Jeff Green | Oct 29, 2015


It has been a strange week here at the News. A Tuesday power failure certainly put a kink in the works. Seven hours sitting around waiting for the power to come back so we could put the paper together was not exactly part of our plan.

We attempted to fire up two different generators. The first one ran smoothly but did not put any power out. The second one certainly put out power, but just as the computers began kicking into life, one of the surge protector power bars popped, and seconds later sparks started flying out of another one. We shut the beast down and decided to wait it out.

Some other odd things happened as well, nothing major, just enough to throw us a little off kilter as we carried out the normally straightforward tasks of putting out a newspaper.

I think I know the reason why. Monday was the last day that Dale Ham came in to help with typing, proof-reading and formatting.

Dale has been coming in on most Mondays since about 1995. She was here before all of the rest of us. But now that Dale and her husband Tom, a dedicated community volunteer in his own right, are moving to Ottawa, she will no longer be coming in on Mondays.

Dale said that when she first applied to be a volunteer with the North Frontenac News, she got all dressed up for an interview with Linda Rush, who was then the executive director of North Frontenac Community Services, which ran the paper as a not-for-profit enterprise for almost 30 years.

“I quickly learned that there was no need to dress up to work at the News,” Dale said this week, a situation that she added has not changed since the paper became a private, for profit enterprise in the summer of 2000.

When I started at the News 18 months later, Dale was driving her friend and fellow retired teacher, Doreen Howes, in to volunteer at the paper each Monday. They pored over the columns, gossiping some of the time but considering the fine points of grammar most of the time.

The first Monday when Dale came in after Doreen died a few years later was certainly a poignant day, more difficult than it will be next Monday when Dale is not here. That's because we know that Dale and Tom, after spending over 20 years making Central Frontenac a more livable community, are looking forward to enjoying life in the City of Ottawa. They are leaving on their own terms, with no regrets.

They arrived as young seniors in Parham in the early 1990s, built a home, and each took on their own volunteer roles with a long list of groups and organisations, including: the Festival of Trees, Northern Frontenac Community Services, Community Living, and Rural Legal Services. They played bridge together on Fridays and once a month Dale went to the book club she founded. When they weren't volunteering they were entertaining grandchildren, visiting with friends or just enjoying life on the lake. Life has been an adventure for them in this community and they are looking forward to the next adventure, this time with no property maintenance concerns to worry about.

We will miss Dale's guidance, and the work she does on the paper, and we will miss the interesting conversations during breaks from work even more. Over years you learn how someone thinks, the specific ways they react to things that happen in the community and in the world at large. You get used to them being around.

We'll certainly miss Dale and Tom in our community and at the News, and we wish them all the best in their new life in Ottawa.

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