====== Mika-Wladimiruk, Nicholas ====== (died 18 Jan. 1999, aged 86), known as Nick Mika, and his wife **Helma Rosa Kate Mika-Wladimiruk** (died 9 Oct. 1995, aged 71), known as Helma Mika, publishers. Nick Mika was born in the Ukraine and lived in Poland and Germany before coming to Canada in 1949. Before coming to Canada, he had studied art, and gained experience as a journalist and small publisher. Settling in Belleville, Ont., he at first worked as an attendant at the House of Refuge, then he worked for some years as a chemist at the Bakelite plant. Helma, whose maiden name is given in various spellings including Obentshine and Avendschein, was born in Frankfurt, Germany. In later years, breaking with her usual reserve (which contrasted with the somewhat bearlike Nick’s bluffness and ebullience), she spoke of her terrifying experiences of being huddled in the Frankfurt bomb shelters during the World War II bombings. She is said to have come to Canada in response to Nick’s request that she come there to marry him. At some stage she lived in Montreal, where she learned French as a business language. In the 1950s the two Mikas began a silk-screening business out of their home in Belleville. Later, this became the well known Mika Publishing Company, the publisher of many new books on Canadian (mainly Ontario) history, and the reprinters of what must have been in all several hundreds of the older Canadian histories (mainly 19th century), many of them from the Maritimes. The two Mikas were also themselves the joint authors of many new histories, including //Historic Belleville// and //Railways of Canada//. The Mika Publishing Co. books were published in attractive format on good paper and with good type, and not only handsomely but most solidly bound (they were admirably suited to survive hard service at the photocopier), and gave the impression they were intended to last for centuries, and would do so. The illustrations were always reproduced with the highest standards of colour and precision. The Mika Publishing Company was always a very small firm, operating with a tiny staff (essentially, just the two Mikas, and one or two others). It was housed in the 1970s and 1980s in a small, pleasant, one-storey structure (at 200 Stanley Street, Belleville) which included warehousing space for the book stock. In the later years at least, the office space had numbers of warm-hearted dogs and cats, placid and discreetly behaved, yet firm in demanding the attention and affection of every visitor. About the time of Helma’s death, when Nick was no longer well enough to manage the company, and no buyer could be found to continue the business, the firm was closed and the remaining stock sold. Helma died at the Belleville General Hospital. Nick, who survived her by three years, died in Belleville at Hastings Manor, where he had been a resident since Jan. 1997. They had no children. Nick was over a long period a loyal supporter of the local Rotary Club, and Helma, at least in her later years, was deeply involved with the work of the Quinte Humane Society. To a least one visitor over the years at the Mika press building in Belleville, there seemed a touch of bitterness and fanaticism in Helma’s involvement in her later years with animal welfare. It was as if the feelings she committed to it also expressed a resentment that the contribution of herself and–which would have mattered more to her–her husband to Canadian cultural life had been poorly appreciated. On one occasion, she was deeply wounded when someone (apparently an academic) had insulted her husband in the faculty room of one of the Ontario universities, a university where Nick had been invited to use the faculty room during his research visits to the library. Belleville is rather a long way from GC, but nevertheless, as chance had it, the Mikas had, through their publishing firm a stronger link with GC than with any part of Ontario outside the Belleville-Kingston link-up. They published the first two volumes of Alex Fraser’s //Gravestones of Glengarry// (1976, 1978), Alan MacKinnon’s history of Vankleek Hill (1979), the MacGillivray and Ross history of Glengarry (1979), the Marins’ history of SDG (1982), Elinor Senior’s history of Cornwall (1983), Campbell and McDermid’s //Kennedys// (1986), two further books by the present author (1985, 1990), a facsimile reprint of the 1879 atlas of SDG (one of two reprints of that valuable work issued by publishers in 1972), also the facsimile reprints of the well-known histories of Croil, Thomas, Pringle and Jack Greenfield (J. A. Macdonell), the Greenfield book being done on commission from the Glengarry Historical Society as the society’s Ontario Bicentennial project. ---- //Belleville Intelligencer// (newspaper), with various portraits: 11 and 17 Oct. 1995, 19 and 20 Jan. & 12 Feb. 1999; interview article 8 Oct. 1995 (“Publishing for Posterity”); honours, 27 Nov. 1995, 4 Nov. 1996 * information kindly supplied by the Belleville Public Library * personal knowledge * Mika press catalogues, Nos. 9 and 12A, in present author’s collection * //Bibliography of Glengarry//: index * Edward S. St. John, “Mika Publishing Company: a Remarkable Contribution to Our Local History,” //Glengarry Life// No. 38 (2005) [<6>]