By Gordon Brock

There has been a longstanding relationship between The Temiskaming Speaker and the Royal Canadian Legion, and Remembrance Day.

The Speaker began publication in 1906. It was started by a father and son team, E. F. and A.E. Stephenson.

They owned and operated the paper from 1906 until they sold it in 1939 to a group led by Cecil Bond.

When World War I broke out in 1914 and many local residents enlisted and went overseas, The Speaker began publishing the letters home written by the soldiers.

It’s been stated before — we don’t know how or if these letters made it through government censors back then but those correspondences did find their way on to the front page of The Speaker during those war years.

The 1938 sale of The Speaker from the Stephensons to a group headed by Cecil Bond took effect in 1939 which was the year that saw the beginning of World War II.

While World War II didn’t end until August 1945 (actually, officially, in early September), the Nazi unconditional surrender in May of 1945 really marked the end of fighting for Temiskaming soldiers as very few moved on to fight in the Pacific.

The summer of that year saw our soldiers start to trickle back home. However, some of them didn’t return to Canada until early 1946 as they were part of our troops that oversaw the beginning of the reconstruction of Germany.

At the end of World War II, The Temiskaming Speaker published on the front page of the paper many of the pictures of the local soldiers that were killed.

In the 1980s The Speaker began a practice of attending the various Remembrance Day services. A practice that continues to this day.

In the 1990s The Speaker began publishing an annual Remembrance Day tabloid. Before that, the paper did periodic stories around November 11 on veterans and the paper did stories on contemporary local servicemen — whether they be in Bosnia, or in the Gulf coast or stationed anywhere in the world.

At the turn of the millennium, The Speaker began focusing on the stories of our surviving World War II veterans.

But we did not exclude our other local serviceman. For example, The Speaker received an Ontario Community Newspaper Association Award for its coverage of the New Liskeard 2010 funeral of Sgt. Martin Goudreault who was killed serving in Afghanistan.

We know in the years ahead Remembrance Day will evolve as will The Temiskaming Speaker’s coverage of it locally. But the war efforts of our local people: from those World War I soldiers, who were this paper’s first letters to the editor writers, to Sergeant Martin Goudreault won’t be forgotten.

All of them offered themselves up to die to serve for a greater good and that is why The

Temiskaming Speaker and this community will always remember.

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Gordon Brock was the editor of The Temiskaming Speaker from 1985 to 2017. His columns have appeared in The Speaker since 1984.