One June evening in 1961, 38-year-old Pauli Keats was sitting on the patio of the Glenmore Crescent home she shared with her sister, enjoying dinner. While Keats normally worked for the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra (ESO), the musicians were on summer break. Then a man walked around the corner to discuss an idea that would endure 50 years later.
That man was Wim Netelenbos Sr. Originally from Holland, Netelenbos worked as a textile engineer and lived in St. Albert with his wife Eveline and sons Wim Jr., John and Alex. The family had moved to town the previous year.
"We were out on the patio having dinner when Netelenbos came around the corner," Keats, now 88, remembers. "He asked me if I'd write for the paper. I don't know where he got my name or information. I said, 'What do you want?' He said 'social page, we're just starting up and don't know how successful it's going to be.'"
That paper, it turned out, was going to be called the St. Albert Gazette. Keats accepted Netelenbos' offer. She would write from home and drop her story off at Netelenbos' residence. Those were the perks.
"I worked for nothing," Keats said. "Just for something to do."
Keats would become the first writer in the 50-year history of the Gazette when, on June 17, 1961, her interview with life-long resident Louise Belcourt (née Rowland) was featured on page four of the paper's first edition. Keats would go on to write a few more stories over the rest of that summer, covering some weddings and writing an impassioned defence of the role of books in society. By the time she returned to the ESO, the Gazette was already a staple of the community.
Birth of a newspaper
It was love of community that propelled Netelenbos to start the Gazette, according to son John, who was 11 at the time and holds the distinction of being the paper's first carrier.
"They were immigrants from Holland and felt there was a need for some kind of community contact for the citizens of St. Albert," John said, citing what he called a small but visible divide between the Roman Catholic and Protestant citizens. "It wasn't pronounced but it was there."
The launch of the paper coincided with St. Albert's centennial, which dominated much of the first issue's content, generated almost solely by Netelenbos and his small staff of six. They operated out of the Netelenbos home on 44 Sunset Blvd., which featured a small box at the end of the driveway where people placing classified ads could leave both their ad and their money. John was one of 11 carriers.
"I'll never forget my father had to get carrier bags and these were kit bags from World War One; he got them at a surplus store, made of heavy canvas."
If a carrier didn't show up, John picked up the slack.
"Sometimes I'd be walking my routes until about 10 or 11 at night.
Ownership change
One hundred kilometres to the south in Ponoka, a young boy named Donald 'Duff' Jamison, was mad. His parents, Ernie and Shirley, had just informed him and his sister they were going to be moving to a small town called St. Albert.
"I was playing hockey and all the sports I could cram in and had my buddies. I was very comfortable. And we'd just knocked St. Albert off in the provincial playoffs the year before, 21-1. It was a total points game."
Ernie was a newspaperman. Besides running the paper in Ponoka, Ernie had a regional newspaper called Western Weekly best described as a Sunday insert for community weeklies. Between his travels and his family up in Athabasca, Ernie was familiar with St. Albert. In the summer of 1966, Ernie purchased the St. Albert Gazette from Netelenbos and moved his family to St. Albert.
The result was instant change. Instead of the small 11- x -8.5-inch 'newsletter' Netelenbos had produced, Ernie and Shirley turned it into an actual newspaper. Within weeks the paper was being printed at a newspaper press on actual newsprint. "It went from this small to this big very quickly," Jamison said.
The focus of the paper was immediately defined — town council. Even as the New Town became a town and then a city, local politics was always the Gazette's bread and butter.
"The Gazette has always had its primary focus on city politics, the decisions made about our community's future. From the very beginning, it was a major focus and remains so today," Jamison said.
The local scene
Flip through any Gazette from any of its 50 years and the name Bob Russell is bound to show up, whether he was sitting on city council or running in a federal election.
"I think whether it's council or school board, [the St. Albert Gazette] always exemplified themselves," Russell said.
One example he recalled was during Richard Plain's second tenure as mayor from 2001 to 2004. One evening a regularly scheduled council meeting wrapped up early. While everyone else left, city hall reporter Glenna Hanley waited in the shadows, suspecting something was happening. Shortly afterwards, council returned and promptly fired city manager Glen Davies.
"So she got home, phoned the city manager and asked, 'What is your reaction?' He had no idea what had happened. To me that's being a reporter. She could have left but she somehow sensed there [was] something going wrong," Russell said.
Russell made his share of headlines, from writing a letter to the Gazette as an alderman accusing the mayor and council of acting irresponsibly to accusing another councillor years later of being in a conflict of interest. Yet Russell felt the Gazette always treated matters fairly and objectively.
"I believe it has and any time you don't agree, you can write a letter to the editor. If I ever felt that my side wasn't dealt with correctly, I can sit down and write a letter. I've never had a letter rejected, just revised," Russell said.
Plain had more than a few run-ins with the Gazette, especially in the 1970s when a story about deficiencies in the fire department ran in the paper. The story put Gazette publisher/local MLA Ernie Jamison in a conflict with city council, and quickly escalated to the point the paper stopped running the long-time mayor's column. Regardless, Plain holds no ill will.
"There was always that detailed insight for what was going on at city hall. The editors and reporters shared the policies of the day. You don't have anything else like that," Plain said.
In 1980, when Edmonton launched its bid to annex surrounding municipalities, including St. Albert, a move that was subsequently approved by the Local Authorities Board, Plain launched the Anti-Annexation Committee to fight back.
"Certainly the St. Albert Gazette stood right behind the citizens and the widespread citizen movement which was totally opposed to being developed as another Edmonton neighbourhood," Plain said.
"Without the Gazette, there would not have been St. Albert."
Jacks-of-all-trades
Whether it was sweeping, taking photos, cutting and pasting or distributing the paper, the Gazette's small staff were expected to do it all.
"We had people who could sell and write but we didn't have the creative talent we have today," Jamison said.
Even as a young man Jamison was doing everything he could in the newsroom from photos to typesetting to layout and sales. But the early years of the Gazette were lean years for the Jamisons.
"We clearly remember the time the town came and turned the water off at our house because there wasn't enough money to pay the water bill," Jamison said. "So they came and screwed the valve shut."
But slowly the Gazette began to evolve, covering not just St. Albert news but also items from the surrounding communities in Sturgeon County. By the late 1970s, the paper was in a position to hire its first — and possibly the first in Canada for a community weekly — full-time photographer, Al Popil. But the hours and responsibilities were tough. Sometimes Popil was shooting 12 to 14 assignments a day and it wasn't uncommon to cover three baseball games in one evening — in three separate communities.
"There was one in Legal, one in Morinville and one in St. Albert," Popil recalled. "You'd start in Legal, get your shots, then on to Morinville. By the time you got to St. Albert, the sun was setting and you'd have 30-foot shadows."
Even though he was a specialist as a photographer, Popil still had to chip in wherever he could.
"We drove the newspapers out to the rural areas," Popil said. "I'd do RiviÈre Qui Barre and Villeneuve, in that area. I'd stop at the local stores and the news correspondents from those communities would have their stories ready and it was always marked, URGENT: EDITOR. It was the folksy stuff."
As the page counts increased and revenue started rolling in, the Gazette added more staff. Though not the first sports editor, a young man from a paper in Rocky Mountain House joined the Gazette in the winter of 1984. Dan Barnes had originally started his career at the Innisfail Province where he met and befriended a young reporter named Scott McKeen, who was eventually hired by the Gazette.
"He said [the Gazette] was a good paper. I came up for an interview with Duff Jamison and not long after I was hired," Barnes said.
Both McKeen and Barnes, who both went on to become columnists with the Edmonton Journal, remember their time with the Gazette fondly.
"We had good shooters, we had good reporters, good editors. It was just a really well-run newspaper. The other papers were good quality but not in the same class," Barnes said. "They were doing more [work] you associated with a daily. It was a really good product."
McKeen can remember the first story he wrote for the Gazette in the early 1980s — the return of strippers to the Bruin Inn. He would go on to cover almost every aspect of life in St. Albert.
"It was one of the best times I had in journalism," McKeen said. "Fabulous people and it was a proud newspaper. It was fun, serious reporting. It was a real fine paper, too."
Evolutions
In the mid-1980s, the Gazette decided to expand its coverage. Influenced by a former Sun editor, a Sunday Gazette was launched, featuring softer news coverage and more features. Yet there were problems. Advertisers told the paper that Sunday wasn't a good day for them and readers didn't want a softer news package — they wanted as much local news as they could get.
The paper also split its rural coverage into a separate paper that was focused specifically on Morinville and Sturgeon County. The two had always run in the Gazette but balancing urban and rural coverage proved difficult. But all of the new products experienced difficulty. The Wednesday paper, for which readers paid, saw its circulation drop while the Saturday paper, which was free, was more popular. The Gazette also produced a third product called Homestyle, which focused on home building, design and décor. And there was the hint of competition as the St. Albert Booster launched. In 1996, the Morinville Gazette and Homestyle were folded and all of the coverage was again brought under one paper. There were no more subscription fees and, due to the increase in the price of newsprint, the Gazette switched from a broadsheet to tabloid. The result was a success.
"Whenever we made a little money, we hired another reporter," Jamison said. "That jack-of-all-trades period became a time of specialists. Today we've got the largest community newspaper newsroom in Canada, probably in North America. People are flabbergasted when they hear how many reporters or photographers we have."
The next step was exposure. As of 1995, the Gazette was not a member of any of the newspaper associations such as the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association (AWNA), the Canadian Community Newspapers Association or the Suburban Newspapers of America (SNA). Jamison started to attend conferences, looking to make the Gazette the best paper in the country. He took his inspiration from the Mississauga News, at the time judged to be the best.
"So I actually went to Mississauga, subscribed to it and it was a very good newspaper. I asked [owner John Bassett] what did he do to make it the best and he said, 'If it doesn't say Mississauga, it doesn't appear in the Mississauga News.'"
Shortly afterwards, the Gazette won best overall newspaper from the AWNA.
"But we thought we're targeting best in Canada and then we won best in North America through the SNA and we've tried to keep that up ever since.
"Everyone that comes in here soon learns about how high that bar has been set. Sometimes it's uncomfortable because regular work is passed on as 'just fine,' but [staff are encouraged to] do something spectacular. That's how I think you maintain a winning culture," Jamison said. "We don't do mediocre at the Gazette."
Now and the future
The Gazette has continued to evolve with the times, embracing the digital world and putting more resources into its website, re-launched last year, as well as multimedia projects such as video. The paper has also started construction of a new building in Campbell Business Park that will open next year.
"We're going to make investments in the printing technologies that will provide a very sharp-looking print project to our readers and we're going to deliver our content through mobile devices and those kind of things. It's going be some blend of printed products and digital delivery," Jamison said.
But regardless of what the next 50 years might hold, Jamison says the Gazette will always be rooted in the one constant that first gave birth to the paper 50 years ago — the community.
"We felt obligated to build a better place. That's been the focus of the Gazette from the beginning and it remains that way today.
"It's a balance we try to keep between public ownership — reader ownership of the Gazette even though it's a private business. We want residents to think of the St. Albert Gazette. as theirs. We're the stewards, but it's their newspaper."
