by Dan McCaffery
(2015) “For decades politicians trembled every Wednesday when it hit the streets.”
That’s how The Observer led off a story in the summer of 1995, reporting on the demise of the legendary Sarnia Gazette weekly newspaper. It was August 19, 1995 to be exact, and the final edition of the feisty tabloid had just rolled off the presses.
As it turned out, The Observer was right.
Indeed, one former Sarnia mayor said he never picked up the Gazette, “Unless I had a good stiff drink in my hand.”
The little paper was a thorn in the side of establishment figures almost from the moment it appeared in the autumn of 1953.
The Gazette was founded by the late Marceil Saddy and Jack Fullerton, a pair of University of Western Ontario school of journalism graduates who met on a park bench in Montreal.
They would go on to become two of the most colourful newspapermen Sarnia has ever seen — but only after overcoming obstacles that would have stopped lesser wordsmiths in their tracks.
“We had one typewriter between us,” Fullerton recalled in a 1995 interview. “We lived on petty cash and a barter system. We’d get haircuts by telling people, ‘we’ll carry your ad if you cut our hair.’”
They had no press of their own, so Fullerton drove to Toronto once a week for 10 years to get the paper printed. He’d grab some sleep while the presses rolled, then return to Sarnia the same day in a 1939 Packard loaded with newspapers.
Before long, The Gazette was raising eyebrows with its hard-hitting editorials.
“We wanted to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” Fullerton said.
Once, when they took the local school board to task on an issue, trustees launched a lawsuit. The Gazette responded with a front page editorial headlined ‘Sue and be Damned!’
The board quickly backed down.
Other lawsuits were launched from other sources over the years, and some were successful.
“Whenever we were wrong, we were wrong out loud,” Fullerton recalled.
The paper’s popularity grew as, time and again, it took the side of ‘the little guy.’ On one occasion, it came to the aid of a local character known as ‘Pete the Popcorn Man.’
“Pete was selling popcorn downtown from his wagon and city council thought such a presence didn’t add to the stature of the city,” Fullerton said. “Marceil and I both agreed Pete added a certain flair. We took up Pete’s cause and defended him.”
Council eventually agreed to let Pete stay.
The crusading journalists challenged the city again when it tried to stop a resident from making a honey wine in his basement. “We said city council should stay out of a man’s basement, that a man’s home was his castle,” Fullerton said. “Eventually it (the homemade wine) appeared in liquor stores across Ontario.”
But it wasn’t all about politics. Some of the biggest feedback the paper received came when Saddy wrote about his cat, Josephine, or when Fullerton told of his battles with the mice that were infiltrating his cottage.
In the mid-1970s Sarnia was booming, with Petrosar, Union Carbide, the Lambton Mall and hundreds of new homes, popping up. The Gazette expanded with it, adding newsmen such as Chris Cooke, Sid Rose and myself.
With its bigger staff the paper started covering organizations that, up until that time, had almost never received any ink, including the local Catholic school board, the hydro commission, the old Sarnia parks board and the city’s planning board. It also started showing up at council meetings across rural Lambton. Other media quickly followed but, in several of those cases, The Gazette was the trailblazer.
There was a family atmosphere about the place.
Saddy, who had no airs about him whatsoever, would often go downstairs into the press room to eat his lunch with the pressmen.
When Marceil turned 50, the staff secretly bought a billy goat and presented it to him right in the lunch room. The veteran editor and publisher laughed so hard he fell out of his chair and rolled on the floor, tears streaming down his face. Afterward, he took the goat to his cottage near Camlachie, where there was plenty of room for it to roam about.
After 42 years, the paper disappeared, but not before Time magazine wrote an article about The Gazette, describing it as one of the best weeklies in Canada.
It was a description a great many Sarnians of the era would agree with.