In 1973 there was obviously a hot debate over the wittiest, most suitable name for a weekly paper reporting news (in English) in the Gatineau Hills area. A compromise must have been reached, because it came out as The Low Down to Hull & Back News, which with no competition, at 76¢ a copy, is still going strong. Low is a village named after a lumber merchant at the northernmost extremity of the paper's reach, and Hull (now part of Gatineau) is the city that lies to the south of the hills across the river from Ottawa.
I love these little papers; when we lived in North Carolina in the 1980s, I used to keep cuttings from The Chapel Hill News, so entertaining did I find it.
Elva has lent me her copy of a recent edition of The Low Down. The headlines à la Une tell me that Stag Creek wins fifth Dragonfest (that's a hockey tournament)—picture of a "Low Black Hawk" trying to "take out the legs of Orangeman Scotty MacKay" at the Wakefield match—Cougar up tree, not in trap (Subheading: Cougar leaned on trap, sniffed bait and turned around) and that Erick goes back to school (subheaded: How do we help this little fella?) which is the continuing story of an 8 year old who "threw an egg at the school" (Wakefield Elementary) and got suspended after resisting arrest, so to speak. In the aftermath he was said to have locked himself "in a resource room" and is now threatened with a year's expulsion from every school under the Western Quebec School Board's jurisdiction. A child psychologist has diagnosed the young man's problem as Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Yes, well, I came across a fair number of kids who had that disorder myself. Seems to me I used to teach whole classes suffering from it, though I don't think they suffered as much as I did.
On Page 3, above a story about Quebec's "beef and hog producers" and their latest clash with the federal government, is a sweet picture of some better-behaved children, aka "Jackrabbits"—seven-year-old girls on a cross-country skiing lesson.
The editorial is a funny account of a "winter camping trip": a story about nine women who slept out of doors in "a shallow culvert in the snow" at -15° in an attempt to beat the winter blues. At 3a.m. the editor of the paper gave up and walked home to her warm bed.
Page 5 has a description of the discovery of a "nice-sized" marijuana "grow-op", 1070 plants being cultivated in someone's basement at Edelweiss. The police literally sniffed them out, which sounds just like a scene from Saving Grace, that funny film set in Cornwall, England.
On other pages, the paper tells us that Wakefield Memorial Hospital is replacing its styrofoam coffee cups with biodegradable ones (that's good news!) and that a new political party is being formed in Quebec in the interests of minorities such as Inuits and anglophones, whose leader is a certain Allen Nutik. A recruitment drive is announced for the Nocturnal Owl Survey (Owl Survey a hoot, says the headline) and another bird story features the sighting of what appeared to be a real penguin at Chelsea's "Penguin" picnic field, actually a murre blown astray from its migration path to Newfoundland.
This paper is highly educational. On Page 10 appears a feature about a local artist who has been on a "ceramic exchange" to Fuping, China, bringing back the fruits of his experience for display at the Museum of Ceramic Arts (I had no idea there was such a museum). And there are the usual articles about land ownership and sewers.
The small ads offer opportunities to buy a dump trailer, Celtic fiddle lessons, a small size woman ski instructor's snow suit, ecological firewood, winterized cottages and 14 male alpacas.
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