1984 - Ian Shields & Pat McQuaid

Interviewed by Liisa Ogburn on July 20, 2013

Ian Shields and Pat McQuaid moved into Oakwood in 1984 from Montreal. In addition to working with the newsletter and Oakwood directory, Ian has served on the SPHO Board multiple times and cooked pig for the annual pig pickin’ for the last twenty-five years. Pat has managed the newsletter and been involved with the Oakwood Gardening Club.

I think it is important to have communications and to know your neighbors. I know people have come here and visited us, and they’re surprised at just how many people that we know here. We’ve lived here for almost thirty years. Most people who visit just wouldn’t have that many people in their neighborhood that they could identify, let alone be friendly with.

One night, Rusty [who’d delivered the newsletter for several years] walked into the board meeting  and announced that he wasn’t going to do it any more. So I thought, “Well, I would be willing to take on coordinating it, so  that’s what I did. The next newsletter, I delivered the entire neighborhood, wrote down every address, and built a list of addresses. And then I’d put all this into a database, and sorted and arranged them into routes. The next month, I walked those routes myself to test out whether the routes were reasonable and equitable. We have eight routes that take about 45 minutes to an hour each. I actually have twice as many carriers, plus some backups, as I need for the routes- and so a carrier will deliver a route every alternate month. The neighborhood newsletter does not get mailed to people. I would say that there’s a lot of value in just delivering it by hand, because you get the one-on-one communication.