Tom Hawthorn's blog

Vancouver snapshots — then and now

2012-01-13T20:04:00.000-08:00

In the 1940s, the downtown corner of West Cordova and Granville hummed with activity. The train station was across the street and the main post office next door. Wilson's newsstand is next door to Lando's Furs. City of Vancouver Archives photograph, CVA 1184-3272.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
January 11, 2012

The garage is a utilitarian wonder, a concrete box standing seven storeys tall on a downtown Vancouver street corner. An interior series of ramps winds to the rooftop, where painted stalls provide room for yet another 58 automobiles.

From that roof one can marvel at the neo-classical beauty of Waterfront Station across West Cordova Street, as well as the mixed art deco and Edwardian Baroque magnificence of the Sinclair Centre across Granville Street.

It is much better to be in the garage looking out than to be outside looking in. The garage, built in 1969, is an ugly, dreary blot on the landscape. The garage’s opened facade is like a grim stack of grey concrete pancakes.

The site was not always so unwelcoming.

Once, a strip of mom-and-pop businesses operated on the block. A photograph taken during the war years depicts well-dressed couples strolling past businesses with opened doors.

The two images — the sterile parking garage and the vibrant street of shops — are paired in a fascinating new blog called Changing Vancouver. The site matches then and now photographs taken at the exact same location.

Launched on Christmas Day, the blog already has more than 50 entries complete with historical background and information on architects and builders.

It is an irresistible time waster.

The blog is produced by Andy Coupland, a London-born City Hall planner, and John Atkin, the historian and heritage advocate. It is a followup to The Changing City, their book of walking tours published last year by Stellar Press.

The contemporary photographs are shot by Mr. Coupland (pronounced coop-land), who strolls city sidewalks armed with a digital camera, a tripod, and a wallet of black-and-white prints as he seeks the precise spot where the historical photographs were taken. It is not as easy a task as it sounds and even somewhat hazardous.

“A lot of them were set up standing in the middle of traffic,” he said. “That is quite problematic.”

Sometimes, the before-and-after images are surprisingly similar. (A trio of buildings facing the northeast corner of Victory Square remains intact.) Other times, it is hard to imagine what has forever disappeared. That ordinary, ho-hum, never-give-it-a-second-glance Standard Life Building office tower at Howe and Dunsmuir? It stands on ground once occupied by the many-gabled Manor House Hotel, which boasted a wraparound porch on all three levels, as well as a bell tower overlooking the intersection. The Manor House was designed by William Blackmore, a British-born architect who skipped debts in Winnipeg and Minneapolis to set up practice in Vancouver a year after the city was founded.

One of the blog’s most shocking contrasts is the pairing of today’s parking garage with yesterday’s modest shops at the corner of Granville and Cordova.

“That single story is so much more interesting than the parking garage,” Mr. Coupland said.

“It’s interesting how busy that corner used to be, and how dead it is now.”

In that one block, now relegated to memory, can be told the story of a city.

Along Granville Street could be found a lunch counter and an office of the Railway Express Agency, which shipped parcels. There was also a barber shop operated by James Willows; the Wigwam novelty store offering native crafts and Japanese porcelain; and, a furrier. The corner was occupied by Wilson’s, described as the Post Office News Stand in the city directory.

A star-shaped neon sign advertised the Star Weekly magazine, while other exterior signs promoted Coca-Cola and Sweet Caporal cigarettes. The newsstand is open to both Granville and Cordova Streets, attracting customers from the train station (now Waterfront Station) and the post office (now Sinclair Centre).

The adjacent fur store was founded by the Lando family. Lou and Sara Lando’s son, Esmond (Bud) Lando became a prominent lawyer and sportsman in the city, while his wife, Edith, was named to the Order of Canada as a “quintessential volunteer.” Their children are known for their own volunteer and philanthropic works. One of them, Barry Lando, worked for a quarter-century as a producer on CBS’s 60 Minutes.

All of which is more interesting than a parking garage.

While the blog has so far used archival photos, Mr. Atkin is dipping into his extensive collection of private, never-before-seen photos dating from more recent decades.

Among these is a 1962 shot of the Courtesy Kitchen, serving Chinese and Canadian food, at the corner of East Broadway and Scotia. Next door, a one-time foresters hall houses a shop selling foam.

Today, both buildings have survived. The former Courtesy Kitchen is now home to the pleasant Rhizome Café, while the foam store, which has also been a confectionary, a print shop and a strip joint, is home to Starbucks.

At least it was the last time I checked. In Vancouver, you never know what’s going to be there in the morning.

Since 1969, a dreary parking garage has snuffed the vibrancy from the same intersection. Andy Coupland photograph.

At a Jewish cemetery, a lesson in humanity

2012-01-13T19:49:00.000-08:00

A large crowd gathered at the Jewish cemetery in Victoria after unknown vandals defaced headstones with swastikas. Chad Hipolito photographs for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
January 9, 2012

VICTORIA

An unknown hand perpetrated the unthinkable — painting swastikas on headstones in a Jewish cemetery.

It was a criminal act and a cowardly one, too, a desecration designed to disgust and perhaps to intimidate.

There is disgust. There is no intimidation.

On a grey Sunday afternoon, people came in their multitudes to gather on hallowed ground on a hillside overlooking the city. They filed past a gatepost bearing the Hebrew inscription Bais HaChayim (house of the living) before gathering around a memorial to the Holocaust.

More than 600 came for a vigil.

“All of us coming out here and standing together means we will not be silent in the face of a hate crime,” Rabbi Harry Brechner of the Congregation Emanu-El synagogue told the crowd.

On the final day of last year, it was discovered swastikas had been painted on five headstones. One had also been defaced with a white power symbol, as well as the scrawled words “Jewish scum.”

In the new year, a removal agent was applied to the monuments, which were wrapped in a see-through sheet. It gave them the appearance of having been wounded in battle. The wrap is now off, the blotched areas on which the solvent had been applied looking like scars.

Each of the vandalized headstones tells a story.

Rabbi Harry Brechner

The most modest of the damaged ones is adorned not by a Star of David but with an engraved maple leaf. It marks the wartime burial site of Joseph L. Vince, a 44-year-old private with the Royal Canadian Regiment, who died of heart failure in 1915.

Nearby is a small granite marker for Annabelle and Eli Beam, a couple who lived at 15 Linden St., one house from the Dallas Road waterfront in Fairfield. He owned two businesses on Wharf Street — the Pacific Sanitary Bag Co. and the Victoria Junk Agency. He died in 1940. Her death date is now obscured. The stone awaits further repairs.

A monument of pink granite honours Charles A. Freedman, a theatre manager who had made his fortune in the Klondike gold rush. One March evening in 1908, he returned home from a night at the theatre with his wife when he stumbled across a prowler in the pantry. The men struggled, the intruder pressing a rusty .38 revolver to the left side of Freedman’s chest before pulling the trigger.

The wounded man chased his attacker out of the house, then fell, mortally wounded. “Marion, I’m shot,” he told his wife. “I’m done for.” He died minutes later.

The other damaged monuments mark the resting spot of three brothers and their families. Born in Germany, they made their fortunes as merchants on the Pacific coast. The eldest was only 23 years old when he got a contract to build a trail from the Stikine River to the Cassiar gold fields, along which he collected a toll of two cents per pound of freight.

Simon Leiser and Company became the province’s largest grocery wholesaler with several stores in the mining towns dotting Vancouver Island. In 1896, he built a red brick warehouse at 524 Yates St. alongside Waddington Alley in downtown Victoria. The building still stands.

An advertisement for Lenz & Leiser.

His brother Gustav went into business here as a dry-goods merchant, while Max, the younger of the trio, imported wines, liquors, and cigars. Gustav died unexpectedly of pneumonia, aged 40 in 1896. Max later built a handsome, four-story brick building at the corner of Blanshard and Johnson Streets. (Today, the ground floor is home to the Shine Cafe.) It was called the Kaiserhof Hotel and boasted a beer garden at the rear.

In 1915, the civilian passenger liner Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat with great loss of life, including James Dunsmuir Jr., the 21-year-old scion of the Vancouver Island coal-mining fortune. News of the sinking enraged a crowd of men in Victoria. Led by soldiers in uniform, a mob numbering 500 attacked the Kaiserhof, since renamed the Blanshard Hotel. The bar was trashed. Another $25,000 worth of damage was done to Simon Leiser’s warehouse. Other businesses owned by those with German names, many of them Jewish, were also attacked.

It mattered not at all to the frenzied throng that the Leisers, prominent in the arts and business in Victoria, had long since become loyal British citizens.

A century ago, a mob acted in mindless fury. The recent vandalism reflects a similarly ugly spirit.

On Sunday, another large crowd — this one motivated by love, not hate — gathered around the graves of people named Beam and Vince and Freedman and Leiser.

The grounds of the Jewish cemetery were consecrated in 1859, desecrated in 2011, venerated in 2012.

Repairs were made to the headstone of Simon Leiser, who built a wholesale grocer business in the province by supplying prospectors and mining towns on Vancouver island.

Book celebrates Victoria's notable private residences

2012-01-06T14:38:00.000-08:00

The author Nick Russell stands in front of Pinehurst, an 1889 mansion in Victoria's James Bay neighbourhood. Chad Hipolito photographs for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
January 4, 2012

VICTORIA

The block on which Thomas Donovan built his family home included three carpenters, two laborers, a butcher, a saddler, a plasterer, and a letter carrier.

It also boasted a bricklayer. You only had to look at the exterior of No. 23 Milne St. to know where he lived.

In a city surrounded by forest, with mills lining the waterways and timber both plentiful and cheap, Mr. Donovan built his home of red brick.

It has a hipped roof and cross gables, as well as a patterned frieze separating the ground floor from the second. The home is a spectacular testimony of a craftsman’s skill.

The records suggest it took him three years and $2,000 to complete by the time his family moved in 110 years ago.

The Donovan house is one of the homes featured in Glorious Victorians, an illustrated book celebrating the capital city’s stunning stock of notable private residences. The book’s subtitle promises 150 houses to mark the city’s 150th birthday this year, with entries from castles to cottages, and in architectural styles ranging from Queen Anne Revivals with their fussy gingerbread woodwork to art-deco wonders of sleek, curvilinear shape.

As the capital of a province dependent on natural-resource industries, with dramatic boom-and-bust cycles, it is a wonder so many remarkable homes have avoided the wrecking ball.

Victoria has lucked out. After the gold rush, the booms were never too loud, nor the busts too desperate. Where vast swaths of Vancouver have been leveled, grand private homes replaced by apartment towers in the West End and modest cottages torn down for Vancouver Specials, the capital’s steady growth left intact an inventory of homes spanning a century-and-a-half of favoured styles.

A charming streetscape is one of Victoria’s understated lures.

“The city has attracted people who like what they find and want to keep it that way,” said Nick Russell, the journalist and heritage researcher who produced the book. “A lot of people move here and stay because they love the ambience.”

His research has found worthy homes in all corners of the city, including a cottage along the harbour waterfront that is all but invisible from the street, hidden as it is behind a curtain of trees. It can be spotted from the water if one looks down from the deck of the passing MV Coho ferry.

His favourite street for house sightseeing will come as little surprise to anyone familiar with the city.

“I still get a frisson of pleasure driving up Rockland where there are so many glorious, classic buildings from 1910, 1912, and where you also come across ultra-modern buildings, which are exciting architecture in their own right. I like that mix.”

Mr. Russell, 73, has renovated two houses since moving to Victoria from Regina more than a decade ago. The first was a homestead-style house covered in stucco and in disrepair as a longtime rental. During the renovation, it was learned the house dated not from 1900, as thought, but from 1861, when it was built for one of the first African-American families lured to the colony by Gov. James Douglas.

The second is his current home in the James Bay neighbourhood. It is known as the Mansard House for its roofline, an uncommon style in Victoria. He did not include it in his self-published book, as the house once had been lifted to make room for a full basement, losing the original integrity of the design. He and his wife, Sharon, worked on the restoration, which received an award from the local Hallmark Heritage Society.

The longtime reporter and educator trained many of the reporters whose bylines can be read in British Columbia newspapers. As well, he wrote Morals and the Media, a book on ethics in journalism. (Insert your own wisecrack here.) He was senior editor of This Old House, a four-volume register of Victoria’s historic homes produced by the Victoria Heritage Foundation.

Working with other researchers, Mr. Russell picked through the detritus of city hall’s attic and found dusty ledgers with valuable information for those interested in researching house histories.

So far, he has gathered 3,600 plumbing permits, 6,450 water permits, and 8,218 building permits, a dreary accumulation of data for the uninitiated but a trove of detail for researchers. The goal is to have this information made available online.

An advocate of preservation, Mr. Russell does not want Victoria to become a time capsule. A city is living space for people, he notes, not a museum.

Nick Russell checks out the architectural drawings for one of Victoria's spectacular homes.

A centennial for ice hockey on Vancouver Island

2012-01-03T11:38:00.000-08:00

Professional hockey made its debut on Vancouver Island at this magnificent arena in Oak Bay on Jan. 2, 1912. The arena was one of two built by the innovative Patrick brothers. The Arena burned to the ground on Nov. 11, 1929. Modest apartment blocks have been built on its site.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
January 2, 2012

VICTORIA

The arena opened to great fanfare. A ticket was sold for every seat. The standing-room area was packed to the building’s timber rafters.

A band struck up the national anthem when the lieutenant-governor entered the building. The hockey teams skated onto the ice, the home side first, followed by the visitors.

The vice-regal officer then stepped onto ice made hard and cold by an ingenious system of pipes beneath the surface. Thomas Wilson Paterson, a railway contractor and former politician, dropped the puck for a ceremonial opening face off.

One hundred years ago today, on Jan. 2, 1912, the exciting sport of ice hockey made its professional debut on Vancouver Island at a new arena built in Oak Bay, just outside the city of Victoria’s borders.

“The sport is all it was cracked up to be and more,” trilled the Daily Times after the game.

“With all due reverence to cricket, we think hockey is a trifle faster.”

It seems hard to imagine the game now so deeply associated with Canadian identity needed any introduction at any time in the Dominion. Hockey was played in the province, especially in the mining towns in the frozen valleys of the Kootenays, but fair weather on southern Vancouver island only permitted the occasional children’s game of shinny on a frozen pond.

On that day a century ago, the seven members of the New Westminster Royals sailed across the strait to play the Victoria Senators in the inaugural game of the three-team Pacific Coast Hockey Association.

The modern arena with artificial ice, the three teams and the league were all the product of Frank and Lester Patrick, ambitious and far-sighted brothers who had made a fortune with their father in the lumber business.

Both brothers had played pro hockey back east. They figured another fortune was to be made in promoting the sport in Canada’s booming Pacific cities. They also intended to challenge for the Stanley Cup, even then inspiring fevered dreams of hockey glory.

In Vancouver, the brothers built a grand, $175,000 arena on Georgia Street overlooking Coal Harbour. It boasted a seating capacity of 10,000, making it the largest arena in the Dominion. Incredibly, the city’s population was just 120,000, though it had doubled in five years.

In Victoria, they built a more modest, but still modern building of wood. It stood at the corner of Cadboro Bay Road and what is now Epworth Street. (The arena burned to the ground in the early morning hours of Remembrance Day in 1929. The flames, first spotted by a passing milkman, lit up the night sky. The site is now occupied by a pair of three-story apartment blocks across the street from the Oak Bay Secondary sporting grounds.)

Jack Ulrich

The world-class arenas helped lure to the coast some of the best-known names in hockey, including Newsy Lalonde, Harry Hyland and Tom Dunderdale. (The Vancouver Millionaires also employed a 19-year-old player called Silent Jack Ulrich, as he was deaf and mute.)

The Royals wore black and orange sweaters, while the Senators sported a red, white and blue combination.

The sportswriters wrote in purple.

“Every moment provided a fresh sensation and never while playing was going on was the blood given time to cool,” ran a report in the Daily Times. “As the puck darted hither and thither with such dazzling rapidity that at times it was impossible for the crowd to follow its course, the most phlegmatic were stirred to their deepest depths; as spectacular burst crowded upon spectacular burst in almost unending succession, this unrestrained delight brought the spectators up all standing.”

Of course the referee came in for criticism from the Daily Colonist for having missed “one or two rough house stunts.”

The Victoria arena opened to the public with an offer of free skating on Christmas Day, leading several downtown stores to advertise their new stocks of equipment.

James Maynard’s store in the Oddfellows Block on Douglas Street suggested “hockey boots and skates make fine Xmas gifts for all.” Peden Bros. boasted carrying a complete stock of the best skate makers, including Lunns, McCulloch, and Automobile. A pair of McPhearson’s skating boots for ladies costing $3, a pair of Gales hockey boots for men at $5.

J.R. Collister, at 1321 Government St., now occupied by The Gap, also sought customers interested in the new skating rink. “Be in the swim, join the merry throng, and remember you can procure the latest model skates here,” the store stated in an advertisement placed in the Daily Colonist. “All kinds, all sizes, and of the very best makes. HOCKEY MODELS, used by amateurs and professionals the country over. The blades are remarkably hard and tough, retaining a keen edge through long use. OUNCES LIGHTER THAN ANY OTHERS.”

Bert Lindsay

Victoria lost the first game at the arena by 8-3. In goal for the home side was Bert Lindsay, 31, who had been lured away from the Renfrew (Ont.) Creamery Kings by the Patricks. Lindsay spent four seasons on the coast before returning east, where he played for the Montreal Wanderers and Toronto Arenas in the inaugural two seasons of the National Hockey League. Lindsay’s son also became a hockey star. Terrible Ted Lindsay is now 86.

The Patricks are credited with such innovations as permitting forward passing, adding blue lines, and substituting skaters while play continues.

At the end of the short 1912 season, Frank Patrick suggested the Stanley Cup be decided by a series of games, not just a two-game playoff as was the practice.

His league sent a letter to the Stanley Cup trustees offering to send their champion to Eastern Canada to challenge for the trophy. The suggestion was rejected, as the natural ice used in rinks in Montreal, Toronto and Quebec City would be too slushy by late March. By the end of the year, the Arena Gardens (later known as the Mutual Street Arena) in Toronto had artificial ice

These days, the Stanley Cup finals end in balmy June. And the storied trophy has even been won by a team in Florida.

A forgotten arena in Victoria was once the stage that showed how such wonders were possible.

Lester Patrick and Frank Patrick were the masterminds behind pro hockey on the Pacific coast.

Recalling a lone friendly voice heard while in exile in the land of his birth

2011-12-30T16:15:00.000-08:00

Yoshio (Yon) Shimizu (left) was forced to work at a bush camp after the Canadian government ordered him to leave the British Columbia coast in 1942. Shimizu, who went to become a business executive in Wallaceburg, Ont., did not get to graduate with his Victoria High School classmates.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 28, 2011

VICTORIA

Yoshio (Yon) Shimizu, 87, has enjoyed a long marriage, raised a fine daughter, finds satisfaction in retirement from a successful career in the faucet industry.

His health is good, though he has lost his eyesight and his memory is not as cracker-jack sharp as before. The resident of Wallaceburg, Ont., is at a stage of life when one wishes to complete unfinished business.

Mr. Shimizu belongs to the Class of ’42 from Victoria High School in the city in which he was born. The yearbook includes a photograph in which he wears a dark suit and tie, his face stern and his jet black hair swept back from his forehead. He is hailed as “one of the brightest and most cheerful boys” in the class.

Yet, he did not get to graduate with his peers.

A top student, a basketball star and an all-round popular figure at school was ordered to leave the city. A school year that had begun with such optimism about future prospects ended abruptly.

In a few terrible weeks, Mr. Shimizu’s plans and those of his fellow Japanese-Canadian classmates were forever altered.

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and then Hong Kong 70 years ago this month. Then, in February, just three days after Mr. Shimizu’s 18th birthday, the Canadian government imposed a sunset-to-sunrise curfew on all people of Japanese ancestry. They were to be forcibly removed from the West Coast.

“It was a shock what the government proposed to do with us,” Mr. Shimizu said.

“What could you do but accept it as the way the dice were rolled. There’s nothing you can do.”

His siblings and widowed mother were ordered to Vancouver, and from there, on to the internment camp at New Denver in the British Columbia Interior.

Mr. Shimizu, determined to graduate with his his classmates, asked the school principal to help him extend his stay. Since the family’s home and the stock from their dry-goods business were seized, he got a neighbouring family to agree to take him in.

But the youth’s appeal was denied and he was ordered to report.

The attendance book in the school archives indicates his last half-day of studies occurred on April 23, 1942.

An assembly bade farewell to the school’s few Japanese-Canadian students, including among them Yasuo Hasegawa, known as Pete, an army cadet. The principal, Henry L. Smith, read a psalm. The students recited the Lord’s Prayer before filing quietly from the auditorium, some of them crying, passing through a door held open by young Mr. Shimizu.

The young man packed his possessions in an old army duffle bag, carefully folding the prized No. 8 singlet he wore as a forward on his basketball team.

He had not experienced much racism himself, but he worked as a newsboy selling the Victoria Daily Times on a downtown corner. He read the headlines.

“It was all the propaganda in the newspapers and the politicians yelling for us to be shipped out of Canada that would make you realize there were people who weren’t happy to have Japanese in the province,” he said.

For one brief week, he had been taken in by the Burnett family, British immigrants who lived around the corner from the Shimizu home. The father was a sawmill labourer, while the mother worked as a housekeeper. Their son, John, who also sold the Times, inherited the Shimizu route, as well as his prized corner of Yates and Government.

The family’s kindness was not well received by others.

“We got called Jap lovers and all that crap,” said John Burnett, 84, who now lives in Nanaimo.

Young Shimizu was ordered to Hastings Park in Vancouver where, as a young, single man, he was ordered to a work camp outside Schreiber, Ont., where he swept floors and kept the fires stoked inside a tar-paper shack serving as a kitchen. He was then transferred to a sugar-beet farm near Glencoe before being sent to a bush camp at Kapuskasing in November, 1942.

In 1943, he got permission to join a brother in Toronto, eventually completing his high school education at Jarvis Collegiate. A skinny physique made the tree falling and sawing at the bush camp exhausting, while a job found for him at a plating company in Toronto was also too physically taxing. After the war, he returned to the classroom, studying chemical engineering and eventually gaining a degree in business administration. He retired in 1985 as a high-ranking manager with Waltec Industries (now Delta Faucets, formerly Wallaceburg Brass).

Years passed before he would allow himself to return to Vancouver Island. When he first did so, he visited the Burnett family to offer his thanks. He also renewed acquaintances with Mary Hamilton, his old French teacher at Vic High, who had been the only member of the student body or faculty to write him after he was forced from Victoria.

“You grow up with an inferiority complex because you grow up knowing you’re not the most popular race in the province,” he said. “Having a teacher being good to you is encouraging.”

Mr. Shimizu recently agreed to take part in a fundraising effort organized by the school’s alumni association. He has donated $200 to sponsor a seat in the school’s 98-year-old auditorium, the same in which an assembly once bade him farewell with prayers and a psalm. The plaque on the seat includes his name, his would-be graduating year and the words, “remembering Miss Mary W. Hamilton.”

As well, the Class of ’12 is considering a suitable commemoration for those members of the Class of ’42 who were denied the triumph of a graduation ceremony — and so much more — seven decades ago.

Yon Shimizu was a star basketball forward in his hometown of Victoria.

Bill Ozard, broadcaster, bureaucrat (1938-2011)

2011-12-27T10:46:00.000-08:00

Bill Ozard became one of Nova Scotia's best-known radio and television broadcasters. He later unwittingly ran afoul of British Columbia's Social Credit government.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 27, 2011

Bill Ozard began working for the B.C. tourism ministry on a February morning in 1978. Less than two hours later, he was fired.

The sacking generated newspaper headlines, tough questions in the Legislature, and, eventually, an out-of-court settlement.

The incident was an inconvenience for Ozard and an embarrassment to the province’s Social Credit government.

The dispute was all the more remarkable for having been caused by a classified advertisement placed by Ozard expressing his gratitude for the job.

Ozard, who has died, aged 73, had a long career as a broadcaster in Victoria and Halifax, where he was a familiar figure as a hotline host, election-night commentator, and contributor to the annual Christmas Daddies Telethon.

William Wakefield Ozard was born in Victoria on Feb. 2, 1938, to Evelyn Royal Georgina Bonavia and William Charles Ozard, a school teacher.

Ozard’s introduction to radio came as a student at Victoria College, where he studied English and history. A radio club formed on campus in 1955 and Ozard was a founding member as one of the “top college disc jockeys” who hit the airwaves each school day at noon. The studio was in a gardener’s hut where they spun records and read the news to students in the nearby cafeteria. The broadcast day for CJVC that debut year ended promptly at 1:25 p.m., so students could return to class.

Ozard found work at radio stations CJVI and CKDA in his hometown before leaving to take a post in Halifax with CJCH in 1960. He soon became one of the best-known broadcasters in Nova Scotia, hosting a hotline radio program and anchoring election night coverage on the sister television station launched the year after he moved east.

For four years, he hosted Phone Forum, a popular radio call-in show. A photograph from this era shows him in the studio, a headset covering his ears, dark-framed glasses on his face, a cigarette smoking in his raised left hand.

A successful hotline show needs “a true dialogue, richly laced with controversy and opinion,” Ozard wrote. “The hosts must take stands on issues, they must be crusaders.” One of his show’s successful campaigns led to an inquiry into conditions at a mental hospital at Cole Harbour.

He left radio briefly in 1969 to become a publicist for the Scotia Square development in downtown Halifax, only to soon after return to CJCH as station manager.

In his 1999 book, Not Guilty: The Trial of Gerald Regan, the journalist Stephen Kimber tells a story about how an exposé on vote buying in Regan’s constituency got killed. The radio station’s owners were seeking to purchase a television station and feared upsetting a powerful Nova Scotia Liberal. It fell to Ozard to break the news to reporters and it was a sign of his management style that he allowed them to angrily express their dissatisfaction.

In the 1974 federal election, Ozard challenged longtime Progressive Conservative incumbent Bob McCleave in Halifax-East Hants. The broadcaster increased the Liberal share of the vote, but he still finished a distant second.

The defeated candidate took a position as director of special promotions in the Nova Scotia tourism ministry, later becoming deputy minister.

It was with those qualifications that he was hired by the British Columbia government as a $2,035-per-month supervisor of travel marketing. He rented an apartment in Victoria and placed a classified advertisement in the local newspaper expressing his gratitude.

“Three months ago, I decided to return to Victoria after a 17-year absence,” he wrote in the advertisement. “God’s blessings are many.”

He thanked 13 people by name, including tourism minister Grace McCarthy and her deputy.

When he reported to work he was told his tiny advertisement created the impression his had been a patronage hire.

“I never dreamed there could possibly be any adverse comment on a thank-you note,” he said.

Ozard was dismissed after about 90 minutes. Reporters were told he had not passed his probationary period, the same excuse offered in the Legislature when the matter was raised by the opposition New Democrats.

Ozard filed a writ of summons in the B.C. Supreme Court to determine whether he remained in the ministry’s employ and, if so, to order his salary be paid. The matter was settled out of court with McCarthy telling the Legislature the bureaucrat had received $4,300.

He wound up with a similar job in neighbouring Alberta where for several years he promoted travel within that province.

Ozard was diagnosed with colorectal cancer five years ago. He died from the disease, or, as his family stated in a paid obituary notice, “signed off the air,” on Nov. 25 at Bedford, N.S. He leaves a son, four daughters, three grandsons, and a sister.

Bill Ozard checks an avalanche of mail at CJCH in Halifax, circa 1961.

Hundreds of $10 heroes keep the Tall Tales coming

2011-12-27T10:36:00.000-08:00

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 26, 2011

VICTORIA

A look back at the year that was:

In June, the Big Bad Wolf knocked at the door of Tall Tale Books, a children’s store.

The owners, Kate and Drew Lorimer, were prepared to shutter the store, giving up on a dream of creating a bright, kid-friendly bookstore of their own in downtown Victoria.

They decided to take one last shot, hitting on the idea of what they called the Hero Society. They asked patrons to subscribe for as little as $10 per month in exchange for merchandise at the store. That way the couple could have a predictable, guaranteed income and keep the store afloat.

Kate, Drew and Emma Grace Lorimer.

In a month-long campaign, they sought 400 subscribers by Canada Day.

How’d they do?

”Six months later, we’re still here,” Mr. Lorimer said.

“We got a little over 300, so we didn’t quite make out goal, but we’ve got an amazing group of people supporting us. Things are definitely better. It’s still week to week, month to month. We’re never out of the woods.”

The store’s third Christmas season has been its busiest yet. Particularly popular have been Patrick McDonnell’s Me ... Jane (“a picture book about Jane Goodall as a kid — adorable, simple sweet story but inspirational”) and Sherri Duskey Rinker’s Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site (“a humourous bedtime lullaby book about construction vehicles on a worksite going to bed with teddy bears and blankies”).

In the end, another year passed with the Lorimers having kept the wolf at bay. Can’t yet call it a happy ending, as the story of Tall Tale Books is still being written.

Of the more than 50 “Eyes on the Island” columns published this year, none got as much attention as a report on Daniel Loxton’s efforts to get published an illustrated children’s book on evolution. The Victoria writer and illustrator shopped his book to American publishers, none of which would agree to bring the book to market.

Instead, the evolution book was released by Canadian-owned Kids Can Press of Toronto.

The news that American publishers wouldn’t touch a children’s book about evolution generated about 600 Tweets, including one by the film and culture critic Roger Ebert, as well as more than 4,000 Facebook recommendations. It was mentioned on CNN.

Mr. Loxton’s book, Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be, went on to win the prestigious Lane Anderson Award for young readers. The judges described the book as a “tour de force of science writing.”

Soon after, Loxton launched his second book, Ankylosaur Attack, at Tall Tale Books. A herd of dinosaur-loving children, many of them exhibiting their fierce claws and fangs, listened to the author Grr! Arr! and Rawr! his way through a reading.

Social media also played a prominent role in the municipal campaign of Lisa Helps, who was one of three rookies elected to Victoria city council in November. Ms. Helps’ savvy operation included regular Facebook and Twitter updates. She called on other candidates to join her in a hootenanny at Logan’s Pub and she held weekly work crews to repair fences and tidy community gardens.

The candidate whose name doubles as a campaign slogan finished in third place in the at-large election, within striking distance of topping the polls.

After her victory, she converted her campaign website into one in which she asks the public for input on issues facing council. Her slogan: “A city where citizens lead.” It will be interesting in the new year to see if the citizens feel any more empowered with this council than its predecessors.

Last January, we looked at the shuttering of the Blethering Place, a restaurant on Oak Bay’s High Street decorated as though by one’s eccentric English auntie. For three decades, the restaurant served as Victoria’s “favourite faux Tudor tearoom,” as it was called, offering bangers and mash to a clientele that included Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet. Today, the Oak Bay Bistro offers bison, chicken liver parfait, and local artisan goat cheese from Saltspring Island.

Fish and chips? Not on the menu. But there is slow-roasted Arctic char with roasted sunchoke and sweet potato hash.

Oak Bay has lost some of its Olde England flavour. All for the better.

South Vancouver Island a haven for craft brewing

2011-12-23T11:04:00.000-08:00

Bonnie and Don Bradley are the husband-wife team behind the new Moon Under Water brewpub in Victoria's industrial Rock Bay neighbourhood. Craft brewers and brewpubs have turned southern Vancouver Island into a beer-lover's mecca. Chad Hipolito photograph for the Globe and Mail.

Globe British Columbia series: Things that work

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 21, 2011

VICTORIA

A private liquor store in Oak Bay promotes the sale of locally-brewed ales and lagers in what it calls the “two-mile beer diet.”

At long last, a diet I can follow.

Let’s go to the source. Drive along busy Bay Street to the Rock Bay industrial corridor. Stop at a commercial strip mall. Across the street is a gravel yard. In a nondescript cinderblock building, a former Direct Buy showroom has been transformed into a pub.

This is The Moon Under Water pub and brewery, which boasts “the best service in town — because you serve yourself.” Patrons order from the bar, where publicans pour from taps.

The glass is held at a proper angle, the amber liquid flowing like the nectar of the gods that it is.

A head forms before settling into place as the glass is righted. Bring it to the lips, the beer rolling past the tongue, leaving behind a light caramel flavor. Smooth with a dry finish. Who’m I kidding? It’s a beer and it’s good. Time for another swig.

This is a glass of Full Moon Bitter, a flavourful beer brewed from two-row barley, Northwest hops and speciality malts. It won a first-place prize ahead of 17 other British Columbia craft beers at a beer-cask festival held earlier this year by CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale.

“People are looking for flavour,” said proprietor Don Bradley. “That’s been a mistake by the big guys, who have advertised all along that there’s no after-taste in their beer. So, I guess that means there’s no taste at all.”

The year-old Moon Under Water is the latest addition to the thriving craft brewing and brewpub scene on southern Vancouver Island.

Thirty years ago, a pub owner challenged Prohibition-era laws to open a brewpub in West Vancouver. Two years later, in 1984, Spinnakers opened as a neighbourhood pub in a forgotten, mixed industrial and residential corner of Vic West overlooking the harbour. A month later, the pub served the first batch of its beers — an ale, a malt, a stout, and a special brew. And people came and they drank and, lo, they pronounced it good, so others went forth to begat other craft breweries.

Today, Victoria boasts four brewpubs with others in Sidney, Duncan and Nanaimo, while another quartet of Victoria brewers offer even more choices for the discerning quaffer of fermented malt beverages.

“This is the mecca,” pronounces Jim Dodds, general manager of Vancouver Island Brewery, the largest of the island’s craft brewers and, also founded in 1984, the oldest. “We represent beers that are flavourful. No preservatives, no additives.”

The larger brewers — referred to as “factory beers” by Mr. Bradley and as “the Big Guys" by Mr. Dodds — want in on the market.

“You can see where they’re getting into the market with their domestic premiums, but they’re still mass produced.” Mr. Dodds said. “Craft beer (sales) are almost like a rocket ship, they’re doing so well.”

In an annual report on the brewing industry, Agriculture Canada salutes craft brewers for their “product creativity.”

Many specialty brews are released in the harvest and yuletide seasons. They are known for unique taste combinations, as well as for lively monikers and memorable labels.

Vancouver Island Brewery has released a Dough Head Gingerbread Ale in which brewer Chris Graham used clove, ginger and cinnamon to create a beer that tastes and smells like the baked treat. It is on tap at the trendy Aura restaurant at the Laurel Point Inn, two bits from every pint being donated to the local Habitat for Humanity to support house-building for low-income families. The memorable label features a giant grinning gingerbread man striding over the Legislature.

Driftwood Brewery has issued a spicy and complex Belgian-style ale named Farmhand. It is made of partial sour-mash with ground black pepper.

The slogan at Phillips Beer is “Inspiration through fermentation.” Their seasonal releases include a Crooked Tooth Pumpkin Ale and a Dirty Squirrel Hazelnut Brown Ale, both “proudly brewed in a little brewery at the bottom of a mid-sized island on the left side of a very big country.”

Matt Phillips originally financed his dream of an artisanal brewery a decade ago through unorthodox means. Every bank and credit union turned him down for a business loan, but on his way out the door at each he took a credit-card application. Those funds gave him enough to buy brewing equipment and to sign a lease for a dark warehouse above a metal shop.

Phillips also has a 24-Mile Blueberry Pail Ale in which every ingredient is said to have travelled no more than that distance from farm to brew kettle. The hops come from Vic Davies, the barley from Mike Doehnel and the water from the Sooke reservoir.

When you know the names of the farmers who grew the grains and of the brewer who cooked the batch, then you know to whose health to drink.

Craft brewing and brewpubs

What it is: A challenge to Prohibition-era drinking laws 30 years ago led to the opening of the first modern-era brew pub in Canada at West Vancouver’s Horseshoe Bay. Two years later, in 1984, Spinnakers opened in Victoria. That same year, Vancouver Island Brewery released its first batch of beers, eventually to be joined by a half-dozen other craft brewers. Today, several fine brewpubs compete for thirsty patrons, offering a selection of ales and lagers brewed on southern Vancouver Island. One of the most popular remains Spinnakers. An aficionado can go on a pub crawl that would seem to last from beer to eternity.

How it works: Using natural, locally-sourced ingredients, as well as some of the best water on the planet, craft brewers perform alchemy in copper fermentation vats.

The microbrewing industry is a throwback to the early days of the 20th century, when every city boasted competing breweries. Advances in refrigeration techniques and the building of superhighways led to a consolidation in the brewing industry until only a handful of big players dominated the market.

In recent years, the demand for premium, flavourful beers has allowed microbrewers to carve a niche of about 10-12 per cent of the B.C. market.

The craft brewers “advance people’s tastes and open new horizons in beer experience,” said Don Bradley, proprietor of Moon Under Water pub and brewery in Victoria.

Fred Etcher, hockey player (1932-2011)

2011-12-21T09:57:00.000-08:00

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 21, 2011

His left leg encased in a plaster cast, Fred Etcher had to skip the biggest hockey game of his life.

He stood on crutches as he prepared to address his teammates in a dressing room near an outdoor rink at Oslo, Norway.

A broken bone in his ankle had failed to heal in time for the 1958 world championships. The tournament’s final game pitted the Soviet Union versus Canada’s representatives, a squad of amateurs from small-town Ontario.

The Whitby Dunlops carried the name of a sponsor, a tire manufacturer, on their sweaters. They claimed the senior amateur championship in Canada months earlier, earning the right to represent the country at the upcoming world championships.

As the players prepared for a one-game showdown against the Soviets, telegrams urging them on to victory sent by fans back home were read aloud.

Then, Mr. Etcher stepped up to wish his teammates good luck. In the midst of his exhortation, he broke down.

Even an athlete who could not play succumbed to the great pressures of representing Canada against a foe seen as the embodiment of evil. The Dunlops “were carrying the worries of the world on their shoulders and they played as if the world had a bulldozer on top of it,” the sportswriter Milt Dunnell told readers of the Toronto Star.

Etcher, who has died, aged 79, traveled overseas with the team, his cast painted in the Dunlops’ distinctive black-and-yellow livery. (Earlier, when a Soviet team embarked on a goodwill tour of Canada, the forward Veniamin Alexandrov signed the cast as a gesture of friendship.) Though he could not play, Etcher became a familiar figure at the outdoor rink as he outshouted all fans in cheering on his teammates.

Fred Etcher

The town of Whitby paused as the final game of the world championship was played. Even though her husband was not skating, his wife listened attentively at home in Whitby, radios tuned to Foster Hewitt’s play-by-play call of the world championship game. She turned on a set in both her bedroom and parlour, so she would not miss any action as she nervously paced between the two rooms.

The Dunnies prevailed at Jordal Amfi Stadium, coming from behind to defeat the Soviets 4-2, setting off wild scenes back home, including an impromptu parade of cars and the burning of an effigy of a Soviet hockey player.

Etcher, a 180-pound left-winger, had a reputation as a smooth skater with a lethal shot. He had heavy-lidded eyes, a hint of a widow’s peak, and combed the brow of his short-cropped hair straight back in the fashion of Bing Crosby. A member of the Dunlops’ top line, along with Bob Attersley (obituary, April 7, 2010) and George Samolenko, he also handled penalty-killing duties, his superior skating allowing him to rag the puck.

A devout Mormon, who remained active in his church throughout his life, Etcher opposed playing hockey on the sabbath.

On occasion, sportswriters would note his religious affiliation, such as during the 1957 Memorial Cup, when he scored what would prove to be the wining goal in the decisive game. An American newspaper reported that Etcher’s shots “seemed to have almost divine guidance.”

Frederick Keith Etcher was born on Aug. 23, 1932, the first of six children — three boys and three girls — to Nellie and Keith Etcher.

He was still a teenager when he led the Oshawa Bees to the junior-B championship and a league scoring title in 1951. He moved up a rank to the Oshawa Generals for two seasons before his scoring prowess helped the Oshawa Truckmen claim the senior-B title in 1954.

A rare Fred Etcher hockey card.

He then joined the Dunlops for whom he would skate for six seasons, winning two Allan Cup amateur titles, a world championship, and an Olympic silver medal.

In 1960, the Kitchener-Waterloo (Ont.) Dutchmen were asked to represent Canada in the hockey tournament to be held during the Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley, Calif. The Dutchmen were hoping to make up for the ignominy of failing to win the gold medal in 1956, only the second time the Canadian squad had not been triumphant.

The Dutchies supplemented their roster with Whitby players such as defenceman Harry Sinden and the Attersley-Etcher-Samolenko line.

Etcher had two goals and an assist in Canada’s opening game against Sweden, a 5-2 victory, then added a hat-trick and four assists in a 19-1 shellacking of hapless Japan.

Against West Germany, Etcher opened the scoring with two quick goals, later adding three assists, as Canada cruised to a 12-0 victory. He recorded a lone assist when Canada shut out Czechoslovakia, 4-0.

The Canadians’ first serious challenge came against the Americans. Just 10 seconds into the game, Etcher had a clear shot at Jack McCartan in the American goal, but failed to score. The underdogs jumped to a 2-0 lead before the Canadians scored with less than seven minutes left. McCartan turned away all attacks, then, with 20 seconds left on the clock, Attersley raced into the American end with Etcher alongside and but one defenceman between them. Attersley’s pass was knocked away by the desperate defender. Seconds later, as the game ended, the Americans piled on top of their goalie in a delirious pyramid of happiness.

The next morning, the Globe and Mail’s front page featured a photograph of the winning goal being scored with Etcher an unhappy witness to the scene.

The top line, including Etcher, put on a “shoddy performance,” according to the Star.

The Canadians went on to again defeat the Swedes, as well as the Soviets, to gain the silver medal, a prize of little consolation in a land that expected nothing less than gold.

Etcher led all scorers in the Olympic tournament with 21 points in seven games, a record that has now stood for more than a half-century.

In the fall of 1960, Etcher signed as a playing coach for the Uxbridge (Ont.) Black Hawks, an intermediate amateur team who he helped win several consecutive titles.

In summer, Etcher played fastpitch softball, most notably as a slugging first baseman with a high batting average for the Oshawa Tony’s of the Toronto Beaches League.

Etcher spent his working life with General Motors, where he retired as an industrial engineer.

Etcher has been inducted into both the Oshawa and Whitby sports halls of fame.

He died on Nov. 25 at University Hospital at London, Ont. He is survived by his wife, Mary Jane; four adult children; seven grandchildren; a brother; and, a sister. He was predeceased by a brother and two sisters.

Gregg Madill, hockey referee (1944-2011)

2011-12-20T19:13:00.001-08:00

On Dec. 23, 1979, the Boston Bruins waded into the stands to do battle with rowdy fans at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan. The brouhaha ensued at the end of an NHL game officiated by Gregg Madill.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 20, 2011

A hockey referee is judge and jury, witness and prosecutor. A verdict is delivered on the spot, the penalty pronounced forthwith.

Such frontier justice does not make popular those who don the black-and-white sweater. (In the sporting world, the jurists, not the convicted, wear stripes.) Their uniform leads to the jocular appellation of referees as zebras. More often, they are thought of as asses.

Gregg Madill, who has died, aged 67, generated an inordinate amount of criticism even for his profession.

Players questioned his calls. Coaches questioned his motives.

“The refereeing, as usual, was a joke,” Ken (The Rat) Linseman of the Edmonton Oilers said after one 1983 game officiated by Madill. The ref assessed 164 minutes in penalties, most of those coming after a bench-clearing brawl.

After a 1980 loss, New York Rangers coach Fred Shero complained to the New York Times: “He was doing funny things for both teams and the players found it hard to concentrate.”

“You can’t cry about officiating,” defenceman Barry Beck added, “but you sure can lose some games the way he called them tonight.”

Even in victory, players found reason to whine.

Montreal’s Jacques Lemaire, fresh from scoring a hat-trick in a 4-1 victory, moaned about an ignored infraction that impeded a streaking Canadiens player. “Madill was doing a bad thing for hockey when he didn’t call a penalty on (Andre) St. Laurent for hooking,” Lemaire said. “He broke the rhythm of the game. People come to see exciting plays like a breakaway.”

Montreal’s Steve Shutt was once so incensed by the referee that he deliberately bumped into him with an elbow, earning a three-game suspension from the league office.

Sports writers piled on.

After one frustrating game, Steve Simmons informed readers of the Calgary Herald that Madill “upheld his well-deserved reputation for being the worst referee in the modern-day National Hockey League.”

Perhaps the most devastating assessment came from Sports Illustrated. The American magazine evaluated all 12 NHL referees, ranking Madill at the bottom of the class.

“A cut below the rest,” the report stated. “Can get flustered and lose control of a game.”

A year later, he was dismissed by the NHL, though he did not give up refereeing, soon after patrolling junior games for the Ontario Hockey League.

Madill’s career coincided with an era of goon hockey, during which brawls, melees and donnybrooks were as common as an everyday slash.

He once ejected nine players from a game for fighting.

The most notorious incident in Madill’s career came at the end of a game at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan on Dec. 23, 1979. After the final whistle, players from both teams milled on the ice in a scrum that grew more heated as players argued. A fan then reached over the glass surrounding the rink to sock Boston’s Stan Jonathan in the nose, drawing blood.

The Bruins, skates still on their feet, climbed the glass to fight with the fans.Mike Milbury wrestled one fan over a row of seats, ripping a shoe off his feet before beating him with it.

As police broke up the battle in the stands, Rangers captain Dave Maloney had a heated argument on the ice with Madill before smashing his stick on the ice. The ref assessed him a game misconduct even though the match had long since ended. Later, Maloney complained to reporters that Madill had sworn at him and accused New York’s Swedish players of deliberately falling down so as to incur penalties on their opponents, an unsportsmanlike behaviour known as diving.

League president John Ziegler suspended three and fined 18 of the Bruins. He took no action against the Rangers, or the referee, though Sports Illustrated blamed Madill for ignoring a trip and a retaliation that led to the scrum after the final whistle.

(The brawl remains a staple of sports highlight programs, somewhat to the embarrassment of Milbury, whose current appeal to machismo as a hockey broadcaster is diminished by his ridiculous use of a shoe as a weapon.

(Earlier this week, Milbury was charged with assault of a 12-year-old pee-wee hockey player in Massachusetts. News accounts indicated the boy had made reference to the shoe beating.)

One of the odder incidents in Madill’s career occurred during a game in Denver, when he banished goal judge Rod Lippman after the off-ice official lit the red lamp signaling a goal even though the puck had hit a goal post. It was the goal judge’s third disputed call of the night.

Though criticized as an NHL referee, Madill had worked his way up to the league after stints in minor professional circuits. He earned praise for his handling of international hockey games, including a successful assignment as an official at the world championships in Moscow in 1979.

Richard Gregg Madill was born in Toronto on July 15, 1944. He died on Dec. 5 at his winter home at Kissimmee, Fla. He also had a residence in the village of Apsley within the township of North Kawartha, Ont. He has been a residential building contractor.

He leaves his wife, Judy; two sons; a stepdaughter; and, six grandchildren. One of his sons, Jeff Madill, a right-winger, played 14 games with the New Jersey Devils of the NHL and had a long career in the minors.

Last year, an online auction house sold one of Madill’s NHL sweaters. The “spectacular set of stripes,” the listing noted, showed “some light staining that appears to be blood.”

This article originally misspelled Ken Linseman's family name. As Linesman. Which is the guy who works with a referee. Which would have been clever had it been intentional and not a typo. It has been changed. Linseman's nickname has also been added to the text.

'Ambassador of art' makes painting a spectator sport

2011-12-20T18:58:00.000-08:00

Judy McLaren has been artist in residence at the Fairmont Empress in Victoria since August. A glimpse in the kitchen led to this oil painting, titled "Pastry Chefs."

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 19, 2011

VICTORIA

Judy McLaren stepped back from the canvas, then tilted her head before reaching forward to make broad strokes with a brush.

She wore paint-splattered gloves on both hands. A drop sheet protected the carpet.

Painting can be a reclusive activity, typically practiced alone in a studio or garret.

Not so for Ms. McLaren, who is creating art as a form of spectator sport.

A stream of passersby flowed past. From time to time, people stopped to watch, commenting on the work.

The artist has been on public display in the upper lobby of the Fairmont Empress Hotel since summertime. She is the current artist in residence at the stately hotel. For several days of the week, she can be found daubing and dabbing outside a temporary gallery housing her latest works.

Her role is to be “an ambassador of art,” she told one recent visitor.

If so, her attaché is Bubbles, an amiable seven-year-old goldendoodle with black fur who is her constant companion. Bubs, as she is also known, caused a minor diplomatic flap the other day when she helped herself to a chocolate treat attached to a gingerbread house on display in the lobby.

The artist and her dog have been daily features of hotel life for six months now. Ms. McLaren wanders the halls in search of subjects, as she has made the hotel the focus of a series of 16 paintings completed so far during her residency.

She has portrayed the hotel’s elegant tea room, which is a popular stop for tourists, as well as the Bengal Lounge, where an ancient tiger skin over the fireplace is a reminder of an empire’s former reach.

A thin woman of bright temperament and an ease at making acquaintance of strangers, Ms. McLaren, 60, has taken on a heavy workload with ambitious goals. She knows it is a rare privilege for an outsider to explore the nooks and crannies behind the curtains of a busy hotel.

“An artist doesn’t get chances like this all the time,” she said.

Her current canvas includes the early outlines of a painting featuring the banquet staff having a meeting in an empty dining room. She was attracted by the light of the room, where an afternoon sun turned long-stemmed wine glasses into vertical streaks of silvery white.

Kamal Silva by Judy McLaren

The artist has completed portraits of general manager Martin Leclerc and executive chef Kamal Silva. More remarkable is to see the working staff of the hotel portrayed in oils. Perhaps the most dynamic of her hotel works depicts a quartet of pastry chefs in an intense discussion. The artist has an affinity for the kitchen, where the industrial setting is offset by cooks in brilliant white coats and chefs topped by mushroom-shaped toques blanches.

“Whites,” she pronounced, “are so wonderful.”

The artist was born in 1951 in Guernsey, the British crown dependency whose bailiwick includes several islands in the English Channel. Her birth came just six years after the Germans were expelled from the only British soil occupied during the Second World War. Her father was an Anglican priest whose parish included the isolated and bucolic isle of Sark.

After postings in England, the family decided to immigrate to Ontario, her father taking a teaching position at Upper Canada College in Toronto.

Ms. McLaren graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design. She has been an illustrator for children’s books and does many commissioned oil portraits.

Her husband is Keith McLaren, a senior master with BC Ferries who can be found aboard the Spirit of Vancouver Island as it plies the waters separating Swartz Bay and Tsawwassen. He won a prestigious award for a book on the schooner Bluenose, one of three books he has written.

The artist has tailed porters, sous chefs and housekeepers. On Friday, she spotted Amanda Demontigny, a 16-year employee, at work cleaning the upper lobby. The worker scrubbed a staircase, her silhouette outlined by a grand window through which could be seen a spectacular, shimmering background orange leaves.

“She’s going to be starring in one of my paintings,” the artist vowed.

“That’s if you can catch me,” the cleaner replied, mopping feverishly, step by step.

Passersby admire the work of painter Judy McLaren, who paints daily in the upper lobby of the Fairmont Empress Hotel in Victoria. Chad Hipolito photograph for the Globe and Mail.

Andy Stephen, broadcast journalist (1927-2011)

2011-12-17T13:45:00.000-08:00

Andy Stephen in the studios of Victoria radio station CKDA, circa 1954. He later became a well-known reporter with television station CHEK.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 16, 2011

VICTORIA

Andy Stephen reported the news of Vancouver Island to a television audience for whom he became as familiar as the newsmakers he covered.

With a stentorian baritone, his words enunciated with crisp precision, Stephen chronicled the damming of rivers and the cutting of highways through British Columbia’s rugged terrain. He arrived in Victoria shortly after the ascension of W.A.C. Bennett to the premier’s office, an era in which Social Credit went from loony fringe to family dynasty.

Stephen, who has died, aged 84, forged working friendships with the premier and his supporting cast in cabinet, plying them with drink (save for Bennett, a teetotaler) and invitations to go fishing.

Every three years, the reporter seemed to scoop the rest of the pack by breaking the news of an election call. So predictable were his exclusives that jealous rivals wondered how the reporter became privy to inside information. Was he in cahoots with the premier?

The truth, according to Jim Hume, the veteran political columnist, was far less dramatic. Stephen was a rare reporter to have established a relationship with Commander Gar Dixon, the tight-lipped secretary of Government House. When rumours swirled, Stephen made a daily morning telephone call to the residence of the lieutenant-governor. After chit-chat about fishing, the reporter would ask Dixon, “Is the premier dropping in for tea today?” An affirmative answer meant an election writ, or at least a cabinet shuffle, was in the works.

For 22 years, Stephen hosted Capital Comment, a weekly roundtable program in which reporters and politicians discussed the issues of the day. Premier Bennett was the inaugural guest. Such exposure, as well as his pioneering work as a television reporter covering the legislature for stations based in Victoria and Vancouver, made Stephen a recognizable figure even to residents in such far-off locales as Pouce Coupe.

Blessed with a rich, resonant tone, Stephen required no amplification. His voice boomed. Even when whispering, he did so in a voce less than sotto.

It would come as little surprise to his audience to learn he had been briefly an opera singer as a youth before he ever considered becoming a newsman.

Born in Edmonton on Aug. 22, 1927, Andrew Yurechuk was the son of Ukrainian immigrants. His father, Stephen, arrived in Canada as a year-old infant in 1903, while his mother, Katherine Kolody, born in the town of Stryi, settled with her family in southern Alberta a decade later, homesteading near the hamlet of Etzikom.

Andy Stephen and W.A.C. Bennett on Capital Comment.

His father worked the kill floor of a slaughterhouse. When he lost his job during the Depression, he found similar work in Winnipeg, moving his family about the time of his son’s 10th birthday. At age 17, Andrew wielded a cutlass in a school production of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera, Pirates of Penzance. The following year he was selected by Metropolitan Church Choir director Herbert Sadler to play General Malona in the operetta The Maid of the Mountains. A Winnipeg Free Press reviewer cited the “unquestionable” talent of Yurechuk, who was “particularly adept at stage business.”

While visiting Toronto in 1948, Yurechuk popped into the CBC’s studios, where he met Leslie Nielsen, who advised him to enroll at the Academy of Radio Arts operated by Lorne Greene. He did so, soon dropping out, having been hired as an announcer at Ottawa radio station CFRA. By then, he had adopted his father’s given name as a surname.

He broadcast ballroom dances at the Chateau Laurier and fiddler’s dances in towns along the Ottawa Valley. A highlight was covering Newfoundland’s entry into Confederation in 1949.

In Ottawa, he worked with announcer and program director Fred Davis, later to become nationally famous as host of television’s Front Page Challenge.

In 1953, Stephen was hired as news director of Victoria station CKDA and, three years later, also became the first news director after the launch of television station CHEK, the first privately-owned outlet in the province. At Channel 6 on the dial, it was only the third station available in southwestern British Columbia.

His days began before dawn as he prepared morning news casts for the radio station, then moving on to the television studio, where he anchored the suppertime 6 Star Final News. He later co-hosted a noon-hour show.

Stephen covered the Swiftsure international yacht race from aboard the ocean-going tug Sudbury, delivering hourly reports over a grueling 32-hour broadcast session.

In other summers, he provided dramatic accounts as marathon solo swimmers Marilyn Bell and Cliff Lumsdon each conquered the chill waters of Juan de Fuca Strait.

“It was a clean-living town,” he told broadcast historian Drew Snider in 2004. “If you got a car stolen, it was a big deal.”

A rare serious crime occurred on April 24, 1960, when an escaped mental patient shot 35-year-old Saanich police Const. Robert Kirby, a six-year veteran, through the heart, killing him instantly. Stephen covered the aftermath of the shooting scene, as well as the funeral procession, but his cameraman was barred from the church.

It was in the province’s hothouse of politics that he earned his reputation. He caused a stir by making the first radio report of the sitting of the Legislature from within the chamber in 1953. His arrival in the building was not greeted warmly by print rivals, who vacillated between sneering at radio and television reportage while fearing that it might end their predominance, as it did.

In time, colleagues in the Legislative Press Gallery warmed to him, and Stephen served three terms as president, presiding over the writing of the group’s first formal constitution in 1972. (He was succeeded by Barbara McLintock, who became the first woman to hold the post. She is now a coroner.) He was later made a life member, a rare honour.

The Socreds delivered an activist government, nationalizing the hydroelectric company and creating a provincial ferry service. While such characters as highways minister Flyin’ Phil Gaglardi, who explained speeding tickets by insisting he was “testing the curves,” offered good stories, the government remained very much a one-man act.

In 1959, the Queen of Sidney, a car ferry built at the Victoria Machinery Depot, was launched with fanfare as the first of a fleet of boats that would come to be known as Bennett’s Navy. The premier had a surprise for those who joined him on the ferry’s inaugural voyage.

As Stephen once recounted to the historian Ross Crockford, “When we got halfway across the Strait of Georgia, (Bennett) stopped the ferry and said, ‘I’ve got something to show you.’ His secretary brought out a suitcase, and Bennett opened it and pulled out a flag. The premier ran it up the mast and said, ‘That, ladies and gentleman, is the first unveiling of our new provincial flag.’ ”

During the sitting of the legislature, the premier conducting a brief session daily in his office at precisely 9:30 a.m. Stephen sat at the end of the premier’s desk, while other reporters sat in two rows of chairs. The questioning ended when Stephen said, “Thank you, Mr. Premier.” Stephen was one reporter who could attend after hours at Bennett’s Oak Bay apartment without incurring the premier’s wrath.

The hard-drinking denizens of the Press Gallery, who worked then as now in a cluttered, filthy space mirroring the setting of The Front Page, were keen for hijinks.

Stephen led a team of fortified reporters to victory in the First Great International St. Patrick’s Pothole Golf Tournament held in the northern Vancouver Island logging town of Port McNeill in 1968. They returned to defend their title the following year on a road trip during which the local Socred MLA was to officiate at the opening of a highway bearing his name.

After Liberal MLA Pat McGeer, a noted oenophile, criticized British Columbia vintners for producing an inferior product, which he described as “terrible,” “lousy,” and “garbage,” Stephen organized a blind wine-tasting in which three imported whites were pitted against three provincial whites. The politician’s grimace, as though he had swallowed vinegar, made the national news and caused consternation among Okanagan wineries.

Stephen eventually became a freelancer. He held positions as an information officer and for a brief time drove taxi in the city. He also exhibited a gizmo known as the Seat Belt Convincer, which simulated the impact of a crash at 6 m.p.h. (9.7 km/h).

He died on Nov. 22 at Saanich Peninsula Hospital, near Victoria. He leaves his partner, Joan Martins; a son; a daughter; and, a brother.

His memorial service was attended by many former colleagues, known as CHEK-mates. The station he helped launch aired a brief news report that evening including still images of Stephen interviewing Santa Claus, pecking at a typewriter, and wearing a grass skirt while beating a bongo drum.

His Christmas chestnuts can be found on CDs

2011-12-17T11:54:00.000-08:00

Bob Mercer, a longtime figure on the Vancouver publishing scene, is known for his spectacular Christmas compilation CDs. Rafel Gerszak photograph for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 14, 2011

’Tis the season for Christmas tunes, which have only been in rotation for four weeks now (with at least two more weeks to go).

Three of Billboard’s top 10 albums in Canada this week are holiday themed with Jackie Evancho’s Heavenly Christmas and Justin Bieber’s Under the Mistletoe trailing million-selling Christmas by Michael Bublé. The Burnaby-born crooner’s album also tops the jazz, seasonal and digital charts. This season, he stands atop the music world like Santa at the North Pole.

For some, the high rotation of canned carols and merry Muzak is enough to bring on madness. Santa Baby being sung in a Betty Boop voice by Madonna or Britney Spears? Bah, humbug.

For others, Christmas songs offer a nostalgic journey through happy memories of frolic, family, and friendship.

Bob Mercer is one of those who digs Christmas tunes. A longtime figure on the Vancouver magazine scene, he is known for producing for his friends an annual compilation of rarities and oddities. He doesn’t roast chestnuts on an open fire, he burns them onto a CD.

At this time of year, he always has CDs on hand.

“I walk around with a pocketful of them in case I bump into people,” he said, “part of my swashbuckling persona.”

Bob Mercer by Jonathan Cruz

He considers the annual compilation to be his Christmas baking.

Mr. Mercer teaches publishing at Simon Fraser University after a long career in newspapers and magazines. He has been editor of Vancouver and the Georgia Straight, as well as other publications. When not in the lecture hall, he fronts The Masses, a blues-based rock ’n’ roll band. As a lead singer and harmonica player, Mr. Mercer is heavily influenced by Keith Relf of the Yardbirds.

For years, he has haunted yard sales and thrift shops in search of discarded vinyl gems. Christmas records are both a popular seasonal purchase and a popular seasonal donation. He’d drop $1 on a K-tel collection, or a Time-Life box set. One of his favourite finds was a copy of Christmas Album by Boney M., the West German-based group featuring singers from the Caribbean. They had a monster hit in Britain with a cover of Harry Belafonte’s Mary’s Boy Child.

Mr. Mercer’s interest in seasonal music was rekindled by the release of Do They Know It’s Christmas? in 1984. The song, co-written by Bob Geldof, who had also worked at the Straight in the 1970s, was released as a charity single to raise money to relieve a famine in Ethiopia. He found in it a spirit to answer “the greedy ’80s of Reagan, Thatcher, Mulroney and all those other Scrooges.”

He has found Christmas songs in just about every music genre imaginable, though the contributions from death metal bands is limited. The Vancouver punk scene’s pop chapter produced one killer yuletide song in the Payola$ Christmas is Coming.

“Been down to the U.I., lined up in the queues, been down to the welfare, with holes in my shoes,” Paul Hyde sings. “The kitchen’s still leaking, with floods on the floor, the landlord won’t fix it, he only wants more.”

For years, Mr. Mercer made a master tape by dubbing from vinyl to a master cassette tape from which he then made tapes to hand out. He later moved to CDs and now can find even the most obscure tracks online.

In his selections, he seeks a balance between the religious and those songs more attuned to the holiday’s pagan origins.

“It if was all sacred, it would be unbearable,” he said. “And if it was all profane that would be tiresome, too.”

When he was a boy, his family listened to records like Robert Shaw Chorale’s Christmas Hymns and Carols on the family record player. His father was a prominent United Church minister on the Prairies. Mr. Mercer was dragooned into a boy’s choir in Winnipeg. At church on the Sunday before Christmas, he’d hear the choir singing selections from Handel’s Messiah. “They’d tear the roof off the place,” he said.

This year, his holiday playlist includes a rare cut called, How Will You Spend Christmas? by Rev. A.W. Nix.

“You can’t hardly find a job no place,” the reverend says in a rollicking sermon recorded live with sing-song preaching and a call and response from the congregation. “Your wife is mad, your chillins crying, how will you spend your Christmas?” Not surprisingly, the reverend calls for a sobering up on Christmas Day, the better to praise God.

(Rev. Nix was a fire-breathing preacher and singer who cut 50 sermons from the 1920s until about 1931. His popular records often included a holiday theme, such as Death May Be Your Christmas Present. Talk about your Grinches.)

On Tuesday night, Mr. Mercer was to perform in Vancouver with his band. They planned on ending their set with Run, Rudolph, Run, a hit for Chuck Berry.

He hoped the rocking number might make someone’s Christmas.

“Everyone has a Frank Capra moment every Christmas,” he said, “even if it’s just 15 minutes at midnight on Christmas Eve when it’s quiet and you think, ‘This is Christmas for me.’ ”

Iceman delivers his own miracle on ice

2011-12-17T11:13:00.000-08:00

Victoria skaters enjoy a rare treat on southern Vancouver Island — a chance to skate outdoors on real ice. BELOW: A worker relies on old-fashioned methods to clean the rink. Chad Hipolito photographs for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 12, 2011

VICTORIA

The gear was carefully laid out — T-shirt, flannel shirt, long johns, socks, extra woolen socks, gloves, winter jacket, and hockey sweater.

A thermos filled with hot chocolate was overruled in favour of a flask.

Thus fortified, it was time for that greatest of our pastimes — skating outdoors in Canada in December.

Toronto has 54 outdoor rinks, including the frozen reflecting pool at Nathan Philips Square, an ice surface large enough for games of shinny in the middle while recreational skaters complete loops on the edge.

In Ottawa, temperatures frigid enough to rival those of Ulan Bator freeze waters solid for long winter months. The Rideau Canal Skateway stretches from the Parliament Buildings to Dows Lake, home to an outdoor art gallery. The 7.8-kilometre route offers warmup shacks with snacks and hot drinks along the way. Next month, the NHL’s all-star game festivities will include a nighttime skate along the canal by headlamp-wearing fans.

Not to be outdone, Winnipeg grooms even longer trails along the Red and Assiniboine rivers, dotting the landscape with warming huts. This season, the huts along “the world’s longest skating rink” have been designed by such architectural luminaries as Frank Gehry.

On southern Vancouver Island, the opportunities to indulge so simple a pleasure are few.

It takes ingenuity, science, and a company from Ontario to create what nature neglects to provide. It is easier to find ice in cocktails at Clive’s Classic Lounge than at an outdoor rink. As the sponsoring Downtown Victoria Business Association promises: “Outdoor ice skating on REAL ICE!” It is a commodity so rare in the capital as to deserve capital letters and an exclamation point.

Lacing on a pair of CCM Tacks 670 Pro 3 Lite hockey skates, I stepped onto freshly groomed ice, took five strides, turned left, two strides, turned left, five more strides, turned left, two strides, turned left. One circuit completed.

The seasonal treat of a temporary outdoor skating rink at Centennial Square next to City Hall is tempered a bit by an ice sheet not much bigger than a goalie’s crease.

Still, the sheet has attracted a steady crowd of skaters, including the likes of former Olympic figure skater Gary Beacom. On Friday afternoon, those at the rink admired Martin Newham and Andrea Boyes, who has appeared in such shows as Disney on Ice and Holiday on Ice, as they practiced a few moves. The skaters, with the Juan de Fuca skating club, won a silver medal in the adult nationals competition in April.

“It’s such a beautiful day,” Ms. Boyes said, “and it’s good, high quality ice.”

Looking out on the scene was Emir Ishmael, 51, a visitor from Mississauga, Ont. He had flown in to check out on the ice his company, Center Ice Home Arenas, had constructed in the square.

The weather was sunny, the temperature a warming 6-degrees C. A slight, cheerful man, he wore a toque on his head. He was not worried the above-freezing temperatures would turn his ice to slush. A giant refrigeration unit chills glycol in plastic pipes beneath the surface. The unit is strong enough to keep water frozen even when the outside temperature is as high as 17-degrees C.

“We don’t want to have the rink melting,” he said.

The sheet is 36-by-56 feet (about 11-by-17 metres) with a claimed capacity of 60, which one suspects would look like a crowd scene in one of those penguin movies.

Because the surface is so small, the resurfacing has to be done by hand, a scraper pushed along followed by a tool through which water pours onto the ice, made smooth by a trailing cloth. The hot water for the Victoria rink comes by a garden hose from the lobby bar at the nearby McPherson Playhouse.

Mr. Ishmael spends his winters erecting similar rinks in the backyards of well-to-do families in Greater Toronto.

Next year, he hopes the business association will go for a larger rink, perhaps one even circling the fountain in the centre of the square.

He takes pride in his craft.

“I try to make good ice so I can enjoy other people skating,” he said in a voice in which his native Trinidad can be heard.

He came to Canada 19 years ago, taking over his brother-in-law’s business seven years after that.

He makes good ice, an achievement for someone who does not know how to skate.
“I tried it a couple of times,” he said with a shrug.

The iceman cometh without blades. Like a teetotaler tending bar, he is more interested in the theory than the practice.

They're pouring pints again at the Bimini

2011-12-08T11:04:00.000-08:00

Jeff Donnelly, who owns The Bimini pub, stands in front of the reopened Kitsilano landmark. You can tell the story of the city from that one address. Rafel Gerszak photograph for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 7, 2011

A landmark pub reopens its doors four years after being destroyed by fire.

The pub enlists a publicist to ensure word gets out about “seasonal menus crafted from organic, locally sourced ingredients,” about an executive chef working with a consulting chef, about a design firm is enlisted to create a room with “a modern but warm and familiar feel.” It is noted the rebuilt interior includes 85-year-old wood reclaimed from a defunct mill.

The bartenders at the Bimini in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood are once again pouring pints, happy news for them and for those who imbibe. On Oct. 4, 2007, the day before the bar was to reopen following a $250,000 renovation, fire destroyed an historic building. Even a popular foosball table had been burned beyond salvage, the players melted into plastic blobs.

Bars and restaurants open — and close — all the time in Vancouver. It’s part of the city’s boom-and-bust cycle. After all, a metropolis grew from a site beneath a maple tree chosen by a windbag saloonkeeper known as Gassy Jack Deighton. He promised to tap his whiskey barrel as soon as a wooden saloon was constructed. The work was done in a day.

The Bimini, at 2010 W. Fourth Ave., became a landmark as one of the city’s first neighbourhood pubs.

You can tell a chapter in the story of the city by working from that street address.

For decades following prohibition, the hotel industry had a monopoly on the sale of draft beer. Nightspots were known as bottle clubs, where patrons bought pricy mixes to go with their secreted under-the-table, brownbagged booze. In Chinatown, thirsty patrons could order special teas in which beer would be served from pots into thimble-sized tea cups.

The liberalization of liquor laws came slowly. A cocktail license is granted to the Dine in the Sky atop the Sylvia Hotel. Then, the Cave and Palomar clubs gain cabaret licenses. The longtime Social Credit government of W.A.C. Bennett, a teetotaler, is not eager to increase beer sales. The province’s drinking laws are considered antediluvian by sophisticates.

The NDP swept away Mr. Bennett’s Socreds in 1972. They brought in Hansard for the legislature, banned pay toilets and corporal punishment in the schools. They also thought it might be pleasant for working people to celebrate the end of the day by enjoying a glass of beer at a nearby, English-style pub.

Peter Uram, a recent graduate from Simon Fraser University who had been making commercial films, decided to try for one of the new licenses.

“Back then, you only had hotel bars and that was about it,” he said, Tuesday. “Took us three years, lots of ups and downs, to get a license.”

He had bought a decrepit, wooden building on a stretch of West Fourth that remained more industrial than retail. The growing hippie popularity of the strip had seen the opening of small businesses such as the Soft Rock Cafe and the Lifestream health-food store.

Mr. Uram’s building had long been the home of the Fourth Avenue Heating and Plumbing Works. It had a large open space and tall ceilings. At some time in the past, the space had been used for the building of sailing boats, which could be launched into the waters of nearby English Bay.

To counter the monsoon-like autumn rains, the interior was given a tropical theme. He named the place Bimini after the paradisiacal Bahamian islands.

The pub was a welcome addition to a street undergoing development. At the same time, the staff joined the Service, Office and Retail Workers’ Union of Canada, an independent trade union with a feminist perspective seeking to organize “pink collar” workers in bars, restaurants and banks. A bitter strike, including an attempted raid by an American-led rival union, ended with a contract. The union was decertified within a year.

Mr. Uram remembers one unhappy night when the Doobie Brothers were made to queue.

“The doorman didn’t recognize them,” he said, “and didn’t let them in past the lineup.”

Another time, English punk rockers The Clash played foosball at the pub while being interviewed.

In time, the street changed from semi-industrial to mom-and-pop retail to higher-end retail.

“Our success helped make West Fourth what it is today — a nice shopping area,” said Mr. Uram, 65, who still owns the building. “It’s not quite Robson Street, but it’s a pleasant place to spend an afternoon, or evening.”

Four years ago, he looked out his West End residence to see a tower of smoke rising from Kitsilano. He soon learned it was his building.

The original wooden structure has been replaced with concrete block and sprinklers.

“We’re good for another 50 years,” he vowed.

The first building on the site had a tall ceiling and an open interior for a reason. At a time when West Fourth ended one block further west, when the few houses on the quiet slope were occupied by masons, painters and carpenters, a prominent local pastor named Rev. P.H. McEwen built the Fairview Baptist Church. The church abandoned the building after less than eight years. Demon rum is being offered where once the prayers were for temperance.

Eviction won't shutter Ministry of Casual Living's artistic ambitions

2011-12-07T21:04:00.000-08:00

The artist Aubrey Burke in front of the Ministry of Casual Living. The gallery, in which many Victoria artists made their public debut, is losing its storefront after a decade. Chad Hipolito photographs for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 5, 2011

VICTORIA

The sign on a whitewashed, one-story stucco building on a sleepy street looks, at first glance, like a government insignia.

It has white letters on a brown background in the style used by the provincial government in the 1980s.

It reads, “Ministry of Casual Living.”

On closer examination, the logo depicts not the provincial crest, but an abstract glyph. Some see in it what looks like an angry person.

You could pass the buildings for days without noticing any activity. With its odd name and abandoned appearance, the storefront generates a vaguely Orwellian feel.

It is located at 1442 Haultain St. in Victoria, at a quiet intersection in a residential neighbourhood where a handful of mom-and-pop businesses cover the corner — a barber, two groceries, a coffee shop, a video store, and a used- furniture shop.

If you knock on the door, you might meet Aubrey Burke, a 24-year-old university student who is majoring in art and minoring in business. He is also a part-time janitor for the school board. He introduces himself as the minister of casual living.

Aubrey Burke

“It’s common to walk out the front door and have someone say, ‘Hey. What’s happening in there?’,” he said. “They want to know, ‘Who are you? What are you guys doing?’ ”

For almost a decade, this address has been an art gallery for emerging artists, as well as a residence for whichever impoverished artist handles curatorial duties. The post comes with no salary, yet the reward comes in offering art to the world. You also get to use the nifty title of minister.

The living quarters are meagre — tiny washroom, makeshift kitchenette. “No shower, no laundry and pretty much no heat,” he said. “It’s cold. A dark, dank cave in the wintertime. It’s like urban camping. I consider it boot camp for the up-and-coming artist.”

A street-front window and a modest display space has been offered to artists since March, 2002. In every year since, the gallery has exhibited 50 weekly art shows.

The ministry’s website notes the curators have no interest in credentials or curriculum vitae.

“Anyone can throw down,” Mr. Burke said. “Lots of people have had their first show here. I had my first art show here.”

Artists are encouraged to experiment. “We try to get people to push the limits,” he said. “Do experimental stuff. If they’re into painting, push it a little farther. Paint on the window, paint on the walls, paint on your face. Not your typical art stuff on the wall.”

Earlier this summer, the artist Pudy Tong had a display called “Brand New!” in which he created a letter banner like those used for birthdays, or anniversaries. This was made by exposing paper to sun through a stencil. Once hung in the window, the sun’s rays washed out the rest of the paper, erasing the message.

The only limits placed on artists were to keep in mind the gallery’s neighbourhood setting, along which children regularly pass.

Alas, the ministry is being evicted. The building’s owner is putting up for sale the ministry’s headquarters and the adjacent two-story building that houses a grocery. The asking price is expected to be a cool $950,000, beyond the means of artists who scrounge to cover $640 monthly rent.

To bid farewell to the space, 30 artists have contributed 30 pieces for the final 30 days. It was called the Burnout Extravaganza.

Though they are losing their Fernwood gallery, the second to close in the neighbourhood this month because of rising rents and development pressures, the ministry is continuing with art displays in downtown windows over the holidays.

The founders deliberately chose a confusing name whose intent it was to encourage a vision of life away from the rat race.

“It was made ambiguous so people would keep questioning, keep more of an open dialogue about what it could be,” Mr. Burke said.

The artist has placed a familiar-looking red-and-black sign on the front door. It reads: “Sorry, we’re CASUAL.”

CUP RUNNETH OVER: The Grey Cup, emblematic of Canadian football supremacy, arrived at the Legislature on Friday, a rare visit to Vancouver Island for the silverware. The storied trophy was escorted by Geroy Simon and two teammates with the B.C. Lions, who won the championship in convincing fashion a week ago.

Andrew Harris, who played junior football out of Nanaimo for the Vancouver Island Raiders and who earned most-valuable Canadian honours in the big game, was not with them.

The players and the Grey Cup disappeared behind closed doors for a private autograph and photograph session with members of the B.C. Liberal caucus.

Perhaps that was a reward for the government allocating $563 million of public funds to renovate the Lions’ home at BC Place Stadium.

The Lions are owned by David Braley, whose company has donated to the Conservatives and who gained an appointment to the Senate last years.

After the private session, the trophy emerged with a grinning premier in tow to be presented to the little people — guards, passing schoolchildren, giddy members of the press gallery.

CHAMPS: Two Grey Cup champions once sat in the Legislature, though not at the same time. Herb Capozzi, who died last month, had two terms as a Social Credit MLA. Emery Barnes, a New Democrat, defeated Mr. Capozzi in the dual-member riding of Vancouver Centre in 1972. Mr. Barnes won re-election five times, serving for two years as Speaker of the House.

Mr. Capozzi was general manager of the 1964 Grey Cup-winning B.C. Lions, for whom Mr. Barnes played defensive end. He missed the championship game with an injury.

This article originally used an incorrect personal pronoun for the artist Pudy Tong.

Stop cheering hockey violence, before player's brains turn to mush

2011-12-07T10:02:00.000-08:00

After his death, at age 73, Reggie Fleming was found to have had chronic traumatic enchephalopathy,

By Tom Hawthorn
Boulevard Magazine
November 30, 2011

On the second Saturday after my 15th birthday, the cover of The Canadian Magazine, which came with the weekend newspapers I had just delivered, featured the image of a half-dressed hockey player about my father’s age. His face was scarred and battered, greasy hair plastered to a sweaty and bumpy brow. The cover line read: “The agony of a punched-out bully.”

Inside, the writer Earl McRae told the story of Reggie Fleming, a Montreal guy who had gained a long hockey career despite limited skating and stickhandling skills. He occasionally put the puck in the net, but he was employed more for the damage his fists could do to an opponent’s face. Fleming was an intimidating presence, a ferocious fighter who rivals preferred to avoid. In hockey parlance, he was a policeman, a guy who maintained order through the threat of retaliatory violence should any of his more talented teammates be targeted. In the real world, he was a goon.

The article ended with McRae describing Fleming alone in the dressing room following a fight, blood pouring down his face. His hands tremble. Here’s how McRae told it: “Sometimes,’ [Fleming] says softly and haltingly, “sometimes I wish I could control myself just once. It’s ... it’s the kids. I go home and they see the cuts and bruises and —” He doesn’t finish the sentence. He lifts his hands to his face. For a long time he’s quiet and then, from behind the red swollen hands, a long, shuddering sigh. In the morning, the children will see him. He knows what they will ask. And he knows, as always, he won’t have an answer.”

Earl McRae's book

The story knocked me out. You didn’t read this stuff on the sports pages, where the world is divided into heroes and goats. Here was an athlete in all his complications — a thug, ashamed before his children, but also a man earning a paycheque as best he knew how. For a Canadian teenager, this was Shakespearean drama (and in an English I could understand on first reading).

The article, which became known as “Requiem for Reggie,” altered forever how I’d watch hockey, as a teenaged fan and, later, as a sportswriter. I loved the game for its speed, its majesty, and, yes, its violence — the spectacular and breathtaking way in which a bodycheck can change the complexion of a game. One Christmas, I got as a gift one of Don Cherry’s Rock ’Em, Sock ’Em Hockey videotapes. Liked the big hits. Cherry has produced at least 22 of those compilations. Now we know how grotesque my enjoyment has been.

Not so long ago, athletes who “had their bell rung” were told to “shake it off” and get back in the game. Now we know a concussion can have long-term consequences, perhaps even devastating ones.

Not so long ago, it was said no one got seriously hurt in hockey fights. Now we know that Reggie Fleming suffered brain damage. After he died, aged 73, two years ago, he was found to have had chronic traumatic enchephalopathy, a disease that alters behaviour and eventually leads to dementia. He paid a terrible price for those blows to the head, not the least of which was an early death.

Junior hockey returned to Victoria earlier this year, when the puck dropped for the inaugural game of the Royals. The atmosphere was electric; O Canada was sung with an operatic flourish by Mark Donnelly; and, the hockey was thrilling, as the young players exhibited tremendous skill.

In the first period, two players tussled at the blue line, dropping their gloves to throw punches. The crowd roared its approval, many leaping to their feet and punching the air.

I stayed in my seat, as did some others. Cheer a teenager as he punches another in the face? Can’t do it. Those young men were barely older than I had been when a magazine article revealed to me the ugly side of pro hockey.

Junior hockey permits fighting because the NHL permits fighting. Hockey would become even more savage without it, goes the argument. Besides, the braying crowds demand it.

Yet, they hold an Olympic hockey tournament without fighting. World championships, too. All the major sports — football, basketball, baseball, soccer — punish fighting with automatic banishment from the game. As does college hockey. As did the NHL before 1922.

The hockey world faces a crisis. Don Cherry used his bully pulpit on Hockey Night in Canada to dismiss as “pukes” the retired NHL pugilists who now question the role of goonery in hockey. Cherry apologized, sort of, weeks later, but the damage was done. He had estranged himself from some of the very players on whose bloody faces and sore knuckles he built a private fortune.

It’s time to ban fighting in hockey. Now. Before any of these teenaged players whose exploits we cheer wind up with brains of mush, like poor Reggie Fleming.

Goldsmith's voice remains untarnished

2011-12-06T23:42:00.000-08:00

Hans Stamer fires up a jewelry tool in his Vancouver shop. His rock band wowed the critics, but he has returned to his roots in recent years by recording an album of jazz ballads. Darryl Dyck photograph for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 1, 2011

Hans Stamer crafts by hand his own jewelry designs.

“It’s something I’ve been doing all my life,” he said in an accent that betrays his German birthplace even after a half-century in Canada. He turned 73 earlier this month. “It makes me a fairly good living, even at my age.”

He makes bracelets and brooches, engagement rings and wedding rings.

“A lot of times when I finish a piece and it is handed to the lady who is getting married to the gentleman, I get a big hug,” he said.

He also has on offer in his shop compact discs tucked inside jewel cases. For many years as a young man, he abandoned the jeweler’s workbench for the concert stage, put aside a craftsman’s tools to instead hold a microphone. This was one goldsmith who sought to make a gold record.

Mr. Stamer (pronounced STAY-mer) began an apprenticeship at age 16 in his native land, taught by master goldsmiths in skills that trace their roots to the ancient Phoenicians. He was early into his training in Hamburg when he attended a concert by the great jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong.

“Louis was the king,” Mr. Stamer said. “He blew our minds. I said, ‘I’m going to sing like that some day.’ ”

(The 1955 concert is notorious in the annals of jazz, as the performance ended in disarray when youths rioted after the amplifying system went on the fritz. Chairs were smashed and broken pieces thrown at the stage of the Ernst Merck Hall. Twenty-three rowdy concertgoers were arrested. The New York Times ran a front-page story days later with the headline: “United States has secret sonic weapon — jazz: Europe falls captive as crowds riot to hear Dixieland.”)

Mr. Stamer caught many acts that toured through Hamburg, including a rocking group from Liverpool who appeared at clubs along the Reeperbahn. Not long after he moved to Canada, he was surprised to see the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. He had been unaware of their startling rise in popularity.

In Edmonton, he fronted a group called The Famous Last Words, a hard-driving blues outfit. In front of a microphone, Mr. Stamer lost his accent, transforming himself into a raspy-voiced, hand-clapping son of the Southern soil. He was “a boy from Hamburg who sounded like he was from the Mississippi Delta,” said Al Girard, the group’s drummer.

Mr. Stamer then wound up in Quebec as lead singer of the Backstreet Dudes, replacing Chan Romero, the author of Hippy Hippy Shake, who had abandoned the band after finding God one Christmas while at home in Montana. The Dudes renamed themselves Phoenix of Ayer’s Cliff, after an Eastern Townships village, and toured the United States.

After the group disbanded, Mr. Stamer returned west, landing in Vancouver, where, in 1969, he joined Django, which had a regular gig at The Parlour, a small club without a liquor license at Pender and Main. The quintet, featuring the spectacular stylings of guitar wizard Gaye Delorme, shared a house near Jericho Beach, spending a part of each day in meditation. They placed lit candles and flowers around the stage while performing. (Mr. Delorme died earlier this year, aged 64.)

By the early 1970s, Mr. Stamer had formed his own eponymous band, changing the spelling of his name to Staymer at the urging of the record company. He also released a full long-playing record with an album cover featuring him rubbing a washboard. “The cuts virtually sizzle and sputter with a form of musical and vocal intensity that is indeed a delight,” the music-industry magazine Billboard stated in a review. The single Dig A Hole got scattered airplay across Canada and the U.S.

The band signed with RCA Canada and opened for the likes of James Brown, Tina Turner, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. A second album was praised for “a loose, easy-rolling funkiness” by Jim Millican, a reviewer for the Canadian Press.

A full-page advertisement appeared in Rolling Stone. The band was preparing to go to San Francisco for a show, where they were to meet Ralph J. Gleason, the influential jazz and rock critic.

The visit was cancelled when the critic died suddenly.

“One of those breaks,” Mr. Stamer said.

Soon after, the label lost interest.

“Nobody knew what to do with us and the whole thing fell apart.”

The singer returned to his old craft. He did not give up music entirely, performing around Vancouver with the R&B Allstars, a well-regarded outfit with as many as 10 players who were known for wearing formal white tuxes, “a real whoop-de-doo show,” Mr. Stamer said.

He opened a shop, only to abandon street-level retail after being pepper-sprayed by a thief.

In 1998, Mr. Stamer earned a Juno Award nomination with Bill Bourne and Andreas Schuld for best blues album for No Special Rider.

The award went to Colin James, the younger Vancouver bluesman.

There were no hard feelings.

When Mr. James got married, it was Mr. Stamer who crafted the wedding rings.

Two years ago, Mr. Stamer at last recorded the album he had in mind ever since seeing Louis Armstrong all those years ago. The title track of Everything Happens to Me shows the goldsmith’s voice has not tarnished over the years. This record is gold in everything but sales.

Michael Magee, actor, horse-racing analyst (1929-2011)

2011-12-06T19:21:00.001-08:00

Michael Magee in character as the cracker-barrel philosopher Fred C. Dobbs.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 30, 2011

In a three-piece chalk-stripe suit, the farmer Fred C. Dobbs railed against political perfidy and bureaucratic stasis. With tumbleweed eyebrows and a soup-catching mustache, his hair as disheveled as the bristles on a barnyard broom, Dobbs expounded on his philosophy with the subtlety of an Old Testament prophet.

“If the Lord had meant for us to go metric,” he pronounced, “He’d have given us 10 apostles.”

Such were the sayings of the cantankerous Dobbs, the self-proclaimed sage of Beamsville, Ont., a cracker-barrel philosopher who challenged Bay Street from Main Street.

Dobbs was the alter-ego of Michael Magee, who has died, aged 81, after a long struggle with colitis, which ultimately led to heart failure. The actor had a long career in radio and television, where he also enjoyed great success as an analyst of thoroughbred horse races.

“Michael Magee is as enthusiastic about racing and its future as anyone I’ve ever known,” the industrialist and celebrated horseman E.P. Taylor once wrote. “It would be fair to say that he is having a lifelong love affair with the sport.”

Where an older generation was familiar with him as a curmudgeonly sage, or as an evaluator of horse flesh, a younger generation rooted against him as the voice of the dastardly Cyril Sneer in the popular animated series The Raccoons.

Magee was born on Oct. 11, 1929, a fortnight before cascading days of panic selling led to the Wall Street crash, plunging the world economy into depression.

His parents belonged to the Ontario Jockey Club, which was headed by Taylor, one of Canada’s wealthiest men. Taylor’s mother was a Magee and the industrialist was Michael Magee’s uncle.

At age 12, Michael criticized his parents’ passion for horse racing. His father challenged him to learn about a subject before offering a critique. The boy then became a regular at the track, a refuge during what would prove to be a tumultuous tenure at a series of private schools in Ontario.

As a teenager, he worked as a money runner for the mutuels department at the original Woodbine track in east-side Toronto, before taking a similar job at Exhibition Park in Vancouver. In 1956, he became a partner in Triangle Stable, whose lone racer was the filly Brighton Queen, named for an English Channel paddle steamer. Magee joked that she was slower even than her namesake.

That same year he debuted on radio station CKNW, based in New Westminster, outside Vancouver. His daily feature on the It Could Happen Show included a simulation of a fictitious horse race complete with cheering and faked public-address announcements.

“I’d dramatize a race before it was run, as I thought it would be run, speedsters setting the pace and so on,” he once said, “but I’d make sure the winner would be the one I was tipping that day.”

Magee spent nearly a half-century on the radio talking about the Sport of Kings, including stints on CBC Radio, CKEY, CKO and The FAN, where, in 1994, he began co-hosting a Saturday program during the racing season called Racing With Magee. He was also a familiar commentator on CBC television broadcasts of such prestigious races as the Queen’s Plate.

As a young man on the West Coast, he worked as a janitor, a surveyor, a hotel desk clerk, and on the line of canning factory, “crummy jobs,” he once acknowledged to an interviewer, “all designed to free me to go to the track in the twilight hours.”

Magee also launched a stage career, notably as a solo performer in the challenging, one-act Samuel Beckett play, Krapp’s Last Tape. The first quarter of the 80-minute play includes no dialogue.

“It is due to the work of actor Magee that the lurid and lucid picture of a man kept alive by the descriptive excesses of his past gets across as vividly as it does,” the Vancouver Sun noted in an unsigned review.

Magee did not last long on the stage.

“You starve acting,” he said, “and you need money to go to the races.”

He returned to Toronto in 1962 and three years later was co-host of a public-affairs program out of Winnipeg called The View From Here.

The Dobbs character was introduced to a national audience in 1968 on Gerussi: Words and Music, a mid-morning CBC Radio show hosted by Bruno Gerussi. The popularity of the crusty character led to a slot the following summer as a 10-week holiday replacement for The Max Ferguson Show.

It was while working as the overnight cleanup man at a Vancouver hotel that Magee conjured a character who mistrusted politicians and bureaucrats, big labour and big business.

“All the old ‘lobby generals’ used to congregate there and talk, and I used to listen to them,” Magee told the Toronto Star in 1969. “Fred is based on those guys, and on the old guys that hang around race tracks. They’re honest and opinionated, and they’ve got guts. You see an old guy walking across the street and a car pulls up short and the driver honks his horn at him. The old guy is liable to bring his walking stick crashing down on the hood of the car. Can you see a doctor, or a lawyer, or a guy from McLaren’s advertising doing that?”

The name Fred C. Dobbs was freely borrowed from the main character in the B. Traven novel, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, popularized by a 1948 movie starring Humphrey Bogart as Dobbs.

Dobbs also appeared weekly on Ottawa television as a parliamentary correspondent from Beamsville before making his national television debut with Don Harron on a 1969 New Year’s Eve broadcast, That’s the News??? Good Night!!! The Star called it “CBC’s best TV comedy special ever,” while Magee was heralded as the comedy find of the year.

The duo again paired a year later in Wring Out the Old, which the same critic, Patrick Scott, described as the disappointment of the year.

In 1969, Magee hosted a television show shoehorned in the remaining time left in a half-hour slot at the conclusion of Hockey Night in Canada. The show, Champion, profiled a Canadian athlete.

The comic’s acidic take on hypocrisy found expression during a pilot episode of a series titled True North during which Magee angrily denounced Canadians for a placid, colonial mindset. “For America, Canadian water,” he complained. “For China, Canadian wheat. For Russia, Canadian hockey. For Canada, Canadian mewing, whining and puking.”

Magee paired with his wife, Duddie, a former secretary, on The Real Magees, a half-hour midday talk show. Guests on their debut week in 1973 included a taxi driver, a nightclub bouncer, and a fortune teller who informed the couple they were not suited for one another.

The couple “argue with each other with the most incredibly bad taste,” Helen Worthington wrote in the Star. “Who needs it? This, most of us can get at home without turning on the TV.”

As well as appearing together on television, the couple owned and operated a meat market on Church Street in Toronto, for which they imported dulse seaweed from the Maritimes and sold sauerkraut from a barrel.

The Dobbs character continued to delight audiences as one of a parade of Magee creations appearing on Magee and Company, a satirical, 15-minute show that ran on TVOntario and developed a cult following. Magee showed off a cast of characters, including The Pastor, Baunston Tudball, and J. Carter Hughes, chairman of the Dominion Gas and Screw Co. Ltd., a businessman who served as a foil for Dobbs.

Magee as Dobbs authored a humour book, titled The Golden Age of B.S. (1977), which was favourably reviewed in the Globe by Ontario premier William Davis, who proclaimed the character to be “honest, direct, frustrated and appealing.” This was followed by a sequel, The Platinum Age of B.S. (1981). Magee also wrote Champions, reviewing the careers of 17 thoroughbred winners from the 1970s, a golden age in horse racing. The book featured 80 colour images by the Toronto photographer Pat Bayes.

Dobbs became so popular a figure that he was once billed as a speaker at a Toronto conference with the likes of Peter Gzowski, Marshall McLuhan and John Diefenbaker. He also appeared in the Merry Posa Review during the annual Leacock Festival of Humour at Orillia, Ont.

In 1983, Global aired an hour-long comedy special, Fred C. Dobbs Goes to Hollywood, during which the curmudgeon joined country singer Hoyt Axton, met a Burt Reynolds lookalike, and watched as William Shatner polished his star in the sidewalk at Hollywood and Vine.

In time, the Dobbsian sense of humour came to be less universally appreciated. He was the after-dinner speaker at a conference of the Writers’ Union of Canada when his comments, including a description of his fictional wife as “the old mattress,” led some members to exit. Years later, he dismissed the incident as “four women with mustaches walk(ing) out,” a bitter reaction that did not reflect well on him.

In 1976, Magee lost a suit for damages for wrongful dismissal after he said he was replaced as host of a public-affairs show on Toronto’s CITY-TV. An Ontario Supreme Court judge ruled that while Magee had an oral contract with CITY president Moses Znaimer, the conversation took place on a Sunday, contravening the Lord’s Day Act.

His lengthy list of credits includes an appearance as a baffled police inspector in David Cronenberg’s The Brood, a horror film about mutant children.

In 1980, Magee voiced Cyril Sneer, a cigar-chewing aardvark who is the villain of The Christmas Raccoons, an animated special featuring voices by Rich Little and the singer Rita Coolidge as well as hockey play-by-play by Danny Gallivan. The Raccoons later aired for several seasons as a popular children’s series. Magee modeled Sneer on a schoolmaster under whom he had suffered.

One of his odder gigs involved serving as master of ceremonies for a fundraiser for John Crosbie, who incurred a $200,000 debt in an unsuccessful campaign for the federal leadership of the Progressive Conservatives in 1983. Others on the bill included the pianist Andre Gagnon, singer Helen Reddy and Playboy playmate of the year Shannon Tweed, who was born in Newfoundland, as was Crosbie, who currently serves as the province’s lieutenant governor.

Magee produced several institutional films for the Canadian Trotting Association, as well as features on such horses as Nijinsky and Secretariat. He won a journalism prize for a documentary on the trotter Armbro Flight. He also earned an ACTRA (Association of Canadian Television and Radio Artists) award nomination for documentary writing for his work on True North.

His great passion for the turf led to horses being named after him, including Michael Magee by Dacotah Stables in Manitoba, as well as Ontario-bred Fred C. Dobbs, a stakes winner as a two-year-old.

Despite having evaluated thousands of horses over the years, their tendencies and pedigrees committed to memory for live broadcasts, Magee never forgot his first winning bet, placed at Thorncliffe Park Raceway at Leaside, Ont., later absorbed by Toronto. Years later, he would recall with delight a horse named Isbright.

Magee, a resident of Caledon, Ont., died on July 15 at Grand River Hospital in Kitchener, Ont. He leaves Sally Hamilton, his companion of 26 years.

With hard work and groundwork, rookie politician wins his first election

2011-12-06T18:05:00.000-08:00

George Anderson relied on hardworking volunteers and social media to get his message across to Nanaimo voters. The 20-year-old won election to city counci and will be a politician to watch. Geoff Howe photograph for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 28, 2011

VICTORIA

George Anderson showed up for an evening’s bowling with his right index finger heavily bandaged after an incident with a sledgehammer.

In solidarity, his companions decided to bowl with their weaker hand.

As the pins fell, his phone buzzed with calls and messages.

He apologized, but left early. He needed to get to the Shaw Auditorium in downtown Nanaimo.

It was election night and Mr. Anderson was among 22 candidates vying for eight spots on Nanaimo city council.

An earnest, well-spoken student, Mr. Anderson juggles part-time jobs while studying biology and criminology at Vancouver Island University. He will decide on law or medical school later this year. A busy schedule always includes charity work.

Without a hint of insincerity, he speaks of love for his birthplace of Nanaimo, a community not known for inspiring paeans.

When the ballot count ended, Mr. Anderson had 7,450 votes to finish in fourth place, ahead of seasoned incumbents.

Just three years removed from high school graduation — he was class valedictorian at John Barsby Secondary — this Canadian-born son of Ghanaian immigrants earned a place on city council.

“I still live at home,” he noted. “Now I can have my parents yell at me about their property taxes.”

Mr. Anderson operated an insurgent campaign online and on the streets of the Hub City. On occasion, his volunteer team met at the Tim Hortons at 1812 Bowen Rd.

He posted an impressive, one-minute campaign video on YouTube.

“We can no longer be a city that is business versus residents, north versus south, new-timers versus old-timers,” he says in the video. “We need to come together and build upon a collective vision that each and everyone of us can be proud of.”

The message owes more than a little to the optimism of a recent presidential campaign. His own platform included such uncontroversial stands as calling for a stronger business community. If the rhetoric was less than meaty, the Anderson campaign made up for it through the gritty work of knocking on doors.

The candidate himself lost count after 2,000. (He was distracted by midterms midway through the campaign.) He even made a point of canvassing little Protection Island, where residents told him they had not before had a politician on their stoop. “People really liked that I was able to come and talk to them,” he said.

In the end, his 62 votes led the island’s poll.

The campaign spent under $5,000, less than a dollar per vote.

About the only misstep came when his financial agent accidently mashed his finger with a sledgehammer as they tried to erect a homemade sign.

The finger was fractured, but the doctor assures him he will be able to return to playing the piano. As well, he leads an eponymous jazz trio, and also plays tuba, trumpet, and alto and tenor saxophone.

Mr. Anderson has been a postal clerk, a customer service representative, and a “sandwich artist” for a fast-food chain. In this year’s federal election, he held a position as a youth outreach worker for Elections Canada. Now he can add councillor to an impressive resumé.

He decided to run in June, having closely followed civic politics for several years. A controversial severance package paid to the retiring city manager was among the issues that convinced him to enter the race.

John Ruttan, the re-elected mayor, told the Nanaimo Daily News that he considered the youngest addition to council to be “bright and articulate.”

Mr. Anderson counts among his political inspirations Wilfrid Laurier (“someone who wanted to pull our country together”), Robert Borden (“who brought the government together in a time of war”), and Tommy Douglas (“who helped father our health-care system”).

“In everything I’ve tried for, I tend to win,” he said. A rare exception: He lost a race for student council when in Grade 6 at Park Avenue Elementary.

His father, Nicholas, is a machine operator for PostMedia, while his mother, Elizabeth, is a collator for Black Press. George is the youngest of four children. His parents taught him that he should be polite even should he be disliked solely for reason of his ethnicity.

“People want to put people in boxes. I don’t think that’s right,” he said.

In high school, he found his straight-arrow image challenged stereotypes.

“Just because I look a certain way I’m supposed to act a certain way,” he said. “I don’t think I should have to wear baggy pants, or have my teeth look ugly and have a do-rag on. I’m George Anderson and I should be able to be the way I want to be.”

He has been involved with Big Brothers Big Sisters, helped organize a summer camp for poor children, conducted a symposium for high schoolers on drugs and mental health. Every yuletide, he rings Christmas bells as part of the Salvation Army’s kettle campaign.

On Friday, though, Mr. Anderson took a rare day off. He had good reason. It was his 21st birthday.

Former Miss B.C. Lions went on to be hailed as a hero

2011-12-06T17:58:00.000-08:00

The contestants for the 1955 Miss Grey Cup pageant line up on stage in Vancouver. Glenda Sjoberg, the 18-year-old Miss B.C. Lions, is on the far right wearing a sweater with the letter L on the front. The crown went to Miss Edmonton Eskimos.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 24, 2011

The Grey Cup parade featured clowns and cowboys; marching bands and baton-twirling majorettes; Mounties in Red Serge, a smart Stetson on each head, and Shriners in silky harem pants, a silly fez on each head.

In 1955, on the cusp of the first Grey Cup football championship to be played on the West Coast, tens of thousands lined the neon-lit streets of downtown Vancouver for a glimpse of the spectacle.

A procession of horses and tractors and colourful floats paraded past. There was a grizzled prosector with a mule and an inexplicable Saskatchewan display featuring a man in a football costume shoveling wheat over his shoulder onto the blacktop.

An open convertible carried Marilyn Bell, who was cheered by the throngs a year after the teenaged swimmer conquered Lake Ontario.

Towards the end, a young woman wearing a sweater in the black-and-orange livery of the local football team waved to the crowd while sitting atop the trunk of a convertible.

This was Miss B.C. Lions, a beauty queen selected to represent the team in the contest to be named Miss Grey Cup.

Miss Grey Cup escorts the trophy at 1955 parade.

Glenda Sjoberg, known as Goldie for her lustrous locks, was an 18-year-old logger’s daughter from Nanaimo. According to the newspapers, she was “Glamorous Glenda,” a “comely,” “charming,” “beautiful,” “tall, blue-eyed blonde.” She had won a local beauty pageant to become Miss Nanaimo before defeating 22 other contestants to become Miss PNE (Pacific National Exhibition).

She won a gold compact, a white Arctic fox fur shoulder piece, and a carved hardwood salad bowl from the British West Indies. Officials presented her a cheque for $1,000, which she said would be used to pay for treatments for her mother, Olga, bedridden with arthritis.

As Miss PNE, Miss Sjoberg automatically became Miss B.C. Lions, making necessary a crash course in football, a sport about which she knew little.

In the end, she did not win the Miss Grey Cup title, which went to Miss Edmonton Eskimos. The Eskimos were also successful on the gridiron, defeating the Montreal Alouettes, 34-19, to claim the trophy. Empire Stadium was packed with 39,417 paying customers, a Grey Cup attendance record that would stand for 21 seasons.

For a young woman from Vancouver Island, her reign as a local pageant queen was a whirlwind of adventure. (But not too much adventure. She was chaperoned by a family friend.) She did not entertain visions of trying to break into movies.

“Hollywood? No thanks,” she said at the time. “That kind of life just isn’t for me.”

After the game, she returned to the anonymity of life as a dental assistant on Vancouver Island.

A few years later, she graduated from a course for stewardesses conducted by Trans-Canada Air Lines. They issued a press photograph to promote their hiring of a former Miss B.C. Lions.

Miss Sjoberg had been on the job less than a year when she would need to call on all her training.

On Oct. 3, 1959, she was aboard a Viscount airliner on approach to Malton airport, outside Toronto, in a blinding rainstorm. The stewardess was handing out hats and jackets to the passengers when intuition led her to quickly take her place in a rear-facing jump seat. Just as she was about to buckle the seatbelt, the plane touched down hard before becoming airborne again.

Short of the runway, speeding along at 120 m.p.h., the plane clipped a light pole, ripped off barbed wire atop a fence surrounding a covered reservoir, bounced into the air, narrowly missing a transformer, before skidding over a ditch and across a road and over another ditch, then tearing down a section of the fence surrounding the airport before coming to a thudding halt, the fuselage cracked in half.

“Wham, bam, crash,” the retired stewardess remembered on Tuesday. “The lights went. There was dust and dirt.”

For a moment, there was also silence.

A woman cried out. She had been holding twin baby girls in her arms and both had slipped from her grasp on a hard bounce. The infants were found beneath the seats, unharmed.

Miss Sjoberg ensured the passengers and crew were evacuated before going for help.

“I’ve got no shoes on and it’s raining,” she said. “What am I going to do? I’m not going to go looking through metal and mud for them.”

She made her way in stocking feet to a nearby service station, telling them to call for an ambulance. Then she returned to the plane to assist three fellow crew members and 36 passengers. Among them was Ward Cornell, the sports announcer who was about to make his debut on Hockey Night in Canada.

Four went to hospital with injuries, including the pilot and the other stewardess. All survived.

“Everybody” she said, “was very lucky.”

Some contemporary accounts hailed her as a hero.

The crash was blamed on wind sheer. The turboprop was a write-off.

The following year she married Pete Kinzie, a pilot. She had to quit her job, as married women were not allowed to work as stewardesses in those days.

She enjoyed the work, and now remembers happily the pleasures of passenger flight in those days. She has yet to see an episode of the period drama Pan Am.

She traveled the world with her husband before settling in Burlington, Ont., where today a 75-year-old retiree can barely believe she was once Miss B.C. Lions.

“I was not a beauty-pageant type,” she said. “I did it for my mother.”

This Trans-Canada Air Lines Viscount landed short of the runway at Toronto's Malton airport in 1959. It skidded along the ground along the length of several football fields. All 40 passengers and crew survived, including a stewardess who had been a beauty queen.

Election winners: A poet, a prosecutor and a partier in a Prius

2011-12-06T17:48:00.000-08:00

Dean Fortin won easy re-election as mayor of Victoria, though two incumbent councillors he endorsed endured a surprising defeat. Chad Hipolito photograph for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 21, 2011

VICTORIA

Scenes from an election:

The news left John Luton crestfallen. He had lost his seat on Victoria city council. At 57, he wondered aloud about his future employment.

“I’m not afraid of hard work,” he said, before noting, “It’s a time of life when it can be very hard to find a job.”

All around him, people were celebrating the re-election of Victoria mayor Dean Fortin and two members of what was billed as Dean’s Team — councillors Pam Madoff and Marianne Alto. Mr. Luton and Lynn Hunter, a former member of Parliament, were two members of the team who lost their re-election bids.

Mr. Luton lingered at Mr. Fortin’s victory celebration at the Union Pacific Coffee Co. to thank volunteers.

He was in the midst of contemplating his future when interrupted by Ben Isitt, 33, an academic and author who had just won election to council.

Mr. Isitt grabbed his right hand.

“You were the part of the Dean Team that I most wanted to work with,” Mr. Isitt said.

As they continued their exchange, the ebullient Mr. Isitt pumped Mr. Luton’s hand again and again.

Mr. Luton offered a wan smile. He then put on his helmet and reflective vest to cycle home alone in the dark.

* * *

Victoria is still small enough that some campaigns operate from the kitchen table.

After the polls closed, Victoria councillor Charlayne Thornton-Joe and her husband Phil, a longtime bus driver, parked on a street in Chinatown around the corner from where her family once operated a store selling caulk boots to loggers. (It is now a tattoo parlour.) The couple listened to the results on the radio.

After her re-election was announced, they held a two-person victory party in their Prius. Then, they got out and walked a block to join the throng at the Fortin celebration.

***

The other two new councillors in Victoria are restaurateur Shellie Gudgeon and Lisa Helps, whose name doubles as a campaign slogan.

* * *

In neighbouring Oak Bay, a pleasant municipality described as being behind a Tweed Curtain, the seasonal pleasures of leaf-raking and strolling a high street redolent with roasting chestnuts have been disturbed by the unseemliness of a competitive electoral race.

Mayor Christopher Causton, who lost a campaign for a seat in Parliament earlier this year, decided to retire after 15 years of wielding the gavel at council. Mr. Causton was known for showing up on the doorstep of every new resident to bring them official greetings.

His retirement pitted council veterans Nils Jensen and Hazel Braithwaite in a contest for the mayor’s chair.

A major issue in the race — nuisance deer.

Mr. Jensen, a Crown prosecutor, defeated his council rival by 3,197 votes to 2,769.

His campaign website features an impressive resumé, yet neglects to mention his foray into provincial politics. Though not known as a New Democrat, Mr. Jensen emerged as a challenger for the provincial party leadership eight years ago. On the first ballot, he finished second to eventual winner Carole James.

The Oak Bay council poll was topped by Tara Ney, the daughter of the late Frank Ney, a swashbuckling mayor who dressed as a sabre-waving pirate to promote the bathtub races that made Nanaimo famous. Ms. Ney is more superhero than buccaneer — she once earned a commendation from the Governor General for alerting a neighbouring family to a house fire. Among the achievements listed on her website was convincing the local Starbucks to open early at 5:30 a.m. so that she could begin her day’s work.

* * *

In Saanich, Frank Leonard held on the mayor’s chair despite a stiff challenge from former NDP MLA David Cubberley. Fun fact: Mr. Leonard’s infant son with Jackie Ngai, a former councillor, is named Atticus. Atticus Finch is the lawyer hero of Harper Lee’s novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

* * *

Paul Reitsma once again placed his name before the voters of Parksville, where he served as mayor from 1987 to 1996 before winning election to the Legislature.

“I think that those without some baggage have not traveled much on life’s journey,” he said during the campaign.

As a Liberal MLA, he had been caught by the local newspaper writing letters to the editor under fake names. The exposé generated the most memorable headline in recent B.C. newspapering history: “MLA Reitsma is a liar and we can prove it.” He resigned on the cusp of becoming the first politician in the Commonwealth to be recalled by voters.

Mr. Reitsma comeback failed, as he took just 749 votes. Chris Burger won the mayoralty with 2,355.

* * *

Port McNeill mayor Gerry Furney, a poetry-writing Irishman who has held elected office in the Vancouver Island logging town for 43 years, held off a challenge from a councillor. Furney took 572 votes to Shelley Downey’s 394.

Last year, His Worship released “Popcorn for Breakfast,” a volume of rhyming verse. The title poem describes a hockey father seeking morning nourishment from arena vending machines:

“(O)f the junk food I ate there first/ Popcorn for breakfast was surely the worst./ The coffee was stale, the hot chocolate cold,/ Sandwiches tasteless except for the mould.”

He’s also written about logger’s equipment: “It’s sad that men in fancy suits/ Don’t know much about caulk boots.”

He’s no Seamus Heaney, but he has a certain North Island charm.

Fotheringham a lucky man living with tragedy

2011-12-05T18:58:00.000-08:00

Allan Fotheringham has penned a memoir of his journalistic career, ranging from his beginnings on the Ubyssey student newspaper to seeing the world on the publisher's dime. Rafel Gerszak photograph for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 16, 2011

VICTORIA

An obituarist does not often get to meet his subject four years after the assignment, but here was Allan Fotheringham, hale and hearty at 79.

The self-described “humble scribe” is on tour to promote his ninth book, the first in a decade and a return to form after an escalating series of ailments and medical mishaps left him near death in 2007.

Thinner, his voice reedier from damage to vocal cords caused by a breathing tube, he still carried on his face a familiar, smart-aleck impishness.

On a quiet fall afternoon, an attentive audience filled 70 chairs in a room at the central branch of the Victoria library, seeking a few moments with a writer who has been poking the pomposity of the powerful for more than four decades. Most had aged with him, from the must-read column in the Vancouver Sun, to 27 years of caustic commentary at Maclean’s, to being a wiseacre on a prime piece of real estate in the Globe, to many seasons of wit and irreverence on television’s Front Page Challenge.

“Even I cannot believe the life I am living,” he said.

Dr. Foth, as he also describes himself, read two anecdotes from his memoir, one about the marriage of Pierre Elliott Himself (a coinage known as a Fothism). The other was about another prime minister replacing the first syllables of the columnist’s family name with a venerable expletive in verb form. When an editor removed the swear word in an earlier book, Mr. Fotheringham slowed book signings by turning to the offending page to scratch out his name to replace it with the vulgarity. The crowd howled at the story.

His wife collected $32 cash for each copy of Boy From Nowhere, which he then signed. Some of the audience brought with them ancient copies of a magazine from whose pages he disappeared eight years ago. He was praised for using such phrases as “the Excited States of America.”

It was like witnessing a solo rock act, long fallen from the charts, being feted on a nostalgia tour.

“Gratifying doesn’t express it all,” he said. “It’s amazing. As I said, it took me 79 years to write this book. All the twists and turns in 91 countries, (trips) paid for by somebody else, I’ve had a remarkable life.

“I’ve got my health back and play tennis three mornings a week at 9 a.m., after almost dying four years ago. I’m the luckiest bugger around.”

Except when he isn’t.

He was in the final editing stage of the manuscript in late June when he received terrible news from overseas. His eldest son, who had been living in South Korea for seven years, had died suddenly.

“He was the bravest man I ever met,” Mr. Fotheringham said. “As a child, he was diagnosed with epilepsy. He had to take 20 pills a day to lead a normal life. He tried to follow his father and travel the world, not by expense account like me, but on a bike.”

The younger Fotheringham spent three month following the ancient silk road across Asia, a 4,800-kilometre cycling odyssey that included encounters with Tajik farmers and Afghan tank commanders. He fired an AK-47 on offer from an arms dealer, managed to twice elude a long stay in the hoosegow after being arrested by Chinese authorities.

He recounted his adventures in a book, On the Trail of Marco Polo. As one reviewer noted, his writing combined Gen-X jargon with cool understatement, as in this passage about camping in the mountains: “This is the life I thought. I just hope I don’t roll over the edge at night into the river. That would bite.”

The reviews were generally favourable, though they all seemed to compare the son’s writing to the father’s.

Allan Fotheringham at the Ubyssey.

“A good little book,” says a proud father. “The reviewers weren’t very fair to it, because they said, ‘This is a pretty good book, but it doesn’t have the wit of his father, or it doesn’t have the political depth of his father.’ We never discussed it, but I’m quite sure that’s why he decided to move out of Canada. He could see that whatever he did as a journalist, he would be compared to his father.”

In Korea, young Fotheringham taught English as a second language and wrote several reading and vocabulary books for beginners.

He was a curious man, a good quality for a journalist, and while he liked adventure he had to be careful about his health. The end came unexpectedly.

“His heart just gave out,” he said. “He fell in the bathroom and was dead before he hit the floor. It was a tragedy.”

The loss “wiped me out for a couple of months,” Mr. Fotheringham said. “My wife, Anne, the strongest person you could ever meet, got me through it.”

Dr. Foth has funded an annual $20,000 scholarship in his son’s name for the top graduating student in English at the school in Seoul.

Brady Delbridge Fotheringham, named for the great Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, was 47.

A newspaper clipping of a rare Fotheringham defeat in a libel suit.

Tsunami debris needs to be treated with respect

2011-12-05T18:45:00.001-08:00

Seattle oceanographer Curt Ebbesmeyer is an expert on flotsam, jetsam, and where a message in a bottle is likely to wash ashore. Dave Ingrham photograph.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 14, 2011

VICTORIA

In rough seas, the Coast Guard patrol vessel Sooke Post spotted an overturned boat about to be dashed onto rocks.

The battered craft was towed to Prince Rupert, where it was learned the damaged craft was the Kazu Maru. The dinghy had last been seen 18 months earlier when its owner, Kazukio Sakamoto, a retired civil servant, left for a day’s fishing. He was lost, presumed drown.

He had gone to sea from Owase, Japan. By strange coincidence, Owase and Prince Rupert were sister cities.

With the widow’s permission, the restored boat was placed on display at the local cannery museum before being moved to a waterfront park where it now stands as a memorial to sailors lost at sea. The widow and dignitaries from Japan attended the ceremony.

The story of the drifting dinghy is a lesson, as an entire fleet of Kazu Marus — and much, much more — is on the way to Vancouver Island.

The tsunami that devastated Japan in March washed to sea entire villages — cars, boats, houses.

Some of it sank. Much of it floated.

Some bits and pieces might already have washed up on the island’s rugged and isolated west coast.

Scientists predicted the debris would begin washing up on North America’s Pacific shore in late 2013, or early 2014.

Now, a prominent oceanographer recognized for his trailblazing work in studying the contents of spilled cargo containers — from Nike sneakers to a bobbing bunch of yellow rubber duckies — believes the first arrivals from the disaster are lapping at our coast.

Curt Ebbesmeyer, 68, of Seattle, is asking fishermen, holidayers, and beachcombers to be on the alert for items from the disaster. He urges any finds to be reported and recorded with photographs as an aid to further scientific studies on ocean currents. He is also calling on people to not treat what what washes up as garbage, or as a souvenir.

“When people find something, it isn’t just debris,” he said. “It’s a memento for Japanese families and their loved ones. It needs to be treated with great respect.”

Anyone finding tsunami debris is encouraged to contact the retired scientist through his Beachcombers’ Alert website at beachcombersalert.org, a not-for-profit site dedicated to tracking flotsam and jetsam.

“Don’t just burn it as debris. Get it, sequester it, go through it for any remains. Test it for radioactivity. Then think about disposal.”

Officials estimate 16,000 were killed in the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, while another 4,500 remain missing, likely swept to sea.

Earlier this year, he said of the aftermath: “If you put a major city through a trash grinder and sprinkle it on the water, that’s what you’re dealing with.” The debris field is as expansive as the state of California.

Scientists made their original prediction based on estimations of wind pull and ocean motion caused by the swift Kuroshio Current off Japan. Mr. Ebbesmeyer, who jokingly describes his expertise as driftology, has found that larger items act like sailboats in the wind.

Four years ago, two beachcombers discovered a red, 10-metre-long fishing buoy bobbing in the breakers off Copalis, Wash. The Japanese lettering gave a hint as to its origins. Turns out the buoy belonged to a fishing co-operative at Ginoza, a village in Okinawa. It had come unmoored during a super typhoon, crossing the vast ocean in 245 days.

The oceanographer asked his colleague Jim Ingraham to simulate a transpacific trajectory on a computer program known as OSCURS (Ocean Surface CURrent Simulator). The results show large debris can move much faster across the Pacific than previously thought.

“Twenty miles a day, 5,000 miles, eight months,” Mr. Ebbesmeyer said of the tsunami debris. “Eight months from March is November.”

The red buoy has been put on display in Ocean Shores, Wash. The Okinawan village mayor, two fishermen, and the consul general for Japan based in Seattle attended a ceremony at which the buoy, worth $30,000US, was presented as a gift. As well, the two communities became sister cities.

As tsunami debris reaches these shores, Mr. Ebbesmeyer said it is important to remember the reaction of the Japanese to the recovery and preservation of the red buoy and the Kaza Maru.

“Multiply that by a thousand times all along the B.C. coast,” he said. “Multiply each of those thousand times by three people who are going to want to come over to pay last respects.”

Cast your eyes to the sea. What the ocean swallows, it sometimes spits back.

All the news that's fit to reprint

2011-12-05T14:24:00.000-08:00

The defunct Abbotsford Post boasted an ornate flag featuring the bounty of the Fraser Valley. The Post is one of 24 titles, with 45,000 pages, now made available online for free by the University of British Columbia Library.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 11, 2011

A large, noisy crowd filled the street in front of the train station at Grand Forks, pressing onto the platform to salute men off to war.

It was a fine Sunday in August. Fifteen local sharpshooters had volunteered to go to the front to fight Germany in a war declared earlier in the month.

One of the older volunteers was Lawrence Green, a swarthy, 36-year-old married man, a butcher by trade, whose black hair was already turning grey.

A band played patriotic songs. The crowd “lustily cheered the volunteers and hoped that everyone of them would return a general, or at least a colonel,” reported the local newspaper. As the train pulled away, the sound of three “hip hip hoorays” echoed along the tracks.

It was 1914 and few anticipated the four years of carnage and savagery about to ensue.

Mr. Green would return only as a name on a grey granite cenotaph.

The war in which he lost his life was supposed to be the war to end all wars. As we gather Friday on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, a Remembrance Day founded a year after the armistice ending what we now call the First World War, it is a time to reflect on the lives of those who never returned from battle.

The story of the unfortunate butcher can be found in the pages of the Grand Forks Sun and Kettle Valley Orchardist, a weekly newspaper that folded soon after the end of the war.

The Grand Forks paper and 23 other defunct titles have been made available online for free beginning this week. Some 45,000 pages, dating from colonial days to the Jazz Age, have been digitized by the University of British Columbia Library.

The newspapers carry names from the province’s distant past — from the Bella Coola Courier to the Boundary Creek Times, from the Kootenay Mail to the Nelson Economist.

Many carried in their names the lure that brought men from afar to a hinterland — the Atlin Claim and the Nelson Miner; the Mining Review of Sandon and The Prospector of Fort Steele.

These are forgotten voices from the past, ghost newspapers from ghost towns.

The papers are a treasure trove for historians, researchers, and genealogists.

“They’re addictive,” said Bob McDonald, an associate history professor at the university. “For many of these newspapers, I didn’t even know they existed.”

Mr. McDonald, 67, who plans to retire next year, is using the newspapers for some additional research on a political history of the province. His earlier book, Making Vancouver, was shortlisted for the Vancouver Book Award in 1996.

Some of the newspapers display spectacular Page One logos, known in the business as the flag, or nameplate. These can be a publicist’s fantasy, or chamber-of-commerce boosterism.

The logo of a 1913 edition of the Bella Coola Courier depicts a steam engine rolling along the valley.

The Abbotsford Post logo shows a bounty of strawberries, peaches and cherries flanked on one side by a pastoral farm scene of cows contentedly grazing and on the other by a smoke-belching factory, all entwined by a grape vine.

The professor found himself drawn to the pages of the Phoenix Pioneer and Boundary Mining Journal, a publication for a settlement that disappears from the map. Phoenix was a boom town that went bust.

On Aug. 12, 1910, the offices of the newspaper burned down, as did much of the town. A new edition did not appear until five weeks later. The editor declared a loss of $3,000.
The paper returned with a dramatic account of the fire, which started at 4 p.m. in the oil house of a tunnel of the copper mine. A brisk breeze carried sparks and cinders to the lower streets. Soon, the school, a livery stable, and the Pioneer’s printing office, as well as the Methodist and Presbyterian churches, were aflame.

“All the buildings being frame they were eaten up like matchwood by the fire and the heat was terrific,” the newspaper reported.

The newspaper needed a full month before a new press could be acquired. The publisher announced his ledger books had been consumed in the conflagration. He asked readers, especially those in arrears, to pay up their subscriptions.

“There are times even in business life,” wrote T. Alfred Love, “when a $2 bill will do more for a person than a five-spot will accomplish when the cash drawer is full, and the Pioneer is now in a position to appreciate this.”

The paper sputtered along for another six years before a new publisher called it quits. “Too long have we fed upon husks,” he wrote in a bitter farewell editorial calling on those “delinquents on our books” to pay up.

Hard to make a buck in the journalism business? Some things never change.

A much-loved surfer rides his last wave

2011-12-05T14:08:00.000-08:00

Isaiah Oke, wearing a wetsuit against the cold, gets a peck on the cheek. The Oke family, famous for their surfing prowess, has been struck by tragedy since being evicted from Sombrio Beach.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 7, 2011

VICTORIA

The flags flew at half-mast in Port Renfrew for tragedy had again struck the Oke family.

A quiet, muscular man with a goofy, lopsided smile, Isaiah Oke was born into a famed surfing clan, their family name familiar to all who have ever ridden a wave off the west coast of Vancouver Island.

Mr. Oke, 30, a fearless, hard-charging surfer a newspaper once described as a “big wave deity,” died late last month.

On Wednesday, residents of the hamlet gathered at the local elementary school for a remembrance ceremony.

On Saturday, a smaller group of friends and family headed east along lonely Highway 14 for an informal ceremony at Sombrio Beach. Mr. Oke’s ashes were spread atop the sea foam, washing up on the sand and the water-smoothed rocks of the beach on which he had been born.

It is also the place where the ashes of his father, his sister, and two brothers have been committed to nature in recent years.

How much tragedy must one family endure?

To be an Oke in Port Renfrew is to know grief.

“It has been a series of tragedies. Hard to fathom,” said Paul Manly, a Nanaimo filmmaker who produced a documentary, Sombrio, about the last days of a squatter and surfer community that lived on the beach.

The family, whose name is pronounced like that of the sturdy tree, were longtime residents at Sombrio. Back in the 1970s, Steve Johnson, a Californian who preferred to battle waves rather than the Vietnamese, came to Canada, where he worked as a tree planter. He eventually settled on the beach with Barbara Oke. The couple had three children from other relationships, adding eight more of their own, a hippie Brady Bunch.

In time, the family built a sprawling, ramshackle, shake-shingle cabin on the beach. It had no electricity and running water was provided by a hose attached to a nearby creek.

Nature provided a bounty of blackberries and edible kelp, salmon and octopus. Barbara coaxed a vegetable garden from the forest floor. Running water was available from a hose linked to a nearby stream. There was no electricity.

In turn, each of the Oke children learned to surf, more from example than instruction. Some were riding waves before knowing how to swim. Bernardine Boudreau, who visited the beach in 1995, remembers a gaggle of happy children. “Life shone in their eyes,” she said “and declared their guileless spirit.”

The beach idyll also attracted misfits and adventurers, dropouts and outlaws.

“People not just off the grid, but on the run,” said Harry Abrams, a frequent visitor back in the day who created a Facebook tribute page for Isaiah. “It was like a cross between Woodstock Nation and Deliverance.”

On the beach, Sombrio Steve, as he was known, acted as an unofficial mayor, while Barbara was a Madonna-like figure for the lost souls who arrived like flotsam on the beach.

Paradise was lost when bureaucrats evicted the squatters to make way for a provincial park. The shacks were torched.

The family wound up living in a tiny house in Port Renfrew, a fishing and logging settlement at the terminus of Highway 14, the West Coast Highway. Their wandering goats annoyed their new neighbours. Their bush life was an uncomfortable fit for them and the town.

Much worse was to come.

In November, 1999, Clearlight Johnson, 27, the oldest of the 11 children, died in a car wreck, likely after having fallen alseep at the wheel. A month later, Dawn Oke died when she lost control of her car. Then, Jesse Oke, a surfer of exceptional skill, drowned after his truck slid off the dock of the government wharf in Port Renfrew. Three children gone in a four-month span.

In 2002, Mr. Johnson, the patriarch of the clan, died of cancer.

Now, Isaiah, a gentle, laid-back fellow, is gone, too, a suicide. He leaves a wife and children.

“You were 220 pounds of solid muscles with a barrel chest with a big heart,” remembered Rivermouth Mike Calloway, one of the Sombrio regulars.

Isaiah’s wife, Lenore Jones, has not spared her friends the raw emotions of grief in her Facebook postings. Amid the pain and anguish, amid the encouraging words of her family and friends, a single plaintive cry will be familiar to any who have ever grieved for a partner: “I really just want my Isaiah back.”

The exploits of the surfing clan have been featured in such movies as Sombrio, 5MM Canada, and 49 Degrees, as well as Grant Shilling’s history book, The Cedar Surf.

There is talk of creating a trust fund for Isaiah’s children. As well, a Victoria business, Salts Organic Clothing, has begun collecting money for the family.

The Biblical Isaiah was a prophet, the surfing one a more down-to-earth figure.

A decade ago, when it came time to bid adieu to Jesse on the beach at Sombrio, it was young Isaiah who paddled on a board out into the cold surf to sprinkle his brother’s ashes.

This mom really rolls ’em

2011-12-05T13:58:00.000-08:00

Jennifer Park's parents ran a bowling alley in Nanaimo. Now she competes for Canada on the world stage, including at the Pan American Games. Chad Hipolito photographs for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 3, 2011

VICTORIA

Jennifer Park recently returned from Mexico with a souvenir made of silver.

The 37-year-old mother of three, who is on maternity leave from her job as an office manager for a chartered accountant, spent a few days in sunny Guadalajara, a city known for its colonial architecture and its mariachi bands in wide-brimmed hats and silver-studded charro outfits.

She saw none of it.

Ms. Park spent her nights in a hotel room and her days on the lanes at the Tapatio Bowling Alley.

As she set pins flying, her older sister, Catherine, walked behind bleachers filled with cheering, screaming, chanting fans. In her arms she held her niece, Katelyn, delivered by C-section on July 27.

After each game, win or lose, though it was mostly win, Ms. Park retreated from the lanes to join her sister amid the tumult. If needed, she fed her infant daughter, who is still breast feeding.

“I want my kids to know that anything is possible,” she said from her home in Nanaimo on Tuesday. “That there aren’t limitations, especially for my daughters.”

Working mothers, here is your sporting hero.

The juggling act will be familiar to many parents, who balance the demands of family with those of work. A further demand is made on her time by her desire to compete at a world-class level in a sport that in this country offers little financial reward.

She won a silver medal last week while representing Canada at the Pan American Games in Mexico, her first tournament since giving birth this summer.

Over the years, her achievements have been recounted in short newspaper articles. A junior title here, a Canadian championship there. Even when she was named Canada’s female junior bowler of the millennium back in 2000, the news barely received a mention in her hometown.

The lack of profile does not bother her — “I’m not one to seek attention,” she said — though she wishes she could train every day.

It is her burden to be a blue-ribbon champion in a blue-collar sport whose heyday passed well before her birth in Duncan on Vancouver Island in 1973.

You might say her family lived in the gutter. Her parents, Bob and Annie Willis, owned Evergreen Lanes in Nanaimo. The parents had a rule for their three daughters: No playing on the lanes until old enough to attend kindergarten. At age four, she sulked as her older sister got to play. By age five, young Jennifer was playing ten pin.

The three Willis sisters — Catherine, Jennifer and Kimberley — have all competed on the international stage. The trio has each bowled a perfect game — that’s 12 consecutive strikes, never missing a pin — at Evergreen. (The family sold the alley five years ago and it is now known as Splitsville.) Ms. Park has bowled a perfect 300 six times.

A left-hander, Ms. Park’s skill has taken her as far afield to complete as Chile, Hong Kong, Japan, Argentina, Australia, United Arab Emirates, and the Dominican Republic.

“It’s taken me around the world,” she said. “I’ve got to see many places. I’ve been lucky.”

She qualified for the gold-medal match in Mexico, facing arch-rival Liz Johnson of Cheektowaga, N.Y., a professional bowler who was named the female bowler of the decade in a 2010 issue of U.S. Bowler magazine.

“Liz Johnson is a phenomenal bowler,” Ms. Park said. “I know I can beat her. But I have to be 110 per cent.”

Instead, she entered the finals exhausted by her schedule. Worse, she developed a blister on her thumb, as the callous had softened during her postpartum sabbatical. She even bled on her ball.

The American beat her 232-196 and 235-190.

Ms. Park returned home with a sore thumb and a silver medal on Friday night via Guadalajara to Phoenix to Vancouver to Nanaimo.

On Monday night, she went trick-or-treating door-to-door with Jasmine, 5, dressed as a witch, and Brody, 3, a dragon. Her husband, Cameron Park, a vice-principal at Stu”ate Lelum Secondary, a independent school for First Nations students at Ladysmith, stayed home with Katelyn to hand out candies.

Ms. Park bowls with a 15-pound ball.

Her infant daughter now weighs about 13 pounds.

As it turns out, “carrying bowling balls is good practice for carrying babies,” she said.

At the end of the month, mother and youngest daughter will once again board an airplane. Next stop: Johannesburg, South Africa, site of the 2011 World Cup, where she will compete against the top women from 70 countries. That’s just how this mother rolls.

Baby Katelyn reaches for her mother's silver medal from the 10-pin competition at the Pan American Games in Mexico.

Ghost bus-tour offers a spectral stroll through Victoria

2011-12-05T01:11:00.000-08:00

The historian and raconteur John Adams knows where all the best stories are buried. He offers walking and bus tours of Victoria's favourite haunts. Chad Hipolito photographs for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
October 31, 2011

VICTORIA

John Adams haunts the haunts of ghosts.

The erudite, 62-year-old raconteur, who has a history degree and a graduate degree in museum studies, is Victoria’s foremost purveyor of anecdotes about apparitions.

October is a busy month for one whose livelihood depends on interest in the spooky.

Each night this past week, his company, Discover the Past, has held four walking tours of ghostly haunts in downtown Victoria, including Chinatown and the old red-light district, the Legislature and Bastion Square, the site of gallows in colonial days. There are lectures to deliver and ghost dinners to host, not to mention the responsibilities of conducting a nightly Ghost Bus-tour, a trademarked name that is a play on ghostbuster.

“Everyone,” Mr. Adams said, “seems to want a ghost story at this time of year.”

The province’s capital city is said to have no shortage of spectral presences.

One of his favourite ghosts can be found at the Bard and Banker, a pub on Government Street, which once housed a bank. The tellers used to live on the second floor, from where it has been said can be seen the ghostly presence of Robert Service, the Bard of the Yukon, who once worked and lived in the building.

To hear Mr. Adams tell it, you can hardly enter an historic building in the city without encountering some unsettled spirit of the past. The city’s jail, cemetery, and Catholic cathedral are all said to have ghosts. (Apparently, though, there is no phantom at the opera house.)

Francis Rattenbury, the province’s most famous architect, is said to haunt three of his own buildings — the Legislature, the Empress Hotel, and his private home on Beach Drive, now occupied by a private school. Rattenbury was bludgeoned to death with a croquet mallet wielded by his young chauffeur, who was having an affair with the architect’s wife. The murder happened in England, where Rattenbury is buried, so it must be a long commute for his ghost.

John Adams

The city’s best-known spirit is said be found on the No. 7 Hole of the seaside Victoria Golf Club. Over the years, there have been reports of a woman in a white gown (or period clothes) running along the fairway, or swooping into the sky, or even passing through moving vehicles on a nearby roadway. The specter is said to be that of Doris Gravlin, a young woman beaten and strangled to death whose barefoot body was found on the waterfront rocks. Weeks later, the body of her estranged husband washed up on shore, the murder weapon — a rope — and her shoes in his pockets. He had been a sports reporter, so perfidy on his part is no stretch. The 1936 murder shocked a genteel city.

“Any school child in Victoria will at some point hear about Doris,” Mr. Adams said, “and at some point they will head down there at night to see her. It’s almost a rite of passage.”

These days, she is sometimes referred to as the April Ghost, as she is said to appear only in that month, announcing her presence by ringing a bell on the course.

The storyteller is having none of it.

“Those are all myths,” he said, dismissively. “She’s there all the time.”

(The great golfer Ben Hogan once rolled a putt off the undulating No. 7 green into the fringe and onto the rocks out of bounds. Don’t know if it is haunted, but it certainly is scary.)

Mr. Adams was born in St. Thomas, where his father worked for an insurance company. The southwestern Ontario city is where Jumbo, the circus elephant, died more than a century ago after being struck by a locomotive. An autopsy discovered in the pachyderm’s stomach a quantity of pebbles and gravel, as well as nails, rivets, screws, keys, bits of wire, copper pennies, and a policeman’s whistle. While the coins were sold as souvenirs, other items wound up on display at the Elgin County Museum, the oddities and the beast’s tragic story fueling a boy’s interest in the historical.

The family moved to Victoria in 1960, renting a house on Dallas Road from which they looked out onto Juan de Fuca Strait. They barely noticed the adjacent street’s name — Memorial Crescent — and the adjoining acreage known as Ross Bay Cemetery. The beach and consecrated ground alike became a playground for young John.

He went on to enjoy a distinguished quarter-century career as a civil servant. He has also authored two books.

On Sunday, he could be found taking part in the annual ghost tour of Ross Bay, a popular Halloween tradition run by the Old Cemeteries Society, a group he helped found.

For Mr. Adams, a cemetery is a garden of unearthly delights.

Over the years, he has collected a tremendous repertoire of ghost stories, which he recounts with the entertaining aplomb of a practiced historian. To hear him tell it, even his own century-old home in James Bay is haunted by the ghost of a Chinese servant named Lum, a helpful presence in finding lost objects in the household.

Does he really, truly believe in ghosts?

“There are some things we can’t explain,” he said.

Maybe that’s why the province was known as supernatural British Columbia.

I will say this: After 9 p.m. on a weeknight, downtown Victoria is a ghost town.

A writer haunting a pub? Happens all the time.

A cultural awakening

2011-12-05T00:57:00.000-08:00

A tattered family snapshot of Charlayne Thornton-Joe as a toddler in the living room of the family's modest home on Quadra Street. It is now a coffee shop.

By Tom Hawthorn
Torch Magazine
Autumn, 2011

By Tom Hawthorn

The Knotty Bean Cafe has a homey feel. A display case offers a selection of cookies and baked goods. Boxes of tea are displayed on tidy shelves. A chalk board on the far wall lists the day’s specials. It even has a fireplace.

Soon after it opened, Charlayne Thornton-Joe, the city councillor, dropped by the cafe at 1921 Quadra St., a wee house located on an alleyway across the street from the curling rink. She brought along an older sister and her parents. She also had with her some old photographs.

The cafe’s tables are placed in what had once been the Joe family’s living room. A half-century ago, aunts squeezed into a cramped kitchen to claim one of four spots at a formica table for spirited games of mahjong.

This was the home in which Charlayne spent her first four years, a safe place in which she has only happy memories. Her family left the neighbourhood for a larger home on a more prosperous suburban crescent. The change brought misery to the youngest of four children.

Charlayne Thornton-Joe

Thornton-Joe (BA, ’83) told the story about her family’s move earlier this year at a ceremony at the University Club. The Distinguished Alumni Award was presented to 11 graduates, among them a doctor, a nurse, a lawyer, a teacher, an engineer, a tuba player, scientists, and a young entrepreneur. The politician was the humanities honoree. A sister and her father were in the audience. Her ailing mother could not attend. As she told her story, Thornton-Joe wiped tears from the corner of her eye.

In offering a brief outline of her life story, she acknowledged the role the university played in her struggle to find an identity as the second generation of her family to be born in Canada. Early in her academic career, a friend suggested she take a Chinese history class as an elective. “Being Chinese,” Thornton-Joe recounted, “I thought it’d be an easy course.” Instead, it changed her life.

She had gone to UVic to get an education. The great lesson she learned was to accept the culture that was her birthright. She found herself.

It was not a smooth journey.

One of her earliest memories is of peering out the front window of the tiny house on Quadra Street from which she could see the bright lights of a ferris wheel from a traveling carnival. The surrounding streets included families who traced their ancestries around the globe.

Her paternal grandfather, Chow Shon Wing, a merchant, paid the hated Head Tax to enter this country. Her father, Jon Joe, grew up in a city in which he was barred from enjoying the waters of the Crystal Gardens pool. He enlisted in the Canadian Army during the Second World War, training to defend a country that refused him the full rights of citizenship because of his race. By the time Charlayne was born in 1960, only 13 years had passed since Chinese-Canadians had been granted the franchise.

Life for the Joe family centered around Chinatown, where the family shoe store, the euphonious Toy Sing, at 1710 Government St., outfitted generations of millworkers and loggers who worked the woods of Sooke and Metchosin. (Today, the store houses a tattoo parlour.)

Her family moved to Gordon Head in the mid-1960s, a time when few non-white families lived in the neighbourhood. Young Charlayne had a difficult time.

“I hated going to school,” she said. “I used to come home crying. That is why I rebelled against my culture at a young age.

“I was called names. I can’t say the word, even now. The C-word. The rhyme that people used. That’s what people would call out, or sing the song. I hated that word. It’s to the point that it upsets me so much that in common language if someone says ‘a chink in the armour,’ it brings tears to my eyes.”

A school chum invited her for supper. While the girls played in the bedroom, she overheard the parents talking: “I remember the mother saying to the father to wash my dish twice.” Charlayne ran home in tears.

In high school, the typical teenage difficulties were magnified by being one of the few ethnic Chinese in her school.

All three of her siblings learned Cantonese, but Charlayne, four years younger than her next oldest sibling, didn’t learn the language. She wasn’t interested in the culture, other than enjoying the red envelopes filled with cash on Chinese New Year.

“The way I looked, the way I dressed, I just wanted to assimilate,” she said.
“I wanted to blend in.”

That attitude changed during her time on campus. The elective on Chinese history led her to ask for father to share his extensive knowledge of China. Daughter and father found a rapport in her new-found intellectual pursuit.

She immersed in Asian studies by her second year on campus. She took a language course. Her father was proud his youngest daughter was learning Chinese, even if it was Mandarin. In 1982, she went overseas for two months as part of an exchange program with East China Normal University in Shanghai. She was the first in her family to return to the ancestral homeland, a journey all the more poignant when her last surviving grandparent, Annie Chow, died shortly before her departure. On her arrival, a professor escorted her to a lake on which she placed a flower in memory of her grandmother.

Many Chinese still wore green Red Army jackets. Yet again, she stuck out. “The way I dressed, my jewelry, the way I wore my hair” made her an obvious Westerner at a glance.

One memory she has is of writing a letter to her parents entirely in Chinese, a painstaking task that took her hours.

After graduating with a degree in Pacific and Asian studies, she became active with the Victoria Chinatown Lioness Club, for which she created and conducted tours of Chinatown. She became president of the Inter-Cultural Association of Greater Victoria, developing a reputation as a tireless opponent of discrimination in any of its many forms. For the past two decades, she has promoted Chinese and Chinese-Canadian culture by bringing to the city such speakers as the author Lisa See, the actress Nancy Kwan, and the journalists Jan Wong and Denise Chong. In 2002, Thornton-Joe was elected to city council, gaining re-election in 2005 and 2008, when she topped the polls among all candidates contesting the eight seats on council. She is up for re-election in November.

Today, the home she shares with her husband Phil is filled with Chinese art. She makes an effort to stay current on Chinese literature and cinema. She is at peace with her identity as a Canadian of Chinese ancestry.

Her mother, the former Verna Wong, died in February, just days after Charlayne received the Distinguished Alumni Award. While going through family papers, her father handed her an envelope she had not seen in many years. Her parents had carefully saved the letter their youngest daughter had so laboriously written in Chinese characters while studying overseas.

A future Victoria city councillor rides a hobby-horse in her family's living room in the early 1960s. She is being supervised by an older sister.

As small as a boy’s scar, as big as lost love, war changes an ordinary family

2011-12-05T00:41:00.000-08:00

By Tom Hawthorn
Boulevard Magazine
November, 2011

My father remembered hearing the news while playing on the street. The war was over. The Nazis were beaten. A parent he could barely remember would soon be home after years battling the enemy overseas.

It was May 8, 1945. Throughout Canada, people took to the streets in spontaneous celebrations to mark V-E (Victory in Europe) Day. In overcrowded Halifax, drunken celebrants — serviceman, at first, soon after joined by civilians — smashed windows and looted shops. In most places, the explosion of pent-up exuberance cost no greater damage than a morning-after headache.

My father wound up with a souvenir of his own. He was a boy in short pants that day, a Grade One student approaching his seventh birthday. As he ran home to tell his mother the exciting news, he fell on a gravel street and skinned his knee, the scar long a reminder of an otherwise happy day.

The reunion my father anticipated did not work out as he imagined. His father returned unscathed, but the years away had altered the marriage. It did not turn out to be a happy homecoming, as they ended up living apart.

When he came of age, my father followed his father’s example by enlisting. For a young man of limited financial means, the army offered an opportunity perhaps to see the world, even if that meant patrolling on the front lines of the Cold War in Europe. As it turned out, he met my mother and the birth of two children 14 months apart put the kibosh on his globetrotting ambitions. An early family photograph captures me wearing my dad’s cap sideways and grinning like a goof.

My grandfather gave his name to my father, who in turn gave the name to me, an inheritance from men who had little of material wealth to pass on. Both had volunteered for military service, an option that held little attraction for me. My boyhood paralleled the Vietnam War era and ours was a household that opposed a war in which Canada, thankfully, was not engaged.

Still, I grew up in apartments in which the cinder-block-and-plank shelves groaned with books about war history. The paperback edition of William L. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, with its lurid swastika cover, especially looms in memory. I read it in middle school and later interviewed the war correspondent himself. At home, military history mattered.

Yet the Hawthorn contribution to military service is not distinguished. My Scottish-born grandfather, who had been a bootblack and shipyard labourer in Glasgow, served with Fort Garry Horse, which took part in the tough slog through occupied France, Belgium, Holland and on into Germany. He was a cook — I never heard a word about his culinary prowess — so it is possible he inflicted more harm on our troops than on the enemy.

I’d like to know what my late father would have made of the news that the government is reinstating regal designations of two branches of the armed forces — the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Canadian Air Force. Those names disappeared into the history books with the amalgamation of the armed forces in 1968, a move that at the time certainly outraged veterans and many serving members. But no one in uniform today has ever served under the old designations.

My father served with the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment), which was known for its kilts and bagpiping. Enlisting in the late 1950s, he saw no combat other than the occasional weekend dust-up with air force fly boys in their blue uniforms.

His own army stories involved falling afoul of a tough-minded sergeant. He was chewed out at morning parade for having a soiled uniform and warned not to repeat the infraction. He showed up the next day wearing impeccably polished boots and nothing else. “As you ordered, sir,” he told the sergeant. “Spotless, sir.”

The Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) lives on now only as a reserve regiment, another of the royal connections to have slipped away over the years. The military historian J.L. Granatstein makes a convincing argument that the Royal designation is meaningless in modern Canada. “The reality is that soldiers fight for their regiments and their comrades; sailors fight for their shipmates; airmen for their squadron,” he writes. For many, monarchy and the British connection remain an abstraction, one likely to grow ever blurry and distant in the coming years.

But the word is not meaningless to a navy man I talked to, who works at CFB Esquimalt with the training ketch HMCS Oriole. “Gives us pride,” he said. “Sounds better than Maritime Command, Maritime Operations Group 4.” He paused. “MAROPSGRU 4.”

Not that the renaming will eliminate the military’s penchant for acronyms.

Hard to know what my old man would have said about the return of the royal designation. He liked tradition, but he also was a Canadian nationalist. I know one thing. On Remembrance Day, he paused to remember the veterans, his own father, who came home a changed man, and all the others who never made it home.

Tony La Russa's humble Vancouver beginnings

2011-10-27T14:38:00.000-07:00

Tony La Russa, an intense 23-year-old infielder, joined the Vancouver Mounties in May, 1968. The team finished in last place, but the roster included five future major-league managers. Photograph courtesy the David Eskenazi Collection.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
October 27, 2011

Tony La Russa changes pitchers as often as Lady Gaga changes wardrobes.

The manager of the St. Louis Cardinals is a mad genius of the diamond. His stratagems have earned him two World Series titles. Only the legendary Connie Mark and John McGraw have enjoyed more victories as managers.

Yet, in Game Five of the World Series, the Cardinals brain trust suffered from brain cramps.

A fresh pitcher arrived with orders to issue an intentional walk. After making four easy lobs, he was dismissed for the night.

A failed hit-and-run play resulted in the slow-footed Allen Craig churning along the base path like a doomed dispatch runner in the mud on the Western Front.

After the game, a 4-1 win for the Texas Rangers, who can claim their first World Series with a victory in St. Louis on Thursday night, La Russa blamed crowd noise and confusion on the telephone to the bullpen for the fiasco.

At one point, he greeted a reliever on the pitching mound with the words, “What are you doing here?”

La Russa’s pitching coach, Dave Duncan, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “How this happened, I have no idea. But I blame myself.”

Back in British Columbia, the drama was watched on television with keen interest by two former ball players.

Gerry Reimer, 73, of Enderby and Wayne Norton, 68, of Port Moody, played together on the Vancouver Mounties in 1968. Reimer covered first base, while Norton patrolled behind him in right field. The team’s starting catcher was Duncan, while the second baseman was La Russa, an intense 23-year-old with more ambition than skill.

The infielder arrived in Vancouver after being demoted by the parent Oakland A’s. At the time, the sportswriter Greg Douglas wrote that the prospect “knows only one way to approach a game and that is to hustle until you simply run out of breath.”

All hoped to catch on with a big-league club. Duncan and La Russa made it. Reimer and Norton did not.

Norton has kept his hand in the game, too, as a Seattle Mariners scout responsible for Canada and Europe. Looking back, he can see why La Russa had only modest success as a major leaguer, spreading 132 games over six seasons on three clubs.

“He had limited tools as a player,” he said. “There are five tools you look for” — fielding, arm strength, running speed, hitting for power, and hitting for average — “and he was not outstanding in any of them.”

Norton spent several seasons with La Russa in the Athletics system.

“I roomed with him on the road,” he said. “In Des Moines (Iowa), Vancouver, and Birmingham (Ala.). He was serious and dedicated.”

The 1968 Mounties included three Canadians on the roster, a rarity at the time, as Norton and Reimer were joined by right-handed pitcher Vern Handrahan, a mailman from Prince Edward Island known for chewing toothpicks, a nervous habit he maintained even while on the mound pitching.

Reimer remembers the Mounties being a close-knit squad. He had the team over for a barbecue at his house on Windsor Street, a long fly ball from the park. The company and the home-cooked meal were welcomed by out-of-towners like Duncan and La Russa.

Reimer also remembers a friendly atmosphere at Capilano (now Nat Bailey) Stadium, where he recalls his four-year-old son being bounced on the knee of one of the Phillipone brothers, owners of the notorious Penthouse Cabaret, a strip club frequently raided by police.

It was a woeful season for the Mounties, whose 58-88 record was the worst in the Pacific Coast League, a Triple-A circuit. According to a report in the Sporting News, Vancouver went a stretch of 33 games during which the team hit only two home runs. La Russa, not a power hitter, smacked them both. Many games were attended by fewer than 1,000 fans.

Mickey Vernon, the Mounties’ kindly manager, allowed the players to participate in stunts in the hope of attracting more people to the park. The Panamanian Ossie Chavarria, who liked Vancouver so much that he settled in the neighbouring suburb of Burnaby, played all nine positions in one game. In another, the clubhouse attendant, a 19-year-old university undergraduate, convinced the manager to allow him to be the starting pitcher for the final game of the season.

The kid did all right, allowing just one run over three innings. He even struck out a batter.

The game lasted just 64 minutes, as both teams were eager to get on with civilian life.

The rookie’s career lasted but the one game. (He signed a contract for the day in which he was paid $25. He was promptly fined $25 for wearing his spikes in the team’s business office.) He later became a teacher and a union president. Ernest (Kit) Krieger, who is now the registrar of the B.C. College of Teachers, caught up with La Russa while attending a baseball game in Miami earlier this year.

He reminded the Cardinals skipper about the final game of the 1968 season, the one that ended so quickly.

The manager sized up the paunchy, grey-haired, bespectacled 62-year-old in front of him.

“You pitched that game?!” he said.

Oddly, the woeful ’68 Mounties produced five major-league managers — La Russa, Steve Boros, Joe Nossek, and the brothers Rene and Marcel Lachemann.

While Norton is cheering for La Russa, Reimer is not. The son who bounced on the cabaret owner’s knee went on to crack a major-league roster. Kevin Reimer, a slugger like his father, broke in with the Texas Rangers.

The linescore foe the final game of the Vancouver Mounties' woeful 1968 season. Teenaged pitcher Kit Krieger made his debut as a professional by pitching the first three innings. It was also his final game. Note how the Sporting News misspelled his name.

Quirky moniker Helps political novice in name recognition challenge

2011-10-24T18:05:00.000-07:00

Victoria city council candidate Lisa Helps helps harvest vegetables from Haultain Common, a strip of city-owned land. Chad Hipolito photographs for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
October 24, 2011

VICTORIA

The candidate gets quizzical looks on the doorstep when she introduces herself.

That can happen when your family name is also an intransitive verb.

“My name really is Lisa Helps,” she assures voters.

The felicitously-named candidate is making her debut on the hustings this fall. She is among 20 candidates vying for eight seats on Victoria city council. Among the contenders are all eight incumbents.

For the challengers, it’s like playing a game of musical chairs in which every chair is occupied.

The incumbents began the campaign favoured to return to their seats after the Nov. 19 civic election. Name recognition can be a trump card. Voter interest is low. Three years ago, only 27 per cent of eligible voters bothered to cast a ballot.

For Ms. Helps, the challenge is not only to become known, but to encourage more voters to go to the polls.

Lisa Helps

“It requires a lot of interesting campaigning,” she said. “I need to reach everybody.”
Like most candidates, she is relying on social media to spread her message. A Twitter and Facebook presence allows her to canvass potential supporters for their views on the issues. It also helps her build a platform during the campaign.

“It’s not just, ‘I’m Lisa, vote for me.’ It’s ‘Hey, I’m Lisa, what are your hopes, dreams, ideas, thoughts for the city?’ ”

The modern approach is being backed by an old-fashioned letter-writing strategy her campaign calls the Judd Buchanan Project. Mr. Buchanan, 82, told Ms. Helps that he had launched his political career by winning election to the school board in London, Ont., by writing personal letters to potential supporters. The insurance agent went on to to win five consecutive elections to the House of Commons, where he served as a Cabinet minister under Pierre Trudeau before moving to Victoria.

To campaign in a civic election is to practice politics at the neighbourhood level with door-knocking, mainstreeting and kaffeeklatsches. Ms. Helps spends two nights a week at gatherings in private homes where she is introduced to neighbours over tea, chocolates, or wine and cheese. “They feel like job interviews,” she said, laughing. Which, of course, they are.

The 12 non-incumbent candidates include homeless advocate Rose Henry and property owner Robin Kimpton, who has been in disputes with the city over the disrepair of his rental properties. Ben Isitt, an historian and author, who twice ran unsuccessfully for mayor, is also seeking a council seat. Three candidates — Aaron Hall, Linda McGrew and Sukhi Lalli — are running as a slate endorsed by Open Victoria, a group calling for greater transparency at city hall.

Ms. Helps, 35, is executive director of Community Micro Lending, which provides modest loans to budding entrepreneurs seeking to start a small business. The group also pairs the loan recipients with mentors from the business community.

Earlier, she chaired the Fernwood Neighbourhood Resource Group when it bought a dilapidated century-old building on the area’s main intersection. The building was renovated with apartments for low-income residents upstairs and a popular coffee shop on street level. (Victoria is a small town. The building was purchased from Mr. Kimpton, against whom she now competes for a council seat.)

One feature of the Helps campaign is the holding of a weekly work party.

“We’re repairing fences, helping with gardens and building bookshelves,” she said.

“That draws attention to ‘Hey, Lisa actually gets stuff done,’ which is one of my key messages.”

On Saturday, she was joined by incumbent Philippe Lucas and candidate Shellie Gudgeon, a restaurateur, in harvesting and weeding Haultain Common, a vegetable garden planted with tomatoes, potatoes, and squash along a narrow boulevard of city-owned land.

Lest campaigning be all work and no fun, she is inviting all 20 council and four mayoral candidates to a hootenanny at Logan’s Pub.

“It’s going to be interesting to see who shows up and what they sing,” she said.

“It’ll lighten things up and draw people together.”

She plans to sing with her campaign team She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain. They’ve changed the lyrics to fit into the campaign: “She’ll be making an infrastructure priority plan when she comes ...”

Good thing she’s not running for Canadian Idol.

The campaign introduced the candidate to the electorate with a charming day-in-the-life video.

Author prefers type over stereotype

2011-10-21T00:06:00.000-07:00

The Vancouver author Kevin Chong has just released his second novel, Beauty Plus Pity. Jeff Vinnick photograph for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
October 20, 2011

The Vancouver of Kevin Chong’s boyhood was not one of hikes through dense woods, nor jet-skiing on English Bay, nor schussing down Grouse Mountain.

The natural wonders of the City of Glass on the edge of the rainforest were backdrop to a boy who preferred indoor entertainments. He watched a lot of television. “I like a lot of comedies like Night Court and The Cosby Show,” he said. “The A-Team. Little House on the Prairies. WKRP, a great show,” he said.

When his immigrant parents spent an evening with friends huddled over mahjong tiles, he spent the night with the friends’ children playing computer games.

As he grew older, books, movies and music informed the world view of an aspiring writer who considered himself to be modern, media savvy, and pop-culture satiated.

A decade ago, on the release of his debut novel, Baroque-a-Nova, Mr. Chong let it be known he was “loathe to write any books that might have a cover with bamboo lettering on it.” He did not want to be limited in his subject matter by his ethnicity. So, no restaurants, no railroads, no laundries. No “joy,” no “luck,” no “jade.” Not his immigrant experience.

Though both grandfathers had paid the hated head tax, Mr. Chong was born in Hong Kong. He arrived in this land at age five with a bowl haircut and a hunger for what he would recognize as an adult as a desire for cultural fluency.

None of the major characters in the first novel are of Chinese ancestry. His second novel, Beauty Plus Pity, released recently by Arsenal Pulp Press of Vancouver, is about a young man struggling with a romantic breakup and the death of his father. Malcolm Kwan is the son of immigrants from Hong Kong who aspires to be a male model. (“This is where the autobiography stops,” Mr. Chong quips.)

“It deals with how I experienced being a child of immigrants,” he said. “I wasn’t fixated on having to straddle two cultures. It was more indirect. I’m an outsider. It made me more indoorsy and culture obsessed.”

In trying to learn more about his late father, the character uncovers an affair that produced a love child, a half-sister with whom he develops a friendship.

The city in which he was raised provides the setting for both his novels.

“I write about Vancouver out of a lack of imagination,” he said. “It’s the world around me. I toyed with the idea of writing about different places and different times. Maybe I’m too self-absorbed to write outside of the world that I know, and of the obsessions that take up my daily life.”

What are those obsessions?

“Media. The hyphenated culture. Being raised in a place like Vancouver, which is so strongly Asian but also has this British underlayer.”

His Vancouver includes a Legion on Main Street at which he and other writers gather for Thursday beers, as well as such hybrid joints as a Japanese restaurant serving Chinese-style poutine. The city becomes ever more cosmopolitan even as it becomes more expensive and less friendly.

He went to elementary school in Ladner, then attended the Catholic middle school Vancouver College, where he developed a “brutish, fart-centered sense of humour,” before entering Eric Hamber Secondary. “Hamber was an alienating experience,” he said. “The school has two major populations — Asian kids who liked hip-hop and Jewish kids. I was the Asian kid who liked Neil Young. That was a lonely year.” He completed high school at the Prince of Wales Mini School with fellow “brainy misfits.”

His musical passion led him to take a road trip with three boys detailed in the comic memoir Neil Young Nation.

Another nonfiction book will be released next spring when GreyStone issues My Year of the Racehorse, Mr. Chong’s tour of tracks from Kentucky to Hong Kong. For a time, he owned a share in Mocha Time. “She was an honest runner,” he said. “Not very talented, but always gave it her best.” She twice won races at Hastings Racecourse before being claimed at a race two years ago. He still misses her.

He is sad to see the sport of kings in such decline.

“Once, it was the only game in town,” he said. “Now people want to lose their money more quickly.”

A part-time writing teacher, Mr. Chong, 36, likes to show his classes a clip from the movie Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. He asks his students the difference between Kumar and the stoners of Dude, Where’s My Car? All kinds of convoluted suggestions are offered: “Harold is more studious than Seann William Scott,” or, “Kumar is more tied to familial obligations.”

The Harold & Kumar story works on two levels, he tells the class. It’s about two guys who want to go to White Castle. It’s also about two men of Asian ancestry seeking mainstream acceptance.

“They (the students) take pains to avoid the obvious,” he said.

Mr. Chong knows that to be described as a Chinese-Canadian writer is to arouse certain expectations. A writer who happens to be of Chinese ancestry is less likely to have bamboo lettering on his dust jacket.

Kevin Chong will be appearing on a panel called “Bamboo Lettering” with Ling Zhang and Jen Sookfong Lee on Saturday at the Vancouver International Writers Festival. He will be reading in Seattle on Oct. 24, in Ottawa on Oct. 25, in Toronto on Nov. 3, and in Montreal on Nov. 5.

Vancouver writer Kevin Chong has a second novel out this fall, which is to be followed by a second non-fiction book in the new year about his experiences betting on horses.

After violence in the Philippines, a refugee thrives in her new home

2011-10-17T15:13:00.000-07:00

Chandu Claver poses in his Victoria backyard with daughters (from left) Alex, 12; Samantha, 17; and, Sandy, 15. Chad Hipolito photograph for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
october 17, 2011

VICTORIA

The morning routine on a school day at the Claver home operates like clockwork.

The father, Constancio, known as Chandu, rises before dawn, cleans up, puts rice on the stove.

At 5:55, he begins trying to wake the youngest of his three daughters. Alex, 12, gets to use the lone bathroom until 6:30, when it is turned over to 15-year-old Sandy.

Everyone comes to the table at 7 a.m., when the father serves a traditional Filipino breakfast of eggs and garlic fried rice with a bit of meat, or fish.

Then, the eldest daughter, Samantha, 17, gets the use of the bathroom before heading off to catch the 7:55 bus to Victoria High School.

After the girls are off to classes, Mr. Claver walks for a half-hour to his 10-hour shift as a client service worker at an emergency homeless shelter.

He arrived in Canada four years ago with what remained of his family. As a refugee, he expected hardships.

“I knew that before I came,” he said.

He knows his girls miss cousins and friends back in the homeland they left so unexpectedly.

Last week, the family’s routine was interrupted. Samantha, a Grade 12 student, traveled to Vancouver where she received an award of excellence from Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, B.C.’s representative for children and youth.

The teenager has been active in two stage productions — “Where is Home” and “My Forbidden Disorder” — in which youth share their immigrant experiences. As well, she has helped develop programming for Project Respect, a program to help youth avoid being victims of sexual violence.

The press release announcing her award describes her coming to Canada “as a result of fear and violence in her home country.”

That does not begin to tell the tale.

On July 31, 2006, while Samantha was attending a Girl Scout gathering in South Korea, her parents went about an ordinary morning routine in their home of Tabuk, a rice-growing centre and capital of Kalinga province in the northern Philippines. Her father, a medical doctor, supervised several health clinics for which his wife, Alyce, kept the books. The couple had met while promoting social justice for local indigenous people, whose poverty the doctor believed was responsible for many of their recurring illnesses.

The couple had just dropped off Alex at her school and were on their way to Sandy’s school when they were attacked at a busy intersection.

“We were cut off by a van,” Mr. Claver recalled. “Two riflemen came out and started shooting at the car. One on my left, one on my right. It happened so fast.”

A shot tore into his left shoulder. He ducked to his right, seeking cover beneath the dashboard. His wife, Alyce, sitting in the passenger seat, also ducked, covering his body with hers.

In the backseat, Sandy cowered as low as she could go.

The shots kept coming.

“We were thinking they would come and finish us off,” he said.

Instead, the gunmen fled in their van.

Later, 38 cartridge cases would be found on the roadway.

The doctor bled profusely from the shoulder wound. His wife was struck by seven bullets, grievously wounded, though still able to talk. Sandy suffered a grazing head wound.

The parents were rushed to surgery. He remembers hearing his wife calling relatives on a cell phone, urging them to take care of the daughters.

“I made it,” he said. “She didn’t.”

The shooting was a high-profile case in the Philippines, where government agents with ties to the military were suspected of the attack. More than 900 Filipinos have been the victims of extra-judicial killings in the past decade.

The doctor stayed in safe houses after the attack, but received a warning that his daughters were in danger.

Mr. Claver quickly arranged what everyone was told was to be an extended holiday. He did not tell the girls that he planned on seeking refugee status after arriving in Canada. Once here, the daughters discovered in his luggage a Filipino cookbook. The secret was out. This was to be more than a visit.

The family received refugee status, becoming permanent residents.

Mr. Claver, unable to practice medicine here, took a janitorial job with the Cool Aid Society. He found a two-bedroom home to rent, taught himself to cook, attentively monitored his daughters’ progress at school.

News of Samantha’s latest honour was warmly received.

“It brings great satisfaction,” Mr. Claver said. “It shows they’re fitting in. For myself, it was a big worry, having to transplant them suddenly to Canada. They were never prepared for this.

“It’s a good sign.”

As for Samantha, she plans on becoming a doctor. Like her father.

The story of B.C.'s Slocan Valley, told in forgotten images

2011-10-12T14:22:00.003-07:00

Doukhobor men pose at he communal brick factory on the banks of the Slocan River in 1914. The image appears in Rita Moir's fascinating new book, The Third Crop, published by Sono Nis Press. Photograph courtesy of the Doukhobor Discovery Centre.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
October 12, 2011

VICTORIA

The photographs were shoved inside shoeboxes, hidden away in archives, glued to family albums held together by string.

When Rita Moir searched for unpublished images to tell the story of British Columbia’s Slocan Valley, she set off scavenger hunts in private homes and public institutions.

The search uncovered many treasures, gathered in The Third Crop (Sono Nis Press), an elegantly-designed book rich in detail about a valley unlike any other in the province.

Here are unsmiling Doukhobor men at a riverbank brickyard, some looking as though they’ve just arrived from the Russian steppes.

Here are the proud women who have made 1,720 pounds of jam, a donation from their peaceful valley to war-ravaged Britain.

Here are Japanese-Canadians building their own uninsulated housing at an internment camp at Lemon Creek.

Here is a Mrs. Woyna holding kielbasas at the general store in Appledale, where a box of Crisco shortening costs 30 cents, while a tin of oily pilchards went for 16 cents.

Here is John Avis, that kidder, performing a precarious handstand atop the gabled roof of the new schoolhouse.

Here is the Clever Block at 115 6th Ave. in New Denver, an address shared for a time by a mortuary and a meat market.

Here are miners blasting rocks, children dancing around a maypole, hunters with cougar pelts worth a bounty of $20 each.

Here are three First Nations paddlers in a pine-bark canoe shaped like the giant sturgeons that haunt the local lake.

The Slocan Valley is the ancestral home of the Sinixt and Ktunaxa peoples and later a settling place for waves of immigrants, including those fleeing Czarist repression, or the limited future of working in a British mine.

The valley has long attracted exiles, whether by choice (the pacifist Doukhobors), or by force (interned Japanese-Canadians civilians). Later still, some came to escape an unpopular war in Asia, as well as the alienation of modern urban life.

Ms. Moir has lived in the valley for 36 years, making her “a relative new comer” in her words.

“I want to show how all the cultures here in their time have contributed to the ancestry of place, of who we are now,” she said.

“It may have been the Scandinavian men blasting the roads up through the bluffs from Slocan to Silverton and New Denver. It may have been the Japanese-Canadian people building their own internment camps. It may have been the women teaching in the schools and working in the orchards. It may have been the Doukhobor people contributing their agricultural knowledge. All of this contributed to who we are today.”

Slocan women with jam for wartime Britain.

The book takes its title from a third cutting of hay, a rare crop whose bounty allows livestock to thrive through long, hard winters. To dry the harvest, farmers placed limbed trees in portholes, hanging the green hay like tinsel on a Christmas tree. For the author, the third crop is a metaphor for “what happens when a group of people work hard enough and long enough, go that extra mile, and celebrate together, too.”

This is the fourth non-fiction book from Ms. Moir, who won the VanCity Book Prize and the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 2000 for Buffalo Jump: A Woman’s Travels.

She arrived in the valley at age 23 in 1975, taking a job as the live-in caretaker for the local community centre. First, though, she had to build a log cabin next door that would be her home.

Soon after, she got hired as a reporter at the Nelson Daily News. New owners from Eastern Canada were soon ordering editorials be published with which the local reporting staff took exception for factual inaccuracies. In time, Ms. Moir and another reporter, Jim Sinclair, now the president of the B.C. Federation of Labour, were forced from their jobs. Their antagonists were newspaper baron Conrad Black and right-hand man David Radler, both of whom wound up doing prison time, a downfall for which she has little sympathy.

Some years ago, Ms. Moir salvaged bricks from a torn-down chimney. She even carted some with her when she moved to another home in Vallican, using them to construct an outdoor fireplace. As it turns out, the century-old bricks are from the riverside Doukhobor brick factory featured in the photograph in the new book.

Four young women take a break while working on a family farm in 1946. An internment camp for Japanese-Canadians was established at Lemon Creek in the Slocan Valley. After the war, the residents were forbidden from returning to the coast.

Homage for the tree that says Vancouver Island

2011-10-12T13:29:00.000-07:00

A conservation worker checks out a Garry oak meadow overlooking the lighthouse at historic Fort Rodd Hill, outside Victoria. Chad Hipolito photograph for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
October 10, 2011

VICTORIA

O gnarly Garry oak, how majestic you stand.

In summer, you offer leafy shade beneath an umbrella canopy, your branches reaching out to offer protection from harsh sunshine.

Alas, the summer warmth is but a memory. The sun hangs lower in the sky. The oaks now prepare to go dormant. Every zephyr causes a cascade of debris. The oaks shed every leaf in a downpour that includes acorns and coarse woody debris. Some fallen branches are as thick as a man’s thigh.

It is advisable to wear a hardhat while raking the yard.

The detritus accumulates in a pile at curbside, a brown pyramid of dead leaves as crunchy as potato chips.

Halloween approaches and bared Garry oaks now look spooky with knobby limbs reaching out as though to grab the slowest of the trick-or-treaters.

Lone Garry oaks dot the local landscape — three are rooted in my yard — but one of the richest ecosystems in the land is also one of the most endangered. Other than two small stands in the Fraser Valley, the tree is found only on the southern Gulf Islands and on Vancouver Island.

Once common in these parts, Garry oak meadows now cover less than five per cent of their former territory.

Happily, a group of botanists, zoologists and vegetation ecologists are coming to the rescue. The Garry Oak Ecosystem Recovery Team, formed 12 years ago, has just released an online guide for preserving and restoring Garry oak meadows.

Conan Webb

One of the lead authors is Conan Webb, who chairs the team’s restoration and management recovery implementation group. By day, he works for Parks Canada as a species-at-risk recovery planner. (Those who are trying to preserve the Garry oak have titles as gothic as the trees.) Mr. Webb, 33, said the tree’s ecosystem is one of the most diverse to be found on the planet.

“It’s so different from the rest of the West Coast rainforest,” he noted.

Some 1,600 species of native plants and animals can be found in the Garry oak ecosystem. About 100 are threatened with extinction.

The meadows are under assault by encroaching land development, as well as by invasive species such as Scotch broom and English ivy. European starlings and eastern grey squirrels displace native birds and eat their eggs. Garry oaks were infested by winter moths in the 1980s, an invasion repulsed over time by the voracious appetites of predatory ground beetles. The moths were followed by the jumping gall wasp and the pesky, sap-sucking phylloxera.

Before the arrival of Europeans, oak meadows blanketed the islands, thriving in the protected rain shadow found behind the Olympic Mountains and the Vancouver Island Ranges. It is a pocket of Mediterranean-like weather.

The meadows are known for their brilliant wildflower displays in spring. The First Nations cultivated camas, whose bulbs are rich in carbohydrates. Early European settlers mistook distant fields of the brilliantly blue flower for lakes, a floral mirage. James Douglas, the first colonial governor, pronounced the land surrounding Victoria’s natural harbour to be “a perfect Eden.”

Much of what is now the city of Victoria was covered by Garry oak meadow. Today, one has to go to Beacon Hill Park, or the grounds of Government House to see a meadow in a natural state.

Elsewhere in the city, small patches of meadow are maintained, with volunteers supervising the well-being of the sites. Near my own house, two small city-owned plots of land, smaller than a residential lot, are home to Quercus garryana, a species named for Nicholas Garry, deputy-governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Fort Garry in Winnipeg is named after him, too, which is how far east you have to go in Western Canada to find another native species of oak.

Mr. Webb, who graduated from the University of Victoria with a biology degree, grew up in Port Hardy, outside the range of the ecosystem that now dominates his working life. As a boy, he played in the surrounding rainforest, building forts and playing hide and seek.

In Victoria, he reminds himself to make an effort to introduce his young son to natural wonders.

“In the city,” he said, “it’s so easy to get disconnected from nature.”

We live amid natural wonders, from the arbutus, whose bark peels like the aftermath of a bad sunburn, to the towering Douglas fir. No tree says Vancouver Island, or the Gulf Islands, quite like the Garry oak, for which we can all give thanks, even as we spend the holiday rake in hand.

Memorial trees
In 1917, as war raged overseas, 14 silver maple saplings were planted on the grounds of Victoria High School to commemorate the fallen. The school lost three teachers and 83 students in the Great War, later to be known as the First World War.

Those 94-year-old trees stood as silent sentinels along the Vining Street entrance until earlier this year when, to the dismay of many, they were cut down because of rot.

On Nov 10, the day before Remembrance Day, a row of 10 red maples will be planted in a ceremony at which the 5th Field Regiment Band will perform, as it did back in 1917.

Victoria needs more Portland

2011-10-12T09:21:00.000-07:00

Corey Judd of Cabin 12 restaurant in downtown Victoria checks out a delivery of a gross of eggs.

By Tom Hawthorn
Boulevard Magazine
October, 2011

Pilgrims return with word of paradise on earth, a place where junk shops hold treasures; where brew pubs outnumber churches; where food carts offer a United Nations smorgasbord of delectable delights; where restaurants serve only the freshest of locally-grown foods; where java joints dot every corner with steaming cups of fair-trade organic coffee; where record stores actually sell vinyl, and where a roster of used-book stores includes a sprawling emporium covering an entire downtown block.

I speak, of course, of the fragrant City of Roses. Portland! O shining exemplar of all things urban and trendy and good, you are my hipster heaven.

My own foray to the Wonder on the Willamette included a stay at the Ace Hotel, where rooms come equipped with record players and a photo booth can be found in the lobby. (In its previous incarnation as the Clyde Hotel, a dive, the hotel served as the setting for the harrowing movie Drugstore Cowboy.) The groaning shelves of Powell’s City of Books lured me one block north for several hours of scanning dust-jacket spines. Elsewhere in the city, the local McMenamins chain of brew pubs offers inexpensive fare and good beers in odd venues, such as a converted funeral parlor. Over in the Hawthorne district, a cornucopia of mom-and-pop shops offers trendy, funky and bohemian choices.

So hip that it aches, the scene has been parodied as Portlandia, a sketch comedy show. (Check out the clips on YouTube. Hilarious.) On the show, Portland “is the city where young people go to retire.”

We’ve got our own Portland North going on in Victoria. We need more of it.

Young entrepreneurs have turned commercial spaces into communal gathering places. For instance, the interior of the restaurant called Cabin 12 seems as homey as grandma’s living room, filled as it is with pocket books, long-playing records and board games. The restaurateur Corey Judd raised funds through appeals on social media. He was so broke he lived for a time in a room at the back. Judd hired employees of similarly struggling backgrounds, seeing in them an echo of his own resourceful self. The presence of Cabin 12 improved the neighbourhood, but the building in which they are located has been sold and will be redeveloped. Cabin 12 has to find a new home.

Other restaurants that contribute to the city’s vibe first had to deal with a slow-moving municipal bureaucracy. Located in a repurposed shipping crate on the Inner Harbour, the terrific Red Fish, Blue Fish offers sustainable seafood fare. The lines now stretch the full length of the wharf. It took ages for the owners to get permission for what has been a worthwhile contribution to the waterfront.

A decade ago, intrepid travelers Jodi Mann and Nick Crooks decided to bring the street foods of Southeast Asia to hungry pedestrians in Victoria. They stir-fried noodles from a converted hotdog cart in a Chinatown parking lot. But the city’s red tape and an unhelpful health department led the couple to abandon the outdoors. Today, the Noodle Box has five indoor outlets in the city, as well as two more in Vancouver.

Instead of throwing up roadblocks, the city should be encouraging the use of food carts, an inexpensive way for budding entrepreneurs to get started. Carts bring foot traffic and activity to the street.

A city’s vibe depends on the residents, not just commercial ventures. In my Gonzales neighbourhood, an annual block party on Maddison Street brings a temporary halt to busy lives as locals meet and share favourite foods. Children find new play pals, while older neighbours living on their own become a little less isolated.

A smaller backyard party is held every summer on the nearby 1000-block Clare Street. The Clare folks have placed arty, hand-painted signs at either end of the block, warning drivers of the presence of children and pets. One of them even built a box in front of her house from which passersby can borrow, or donate, books.

Over in Fernwood, one woman’s initiative has led to the painting of hundreds of telephone poles (many defaced by ugly tags and graffiti) with bright designs. The neighbourhood is also a place of mom-and-pop operations, such as the Fernwood Coffee Company, an artisan roaster. The Fernwood people have the right idea in creating a hip, funky, engaged neighbourhood, an eccentric outpost in a world of global brand names. The place is so groovy I think of it as Little Portland.

Portland's hipster ache drives Portlandia, a wickedly funny portrayal of the worst of the best: "In Portland, you can put a bird on something and call it art."

Officers got their man long before the Mounties arrived

2011-10-07T10:21:00.000-07:00

A member of the B.C. Provincial Police takes aim with a tommy gun. The force, older than the RCMP, policed the colony and then the province from 1858 until 1950. BC Archives B-06995.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
October 6, 2011

VICTORIA

Eric Hallam is one of the last surviving members of the force that policed this province for nearly a century.

The remaining veterans of the British Columbia Provincial Police muster on the second Tuesday of every month for lunch at a Greek restaurant in Langley.

“The widows come now, too, because there are so few of us,” Mr. Hallam said. “Many aren’t that mobile anymore.”

Once, the police force patrolled mountain highways in radio-operated squad cars. It even boasted a navy of vessels to scout smuggler’s coves.

The BCPP was disbanded in 1950 when the RCMP took over policing in the province. Ever since, voices are raised every few years to suggest the Mounties be replaced by a revived provincial police force. When federal Public Safety Minister Vic Toews recently said B.C. had until November to accept a new 20-year deal or face withdrawal of RCMP services by 2014, Premier Christy Clark countered with the possibility of striking a new provincial police force.

Eric Hallam at home in Chilliwack

Mr. Hallam is one who does not think the RCMP will be leaving anytime soon.

“It’ll be too expensive,” he said. “Besides, you’d only be changing the uniform of the members who are here now. Where are we going to find 6,000 men to police this province? And where are the Mounties going to put 6,000 if they have to take them out of here?”

A constabulary was formed at Fort Langley with the founding of the colony of British Columbia in 1858. The authorities were eager to police a flood of pistol-packing gold prospectors from California.

Over the years, the provincial police did battle with naked Doukhobors and chased rumrunners through coastal waters. Forbes Cruickshank, an inspector with the BCPP, became famous for solving the mystery of the Beryl G, a vessel found abandoned with her decks specked by bloodstains. The owner and his son were missing. Having a hat and a camera as clues, the inspector tracked down Harry Sowash and Owen (Cannonball) Baker, who were hanged for murder.

It could be dangerous work. John Ussher, a constable, was shot to death in 1879 while persuing the notorious McLean brothers, outlaw horse thieves.

Seven years ago, Mr. Hallam, the longtime president of the BCPP veterans’ association, came to Victoria for the official unveiling of The Bastion, a monument on the grounds of the Legislature honouring police killed on duty. Among those named are 14 members of the BCPP.

Few in attendance knew Mr. Hallam came within a knife tip of being No. 15.

Born in Armstrong, he moved with his family to the Fraser Valley, where his parents ran a dairy farm. He did not care for milking cows with their manure-encrusted tails, so ran away from home on his 17th birthday to enlist with the Royal Canadian Navy as a boy seaman.

He served on North Atlantic convoys and fished the bodies of Allied soldiers from the English Channel following D-Day. After the war, he returned to Canada, joining the provincial police at age 21. He was posted to Prince Rupert, Ocean Falls and Bella Bella, and sent to the Kootenays at a time when the Sons of Freedom sect of Doukhobors were burning buildings in protest.

“I remember sitting up at nights in schools to prevent them from getting blown up,” he said.

In 1950, just a few weeks before the provincials were to be disbanded, he was ordered to join two other constables and a doctor in taking into custody Stanley Thacker, a 32-year-old man suffering from schizophrenia.

As they arrived at his house, Mr. Thacker jumped into a car and fled. The policed boxed in his car on a side road. As they tried to arrest him, the man lunged at the officers wielding what Mr. Hallam remembers as “a homemade six-inch knife made from a No. 10 bastard file.”

“I got five holes in me that night,” he said.

The constable got stabbed in the back and the left arm, the shiv puncturing a lung and the outer edge of his heart. One headline in an American newspaper the next day read: Police constable fighting for life.

“I should have died,” he said.

He survived, as did Mr. Thacker, who recovered after being shot in the abdomen by the officer.

When the 520-man provincial force was disbanded 10 weeks later, Mr. Hallam was one of the few not to join the RCMP, as the force wanted him to sign a waiver clearing them of future responsibility for lung or heart troubles. Instead, he joined the city police force in New Westminster, retiring as acting chief constable of the West Vancouver police.

After taking over policing in the province, the RCMP took a stash a weapons — including 49 revolvers, 15 automatics and four Great War-era machine-guns — and dumped them at sea. The Mounties also destroyed a quantity of B.C. Provincial Police badges and other insignia.

“It was a good organization,” he said. “I don’t think there was anything wrong with it at all.”

It has fallen to Mr. Hallam, 85, of Chilliwack, and his diminishing band of veterans to keep alive the memory of a force that policed the province for 92 years, from the gold-rush days to when a young constable nearly lost his life to a knfe-wielding man.

The mean streets claim 'our little waif'

2011-10-03T12:18:00.000-07:00

Ariana Simpson was killed instantly when struck by a bus after being pushed. The man who pushed her was convicted of manslaughter on Friday.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
October 3, 2011

VICTORIA

A young man pushed and a young woman fell. In that moment, one life ended and another became forever stained.

Shortly before midnight on a February night, a downtown Victoria street was the scene of a noisy confrontation. That in itself was not unusual. The intersection of Quadra Street and Pandora Avenue, a hangout for street people, all too often resembles a horror from Dante’s Inferno.

The corner’s reputation had lured two men, one of whom sought to buy cocaine. They had been drinking. One was belligerent. Earlier in the night, he had kicked the exterior of a taxi cab after having been told to leave a bar.

At the corner, the attempt to buy drugs turned into chaos. The drunken would-be drug buyer removed his shirt to do battle. His friend urged him to abandon the corner with its “junkies” and “crackheads.”

This advice did not go over well.

In the ensuing exchange, a slight, 20-year-old woman — “our little waif,” in her mother’s words — was pushed into the street, where she was crushed beneath the rear wheels of a passing city bus.

On Friday, after two days of deliberation, a jury convicted Christopher Michael Groves, 23, of manslaughter. He had been the one who trailed his belligerent buddy to the corner. A hearing to set a date for sentencing is scheduled for Wednesday.

After the sentence was delivered, some news reports relied on standard journalistic shorthand to describe the victim.

Crack addict. Homeless woman.

That is how the perpetrator saw the situation that terrible night in 2009.

He fled the scene, retreating from angry witnesses who beat him, seeking refuge at the police station four blocks to the north. The officer who arrested him testified that he said, “OK, I didn’t do anything though. I’m a good kid. ... Some (expletive) crackhead tried to attack my friend, some (expletive) junkie.”

One of the sadder accounts can be found in a Times Colonist story from the trial about the testimony of a witness who was aboard the bus that ran over the woman. According to the newspaper, the witness called 911 with the following report: “A junkie ran under the bus and it wasn’t the bus’s fault.”

It should be noted that the street scene on Pandora is fueled by middle-class drug users. Buy the product, denounce the vendor.

The unspoken verdict about crimes committed against street people is that they had it coming.

Ariana May Simpson was born on July 22, 1988. (The date seems so recent, yet Michael Dukakis had just been nominated by the Democrats, sprinter Ben Johnson was Canada’s Olympic hopeful, and Nelson Mandela still languished in a South African prison.) She was a third daughter for her family. Ariana attended elementary and high school in Esquimalt. She began hanging out on the street in her mid-teens.

In 1999, a trusted family friend was sentenced to a year in prison for sexual interference involving Ariana and others.

After her daughter’s death, Cindy Simpson, Ariana’s mother, wrote on Facebook about her “boiling anger for the man that hurt Ariana as a little girl — for years — without our knowledge.” It was him she wanted to see on trial for her death, for causing the pain that led her to the streets and a terrible fate.

At the corner where she died, her friends created a makeshift shrine in a planter bed. It held flowers and stuffed animals. A photograph of the smiling woman was stapled to a piece of cardboard. John Lennon lyrics were placed nearby, similarly protected from the elements by a plastic covering. Those who knew Harley, as she was known on the street and at the Our Place drop-in, were invited to write their condolences on an ordinary piece of cardboard torn from a box.

“I will always love you, my baby sister,” one of her sisters wrote.

The shrine is long gone, but in an eerie echo of our cyber age it can still be seen on Google Street View.

An artist painted her portrait on the wall of a bakery at the corner. It looked like one of those murals in tribute to a northern Irish martyr, only in this case the martial imagery is absent, replaced by butterflies, dogs and an eagle. The legend read, “Forever loved.” The portrait is now gone, too.

In memory, she will remain frozen at age 20, never to grow old. She was a young woman dealt a poor hand who wound up beneath a yellow tarp on a cold street, a victim yet again.

Hail to Vancouver taxi firm on its 100th birthday

2011-09-29T09:57:00.000-07:00

This photograph depicts Dan MacLure in his car for hire touring a couple around Stanley Park in 1911. MacLure started a namesake cab company still in business today.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 29, 2011

A tattered photograph, long ago bent in half and the upper corner torn away, depicts a cab driver in cap and uniform at the wheel of an open vehicle. In the rear sit two passengers in their Sunday best.

The hand-written caption reads, “Seeing Stanley Park in 1911.”

The driver is Donald Campbell MacLure, known as Dan, who would go on to own a service station, a motor-boat service, and a fledgling airline. His lasting contribution to Vancouver’s history is his name, which to this day appears in Coca-Cola script as part of the familiar blue-and-white livery of MacLure’s Cabs.

The oldest taxi company in the Lower Mainland will celebrate its 100th birthday next week with a private party at which a 1911 Cadillac is to be displayed alongside a Toyota Prius. The music will be provided by the Dal Richard Orchestra, which is appropriate since the one-man taxi company was barely six years old when the band leader was born.

Reporters have a soft spot for hacks, who, after all, know the location of every speakeasy and bootlegger in town. Cab drivers are also always good for a quote, sometimes even speaking the words which are attributed to them.

Taxis are useful, but they’re a service that seems to generate lots of complaints.
Unclean. Unsafe. Cheaters. And that’s just the passengers.

We’ve all had rides with drivers who seem as moody and paranoid as Travis Bickle.

The local taxi industry has a checkered history.

While trying to break a printers’ strike in 1946, management at the Daily Province hired Diamond Cabs to distribute a paper produced by non-union labour. In later years, taxi drivers were fired for trying to form a union.

At the airport, the battle over lucrative fares threatened to spill into violence among drivers from rival companies. Passengers complained of being refused entry if their destination was too nearby.

In 1975, the first plastic shield, imported from New York and strong enough to stop a .38-calibre bullet, was installed in a Yellow Cab to protect the driver from his passengers.

In the city’s post-war years, cabbies took part in plenty of stunts. Radio disc jockey Jack Cullen broadcast one of his famous Owl Prowl shows from a Black Top cabbed parked at a drive-in restaurant. Yellow Cabs held a Most Handsome Driver contest in 1950. The winner, Bud Veale, was a dead ringer for Hollywood movie star Van Johnson.

In those days, drivers had a reputation of doing anything for a passenger. In 1954, Dave King of B.C. Radio Cabs was driving a young woman to West Vancouver. When slowed by traffic on the Lions Gate Bridge, she jumped out. To the driver’s horror, she began climbing the railing. He raced over, hauling her to safety before escorting her into his car. Then they returned to her West End address. The would-be suicide paid her fare, he later told police, even tipping him 50 cents.

While Dan MacLure was an early cabbie, he was not the city’s first, an honour that possibly belongs to William Hayward. The hotel proprietor owned a White Steamer, manufactured in Cleveland at a sewing-machine factory. In 1904, the car could be hired for jaunts around the city by dialing 284 — the city had fewer than 1,000 telephones.

The other contender for the title of the city’s first cabbie is Charles Henry Hooper, an adventurer who raced cars against the famous Barney Oldfield, rustled cattle in the Cariboo and mined for gold in the Klondike. Handsome Harry, as he was known, drove a wheezy, two-cylinder Ford Model A. For a time, he earned his living as a professional cyclist, touring Canada with a dog called Dirty Face.

As part of its centenary celebration, MacLure’s will be adding the phrase “Serving Vancouver since 1911” to its fleet of 65 vehicles. The company changed hands several times after the 1953 death of the founder and is currently known as MacLure’s Cabs (1984) Ltd., a 27-year-old company marking a centenary.

So, happy 100 years to the Vancouver taxi industry.

I know it only seems I’ve been waiting that long for my car.

Dan MacLure's name still appears on a Vancouver cab company a century after he began as a driver for hire.

Hey, Mac

Only four Vancouver companies remain in a business that once counted dozens of rival firms. MacLure’s claims to be the oldest, followed by Yellow, which started in 1921. Black Top and Checker Cabs was started by eight veterans returning from the Second World War. Vancouver Taxi launched in the 1980s to provide service to handicapped customers only.

In 1910, the first motor taxi company appears in the Vancouver city directory. Columbia Taxicab was owned by E.H. Heaps, a businessman who also had timber interests.

By the boom years of the late 1920s, the city had dozens of rival taxi companies, names that have mostly disappeared from the public memory. There was ABC Taxi and BB Taxi; Fifty Cent Taxi and Fred’s Dollar Taxi; Frisco and Hollywood; Owl and Sun; Canadian and Dominion; Commercial and Webster’s Peerless; Devonshire and Kerrisdale; Mikado and Nabata; Queens and Empress and Royal City; Ready and Roamer; De Luxe and Gold Band.

Charles Henry Hooper, known as Handsome Harry, is believed to have been Vancouver's first taxi driver. He prospected for gold in the Klondike and operated a placer mine in the Cariboo.

A 1910 advertisement for Columbia Taxicab, the first to advertise in the city directory.

Victoria searches for successor to the 'people's poet'

2011-09-26T11:36:00.000-07:00

The prolific Linda Rogers is concluding a three-year term as Victoria's poet laureate.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 26, 2011

VICTORIA

The patrician figure in tasteful black rose from a pew in the nave, bowing in the direction of the altar before taking her place at the lectern.

Without introduction, she began to read, picking up where a predecessor had left off. Linda Rogers spoke the familiar words of Chapter 5 of the gospel according to Matthew, the Sermon from the Mount. Blessed are the meek, etc.

Verily, I say unto you the reading exhibited her extensive experience in the elocutionary arts.

The audience in the cavernous and magnificent Christ Church Cathedral numbered just 11. She was reading during the dinner hour on Friday, the penultimate day of the cathedral’s week-long King James Biblethon. It was surely one of the smallest audiences the poet laureate of Victoria has faced in her tenure.

Ms. Rogers is nearing the end of a three-year term as a literary ambassador and “people’s poet.” The city is now canvassing for nominations for a successor. Applicants must be residents of greater Victoria, have published at least two volumes (self publishing does not count) and must have written work “that demonstrates poetry richness and flexibility (be more than one style).”

OK, first job for the next poet laureate — rewrite the eligibility criteria.

The winning candidate has to write at least three original works for each year of the term. In exchange, the laureate gets a $2,500 honorarium, guaranteed invites to swanky galas, and the future possibility of resting on one’s laurels.

The prolific Ms. Rogers has produced 27 poems for the city. She has visited classrooms, hospitals and seniors’ homes to encourage the creation of free verse and rhyming couplets, sonnets and haikus.

“More people who didn’t regard themselves as poets are now engaged,” she said.

Linda Rogers

A book of poems by schoolchildren celebrating the pending marriage of Prince William to Kate Middleton was sent to the royal couple before their wedding ceremony.
In April, local poets wrote poems about downtown businesses, which then showcased the works in window displays.

Ms. Rogers also continued a popular program called Love, Poetry and Chocolate during which the public is invited to contribute and read aloud romantic poetry. The event, held near Valentine’s Day, was launched by her predecessor, Carla Funk, who became Victoria’s inaugural poet laureate five years ago.

The city sponsors one of 18 poet laureate positions that exist in Canada, the most prestigious of which is the parliamentary poet laureate. Victoria is one of only three cities in British Columbia with an official poet laureate. New Westminster named its first in 1998 with Vancouver following suit four years ago.

Ms. Rogers, who says her antecedents include an abundance of lawyers, theologians and writers, including the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, is a ubiquitous presence on the local writing scene.

Alas, she has found the wedding of the spontaneous spirit of the poet with the demands of civic officials to not always be harmonious. She has found it difficult to accept some of the diktats issued by those who supervise the laureate. She said she was asked to read over any works to be read aloud by other writers at public events. What to City Hall seemed like a prudent vetting to the poet sounded like censorship.

She had hoped a legacy gift to conclude her term would be an anthology featuring the work of 30 local poets and visual artists, a volume the city could use as a protocol gift for visiting dignitaries. At the moment, the project has no publisher, though she vows to see it in print.

“I’ve failed Bureaucracy 101,” she said. “First course I’ve ever failed.”

Back at the cathedral, Ms. Rogers concluded her chapters by stating, “End of the reading.”

She stepped down from the lectern, retrieveing a purse left unattended in the pew before heading for the door, where I caught up with her to ask what she took from the reading.

“I’ve been having trouble with bureaucrats,” she said.

She contemplated the reading she had just completed.

“Judge not lest ye be judged,” she recited.

Good advice whether from Matthew or anyone else.

Glass Half Full

Linda Rogers completes a three-year term as Victoria’s poet laureate at the end of November. Her most recent poem for the city is described as a caption for Tyler Hodgin’s playful Glass Half Full sculpture along the Dallas Road waterfront.

This poem, which shares its title with the sculpture, is displayed on a round plaque set in the ground, the words rotating clockwise in a spiral like water going down a drain. The poet has a whimsical idea for the city — perhaps manhole covers could be replaced by similar poetic plaques.

The circle keeps turning. This
is where spinning children find out
we are one drop of water in
sky becoming ocean, or earth,
what ever catches the I, eye, first
as we go round in the half-full
glass that never empties or fills,
in the song that never ends.

Olympian who overcame the odds now seeks a final turn with the torch

2011-09-22T12:02:00.000-07:00

Shirley Gordon (later Olafsson) developed an unorthodox style of a scissor leg-kick to compete in the high jump. Born with a defect to her left foot, she needed to take off and land on her right. She represented Canada at the 1948 Olympics in London.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 22, 2011

To appreciate Shirley Gordon Olafsson’s athletic career, you need to know this statistic — her right shoe is size 9½, her left 5½.

She was born with a deformed foot, enduring a series of operations and corrections through her childhood. She spent spent long, lonely weeks at the Crippled Children’s Hospital on Hudson Street in south Vancouver, which opened its doors a year after her birth in 1927.

A clunky boot with metal braces drew attention to a shy, self-conscious child.

Despite the many surgeries and treatments, the foot remained withered, the ankle locked in place, the calf muscle weak.

Though she walked with a pronounced limp, the girl determined to play sports. It looked like fun.

Shirley Gordon Olaffson. (Photo by Rafal Gerszak.)

She got selected last for pickup teams. During basketball games, she sat on the end of the bench waiting for a call that never came. A cruel field hockey coach told her she’d be more useful as a goalpost than as a player.

Mrs. Olafsson, now 84, remembers the rejection as though it happened yesterday.

“Nobody wanted me anywhere,” she said.

If teams would not find a roster spot for her, then she would find an individual sport.

Sprinting was out, as was distance running. She tried the high jump. At first, she was terrible. But she saw some potential in herself and began training on her own after school, dragging out the equipment and digging a landing pit of loose sand to ease her fall on the other side of the bar.

Later, a neighbour built a bar and pit unfortunately located on a downhill slope, making the landings somewhat perilous.

In those days, the style of jumping was known as a scissors kick, as the jumper ran to the bar before swinging one leg over to be followed by the other. Her routine was complicated by the need to take off and land on the same foot, an unorthodox style.

“I kind of hopped over the bar on one foot,” she said.

When a sprinter friend was invited to join a prestigious track club sponsored by the Hudson’s Bay Company, the youth agreed to join if she was allowed to bring along Shirley. Soon, the pair were training under experienced coaches at Brockton Oval at Stanley Park.

“I figured if I worked harder than anybody else, maybe I could do it,” she said.

She won her first ribbon in the inter-city high school championships at Hastings Park in 1943. A few years later, she finished second at the Canadian championships, earning a coveted berth on the Canadian team for the 1948 Summer Olympics to be held in London.

Headlines told the story: “Crippled girl becomes B.C. Olympic star” and “Transformation of cripple into star athlete.” Maxwell Stiles, a well-known Los Angeles newspaper columnist, described her as “a gallant girl.”

The first post-war Olympics were a Spartan affair. The Canadian team crossed the Atlantic in steerage, bringing with them their own supplies for a Games to be held in a capital still rationing food. (At the games, the high jumper discovered a cache of American bread, helping herself to a modest amount.)

The high jump was held before 60,000 spectators at Wembley Stadium. She cleared 4-foot-11 (1.5 metres), finishing tied for 11th, watching from the sidelines as Alice Coachman, of Albany, Ga., battled British housewife Dorothy (née Odam) Tyler. The American won, becoming the first black woman to claim an Olympic gold medal. Tyler is the only woman to win an Olympic medal before and after the Second World War.

Two years later, the Vancouver jumper tied for fifth at the British Empire Games in Auckland, New Zealand. On her return, she continued to play basketball and to coach her two favourite sports. She married Herbert Olafsson, a basketball star from Winnipeg who represented Canada at the world championships in Brazil in 1954 and Pan Am Games in Chicago in 1959.

Mrs. Olafsson’s feat was an early example of a British Columbian overcoming adversity to succeed in sport.

Doug Hepburn, born cross-eyed and with a club foot, took up weightlifting as a response to schoolyard taunts, in time claiming the title of World’s Strongest Man; Doug Mowat convinced his employer to sponsor the Vancouver Dueck Powerglides, the province’s first wheelchair basketball team; Rick Hansen circled the globe in his wheelchair; one-legged Terry Fox inspired a nation by trying to run across its vast expanse. Thousands took to the streets last weekend to raise money for cancer research in his name.

They all showed the same determination as Mrs. Olafsson, a widow who exercises daily and still curls once a week. She walks with a limp to this day.

Three years ago, she was one of 10 Canadians invited to run in China as part of the Paralympic torch relay. She also took part in a torch relay near her Richmond home before last year’s Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Now, she wants to run a segment of the torch relay when the Olympics return to London next year.

She is waiting to hear from organizers. They should know that she is not one to calmly accept rejection.

Shirley Gordon Olafsson was inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame in 2004. She was also a player with the national champion Vancouver Hedlunds basketball team of 1944-45, which was inducted into the hall in 1989.

A blast from the past with the Malahat Marauders

2011-09-19T12:34:00.000-07:00

Dressed in period regalia, Perry Chow fires a blank from a replica of a muzzle-loading hunting rifle at the Luxton Fall Fair. Chad Hipolito photograph for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 19, 2011

VICTORIA

A raccoon tail dangled from Perry Chow’s waist, where he also carried a powder horn. He held a hunting rifle in his right hand.

He placed the butt of the rifle into the dirt outside the Pioneer Building on the Luxton fairgrounds. He jiggled a pinch of black gunpowder into the barrel, having first carefully measured the amount. He joked that carelessness would turn the powder horn at his hip into a hand grenade.

Mr. Chow, 55, a steel fabricator, devotes much of his spare time to the local Black Powder Society, a group whose members turn the pages of history back at least a century.

They call themselves the Malahat Marauders, a shooting group whose members wear period costumes — or, as some prefer, regalia — to depict the hunters and trappers who once traversed the continent. After all, Fort Victoria was originally built as a trading depot for the Hudson’s Bay Company.

A half-dozen members could be found on Sunday at the Luxton Fall Fair, an agricultural exhibition held outside the capital. The fair features quilts and rafts, blacksmiths and working antique farm equipment, as well as demonstrations of the best hand-milking techniques for jersey cows. Blue ribbons are awarded the best in baking and canning.

Billed as a celebration of pioneer life, the fair’s most popular attractions include such modern entertainments as greasy food, midway rides and the Tough Truck Challenge.

The Marauders know their passion tables filled with the detritus of a lost age hold a limited attraction to others.

They had on display a selection of clothing (including a tricorn hat), furs (deer, mink, red fox, silver fox, beaver, weasel, coyote, timber wolf, mountain goat, even skunk), and gadgets, including compasses canteens and candle-makers.

An impressive arsenal of period pieces, reproductions and hand-tooled firearms garnered some attention. There were rifles, pistols and revolvers.

Doug Linton, 65, worked on making his own fucil de chasse, a hunting gun popular with fur traders. The parts cost about $1,000 and he figures he will have spent hundreds of hours on the gun before it is completed.

He is devoted to knowing more about the life of fur traders, even going so far as cooking a batch of pemmican. (How did it taste? “Like greasy granola,” he said. “With meat.”) With fellow society member Jean Chandler, he recently completed a retracing of the explorer David Thompson’s route along the Columbia River.

On Sunday, he wore cowhide breeches of his own design, including a drop flap in front should he need to answer nature’s call. He wore a military Tam o’ Shanter on his head and boasted a white Hemingway beard on his jaw.

Mr. Linton spent four decades as a bark beetle entomologist with the federal government. As a black-powder enthusiast, his quarry is significantly larger. He goes bear hunting armed with a single-shot cartridge rifle and five rounds on his belt.

“It puts a bit more adrenalin into it when you’ve got one shot,” he said. “You don’t piss around.”

He once was stalking a black bear near Gold River when he was surprised by a rustle in the grass nearby. “They’re like gophers up there,” he said. He had startled a second bear.

“I just said, ‘You’ll do. Popped him.’ ”

Mr. Chow said the uninitiated are not intimidated by the firepower of guns that take so much time to load.

“You’re not in the Rambo mentality like you might get with a more modern weapon,” he said, a grey rabbit-fur cap on his head and a gorget dangling from his neck. “You’re slowing down your pace. It’s not done fast.

“It brings you back to an easier style of life.”

Simpler, perhaps, but not easier. One of the frontier skills he exhibited was the making of a fire with straw, hemp, flint and steel. Even on a dry day with little wind it took a few minutes.

Finally, it was time for a shooting demonstration. After loading gunpowder, he placed a blank in the muzzle, using a short starter to push it partway down before inserting a ramrod.

He then aimed, squeezing the trigger.

A sharp retort echoed through the fairgrounds.

Hardly a head turned.

Hey, it’s Luxton, not Oak Bay. In the countryside, a fellow sometimes has just got to fire off his rifle.

Doug Linton, a 25-year member of the Malahat Marauders, works on a home-built rifle. Linton, a retired entomologist, now stalks larger quarry. He hunts black bears while armed with a single-shot black-powder rifle. Chad Hipolito photograph for the Globe and Mail.

Children's book too hot for U.S. publishers warmly received in Canada

2011-09-16T16:39:00.000-07:00

Daniel Loxton, an illustrator and author, has a deadline reminder in his home office. Chad Hipolito photograph for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 14, 2011

VICTORIA

Daniel Loxton, an illustrator and writer, created a children’s book so outrageous, so outlandish, so controversial no American publisher dared touch it.

It does not depict nudity. It does not contain curse words. It does not include blasphemy. The love scenes, such as they are, involve males with females.

It does include a straightforward explanation for the complexity of the natural world through a simple scientific theory.

“So many of the publishing professionals I was talking to were leery,” he said.

“When push came to shove they declined to publish the book. Several did indicate to me it was too hot a topic.”

The book wound up being published by Canadian-owned Kids Can Press, which also expected objections from creationists.

So far, the book, Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be, an illustrated primer written for readers in Grades 3 to 7, has generated more prize nominations than controversy.

Evolution is one of three young-reader finalists in the Lane Anderson Award for Canadian science books. The other finalists for the $10,000 prize, to be awarded Wednesday, are Ultimate Trains by Peter McMahon of Ontario and The Sea Wolves by the British Columbia team of Ian McAllister, a photographer, and Nicholas Read, a writer.

Mr. Loxton’s book is also a finalist in the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian children’s non-fiction. Earlier this year, Evolution was a finalist for the prestigious Silver Birch award.

His latest book, just published, is Ankylosaur Attack about a young, plant-eating, heavy-plated dinosaur.

Mr. Loxton, 36, is editor of Junior Skeptic, a youth supplement included in each issue of Skeptic, a California-based magazine that “examines extraordinary claims.”

He lived an itinerant life in an Airstream trailer as a boy. His parents were contractors who hired planters at clear cuts throughout British Columbia. As for his upbringing, he describes it as being a mix of Utopian and feral.

His parents believed in much paranormal phenomenon. As a boy, he was convinced he had stumbled across a Sasquatch footprint deep in the woods.

He discovered skeptical inquiry as a university student, finding science had explanations for such folkloric beliefs as UFOs and ESP, alien abductions and succubus attacks, human combustion and the predictions of Nostradamus.

Now he has a career solving paranormal mysteries. As Harry Houdini once did. Or Scooby-doo.

Even when displaying a sense of humour, hokum-busting skeptics convey a certain killjoy quality. After all, who does not want to believe in a hairy, harmless, beer-guzzling Bigfoot?

“I want to teach people stuff,” he said. “I don’t want to cram anything down anybody’s throat.”

So, how does a “professional skeptic” handle the topic of the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus with his five-year-old son?

(Spoiler alert: The truth behind fictitious childhood characters revealed below.)

So far, the lad has not asked about a chocolate-sharing rabbit, or a wand-waving dentine thief. As for the gift-toting jolly man whose belly shakes like a bowlful of jelly, the parents are taking a soft position.

“We’re not debunking it,” he said. “I’m a sentimental kind of a guy.”

Which is to say the Loxton household is experiencing the three stages of Santa theorem: You believe in Santa. You don’t believe in Santa. You are Santa.

An illustration from Ankylosaur Attack by Daniel Loxton and Jim W.W. Smith.

Anarchist archive

The University of Victoria library has received seven boxes of papers from Ann Hansen, who was sentenced to a life term for conspiring to rob an armoured car and for a series of bombings in Ontario and British Columbia in the early 1980s. The material, which includes pamphlets and prison correspondence, will be included in the Anarchist Archive founded by art historian Allan Antliff, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Modern Art.

Mr. Antliff approached Ms. Hansen for the donation, for which she will receive no payment. Much of the material will be posted online alongside other anti-authoritarian materials in what is the only archive of its kind in Canada.

The most interesting contribution is a transcript of conversations recorded from a police bug police placed in her bedroom before her arrest. Alas, a 70-year privacy restriction has been placed on the transcript, which will not be accessible to the public until 2081.

Ms. Hansen, 58, spent seven years in jail. She got permission from her parole officer to travel to the campus last week from her home on a farm west of Kingston, Ont., where she remains active in the prison abolition movement.

Official loudmouth

George Bowering, who was Canada’s first parliamentary poet laureate, is a baseball aficionado. He has been issued business cards by the Vancouver Canadians baseball club on which he is identified as the Official Loudmouth Fan. (Anyone who has heard his Foghorn Leghorn declamations from his perch behind home plate would not need a card to confirm his role.) Mr. Bowering’s team won the league championship on the weekend, sending dozens of rooters into paroxysms of non-riotous celebration.

The prolific author took a break from his own merrymaking to write a letter decrying the award of an Order of B.C. to former premier Gordon Campbell. Mr. Bowering was himself invested in the order seven years ago.

Perhaps honours for professional politicians should mirror those of professional athletes, who typically must wait five years before induction into a sports hall of fame. The passage of time allows for a more sober-minded accounting long after passions have cooled.

Bubble Man blows a trail of lustrous wonders

2011-09-12T13:18:00.000-07:00

Four-year-old Frankie Latimer reaches for that most elusive of prizes, the soapy bubble. Behind her is neighbourhood legend Terry Wilson, 65, the Bubble Man of Fernwood. Globe and Mail photograph by Chad Hipolito.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 12, 2011

VICTORIA

Like a swordsman preparing for battle, Terry Wilson unsheathed a slender plastic rod from a long narrow tube.

He strolled across the street, deliberation in every step.

As he did so, he held out his instrument.

What he held in his hands is for play, not war.

Behind him trailed gossamer clouds.

Mr. Wilson, 65, is known as the Bubble Man. On 363 days of the year, excepting only Christmas and New Year’s, he can be found on or near Fernwood Square in Victoria, where he delights passersby by blowing, manufacturing and otherwise interacting with soapy bubbles.

“Little kids chase them. Middle-aged sophisticated people coming out of the wine bar in their finest clothes jump up to pop them,” he said.

“That little kid inside each of us comes out so easily with bubbles.”

To spend an hour with the Bubble Man on a sunny day is to erase a week’s worth of routine and clock-watching deadlines. Children run up to him to play. Drivers slow as they pass, shouting, “Hey, Bubble Man!”

A caution sign at the corner depicts nine black bubbles of various size on a yellow background. Caution, bubble crossing.

For almost a decade now, the Bubble Man has been doing his thing in Fernwood, a neighbourhood that reminds you of what Haight-Ashbury must have been like before it became Haight-Ashbury.

At the Cornerstone Cafe, where he is a regular, the Bubble Man ordered his favorite cup of joe, known here as a Terrycano (rhymes with Americano), for which he does not pay. The free java is a tribute to a beloved character who helps make Fernwood feel like Fernwood.

In the square, the bubbles quickly attract a gaggle of giggling children, among them four-year-old Frankie Latimer. Watching nearby, her mother can only laugh and smile at her daughter’s antics as she plays with the Bubble Man.

“She absolutely, ridiculously adores him,” Phoenix Demski said. “He’s like Santa Claus.”

Mr. Wilson also has toys for children. He scavenges playthings found on the street, repairing them and offering them to children for free. These used to be available at his old home, a collection of oddball squirt guns, bubble wands, and plastic chickens. “Funny, weird stuff,” in the words of another parent.

Some of the castoffs have been used to decorate the Bubble Man’s convertible Volkswagen Bug. A toy Donald Duck head is attached to a front fender, while plastic flowers adorn the rear bumper.

The Bubble Man recently ran afoul of The Man in the form of a bylaw enforcement officer. He had been living in a recreation vehicle parked in the side yard of a house from which he received electricity and whose bathroom he used for a $350 monthly rent. After being evicted, he found a room in a nearby apartment, for which he pays $875, a steep price for a pensioner.

Mr. Wilson has been collecting a disability pension for 12 years after being diagnosed with “depression, sleep disorder, anxiety.” At a recent meeting of the Neighbourhood Resource Group, he proposed the creation of subsidized housing for poets, artists and characters such as himself. He calls his idea “Keep Fernwood Funky.”

The Bubble Man’s father was a geologist with a the mining company before becoming a professor and dean of geology at the University of Manitoba. Terry Wilson lived as a boy in Europe and Africa before the family settled in Winnipeg, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Environmental Studies. He later got a masters degree at York Unversity in Toronto.

He didn’t care for working in government and wound up back in Winnipeg, where he opened a shop from which he sold handmade toys and other wooden crafts. He came to the West Coast nearly two decades ago. He stumbled into bubbling, a lustrous pastime whose responsibilities he takes seriously.

About two years ago, he discovered his favoured Miracle Bubbles® had been watered down, no longer produced bubbles of satisfactory size. After a period of experimentation, he settled on a mixed solution with Ivory Clear Dish Soap for bigger, better, longer-lasting bubbles.

In the square, brothers Cairo, 3, and Ronin Gates, 5, whirled to chase an elusive prize whose capture is necessarily a short-lived triumph. Pop!

The Bubble Man spreads delight by blowing bubbles. Terry Wilson holds a masters degree in environmental studies. He has been called the patron saint of the Fernwood neighbourhood. Globe and Mail photograph by Chad Hipolito.

A family's long, tough haul from the Comox Valley to baseball's major leagues

2011-09-05T09:34:00.000-07:00

Taylor Green golfed a low change-up into right field at Miller Park in Milwaukee for his first hit in the major leagues. Green is the first big leaguer to hail from the Comox Valley. Photograph by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 5, 2011

VICTORIA

Taylor Green, 24, a professional baseball player, got called into the manager’s office.

He was greeted by grim-faced coaches and a manager with bad news.

You’ve flunked a drug test, he was told.

The young athlete’s career flashed before his eyes. Must be a mistake.

“No way,” he insisted, heart pounding. “How is that even possible?!”

He was told his punishment was greater than a 25-game suspension. Worse even than a 50-game suspension. The punishment, his manager said, maintaining a straight-face, was a one-way ticket to Milwaukee.

There was no failed drug test. Instead, the Milwaukee Brewers of the National League had use for a left-handed hitter and Mr. Green was about to be rewarded for years of hard work, including recovery from two serious injuries. He was being promoted to the major leagues. To The Show.

Taylor Green at age 5

A few days later, he was called upon to pinch hit.

His parents, Jacqueline, a teacher now on disability, and Bill, an elementary-school principal, scrambled to get from the Comox Valley to Milwaukee. His mother needed a wheelchair to navigate the stadium. They sat in box seats 20 rows up behind home plate.

Brewers fans have anticipated Green’s arrival. Before he arrived, he was hitting so well in the minor leagues that some rooters launched a “Free Taylor Green” campaign to encourage the Brewers to promote the prospect.

Last week, when his name was announced as a pinch hitter, the stadium rose in a standing ovation, a tribute before he had even taken a swing.

The at-bat brought to an end a long journey from the sandlots of Courtenay to a community college in California where he was scouted, drafted and signed by Milwaukee. A minor-league odyssey lasted five seasons as he played for the Helena (Mont.) Brewers, the West Virginia Power, the Brevard County (Fla.) Manatees, the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, the Huntsville (Ala.) Stars, and the Nashville (Tenn.) Sounds, whose manager, Don Money, himself a former major leaguer, fooled him into thinking he’d failed a drug test.

Along the way, he overcame a broken left wrist, as well as a beaning to the face. A pitch hit the bill of his batting helmet, ricocheting flush onto his nose, which was shattered. Being hit in the face by a pitched ball has ended more than one baseball career, as sometimes a hitter loses nerve, an affliction upon which pitchers will prey by throwing one inside fastball after another. After recovering from reconstructive surgery, Mr. Green forced himself to face pitches without flinching. With a teammate feeding baseballs into a pitching machine, he donned a catcher’s mask and deliberately had ball after ball strike him on his protected face until he knew he had the fortitude to return to the batter’s box.

Those tribulations, testing as they were, diminish when compared to what his mother has faced.

On Valentine’s Day, 1996, Jackie, a popular teacher, was felled by a massive stroke.

She needed two emergency surgeries, spent six weeks in a coma. When she awoke, the only word she could manage was “no.” She spent arduous weeks at the G.F Strong Rehabilitation Centre in Vancouver.

Though she could not speak words, she could sing them. Sometimes, husband and nine-year-old son sang O Canada with her.

One of the friends who rushed to her side was Kim Cattrall, the actress known best for playing the libidinous Samantha in Sex in the City. Ms. Cattrall, who was raised in the Comox Valley, served as maid of honour at the parents’ marriage. She now includes stroke charities in her fundraising efforts. "Whatever I accomplish, I share with Jackie," she has said.

On his debut in Milwaukee, Mr. Green golfed a low pitch into right field for a single. Time was called and the ball was lobbed into the Brewers dugout as a souvenir.

Remarkably, the crowd gave the rookie infielder a second standing ovation, seeing in his modest accomplishment the promise of future contributions.

Behind home plate, his mother was helped to her feet to join in the ovation.

“We’re in awe,” Bill Green said afterwards. “We’re shocked. We’re happy. We’re relieved.”

Two days later, in his next appearance, he slashed another hit as a pinch-hitter, starting a rally that led his team to victory.

On Saturday, he got his first start. In his first at-bat, he rapped his third consecutive single. In a sport in which failing at the plate two times out of three is considered brilliance, the prospect began his career with a perfect 1.000 batting average.

After his debut, his new teammates presented him with a ball purported to be the one he had slashed into the outfield for his first big-league hit. It was scuffed and scratched. Obscenities had been written on it. Another baseball prank.

The real ball was encased in plastic with an engraved plate with details of the hit. It can now be found on a kitchen counter of the Comox Valley home of two proud parents.

Tough road to The Show

Taylor Green is the first player born in the Comox Valley to make a major-league roster, earning a spot in the Baseball Encyclopedia between Shawn Green and Hank Greenberg.

He is only the fifth player born on Vancouver Island to make The Show in the 135-year history of major-league baseball. The others, all born in Victoria, are outfielder Mike Saunders and pitchers Steve Sinclair, Steve Wilson, and Rich Harden, who is with the Oakland A’s.

It is a tough journey that demands skill, luck and timing. Vince Perkins, a fireball-throwing pitcher from Victoria, spent a decade in the minor leagues without ever getting a chance to play in the big leagues. His greatest achievement was pitching for Canada in the World Baseball Classic. Mr. Perkins, who turns 30 later this month, was released earlier this season by the Toronto Blue Jays, who owned his rights. The son of a firefighter, he is now completing paramedic and firefighter training in Florida.

CHEK News of Victoria followed this column with a report on Taylor Green.

Marathon Man ran and ran until he could run no more

2011-08-31T10:04:00.000-07:00

Al Howie completed his run across Canada 20 years ago this week. He averaged more than 100-kilometres per day, greater than running two marathons. The run raised $500,000 for charity.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 31, 2011

VICTORIA

Al Howie ran.

He ran the length of Vancouver Island.

He ran around a paved mile-long loop for 20 hours per day for seven days.

He ran from Winnipeg to Ottawa to compete in a 24-hour endurance race. He won.

He ran across America.

For him, a marathon was a short jog in the park. He was the ultra-marathon man, an unstoppable runner whose distances were so great as to seem fantastic, even comical.

Most famously, he ran across Canada, from St. John’s to Victoria, six times zones and 10 provinces, plunging into the waters of Juan de Fuca Strait just 72 days and 10 hours after dipping into the Atlantic Ocean.

At Mile Zero, a plaque honours Mr. Howie for his epic journey, which concluded 20 years ago this week.

Mr. Howie has had little recognition for his spectacular feats. He has not been enshrined in sports halls of fame. It is as if he ran into the record books and then into obscurity. He seems to have been forgotten by all, except for a small band of dedicated supporters.

These days, Mr. Howie’s home is a small room at an assisted-living facility in Duncan. A man once afraid of needles now gets four daily insulin injections to treat Type I diabetes.

“I’m not so healthy as I was,” Mr. Howie, 65, said by telephone earlier this week, the burr of his native Scotland still on his tongue.

To stay in shape, he swims, preferring the breaststroke. “Like getting a massage while you’re working out,” he said.

These days, he is capable of running only three miles at a time.

Al Howie's bronzed shoes

“It would be nice to get back out on the road,” he admits.

In his day, the runner styled himself as the Tartan Spartan. He wore running shorts emblazoned with the Union Jack. His long, wild hair fell past his shoulders and he grew a fierce beard on his chin, making him a feral figure. He raced along streets and highways like a mad Rob Roy without a horse.

The sport of distance running offered little in the way of prize money, so Mr. Howie spent many years in near-penury. He depended on modest sponsorships and the charity of friends.

“I run on resentment, angrily pounding the blacktop,” he once wrote. “Why must I run on empty? Why do I get no support from my hometown? Mostly, I plod on because I have committed myself to this asphalt insanity and I simply don’t know how to quit.”

Born in Saltcoats, a village on the Scottish coast, southwest of Glasgow, he came to Canada in 1973 after marrying a Canadian woman, a union that would not last. He took up running to cope with cravings while try to quit cigarettes, replacing one addiction with another.

He has been a stonemason, a foundry worker, and a treeplanter. He once operated a crusher at a copper mill mine near Port Hardy, running 20-kilometres each way to work.

A diagnosis of a malignant brian tumour in 1985 failed to end his running career, which won notice not only for his victories but for his preference to run between cities to race. One year, he completed the Edmonton marathon before running the 1,500 kilometres to Vancouver Island to compete at the Royal Victoria Marathon.

“I have to admit,” he once told the New York Times, “there are days when I wish I was good at something a little easier, like darts or pool.”

Sometimes, he drank a beer before a race, a hedonistic stunt all the more frustrating for rivals when he nevertheless ended the day atop the podium.

“Helped put me in the mood,” he says of his pre-race regimen.

The cross-Canada trek, called Tomorrow Run ’91, raised $527,400 for a charity for children with special needs. Mr. Howie ran the equivalent of 2 1/2 Boston Marathons. Every Day. For two months.

It is not known if Mr. Howie’s health will permit him to come to Victoria for a ceremony on Thursday, the 20th anniversary of the day he dove into the water without removing clothes or running shoes. A plaque and a city proclamation declaring “Tomorrow Run ’91 Day” in Victoria might instead be delivered to him at his home in the facility.

Once upon a time, Mr. Howie would have run from Duncan to Victoria to receive the honours.

A restaurant unlike any other seeks a new home

2011-08-29T14:13:00.000-07:00

The restaurateur Corey Judd seeks a new home for Cabin 12, a welcoming gathering place for patrons and staff alike. Chad Hipolito photograph for The Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 29, 2011

VICTORIA

On a chill February morning, Corey Judd opened the doors to his restaurant, ready for another ordinary day of slinging hash.

“All of a sudden two black limousines pulled up outside,” he recalled. “Large men with sunglasses and earpieces walked in.”

Soon, he was preparing eggs benedict and hash browns for a party of six, including David Jacobson, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, who was in the province to attend the Winter Olympics.

The ambassador’s unexpected appearance came about because the restaurant faced a shortage of coffee mugs. The owners — Mr. Judd and partners Dan and Heather Del Villano — came up with the idea of sending letters to every nation participating in the Olympics asking for a souvenir cup.

They got mugs from Chile and Greece. The ambassador, in Victoria to speak to a $30-a-plate business luncheon at the swanky Union Club, delivered a mug in person.

In that moment, Mr. Judd can be forgiven if he allowed himself a moment to imagine success for his restaurant. It opened 30 months ago on a small fund raised through social media. He had no access to credit, nor did he have a home address, spending the early months living in a back room. The doors stayed open thanks to the benevolence of a landlord who preferred late payment to none at all.

It was a business launched on a shoestring potato. The economic downturn hurt. The introduction of the HST hurt. Even a modest expense not in the budget, such as replacing a front window broken overnight by a drunk, threatened the restaurant. Happily, patrons and downtown businesses to contribute to the repairs.

Now, the joint faces its toughest challenge yet. The building has been sold and will be gentrified. The restaurant now needs to find a new home.

Mr. Judd’s first thought: “Here we go again. It’s been one thing after another after another after another. Starting with nothing and no credit. Then the broken window. Then the summer from hell. Then the HST. Then the Olympics.

“It hasn’t been easy to open a restaurant in the past two-and-a-half years in Victoria.”

The irrepressibly optimistic restaurateur is scouting other downtown sites.

His restaurant, with the puzzling but not uninviting name Cabin 12, can be found tucked into the shady north side of the Plaza Hotel, a building best known as home to Monty’s, a strip club. Cabin 12 is a welcoming respite from the sometimes unfriendly scene on the street outside, where drug dealing and other unpalatable activities take place.

Eating at Cabin 12 is like breakfast at your mom’s place — if your mother was a cross between Grandma Moses and Patti Smith.

A turntable greets diners and music is chosen to suit the mood of the room from a generous collection of vinyl. The works of local artists cover the walls, the works for sale without commission. Canadian Tire money is accepted at par and the staff has accumulated about $150 worth of Sandy McTire scrip.

“I’m trying to create a space where people feel they are in their grandma’s house 20 years ago lying on the carpet playing gin rummy,” he said.

The Frommer’s travel guide notes “rambling, artsy charm” and food that is “down-to-earth scrumptious.”

The menu includes an item saucily billed as the HST (hash browns, sausage, toast) with the admonition: “It’s good for you! You’ll learn to like it! Trust us.” A breakfast sandwich is named after popular local columnist Jack Knox, who has championed the restaurant. The menu item is, as the columnist acknowledged, “scrambled and cheesy.” (Mr. Knox fancies himself an award-losing journalist, though having a sandwich named after oneself is the second-highest accolade known to the journalism profession. The highest? Having an alcoholic drink named after you.)

Mr. Judd named Cabin 12 after a favourite cabin at a camp at which he once worked.

The restaurant opened after a rough patch in his personal life, during which a struggle with alcohol and then marijuana dependency left him close to “falling off the edge.”

These days, he hires people — the staff now numbers 16 — who have similarly overcome difficult circumstances.

“We’re looking at a business model which takes people off the streets. Not for any philanthropic reason. Like me, if you’ve lived on the edge for a long time, you’re very resourceful.”

Cabin 12 is not just a restaurant, but a cause, and a change of address is just another temporary roadblock to be overcome on the road to redemption.