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Boxcar was likely first home for News I


t’s not conclusive, but there are a number of people who are pretty sure that a boxcar embedded in a building at 525 North Railway Street is actually the site of the first building that housed the forerunner to the Medicine Hat News — the Medicine Hat Times.


The Times was first published in 1885, by two men originally from Ontario — A.M. Armour and T.B. Braden — who had established the forerunner to today’s Calgary Herald two years earlier.


In 1896, the then Medicine Hat Weekly News vacated the boxcar and set up shop in a building adjacent to the former American Hotel on South Railway Street, and later moved to a two-storey building at the corner of Second and Sixth downtown in 1914. The Post Office and city hall occupied two of the other corners at the intersection.


In 1958 the News bought the adjacent Empress Theatre, which in its heyday had hosted plays, musicals and movies, and used it for additional office space and storage.


Then in 1981 it built a new building on Dunmore Road where it continues to operate today.


But the boxcar story still persists


and it was local businessman Marcel Folk, who owns the building on North Railway, who first alerted the News about his suspicions a couple of years ago.


With the newspaper’s 125th anniversary coming up, the paper decided to investigate the rumour a little more carefully and sought the assistance of Philip Pype, archivist at the Esplanade Archives, and local railway expert Earl Morris.


Both men met with Folk and checked out the building and concluded that it was likely used by the News in the 1880s. According to Pype it was “a little short of 100 per cent certain.”


They also noted the engraving left by John (Dutchy) Kleis on the front sidewalk that had been left there just after an addition had been made to the boxcar in 1944.


John was the son of Adam Kleis, who had originally bought the boxcar from the city and who operated his tailoring business there for years with his wife Adelia.


Kleis had been born in Poland and came to Medicine Hat about 1929. A short time


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“We learned through the years that it possibly was the original site of the News, but we never could prove it,” she said in a previous interview.


She noted that it would have been in a central location near the original train station, and that in the 20 some years she lived in the boxcar, she hadn’t noticed any other structures in the area that had also been boxcars at one time.


later, he sent for his wife and four children, who had been born in Poland.


Audrey Newman, married to Gordon Newman, is one of the three Kleis children to be born in the boxcar, while another brother Bert Kleis was born at the local hospital, but lived in the boxcar too. She was born there in 1933.


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