Born in Burnaby, BC, in 1918, Irene Stangoe and her husband, Clive Stangoe, bought the 20-year-old Williams Lake Tribune in 1950. Over the next two decades they won many awards for their publication, including Best Weekly in Canada in their circulation field. As well as being community editor and features writer, Irene wrote "With Irene", a column in which she told stories of kids, dogs and trips to the family cabin. The Stangoes sold the paper in 1973 and moved to Chimney Lake, west of Williams Lake, and Irene then focussed on local history. In 1975 she launched a new column the Tribune called "Looking Back" to write about bygone days in Williams Lake and the Cariboo-Chilcotin in general. She continued to contribute her "Looking Back" columns to the paper into the 21st century. She received a national award for best historical story in a community newspaper from the Canadian Newspaper Association in 2000 for an excerpt from History and Happenings in the Cariboo-Chilcotin.