One last stroll for StreetBeat - Columnist wraps up 23 years of telling Hamilton's stories

I cried this morning. I didn't see it coming. I was just sitting at the kitchen table with a sharp pencil and a few sheets of loose-leaf paper. I was about to write you a letter.

Long ago, I wrote letters often. I wrote letters when I was 21, right through a lonely winter in Vancouver. I would sit at my desk in an old walk-up near Stanley Park and write home to my parents in Montreal, Auntie Margaret in Ottawa, Grandma McKay in Oakville. When Grandma died that year, she had one of my letters by her bed.

So maybe the kitchen-table tears today come in part from thinking of those who have gone since I used to write letters.

Letters are what got me into this business.

I went to Ryerson after that grey winter out west. But I took business, not journalism. That led to an ad agency on Bay Street in Toronto.

That proved to be not a good fit for me, so I tried to figure out what else I could do.

I remembered that everyone seemed to like my letters. That's how I ended up in newspapers. Really.

The Spec newsroom had a grand party last Saturday night at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. It was for the “buyout bunch,” 14 of us who are taking a package from the paper. Among us, we have 363 years of service. But our leaving will mean some new jobs — fresh, young writers to keep The Spec sparking. Some were at the AGH that night and it was good for them to see a slice of The Spec's history. This paper, established in 1846, is Hamilton's oldest business.

But StreetBeat, of course, was about what happened outside the fortress walls. It was about getting out there and talking to people in living rooms or old shops or at the end of a country lane.

I started at The Spec 30 years ago and have been writing StreetBeat three times a week for the past 23 years.

Comments

[David Auger]

Thanks, Paul!
I think I've enjoyed every column of yours that I've ever read.
And being interviewed by you was something I'll always remember fondly, too.
You've made Hamilton a very personal city for all of us.