Who are the keepers of our public memory?

Until a few years ago the CP24 cable channel would run entire old Citytv newscasts late at night. Rewind, as it was known, was a real gift and a portal into Toronto’s recent past.

Local newscasts are live views into the everyday life of a place and conventional thinking would suggest that news goes stale quickly, yet when viewed decades later they’re a fantastic time machine. As somebody who only arrived here in 2000, Rewind helped fill in the everyday details of this place for me.

Big international stories will give a vague sense of the era — Gorbachev meets Reagan, that kind of thing — but the local news items tended to be immediate and geographic, like the scene openings in Law & Order that mentioned a Manhattan intersection, though without the iconic “Doink Doink” sound.

Because of Rewind, the location of 30-year-old murders are on my mental map of the city. I think of a mid-1980s slaying in a highrise along Hwy. 427 whenever I pass by now, having seen the footage on a Rewind episode. Forgotten by all but those who knew the deceased or were involved somehow, the victims are memorialized through the replaying of these reports on TV. Not much is learned, just a name and few facts about their untimely death, but they’re less forgotten than before.

Another episode led with the 1992 firebombing of Henry Morgentaler’s clinic on Harbord St., a still-remembered event, but the visceral news reports relive the terror of that day.

There’s lots of crime, of course, a staple of local newscasts. Vehicular crashes too; cars have a bad history — it’s a wonder we ever get back in them. But then the news will shift to a more lighthearted tone too. This mix is why Rewind was so great.

A hot July day in the 1980s? A City reporter might be sent to Nathan Phillips Square to ask people how they’re keeping cool. It isn’t a Cold War summit, but these filler stories reveal a lot about Toronto at that moment: who was in the square; what they were wearing; what they choose to talk about. It’s the look and feel of an average day.

Then there’s culture, the things that made the city interesting, including Jeanne Beker reporting from a concert at the Bamboo Club, as she often did. Sports too, with all the old player names. Hey, the Leafs lost again.

All that, and the late anchor Mark Dailey’s “Citytv: Everywhere” line, as memorable as the clang of the streetcar. It’s shame that Rewind was cut after the various City properties were bought up by separate media companies.

Perhaps the closest there is to Rewind now is the website Retro Ontario, retrontario.com, run by a fellow who collects Betamax and VHS tapes he finds at garage sales that contain old news programs, station IDs and commercials from Ontario and its environs.

Facebook groups are good for this kind of thing too. Sometime these “remember when” groups can be tinged with nostalgia, a mostly useless impulse — the past too often misremembered as better than today — but one that often motivates people to scour and scan their own photo albums and collections putting more material in public view.

One great one is “Scarborough, Looking Back,” operated by the Scarborough Historical Society, which traces the area’s transformation from farmland to the tower and bungalow landscape it is today.

Another group, “Vintage Gay Toronto,” has some great photos of the Church Wellesley area through the last few decades, as well as flyers, buttons and other ephemera from events that would otherwise sit in somebody’s shoebox, never seen. Right now it only focuses on Toronto’s “gay male community,” but inviting all the communities that found a home in the neighbourhood would be more representative and certainly produce more great material.

There’s more. Do some creative geographic searches on your neighbourhood and find them, or start your own group if you’ve got a stash. Keep our public memory public.

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Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef.

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