Guest Notebook: (1) Local News One Farmer at a Time, The Rise of George McCullagh

by Mark Bourrie

George McCullagh, the child of Irish immigrants in the tough industrial town of London, Ontario, would become a mid-century media mogul who shaped Canadian politics for a generation. He began at sixteen in the summer of 1921 by selling newspaper subscriptions to rural farmers, because Toronto’s most prestigious paper, the Globe, would not give him a job as a reporter.

McCullagh’s challenge was to sell long-term newspaper mail subscriptions to the people of backwater towns and farm concessions of southwestern Ontario. This was a farming community peopled by descendants of 109 impoverished Scots who had immigrated to Canada in 1853 and settled on the frontier. Their community was connected to the outside world in 1873 when the Wellington, Grey and Bruce Railway built a line to Lake Huron. The hub of Ripley had a couple of grist mills, a lumber mill, a stockyard, and a grain elevator. The teenager’s job was to convince the local people that they needed to read the Globe to keep up on national issues. That meant the young man had to be able to talk politics with people of his parents’ generation. There were important issues to master: liquor prohibition, electrification, the spread of communism from Russia, Canadian labor unrest blamed on communism, problems faced by returning veterans, and the economic downturn that lingered in Canada.