A lot of tragic stories have been headlined at this desk over the years

By Lethbridge Herald on November 15, 2024.

LEAVE IT TO BEEBER
Al Beeber – managing editor

As I write this column early on Remembrance Day in the silence of an empty newsroom with lights off to protect my eyes which are still sensitive from last year’s cataract surgeries, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed.

Year-end is approaching which means figuring out the top stories of the year and compiling 12 months of news highlights to fill pages during the Christmas season which is always the slowest time of the year for news.

I’ve yet to speak to my financial adviser about the future and still haven’t had time to do a test my doctor ordered a month ago. Time is not on my side and I don’t seem to have enough of it in a day to get everything done.

But as I sit here my mind is wandering back to some of the stories that have crossed my desk on the news wire over the years since starting here at The Herald. In rural Ontario, we didn’t have access to Canadian Press during my stint – we filled four tabloid eight-page dailies and a three-section weekly ourselves with our full-time staff and a series of contributors. And the long days and nights there definitely prepared me for my current role which soon is coming to an end. But in the meantime there is so much to get done.

And so my mind shouldn’t be wandering here but it is to a few of the breaking stories that happened when much of my time was spent news pages. In my roles here over the decades as Homes Editor, Entertainment Editor, Wheelers Editor and Travel Editor, I’ve laid out thousands of pages. I’ve lost track of the times I had to redesign our TV book in the newsroom boardroom as its content and size changed. Yes, I also put together that publication for years on top of everything else. And I did a stint laying out the old Sun-Times every week, too.

For years, every Thursday I had to crank out two eight-pages sections – one entirely devoted to auto coverage, the second with entertainment and lifestyles stories. And I had to find time to write and help with other pages. Regularly our Friday papers had 48 pages – dropping to 36 on occasion which would provide momentary breathing room but also provoke worries, especially when we began to see the impact the internet was having on readership. 

Our Saturday paper regularly had 64 pages which was even more work for me and the other editors we had on duty.

Spending much of my day taking stories from the wire had me coming across and reading a lot of news stories from around the globe as history unfolded in front of my eyes.

Unfortunately, I’ve been on page duty when some of the most heinous and heartbreaking stories broke, one of the earliest being the disaster on Dec. 21, 1988 in the skies above Lockerbie Scotland when translantic flight Pan Am Flight 103 was destroyed by a bomb killing a total of 270 people.

I was laying out the paper when Marc Lepine killed 14 people at Ecole Polytechnic de Montreal on Dec. 6, 1989 and while I wasn’t on page duty that night, I do remember seeing the alerts coming over CP when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 was destroyed in a terrorist attack by Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice Terry McNichols, killing 168 people including children.

And everyone was glued to the newswire and television two years previous when the seige at cult leader David Koresh’s compound in Waco, Texas ended in an inferno on April 19, 1993, that event which was cited by McVeigh as his main reason for the Oklahoma bombing two years to the day.

If you have HBO, you can watch a powerful documentary about the Oklahoma City bombings and the social situations that led to that unspeakable horror.

I’m sure as the Paul Bernardo case went to trial, out of morbid curiosity, I wasn’t the only one who would sneek a peak at the daily coverage, which I regret doing because the details of what he did should not be seen by anyone’s eyes.

The Ted Bundy trial and execution also were memorable for all the wrong reasons, the stories written which were compelling yet disturbing reading.  Come to think of it, I think late cousin Mary got suspended from Facebook for a hilariously inappropriate but definitely deserved comment she made on a post about the Netflix series on him. 

All of us who were scheduled to work, of course, were on duty when the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 forever changed the world. I was in the gym on the treadmill with others watching CNN’s coverage on televisions above us of the first World Trade Centre tower being struck when an airliner struck the second.

I rushed back to the office where all newsroom staff frantically were put to work for the only time in my experience here putting out a special edition that was printed in early afternoon before work began on the scheduled Herald edition. 

And I was on page duty Boxing Day of 2004 when an earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia causing a massive tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people in more than a dozen countries.

And when Queen Elizabeth died on Sept. 8, 2022, I made sure we gave her funeral the type of coverage such an historic event deserved.

Over the course of decades laying out pages, I’m sure there have been many more tragedies I’ve written headlines for and given space to in this paper but these are the ones that most stand out.

When the Taber shooting occurred in the 1990s I was on the periphery and was not actively involved in the coverage, the work done by my colleagues who were which was absolutely outstanding.

In recent years, though, I’ve recorded for posterity events that will shape the look of our city forever, namely the fires of the Bow on Tong and Lethbridge Hotel buildings recently, both of which I shot with my camera as firefighters bravely battled the infernos that engulfed them in temperatures hovering close to -40C.

The majority of my own coverage over the years has fortunately been much lighter reading.

 As the entertainment editor, which I guess I still am, I’ve interviewed everyone from Alice Cooper and the late great Bo Diddly to Carrie Underwood and Colin Blunstone of The Zombies, one of my most memorable interviews which will surely be with Freddie Mercury’s personal assistant. 

And I’ll never forget the sadness in the voice of Diddly as he told me that he had to keep touring at his advanced age to pay the bills.

When auto dealers still relied on The Herald to sell product, I drove everything that sales managers would let me take out on the road from Ford Mustang convertibles to Mercedes-Benz SUVs and everything in between.

I built great relationships with all the car dealers in the city and I will always appreciate the great rides they trusted me with from Subaru STis, WRXs and Outbacks – the latter which will forever be perhaps my favourite ride – to the Cadillac CT5, Honda CRV, Ram 1500 diesel, Ford Ranger, Toyota Tacoma, Ford Explorer, GMC Acadia, Nissan Frontier, VW Jetta, Hyundai Palisade and so many others which left indelible impressions on me.

But in this business, bad news seems to dominate memories because that’s the way life is – there is a lot of nastiness in this world. 

Trying to think of the “good” news stories is really difficult and it’s going to take more time than I have in a work day to come up with enough material to write about them.