Update on John Clark

John Clark started Grainews for United Grain Growers in the mid-1970s. Its farmer to farmer style was an instant hit. “We thought we could do a better job than the other farm publications, and we did,” John says. Grainews didn’t take any ads for the first 10 years, and John had a stable of 40 or 50 farmers who kept the paper full. “If someone wrote a great letter, I’d hire him to be a columnist,” John says. Most of them were farmers writing about how to build something or do something. Some writers got political, and usually with a right wing slant. Humour was also “very important,” John says. “Farmers have enough worries.” 

John retired from UGG in 1993. He still lives in Winnipeg and keeps up with many of his past columnists. He spends about four months of the year at his house in Texas. Houses in his part of Texas are cheaper than in Manitoba. “I’m 10 miles north of the Mexican border in the second poorest county in the U.S.A.,” he says. “There is just lower demand for houses.” I asked if he would ever move to Texas permanently. “No. I like Canada,” he says.

John is in two writers groups in Texas. He mostly writes memoirs of times when he was a kid growing up in the Kamsack-Pelly area of Saskatchewan. He’s says they’re mostly for himself and that they’re not ready for publication.