In the very back of the basement was the furnace and the chimney. My close encounter with death happened when I had to go check the clean-out for the chimney. I opened it up and saw what appeared to be a skull. I freaked out and ran upstairs to tell the foreman, Graham Redman, that there was a skull in the chimney.
Actually, what it turned out to be, was a mannequin head from the hairdresser upstairs, the Grecian Coiffure, that had somehow fallen down through the chimney and landed in the basement clean out!
– Gary Hucul, former Observer printer
I started working at the Observer, as an apprentice printer in 1970. On my first day of work, the foreman, Floyd Cary, took me out to the “melting room” and pointed to a huge pile of lead (each week’s newspaper typeset in lead slugs from the linotype was recycled). He gave me a shovel, told me to fill up the natural gas-fired melting pot with the lead and gave me a quick lesson on how to dip out the molten lead from the pot into moulds to form “pigs” of lead, which would be used to make the next issue. It must have been 40 degrees Celsius in that little room and by the end of the day I was sweaty and black-faced. I later found out that was one reason the apprentice was called “the printer’s devil.”
– Bernie Hucul, former Observer printer
“Much like a fallen log in the woods, the Observer building played host to more than just employees. For years, we had birds nesting in the walls of the “morgue,” which was where the old papers were stored, and the odd time, a bird would fly through the office. Also, we had an issue with a colony of wasps, which decided to take up residence in the wall above the sports reporter’s desk, so each time he sat down, he would grab a fly swatter, just in case of attack.”
-Tracy Hughes, reporter and editor since 1996
One of my most memorable was when I showed up for work with a hangover and Graham Redman, the production manager, made me go work in the darkroom developing the trays which were filled with chemicals. It smelled so bad, I kept having to open the door, and stick my head out of the one window that opened to get air. It was a long time before I showed up at work with a hangover after that.
-Jennifer Bertram, Observer production staff since 1980.
In the very early days of the Observer’s history before radio and when outside news was difficult and slow, the paper operated from other community locations. But for the 40 or more years that its reporters reported, its editors stirred the pot, and its printing presses rolled in the Hudson Street building, the Observer was essentially the heart of Salmon Arm. The building is gone, as are many of the characters who worked in it, but the memories and the history of Salmon Arm as reflected in the pages of the Observer remain.
-Lynne Wickett, former Observer co-owner
