Sault native completes labour of love, compiles index of Algoma district news stories from 1960s (2 photos)

Sault Ste. Marie native Brian Latham has completed an extensive compilation of stories written by Sault Star reporter Dorothy MacKenzie (1924-1998), who covered news in towns and villages outside the Sault in the 1960s.

Her column, entitled All Along and Off the Line, focused on news and feature stories in the Algoma district, from Spanish to the east, Wawa to the north and St. Joseph Island and Manitoulin Island to the south.

“Dorothy MacKenzie lived on North Street, just a block away from our place, and I knew and went to school with her daughter Ella Jean,” Latham recalled, speaking to SooToday in a telephone interview from his home in Yellowknife, N.W.T.

Ella Jean MacKenzie (later Ella Jean Richter), went on to be locally well known and respected for her community involvement with Sault North Rotary, the Sault College board of governors, the Group Health Centre, the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation (NOHFC) and the PUC among many other groups and causes, and awarded the city’s medal of merit in 2016. 

Richter, interested in Latham’s project, provided him with her scrapbook collection of her mother’s newspaper articles, but died in May 2018 before Latham’s project could be completed.

“Because Ella Jean and I were neighbours I sometimes hung out at her house and got to know Dorothy, and discovered she was a journalist with the Sault Star. To me, for her to be a journalist and have her stories printed, it was something different, and really interesting to me,” Latham said.

“She interviewed all these people from Wawa to Spanish, covering their events and to talk to them about their history. I thought ‘here’s a project calling out that needs to be done.’”

“Copyright laws would not permit the publication of the complete texts of Dorothy’s stories without the rights holder’s consent, so we went for an original transcribed index. I have no intent for financial gain and do not want to restrict distribution to anyone doing their own historical or genealogical research. It is a gift to the history of an area that may be otherwise forgotten,” Latham stated.

“Dorothy's great pride was being recognized for reporting on First Nations communities, not often covered by the media of the day. This may have led to Ella Jean Richter’s later involvement with the Ted Nolan Foundation (Nolan is mentioned in the index of stories Latham compiled).”

“There was one story Dorothy did about a fellow who was a British Home Child. He was born before 1900, and she spoke to him 50 years ago,” Latham said, when asked if there is a MacKenzie story which particularly stands out in his memory.

Home Children was a child migration program established in 1869, through which more than 100,000 children were sent from the United Kingdom to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa to relocate homeless children, but many were treated badly and used as child labourers. The Home Children program was suspended, for the most part, in the 1930s.

The UK formally apologized for the program in 2010.

Canada did not.

Latham completed the index this summer, estimating it took four years for him to finish it.

Richter’s help in providing her scrapbook was invaluable, said Latham, who also hired a researcher at Toronto’s Archives of Ontario to transcribe the index of MacKenzie’s stories.

“As for distribution of the index, I hope it will be available to everyone in Algoma. It will be in the Sault Library collection, either in hardcopy or electronically,” Latham said.

Latham hopes to have the index available at libraries throughout the Algoma region.

“It was a pretty buoyant time (when MacKenzie wrote in the 1960s). The International Bridge was built, Highway 17 was extended to Montreal River. It was a very optimistic era, especially for me because I was a teenager at the time,” Latham said.

Latham was born and raised in the Sault, though he chuckled “I went to good old Cody Public School, which is not there anymore, went to high school at Bawating, which is not there anymore, so there’s not too much evidence I was there.”

After high school, he studied in London, Ont. before he worked as a federal government employee in the N.W.T. within what is now known as the Ministry of Indigenous and Northern Affairs.

After his retirement as a federal government employee 20 years ago, Latham, though a Sault native, calls Yellowknife home.