Years as a columnist for the Delta Optimist will forever be remembered in a new book by Doug Husband.
Community Comments contains the articles the former mayor wrote for five years for the Optimist complemented by photographs, research and opinions on past and current events as well as the people who contributed to the growth of Delta.
A descendant of the Pybus pioneering family, Husband was elected five times to Delta council, including a term as mayor from 1987 to 1990. He continues to be a long serving community volunteer.
“I was featured in an article by reporter Sandor Gyarmati and following that conversation with Sandor, he suggested I should become one of the paper’s community columnists,” Husband recalled. “I talked with editor Ted Murphy and the rest is history. I became a contributor with the Optimist for five years.”
As Husband writes in the acknowledgments in the book, years spent writing articles in the Optimist was an adventure of its own and then producing a book required a different skill set. He said he has many people to thank for their contributions.
“It was really about my family. It was intended for my family to understand where this old fellow came from,” he said. “Other people saw what I was doing and suggested that it would make for a good book.”
He said the book took a little over a year to get published.
“It was masterminded by our youngest daughter Karen Williams and we used a publishing company in the United States,” he said. “I’m happy with the finished product. There are lots of pictures of family in it. The Delta Archives and Jarrod Millar deserve a lot of credit for historical material and research as do all of the people who I wrote about and allowed me a glimpse into their life story.
“I know enough people who read the columns and now the book who have said it is of general interest to those who have come into the community in the last 10, 20 years. There is lots of history and it is a general eclectic book about the community and my years here. Most people, I think, think of writing a book because it is good to put stuff in written form – so much history that people contain gets lost, so working with Karen we put all of this into book form.”
Community Commentsis available from the publishing company at www.Xlibris.com.
