Columns

It’s been many years since my byline has appeared in the Gazette, and I’m writing today because I attended an event on Thursday that was like no other I’ve attended in the 45 years that I’ve made St. Albert my home.

Folks, as the Music Man warned us, we are in trouble. We are in terrible, terrible trouble.

The redevelopment of downtown St. Albert has been a hot topic in recent years, but the issue has stretched out much longer than that.

As construction is set to begin on the final stage of Ray Gibbon Drive later this year or early next, it’s interesting to find some of the first mentions of the road in issues of the St. Albert Gazette from the 1980s.

It is probably no coincidence that the Montreal La Presse story (Sept. 1) about MichaĂ«lle Jean’s vice-regal use of government aircraft for private travel was soon followed by The Globe & Mail’s helping of similar fare (Sept.

As I rummaged through the shelves at Blockbuster, searching for that diamond in the rough among the shattered remains of a once-unstoppable renting conglomerate, a sadness seeped through me. It truly is the end of an era.

A few years ago, I was watching a television game show, and the host introduced the two contestants for the evening.

As the decade of the 1970s started in St. Albert, there were also a couple of other new beginnings. The new Sturgeon Community Hospital had just recently opened its doors, and the photo on the front page of the Sept. 2, 1970, edition of the St.

It’s amazing how, looking back on some of the Gazettes of decades gone by, some of the issues St. Albert is wrestling with today were the same as they were 50 years ago. Take, for example, the editorial on the front page of the Sept.

When the Sept.