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...

Among the many collections of photographic history contained here in the Dumont Archives, one of our favourites is Brian Cere's portfolio of B/W exhibition prints from the Dumont Press Fifth Anniversary Celebration (with about 125 attendees, the first big Dumont gathering), held at the Chicopee farm in June of 1976. Brian produced a portfolio of 28  individually-numbered 11" x 14" archival black and white prints. Many of them have been scanned, restored and reproduced here on this website. Unfortunately, a number of those prints, numbered 22 to 28, disappeared about 14 years ago, and have not yet been found.

Since then, other copies of two of those photographs, #27 and more recently #25, have turned up and have been digitized to be included in the overall portfolio. Print #25 is still in the process of restoration, but we felt this might be a good opportunity to share it here, as a work in progress, and perhaps a bit of a prompt to help us locate the rest of the missing portfolio prints.

I received these clippings of articles from the Kitchener-Waterloo Record from rych mills.

Since the text is a little difficult to read, I will gradually add transcriptions of the articles. Here is the introduction to part one of the two-day series.

New outlook, but still radicals

Jim Nagel, former editor of the University of Waterloo student paper and then a reporter for The Record, is now working in a religious communal farm he helped organize at Glastonbury, England. On a trip to K-W, he revisited radical students. In the first of a two-part series, he reports what they are doing today and what they thought about the student activist days.

By Jim Nagel

Special to The Record

Whatever happened to the student radical wave of the 1960s?

At the University of Waterloo for much of the period, editor of the student newspaper for two years, I knew all the activists and probably had an idea of what they were about—even if I was too much of a fence-sitter to play a passionate role,

A full decade—the 1970s—has passed since the crest of the radical wave. I have looked up my friends who were active in Waterloo student affairs then to see where life has led them.

Some went into law; others into government to save the environment. Some went into organized labour; others into their own small businesses.

Some went into (or stayed in) the news and publishing game. Some went back to the land. Some went into university faculties to analyze where the movement went.

Most of the radical wave of the 1960s is still rolling, although the ripples have changed. The individuals who made up the wave, for the most part, have not changed their radical personalities of the past. But they have spread thin. Students of the baby boom are no longer concentrated on a campus, reinforcing one another’s ideas, but are separated across the country.

It was Hush, the Toronto tabloid, I think, that headlined Waterloo as “the Red university.” The UW, along with Simon Fraser University in the West, had the reputation of being English Canada’s radical hotbed.

That reputation surprised me, because the most spectacular thing that ever happened at Waterloo was the bookstore sit-in of 1966. For example, in all of Canada, the only real violence of that era was the 1969 computer-burning at Sir George Williams University in Montreal. While students here held Protests, outside Canada it was different.

In Paris in May 1968, student revolutionaries were on the verge of overthrowing De Gaulle’s reactionary government. The Sorbonne was occupied, riot cops faced cobblestones in the streets, ten million French workers joined a nationwide strike led by the students.

At the same time in New York, police were dragging Columbia University students from buildings. In Washington, the widowed Mrs. Martin Luther King was opening the Poor People’s Campaign and its plywood city at the Lincoln Memorial.

In Bonn, the government was laying down the law on student demonstrators. Someone tried to assassinate the radical leader Red Rudi Dutschke. In Prague, Alexander Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face” was blooming. And the wind was blowing rumours of Soviet troops massing on the border.

Back in Canada it was the time of flower power. Pierre became prime minister in April and called a general election three days later; Trudeaumania was sweeping the country.

In Saigon, a secret U.S. army directive was calling for an all-out Vietnam offensive. President Johnson asked Congress for $3.9 billion more for the war. Paris peace talks stalled.

Today, a full decade separating us from these concurrent hurricanes, that world has calmed down. The Vietnam war has at long last been repudiated, blacks got civil rights, students got some say on university boards.

The campus is quiet. Students today are more concerned about jobs amid high unemployment than they are about causes.

Students of the ’60s are now in the wide-open world beyond university. Most of the students whose integrity I respected in 1968 have not lost it in 1990. And they’re still concerned about worldwide problems:

Unemployment, education cutbacks, power of huge corporations, half the world starving, the bomb still hanging over it all, authoritarian government lurking to “save” us.

4 leftists turn into lawyers

In 1969 and 1970 a half-dozen of the University of Waterloo student leaders intended to carry their ideals from university polities into law school.

Their intention: Gain understanding of the power structure. Learn to use the system to carry their ideals into the real world.

While at school they planned to live communally in a big house. During the next two years, the household &endash; and some of the marriages and friendships &endash; split up.

Now in 1980, they are practising law, each going their own way, with varying political positions.

Steve Ireland says of the law school commune it was “really bourgeois” to other radical students sharing housing. “That was the time when Stewart (Saxe) had the Mercedes,” he chuckles.

Success surprised us, ’60s “firebrand” recalls

“Firebrand Ireland” I used to call him for fun when he was student-radical president at the University of Waterloo 12 years ago.

Today Stephen W. Ireland, B.A., LL.B. ts a respectable Toronto lawyer wearing a [obscured; maybe “sports jacket”?] but at least it’s corduroy,” he is quick to point out.

Ireland never was one of those slogan-shouting types that, at least in media imaginations, characterized the 1960s. At Waterloo, the most outwardly spectacular event in that period was the bookstore strike of November 1966, when several hundred students sat in the campus shop with guitars, protesting; the university’s high-profit prices on textbooks.

Former university president Dr. J.G. Hagey refused to come to talk to the students, so 210 students trooped up to his office. It was all good-natured, and it worked. The university changed the pricing policy.

“Nobody thought that sort of thing could happen,” said Ireland, “Least of all those who organized it.”

The bookstore success bolstered the student leaders’ confidence. Issue followed issue. “There was a lot of controversy,” said Ireland, “And that was the point.”

Students “saw that if you made your concerns known and had a bit of force behind them — if you were organized and had numbers behind you — you could be heard.”

As a result of student pressure while the new athletics building was planned, for example, planning was done for the general student apart from league sports. Similarly, a sit-in persuaded the library to adopt more flexible hours.

Get the student federation incorporated: that was one of Ireland’s first priorities as president. That legal framework proved to be a structure that weathered the turbulent months following.

Ireland’s biggest contribution was in “getting the principle recognized about student participation in university government.”

He was one of the main authors of a 1967 report that opened a long debate. Some faculty were bitterly opposed but students were granted seats on most university governing bodies.

“How that’s being followed up today— whether, students are playing a meaningful part—I have no idea,” said Ireland.

(One seat on UW’s board of governors today, as it happens, is filled by John Bergsma. An engineering graduate, he is now president and general manager of Columbus McKinnon Industries in Burlington.)

Times have changed for students since the economic slump of the 1970s, Ireland says. In our era, “We had the world by the tail. We were able to flaunt the authorities, to say obnoxious and unpleasant things without worrying about the consequences,

“We all got degrees, got tickets into the Establishment, and we’re all doing good work.” Today students worry how to support themselves.

Ireland and a partner (and a secretary each) are now set up above a bank opposite the central Toronto law courts: “Not plush, but convenient.”

"Criminal cases, “which I’m not all that fond of,” used to make up half his clientele, He now devotes most of his work to family law — divorce, separation, custody of children and property. Working with real people he finds more satisfying: &endash; especially when out of the blue a year later comes a thank-you from a past client.

Steve and his wife Sally, themselves recently separated and reunited, own a [obscured] musical taste might be a barometer of his political views: some Beethoven and a “fair amount of not-too-hard rock.”

Activist student now activist lawyer

Brian Iler, barrister and solicitor dressed in cords and cardigan, drives a 1971 Datsun with 132,000 miles on it and prefers to do his legal work in Toronto with community groups “which tend to be substantially to the left of the NDP.”

It’s 12 years ago that Iler, from Guelph, was elected student president and helped form the Radical Student Movement. [obscured] Today he believes in getting housing, food and such co-ops legally established because “the process people go through in running their own lives is an important part of social change. It’s a matter of bringing institutions down to a size people can feel comfortable with.”

Toronto now has a federation of housing co-ops, each with 10 to 100 units. The federation’s staff of a dozen helps new groups set up, does management services, deals with the mortgage corporations, and so on.

Brian and his wife Arel Agnew — a fellow Waterloo student — and their two children share a house in central Toronto with another couple. They take turns at chores in a day-care centre and food co-op. Iler is involved in the Law Union of Ontario, a federation of 500 left-wing lawyers, law students, and legal workers. He is not in a political party.

Iler practises on his own, sharing space with two native-rights lawyers. He rides his bicycle four blocks to work — even in winter.

An engineering student in 1965, he became active through Circle K, a campus service club and went on to organize the university’s Tenth Anniversary Week in 1967 to mark UW’s first decade. He succeeded Ireland as student president in 1968, the year of the radical crest.

Behind the scenes, radical action was being orchestrated by a small cell including ILer, tongue-in-cheek calling themselves the Committee for Intellectual Mobility. They met Thursday midnights.

“We’d hatch issues to raise shit on.”

They organized an outdoor rally on the shortage of student housing and decided to set up a protest tent city. Iler laughs that the tent city was not very successful. “Gerry Hagey (then UW president) came round one Sunday morning to visit people in their tents, and there was hardly anyone there.”

A mass resignation of student council and Iler as its president was another Thursday-midnight idea aimed to stir up discussion by students.

That was how Iler’s presidency ended, in October 1968 in a “town-hall” impeachment referendum of over 2,000 students. In the ensuing election he was defeated by conservative John Bergsma.

A 1971 summer job in Morley Rosenberg’s law office in Kitchener brought Iler into the middle of the Market Square controversy. The city council and the K-W news media had kept quiet about a deal with Oxlea Investments Ltd. to rip down the old city hall and farmers market to make way for a new mall.

Someone leaked news of the deal to The Chevron, and the student paper hit the streets with a special city-wide extra.

“We fell down badly on organizing the opposition to that afterwards. No one had had any experience organizing that kind of campaign.”

In his Toronto office, one of Iler’s biggest cases was a successful suit in 1976 against a guard at Millhaven maximum-security prison &endash; apparently the first such action against a prison guard to come to court.

Is he still reading Marx?

“I’m not too familiar with his stuff any [obscured] have been. Tom Patterson and Cyril Levitt (in 1968) theorized; I worked.

“I practise law because I enjoy working with people and doing practical things.

“And not just that. It's working with people towards a saner society.”

Student organizing “taught us a lot”

Steve Flott, one of the chief theoreticians at UW in the heyday of campus radicalism, admits that life now is outwardly “upper-middle-class traditional.”

He specialized in transportation law and since 1978 has been executive vice-president and general manager of the Ontario Trucking Association, in Toronto. !Some of the basic (radical) “concepts are still there They take a [obscured].”

Finding his job challenging enough, Flott has decided to stay low-key regarding politics for the next five years. The job involves him with trucking companies of all sizes in their licence applications to the provincial transport board.

One of his ex-radical friends calls him a workaholic. He always was one. He polished off an MA degree in history in only eight months in 1968 at Waterloo. American by birth, he had come to UW from Catholic priesthood training.

He was in on the secret steering committee at Thursday midnight.

You learn as much from working on student council or the campus newspaper as you do on your degree courses. “Part of the success that a number of us have had since leaving school was due to our experience at organizing things and managing during our student-politics days. We gained a lot of political skills which weren’t only used in politics.”

He was wearing his Saturday cords, turtleneck, and 10-year-old sweater at the interview at the large house he and his wife own in Toronto’s suburbia.

“I’m not saying society works well, but it’s there. I can’t see why I shouldn’t take advantage of that situation.”

Ex-radical maps out battles with labour

Stewart Saxe in 1968-69 published 1,000 pages of radical manifestos as editor of the University of Waterloo’s student newspaper The Chevron.

Today he has become a member of the biggest law firm in the world, representing multinational corporations.

Besides becoming a lawyer, he is owner of a modest estate, a rather isolated country house overlooking the Credit River near Georgetown.

Moreover, he has become son-in-law to Morton Shulman, Ontario’s outspoken ex-coroner, ex-MPP and author of Anyone Can Make a Million. Dianne Shulman Saxe is also a lawyer.

He sports a pocket watch in the vest of his three-piece suit and in its inside pocket the inevitable Daytimer, the efficient appointment diary like the one radical student executives carried back at Waterloo in the late ’60s.

He practises labour law — on the management side, How does this fit with his left-wing ideals?

“Poorly!” said Saxe laughing. “But let’s say it’s no trouble in my case. There are some people who practise labour law in ways that I will not.”

His job is to make quick deals between management and union, avoiding public battles. “I don’t think there’s anything anti-employee in this.”

After four years of legal studies at Osgoode Hall plus articling, he started in 1975 as a senior solicitor at the Ontario Labour Relations Board in Toronto. A year later he was its director &endash; meaning in charge of the 100-person secretariat responsible for deploying a field staff of [obscured].

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, what’s with man buns!?!

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

Fred Kemp (1941-2018) published Downer & Bitchin’ in 1972 (our estimate -- the original publication is undated). Halfway between a book and a political pamphlet, it was Fred’s attempt to come to grips with his own place in his adopted country and his understanding of the forces then roiling social norms and political ideologies worldwide.

Though reflecting the tenor of the sixties and seventies, many of the ideas in the book remain as vital today as when Fred first put pen to paper: the dizzying pace of technological change, the strain a rapidly growing population places on the environment, the insidious roll of racism and nationalism, the limits of capitalism in addressing problems of its own making.

Fred’s viewpoint was neither predictive nor prescriptive, coming as it did from his background as a psychologist and academic. Rather, it was more a summation of any number of currents, both political and personal, that “the left” was struggling with at the time.

Through it all, Fred’s voice — with its deep-south Texas drawl — comes through as a clarion call to take up the struggle and create what he called a “joyous, beautiful set of alternatives” to the depressing reality of a post-industrial capitalist society.

Over the next few months, we will be republishing Fred's book in installments, based on the format of the original publication. Downer & Bitchin' covers a lot of ground. We welcome your comments, analysis and critiques.

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.

Since my memory of events of fifty years ago is not always reliable, I need to "crowd-source" a coherent story of how the mock-up of the new student residence room came to find its way to the campus centre. Anyone that has a recollection can contact me, and I'll try to put together a tale.

From another contributor:

Well there was the one that occurred when the library began demanding that you needed a UofW ID card to use the premises. One reaction was outrage but another took a different form. These protestors obviously knew about the tunnels because they entered the library through them into the basement and took the elevator up to the second floor and entered. Now the second and third floors did not have a handy button to allow you to stop there. You needed a key. But if you timed your ascent correctly you could hit the red Help button and the doors would open automatically. It was what they did and then they blocked the doors from closing and proceeded to haul books from the shelves and filled the elevator car. They were found in the morning along with a note suggesting that if the administration were worried about strangers stealing their library books out the front door maybe they were missing the point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re welcome, Greta.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I recently received these pictures from Ralph Riener. They were definitely taken on his old Leica rangefinder, but he's not sure whether I took them or he took them. He's in the pictures, but I'm not, so he thinks I might have taken them. I don't think I was that good a photographer back then, so I might have taken the picture of him, but the others have what I think is a very good kind of framing and perfect focus, neither of which shows up consistently on pictures I took during that time.

 Cynthia, Reevin, Ralph, and I all worked at Dumont at some point during the first half of the 1970s. Marie, as most people know, was within the inner circle of the Dumont community. All five of us lived at 296 Guelph St. (demolished about eight years ago) for the first few months of 1970, probably February until sometime in the spring. Ralph and I lived there until the end of September, I believe. Many other familiar names lived there at some point as well, including Andy Telegdi (and his monkey), Rick Degrass, and Nick Savage. Eddie Schneider lived there a few years later with a slightly younger group of people.

Going To The Country

While Dumont was truly a salvation for me when I abruptly left a teaching position at my old Catholic High School in Kitchener, my personal transition continued.  What I believe facilitated this process was exactly what made Dumont my salvation – “community”.   As some of the student radicals around us argued for “the correct line” (whether Trotskyist or Maoist), at Dumont we worked together toward a shared goal. 

Yet during the 1970’s, besides politics, there were other radical, social-departure-type themes which I experienced through reading – and particularly through music.  On the one hand there was Bruce Cockburn’s joyful song “Going To The Country”, and on the other, Neil Young’s apocalyptic song “After the Gold Rush”.  Both struck a chord in me.  

At first I was drawn to the rural setting of The House of Zonk.  It certainly was fun and welcoming – but it was also confusing and, to me, it felt too loose.  So, the more serious side of me reasoned that a rural commune near Erbsville, with a garden, and a group-commitment might be the answer.  Unfortunately, the personalities who comprised that grouping didn’t mesh.  As well, it was too close to my roots in Kitchener -- for on one lovely early spring Sunday morning my parents made me a surprise visit.  It happened, at the time, that a few us had done a hit of mescaline and were enjoying the fields around us – naked (Oh weren’t those the days!).   That incident (which, regrettably, may have caused my father a heart attack), and the fact that my relatives were all Catholic, led me to believe that I ‘had to get away’.

Meanwhile others from our U of W radical group of friends began to explore more distant and dedicated rural settings.  After Zonk, there was Markdale, the closest, which I visited and enjoyed.  There was Killaloe where I also visited – and subsequently spent a winter.  And there was Kaministiquia, outside of Thunder Bay.  On my quest I visited them all.  (I should also mention the whole crew of Waterloo friends who I didn't visit, and who decided to move to New Brunswick as their country choice.)

But it was in Kaministiquia, where I spent the latter part of the summer of ’71, where my personal choice really took shape.  There I met folks who were buying land and actually building their own houses.  Some were in distinct couples, others in communal groups.  They were also having children which, out of the blue, inspired ‘family instincts’.

Accordingly, I met Kerrie at a rural ‘building work day’.  She was nursing her 5 month old baby boy at one of the “commune centres” -- which is what the OPP called them.  And there were a few of them around Thunder Bay.   In fact, that was where I found the most numerous and focused back-to-the-landers that I had come across.  Through the latter summer of that year I got to know Kerrie while making apple jelly, washing diapers, babysitting other friends’ children, and attending Pete Seger and John Lee Hooker concerts.  

In the fall Kerrie and I took a trip to Southern Ontario, and ended up wanting to live together.  So it was that we spent a snowy winter in Killaloe with Bernadine and Jim– sharing an isolated old country house on a hill, with our baby Tag, and their baby, Kelly.  For me, with few manual skills, it was a constant learning experience.  Jim will tell you that I almost cut his hand off as he taught me to use a chain saw…  At the time when I joined him, Jim was employed by a local sawyer to cut a cedar bush, using a horse to do so.  But we were dedicated.  We milked goats.  We went to an auction to buy a pig, so that we could smoke, salt, and keep it for the winter.  And as we worked we were welcomed, long hair and all, into the local farming culture.   We were invited to Christmas dinner down the road with the local Reeve, and to family occasions with our neighbours, the O’Conners.  And we were visited regularly by the local folks who were curious at first, but who soon became friends.

Working with local people was clearly a key to finding roots in the country.  Upon our return to Kaministiquia in the spring, it was with the ‘old-timers’ that we first made friends.  In the 60’s many of them had been left in the country when their children migrated into Thunder Bay, attracted by the jobs provided by post-war industrialization.

Much of our interactions and transactions were cooperative, and bartered.  For instance, the nearby sawyer traded lumber for my labour.  And because I worked with him and he trusted me, he simply gave me the lumber as I built my house.  Then, one evening three years later, he and his wife came over for evening coffee and he asked me to wire and roof the addition to his house. 

Another family lent us their tractor to cut and haul hay for our goats.  Another traded chickens and a calf for helping to cut and bring in their hay.  Many a time I carried animals out from a neighbour’s trap line, as he had been gassed in WW2, and had a reduced lung capacity.  Now and then we ‘visited’ with the snow plow operator by accompanying him on his route. 

Thus it was that I chose to live here in Kaministiquia -- 50 years ago.  Kerrie and I still maintain a rural lifestyle, and community is still very much a part of our life, as mentioned in my initial essay on this Dumont Press Grafix website.

Community and volunteer work over the years has been ongoing for me -- earlier with the Lakehead Social Planning Council, and as well with Volunteer Leadership Development.  More politically I have been engaged in environmental issues against the Energy East Pipeline; and again (after 40 years) against the continuing plans by the nuclear industry to bury waste in our region.  We drove them off then -- and hope to do it again. Check out  our Wonderful Core Band video of friends and family against nuclear waste: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28BjBP6Jdbo

Cheers.

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.

Imagine my surprise when I looked up from my plant world a month ago and realized that somehow in the intervening 35 years since I decided to be disinterested in politics, that I am on the right! Maybe even the far right!

Why? Because I support the Freedom Convoy for vaccine choice and to end mandates. Why? Because I support the truckers peaceful protest in Ottawa. Why? Because I have felt from the get go of this public health event that government was going too far by mandating what goes into our bodies. A long way from “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation”, the 1968 upgrade to the Canadian Criminal Code that, among other measures, decriminalized homosexuality, contraceptives and made therapeutic abortions legal. That was Trudeau Sr as Minister of Justice.

You all are old enough to remember when the same elder Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act during the “October Crisis”. Back then, in the now famous “Just watch me” news clip, the left, and the mainstream media (even), questioned on behalf of Canadians the abrogation of civil liberties.

And here we all are, about 50 years later with the illegal invocation of the Emergencies Act (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3PAZDinO2o), with full complicity by what we used to call “the instrument of the state”, i.e. the CBC and its private sector cronies - Global and CTV - smearing peaceful protesters, spinning the narrative, supporting Justin Trudeau and the the corrupt state of the Liberal Party.

Oh and by the way, the NDP, since the last time I looked 35 years ago, seems to have lost sight of their roots as the party of labour, with their leader also condemning the blue collar truckers.

Today the organizing committee for the truckers is calling for, what we used to call, a general strike. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57qon3Ud5b0) They are calling it “Freedom Week”, starting February 21. Call in sick. Withdraw your money from the banks before your funds are frozen without a court order, as is allowed under the Emergencies Act. Prepay fixed expenses.

You guys. Don’t rest on your laurels. If you haven’t already reached outside the Trusted News Initiative (https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/media-centre/trusted-news-initiative-plan-disinformation-coronavirus) i.e. censorship of discussion and differing opinions, then do so now. Do what you did best back in the heyday of Dumont: question authority, own the press, write, analyze, think critically, organize and fight for the rights and freedoms embedded in our Constitution so that our kids and grandkids can enjoy them as we have. The labels have changed from 50 years ago, but the corruption is still corruption, and fairness, community and family, and all the rights and freedoms we value and have taken for granted, are still something to stand up for.

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.

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.”

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.  

This reunion was just west of Waterloo at Glen Soulis' dad's place.

Dumont started working on the Iron Warrior, a publicaiton of the Engineering Society, in 1981. During one memorable typesetting session in 1983, PC gremlins infiltrated the shop and somehow managed to alter references to 'he' and 'his' in an article to 's/he' and 'her/his'. This exercise in correct ideas did not go unnoticed by the editors of Iron Warrior who were not amused.