As we scramble to meet the deadline of getting the first draft of the winter leisure guide to the graphics person in order to meet the Dec. 1 distribution date, we are also in the midst of planning for a pretty major change to the format. Over the past few years, we had already begun working closely with our fellow RDCKites in Nelson, Castlegar, Salmo and Slocan Valley toward the layout and production of each of our respective leisure guides (please tell me you knew all those places were in the Regional District of Central Kootenay). Anyway, all those guides are on our website at www.rdck.ca where you notice — hey — they all follow the same format and layout, which only made sense as far as saving both money and resources. The next logical step is doing a common guide so the graphics person is working on one guide as is the printing company.
This will be a different looking guide for all of us in each locale as we get a bigger picture view of some of the other areas in the RDCK from a leisure services aspect. Even this won’t demonstrate how geographically huge the RDCK is, with its population of around 60,000 residents. (If you are curious about our boundaries, that info is also available on the RDCK website.) At this point, the combined guide won’t show up until the spring issue, but it will be interesting to see both the diversity and similarities in all the communities represented in the guide.
We have come a long way in a short time as far as this aspect of leisure services advertising is concerned. My collection of Creston and district leisure guides starts in 1993 and probably has the same value as my hockey card collection (very, very little). Historical value however, is priceless, as it represents a cross section of what the community was interested in at that time or at least what instructors were available to teach or supervise. Many of the volunteers or instructors names are also surprising to see who did what way back then. I remember someone telling me many years ago that everyone in Creston has worked at the rec centre at one time or another.
My involvement in the leisure guide production started in 1996 and was a compilation of a print shop program with a liberal amount of actual pre-electronic cut and paste in order to make an original that you then stuck on the photocopier and ran virtually non-stop, spewing out 11x17 copies, which you then collated and folded in half by hand. The copiers back then were not the ultra quiet, light-speed-output, consuming-about-three-watts-of-power models that we have today but an intricate assembly of rollers, belts and gears overtop a pan of liquid black toner that sloshed over the edge when you moved the machine, forever staining your rug and memory. Since then, we have seen many incarnations of the guide, each one becoming more automated and containing more programs events and schedules as we grew. Our first glossy cover was in winter 2010 just prior to opening the “new” community complex and a short two years later we graduated to a smaller format that had the magazine finish all the way through.
The timeline on leisure guides is representative of our evolution as a community complex; we are not what we were 20 or 30 years ago, but we are as a result of it. As Martha would say, “That’s a good thing”.
Neil Ostafichuk is the recreation supervisor at the Creston and District Community Complex.