Tom Roper is not the kind of man who lets moss grow on his feet.
Whether it’s fleeing from the family shoe business to sail the high seas, or rambling around Europe and Africa on a shoe-string budget, or joining the back-to-the-land movement and ranching in the rural north, or trying his hand at prospecting for gold, if something piques Tom’s interest, he sets a goal, accomplishes it and moves on.
When Tom came to me three years ago pitching a column for the Interior News, he was no stranger to me. Some of Tom’s many interests included the Backcountry Horsemen and the ukelele.
I did a story on the former and we had, through mutual friends, jammed a bit. The two coincided when we performed together at a Backcountry Horsemen gathering at their Coalmine Camp outside of Telkwa.
He is an interesting character, to say the least.
So when he walked into the office on Broadway Avenue saying he wanted to try his hand at column writing after our beloved Brenda Mallory decided she could no longer keep up her longstanding Spice of Life column, I was happy to bring him on.
Recently, he submitted his notice that he would no longer be writing for us as of the end of March. He told me he had set a goal to do three years or 156 columns and as of next week, he will have accomplished that.
Unfortunately for us, his interests are once again evolving. As I implied before, the man is a rolling stone.
We have loved having On the Ropes in our paper for the last 155 weeks. Whether it was recounting his adventures or chronicling the lives of other colourful characters in the valley, Tom has been a great contributor to the Interior News and we will miss him.
This newspaper has a long tradition of hosting the musings of community columnists. When I came back to Smithers in 2019, we still had Brenda (rest in peace), who wrote for us for almost three decades.
Lorraine Doiron was also still here with her View from the Porch, but moved to Prince George shortly thereafter to be closer to her family.
Since then, in addition to Tom, we had Erik Jacobsen’s Gardener’s Corner, which was very popular during its tenure and the ongoing Nature Nut by Rosamund Pojar, which also gets picked up by many of our other papers around the province.
As we bid farewell, but never goodbye, to Tom, the only question remaining is who will step up to continue our great community columnist tradition.
Got something to say? Email me at thom.barker@interior-news.com.
Thanks for reading.
Thom