by John Paskievich
Winnipeg, Manitoba
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Since retiring from a 33-year career as a teacher and principal in the Manitoba public school system, Russ Gourluck has devoted his time to a life-long interest in writing. In the past few years he has published the popular illustrated histories, A Store Like No Other: Eaton’s of Winnipeg (2004) and Going Downtown: A History of Winnipeg’s Portage Avenue (2006). His latest book, Picturing Manitoba: Legacies of The Winnipeg Tribune, is similar in conception and design to its predecessors. It is mostly a collection of photographs taken across Manitoba by Tribune staff photographers who worked at the newspaper from the 1950s to 1980. That was the year the Trib, as the paper was colloquially called, stopped publishing after years of losing money with various bold, but ultimately fruitless, marketing strategies such as free want ads to draw readers away from the rival Winnipeg Free Press.
While primarily a pictorial product, Gourluck’s book also includes an informative written history of the Tribune from the paper’s founding in 1890 to its ignoble demise on “Black Wednesday,” 27 August 1980, when the publisher, Bill Wheatley, stood on a desktop in the newsroom and told the assembled that all 650 employees of the Tribune no longer had jobs. Just two weeks prior to his pulling the plug on the Trib Wheatley had told a reporter for Manitoba Business that his newspaper was in good shape financially.
Not long after the closure of the Tribune, the Winnipeg Free Press made sure that its perennial rival would not rise from the dead. The Free Press acquired The Winnipeg Tribune name and equipment, as well as the building, which was then ignominiously turned into that most common of Winnipeg landmarks: a parking lot.
In addition to the finely written history of the Trib, the book provides a series of folksy, once-over-lightly bios of the various photographers, writers and editors who worked at the paper. Many of these profiles could have used a rewrite. One bio in particular is surprisingly sophomoric. What purpose and audience does it serve to recall that the University of Winnipeg’s student newspaper once parodied the late Harry Mardon as Harry Hard-on?
The images in Picturing Manitoba were gleaned from the Tribune’s immense collection of approximately 500,000 photographs, which are housed at the University of Manitoba Archives. The Tribune’s strong emphasis on local and provincial news, coupled with its liberal use of photographs, has left us a remarkable record of life across Manitoba.
It has been said that after twenty years every photograph becomes a good photograph. This thought in no way implies that photographers have neither talent nor imagination. Rather, it is a way of saying that photography, more than any other medium, is reality based. Through photographs we are able to visit, emotionally and intellectually, a time and place that we once knew or did not know at all. The photographs in Picturing Manitoba are replete with memory, nostalgia, recognition and discovery. Here, among a myriad of other subjects, are floods, fires, blizzards, festivals, town and street scenes, concerts, political rallies, visiting Royals, local heroes, local yokels, and dogs riding bicycles.
As mentioned, the pictures in this book date mostly from the 1950s. It would be wonderful to see the work that was done by the Tribune photographers who worked before that time. Perhaps some of these photographs will appear in Gourluck’s next book, which has as its focus Winnipeg’s many-storied North End.
The first home of the Winnipeg Tribune, from 1890 until 1901, was formerly occupied by the Winnipeg Sun.
Source: University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections, Winnipeg Tribune Fonds (PC 18), Box 66, Folder 6551, Item 5
Page revised: 4 July 2016
