Former Edmonton Senior columnist Lou Broten has died at the
age of 99.
His death occurred on May 7, following some years of ill health.
Broten was born in North Dakota in 1914, and then the family
moved to a farm in Saskatchewan three years later.
During the course of his life he was a homesteader, freight
train rider, salmon fisher, railway locomotive engineer and international trade
union official, as well as a World War II veteran.
Broten began writing a column for the Edmonton Senior in
1994, his first venture into journalism. Adorned with a photo of him in his
trademark hat, the column became a must-read for many of the newspaper’s
readers.
“When I started writing articles for the Edmonton Senior I
had no journalistic experience, so it was a matter of trial and error,” he once
wrote. “Fortunately, as a senior citizen I had the experience of a lifetime on
which to draw…”
He touched on politics and issues of the day, provincial,
national and international, along with favourite topics such as the importance
of growing food in the city.
Holding strong opinions but never shrill, Broten was an
adherent of no particular party. A theme he returned to many times was the need
for a new style of non-partisan politics and government.
Broten often drew on lessons from history, including his own
experiences of the Depression and wartime, to point the out the path to social
progress. He frequently used the image of the Roman god Janus, portrayed with
two faces, one looking back and one looking forward, to emphasize the
importance of looking at the events of the past to gain an understanding of the
present and future.
The face of Janus also appeared on the cover of Looking Back, Looking Forward, a
collection of 98 of the Edmonton Senior
columns, published in 2003. Once the book was published, he and Vera, his wife
of more than 60 years, promoted and sold it themselves.
Affected by worsening health, Broten wrote his last column
in early 2009. A couple of years later Vera passed away.
On February 14, 2004, a couple of hundred people attended a
party to celebrate his 90th birthday at the Calder Seniors Drop-in
Centre, where he had been president.
As reported in the Edmonton
Senior, Broten told those in attendance, “I do know that if I am here for a
purpose it has to be to contribute to this life and that’s what I have tried to
do. If there is any purpose it has to be to make a better life for all of us.”
