Like a river, The Record runs through this region

It’s five in the morning, pitch dark outside my Kitchener home and the alarm isn’t set to ring for hours. But if the footsteps clacking in my driveway and the high-pitched squeak and metallic clank of my mailbox opening and shutting aren’t enough to wake me from a deep sleep, the barking dog is.

The covers tumble off as I sit up in bed, open my eyes and realize what I’ve just heard.

“It’s just the newspaper,” I say to myself, as I lay back and wriggle under the duvet.

Then I sit up again. Just the newspaper?

“What’s happening in the NAFTA talks?” I ask myself.

“What’s Trump been tweeting now?” “Is Kitchener council going to save those historic old houses on Queen or OK a new highrise?”

I can’t go back to sleep. Too many questions are tumbling inside my head, like a load of laundry in a spinning clothes dryer. Even my trusted cellphone can’t answer all of them.

So, thanks to the dog and my silent, nagging inquisitions, I do something I usually loathe. I get up, hours before sunrise. I shuffle downstairs, open the door and put my hand into my mailbox. Another day in the life of a newspaper addict begins.

If I were to describe Waterloo Region to someone who had never visited, I would say it is an area of rich, rolling farmland, of deep forests covering glacial hills, of charming towns, prosperous villages and three dynamic, mid-sized cities.

Then I would add that a river runs

RECORD continues // E2

Briefly, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, The Record dropped bundles of newspapers by air for waiting carriers in the northern reaches of its circulation area.In the 1950s a canoe was used to deliver The Record to cottages in Muskoka.

RECORD HISTORICAL PHOTO COLLECTION Ralph Hagey makes his deliveries in The Record van in 1965.