Our speaker for the evening will be Lon Wood. Registration will close on Monday morning November 17th.
Lon Wood is a Vancouver Island journalist whose career spanned the better part of a half century in British Columbia.As a veteran reporter, editor and columnist, Lon served the province’s major urban dailies after apprenticing with a score of weekly and community newspapers and covering the B.C. Legislature for The Canadian Press.
Lon was born in Montreal at the height of the Second World War and was raised in Winnipeg, Regina and Vancouver before settling in Victoria in1968.
He and his wife Lorrie, a retired Camosun College instructor, are in their 60th year together and reside on Mt. Tzhouhalem, overlooking Quamichan Lake near Maple Bay in the Cowichan Valley.
Lon says as an academic underachiever he got by on what he heard in class while rarely opening course texts. Nonetheless he did well in English composition, routinely earning rare 10-out-of-10results despite lack lustre showing in algebra, lab sciences and rote learning.
By high school graduation at 17, Lon had a portfolio of letters to the editor published in major Canadian and U.S. dailies — “Precociously written,” he says,“on topics then well over my head”.Lon was determined to become a reporter
Late in 1962 Lon turned up on the 4th floor newsroom at The Sun Tower on Beatty Street and made an impassioned pitch for work as a cub reporter at the major daily. Instead, he was hired as an editorial Copy Runner and by summer became City Desk Clerk — taking stories by typewriter over the phone from correspondents in London,Washington DC, Hong Kong, Havana, Paris or Stockholm.Sun Managing Editor Erwin Swangard, however,told Lon there would be no reporting post without completion of an arts degree.
Enrolled at UBC, Lon skipped classes in favour of joining the staff of the student newspaper, The Ubyssey, spawning ground for the talents of such literary, political and journalistic luminaries as Pierre Berton, John Turner, Allan Fotheringham, Peter Worthington, Earle Birney and Michael Valpy.
But the lure of working to put out a “real”newspaper was too big a draw. Lon dropped classes, grabbed a BC roadmap and scoured the province in search of newspapers with long hours,low pay — and the wealth of experience on which he built the career of his dreams.
That’s where the story really starts
Don't forget your $5 for the bottle draw.
