For those who have filled the letters pages over the decades, the resilience of the form feels as essential as journalism itself
Former federal cabinet minister Lloyd Axworthy has worn many hats during his long career in politics and academia. In 1964, however, he was but a young Winnipegger who had recently completed a graduate degree in politics at Princeton University and was looking forward to coming home. Unfortunately, he wasn’t having much luck landing suitable work in Canada.
, published in 1985, “the letters page of a newspaper must be a forum dedicated to its readers, a page where their opinion can be heard, their honour defended, their spleens spilled.” Meet the readers who write Letters to the Editor: ‘We bet on which one of us would be the first to get a letter published’
March 26, 1945: As the Second World War stretched on, readers such as Beecher Parkhouse of Fergus, Ont., found ways to stay positive: “I guess the war must be going pretty well for our side. We have not been called on for a Day of Prayer for some time.”Oct. 24, 1970: Poet Irving Layton took stock of a dark chapter in Canadian history.
There are also letter-writing giants such as Eugene Forsey, a former senator and constitutional expert who, having written some 800 letters to various publications over his lifetime, is the subject of his own academic compendium from 2000,. “The moment you saw the name Eugene Forsey,” Kapica recalls, you knew you had a contender. “The guy required no grammatical correction, no spelling or anything like that. The man was very educated.
Stewart’s popularity and frequency on the letters page soon invited detractors. Eventually, one frustrated letter writer suggested The Globe would surely publish any letter, no questions asked, if it was signed “J.D.M. Stewart.” From there, it was determined that regular contributors would be limited to every two weeks. Today, like many other daily publications, The Globe tries to limit writers to every four weeks.
As the institution of letters continues to evolve with the times, it would be fair to ask: What next? A pessimist may hold the view that its stubborn resilience is generational and tied to an aging population of boomers, the main demographic for printed periodicals. An informal survey of more than 200 of The Globe’s most frequent letter writers conducted for this essay bears that out: The majority of respondents were 50-plus, many of them retired; more than a few were in their 90s.
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