The first edition of this newspaper, the Thompson Citizen, Volume 1, Number 1, was published on Friday, June 3, 1960 – 50 years ago tomorrow. It was eight pages and owner-publisher W.H. “Duke” DeCoursey noted on the front page that “this week’s edition of the Thompson Citizen is ‘on the house’ – but the publisher has sad news: hereafter the following charges will be applicable: single copy 10¢: by subscription, two years for a five spot or a year for three dollars.”

DeCoursey had arrived from Dauphin where he at first leased and later owned Parkview Printing. While the story of Grant and Joan Wright, who followed soon after in March 1961, starting the Nickel Belt News, first published out of The Northern Mail in The Pas, and later on Kelsey Bay, underneath what is now the front entrance of the City Centre Mall, is better known, as the Wright family stayed on as feisty, independent newspaper proprietors, DeCoursey nine months earlier had – albeit initially still in Dauphin through his Parkview Publishing Limited, formed in May 1960 – produced the Thompson Citizen – this paper – and his story deserves to be remembered and told at least in part. Grant Wright himself described DeCoursey as “the pioneer publisher in Thompson.”

If it is forgotten, it is perhaps because Thompson would be only one of many colourful stops on DeCoursey’s Northern newspapering career. During his 1960’s sojourn in Thompson, DeCoursey also wrote a popular column for the paper called, “Duke’s Mixture,” and was proprietor of the Northlander, Thompson’s first confectionary store. He located both the candy and newspaper operations originally in the basement of the Strand Theatre building.

Born in Montana, DeCoursey had a knack for being where the action was. In 1960, with the new model mining town and the International Nickel Company of Canada Limited (INCO), that place was Thompson, which DeCoursey visited for the first time in February 1960. On April 6, 1960, he ran a special Thompson section with his Central Manitoba News out of Dauphin. Less than two months later, the Thompson Citizen was launched.

Yet, before the 1960s ended, after six years of fierce rivalry, DeCoursey and the Wrights merged ownership of their two weeklies in 1967 as the Precambrian Press Ltd., with the Thompson Citizen becoming a paid circulation daily for a time, while the Nickel Belt News remained weekly but became free distribution. DeCoursey served as the first editor of the combined publications. The papers moved to their current Commercial Place home in 1970. DeCoursey had retired in 1969, selling his interest in the business to Joan Wright, who repaid him within 20 years, and moved to British Columbia.

DeCoursey was a veteran newsman and Northern pioneer who had entered the newspapering and printing business during the hard times of the Great Depression in 1930, staring out as a “printer’s devil” in Alberta bush country at the Rimbey Record.

By 1939, DeCoursey also owned Alberta weeklies in Thorsby, Leduc and Winfield. He sold the papers during the Second World War while serving mainly in the press liaison section of the Canadian Air Force and later Canadian Army until 1945.

That same year – in May 1945 – as the war ended, DeCoursey moved to Yellowknife and launched the News of the North. Within two months, DeCoursey wrote an open letter to the government railing against the beer shortage, editorializing on July 2, 1945 that it was a threat to law and order: “Because of the fact that so many follow the urge to get as much as possible of a rationed commodity, Yellowknife has not been the well-behaved town Saturday nights it was during the pre-ration days. In fact we are quite certain that during the past four weekends, the RCMP have been very busy.”

Thompson was not the first place the DeCoursey and Wright families would cross paths. In 1956, when DeCoursey moved to Manitoba it was to work as a printer for The Northern Mail in The Pas. The Northern Mail had been purchased the year before by – you guessed it – George Ostry of Flin Flon and the Wright family, namely Orson F. Wright. Later incorporated as the Northern Publishing Company, it published The Pas Herald and Nickel Belt News.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, Orson F. Wright was a prominent lawyer and Liberal Party member, who served as mayor of Flin Flon between 1941 and 1943, was appointed King’s Counsel (K.C.) and became a district coroner in 1942, who also served as a Crown attorney and was the father of Grant Wright, who would later become noteworthy at the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News for his small “c” conservative views. During the 1990 provincial election campaign, when Joan Wright worked on Progressive Conservative candidate Loretta Clarke’s losing campaign, a pile of Tory campaign signs was dumped surreptitiously in front of the Thompson Citizen. Grant Wright himself noted in a piece on July 8, 1981, “this newspaper has always been accused of having a conservative bias.”

DeCoursey, never one to let the grass grow under his feet, had by June 1956 moved onto Dauphin and Parkview Printing. Thompson would be his next stop four years later.

DeCoursey eventually would publish some of his tales out of Parkview Publishing in Squamish in his autobiography, All in a Lifetime: Newspapering and Other Pioneer Adventures.

Time, of course, no more stands still for newspapers than it does for other businesses or people. So in January 2007, after almost 46 years of newspapering in Thompson, the Wright family sold the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News to Glacier Media Inc. of Vancouver. While new ownership has meant new resources, new opportunities and even, at times, perhaps a new way of looking at things, we remain proud of our past, of our history, and especially those Thompson newspaper pioneers – W.H. “Duke” DeCoursey and Grant and Joan Wright. We’re here today 50 years later because of their vision and their blood, sweat and tears.

The very first editorial in the Thompson Citizen on June 3, 1960 explained, “Politically we have no axe to grind for anyone. We prefer to keep our newspaper in a position so that we can commend or condemn local, provincial or national issues as we see them; at the same time, we’ll not hesitate to express ourselves editorially when we consider that a reason calls for expression of opinion by The Citizen.”

Fifty years later, that still sums up our editorial philosophy.