Regina in Print: Conversation with Pat Schuett, Typist for the Prairie Fire
Prairie Fire was an independent newspaper that was published in Regina from 1969 to 1971, covering everything from the daily lives of workers to international politics. We spoke with Pat Schuett, who was a typist for Prairie Fire, to learn more about the social context at the time the paper was published, as well as the technical production that went into typing and formatting newspapers at that time.
So, are you ready?
Sort of? Are you able to edit this?
Yeah, I transcribe it afterwards. I can send it to you before it goes on the blog.
No, no, you can't allow your sources to dictate content.
That’s true.
Okay. What’s your story?
What's my -- what do you mean? Oh, I thought that was the title! Oh dear. I didn't have anything prepared for that part.
I’ve lived in Regina, basically for 74 years, barring a few years in the early ‘70s. I worked at the public library for 35 years, in the reference area, and I’ve been involved in feral cat rescue for quite a while and, yeah, that's it. I'm sorry! I thought that was the title, I didn’t have anything ready for that.
What led you to working on the Prairie Fire?
Well, I had a couple of friends that were already involved, and they put me in touch because, basically, I was a fast typist. They had lots of people who were interested in writing the stories and they had lots of ideas about how they wanted to focus, and so forth, and not many people doing the technical part of actually putting it on the page.
I was coming out of the Catholic high school system, so I'd had quite a sheltered existence up until then, and quite traditional, and university was an opportunity to get exposed to a lot of different philosophies. Basically, I started because I was interested in actually doing something concrete for the paper, and that introduced me to the content and the whole story behind it, and I became more and more involved.
Six months into it, I started living at the commune that was the collective that produced the paper. And got more and more involved in the political part of it, which was a very important way of shaping the content of the paper… the groups that we were involved in, and where we were putting our energy in terms of demonstrations, and that sort of thing, and causes that were being, you know, promoted and talked about.
Can you talk about the commune a little bit?
It already had been in existence for a number of years when I joined, but at that time, there were four houses in the commune. The four houses were a collective, but each individual house was a separate collective. It was based on the communist model that people contributed what they had to contribute, and it was understood if you did not have money to help support the group, you maybe took on more in the way of chores or actual work.
There was quite a diverse group of people. I would say the two groups that made it up mainly, were people like me who were young, local university students, and professors from the university who fortunately were fairly well paid and helped take care of the monetary end of it. The houses were all over the city. There was one way north on Broad Street and there were quite a number in the Cathedral area, and one or two in the south end at different times. It was just where we could rent a house big enough to house about 10 to 14 people. I got involved in the late ‘60s, it would have been ‘69, I think.
Many of the university professors were Americans who were in Canada to avoid the draft because it was at the end of the Vietnam War. Most of the ones that were involved in the commune were people for whom it was not just a matter of not wanting to kill other people, it was a deep ideological conviction. They had actually moved to Canada because they couldn't live the way they wanted to in the States, it wasn't just to avoid the draft. They were quite radical people for that time. The two groups cross-pollinated each other, kind of, to bring about the ideological basis for the commune.
It operated like a traditional commune where we had meetings all the time, and we had self-criticism sessions, and we had very free discussions about who was pulling their weight and who wasn't. By and large, it wasn't done nastily, it wasn't like, for revenge, or somebody you just didn't like, or something. Usually it was a statement about something that all of us knew but nobody had said out loud, and so the person was maybe getting away with something, or thought they were getting away with something, and once it was brought up in the open we were able to remedy the situation.
Can you talk about some of the technical aspects of your work on the Prairie Fire?
I'm missing some crucial information there, I think, because we did it up to a certain point. We actually did, as I was describing to you before, we got the columns straight, and and typed everything up, and there was gallons of correction fluid used to make sure all the the spelling was correct, and all that jazz.
There was two guys that were in contact with the printer, which I never had anything to do with. The deadline was actually midnight on a certain date. Every time, we went right up to midnight and sometimes slightly beyond, and the guys would be careening through the streets trying to get this to the printer in time to make the deadline or we would get at least a stern talking to. I wouldn't have even known how they did it.
But on your end?
I was the primary typist. At that time, it was just in the infancy of computers. If you hadn't taken typing in high school or had access to a typewriter at home, it was not a skill that everyone had at that time. Generally, typing was to some extent for possible work prospects for girls. I never was in a typing class that had any boys in it whatsoever. Fortunately, my mother wrote somewhat, herself at home, just for pleasure, and she had an actual typewriter. I was able to practice at home and write some of my own stuff and also just get better at typing.
I don't think I ever had a job where it was really important to have to type, but I'd gotten good enough that I often did, or fairly regularly did, the entire paper in terms of the typing. Just because we would be heading for the deadline and I would have finished all the stories I was supposed to do and other people would be doing other ones, but they would be doing them slowly. I wanted to go home, so I would do theirs too. There were some other people that were good at it. I think there was a couple of the guys who were already working towards careers in journalism. They'd learned to type, because at the time there was no alternative to typing. If you were going to write for any newspaper in the country, or the world, you had to type your own stories.
So, all week, stories would be zinging around and we'd be having multiple meetings about stories, and who was writing what, and who had what possibility to develop as a story… if there were pictures, you know, how much we were going to enlarge or reduce the pictures, according to how much print we had to pack into it. The one thing that I remember is, I was new to the idea of the columns and how you were responsible to get them lined up. At that point, we didn't have a printing press or type setters on staff, so we had to provide it. I presume it was some kind of a photographic reproduction that they were using because they used our stories and our layout, which would be all little pieces cut and pasted and stuck down with certain kinds of tape that wouldn't show.
We had to know how many characters wide a column was. As typewriters got more sophisticated, an m would be wider than an i, but at that time, all the letters took up a uniform amount of space. So, when you saw you were getting to the end of the line, you'd fill it in with x's, and then whoever was doing the final copy would use those x's to determine how many extra spaces they put between words to make the columns come out even in the end. Everything got typed twice, maybe more than twice, if it was somebody that didn't do the justifying themselves.
That part of it was satisfying. It was obviously a job that needed to be done and that was valued. A couple of times I would catch a flu or something like that and it would be a big crisis. Like how are we gonna get the paper out? Our typist is almost dead!
Every story, picture, and advertisement would be cut out with scissors and taped onto pages that were the size that the printer wanted us to submit. It was a really interesting process, and as I say, now I wish I'd known more about it, because there was some kind of magic behind the whole thing that I never saw. I'm not even sure where they took it, because there were printers and typesetters in town, but I don't think this one was a particularly major one. I think they just gave us a good rate on it and they were tolerant of our crazy behavior. My understanding was they were there at midnight to actually accept it and start work on it because otherwise, it wouldn't have made any sense to make that deadline.
Anyway, it was sort of mysterious to me, what happened to it afterwards, and how it came back as a paper. Usually, I think it was a Monday that we had to have it in, and by Friday it was back and we had the actual paper smelling of fresh ink, and all that sort of thing. When the new editions came out, you couldn't touch them because the ink had to be completely absorbed into the paper. It would come off on your hands, but you'd smear the words too. So you had to, like, actually sit on your hands almost, and you would have a pencil where you would move the page one way or the other.
Since then, I've wished I knew more about it, but there were only a couple of people who ever had contact with the printers. Sometimes they would give us grief for different things we'd done that caused them trouble, and that would be passed on to me if it was something that I could that I could help with, but I never knew, it was kind of mysterious. It would just be handed over and come back.
Do you have a favourite memory to share from your time working at Prairie Fire?
I wouldn't say one. I was thinking about the War Measures Act. We published it on the front page of the paper. I don't think we discussed that long whether or not we should do it, but we were trying to figure out what was going to happen, what was likely. That was so intense because we all figured if our names were on the masthead, we had to be prepared to take responsibility for it. After that happened, I was living in the commune and we had somebody staying awake like 24 hours a day because we were sure they were going to come and arrest us. That they would, you know, take this opportunity to do a real grandstanding thing of arresting us. And they never did. I don't know if they ever did anywhere across the country. There weren't a lot of papers that did it though. They had to be pretty radical to do that. We thought we might actually go to jail, because it seemed like the authorities were kind of poised, I know here, you could just feel the police and the provincial government, which was at the time Ross Thatcher…
He was so easy to caricature and he did so many horrible things. You can see where Colin Thatcher came from, because he was his father's son. He was just always looking for an opportunity to crucify these annoying hippie commie pinkos that were constantly saying rude things about him, and he couldn't figure out why this was allowed, he was the Premier for Christ's sake! It should be legislated that everybody had to respect him and idolize him. We figured that would be a tailor-made opportunity for him to nail us to the barn door and that he would not miss it. But nothing happened. Nothing at all. In that case, they never came for us. There were a couple of occasions that they did.
First, the Sheldon Williams Riot, you've read articles in Prairie Fire about that. And the other case was sort of a tangential one, not really directly involved with politics or Prairie Fire, but we were given a certain number of tickets to this production of the musical Hair at the Centre of the Arts. And we, a bunch of us from the commune, went. At the end of it there was a big singing and dancing number where they encouraged people from the audience to come up on stage. Some of the people from the commune did go up on stage, and some of the cast members asked them if they knew where they could get marijuana. Of course, the people from the commune were very cooperative and hospitable and this was arranged. In fact, a couple of people from the commune went and helped these guys, I think gave them rides to the place that this could be bought and sort of facilitated that, introduced them to the people who were selling it, and then came home.
It turned out that the police had the cast’s hotel rooms staked out. They had heard rumours from other cities that the cast of this play, Hair, which was basically about hippies, had been purchasing marijuana as they went across the country, and this was going to stop in Regina. In the middle of the night, there was this strange phone call to the commune, where this garbled voice asked if Lipton was at home. We weren't expecting anything on that particular occasion, so whoever answered the phone said, “Sure, I'll get him.” The police were waiting right outside the door and came in as soon as it was confirmed, it was his name on the search warrant, so he had to be there at the time… And they turned that fucking house upside down! This happened not too long after the War Measures Act, so we either were storing all of our marijuana away from the house, or if it was in the house, it was in a very, very, very good hiding place. In fact they didn't find anything, but they went through everything in the kitchen, and they did things like open a canister of flour and in order to check whether or not there was marijuana in it, they would dump it out on the floor. Basically, they left us with this huge mess, but they never charged anybody in the end, because they couldn't actually find anything. We figured if they didn't find anything, they would plant it, you know, that they were prepared, they weren't going away empty-handed, but in the end they did. I'm not sure why. Maybe thought they would never need Plan B, they were definitely gonna nail these stinking hippies.
As bad as the police still are, to see them do things like refuse to evict the the camps in the legislative grounds, like at that time, the police chief actually stood up to what Moe was definitely trying to do, and refused to cooperate and be used in that way, which that would have never happened with that guy… Arthur Cookson was the police chief at that time, and he was like just an old style scumbag from the word go. It was really a turning point, I think. At that time, the police did the bidding of the people who were running the city, the rich people.
That was the whole process of the Sheldon Williams trial. They thought that was their chance to nail these people, and they went too far. Like they got so overconfident that they were identifying people that could prove that they were not anywhere near, even the city, they were like thousands of miles away and that affected the credibility. That was actually one of the things that the judge cited in finding that there wasn't enough evidence to convict Lipton, the one person that was sent to trial. Part of it was the lack of credibility because of all of the misidentifications that they had done. They thought it was like a slam dunk and they didn't need to really have any evidence or backup, it was just going to happen without any push back, and it didn't unfold that way.
But it was also, like, when people talk about the ‘60s, it's always sort of, you know, the free love and drugs, and all that kind of thing. But when you think of all of the world events that happened at this time, like it was right at the end of the Vietnam War, when people in the States had really had enough of it at this point. There were enough of their children and cousins and so forth who had been killed over there because it went on for years. Some of the atrocities that were brought out and, like, what they did… like the whole Napalm thing, dropping essentially, you know, fiery gasoline on people… the villages that they just went in, because they were pissed off at what the Viet Cong were doing to them, that they were losing all these battles, and and their people were being killed, and they were being essentially run out of the country in disgrace. They would just take revenge by going into a village that had nothing to do with the Viet Cong and just shoot people.
1970, which was the date of some of these newspapers, was when the Kent State Massacre happened, when the National Guard shot students. They knew the National Guard would be there but the students couldn't believe that they would use bullets, actually the directions that they had received was to shoot in the air, they just went crazy at a certain point. They were just pissed off and they just, they thought they would get away with it.
That happened in 1970 and all of these pivotal points, and plus in Saskatchewan, this was not even 10 years after the introduction of Medicare. It was the beginning of the National Farmers Union, which was a really progressive force in Saskatchewan particularly, because of the agricultural base. The NDP, most of that time under Tommy Douglas, had been in power for 20 years. And then the Liberals were elected at the end of the ‘60s, that was what we used to call “sharpening the contradictions”. The NDP lost, but it was way more progressive than it is today. Not that the current one isn't progressive in a social policy way, but there was a really progressive socialist wing of the NDP then called the Waffle. And just all the forces that were coming together in that little period of time.
It was really an exciting time to be involved in something like Prairie Fire, where you were really telling people about a world outside that was not as well known as today — everything is at your fingertips. At the same time as Prairie Fire was coming out, I took my first computer class and it was punch cards. You actually like typed it on a certain kind of machine, which made holes in little pieces of cardboard, and if you put those pieces of cardboard into a computer, it read the punches and something came out. You could actually do a story by typing through that, but that was the way you had to do it, you couldn’t just type something into a computer, you had to do the actual punch cards, which were not efficient really. If you made any mistakes, the whole thing was screwed, you couldn't use it, there was no correcting it. So you had to go back and redo the whole thing, and you had to notice the mistake in the first place. People didn't have the same access to information.
We were really, Prairie Fire was, exposing a world outside ours and, sort of talking, too, about our connection with it. There were not that many publications that were doing that kind of thing. There was at the time, a magazine called Ramparts, that was sort of similar but it was a national and international one, so it didn't really talk much about what was going on in Saskatchewan. That time was sort of the end of that super progressive tradition in Saskatchewan that we were trying to build on, and sort of bring back, and alert people to the fact that it was going the other way. I think also just being exposed to all of the people of the university who were involved in different things that were, like, way beyond what was happening here... But they were teaching classes. They were bringing up discussions and information that you wouldn't find if you weren't going to classes there. There was lots of discussion groups and sort of ersatz classes that were being taught by different people on communist theory and things like that.
I didn't know anything about it, I knew what communism was, but I didn't know any of the theory behind it or how it all fit together or anything like that. I got a pretty fast revelation to that through Prairie Fire too. It was a good time, I think, to be involved in something like that. We were all young and crazy and were prepared to do things that we wouldn't have done 25, 30 years later. You didn't have anything to lose at that age, you didn't have a family, you didn't have, you know, a 20-year career somewhere where you were going to put your pension in doubt if you got fired for taking a stand on something or that kind of thing. So, it was a good time for us, but also there were these elder statesmen that were sort of the advisors and the facilitators to our craziness, our youthful craziness. Anyways! I'm not even sure what question I was answering.
You have moved into the next question in a way. What do you find most impactful about Prairie Fire?
I guess just that, that until we looked at those papers, I'd forgotten about all the things that were going on and how it really… I can't think of anything else in Regina, in particular, that crystallized that movement at that time and what was going on here.
Also just the number of people that were working on Prairie Fire, like the guy who took the stuff to the printer… my memory is, his name was Norm Bolen and he was in one of the communes as well. He went on to work in the CBC for many years, and he was, at the time, running a public relations firm on the side that worked for a lot of progressive groups. And Lipton, who did all kinds of stuff in Regina and also went on to Toronto later. The woman who was my doctor for many years, Sally Mahood, was in the commune. There was a fellow named Brian Gladwell, who is a well-known woodworker, but he has also done pieces of furniture that were exhibited in the Norman Mackenzie and different things like that. And lots of other people that just worked behind the scenes, but continued, some just in their own personal lives, like there's lots of people that worked for a time on the paper that I still see around and they all went on to have different kinds of lives. One of them is the the father of Erin Weir, who was a member of Parliament for Regina for quite a while. There was a woman who has been a really progressive force, Val Overend, who has done a lot of the foundational work for women in trades. I think she just recently retired, but she was at the forefront of trying to get women involved in trades. A lot of those people stopped taking on such a public role, but they didn't change those convictions in the rest of their lives, they continued on with them.
What is the value of physical print publications like the Prairie Fire or the more contemporary prairie dog?
The thing is I would have a hard time commenting on that because that's the only form I've ever consumed media in, really. I guess I listen to some podcasts, but it's not usually in the nature of getting information. It's more like it's an entertaining story that I wanted to hear the ending of. I wouldn't know really how to compare that because I've done so little of the digital stuff.
I think too, these issues of the Prairie Fire are here now because it was hard copy. If it was a podcast or something like that, there'd probably be some way of retrieving it, but the hard copy, it's still here. Anyone could read it, you know, if they had white gloves on probably. It was so omnipresent, it was so easy to get a copy of it. You would just read it for, you know, the record reviews or the listing of concerts, or whatever. I do think that the hard copy had a sort of ongoing contribution that wouldn't have happened if it was digital, but the two of them together are important to benefit each other and to fill in gaps.
But you would probably be a better person to answer a question like that because as I say, I'm very predisposed towards print and hard copy of anything. I've got a stack of things to read. I use old newspaper to line my guinea pig cages, and if I come across an article, when I'm putting them in the cages, I tear that page out and fold it up to read later. Even just scanning something briefly, like the Globe & Mail has the back page of one of their sections, I see it all the time, that is obituaries on people that were instrumental, and some of them quite varied, like there's ones in sports and there's ones in the arts and there's ones that are just regular people that made some contribution, or scientists or something like that. You get to decide when you consume hard copy. I guess to some extent, you can do it with digital stuff if you have a recording of it, but the hard copy just sits there waiting patiently, you don't have to get your phone and you know, press the right button and and have 20 minutes to listen. Hard copy, I can read an article on three different trips to the bathroom to pee, you know, it's just sitting there waiting.
I think people also maybe today are more predisposed towards something that's in smaller chunks than we had at that time, that they're not as patient about reading something that's a whole page or even half a page, that they wander away mentally if they are trying to read something that goes on for too long. That's the crazy thing. Like, when I heard about TikTok, I thought, what is that? Nobody wants that? What can you do with that? You can't even play a whole song. You can't give an in-depth analysis of anything!
It’s interesting though, limited stuff like TikTok, or even Twitter used to have a character limit. But now, both formats have introduced a longer form, so it seems like there is still a desire for that, and then on YouTube you can go watch a four-hour in-depth essay on something, if you want to.
I know, and things like that master class thing. I think a lot of them are two-hour lectures, or maybe one hour, but you have to make more of an effort to get that, whereas things like TikTok, like people tell me, they go on TikTok and two hours later they're still there and they have forgotten what they came for initially, but they just started clicking on stuff.
Guilty.
I feel like that is really shortening people's attention spans to the extent that they almost won't absorb anything detailed. And a lot of important stuff, there's more than you can convey in 30 seconds or 10 seconds or 22 characters or whatever, you know?
I think there's something to be said for a tactile experience too. Like, when you’re on your phone, if you're consuming news or TikTok, or social media, or whatever, the tactile experience is the same, whereas a newspaper versus a novel… like you were talking about getting fresh editions of the Prairie Fire off the press and the smell of the fresh ink, and now that they're 50 years old there's the feel of the yellowing old newspapers…
I'm glad that some of them exist, but I hope that somewhere the whole run is there. I would bet that Barry Lipton probably had the whole set to start with, but maybe he gave them away to people who were supposed to bring them back and they didn't, or something happened to prevent them from doing that. I would bet that the reason that those are missing is because they were like the War Measures Act or something like that. There was something in them that more people wanted to look at.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Not that I can think of. I've already run off the mouth quite a bit!
All images used are taken from issues of the Prairie Fire. Collection of the Regina Eco Museum.