Ray Guy: The Final Columns, 2003-2013 is a collection of the columns Ray Guy wrote for The Northeast Avalon Times, a community newspaper based in Portugal Cove. Guy previously achieved fame and acclaim for his astute and humorous observations of Newfoundland politics and society in columns in The Telegram and The Sunday Express from the 1960s to 1990s. Guy began writing for The Northeast Avalon Times in 2003, the same year Danny Williams was elected premier of the province. During the ensuing decade, Guy exercised the wit and satire that made him so admired by Newfoundland readers. Ray Guy: The Final Columns, 2003-2013 aims to make the brilliant writing of his last decade available to a broader audience. The foibles and folly of premiers on Confederation Hill, the looming disaster of the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project and the frustrating fickleness of "the great Newfoundland voter" were repeatedly addressed by Guy in his unequaled style. Guy was quick to recognize Danny Williams as "another Smallwood," and had much to say and much to mock about the pomp, arrogance and authoritarian rule that largely led to the troubled times Newfoundland subsequently found itself in.
Ray Guy was a reporter and columnist at The Evening Telegram in St. John's from 1963 to 1974. He has been credited with helping turn Newfoundlanders against the authoritarian rule of former premier Joey Smallwood, whose policies Guy ridiculed and mocked with humour and satire. In the 1980s and '90s, Guy was a columnist for The Sunday Express, and then The Telegram. From 2003 to 2013, he wrote a column for The Northeast Avalon Times, a community newspaper based in Portugal Cove, which are collected in Ray Guy: The Final Columns, 2003-2013. He published several books, including "That Far Greater Bay," for which he won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 1977. Guy also wrote TV commentaries and plays, and acted in the CBC-TV series "Up at Ours." His play "Young Triffie's Been Made Away With" was made into a movie in 2006. Guy grew up in Arnold's Cove, and obtained a journalism degree from Ryerson Polytechnic Institute in Toronto in 1963. He died in St. John's on May 14, 2013 at age 74. Brian Jones has been a columnist and desk editor at The Telegram in St. John's since September 2000. He has worked as a journalist and editor in St. John's, Calgary, Vancouver and Yellowknife, N.W.T. In 1997, he edited and published the humour magazine Caboto, and in 1999 he edited and published the humour magazine The Newfoundland Confederate. He obtained a BA in political science from the University of Calgary in 1981, and a BEd from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1995. He moved to St. John's in 1989, and lives in Portugal Cove, Nfld., with his wife, Kathryn Welbourn, and their two sons.
