On Oct. 31, I will celebrate my 35th anniversary of covering the people, places and events of Orléans. It’s hard to believe, to be honest, how fast time flies. It seems like only yesterday that I bumped into my friend James MacArthur at a downtown bar.

I had just returned to Ottawa after the paper I was working for in Montréal had folded and James was recently hired as the new editor of the Star. How serendipitous. He wasn’t in need of a photographer, but he was open to me writing a guest column for the paper. Perfect.

My first effort was a tongue-in-cheek piece calling for the abolition of Hallowe’en. Well, not everyone saw the irony in it. In fact, we received no fewer than eight letters to the editor calling me every sort of name. Now this was back in the day when you actually had to write a letter to the editor using pen and paper.

The common wisdom among journalist types back then was that for every letter to the editor written by an individual at least 100 readers felt the same way, so eight letters to the editor was a big deal. In fact, it was more than the paper had received over the previous 12 months.

Both James and the Orléans Star’s publisher at the time, Gordon Brewerton, were so impressed that they offered me a regular weekly column which I happily accepted for the princely sum of $100 per column.

Back in the day, they gave me a quarter page in which I could write about anything I wanted to. The first columns were a mix of political punditry, personal pageantry and social commentary.

I wrote each column on a Macintosh Plus with a 9-inch monochromatic screen. Some columns took me over six hours to write as I would agonize over every single word.

I also had a habit of failing to save a column as I was writing it which lead to me losing everything I had written when the computer occasionally froze which in turn lead to expletive laden tirade on my part. On more than one occasion I had to be talked out of throwing my Mac Plus through the plate glass window in our second floor offices on Youville Drive.

It wasn’t until John O’Meara shared a few words of wisdom with me that I learned to write more economically both in terms of words and time. “You know what your problem is, Sherwin? You’re enamoured with your own prose,” he told me. It was the best piece of advice I’ve ever been given in my 35 years as a journalist.

John O’Meara was a legend. He was third or fourth generation Irish from The Point in Montréal and was the editor of the local paper in Côte St-Luc during the late
60s and early 70s. When he joined the Orléans Star in 1990 he wrote a quarter page column that ran beside mine.

Those were the good old days. We had a great crew at the Star back then that included Lori Nash, Jan MacNeill, Linda Isham and Valerie Xavier in the sales department, Gail Holleron and her brother Mark, who was our photographer, Frédéric Wallace, who doubled as a reporter for both the Orléans Star and the L’Express, Bernard “Dr. Love” Noonan, who was also a reporter, Louis, who worked in production, and Darren Illingsworth who designed all the ads.

Back then, the Orléans Star would often run 48 pages or more in two sections. It was the Golden Age of community newspapers, or at least for the Orléans Star.

Six weeks after I started working at the paper, we had an epic Christmas party that is etched in the annals of Orléans Star lore.

I remember James and I arrived wearing Hawaiian shirts and paisley dinner jackets with traffic pylons on our heads.

Things got so out of hand that a few of us were politely asked to leave shortly after dinner, so we piled into our limo and had the driver take us to Elgin Street where the party continued until the wee hours of the morning.

I stayed with the Star for the next 10 years moving from columnist to special projects reporter, to eventually managing editor between 1997 to 2001.

(If you wish to comment on this or any other View Point column please write to Fred Sherwin at fsherwin@orleansstar.ca)