The Grape was a newspaper staffed by people formerly from The Georgia Straight who occupied the Straight offices after a dispute with
Dan MacLeod , the Straight's publisher. More details about this can be found in this article from the first issue, which was on January 20, 1972, as well as this page from Rick McGrath's website (now at archive.org), especially the story in the yellow background on the right by Pierre Coupey which discusses the Straight's origins.The occupation of the Straight office at 56A Powell Street continued for a few weeks and after everyone left because of a court injunction, The Grape moved to another location up the street at 324 Powell Street.
During the initial occupation, staff continued to use the Straight's typesetting equipment and other facilities. The first few issues had the same typeface as the Straight, but a deal was eventually worked out with Simon Fraser University so we could run off our copy on the phototypesetting machines there.
After the move, we still had some kind of inputting keyboards similar to those on the Straight's Friden Justowriters (I don't remember where we got the new ones from). There were no modems or telecommunications in those days; the tapes produced by the keyboards -- similar to ticker tape used by the stock market -- had to be driven up to Simon Fraser where they were run off and then the typeset galleys were brought back to the new office.
Click here to see a list of all the articles which I wrote for the new paper. Unfortunately, the back issues cannot be easily accessed through some service like newspapers.com. I had to go to the Vancouver Public Library, where issues of The Grape are in these large bound books. Almost all these digitizations of my articles are from my own clippings. The quality of the printing for many of them is not that great.I left The Grape in the fall of 1972 and went to Japan where I ended up working for The Mainichi Daily News, an English-language newspaper.
By the way, look who was on the cover of the first Grape issue. The artwork was by the late Bob Mercer.
Go up to the main "Journalism" level • Go to my home page.
