Veteran columnist a ‘passionate observer of life’
REGINA — He took a piece of the Leader-post’s third page and made it his own.
That’s why the nickname “Third Page Boy” was bestowed on veteran LeaderPost columnist Ron Petrie, who died in hospital Sunday after a long fight with cancer.
His columns also recently began being featured on Page A3 of The Starphoenix.
Petrie was born in January 1960 in Preeceville, but raised on a farm in the Kelvington/lintlaw area. He attended the University of Saskatchewan, by his own admission doing not so well in science classes, because he was spending all of his free time at The Sheaf, the student newspaper, where he became one of the youngest editors-in-chief in its long history.
After a few years, that experience got him a job at the Hudson Bay Post-review, then a reporting job at the Moose Jaw Times-herald, from which the Leader-post hired him for its Moose Jaw bureau in July 1981. Within mere days, he was covering his first big story, a double homicide in the town of Chaplin.
Posted a few years later to the Leader-post’s main newsroom in Regina, Pet- rie covered the provincial legislature and was eventually given a column — on which he put his distinct trademark, shaping it as a humour column. The four children (three of them triplets) of Ron and his wife Joan were probably the bestknown children in southern Saskatchewan thanks to his references to them.
Among his greatest pleasures in life was his family and, especially, watching his sons play hockey, his wife said. “He was almost obsessive about being a dad,” Joan Petrie said Monday, adding, “everything was for them and about them.”
Indeed it was: Petrie’s happily cluttered office in the Leader-post’s newsroom had no fewer than 45 photos of his family, plus the inevitable Roughrider pennant.
To fill his column, he sometimes wrote satirically on the foibles of everyday life. He eventually created a fictional Saskatchewan town, Cracked Axle, and populated it with fictional characters ranging from mayor Hank Mcgoohan to the pretentious Snerbleflute family. He also took satirical potshots at politics, taking particular glee in mocking high-handedness and political correctness, though he quietly fretted about hurting individuals — as opposed to govern- ments and institutions.
During the last decade, he also wrote hundreds of feature stories, virtually all on the people and places of rural Saskatchewan, for which his affection was obvious.
“I think what people missed about him was that he was a really passionate observer of life,” said longtime colleague Murray Mandryk. “Nothing, really, got past him.”
Diagnosed with cancer about a year ago, “he always had tremendous faith that he would get better,” said Joan, who first met Ron at The Sheaf and met him again in Regina several years later. “He actually was pretty good at the power of positive thinking. He did everything for the kids, like take
“HIS DOWN-TO-EARTH VIEW OF THE WORLD WILL BE MISSED BY MANY.”
DEANA DRIVER
them to hockey, right up to the day before he went back into the hospital.”
A collection of Petrie’s columns was published in late 2010 under the title Running of the Buffalo. “Ron Petrie was a talented, clever man who could also write,” wrote Deana Driver, who, with husband Al, published the book. “He’d want us to chuckle a little as we remem- ber the legacy he left behind.”
She added: “Ron worked very hard at his craft of being a humour columnist, and the result was a wonderful everyman’s view of growing up and living in Saskatchewan. He was a committed family man who loved his family and friends, this province and the people in it. His down-to-earth view of the world will be missed by many.”
Petrie is survived by his wife and four children — Stuart, Spencer, Hayley and Andrew — plus his brother, Barry, of Star City and his sister, Heather, of Wadena.
As of Monday afternoon, funeral arrangements had not yet been completed.