Low Down Articles
Local History
Article 21 of 111
This article first appeared in the April 26, 2023 issue of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
o o o
It made no sense to start a newspaper
But they did, anyway
By Nikki Mantell
This year the Low Down celebrates our 50th anniversary. This is the first in a monthly series dedicated to each decade of covering the Gatineau Hills until we hit the big milestone in October 2023. We hope readers enjoy the look back as much as we do. (And make sure to check out our groovy poster all about 1973 on the last page of this special section. Feel free to cut it out and hang it on your wall.)
The year was 1973, and the Gatineau Hills didn't have as much going on as it does today. It was largely a rural landscape dominated by a river, swaths of farmland and forest, and a dangerous two-lane highway connecting a smattering of tiny villages, where you might find a country store or the odd pub. Even the phone lines were limited to 10-unit party lines in some parts.
In other words, it made no sense to start a newspaper in this neck of the sparsely populated woods.
But start they did, and by "they" we mean Arthur and Kitty Mantell, the husband-and-wife team who, one weekend nearly 50 years ago, became the editor-and-publisher (and photographerand-bookkeeper-and-ad-salesperson-andeverything-else) team that launched The Low Down to Hull and Back News from their dining room table.
Art was a newsman from way back, having worked as a reporter at dailies in Ottawa and Manitoba, from where he and Kitty hailed. She was a librarian by trade with a talent for writing, who may or may not have cautioned against starting such a venture while he was still working a full-time job and they had a new baby and 10-year-old underfoot. But as most headstrong reporters will tell you - and the late Art Mantell certainly was one of those - it's the writer's dream to ditch the stifling confines of your editor and own your own newspaper. (A poster that read "Power of the press belongs to those who own one" featured prominently when Art eventually had an office wall to hang it on.)
Dreaming is one thing; actually publishing a physical newspaper from your country home before the era of computers is another.
"There was no good reason for a weekly newspaper, it seemed, in those days. There wasn't even a city or a town on which to base a paper," reads an article the two co-wrote for the paper's 15th anniversary. "A hell of an interesting community from a newsmaking point of view (a highway that guaranteed a spectacular accident at least once a week, for instance, and peopled by the most incredible cross-section of movers, shakers, and oddballs), but with not a single supermarket to sell advertising as the eye could see."
No, it made no economic sense, but the drive was strong, and Art figured he could sneak in some phone interviews while he did his well-paid but very disliked full-time job as a civil servant; Kitty would do the same from home, and the two would finish the thing on weekends.
The first edition was typed up in their West Hull (Chelsea) house with an IBM typewriter on their dining room table. Their windowless bathroom served as the makeshift darkroom (the clawfoot tub bore the chemical scars for years), and then it was a matter of cut-and-paste, the literal kind, not the keystroke on your laptop.
"It wasn't much of a business at first," wrote Kitty in another anniversary article. "The news was 99 per cent gathered by phone; the type was turned out on an electric typewriter on paper we had lined by hand to the size of the column width, then cut and pasted down on sheets of paper with guidelines. Headlines were done with Letraset; letters were mounted on transparent plastic and transferred to paper by carefully lining them up level, judging the space from the last letter and scribbling over the wanted letter to transfer it. (Need I say that our headlines in those days seldom exceeded four words?)"
It was an unforgiving business, and at times it showed in the final product where a column of type slid slightly askew, or the end of a story simply fell off the dummy in transit to the printer. The paper became famous for its typos, but fixing them would mean missing the 5:00 p.m. bus to the printer in Smiths Falls.
That first edition came out with a bang. It was eight pages and featured a front-page story about burglary involving a beer-swilling bandit and the big-bucks announcement that the Meech Creek Valley in Chelsea would be transformed into a zoo (we are still waiting for that one). Other pages included a feature on how Jeep Picher built a log house on Carman Road by hand and full-page pleas to subscribe or buy a classified ad.
And it actually sold! The husband-andwife team drove around the countryside with 1,000 copies in their car, convincing the few existing store owners it was a good idea to carry an unknown newspaper with a long-winded pun for its name. At 15 cents a copy, locals bought up "the little paper" as it became affectionately known around the Hills, and they nearly doubled the print run just a year later.
For the next three years, Art kept his day job and battled traffic five days a week to work at the NRC in Ottawa. Kitty managed the household, including both kids, some laying hens, and multiple sets of puppies after they had decided to become Bouvier-des-Flandres breeders. Apart from a friend who traded news photography for lodging in their backyard cabin for a year, the early years of the newspaper were essentially a two-person affair, where both scrambled to meet the deadline every Sunday. The deal they struck with themselves that first year was that, when the $1,000 they'd invested in the odds-defying venture called The Low Down to Hull and Back News ran out, they'd throw in the towel.
That was 50 years ago.