Gladys Maria Marguerite Arnold was born in Macoun, Saskatchewan in 1905. She taught in various rural schools before joining the Regina Leader-Post in April 1930. Arnold began as an editorial assistant but was soon writing editorials, feature articles, and news stories that were picked up by other newspapers.
Seeking adventure, Arnold left her job in 1935 and traveled to Europe. Arnold began submitting freelance pieces to the Canadian Press (CP) and shortly was hired as their full-time Paris correspondent. In the next four years she reported from France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Italy and from the Spanish border during the Spanish civil war.
Gladys Arnold was the sole Canadian correspondent in France at the outbreak of the Second World War and she covered the early days of the conflict, the so-called “phoney war”, until the German occupation of Paris in June 1940. Returning to Canada, Arnold served with the CP Bureau in Ottawa until 1941 when she left CP to help set up the Free French Information Service in Canada. After the war this service was attached to the French Embassy in Ottawa and Arnold served as its Director until her retirement in 1971.
In 1987 Arnold published her memoirs about her wartime experiences, One Woman's War: A Canadian Reporter with the Free French (Toronto: J. Lorimer, 1987). For her service to France she was named Honorary Brigadier in the French Free Forces in 1940, and Chevalier de la legion d'honneur in 1975. In 1988 the University of Regina presented her with an honorary Doctor of Laws.
Gladys Arnold died in Regina in 2002.
Helen (Nell) Arzab was born in Melville, Saskatchewan in 1955, she was a student at the University of Regina from 1973 to 1980 studying art and political science. Arzab was a founding member of the Regina Group for a Non-Nuclear Society in the early 1980's, and along with other Regina citizens, was concerned with the on-going nuclear arms race and the complicity of Saskatchewan’s uranium mining industry in supplying high grade uranium for nuclear warheads.
This public awareness group arranged marches and demonstrations, and leaflet campaigns. On the steps of the Saskatchewan Legislative building a staged public performance skit was held to help get their message out and to further protest uranium dust being transported on Saskatchewan highways, a sign was placed near the north end of Albert Street declaring the city of Regina a Nuclear Free Zone.
In 1997, Nell took part in the first international labour studies debate, held online through Solinet, a computer conferencing system designed for trade unions. She has co-taught courses at the University of Regina and was an online copy editor for an American labour e-zine called Disgruntled; later the e-zine evolved into a book (by Daniel Levine). For five years Nell was an online arts columnist for a women’s creative arts journal called Moondance.
Today Nell is a Special-Education Educational Assistant in the Regina Public School system and an encaustic artist who paints abstract organic designs with hot wax. She remains politically active making the world a better place by recycling and gardening, choosing public transportation over owning a car and has planted hundreds of trees.
Elsworth F. Baker was born in 1903 in South Dakota, USA and was a 17 year old student at Regina College during the school year 1920/21, and won first prize in Mathematics that year, he later attended the Regina Normal School. Baker became a psychotherapist who studied and worked with Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) for 11 years. Reich is credited with the discovery of a biological energy, “orgone energy”, the study of which is Orgonomy, and which follows along Freud’s idea on the libido. In 1967 Baker founded the Journal of Orgonomy and the American College of Orgonomy located in Princeton, New Jersey.
Dr. Baker’s publication, Man in the Trap was published 18 times during 1957 and 2000, he died in 1985.