scheme of things, twenty years is

wenty years. | can’t
believe it.
Okay, so in the grand

no more than a blip in the
neverending continuum. A

moment in eternity, the wink of an
eye.

But for a student publication,
and one with no visable form of
hierarchy or leadership (like a
collective provides leadership),
twenty years is pretty good.

Oh sure, there are student

papers that have been around for
longer (the Ubyssey, or the McGill

Daily come to mind), but most of
them dre located at universities.
Considering that Douglas’ own

history doesn’t stretch back much

farther than twenty years, the
Other Press is doing pretty good.

” by Terry Glavin '
Political activist and writer, he spent a number of years covering Native
affairs for the Vancouver Sun. He now writes and edits books about BC, its

history and enivironment.

could put it around four o’clock in

} = I f this thing had a beginning, you

beer

the morning, 20 years ago, ina
portable trailer at what was then the
Surrey campus of Douglas College.
We were bleary-eyed and delirious. As
I recall it, there was Gord Isfeld, Gina
Fiorillo, Maureen Cassie, Steve Sapers

whe and several other names that have

O

disappeared along with the brain cells
that died that weekend. You could also
put the beginning of this thing at about
three years before that, on the railway
tracks behind Burnaby South High
School, in the weeks before our

wed graduation. That’s how I remember it

ffs

am how to use a camera, and

ra
®

am ended up together again at

anyway: That same small group of
people, and how we wondered what
we’d do with our lives. We could get
work on a sawmill green chain. We
could save up enough money and go to
university to bide our time until we
decided what it was we
wanted to do when we grew
up. Whatever. All we knew is
that some of us knew how to
write, and some of us knew

when it came right down to it
that’s what we wanted to do.
We just didn’t know if we
could pull it off and make
enough money to survive. We

Douglas College a couple of

years later, in the middle of the night,

cobbling together Volume 1, Number

1, of this thing called The Other Press.
We had ended up at Douglas

‘College mainly because we could

afford it. It was closer to home than
those big intimidating places like UBC
and SFU. There were some decent
instructors at Douglas College. There
were writing courses, poetry courses,
and what was described as a
journalism course. It had been part of
our credo, and probably part of the
ethos of the age, that if you wanted a
newspaper, it was best to build it
yourself. We weren’t all that interested
in fitting into the cogs of the big media
conglomerates (which is the way we
used to talk back then). Some of us
had already been hacking away for the
Georgia Straight, Pacific News Service
(out of San Francisco), and a variety of
so-called underground newspapers by
the time we found our way to Douglas
College and enrolled in Charlie
Giordano’s journalism program.

We liked Charlie. I should probably
say that right off the top. But the thing
was that what he considered good
journalism was not exactly to our
tastes, and what he considered good

journalism was displayed in the pages
of the “college newspaper,” The
Pinion, which appeared maybe once or
twice a semester. What I remember
about the Pinion was that Charlie was
the editor, and Charlie knew his stuff
when it came to the rubrics of basic
newspaper journalism, and Charlie
would spend the rest of the time
regaling us with his war stories. He
once dated the woman who became
the wife of the Social Credit premier
of the time, Bill Bennett. He had been
a campaign manager for the “free
enterprise” Surrey mayor, Ed
McKitka, who ended up in the
crowbar hotel on some fraud-type
charges. The Pinion’s managing editor
was a woman named Alice Moore,
who was an aldermanic candidate on
some “free enterprise” civic slate in
the Surrey municipal elections. His

...SO he left us alone in the
newspaper lab, and after he

left, we went to work and
started building our own
newspaper.

 

city editor (whose name escapes me
right now) was the wife of a right-
wing Tory MP by the name of John
Reynolds. There was a story in the
Pinion of a visit by Reynolds to the
journalism class. There was a full-page
ad in the same issue for Alice Moore
and her cohorts on that civic slate.
Charlie later went on to serve as Bill
Vander Zalm’s campaign manager, or
campaign tour coordinator, or
something, the year Vander Zalm ran
(successfully) for premier.

You get the picture.

One night, we told Charlie we
wanted to put the Pinion’s production
equipment through the paces @ its
light tables, its Compugraphics 7600
headline writer, its text-composing
machines, all those strange pieces of
equipment that, even at this minor
remove of 20 years, seem as
antiquated as steam engines. Charlie
seemed impressed by such enthusiasm
among his students, so he left us alone
in the newspaper lab, and after he left,
we went to work and started building
our own newspaper. We hadn’t quite
decided what to call the thing. All we
knew for certain was that we wanted
to produce something other than The

by Dave Watson

Georgia Straight.
remember when I was about 10
years old in Saskatoon, reading a
movie review and thinking that
being a movie reviewer would be a
great job.

A decade later (1983) I was a
Community College student, with a
mediocre year of Kwantlen College
under my belt. I went to a Community
College for the same reasons everyone
from the suburbs did after high school
in the early ’80s:

1, Grades not good enough for
University

2. Which is just as well because you
have no idea what you’re going to do
anyway, and

3. Your parents will probably kick
you out of the house if you aren’t in
school.

So, the new Douglas College
Campus had recently opened and I
decided to go part time there and part-
time back in Kwantlen, which was

The Other Press

Dave Watson was a writer and photographer at the OP from 1983 to 1986.
Thereafter he briefly became a semi-nationally famous music critic (at one point
he held the title of “Fifth highest paid Rock Critic in Vancouver”), currently
reduced to making a living (a fairly good one mind you) as an Information
Engineer on the Internet, plus he contributes a weekly technology column to the

then located off 140th in Surrey in a
bunch of old portable classrooms and
temporary buildings. The new Douglas
was way nicer, especially set into to
the run-down state of New West before
the Skytrain. Ah, and you could smoke
in the concourse and hallways. And
the Other Press office. (Back then
Community Colleges were mainly
known as “high schools with
ashtrays.” Now, of course, they’re
not.)

So, it’s registration, September 83.
Go through the routine. Lineup, sign
up, line up. Pay. And right as I exited
there was a table of non-stressed folks
handing out tickets for coffee and
donuts in the cafeteria (where you
could smoke, by the way). They said
they were from the student newspaper.
I said:

“You know, when I was a kid, I
always thought that being a movie
reviewer would be a great job.”

 

 

Pinion. So the name fell to the Other
Press (we also ended up producing a
poetry review for a couple of years
called Otherthan Review).

When Charlie came in the next
morning, we were still there. We had a
newspaper, ready to print. We said,
thanks, Charlie. He had a look at the
pages and seemed not particularly
displeased, just a bit surprised by it all.
Everything happened pretty fast after
that. We gathered up our stuff,
stumbled out into the morning sun,
counted up what few dollars we had in
our wallets, piled into Gord’s dad’s old
Cadillac and hit the freeway for
Hacker Press in Abbotsford. A few
hours later, The Other Press, Volume
One, Number One, was born.

I hung around for a couple of years
and wasted a lot of GPA and blew a
number of courses dedicating most of
my waking hours to the thing. We
moved to the New Westminster
campus, which was then on
8th and McBride (and like
the Surrey campus, is also
no more). By then we’d
picked up people like
Robbie Hancock, Keith
Baldrey, Rory Munro and
Neil Dowie. There were
others, of course. They will
forgive me for not citing
them here, and Rory might
forgive me for pointing out,
with the benefit of the
Statute of Limitations, that it
was he who took a chainsaw to an
adjoining office wall that weekend
between security patrols, doubling our
office space. Tequila was involved in
this. | don’t know what was going
through the mind of the principal,
George Wootten, when he came by to
talk to us about the incident and could
barely make out the people in our new
office for the thick blue haze of
marijuana smoke.

Some of us decided to take our
newspapering obsessions more

seriously. Gordie and I worked a while .

for the Columbian, that long-dead and
much-missed New Westminster daily
that began in the 1860s and folded in
1983. Gordie went on to the big dailies
of Hong Kong and Tokyo. Gina
Fiorillo is now a bigshot Vancouver
labour lawyer. Keith Baldrey is now
the Victoria bureau chief for BCTV.
The last time I saw Rory he was
driving a Porsche. I went on to the
Vancouver Sun and elsewhere. Now,
mostly, I write books, and edit books.
And whenever a book comes back
from the printers, it’s a lot like that
first morning in Abbotsford, holding in
my hands, for the first time, The Other
Press, Volume 1, Number 1.

18 1976

 

Nov 29 1976

 

The Other One

by Ian Hunter

Ian Hunter joined the OP in the spring of ‘79, discovered he
was the only one returning in the fall, and stayed, first as
editor and then as ad manager, until 1982. After a long time as
writer, editor, broadcaster and researcher, Hunter turned to

_ hemp, helping Hemp BC start, and is currently proprietor of

Sacred Herb—The Hemp Store in Victoria.

hen I ended up taking over

the Other Press, it was at

the end of its first glorious wave. By 1979 the OP
had become one of the very few autonomous student
newspapers in Canada, had had time to scrape together some
professional looking, yet irreverent and punchy issues, but had
suffered the inconsistent cyclical exoduses endemic to college
student institutions.

Knowing almost nothing about writing or editing, I was
thrown alone into the OP vortex. But I managed to pull
together a team with whom I had one of the first real
adventures of my life. The experience taught me an incredible
lesson of ego, self reliance, interdependence and perseverance
as well as layout, writing and the media game. The experience
left me less innocent and it largely shaped my views about
writing and politics.

I’d like to think that, almost 20 years later, the Other Press
remains the “Other;” the slightly outcast, outlaw yet non-bitter
strange almost-gone-to-far-this-time organ of the mad
intellectual gutter scribes putting meaning to the strip mall
culture and the seeking suburban students and their lost union
gurus.

 

2 September 3 1996 The Other Press—Twenty Years of Unrestricted Growth

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asyvu tite wuici Ficss

~aWEHihy HOS UY ChiiColiKtou sen