Volunteers clean house on Day of Caring

by Jacqueline Martinz.

Little hands will be touching clean surfaces in Bright Starts Cooperative Early Learning Centre Inc. at the University of Waterloo. On Friday, June 6, a team of volunteers from all over campus spent the morning scrubbing tables, wiping windows, and cleaning cupboards at the location for the United Way's Day of Caring.

The volunteers, which included staff and faculty members, started at 9:00 a.m. and finished at 12:00 p.m. in the Centre. They were dressed in colourful t-shirts with the university name scrawled across and comfortable shoes. Former University of Waterloo United Way Campaign co-chair Alexandra Lippert was present along with current co-chair Professor James Skidmore.

The United Way's Day of Caring is held annually for volunteers to help community-based organizations that support different groups of people including families and the mentally ill. Volunteers perform light maintenance, learn more about what's happening in their area, and gain insight into the work of the United Way.

For anyone who is interested in contributing to the United Way, information about how to give is available online. The University of Waterloo United Way Campaign 2014 begins on October 1.

Photo courtesy of the United Way Campaign.

 

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Environmental scientist to give freshwater talk

The Faculty of Science and the Water Institute are co-hosting a public lecture featuring Killam Memorial Professor of Ecology David Schindler of the University of Alberta on Wednesday, June 18.

In his remarks, “Canada’s Freshwater in the 21^st Century,” Professor Schindler, who is best known for his large-scale experiments on whole lakes leading to the 1973 ban on phosphates in laundry detergents, will discuss the threats to Canada’s freshwater resources and what should be done to address these issues.

Full details about the event are available online, and though the event is free, registration is required.

The event will take place at 7:00 p.m. in QNC 0101.

 

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Remembering The Gazette

It was ten years ago this week that the University published the final (to date) print issue of The Gazette.

The Gazette got its start as a mimeographed newsletter (I'll pause here while many of you Google the word mimeograph) published by the Registrar's Office in 1960, and was then taken over by the "information services" department, the forerunner of today's Marketing & Strategic Communications (MSC).

As the university grew in size, and as its student newspaper, The Chevron, grew in what some might call sophistication (especially in terms of its coverage and critiques of the University administration), plans were made to turn the Gazette into a campus-wide print newspaper.

"The University's president, Gerry Hagey, had what I still think 40 years later was a brilliant idea," former Gazette editor Chris Redmond said in a speech to a gathering of university newspaper editors at Rutgers University in 2011. "Before becoming a college president, he had been a public relations executive at for B.F. Goodrich...One of the things he knew was that if you want people to believe your version of a controversial story, it helps for you to tell your version first, and tell it truthfully, and tell it in a way they can understand. So Gerry Hagey told his communications staff to start a weekly newspaper, aimed at faculty and students and staff members, and to tell the truth in it."

The newspaper first hit newsstands on March 26, 1969. It was published on a weekly and occasionally biweekly basis thereafter, to the tune of about 40 issues per year once holiday breaks were taken into account.

The Gazette was noteworthy in a number of respects - it was one of the first, if not the first, university-published newspapers in the country (as opposed to student-run newspapers, which have a longer history), and it also enjoyed a degree of editorial independence, enshrined in policy, that allowed for frank commentary on issues facing the university.

The Gazette was initially produced using an offset type machine named Igor (its official name was the slightly more respectable "CompuGraphic CompuWriter 1"). Its first editor was Bob Whitton, followed by Denis Grayhurst. Chris Redmond took over the position in July 1973, and would later start the Daily Bulletin, which was originally conceived as an online supplement to the Gazette. Barbara Elve became the editor of the Gazette in February 2003.

The Gazette published news about practically every aspect of the university's life, from politics to technology and sports.

The Communications and Public Affairs department ceased publication of the Gazette in June 2004, citing the growth in scope of the Daily Bulletin,  evolving communication technology and the need to make more efficient use of resources.

 

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Notes on the cusp of Convocation

The Science Undergraduate Office will be closing at 3:30 p.m. today so that staff can attend a dedication in memory of Richard Vollans, the Faculty's recruitment and marketing co-ordinator who died suddenly in October 2011. A new rock specimen in the Peter Russell Rock Garden will be unveiled and dedicated in Richard's memory.

Professor Art Green of the Fine Arts Department is being featured in a documentary that is making its Canadian premiere on Thursday, June 12: Hairy Who & the Chicago Imagists.

This from the film's synopsis: "In the mid 1960s, the city of Chicago was an incubator for an iconoclastic group of young artists. Collectively known as the Imagists, they showed in successive waves of exhibitions with monikers that might have been psychedelic rock bands of the era - Hairy Who, Nonplussed Some, False Image, Marriage Chicago Style. Kissing cousins to the contemporaneous international phenomenon of Pop Art, Chicago Imagism took its own weird, wondrous, in-your-face tack. Variously pugnacious, puerile, scatological, graphic, comical, and absurd, it celebrated a very different version of ‘popular’ from the detached cool of New York, London and Los Angeles. Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists is the first film to tell their wild, woolly, utterly irreverent story."

The documentary was recently screened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The film debuts at the Princess Cinema Thursday at 7:00 p.m. Green will be on hand to participate in a post-screening discussion.

Here's the tech park gourmet food truck schedule for this week:

• Monday - Chef Scotty Cooks and FoCheezy
  
• Tuesday – Schmuck Truck (run by a UW alumnus) and Great Britain Bake
  
• Wednesday - Chef Scotty Cooks & FoCheezy
  
• Thursday - The Command Post & FoCheezy
  
• Friday - West of Seoul and FoCheezy

These vittle-purveying vehicles will be parked outside TechTown from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. each day.

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