Happy birthday to us

Thirty years is quite the milestone.

Usually it involves a party, balloons, hopefully a cake and maybe an adult beverage or two.

Well the Pen turned 30 this year but in our case we’ve decided to forgo the festivities and delve into the archives, to relive the past few decades.

It’s the newspaper equivalent of digging out the pictures of your kid in nappies, their first day of school, high school graduation, and sticking them up on a corkboard for all to see.

Rather than family photographs we’re getting our hands dirty by flipping through past editions in a small room in the basement, affectionately known as the ‘morgue’, which I must say is nice and cool on a hot summer’s day.

Each week you’ll probably see some faces you remember. Maybe some relatives or friends. You’ll certainly come across some of the big stories that caught your attention or the little ones that tickled your fancy.

Whatever it is, drop us a line to let us know what you think, what memories these old front pages, pictures and stories bring back for you.

This week we take a look back at the seafood plant in St Anthony reopening after a three-week-long dispute in 1980.

In a place like the Northern Peninsula, fishery stories are always a big deal. It is, after all, the industry that defines us.

Just as there were disputes then there are disputes now.

Think, for instance, of the hoo-ha around the crab price-setting panel a few months back.

Then you’ve got that shrimp truck blockade in Port Saunders, the massive cut in cod quotas, issues with the Black Duck Cove shrimp plant, a global recession.

And that’s just this season.

Where an industry impacts, it creates passions and when it’s an industry that lasts for just a few months of the year, those passions run high.

As seafood market analyst John Sackton puts it in this week’s yarn about snow crab, the seafood business is a “risky” one.

Too right.

Weather, natural population cycles, government policy, the price of fuel and consumer demand all play a role.

And you can’t get much more fickle than the average consumer.

Though I hasten to add I had one consumer in my car this week that was anything but picky.

It was a sunny day and I’d wandered inside the Main Brook municipal building to find out more about eider ducks.

It was probably 10 or 15 minutes later that I headed outside to my car — to find a small, caramel-brown dog sitting on my front seat.

The windows of my car were half open, sure, but that little dog (the size of a long-legged chihuahua, I guess) had managed to launch itself off the ground and through a window to get at my lunch on the back seat.

The critter had munched through most of a chocolate cupcake and half a slice of pizza.

Impressive.

And anything but fickle or picky.