Cornies: An accidental career turned into a lasting legacy

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I met Barbara Trudell Dunbar on my first day at The London Free Press. It was late on a Monday afternoon in February, the kind where clear, golden sunsets seem to muscle aside months of wintry gloom. She’d finished her day in the news features department and was on her way home.

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“Hi, I’m Barb,” she said, extending a hand from beneath a stylish woollen coat and flashing a 600-watt incandescent smile, framed by shoulder-length brown hair.

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Though we worked at opposite ends of the newsroom, Barb had somehow noticed the new guy in the business department, desperately trying to master the Atex computer system.

That encounter with Barbara was by no means unique. I suspect most of the hundreds of employees with whom she worked had some similar experience. It didn’t matter who you were or in what part of the building you worked; she was interested in getting to know you.

Barbara Trudell was born into a family that understood the value of personal connection. She was the sixth and youngest child of Jean and Bill Trudell, her father having earned the moniker of “the mayor of Dundas Street” for the 40-plus years he managed the Capitol Theatre. He retired in 1975, the same year Barb was hired at the newspaper.

That hadn’t been her career aim. After Grade 13 at Catholic Central, she enrolled at Western University, but, after a year, switched to a law program at Fanshawe College. Along the way, she worked part-time at St. Joseph’s Hospital, assisting with the administration of electrocardiograms.

It was undoubtedly Barbara’s warm personality, cheery disposition and ability to connect with strangers that persuaded the late Tony Bembridge to offer the 22-year-old a job in news features. He was looking for someone to help with the newspaper’s food, fashion and lifestyles pages, in addition to routine clerical duties and the standard “other tasks as assigned.”

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Longtime newspaper photographer Morris Lamont remembers Barbara best for her role as fashion co-ordinator, “making the arrangements for models, dresses and locations. During those massive spring and fall fashion section shoots that lasted all day, she was the glue that held everything together. She was so larger than life.”

As the newsroom re-organized to meet emerging challenges, Barb found herself in different roles, eventually landing in the op-ed department. It was there where she brought all her people skills to bear on the task of being an ambassador of a news organization to the readership it served.

For more than a decade, Barbara served as letters editor, using a process that was as demanding as it was interesting. She checked each letter for the accuracy of its claims, often consulting with reporters about their veracity. She confirmed the identity of each letter writer by phone and negotiated with them about wording and word length. She monitored the frequency with which each reader’s letters appeared, to ensure fairness.

In so doing, she built a robust network of friends and acquaintances in the greater London community. She invented the Reader to Reader feature that continues to this day.

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“She represented the heart and soul of a news organization,” said Helen Connell, a former opinion-page editor and Barb’s manager during the 1990s. “People like Barb work behind the scenes; they never get a byline, but they care deeply about the work. . . . I don’t think there was a better advocate for readers than Barb.”

Barbara left The Free Press after a 37-year career and, in 2013, revealed a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer’s disease.

During the decade that followed, family, friends, former colleagues and professional caregivers enveloped her in love and care. She died on Nov. 25 at age 70.

“My mom was incredibly proud of her career and found so much joy in being part of such a dynamic team,” Kelly Dunbar said. “Her passion, warmth and ability to bring people together left a lasting mark, creating a legacy of connection and impact.”

It’s a revealing and instructive thing. Barbara Dunbar never went to journalism school. Never wrote a story. Never aspired to the rank of supervisor, let alone manager.

And yet, armed with curiosity, empathy, a fun-loving personality, a keen interest in people, loyalty, a willingness to invest deeply in friendships and a readiness to participate in the occasional bit of harmless mischief, she built relationships that will last beyond a lifetime.

And an entire generation of London journalists came to regard her as a kind of unofficial mayor of their newsroom.

Larry Cornies is a London journalist. cornies@gmail.com

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