Inez Nordstrom was a reporter working out of the offices of the News-Optimist from 1968 until 1987. Even after she retired, she continued to write a column from her home well into the 1990s. Over those years, she made many friends, and they turned out in numbers to her 90th birthday party Oct. 11.
"That was a terrific party those kids threw," Nordstrum told the News-Optimist last week. It was organized by her three children, Darrell, Greg and Wendy.
"My daughter was the overseer of everything," said Nordstrom, including a surprise family photo shoot.
"She told me to wear a red sweater and black pants," she said. "I didn'tknow why, but I did it anyway."
It was a beautiful day, and she found herself taken to the grounds of the Saskatchewan Hospital where they were met by Ed Loewen and his team of horses and a buggy. She said she needed a ladder, but she was able to climb up into the buggy and 10 family members went for a ride.
Afterwards, they gathered for a family photo, with the rest of the family dressed in black and white.
"There are 23 members of my immediate family, and 23 members came, "said Nordstrom. "That's a remarkable occurrence."
She then donned a purple party dress, greeted hundreds of guests invited to her party at Porta Bella Restaurant, and sat down to supper with 60 friends and family members.
She noted the party was organized as something of a reunion of family and friends as well as a birthday party. Because her actual birthday is Dec. 26, when people are busy with Christmas, the Thanksgiving weekend was chosen as a time when it would be convenient for people to travel, she said. And they did, with guests from British Columbia to Ontario and places in between.
"I have a stack of cards you wouldn't believe," said Nordstrom.
Afterwards, she said she had dozens of phone calls saying how wonderful the party was.
"It was beautiful. I will think about it forever."
Nordstrom, who has been living in a retirement residence in Saskatoon for the last four years, said, "My heart never left North Battleford. The party could have been in Saskatoon but our friends all have their beginnings from the North Battleford area."
Inez Ferrari grew up in the Livelong area, having arrived there from Italy in 1927.
"My father came to Canada, which was the smartest thing he ever did, in 1925," said Nordstrom. "I was two weeks old."
She, her mother and her older brother came in October of 1927, sailing the Atlantic in steerage.
"Mother couldn't speak a work of English," said Nordstrom. "She was brave."
They joined her father, who had been sponsored to come to Canada, and made their home in the bottom of the saucer of land known as the Livelong Flats, four miles away from the hamlet of Livelong.
"Dad built a barn and we lived in the barn before the cattle did."
She attended a one-room school in Livelong, driving a horse and buggy in summer and horse and cutter in winter, or walking. When it was time to go to high school, it was a further walk through a farmer's field a ways outside the hamlet, where lessons were held in a "little old shack where snow whistled through the walls and we swept the dust into the cracks of the floor."
"It was very primitive."
When she was 18, she attended what was called, in those days, Normal School, a term derived from the French école Normale, an institution that provided instruction in the "norms" of school instruction. She attended for five weeks in preparations for a career as an elementary school teacher.
"The war was on, it was 1943," said Nordstrom. "I was green as grass and scared out of my wits, but it worked out OK."
Her first teaching job was in a one-room school six miles from the tiny hamlet of Robin Hood.
"It was absolutely wonderful,' said Nordstrom. "I pulled up my socks and I decided 'I'm going to make this work,' and I did."
She had 57 students in Grades 1 through 10. The Grade 10 student was only three years younger than she. He took correspondence studies, which she corrected.
"The children loved school. They were farm children who drove as far as six miles," said Nordstrom.
There was a barn to put the horses in, but, in winter, by the time they got to school their lunch was frozen. The Department of Education had decreed that teachers must make something hot for lunch, so she made hot chocolate, soup or a hot pudding in her teacherage.
"As long as they had something hot to go with their meal."
Every Friday, the chairs and benches would be pushed back and people would come to the school to dance or have card parties.
"People need people, and this was where they gathered."
Her teaching career was six years, all of which took place in the Medstead school unit.
The next step was becoming a wife and mother.
She met her husband, Clarence, at a dance welcoming soldiers home from the war. An army engineer, he was from Robin Hood, where they married before moving to Parkdale, then Meota (where she worked in Dart's store) and then North Battleford (where she found work at Woolworths).
It was from a friend at Woolworths that she heard about the job opening at the News-Optimist.
She's always loved to write, so she applied and was hired.
Nordstrom joined the staff of the News-Optimist in 1968. Her orientation was under deal a lady named Audna Voight, "who tried to teach me all she knew in one short week."
Nordstrom's first column was called People and Places. During her time at the paper she instigated a new department, the Lifestyle department, which saw the birth of a column called Potpourri. Nordstrom describes it as a column that offered a little bit of everything. It became a popular column and people shared items on varied topics of interest to both city and country readership.
She says in the preface of a book of Potpourri excerpts made for her family, "The women's page in those days consisted of stories of weddings and ladies teas - fluffy stuff I thought. Surely women have more worldly concerns as well!"
In addition to being the Lifestyles editor for the News-Optimist, she also edited Cut Knife's weekly paper, Highway 40 Courier, and wrote a wild game cooking column for Western Canada Outdoors. She edited all the local news sent in by the paper's community correspondents, totalling approximately 40 men and women, whose purpose was to connect with friends and neighbours near and far, and to earn some pin money. They were paid by the inch.
The News-Optimist was located in a small, downtown building at the time.
"My office was a little eagle's eyrie up high," she said. "You had to access it by walking up stairs."
Nordstrom said, "I used an old Underwood typewriter, two-finger style, wrote and re-wrote all copy longhand. I loved every minute of it!"
Some of the people she interviewed included Colonel Sanders of Kentuck Fried Chicken fame, country artist Ian Tyson, Canadian singers Catherine McKinnon and Anne Murray and classical guitarist Leona Boyd.
"Luckly I was raised on good music," said Norstrom, whose mother was a soprano and who had her daughter explain the stories of the classical music they listened to on the radio. "I acquired a taste for good classical music."
The highlight of her career as a reporter came with the visit by Pope John Paul II to Canada. She was assigned to cover his visit to Edmonton.
"I was thrilled! I saw the Popemobile just a few feet from where I was sitting."
She came back to North Battleford that night and "pulled an all-nighter" because her story had to be in the hands of her editor the next morning.
"I'll never forget that It was really quite something for a little girl from the prairies."
During the time Nordstrom worked at the News-Optimist, it was owned by C. Irwin McIntosh, who eventually became Saskatchewan's lieutenant governor, and as such was to divest himself from involvement with his business.
"He gathered us together and asked if we could look after it. We decided we would do it, and we pulled together," said Nordstrom. "The nice things about newspaper people is they're all working on one product - the paper. Everybody works together to produce one newspaper."
She said they developed a "very fine feeling of camaraderie and they are friends to this day."
After she retired when she was 63, she continued to write Potpourri from her home, from 1981 until the early 1990s.
Her husband passed away in 1997 after being in the regional care centre for four years, and she eventually moved into a condo, the new owners of which even came to her 90th birthday party. She moved to Saskatoon four years ago.
She enjoys the social aspects of her new home and visits often with friends and family.
Her son Darrell is a businessman in Saskatoon, semi-retired, her son Greg of North Battleford has retired from the Ministry of Highways, and her daughter Wendy continues to work as a nurse in Calgary.
It was Wendy who decorated the book they had made of excerpts from her newspaper career. Nordstrom plans to bequeath her copy to the City of North Battleford archives.
"I enjoy life, I enjoy challenge, I enjoy my friends and family," Nordstrom says.
