year later, it is still not funny.

At one point in the summer some staff members came across an article from an American Marxist journal that attempted io prove that, despite the political relationship between Mao Tse-Tung and Joseph Stalin, Mao did not follow Stalin’s directives and could not be considered a Stalinist. Many of us were, at the time, sympathetic to most of what had occurred in China since the 1949 revolution and saw this article as a way of encouraging people to look at China without being confused by the AIA’s rhetoric about it. At the same time we thought that it would force the AIA to state their reverence for Stalin, a situation that we thought would make clear to other staff members and Chevron readers the repressive nature of the AIA’s ideology.

My present feelings about the article have changed significantly. There are more and more indications that Mao was the same kind of ruthless tactician that Stalin was, except perhaps in terms of overall bloodshed. (see various works by Charles Reeve, Simon Leys, “Charlatan Stew,” and the Hong Kong 70’s Front for left-wing critiques of Maoist China). It now seems that the article we presented, while pointing out valuable aspects of how Mao learned from Stalin’s mistakes and “indiscretions,” was still irrelevant to the kinds of articles students are generally interested in. The article covered the same territory as most of the AIA’s political submissions and although it was an attempt to demystify some aspects of this political ground, it did not go far enough in that respect. Yet the AIA never raised the point of its relevancy to students; they were only concerned with it as a political attack which must be suppressed.

The AIA came prepared to the meeting at which the article was to be discussed. They were armed with a multitude of quotes from Mao praising Stalin, but the kind of formal praises that one would expect to read on a Christmas card. The quotes were empty of any kind of indication as to how the practice of Mao and Stalin was related. Even though such a relationship can be established, the AIA made no attempt to do so except through “guilt by association.” In the same way Pierre Trudeau’s many statements complimentary of Mao could be used as proof that Trudeau is a Maoist.

On the other hand, they refuted any statements made that were critical of Stalin: “This writer is an enemy of Stalin and therefore a Trotskyist, and therefore cannot be believed, especially when talking about Stalin.” Our own ranks were not very well organized. Some people remained silent or asked a few leading questions hoping that the AIA would hang itself in the loopholes of its own logic. Others among us, especially myself, could not sit still during what I experienced as a medicine-show con game. Our arguments became so heated and loud with neither side willing or capable of making sense of the other that everyone in the room was made extremely uncomfortable.

The same sort of non-discussion took place around an article concerning Angola and the various “liberation” organizations that were struggling for hegemony in that country. The AIA line favoured one group over the group supported by the article we presented. Like the previously mentioned meeting the main characteristic of this one was the shouting and impossibility of agreement. My feeling is that at both meetings the AIA members present employed the same methods of argumentation and harassment as is typical in their Feedback submissions (see Appendix 2).

During the Mao-Stalin debate the AIA stated that they considered the article an insult not only to Mao and Stalin but to themselves as well. They insisted that the article be not printed at all, but on voting, the staff decided that it was acceptable with a few modifications (it was never printed because it could not be shortened to a suitable length). The result of the Angola debate, apart from the hard feelings, was that the submitted articles would be printed along with a response from the AIA in a special Chevron supplement (this did occur on 23 July 1976).

Harassment of Adrian Rodway and other staff members

An even more serious matter broke out in August 1976 during a meeting to elect a news editor for the next eight months. However the AIA had something else in store for us, much to our surprise: Docherty presented a case against Adrian Rodway, at that time the editor of the Chevron, calling him incompetent, demanding that he be fired, and nominating Larry Hannant for the position of editor. Though it was clear that the AIA and Rodway were not the best of friends this move was quite a shock. Rodway had been working under difficult conditions in completing his schoolwork and supporting his family, yet his articles in the Chevron had been consistently among the most well-written ones in the paper. The AIA complained not only about his articles but that Rodway did not spend as much time at the Chevron offices as an editor should. Only one or two of the non-AIA members agreed with this criticism and the majority of staff voted confidence in Rodway. In fact all the more experienced non-AlA staffers got along well with Rodway and were quite willing to give consideration for his time needs, especially since no one in memory had had to support such a large family while working on the Chevron. This confidence was a good example of how a group working collectively can modify its relationships in order to meet changing needs and conditions.

However, the AIA seemed intent on damaging these relationships. By the end of the summer AIA harassment was an open topic among members of the staff. Two regular news writers, John Morris, a former editor, and Dionyx McMichael, both left by September because of the hostility they felt around the Chevron office. One quickly feels that there is no hope for collective change when one gets arguments more and more frequently in exchange for suggestions and ideas.

In the areas of the paper where the AIA seemed to focus its concern (news, features, “Feedback” especially, but not entertainment or sports) every idea raised became a political idea. This in itself can lead to exciting discussion and development of multi-dimensional perspectives on issues, but in the environment of the Chevron, a political issue became a means for the AIA to polarize people. They took their position, based clearly on a political line, and stuck to it. The argument would go on until one side or the other had to leave for more important things. If they didn’t convince people at one sitting they would try again later on. This practice has led many people to compare the AIA to Jehovah’s Witnesses and other evangelists, a comparison that misses out only on the degree of verbal aggression used by the AIA in their proselytizing.

This was the experience of those members of the Chevron staff who had something besides the AIA view to offer. In this context when Dionyx McMichael heard Neil Docherty say something to the effect of “Why don’t you get up and do some newswriting for a change,” it is not surprising that she failed to see it as a joke (as Docherty later claimed). She knew she could no longer tolerate that kind of work environment.

The same sort of harassment existed for Rodway especially during September, when he was frequently the only non-AIA person in the office on deadline nights, having to withstand single-handedly all the arguments for or against this or that late article. Adrian also spent most Thursday nights at Dumont Press proofing the Chevron between typesetting stages and printing. This was not required of him as editor but was officially the responsibility of Docherty, the production manager. However, more often then not, Rodway stayed longer at Dumont than Docherty.

On these occasions at Dumont I had opportunities to talk to Adrian about events in the Chevron office. He frequently described how he felt “cornered” and “harassed” while alone with the AIA people in the Chevron, and how he did not know how much longer he could endure that experience. Even though it was very disappointing, it came as no surprise when he resigned on 24 September 1976.

Staff dissent after the closing

After Rodway’s resignation and the subsequent closing of the Chevron by the executive of the Federation of Students, it became much easier for the AIA to express its opinions on the Chevron without challenge. AIA members and AIA-influenced people were clearly in the majority among experienced staff members. The key exception was the advertising manager, Brenda Wilson, whose first activities on the Chevron had been in 1968.

Wilson was in a precarious position on the Chevron staff; she was the only paid staff member whose job was still in effect, according to the Federation of Students. She still maintained her office in the Chevron, leaving it open for other staff members to use and instructed them on the procedure of the ad department, but she refused to sell ads for the Free Chevron. She continued to participate in meetings and helped out with various other functions on the paper. Her activities were split largely because of the difficulties she had had throughout her term as ad manager with the AIA when it came to interactions around the office and on Chevron content. Since the closure she had frequently expressed these problems and also her dissatisfaction with the way the AIA was influencing the Free Chevron staff. She, myself, and Jacob Arsenault were by that time the only staff members who had worked on the Chevron previously to the closing and who were willing to raise criticisms of the AIA’s methods on the paper.

There are a few reasons why our criticisms were not being listened to. The majority of people working on the Free Chevron were those who first became acquainted with the paper in early September. At that time there was a burst of energy put into getting the paper out and little time for political arguments except late at night when only the older staffers were around. The new people had not had much of a chance to experience the kinds of problems we were describing.

The closing of the Chevron was clearly and rightfully seen as a repressive move on the part of the student council. It also engendered a great deal of enthusiasm for a fair and valuable cause: keeping the student press operating. Every reason that the Federation gave for closing down the Chevron did not make any sense to those who had just come to work on it.

Given this situation it was very easy for new staffers to accept the simplistic analysis put forward by Hannant and Docherty and other AIA’ers: the Federation was a bunch of corrupt hacks who cannot take criticism and therefore react by pulling the strings of power and ownership that give them authority. It was not only the content of this analysis that appealed to new people but the style with which it came across. Hannant and Docherty organized the occupation and sparked the discussions at meetings; they were the first to present an analysis and did it with the fervour usually found in their presentations.

However, for a few of us to say: “Wait a minute, the situation is much more complex than that; there are a lot of problems within the Chevron,” was like someone standing on the sidelines saying things that just didn’t fit into the excitement of the occasion. We were not on the bandwagon, and my need to work at a full-time job and the personal difficulties the three of us were having with the AIA members made it very difficult for us to ever get on it.

Also, whenever we mentioned that many staffers had left the Chevron because of problems in staff collectivity the AIA’s response was to consider those ex-staffers as people who couldn’t take the pace, or who had “personal” problems. Our raising of criticisms was seen to be something that threatened the kind of unity of attack that the AIA wanted to focus on the Federation.

As a result we were told that what we were saying was irrelevant.

In mid-October Wilson made a statement during a Students’ Council meeting to the effect of “I understand why the Federation acted as it did in closing down the Chevron, but I don’t agree with its tactics.” A few days later I was in the Chevron office when I heard Neil Docherty claim that Wilson had said she had supported the Federation’s move to close the Chevron. Henry Hess agreed that’s what he, too, thought he heard Wilson say. Asking Wilson about it and getting a different story, I urged that the four of us sit down to straighten this out. We talked for an hour in unusually amicable terms. During this discussion Docherty criticized Wilson for organizing a group of Chevron staffers to talk to the Federation after the Free Chevron staff had voted against such a move. She maintained that it was perfectly within their rights as individuals to keep lines of communication open between the Free Chevron and the Federation in the event of the possibility of negotiations. However, by the end of the discussion (people ended it only to get back to other tasks) it appeared to me that there was an agreement among the three people to continue to work together.

At the end of October a meeting was called of Ontario members of Canadian University Press. At the end of the afternoon there was to be a session restricted only to CUP members and the Free Chevron staff. The intent was to exclude representatives from the Federation of Students so that a strategy could be worked out for reinstating the Chevron. At this point the Free Chevron Staffers requested a quick meeting among themselves to decide whether or not all those who said they were Chevron staffers were really sympathetic to the Chevron’s cause. At this meeting it was Wilson, Arsenault, and myself whose sympathies were being challenged. In Wilson’s case her previously mentioned statement was dragged up, again interpreted as support for the Federation. This was coming close to the last straw for us. We argued that this was a misjudgement but before the discussion got very far someone, probably realizing that it might go on for a long time, suggested that we all go back into the CUP meeting.

Once inside I was still feeling somewhat irritated by the accumulation of events like this and asked to talk to the meeting about the problems of staff collectivity. My reasoning was that, given incidents of the sort that had just occurred, talk about united strategies was premature. A discussion about collectivity would also give us a better understanding of why the Chevron was closed down and thus how to build a strategy for opening it up again. The occasion of the CUP conference also seemed to me to be an ideal situation for a discussion of staff dynamics since there were representatives of a number of different newspapers present. The CUP executives and some reps from other papers expressed interest in such dialogue but all of the Free Chevron staff (apart from the three of us and one other) objected completely to this idea, saying that it was irrelevant and detracted from the matter at hand. The debate on whether or not to talk about staff dynamics lasted for nearly an hour.

This marked my last attempt to struggle with the Free Chevron staff.

Summary

In generalizing about the AIA’s activities on the Chevron it is tempting to use a word which they often hurl at their political enemies: opportunism. The word is inadequate in some respects, however, because it implies an organized conspiracy to take over the Chevron. This does not actually appear to be the case, and certainly cannot be proven. What is more likely and is just as much of a problem is that a small group of people with stalwart and stubborn political methods and no sympathy for people critical of their unquestionably correct position merely outlasted their opposition in conscious and concerted struggle. This was a struggle that had nothing to do with the attainment of real needs by one group of people exploited by another, nor of the regaining by a working class of wealth appropriated by an owning class, nor a struggle for human rights by one group oppressed by another. Instead, the AIA’s intent was to assert the hegemony of their world view over all others by various means including the suppression of other views.

The Chevron was useful to the AIA in that it allowed them, as supposedly “objective” reporters, the key voice on issues presented to the student body. The Chevron’s position as the only “unified” voice of students on campus has allowed them to infuse into their exclusive reporting a political line and be essentially unchallenged. No other voice on campus has its power, namely, a circulation of 10,000 copies including an off-campus mailing. (The Gazette has not had the same credibility on campus until recently, but its coverage of campus events is just not as extensive, nor has it been characterized by the kind of critical content that, over the years, the Chevron has come to be known for.)

The Chevron staff can have the last word on anything it wants, including “Feedback,” and thus a large amount of information concerning students’ lives and the decisions that students make concerning their lives is filtered through the Chevron staff’s analysis. For this reason it is essential to keep the Chevron as open a forum with as much debate as possible.

To attempt to exclude the AIA from the Chevron is to engage precisely in their kind of politics. Yet, given their consistent attitudes and methods over the last two years, their participation in almost any project on campus is very likely to cause hostilities and problems on that project. However, the problem is not merely with the AIA but with any group of people that persist in such doctrinaire crusades. People committed to causes in this way have tremendous amounts of energy, and work hard and with dedication for their ideals; yet it is nearly impossible to argue constructively with them. Any such group of people, if they take a liking to a particular project, can fairly easily outlast anyone else already engaged in the project. Since the number of people it takes to produce a student newspaper is small (some have been done single-handedly) any small group, with ideas that are completely irrelevant to what is happening on campus, could take over such a function.

There are two areas that need to be examined in order to get at the roots of this problem. The first is in respect to the funding of student media projects. The crucial part of the Chevron’s present funding is through student fees that are currently compulsory. Even if fees were voluntary, they would still probably be collected on registration and the initiative of the student would be needed in reclaiming his or her fee. In such a system there would still likely be a sizeable amount of money set aside for a student newspaper. The funding of such a newspaper would thus rest a great deal on either student apathy or real student interest in the activities that the fees pay for. But a way of ensuring to the maximum the relevancy of a student newspaper would mean making the staff members go out and get all their funding themselves.

However there are many dangers in this arrangement. There is the possibility that the newspaper content would become predominantly advertisements. Or sensationalism, violence, and pornography—very saleable commodities—might become the norm. Almost certainly, smaller newspapers would result. Just the same, one must consider that there are no restrictions on advertising, pornography, and violence presently imposed by the funding process (although these items are usually restricted by the staff itself), so it is only speculation to assume that this choice of content would change under other conditions. The main advantage of this self-funding system is that the staff would have to have a much more concerned relationship to the paper’s content.

The other area of concern, and one which I consider to be more important is the fact that the Chevron is effectively a monopoly on campus. If the amount of energy, time, resources and enthusiasm that normally goes into the Chevron were spread among a number of smaller papers on campus, the features of student print-media communication would be thoroughly transformed. Most certainly a larger number of topics would be raised and the discussion among the papers would be more comprehensive than ever before.

This would ensure that no single group could monopolize campus media. However, if a number of such small papers commented on particular issues in similar ways, it would be a far more accurate indication (than would, for example, a statement in the Chevron) that students in general were in agreement on that issue and that conditions were good for some sort of integrated action.

Funding might even be easier for such smaller papers in that they would probably be based within small common interest groups such as the student societies. In such a situation where people have a more direct relationship with and, thus, more control in a media project than they would in a centralized project, I think there would be more of a willingness to support it, either through participation or money.

Some objections to this scheme might be raised by citing the example of Enginews, a society paper not much respected for its approach to student life. My feeling is that there is a significant number of engineers (for example) who do not treat the Enginews at all seriously but instead look towards the Chevron to fulfill the functions they see as important for a student newspaper. If the Chevron were not to exist, then it is very likely that the interest shown by these students would be focused on the Enginews or another engineering students’ newspaper. Inevitably a more sophisticated paper would result.

The move to smaller, decentralized student newspapers would only be a healthy move if it was seen as relevant by the student organizations concerned and, especially, the present Chevron staff. The forceful imposition of such a policy would certainly have results as disastrous as the forceful closing of the Chevron last year. The best that can be done at present is to initiate a dialogue on these ideas.

It takes a Village to raise a child, it takes a Community to sustain a Collective.

A significant key to Dumont’s early success and certainly to much of its vitality were the relationships the shop established outside the workplace. These were centred around things like the Dumont Ducks (players and fans), the Food Co-op, the Awarehouse Books Co-operative, trade union support, Running Dog concerts, OPIRG, the K-W Women’s Centre and an endless array of communal gatherings, potlucks and festive gatherings celebrating a wide array of significant and/or eclectic cultural and political milestones.

It was this environment of communalism and co-operation that nurtured and sustained the social lives of the staff of Dumont Press, their housemates, co-conspirators, fellow travelers and assorted vagabonds through our years together. It was a time not without its share of bumps and hiccups, from relationship breakups to political discord to friction over individual work styles. All of these were part of the picture, but to a large extent, it was that sense of community that kept us rolling, and encouraged us to look out for each other.

Three days and nights at a quiet and unassuming lodge in the Kawartha Lakes north of Peterborough, Ontario. Name tags proved to be a handy resource and the mood of the assembled crows was warm, kind and comfortable. So many stories shared, memories restored and most of us just wanted to keep on going...