Book celebrates North Bay’s 100th anniversary

As North Bay celebrates its centennial anniversary, a former resident, Peter Handley, has released a new book about the Gateway City.

Peter Handley says his new book, ‘Vis-a-Vis: North Bay In Deed & Tale,’ is a personal project meant to celebrate the city’s centennial.

“It is transcriptions of interviews I did from around 1970 to 2022 about North Bay history,” Handley said.

“I did a lot of interviews over a lot of years and a number of them happened to be about North Bay history.”

The 91-year-old said initially, a podcast was commissioned by the municipal heritage committee, of which he was the chair at the time.

Collection of interviews

He then remembered he had a collection of old interviews and decided to get them transcribed.

‘‘I thought why not put all those interviews into a history book because you don’t get many that way with the actual voices of people who either researched or who lived through, wrote about, or lived through North Bay’s history," said Handley.

“In a sense, it’s a vanity project.”

The former radio and television broadcaster was also a professor at Canadore College in North Bay. He is a self-professed pack rat and said he had boxes and boxes of old interviews he had done over the years for radio, TV and print.

“Why not put them to good use?” he said.

‘King pack rat’

“So being king pack rat that worked.”

The 650-page book is 6x9 in size with black and white pictures and features 49 interviews with 44 people.

“It’s a brick,” said Handley.

“I know people are going to say, why not take those interviews and cut them down? That’s fine, but then you have lost the flavour and the taste of that interview and of that person.”

The long book could have been even longer -- he had to drop two chapters.

“Leaving it altogether gives you a better sense of that individual,” Handley said.

“How they accepted questions, how they answered questions, did they side-step?”

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Handley doesn’t live in North Bay anymore, but summed up the city this way.

“It is a beautiful city, a friendly city. It has everything you want. If you are an outdoors person, you walk outside your door, and in two or three blocks you can be in the bush.”

The book is available at the North Bay Museum, and the Callander Museum.