This is the season for looking forward to the year ahead, but also for reflecting on the 12 months that have just passed.
This holiday season, Gazette staff writers will share their memories from the past year. Members of the newsroom have been asked to write a short piece about something memorable that happened to them during the course of their professional pursuits in 2011, whether it be their favourite story to cover, a memorable interview or a most memorable moment.
Below are three such reflections. The first instalments were published on Dec. 24 and Dec. 28. One more will follow on Jan. 4.
Inside the warmly-lit St. Albert Royal Canadian Legion on a snowy and cold Saturday afternoon in February I introduced myself to Anna Jarmics, winner of two shiny medals at the Alberta 55 Plus Winter Games.
The 76-year-old darts player from Calgary offered to shake my hand, but she had no hands to shake. Jarmics explained that a grenade blew them off when she was 10 while living in Russian-occupied Hungary in 1945 during the Second World War.
“I was lucky I had my head left,” Jarmics said with a smile frozen in time.
After we exchanged greetings, I spent the next hour fascinated by her zest for life, competitive spirit and sunny disposition.
“I’m not handicapped,” Jarmics repeated throughout the interview. “Everything I do, I do it because it’s challenging.”
Jarmics was forced to live her life without hands after escaping death while playing in a sandbox with her sister and brothers.
“A hand grenade was thrown at us. I grabbed it up because it was thrown right into the sand. I ran with it and I tripped on the sidewalk. I went face down and it exploded,” she recalled without flinching. “I never blamed anybody for my accident. It just happened, and that was it. I just learned how to carry on in life.”
The journey from her hometown in Celldomolk “for a better life” started in 1956 in England before putting roots down in Canada. The former security guard for the city of Brampton, Ont. moved to Calgary 13 years ago while continuing her loyalty to the Legion. In Brampton she threw her first dart at a Legion and in Calgary she played three times a week at three different Legion branches.
“I just love darts,” Jarmics said. “It was hard at first. I had to do my own technique. Everybody asks me how the heck I do it. I just pick up the dart and say, ‘Like this.’ It’s hard to explain how I do it.”
In five trips to the Canada Senior Games she hit the bull’s-eye for medals every year, including the golden trifecta in 75-plus singles, doubles and mixed doubles in 2010.
When asked if she thinks she’s an inspiration to others, the spry senior replied: “Yes, I do. A lot of people say, ‘I can’t do this or I can’t do that.’ I always say there is no such thing. Everybody can do everything if they put their mind to it.”
As we said our good-byes, Jarmics’ parting words were: “It’s been a good life. It definitely could’ve been worse.”
Words to live by, I thought.
As history was my university minor and I have had the privilege of working at the St. Albert Gazette for almost nine years, my favourite interviews of the last year stem from this newspaper’s own history.
While spending many of my Wednesdays hunkered down in our archive room, carefully separating yellowing, tattered newspapers for research purposes (and chuckling at the number of “St. Albert woman marries Edmonton man” headlines), it was the interviews I conducted for the story for the Gazette’s actual 50th birthday that were most meaningful.
First came the opportunity to sit down with Ms. Paulie Keats at her assisted living facility in Edmonton. That chance came only because of a tip from colleague Susan Jones, who gratefully passed it to me. As it turned out, Keats was the Gazette’s first reporter. Though she only wrote for a few issues of the paper, her first story appeared in the very first Gazette. She was never paid and only agreed to write because she was asked and was on a summer break from her work with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.
But tracking down John Netelenbos, the son of Wim Netelenbos, who started the Gazette in June 1961, was the best experience. He recounted his childhood as the Gazette’s first paperboy, typically dragooned into working extra routes using First World War rucksacks to carry the Gazette door-to-door. The paper itself was created at 44 Sunset Blvd. — the Netelenbos home — where writers and advertisers dropped off their stories and payments in a box at the end of the driveway.
In those interviews, in the time spent reminiscing with president Duff Jamison and former staffers, and in those late hours spent under the buzz of fluorescent lights flipping through year after year of the Gazette, I watched not just the newspaper grow, but also this community.
“So Duff, before I embarrass myself, would you even consider a 64-year-old retired journalist for the job of Gazette editor?”
That’s how the phone conversation began between Gazette president Duff Jamison and myself in the last week of August. Before we put down the phones, I suspected my life was about to change dramatically.
After 46 years in the media I had taken a buyout from the Edmonton Journal in October 2010 and had settled into a very comfortable, enjoyable life: freelancing stories, working on my book, skiing in the winter and beginning to find my golf game again in the summer.
Cooking dinner was a regular occurrence, as was spending time with the grandchildren. There was even time to reconnect with some long-lost friends.
So when Gazette sports editor Jeff Hansen told me the paper was looking for an editor, I really wasn’t all that serious when I said, hmmm, I should look into that. For years my plan — don’t tell my wife this because I’m not sure I ever informed her — was to go back to Nelson, B.C. where my journalism career began, to finish out that career with the Daily News. Sadly, that paper was needlessly shut down two years ago, destroying that plan.
Since we have lived in St. Albert since we moved from Winnipeg in 1978, there had been times during those 10 months of semi-retirement I had thought about freelance writing for the Gazette.
Then along came Jeff and the editor’s opening. And that phone call.
So when we decided here in the Gazette newsroom to do a year-end look back at our most memorable moments of 2011, there really wasn’t any doubt what I would remember the most. It was Duff’s reply:
“You know, John, you might be just what we’re looking for.”
