I was working on a story this week about the Highway 24 - Interlakes Lions Club shutting down.
Wanting to find some photos from their early days, I started looking through old papers.
Unfortunately, the Free Press office burned down a number of decades ago and consequently, so did the archives.
From what I understand, people donated whatever papers they had from before then.
So, we have a bunch of papers from the late 70s but not all.
The issue that might have had a story or picture about the club starting up is missing. So I started looking through some of the papers that followed.
Obviously, the papers back then looked a lot different; the size of the pages was bigger, there were more classifieds and the layout was quite different as well.
Notably, semi-scruffy looking and often bearded men always seem to have worked at the Free Press’ editorial department (at least for the issues I looked at), a tradition we seem to be proudly continuing today.
The main message I got from several of those I spoke to is that it was really hard to recruit younger volunteers.
Looking at the papers then and now, this isn’t surprising at all. Back then the people in the paper were by and large, quite young with many of them, at least based on appearances under 40 but above 20. That’s not to say we don’t have any of those now but proportionately, it seems like there’s way less now.
There’s still a lot of students in the paper, but outside of that from the news pictures to the streeter, the demographics have shifted up.
This will come as a shock to few.
However, it does make it much more understandable why organizations have a hard time finding young people.
The other side to this is that with such a seemingly large group of younger people, the events seemed more exciting with things such as people forming a human pyramid on water skis or a so-dubbed “daredevil” trying to fly some sort of contraption that I believe he also crashed into a lake.
If I’m completely honest, the Cariboo of 30 to 40 years ago, at least from looking at the newspapers, seemed a little more exciting than it does today.
That’s not to say people aren’t putting in the effort by any means but maybe with age, the Cariboo has become a bit more tame or reasonable and responsible, depending on how you look at it.