Niagara Has Lost A Great Lover of Newspapers And A Great Guy

By Doug Draper

He was a great lover of newspapers when they deserved to be loved and one of the best friends a journalist could ever have.

Bruce Williamson

His name was Bruce Williamson – known affectionately to his legions of friends and former colleagues in the St. Catharines area as ‘Booty’ – and he was one of the guiding spirits at the St. Catharines Standard in its final decades as an independent newspaper owned by the Burgoyne family. He also had more to do than he possibly ever knew with inspiring young journalists to go out there and dig for the kind of stories that earned the respect of the community and won provincial and sometimes even national newspaper awards, even though he never had a byline in the paper himself.

Booty, who worked for 43 years as a printer in the Standard’s composing room until his retirement in 1992, died this past Dec. 10 following a short battle with cancer, but he won’t be forgotten by this journalist and numerous others whom he inspired with his passion and support, and his steadfast belief that newspapers have a duty to their communities. My friend and fellow former Standard colleague John Nicol, now a producer of news at CBC in Toronto, put it this way in a note to me following the news of Booty’s death.

“Booty, to me, will always have that boyish twinkle in his eye,” wrote John. “He had a natural joie de vivre and a welcome deportment that could only come from a good upbringing. What also made him special, though, was his up-close view of the newspaper business. As a pressman, he saw the value of a newspaper to provide the checks and balances for society, and it infused his own sense of justice. He worked for a family business that rewarded loyalty, and his dedication to the cause inspired his contemporaries and many who came after him. We will miss his kind.”

I’ll never forget Booty in the spring of 1998, when he was already retired for six years and could have been out there playing golf our bowling with his friends, or at home doing his woodwork or writing poetry, coming into a smelly old, abandoned bank building on James Street in St. Catharines where we, from the Standard newsroom, were now on strike against Conrad Black and the Hollinger corporation that now owned the paper and were systematically cutting its staff.

He was clearly troubled by what he saw happening to the paper he devoted more than half of his 77 years to and wondered what he could do to help. We asked him to help us deliver the strike paper we called the Independent to neighbourhoods across the city and he did so, without fail, for the three weeks we were on strike, and there was never any doubt he’d continue helping if we were out for a year. That’s how much he cared.

In an obituary his family ran in his old paper, it was noted that Bruce “truly loved his life and enriched all he knew with his integrity, decency, quite strength and good humour.”

Obituaries are sometimes a little inflated. But in this particular case, no truer words could ever be said.