Excerpt

Introduction from "When Headlines Spoke in Capital Letters"

This isn't one of those books of stories that give you a behind-the-scene look into a journalist's working world. There are no tidbits here about how I had an arrangement with one mayor whereby I could call him directly in the hospital operating room for a quote, or how I covered the speech of a federal transport minister who had too much to drink. Those are for another day.

Besides, the stories that did make it into print are more interesting and, with the passage of time, much more fascinating.

And so you have here a collection of favourite news stories, columns, commentary and editorials that I wrote during the 39 years I worked as a reporter and editor for The Telegraph-Journal and The Evening Times-Globe.

Allan Fotheringham, in one of his Maclean's magazine columns, once argued that the best newspaper writing is on the sport pages, because those scribes are enthusiasts and have "the freedom to dazzle." You cannot say that about a reporter covering a sewer bylaw or a by-election, he maintained.

Maybe. But, while the sports department was one of the few areas of the newsroom I never ventured very far into, I was definitely one of those enthusiasts; always fascinated by what I covered, whether at city hall, on the waterfront or in the community. I hope these stories and commentaries reflect that.

The way newspapers are produced changed drastically over the four decades. One of the papers itself died. Most of the stories here were written at a time when Headlines Spoke In Capital Letters - that is, always with a capital letter for the first letter of each word. As well, headlines themselves had overlines. I have tried to preserve this feeling for the actual reports, even to including subheads, something else that has been making a comeback.

Nothing has been changed or left out. This is the day's history, as it appeared on the pages of the two Saint John dailies.

These stories open windows on how we were in Canada's oldest incorporated city during the last 40 years of the 20th century. Think of them as individual slices from the life of Saint John.

© 2008 C. Williams, Publisher, Grand Bay-Westfield, N.B. All rights reserved. Articles from the Telegraph-Journal reprinted with permission. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, scanning, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without prior written consent of the authors - is an infringement of the copyright law.