Buying newspaper was beginning of the rest of my life (09/26/03)

I was 25 when I came to Sudbury for the first time 30 years ago.

I can say with the assurance of hindsight that I didn’t have a clue what I was getting in to.

Of course, it wasn’t the first time or the last time I would act without a clue, but as things would turn out, it was one of those life-changing moments you only recognize when you have survived.

It was high adventure.

It started in Little Current, Manitoulin Island, where I was running the Manitoulin Expositor for an old friend Rick McCutcheon.

For a number of reasons, too numerous to enumerate here, I had bought a building in Little Current and moved the newspaper on short notice to a new home. Let’s just say we were leaving a landlord who no longer wished to provide the Expositor a home (even though we paid our rent) because of our editorial stance on matters important to him.

Some months later a fellow showed up at my office door in Little Current selling carpet for the House of Broadloom here in Sudbury. He was the scion of a rich family from southern Ontario and he had managed to lose the family fortune (a construction company) in relatively short order. Subsequently he decided to disappear to a small constituency not far from Parry Sound, far from his Hamilton roots, where he eventually became reeve. He drove to Sudbury during the week and sold carpet for Ron Lewis and Cam Stewart.

I explained to this interloper that although it was clear my building would look nicer with carpet, we had managed to get the paper out last week without it, and on balance I had more important things to spend my money on.

He was persistent. We retired to the Anchor Inn for a beer. Some 20 beers later, (financed by my new friend which might be a clue as to why he lost the family fortune) we stumbled from the Anchor Inn and retired to my cabin to sleep it off. In the morning I promised if he would go away, I would come to Sudbury on my motorcycle in a week or two and look at carpet.

I had very little interest in buying carpet but it was a good run on the bike and I kept my promise within the month.

When I arrived at the House of Broadloom, there was no sign of the reeve, but Ron Lewis one of the proprietors was in. He inquired if I was the fellow from Manitoulin who ran the newspaper. I replied in the affirmative.

With little fanfare he explained that he and his partner were the proprietors of a weekly newspaper in Sudbury called Northern Life. It had replaced a previous paper called Sudbury Life, which had run out of money, and the new Northern Life had lost $250,000 in less than a year and it was getting on the nerves of his partner.

I commiserated. I’d never known anyone who could lose that much money and still function. It was breathtaking.

He then made the offer that launched my career.

He said he would give me a hell of deal on the carpet if I would take the newspaper off his hands.

Although, I have absolutely no complaints, I must tell you, if someone offers you a business that is losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for a discount on a consumable item, give it careful thought. I didn’t.

I said OK.

I didn’t know anyone in Sudbury. When I got back to Manitoulin someone gave me the name of Ron Heale, who

was a partner in a company called Brunton Browning Day and Partners.

We agreed to meet at the Northern Life office at the corner of Cedar and Durham on a Friday night to look at the

books.

It was a short meeting.

Ron took one look at the unpaid taxes, the lawsuits, the payables, the receivables, the massive losses, and laughed hysterically.

It was so funny he called his friend Rennie Mastin of the Desmarais, Keenan Beaudry law firm and suggested we meet for a beer at the old Coulson Hotel to enjoy the tale.

As I think back, beer (scotch when I could afford it), seemed to play a central roll in much of our corporate planning.

In any event, by the end of the night I had convinced them it was their civic duty to keep Northern Life alive.

It was the beginning of the rest of my life.

With Rennie and Ron in as investors, it fell to me to call the printer who was owed something north of a hundred thousand dollars to explain to him he had a choice between losing his money to a bankruptcy or exchanging it for equity in the new Northern Life. That was a fairly simple equation for Andy Markle, proprietor of Bayweb printing at the time, and we were off to the races.

In fact, on the surface, it seemed so successful Ron Lewis decided he had given up a potential gold mine and demanded to be allowed to stay in the deal for 20 per cent.

Eight weeks later, when I had managed to lose our entire investment he changed has mind. At that point, in came Bob Bateman and the scrambling began in earnest.

Helpfully, the Sudbury Star, went on strike not long after that and we went from losing our shirts, to working 24

hours a day to put out a paper that was 10 times the size we were equipped to handle.

Next Week: The first five years were a blur.

Michael Atkins is the president of Northern Life.