In 1912, my great uncle Loring Christie wrote a letter to
his parents, describing a political convention he had attended in Chicago. Before launching into his description, he
said:
You would get some
ideas of it from the paper I sent. And looking over the copies of the Montreal
Star that accumulated during my absence I find they had a very good story of it
- and further they had very well informed, intelligent & shrewd editorial
comment on the situation as it developed. (A rattling good paper that, by the
way - it excites the admiration of many of my friends here.)
Sixty-six years later, the Montreal Star
was still going strong and I was one of its teenage readers. It arrived at our door in the late afternoon.
I liked to lay it out on the living room
floor and flip through it when I got home from school. The other Montreal paper, the Montreal Gazette, appeared at our door in
the morning. It actually belonged to Champlain
CEGEP’s library, but was sent to our house so that Mom could bring it with her
to work. If I got up early enough, I
could flip through that one before she left.
Then, in 1978, the Montreal
Star pressmen went on strike. I
missed my afternoon paper, but (probably like most of Montreal) I shrugged and
read the Gazette instead. The strike was settled eight months later, and
my afternoon paper returned. But the Star had a problem; they had to get
their readers back. So, in direct
competition to the Gazette, they
started a morning edition. Now I had two
papers to flip through in the morning. The
Gazette retaliated with an afternoon
edition. Now I had two papers to flip
through in the afternoon too.
It was an all-out turf war, a time of glorious superfluity. For the few months that it lasted, Montreal
readers were wooed by the word. I barely
knew what to do with all this print at my fingertips, this inundation of
information. I was like a present-day
teenager that spends too much time on the internet. My homework called me, but I had four newspapers
to read.
As with any age of excess, it couldn’t last. The frenzied suitors that courted their Montrealers
had limited resources, and the strike-damaged Montreal Star had been weak from the start. Something had to give, and the Star folded in 1979. The Gazette has been going
strong ever since.
