Remembering Doug Symons

Monday, 17 January 2022 at 12:30

Longtime journalist, local historian and author Doug Symons has passed way at the age of 91.

A former Journalist and local author has passed away at the age of 91.

Doug Symons wrote four local history books, including Woodstock Way Back When in 1993, An Informal History of Woodstock in 1997, The Village That Straddled a Swamp and Giants of Oxford.

He was also a longtime journalist for the Woodstock Sentinel Review and wrote a popular column that was compiled in 2011 as "Memories of Yore."

Bill Scriven worked at the newspaper for a number of years with Doug. He says Symons was a pleasure to work with.

"He was a hell of a journalist, did a lot of work in the community, just an all around nice guy. I am really going to miss him, I am sorry to hear the news."

Curator of the Woodstock Museum Karen Houston says Doug Symons was an amazing local historian.

"One of his books, the Village That Straddled A Swamp is a book we have actually just republished at the Museum and the Historical Society and we are using that to create an exhibit and it is so awful that he has died just as we are working on this. So we are asking anyone, if they have memories of Doug, to send them for the exhibit."

Houston says Symons was a wonderful champion for our City.

"He was so much fun and if we were having an event, it didn't matter what it was, he would show up, we have great pictures of him as the mad professor, he was so involved and really, just a wonderful champion for local history."

Doug had three children with his late wife Cathy who passed away in 2020.

Symons was also a member of the Woodstock-Oxford Probus Club, the Woodstock Museum board, the Lions Club of Woodstock, the Oxford Historical Society along with many other associations.

Woodstock City councillor Mark Schadenberg says Doug is going to be missed.

"My recollections of Doug trace back to my years at The Sentinel-Review (1992-98). I was sports editor and he would often be in the news room to talk local current events or chat about the sports figures of yesterday. His contact would be Sentinel city editor Bill Scriven as Doug would submit (before email dominance in communication methods) his latest writing, which could be a significant moment in community archives or could just be a name-dropping column about friends riding their bicycles up an down Dundas as a means of describing who the merchants of the day were."