Brandon Sun moving to new home this spring

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/04/2022 (1253 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Over the Brandon Sun’s 140-year history, the paper has grown, transformed and moved, just like the Wheat City has.

This spring the newspaper is saying goodbye to its current home of almost 58 years on Rosser Avenue and taking a trip down the road to a suite in The Town Centre Mall.

From its early days in a frame building on 12th Street to its more than 59 years on 10th Street, the Sun has been an integral part of downtown Brandon and its growth over the years has reflected the city’s rise from pioneer settlement along the railway to Manitoba’s second-largest city and regional hub.

As the times and technology have changed, so have the Sun’s needs for space, equipment and personnel.

When the Sun’s original publisher and owner W.J. White reflected on his arrival in Brandon in 1881 in a special section of the paper commemorating Brandon’s 45th birthday in 1927, he said he initially thought the city consisted of nothing but tents.

He eventually discovered he was wrong. There were a few buildings and two pieces of wood lining the side of each road acting as a poor set of sidewalks.

The Sun’s first permanent office was located on 12th Street, south of the Daymin Court building at 1202 Rosser Ave. Out of that frame building, the paper’s original format was a daily four-page tabloid.

Though that building no longer exists, the Archives of Manitoba possess a photo of the building from 1958, indicating it survived for more than 75 years.

After 14 years, the Sun had grown just like Brandon and needed to move to a bigger location. The second home for the newspaper was the Patmore Florist Building at 183 Eighth St.

After that stint, the paper moved to 24 10th St., its final home before settling on Rosser Avenue for almost six decades. As the paper continued to grow, so did its home.

In the early days on 10th Street, the sign on the outside simply said “The Sun.” Later, when the paper changed its name to reflect a more thorough publishing schedule, the sign changed to read “The Brandon Daily Sun.”

Publisher J.B. Whitehead had the building established after getting a permit in 1905, with the first newspaper being published out of there arriving in 1906. Expansions and renovations were done to the 10th Street location in 1952 and against in 1957.

After the Sun would leave the space in the following decade after more than 59 years at its second home, the building became the Drop-In Centre, a seniors facility.

Before newspapers were sold out of the Rosser location, it was a farm implement dealership.

In 1963, the Sun purchased what had been a John Deere dealership at 501 Rosser Ave., originally built in 1947.

However, it needed a bit of work — including the installation of a printing plant — before employees moved in and got to work.

“Traffic along Rosser Avenue between Fifth and Sixth Streets slowed perceptibly this week as passersby stopped to watch the large crane positioning the huge slabs that will face the new Brandon Sun building,” a page from the Aug. 7, 1964 edition of the Sun reads.

“The slabs, weighing three and a half tonnes each, are made of white quartz pressed into concrete and are part of the $500,000 expansion and renovation of The Sun. The new plant, modern in every way, air conditioned and equipped with new presses is expected to be completed next month.”

Where the 10th Street location had 7,000 total square feet of space over three floors, the Rosser building had 18,000 square feet of production space and 19,000 square feet of warehouse space.

The last paper completely published out of the 10th Street location was on Nov. 7, 1964, with production expected to move full-time to the new location the following Monday. However, the presses at the old home were being kept in working condition in case any teething problems arose at the new place.

Most of the furniture and equipment were moved over to the new building, but the existing press was replaced by a 40-ton Goss duplex tubular press, which could put out 30,000 newspapers in an hour and allowed the Sun to finally print in colour.

The front page of that day’s paper features a front-page drawing of Li’l Abner from the long-running comic strip of the same name along with a couple of the series’ supporting characters drawn by creator Al Capp.

“We’re hurryin’ to spread the word — The Brandon Sun is moving into new quarters … and they sure are purty!” Li’l Abner exclaims in the drawing.

Despite working out of the Rosser building since the year before, the grand reopening ceremony was held on June 17, 1965.

On hand to unveil the dedication plaque was then-Canadian Press general manager Gillis Purcell, whose father had worked for the Sun decades prior.

When the Sun published an edition commemorating the opening of the Rosser location, it was reported there were 73 regular employees and 241 paper carriers.

That plaque remains in the same place to this day, on the second floor near the entrance to the main reception area on the west side of the building.

Moving with the times, the Sun upgraded its equipment in 1973 by installing new offset presses and introducing computerized type-setting.

When Cathy Arthur, the Sun’s current longest-tenured employee, first started working at the paper in 1986, it was an extremely busy place.

She estimates there were around 140 to 150 employees then, enough to make a seat in the breakroom a rare commodity during lunchtime. Though it was before her time, Arthur remembers colleagues talking about the canteen that used to operate in the building, with a cook providing hot lunches.

She started off working in the composition room, where editorial staff would send their work to be assembled for the next daily edition.

“We designed ads and laid out the paper,” Arthur said. “Editorial would draw up a layout sheet and then they’d send all the copy to us. We’d print them off and then have to lay out the pages and shoot them to the darkroom to make negatives who would then shoot those out to make plates.”

Advances in technology mean darkrooms are no longer needed and layouts can be done directly on a computer and sent to the press, leaving both of those spaces mostly unused these days.

When U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, a Sun staffer had to drive out to Winnipeg to get copies of photos off of a plane landing at midnight and bring them back to Brandon for the next day’s paper. That kind of effort is no longer necessary with the advent of the internet.

After being laid off in 1990, Arthur was invited back a year and a half later to work as an editorial assistant.

Visitors to the Sun building in recent years might remember the newsroom is an enclosed space, with steps up to a room currently housing the advertising department and a hallway leading to the Sun’s print archives.

Back in the 1990s, the downstairs of the Rosser building was a lot more open, with no walls separating the newsroom from adjacent departments. While there was a main reception desk on the second floor, the editorial department also had receptionists.

Currently empty and disused, the warehouse had a second floor with a change room and lockers so the pressmen could put on their uniforms when arriving at work.

Recently, the west second floor contained the classifieds department and the advertising department, with executives and the boardroom on the eastern side of the floor.

In the basement were the graphics and editorial departments on the east side, with a break room and the circulation department on the west side. Due to the sunk-in nature of the newsroom and the yellow paint covering some of the walls and pillars, the epithet “The Sungeon” has sometimes been applied to the newsroom.

One of the major changes to operations at the Rosser location was in 2010, when the company’s printing presses were shut down.

“That was a very, very depressing day,” Arthur said.

When the presses were active, Arthur can remember a slight rumble and a low hum permeating the building. After they were shut down, the loss of employees working on the press and in the mailroom combined with the empty spaces made the building a lot quieter.

Another sad day for Arthur will be when she has to say goodbye to the building she has worked out of for the last 36 years.

“They’re going to have to drag me out of here,” she said with a chuckle. “Right now it’s like ‘oh yeah, no big deal,’ but the day’s coming and it’s going to be a sad day. Too many memories left in this building.”

Now 12 years after the closure, the machinery and equipment that used to churn out copies of the Sun and The Globe and Mail is largely gone, but the magnitude of the operation can still be felt when seeing how much space used to be needed on daily basis.

The Sun’s new digs are on the western side of The Town Centre, adjacent to the optometrist on the opposite side of the building from where the Western Manitoba Regional Library is located.

An official opening date has yet to be set, but it will be sometime in May. Work is currently underway to move furniture, set up workstations and put the finishing touches on renovations.

“As the newspaper business changes, The Brandon Sun is changing with it,” said Eric Lawson, the FP Canadian Newspapers executive in charge of the Sun.

“Our new location will give us an office that better suits our contemporary needs while maintaining a high profile downtown. Our customers will be able to find us easily and we will be well-positioned to keep our finger on the pulse of Westman, as we always have.”

The Sun will publish a notice when the new office is ready to open and continue the paper’s almost six decades of history on Rosser Avenue.

» cslark@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @ColinSlark