Jule Koch – Brison 1951-2016

Jeff Green | Dec 21, 2016

Last Thursday (December 15) Jule Koch died peacefully in her sleep at St. Mary’s by the Lake hospital in Kingston, two months after her 65th birthday. She took ill in late October with what she thought was Lyme’s disease, but found out on November 2nd that she had Leukemia. Treatments in mid and late November failed to halt the progress of the cancer.  A memorial service for her is set of Friday, December 23 at 3:00 at Sharbot Lake Pentecostal Church. A reception will follow at St. James Major Catholic Church Hall, also in Sharbot Lake.

Many readers of this paper did not even know who Jule was. That was partly because a lot of what goes on at a newspaper and news website happens behind the scenes. Receiving and processing email and phone calls, copy editing, and performing dozens of other tasks takes hours of time and effort each week. Jule’s title at the paper was Managing Editor but she called herself an office rat. Most days of the week she came in after everyone had left and worked into the night. The other reason that reader’s did not know who she was is that she liked it that way. The last thing she would want is an article like this to be written about her, and the tributes that can be found on page 6?

Jule came to Canada from Guyana when she was 12 or 13, and moved to Clarendon Road around 1971. She lived there with her first husband Gerald for almost 20 years, most of that at time with no running water or hydro. She became a master basket-maker and sold her work throughout the region. She believed in simple, sturdy designs, and the willow and dogwood baskets and furniture, even those that are over 30 years old, are as strong and beautiful as they were when she first made them. In 2000, her second husband David purchased the Frontenac News. Shortly after he took over, Jule started helping out at the paper. She realised that the running a paper was more than David thought it would be, and it turned out she had a pretty good instinct for  it. Pretty quickly she became central to the operation of the paper, and stayed in that role until a few weeks ago. When David owned the paper, her own ‘pay’ was a tiny ad called “The promise” a different line of scripture that runs in the paper week. I started working for both of them in January of 2002, and soon after that David became ill. It turned out he had pancreatic cancer, and he died on December 11, 2002, almost exactly 14 years before Jule died.

After David died, Jule became the owner of the paper and I worked for her as editor. She believed in the concept of the Frontenac News that its founders were committed to, service to the local community. She was willing to sit with the paper until late on production night each and every week to make sure that everything was in order. In 2008, Jule sold the paper to me, but we both kept our jobs, me as editor/reporter, and she stayed on as managing editor. While we have worked closely together for 15 years, we rarely agreed on fundamental issues, particularly anything that had to do with religion, as she was a Pentecostal and I am an atheist. Issues such as same-sex marriage and a host of others were a challenge, and she even wrote the occasional letter to the editor against positions that I took in the paper.
Aside from her work at the paper, Jule took care of her mother for years. With help from Tarasick carpentry, she built a log house using logs from an old home, and kept improving the house year after year. Although she stopped making baskets she conducted workshops several times each summer and demonstrated at local festivals. A few years ago she started up a Community Christmas dinner in Sharbot Lake, which is going great guns and will continue to operate into the future. She also looked after many people in the community, sometimes for a short time and sometimes for years. She was planning to retire this week, after working on over 900 issues of the Frontenac News. She did not know what she was going to do, but I have no doubt there would have been new careers in her future. No one loved being productive more than Jule did.

She did not want anyone to say anything nice about her after she was gone. She complained that people always seemed to become saints after they die. Jule was no saint, she was stubborn, resistant to change and strong willed. She was also kind, polite to a fault, and non-judgmental, and she loved to jump full bore into a project.

No matter which one of us owned the paper, we ran it as a partnership for 14 years. Keen and even not to keen, readers have no doubt noticed the number of typos and more serious errors that have crept into the paper since November 2nd, but her role was more fundamental than that. I work hard on the paper, I don’t mind saying that, but no one put more into it than she did. You don’t replace that kind of commitment. She cared about the paper but more than that she cared about the role the paper plays in the community. We will carry on and will work to plug the gap that she has left behind. We knew her retirement was coming and had some plans in place, but no one was ready for what happened, except perhaps Jule herself, because of her faith and because of her attitude toward life.

But she was the heart and soul of this enterprise for 16 years, and a valuable community member for almost 50 years. She leaves family and friends behind, and anyone who is any kind of fan of this newspaper is indebted to her, as am I.

I would like to thank the columnists and other writers for their patience with me over the last month or so. I also want to thank our staff; Kate, Susie, Jesse, Julie, Dale and Wilma, for the extra effort they have made to keep the paper together in recent weeks. I also want to thank my wife Martina for her support, and Chava for coming back early for the holidays to help. A special thank you goes out to Scott Cox for coming through as I knew he would when things were difficult.

As I wrote above we will be back on January 12 and there will be some interesting changes coming to the old ‘North Frontenac’ in the new year.

We do not have office hours as of 5:00 tonight (Thursday, December 22) until Monday, January 9th at 8:30, but will be open by chance or appointment. We will be checking phone messages and email throughout that time.

We wish you all a happy Christmas and a pleasant holiday season.