Goodbye Dryden, and that goalie too
Sagacious. Unflappable. Laconic. Witty. Genteel. Jocose. Trustworthy. Balding. All these words and more describe Keith Dryden the newspaper person – and perhaps also that other Dryden, the goalie – but particularly the newspaper person, whose last Fringe column appears this week in a space nearby.
Keith (he lets me call him Keith now) retired from the Producer eight and a half short years ago after spending an ungodly number of years here, first as Joe-boy in Charge of Nothing and finally as Editor in Charge of Some Things.
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He went away in 1954 to work at the Leader Post in Regina and the Albertan in Calgary but returned in 1959 and notched 22 more years here before he finally realized that enough is enough.
But it wasn’t enough, because he continued filing his column until this very day. His reason for putting The Fringe to sleep is to not “embarrass the kindly editors and myself” by letting it run into his dotage and beyond.
But now those kindly editors are squawking and flapping around the henhouse, looking for something to fill the space and realizing it will be impossible to find anything as gently sardonic and unpretentious as Keith’s weekly sermonettes. Not only that, he worked for cheap.
By the time I arrived here in 1975, Keith had already outlasted a couple of publishers and was working on a new one, Bob Phillips. As he put it in his droll fashion, he had proved the Peter Principle by being named managing editor. Still to come were a couple of other titles, culminating in the short and sweet Editor.
Having an unfirm grasp of everything agricultural, I often turned to Keith in times of woe. He knew what wheat was, and rapeseed, and that cows give milk, and politicians obfuscate, prevaricate and in fact have a lock on words that end in -ate. He tended not to get upset by things, not even by new employees who didn’t know a mouldboard plow from a snowplow. “You’ll get the hang of it eventually,” he would lie.
Keith liked to brag that he was from Tuffnell, Sask. I don’t think much is left of Tuffnell now (there wasn’t much there to begin with) but it has a native son to be proud of. And so do we have someone to be proud of.
Too bad we’ll have to cut off his free subscription.
