For 30 years Vera Grawbarger has collected, typed and delivered the news of the Restoule area to the Almaguin News’ readers. Here she holds some of her early columns that she saved over the years.
RESTOULE – Sunday nights for the past 30 years, there was only one place to find Vera Grawbarger – sitting in front of a keyboard typing out her community’s news.
It’s a job she’s done gladly over the past three decades. Whether she was letting people know the cribbage and euchre scores, what was coming up – or had already happened at the community centre – who had a visitor in from out of town, who had taken a trip to an exotic locale and when she spotted the first robin of spring, Vera got the news out.
Asked how she kept it up for all of those years always finding something to write about in the small community of Restoule, Vera doesn’t have a hard answer.
“I don’t know. It was just one of those things. I just enjoyed doing it,” said Vera.
She started writing in 1976 after being asked to take over the Restoule News from Loretta Eckford.
“Loretta gave it to me. It didn’t go to anybody else. Loretta just passed it on and I took over,” said Vera.
Her first column, Vera remembers without hesitation, was about Lewy Learn – a New York state bus driver who died on one of his regular fishing trips to Restoule in 1976.
“He’d been out fishing that day and had caught a 30 lb. pike and he was on his way into the dock when he keeled over,” said Vera.
It was the first of many pieces of news Vera would include in her weekly dispatches from the village.
Getting those dispatches out wasn’t done like it is today, where the push of a button sends words flying electronically all over the globe.
“I used to take (the column) down in my snowsuit and it was -25°F and put it in the mail. I mailed my column in for a long time until when (Canada Post) went to improve the mail and all of a sudden it took a week to get (to the Almaguin News office in Burk’s Falls) instead of a day,” said Vera.
For a while, Vera says she would hand her column off to a high school student taking the bus to Almaguin Highlands Secondary School. There it would get picked up by a reporter and taken the rest of the way in for typesetting.
“That didn’t work very well. The kids weren’t very reliable and were always losing it,” said Vera.
That unreliable system stayed in place until 1991 when Vera finally found access to a fax machine.
The advent of the fax machine meant another change for Vera. She no longer had to type her column out on a carbon paper so that she could have a copy of the original.
“I always kept a copy of it, so if you had a name in there you could check it or if there was a mistake you could prove it wasn’t yours,” said Vera.
Vera still has stacked up in her office space, nearly every column that she ever put to paper, neatly organized by date.
Looking back at the columns Vera remembers the evolution of the community. Though often just a paragraph, her stack carries the history of Restoule. Whether it was the tearing down of the Orange Hall on May 2 of 1979 after 70 years of service or when Shelly Hoffman broke her arm the day before school started in 1980, Vera has it on file.
But there are some things you won’t find in Vera’s columns.
“There’s lots of things I didn’t put in the paper. One time the radio station came in for a fundraising baseball game and they were leaving town and kept on going around the big corner and went into the swamp. I didn’t think that needed to be in.”
For a long time her name wasn’t in the paper. From a more formal era, Vera’s column ran under her husband’s name, with the byline reading, like many did when she started in the 1970s, “Mrs. Gilbert Grawbarger.”
She started using her Christian name in 1988, “because it seemed everyone else was going under their Christian names. It seemed I was the last one using my husband’s name so I decided to switch. But then I thought no one could phone me, because the phone wasn’t listed under my name.”
People still found Vera with their newsworthy items.
“I usually just put in stuff that people told me about. I used to go visiting and asking questions and at one time they would say, ‘Oh, here comes Mrs. Snoopie,’ so I stopped that.”
Her jobs in the village were also good places to hear the news, whether it was Gerry’s General Store, secretary at Restoule Public School or at Interlake Grocery Store (now the Crow’s Nest Resort).
But Vera says community columns aren’t the same as they once were.
“They don’t seem to have as much news in them as they used to. It’s more of a community calendar than the news.
“I used to have people tell me they got the paper so they could keep track of what their family members were up to,” said Vera.
She doesn’t single any columnist out and even admits she has trouble finding out the goings-on.
“People don’t let you know now-a-days what’s going on like they did.”
That she says is the biggest change over her tenure with the Restoule News. What has stayed the same is the community spirit that she enjoyed writing about.
“I always enjoyed typing the news up and letting people who might be away know what’s going on.”
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