Born in Burnaby in 1918, Irene Stangoe and her husband Clive Stangoe bought the 20-year-old Williams Lake Tribune in 1950. They spent their first six years living above the print shop, freezing in winter, roasting in summers, raising two children to the thump, thump, thump of an old Country Brower press, a linotype 'held together with baling wire and chewing gum'. "For two years running we goofed on Daylight Savings Time," she recalls in Looking Back at the Cariboo-Chilcotin (Heritage $14.95), "and we told our readers to put their clocks back when it should have been ahead, and the following year we were a whole day out!" She wrote features and columns for the paper for more than 44 years, launching a new column in 1975 called 'Looking Back' to recall the bygone days of the Cariboo-Chilcotin. The Stangoes sold the Tribune in 1973 and moved to Chimney Lake, west of Williams Lake, but she continued to contribute her Looking Back columns to the local paper into the 21st century. Her 'factual yarns' profile Rudy Johnson's famous Soda Creek Bridge (bought in Alaska and rebuilt with the help of Victoria engineer Howard Elder for less than $200,000, within six months, in 1968), Scottish-Indian Pipers, the Cariboo's first flag, successful authors Eric Collier (Three Against the Wilderness) and Harry Marriott (Cariboo Cowboy), Judge Begbie, ice-fishing secrets and Princess Margaret's visit in 1958. Stangoe's first book was Cariboo-Chilcotin Pioneer People and Places. She received a national award for Best Historical Story in a community newspaper from the Canadian Newspaper Association in 2000 for an excerpt from History and Happenings in the Cariboo-Chilcotin.

BOOKS:

Cariboo-Chilcotin Pioneer People and Places (Heritage House, 1994).
Looking Back at the Cariboo-Chilcotin (Heritage, 1997).
History and Happenings in the Cariboo-Chilcotin: Pioneer Memories (Heritage House, 2000; 2006).

[BCBW 1994 article to come]

[LITHIS / BCBW 2006] "Ranching" "Local History" "Cariboo"