Picking up now on last week’s Timmins history feature about the first newspaper in town, the Porcupine Advance.
Museum director-curator Karen Bachmann tells us it began briefly in 1912 and was revived in 1915 by George Lake.
“They had all kinds of wonderful things printed in there,” she observes. “You could find your social calendar, they attended council meetings both in Timmins and in Tisdale. As the paper grew, they were up to printing two and sometimes three editions a day, depending on what was happening, and the paper really flourished.”
Lake kept publishing the paper weekly and bi-weekly until 1950.
Bachmann calls editions of the Advance “wonderful to look through” to see what the community was like even the ads that tell you what businesses were here.
“There’s a little gossipy section in the back called ‘Items from Timmins’ and you can find out who was marrying who and all those good things and who was a bad boy and what they did and all those bad things.”
We’ll come back to this topic next week, as the newspaper continued to evolve.