Kribs, Louis Pannebaker

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Lovell Clark, “KRIBS, LOUIS P.,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 12, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/kribs_louis_p_12E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Journalist, publisher, and author; b. 27 Feb. 1857 in Hespeler (Cambridge), Upper Canada, son of Ludwig (Lewis) Kribs, carpenter, and Elizabeth Pannebecker; m. 1880 Millie Cliff, and they adopted six children; d. 24 March 1898 in Ottawa.
    • Educated in Hespeler, Louis P. Kribs worked as a youth in the “lumber camps north of Barrie.” In the late 1870s he entered journalism as a reporter for the Toronto Globe but soon moved to Barrie to become editor of the Northern Advance. Later he became editor and proprietor of the Bruce Herald in Walkerton. He sold that paper in 1884 and returned to Toronto to join the News under the innovative Edmund Ernest Sheppard, first as city editor and then, using the pseudonym Henry Pica, as the author of a popular series of articles featuring commentary on events of the day. According to American critic Walter Blackburn Harte, Kribs “did the best work of his life in his struggle to make a success of the News.” He left the News and went to Ottawa as parliamentary correspondent for the Toronto Daily Mail for one session, but after that journal renounced the policies of the Conservative government [see Christopher William Bunting], he resigned and edited the Daily Standard in Toronto, a campaign journal established by the Conservatives during the general election of 1887. Kribs next worked for the Toronto World but when the Conservative Empire was founded later in 1887, he became its news editor and afterwards its Ottawa correspondent. He was elected president of the Parliamentary Press Gallery in 1891.
    • Kribs had been prominent as a journalist, particularly in Ontario, and, although he held strong opinions politically, he was highly popular with journalists of all shades of opinion. At his death there were many tributes to both his ability and his genial and benevolent nature. The Globe commented: “The blues used to take wings at the sight of his burly frame and the sound of his friendly voice and hearty laugh. As a writer he was full of force and rollicking humor, but although he might hit an opponent hard and overwhelm him with harmless fun, there was never a suspicion of vemon in his invective or in his mirth. Generous, manly, clear and vigorous in intellect, sound in heart, his death is, in no merely conventional sense, a loss to the community.”
  • Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: Needs to be submitted Caleb Stives 1760 -1842
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/105758426/louis-pannabaker-kribs