The End of the World of Wonder
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Laurie Triefeldt began her newspaper career with The Windsor Star in her native Canada in 1988. She spent a few years there before moving to the U.S. where she briefly worked for the Newspaper Enterprise Association before moving on to the Camden N.J. Courier-Post in 1993. Triefeldt was a newspaper graphic artist during this time making maps, graphs, and charts for news items. Though on occasion she was tasked with creating an illustration at which she proved most capable.
It was at The Courier-Post where inspiration came for the World of Wonder feature. There the paper’s graphic director Helen I. Driggs helped create and draw Brainstorms an illustrated didactic monthly “graphic encyclopedia for kids.” The page first appeared on March 7, 1995 and by the last half of 1996 and into 1997 Triefeldt was part of a rotating trio of illustrators with Driggs and Lori Gallo creating the page.
The Brainstorm pages were “researched, designed and illustrated” by the individual artists. The Courier-Post was eventually syndicated by Courier-Post’s parent company via the Gannett News Service until 2006.
But by late 1997 Triefeldt had taken the idea and created her own page in the hopes of syndication. World of Wonder first appeared on March 4, 1998 in The Republican newspaper of Springfield, Massachusetts.
While Triefeldt notes that The Republican would run every page from beginning to end it was The Star-Ledger that would become her home. As would the United Feature Syndicate as of the year 2000.
As seen above the topics were wide-ranging, none of the sciences were off limits.
Halfway through her 28th year of creating the page Triefeldt has decided to retire to a life of leisure, her last World of Wonder page was shipped out for the week of August 30, 2026 on which she bade her fans farewell.
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