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After the Pennysaviour

Introduction

As I noted, the next year we did a parody of the local paper The Windsor Star. Actually it was supposed to be a parody of The Globe and Mail. Terry and I wanted to do a parody of a Detroit entertainment weekly called Orbit. This would be the Windsor version and it would be called "Obit", implying Windsor's dead night life. But since the paper was a democracy, most people sided with some yahoo's starkly original Globe and Mail concept. Yeah.

Terry was appointed editor. We knew we had to put an original spin on it and the newly elected NDP government under Bob Rae gave Terry a great idea. One of Rae's mandates was to combat the 1991 recession by dispersing around the province thousands of Toronto government jobs. Sarnia would get the Ministry of Labor. North Bay would get the Ministry of Health. Most people who worked all their lives for the Ontario government in Toronto (a city of about 3 million and 9 good restaurants) hated the idea of going to some jerk water town that had only 2 good restaurants. Anyway, our idea was that the Rae government, faced with an even more dire economic situation than anticipated, would go one better than their original plan of exporting Toronto jobs. Instead, they would physically break up Toronto itself and send its parts, people, and institutions around Ontario. Windsor, as it turned out, was getting the Globe and Mail (Thunderbay was getting the Toronto production of The Phantom of the Opera, requiring a lot of ushers who not only could find seat HH12 in the dark but could help patrons portage to theatre). Since Windsor already had a newspaper, The Windsor Star, it was decided the two papers would enter a joint operating agreement and publish one paper called The Globe and Mail and Windsor Star. (There was YET another layer of parody here... across the river Detroit's two main dailies had entered into a highly controversial joint operating agreement, in which they'd publish a joint edition.) Most of the articles, then, were parodies of Windsor hacks trying to write like high falooten Globe writers and Globe writers lacing their articles with their obvious distaste for Windsor.

Terry's baby was well received but not nearly as controversial as mine. I think he was a nudge disappointed. The following year I graduated and Terry stayed on, producing two more parody issues (I always managed to come back to Windsor at the end of March to help Terry write his parody issue). One was a parody of the paper itself, written as if Student Counsel had taken over the paper and they were publishing a pro-U of W spirit paper! (SAC was always on our case about not having school spirit and kept threatening to cut off our funding.)

Terry's final parody paper, The Border City Lance, was another parody of the paper itself (hrmmm Terry is original in details if not the actual broader picture). Windsor, at this time, was celebrating its centennial. This time the paper was published as if it was an edition from the turn of the century. The gag, I guess, was look how little things have changed. After this Terry managed to graduate and passed on into the real world.

The paper then did a strange thing. Much how a hockey team might retire a jersey of a star player, the paper stopped doing April Fool's parody issues for several years. I guess they felt after the Terry-Karl biumvirate, what they could hack together might just end up looking like little more than a bunch of jokes about CBC broadcasters having big asses.

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