I couldn’t have been more than 16 or so the first time I met Gary O’Flynn. I was one of a handful of teenagers running the Wallaceburg Minor Baseball Association, and I took some game scores into his office at the Courier Press.
The term “office” glorified what was actually an old brick garage on the riverfront on Hope Street. Gary sat in a decrepit chair in front of an ancient Underwood typewriter; his desktop was a plank of wood held at table height by a pile of cinderblocks.
I didn’t pay a lot of attention to what we called grown-ups in those days. O’Flynn was a gruff kind of guy who looked like he’d seen everything in the world. Twice.
Gary was the founder of Wallaceburg’s “other” newspaper, the alternative to the staid Wallaceburg News, owned for decades by the Colwell family, pillars of the community.
Gary was loud, brash, opinionated and argumentative. He also loved Wallaceburg and Wallaceburg (most of it anyway) loved him right back. Being called a “Wallaceburg National” was the highest honour Gary could bestow.
My gang of buddies got that honour once when he wrote that without us “baseball in Wallaceburg would be buried under the rock-hard surface of Kinsmen Park.” A bit overstated, but very welcome to us.
He eventually sold the paper (more on that later) and became the Mayor of Wallaceburg. He had turned that Courier office into an extremely profitable business, using it to help purchase the Baldoon Golf Course.
He did so well that years later, when he won a $1-million lottery prize and was asked what it felt like being a millionaire, he bristled, “I was already a millionaire.” That was Gary for you.
My thoughts turned to Gary when it was announced recently that the Courier Press was being shuttered by Post Media, the paper’s most recent corporate owner. The company had long since abandoned any pretense of local control or ownership, and the paper’s fate was a foregone conclusion.
There aren’t any layoffs because there aren’t any staff left to lay off.
I remember the thrill of seeing my name in print for getting a big hit or winning a championship. It was the same thrill so many people had in those days. Gary and those like him (Max Heath at the Wallaceburg News and Phil Gower at the Wallaceburg Bureau of the Chatham Daily News) made everyone in town puff their chest out a little bit for everything from athletics to growing an award-winning garden or speaking at the Rotary Club.
Telling your own little circle of friends on Facebook that your team did something just doesn’t compare.
Giving people in Chatham-Kent the chance to puff out their chest a little is one of the reasons we do what we do here at The Voice. There is plenty to celebrate in our community, and we’re not shy about doing so.
When Gary decided to sell The Courier, I was editor of a Sarnia newspaper and looking for a way to get back to town.
I was working on a deal to purchase The Courier (basically a dollar down and a dollar a day) when I received a call that Sandy Green, the president of the newspaper company for which I was working, was on his way from London and wanted to see me.
It didn’t take a genius to know that he knew what I knew.
He didn’t mince words, and my professional life flashed before my eyes when he said “I understand you’re trying to buy the Courier Press.” It was a statement, not a question, and I replied that, yes, I was.
“Well, good for you. You’re not going to, though, we are. Would you like to run it for us?”
With that, I was back in town.
