A brochure headed to every Terry Fox Run in the country has a Virgil name on it

~ NOTL News Crew

Joan King has been at her folding table outside the Virgil Valu-mart for years now, same routine every late summer, selling Terry Fox Run T-shirts to whoever stops. This year she had something new to hand out too: a brochure, printed 5,000 times and shipped to Run sites across the country, with a photo on the cover that a Virgil family didn't even know existed until she pulled it out. That's the kind of week this is, ordinary errands turning up something bigger than expected, and it's not the only one below.

In 2023, Megan Dyck was diagnosed with a rare pelvic cancer and given two to six months to live. She wasn't expected to see her 14th birthday. On Aug. 10 this year, she turned 17, marking it with a backyard swim with friends and a cake shaped around her dog Teddy.

The years between have been radiation, chemotherapy, and brachytherapy, treatment applied directly to the cancer sites in her body, which had already spread to her lungs by the time it was caught, at one point leaving her too weak to get out of bed. A newer immunotherapy at McMaster has since given her back some strength and mobility, and this month she's heading into Grade 12 at Eden High School. Her mother, Amber, is plain about where things actually stand: "you don't look at her and think palliative, but that's where we're at."

None of that has slowed her family's involvement in this town's Terry Fox Run. Megan and Amber have been fixtures of it for years, and this fall the Terry Fox Foundation put her, alongside NOTL's Joe Pillitteri, on the cover of a brochure being sent to Run sites across the country, 5,000 copies, meant to recruit more fundraising teams. Neither Megan nor Amber knew the photo existed until Run organizer Joan King handed them one at her T-shirt table outside the Virgil Valu-mart last week.

Pillitteri is the connective tissue. Captain of "Team Pillsy" (Terry Fox Foundation staff have taken to calling him "Million Dollar Joe"), his fundraising comedy nights combined with NOTL's runs have brought in more than $1 million for the Foundation over the years, and his friendship with Megan is, by the Foundation's own account, a real part of why she was chosen. "Megan and her courageous example remind us that there is also so much good," said chief operating officer Martha McClew. "We believe the Terry Fox Run represents the best in us."

Megan will be back on the mic at the Simcoe Park amphitheatre before this year's Run, the 46th annual, on Sept. 20, the same spot she and Amber spoke from last year, before heading out to the Paradise Grove water station to hand out bottles on the walk back. Her own reaction to finding out about the brochure was simpler than any of that: "I like it a lot."

The Foundation passed $1 billion in cumulative cancer research funding this year. Amber is clear-eyed about what that money has and hasn't bought her daughter: not a cure, but time, and treatment that's given her, in Amber's words, "the gift of an improved quality of life." For a town that runs this fundraiser every September almost on autopilot by now, it's worth a moment to remember what, exactly, it's actually for.

Police confirmed six stolen-vehicle reports across NOTL between Aug 27 and this week, plus more than ten additional break-ins or attempts residents have documented themselves on social media: Garrison Village, St. Davids, Virgil, Old Town, Tanbark Road. Stephanie Penman, whose car was taken from Garrison Village overnight Aug 27, says it's changed how she thinks about the town: "This didn't happen 10 years ago. It makes me wonder when they might start just coming in the front door." Andrew Perrie, whose vehicles were checked the same night, isn't there yet: "I feel completely safe... Niagara-on-the-Lake is the safest town in Ontario." Const. Rich Hingley says Niagara Regional Police are working to link the incidents; the practical advice is the usual, lock up, nothing valuable visible, consider an anti-theft device.

Katherine Kivlichan's two daughters start at Crossroads Public School today, part of a boundary change the District School Board of Niagara approved last fall moving roughly 125 kids out of St. Davids Public School's catchment (it also quietly reroutes their eventual high school, from A.N. Myer to Laura Secord, a detail parents learned almost by accident at a contentious school council meeting last November "Where in the world is the transparency in this?" one parent asked). Back in November 2025, a superintendent told Kivlichan the board had "already confirmed" a connecting bus to her daughters' after-school care. He's since retired, and seven months later nobody at the board has confirmed whether the bus is actually running.

Regional council has directed staff to formally review how policing costs get split across Niagara's municipalities, the first real review of a model that currently charges NOTL based on property assessment value rather than household count or actual service calls. Under the current system NOTL's $16-million-plus annual bill would drop to roughly $7.5 million if calculated per household instead. Regional Coun. Andrea Kaiser, who pushed the review through and is now running for NOTL Lord Mayor, says it's overdue: "This was about asking whether the way we share those costs across Niagara is fair." No timeline yet for when staff report back.

A CUPE video campaign about the stress and trauma paramedics face on the job has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times since late July, and more than 1,700 residents have signed a petition over staffing, wages and mental health support. The union says primary care paramedics earn 15-24% less than police or firefighters doing comparable work, and get $3,000 a year in mental health benefits versus $20,000 for police. Paramedics voted 98% in favour of a strike mandate last March; no strike date is set, and Niagara Region says it won't comment on an active negotiation.

Rêve, the Mary Street restaurant chef Adriano Cappuzzello opened with co-owners Nicole Pisarenko, Anna Kruusi and Kevin Gillingham on Aug 28, 2025, just marked its first year: an Italian bottega by day, an intimate farm-to-fire fine-dining room by night, built around an open hearth and a menu that changes with the season. Cappuzzello's résumé includes two-Michelin-starred Locanda Don Serafino in Sicily and a stint at England's The Fat Duck, and a year in, the Michelin talk around Rêve isn't just aspirational marketing, it's genuine industry buzz. Also celebrating this month: Niagara Motors, in business since 1946, and St. Vincent de Paul Parish, part of this community since 1826.

Ishani Pal, a Crossroads Public School student heading into Grade 5, held her fifth annual lemonade stand this past Sunday in support of Niagara Dog Rescue, the organization her family adopted their dog, Spot, from back in 2022. This year's stand alone was good for roughly $2,500, pushing her five-year total past $10,000. "I want to raise money for the dogs and make sure they get a safe home," she says.

Dr. Peter Sacco, a retired criminal psychology professor who now calls NOTL home, hosts The Paranormal Profilers, currently the top-ranked paranormal series on the streaming service Paraflixx, and his new film, "Niagara's 13 Ghosts," screens at the Kitchener-Waterloo International Film Festival this month. Both work through a genuine local landmark list, Fort George, the Olde Angel Inn, Willowbank, the Royal George and Old Courthouse, Laura Secord School, treating the region's most-repeated ghost stories as history with a wink rather than a punchline. Sacco's pitch, unsurprisingly, is that NOTL earns the "most haunted" label better than most places willing to claim it. Good timing either way, with Halloween six weeks out and the Paranormal Magic Show (this issue's Weekend Pick, option A) already proving there's an appetite for it around here.

Ryan Bissell had been noodling on guitar since he was a kid, picking up melodies here and there without ever finishing anything. Then in 2023, five days into a two-month trip to Costa Rica, a stingray got him waist-deep in the water on an early morning swim, "like somebody took a shotgun and blew my leg off," he says. What followed was a Costa Rican hospital, a wound that wouldn't close, a cut-short trip, and six months of a St. Catharines wound clinic back home, plus a couple of staph infections along the way.

Recovery is where the songs came from. Three months in, still sick and mostly housebound, Bissell grabbed his guitar at 4am one night and started playing, and didn't really stop; he eventually had roughly 200 voice-memo fragments saved on his phone. A friend connected him with Niagara Falls producer Paul Gigliotti, and this past July, at 38, Bissell released his first single, "Get Up Get Ready," followed in August by "Turn Up the Radio." He's aiming for a full 10-song album by the end of the year, in no particular hurry: "I'd rather take my time and get it right."

Find him behind the bar at Cork's Wine Bar and Eatery in Old Town, or streaming under his own name.

This issue's got a teenager turning hardship into a national fundraising story, a guy who didn't pick up songwriting until a stingray forced him to slow down, and a 10-year-old who's raised $10,000 with a lemonade stand because of a rescue dog. NOTL seems to have a lot of people who've turned something hard, or just something small, into something that helps other people. Who's yours: who do you know here who's done that, and what did they turn it into?

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