Bruce Duggan points his finger at a name on the first edition of the Winfield Calendar.
The name “Mrs. T Duggan” belongs to his mother.
Ida Duggan, as part of the Winfield Women’s Institute, published the first copy of what would later become the Lake Country Calendar in February 1951.
“It is the sincere wish of the WI that this will be a service that will enable our community to become better acquainted,” the page reads. The paper was little more than a community event page, but the message holds true today.
Duggan, a farmer his whole life, remembers helping his mother churn out copies of the Winfield Calendar, which was only a single page, in the basement of his home.
The equipment may be gone, but Duggan, 73, remains on what was once his parent’s property.
“Parts that I recollect are actually with some of the printing of it. They actually had, they called it a Gestetner, a duplicator, so sometimes they had me do that for them,” he said. “You made up a stencil, you put the stencil on the machine and you just loaded it with paper and cranked it by hand.”
The Winfield Calendar was used to raise funds for the Women’s Institute.
“It wasn’t a newspaper,” Duggan said.
His mother, Duggan said, was a kind, caring person, who enjoyed volunteering with the WI.
In 1973, the paper, then nine pages in size, was taken over by the now defunct Lake Country Hospital Auxiliary.
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During that time the paper grew to 22 double-sided pages and had a circulation of 1,580.
Marion Sallenbach, 96, was a member of the auxiliary and still has an old Gestetner, a typewriter and other equipment that was used to print the papers in her basement.
“We went out and got advertisements from the different businesses, that’s what supported us. And then we put in local news and whatever we could that would be interesting to the people out here,” she said. “We printed the papers here at the house and as it grew bigger and bigger we went down to the Winfield Memorial Hall where we used to staple the papers together.”
“The Girl Guides were quite good at helping us to run around the table because we ended up getting quite a big paper by the time we finished,” she said.
The auxiliary members would scramble to get the papers in order.
“There was a lot of work to it,” Sallenbach said. At the time, there were about 15 to 20 members in the auxiliary who put it together from start to finish.
“It was a big job but we earned quite a bit of money for the hospital for that,” she said.
Sallenbach described her tiny basement, it was so small one of the volunteers had to do the typing for the paper in her own home.
But there was a sense of pride with the paper, she said. The ladies ran a paper on their own that raised money for the hospital.
READ MORE: Lake Country auxiliary still closing
Jack McCarthy and John Gable purchased the Winfield Calendar in 1979 from the hospital auxiliary and dropped Winfield from the title.
The Calendar began to take on a newspaper appearance and look more similar to today’s edition after the sale.
In a December Christmas edition in 1979, The Calendar’s title is outlined in red, and a “Merry Christmas” was placed above a black and white front page photo.
The paper was eventually sold to Black Press in 2007, and it has a circulation of 4,200.
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