Imagine holding onto a newspaper roughly twice as big as the one you have in your hands right now. And now imagine that 37 years later the front-page headlines are still the same.
That was the reality local resident Heather Gordon stumbled on during a family home renovation this summer. Sandwiched in a portion of the house the Gordons discovered two old issues of a former Coast newspaper, The Peninsula Times and a single issue of the Vancouver Sun.
For newspaper geeks such as those toiling at Coast Reporter, this was the equivalent of discovering gold in Roberts Creek.
After first remarking on the difference in size of the old broadsheets (and as befits a paper 37 years old the measurements here are in good old Imperial) a whopping 17 by 22 inches versus our present day tabloid of 11.5 by 16 inches, the next joy was scanning the contents.
Much to our amazement, we found one of the main headlines, "Excessive sprinkling hits regional water resources" on the front page of the Aug. 16, 1972 edition of the Times. A concern mirrored in August 2009. It seems some things never change.
Also in that issue a great picture really tells the difference in the ages. The photo, printed here, shows a couple of provincial politicians along with a chairman for a campaign meeting and the Times "correspondent". We lowly reporter types could only hope to achieve correspondent status. And its unlikely Coast Reporter staff would be featured in a photo clearly biased in favour of one political party. Nowadays we prefer to report the news rather than be part of it.
Another glaring change lies in the back page of the grocery flyer. There a colouring contest for kids is separated into one picture of an exciting car race for boys and one picture depicting a "glamorous" ice-skating show for girls. Try doing that in these politically correct times!
The Aug. 23, 1972 Times elicited further chuckles. There the front-page story featured the mayor of Gibsons, Wally Peterson. The Times had printed verbatim a statement from Peterson that featured language only a politician use. And - wait for it - the issue was the Gibsons bypass route. It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.
In the story his worship had taken umbrage with a certain local editor (one can only surmise that it was not the scribe from the Times).
"All manner of tangled verbiage is being concocted to rouse the voters' emotional bias into a state of mass hysteria over this one detail," Peterson intoned. The one detail being the location of the bypass through the Gibsons water reserve.
The provincial election was being hotly contested during this time frame. Some of you may remember that was the year Dave Barrett put an end to WAC Bennett's Socred stronghold on B.C.
One of the best quotes in the Sun's Aug. 22 issue (found at the same time) was one from Bennett warning, "The socialist hordes are at the gates in British Columbia." We can only guess that the populace didn't see the danger in quite same light as Bennett.
And of course the big story from that issue of the Sun was the hostage taking at the B.C. Penitentiary. Aside from the obvious drama, one of the Sun's own columnists was involved in the hostage negotiation.
Finally just to prove that everything old is new again, a back-to-school ad in the paper was for a long cardigan, the exact same as the hot item for back-to-school in 2009.
