The buy-in, the switch and the wardrobe

The self-taught photographer Hana Pesut has launched a compelling project called Switcheroo, in which couples trade their clothes for before and after pictures. Above: Leila and Azim. Below: Jillian and Andrew.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
February 24, 2012

Jasmine wore sandals, a silky white T-shirt over black leggings, and a cropped denim jacket. Erik wore marigold sneakers, grey sweatpants, and a baggy black T-shirt. His long hair was tucked into a black-and-gold toque, an anomaly on a warm, sunny day.

The amateur models dressed in their own clothes, an everyday wardrobe for life on the West Coast.

They posed at Prospect Point in Stanley Park with the North Shore mountains as a backdrop. Hana Pesut, a self-taught photographer, captured their image with her trusty Hasselblad.

As the shoot progressed, a bus pulled up, tourists armed with their own cameras snapping the couple, as well as the scenic backdrop.

Then, the models began to undress.

Erik let his hair down, pulled his T-shirt off, unlaced his sneakers, dropped the sweatpants.

Jasmine disrobed as discreetly as was possible under the unblinking eye of a busload of camera-toting tourists.

She handed him her clothes. He handed her his.

Erik looked a bit Fabio with his hair blowing in the breeze. Jasmine looked like a 12-year-old boy.

They were photographed by Ms. Pesut as part of a project she calls Switcheroo. She takes before-and-after images of couples she asks to cross-dress in public places around Vancouver.

“It’s a nice way to take a portrait and to see the way couples interact with one another,” she said. “To see how much fun it is for them to see each other in each other’s clothes.”

The images, posted on her Sincerely Hana website, are causing an online rumble, as the images can be goofy, startling, and hilarious.

In most cases, the women pull it off.

In some cases, the men look ridiculous.

Sometimes, you hardly notice a difference.

“A couple of guys have not liked it. They act like their girlfriend tricked them into doing it,” the photographer said. “Others are good sports. They know they look funny. It’s all just for fun.”

One can make grand pronouncements about gender and identity from the images, but the photographer’s intent is not to make any specific statement at all.

“I like letting people interpret it in their own way,” she said.

One of the more intriguing critiques has come from a site dedicated to male cross-dressers. They expressed dissatisfaction with the wardrobe choices of her models.

Her couples mix and match skirts and jeans, summer dresses and trench coats, trucker caps and straw hats, camouflage jackets and pea coats, pendants and bow ties, flip flops and assault boots.

The idea first came to her while on a camping trip with two friends. One was wearing tie-dyed clothes with sequins, while the other was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt. “They thought it would be funny if they switched outfits,” she said.

“Right after that I started obsessing with it. I would see people walking together and I began to think what they would look like in each other’s clothes.”

For Switcheroo, Ms. Pesut shoots film, using natural light in a natural setting, often near a couple’s residence to facilitate a private wardrobe switch,

The 30-year-old photographer works as a deejay and handles social media for a company in the entertainment business. She grew up in Whistler, playing point guard for her high school and college basketball teams.

She learned the sport from her father, a man she knew as Steve Tanaka. A decade ago, he was arrested in Vancouver after 30 years as a fugitive following a conviction in Illinois for cocaine trafficking. He skipped bond, fleeing to Europe before eventually landing in Canada, where he took his mother’s maiden name as his own. Steve Iwami has since completed his sentence and now lives in the Seattle area.

“I went quickly from being dependent on my dad to helping him out and taking care of him,” she said.

The secret was a great burden on him, she said.

“I’m happy for my dad that he doesn’t have to worry about that anymore. He can be more honest and open with me now.”

For the first 20 years of her life, her father toyed with identity and disguise, the very elements that make Switcheroo so compelling a project.

They're pouring pints again at the Bimini

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.

Hail to Vancouver taxi firm on its 100th birthday

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.

PNE prize homes have always been about dreams

Fairgoers in their finery line up to tour the prize home at the Pacific National Exhibition in the 1950s. The modest homes have given way to monsters designed for use as rustic retreats.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 25, 2011

Maxine Dalfo lives in a house of dreams, a modest bungalow that once seemed as grand as a mansion.

In the dark Depression year of 1934, Vancouver fairgoers by the thousands gambled a thin dime on a chance to own the house.

It had cedar-lapped siding painted a dark brown with cream trim.

Inside, to the left of the doorway, French doors swung open to a living room with a fireplace. The main floor also offered a full kitchen (with that remarkable innovation, the electric stove), a dinette, two bedrooms, and a bathroom with a claw-foot tub and jade green fixtures.

The unfinished second floor offered the promise of two additional bedrooms as well as a sewing room with a window in the gable dormer overlooking the front steps.

A team of horses hauled the bungalow along fir skids to its current location at 2812 Dundas St., a half-block from the exhibition grounds. The Dalfos — Victor and the former Maxine Sokowich — bought the home from a widower hardware-store owner 30 years later.

“It was still on stilts,” she said.

For almost a half-century, this has been Mrs. Dalfo’s home, a place where she raised a daughter and buried a husband. Victor Dalfo worked as a longshoreman. Maxine also found a job on the waterfront at a cannery, where she drove jeep, kept tally, and otherwise helped freeze and smoke salmon.

Each summer, she visited the nearby Pacific National Exhibition. “There wasn’t a ride we didn’t go on,” she said, “there wasn’t anything we didn’t try.” She played bingo and placed $2 bets at the horse races. She always made sure to buy tickets for the annual prize home.

BBQ on patio of 1968 prize home.

Fairgoers hear a six-word mantra: “Win a house! Win a car!” The phrase is repeated endlessly by ticket hawkers.

These days it takes a lot of dimes to buy a ticket. The price is $25 for five tickets, or $50 for 15. When the gates open each morning, eager patrons race walk to the entryway of the fully-furnished, 3,100-square-foot Craftsman-style house that is this year’s top prize.

The three-bedroom, three-bathroom home comes with a theatre room, a wine cellar, and a garage loaded with tools. Mrs. Dalfo’s home would fit comfortably inside the main floor. After the winner is announced at the close of the fair on Labour Day, the home will be moved to a lot in Kelowna with a lake view.

The annual prize-home package reveals a lot about our consumerist desires.

In the first blush of post-war prosperity, the fair’s prize homes were prefabricated houses showing off the latest innovations from British Columbia’s wood products industry. Most were simple rectangles in early ranch style. In 1953, the first television set was included with a house.

One of the prize homes wound up on the University of British Columbia campus, where it was used as a dormitory for the athlete scholars Father David Bauer recruited for the 1964 Olympic hockey team.

An academic paper written in 2005 by Elizabeth MacKenzie, a UBC post-graduate architectural student, tracked down many of the early prize homes. These can still be found as far afield as the Capilano Heights subdivision in North Vancouver and along the Lougheed Highway in Burnaby.

In the 1960s, the homes became larger, though the fair’s managers and builders avoided becoming architectural trendsetters. The prize home remained a middle-class dream designed to “suit the tastes of the average person.”

A two-year flirtation with selling tickets for a $50,000 gold bar instead of a house resulted in lower ticket sales. The prize home program was re-introduced in 1969.

Following the energy crisis, a solar-powered home was offered as a prize, but these more modest designs soon gave way to ever larger footprints. Now, the prize home is a mansion designed for a resort.

For a taste of the prize-home high life, one can rent Eagles Nest at Daniel Point, a 5,000-square-foot waterfront mansion on a peninsula overlooking Pender Harbour. The house boasts four bedrooms, a media room with pool table, and three west-facing decks. A week-long summer rental costs $2,600.

The 23-metre-long mansion was the PNE prize home in 2000. It was trucked from east-side Vancouver to a prime waterfront location on the Sunshine Coast by Nickel Bros., an industrial mover that has hauled the prize home for the past 25 years.

It must be odd to stay in a grand holiday rental that may have traveled farther than you have.

Mrs. Dalfo plans on buying prize-home tickets this year. Even if she wins, a one in 1.545 million chance, she will not move from her home, which once offered the dream of a better life in a harsh time.

The 1974 prize home was a rare model to show modernist lines.

The 2011 prize home will be trucked to a lakeview location in Kelowna.

O, Habitat, what a time we had

Workers are dismantling the wharf at Jericho Beach, a final physical reminder of the Habitat Forum in 1976. Lindsay Brown photograph.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 10, 2011

The battle of Jericho is over and the wharf is tumbling down.

Workers are dismantling a wooden structure that juts over the shoreline at Jericho Beach on Vancouver’s west side. Pilings, soaked in creosote, will be removed and the beach restored to a more natural setting.

The decorative metal railings that lined the wharf, against which lovers and sightseers leaned while gazing onto the waters of English Bay, are being stacked for future use, possibly in Stanley Park.

The railing once prevented pedestrians from falling off the Lions Gate Bridge. The bridge had been undergoing a refurbishment and the railings were no longer needed. A visionary named Alan Clapp knew how to use them.

Thirty-five years ago, a sleepy and rough-edged port city played host to the inaugural United Nations Conference on Human Settlements. It was Vancouver’s reluctant debut on the world stage. Local politicians balked at the policing expense, fretting about the violence of the Middle East finding expression in a Pacific city, puzzling why a conference on sheltering the world’s poor was being held in wealthy Canada.

While government officials and other bigwigs met at swank downtown hotels, Mr. Clapp, a television producer with a reputation as an “ideas man,” organized an alternative conference on the site of an old Royal Canadian Air Force seaplane base. A persuasive and indefatigable go-getter, Mr. Clapp negotiated use of the site and gained modest financial support from an NDP provincial government and its Social Credit successor.

Cavernous aircraft hangars left over from the Second World War were modified to resemble native longhouses. Architects designed innovative seating in the hangar used as a plenary hall, as giant wooden blocks were stacked like a giant Jenga game. A massive banner covered the entire ceiling.

Horses hauled driftwood off the adjacent beach. Wood was milled on site. The artist Bill Reid created a magnificent mural on the exterior wall of one of the hangars. Hundreds of school children volunteered, helping to keep the area clean. Instead of being discarded, the old bridge railings were salvaged for use on the wharf, a scenic centerpiece.

The Habitat Forum ran in conjunction with the official meetings. It was an independent, grassroots alternative with open doors to all. Habitat attracted such luminaries as Mother Teresa, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and the futurist Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic dome had been such a hit at Expo 67. Margaret Trudeau, the prime minister’s wife, joined others in hauling water to the site by pail to demonstrate the daily difficulty so many of the world’s poor faced in simply providing a clean and safe drinking supply.

Habitat was chaotic and creative, an admirable attempt to ensure the public could have a voice in tackling the problems of poverty and sustainability.

For some who attended, such as Lindsay Brown, then a 13-year-old high school student, the week-long gathering was an unforgettable experience.

“It was an exciting environment. It had this strongly Utopian feel,” she said.

“I was devastated when it was over. I went back to school and Vancouver went back to how it had always been.”

She long held a nostalgic feel for the gathering, an emotion she assumed was unique to her. Two years ago, she began researching a book about Habitat, some of which can be found on her blog. She discovered the conference had a lingering hold on those who attended.

“It had been formative for a lot of people who then went on to take a more global standpoint in their own work,” she said.

Unlike Expo 86 or last year’s Winter Olympics, which were commercial and tidy, the Habitat gathering did not depend on corporate sponsorship and so was more freewheeling in spirit. The site had a carnival feel. Though participants grappled with big problems, Ms. Brown remembers a spirit of “casualness” and of “hopefulness.”

“There was not a lot of security and you could mix with people from all over the world,” she said. “It felt like a microcosm of the planet.”

The United Nation’s department responsible for settlement issues is still known as UN Habitat and its founding document is The Vancouver Declaration, an unrealized blueprint.

The hangars are now long gone. The wharf has been a last physical reminder of the week 35 years ago when the world came calling. A driftwood sculpture created by Bernard Thor for the event can be found in the adjacent park. It now includes a plaque hailing “a moment in time when people came together to think of their neighbour.”

Margaret Trudeau (left) joins Margaret Mead at Habitat Forum in Vancouver in 1976, a chaotic, colourful gathering that tried to tackle the problems of shelter and poverty for the world's people.

A word about Jericho Beach

The beach’s Biblical name has a more prosaic origin. Long the site of an aboriginal village known as Ee’yullmough, the original residents were shunted aside with the arrival of Europeans. Jeremiah (Jerry) Rogers, whose axeman fell the giant trees of Point Grey and Kitsilano, established a camp and spar-cutting operation at what became known as Jerry’s Cove. Over time, the name mashed into Jericho.


The construction of the alternative conference known as Habitat Forum lured an eclectic crowd to the shores of English Bay at Jericho Beach.

Gary Bannerman, radio host (1947-2011)

Gary Bannerman was a tough interviewer and an acerbic commentator in a long career on Vancouver radio. Photograph from B.C. Radio History.

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

Three desperate prisoners holding 15 hostages at knifepoint in a prison vault invited a popular radio host to enter their stronghold.

Gary Bannerman reported the redoubt had only a narrow entrance, affording inmates the chance to harm hostages should an assaulted be attempted. Ominously, he said the prisoners warned that “blood will flow” if their demand for safe passage out of the country was not met.

A 41-hour standoff ended when guards stormed the area, shooting to death one of the hostages. While prison authorities ordered a news blackout, Bannerman went on the air to describe the siege.

The incident at the B.C. Penitentiary was the bloodiest and most dramatic of three hostage-takings by prisoners in 1975 in which Bannerman was asked to be an intermediary. The others involved inmates with psychiatric problems, both of which ended after radio station CKNW aired interviews with the troubled men.

Bannerman, who has died of what the station describes as liver complications, aged 64, was a newspaper reporter who became the top-rated radio host in Vancouver, a city with a long history as a hotbed for hotline radio. A tough interviewer and an acerbic commentator, he generated plenty of legal actions, including more than 150 libel cases, according to Top Dog!, an official history of the station published in 1993. The claim is made he never lost one, but that is radio ballyhoo. At least two cases were settled out of court. He was also once found guilty of criminal contempt of court. As well, he was censured by radio’s governing body for making “racially abusive remarks” about First Nations people.

Bannerman did not particularly care if he won over the listening audience with his opinion.

“People agree and disagree and I’d be an insufferable idiot if I tried to get everyone to agree with me,” he told TV Week magazine in 1979.

With a balding pate and dramatic sideburns, he favoured a workday wardrobe of a short-sleeve shirt with a tie loosened at the neck. The Globe once described him as “a large smooth egg of a man,” while the columnist Allan Fotheringham called him “the Orson Welles of CKNW.” The hint of a compliment in Fotheringham’s description — Welles had a lovely voice — was likely trumped by the auteur’s corpulence and fondness for alcohol.

Gary William Bannerman was born on May 23, 1947, at Sydney, N.S. In Centennial Year, he was hired by the Saint John (N.B.) Telegraph-Journal as an obituarist, soon after gaining promotion to cover the New Brunswick Legislature. He made a strong impression and by 1970 had been hired by the Province in Vancouver.

Two years later, CKNW launched a program called The Investigators, featuring two hosts and a news legman. The show was a bid to make up for the loss to rival CJOR of top radio personality Jack Webster, the hard-hitting interrogator from Scotland known as the Oatmeal Savage. Two months later, Bannerman, who had been covering City Hall, was lured away from the daily. In time, the show and its coveted 9 a.m. to noon time slot would be all his.

He had been on air less than a year before an editorial about police policies led more than 700 irate listeners to call the station to complain. He exposed crooked car dealers and corrupt businesses.

The daily outrage expected of a talk radio host was leavened by occasional display of a light touch.

“Our schools teach the kids reading and writing, and they can’t spell,” he said in a 1975 commentary. “They teach them arithmetic, and they can’t add. Now they’re teaching sex education. I guess that ends the worry about the population explosion.”

An indefatigable workhorse when healthy, Bannerman continued writing newspaper columns after moving to radio. In his debut for the Kerrisdale Courier, a community newspaper, he offered a hint of his political philosophy: “Nothing but contempt will be expressed toward our city’s redneck fraternity: the people who believe all welfare recipients are bums; those who would substitute harsh punishment for rehabilitation of criminals; the type of individual who resents the immigration of poor suffering Ugandans to this wealthy nation; racists of all descriptions, particularly those who are secretly or publicly indignant about the French fact in Canada.”

Bannerman never revealed a party affiliation, though his antipathy to the NDP and his admiration for Social Credit did not harm his standing with station management, or with advertisers.

In February, 1974, he aired a three-hour show during which he castigated the NDP government of Premier Dave Barrett for buying companies and shares on the Vancouver Stock Exchange. The premier cited six remarks he described as malicious libel and demanded an apology for himself, his cabinet, and his caucus. Bannerman’s comments did lead to an apology and an out-of-court settlement, but not with the premier. An undisclosed sum was paid to four former associates of Dunhill Development Corp. Ltd., who felt the broadcast alleged that they had engaged in improper insider trading.

(In an only-in-British-Columbia twist, Barrett would later be hired by CJOR to host a hotline show facing off against Bannerman, who managed to maintain his ratings lead.)

Just a month after that contentious show, the B.C. Court of Appeal issued an injunction prohibiting the repetition of what the judges described as “grossly defamatory language” in a program in which Bannerman and others described the activities of the Church of Scientology.

Bannerman was found guilty of criminal contempt of court in 1979 after accusing William Faulder (Fats) Robertson of being a “leading member of the Mafia” in a broadcast. Robertson was on trial at the time on cocaine smuggling charges, for which he was found guilty and sentenced to a long prison term. Despite offering “deep apologies,” the hotline host was fined $4,000, as was the radio station.

In 1985, Bannerman delivered an editorial about a Victoria lawyer who had been in the news while representing Holocaust denier Jim Keegstra and Nazi apologist Ernst Zundel. “Doug Christie has aligned himself so many times with these perverted monsters that he has to be viewed as one himself, in my view,” Bannerman said. The lawyer sued for libel. A jury decided the comments were defamatory, but fair comment.

A month after that commentary, Bannerman told listeners native people had no respect for the law, and were dirty, child-like, alcoholic, and committed incest. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission censured the station for the “racially offensive” comments, which it declared to be “ill-advised, irresponsible and regrettable.”

In 1988, Bannerman went on extended sick leave, replaced in his coveted time slot by Rafe Mair, a former Socred cabinet minister.

Denny Boyd, a columnist for the Vancouver Sun, later revealed to his readers the reason for Bannerman’s absence. He described a lunch with Bannerman during which “he had looked like death on a biscuit.”

“He had just been released from University Hospital that morning after a near-fatal collapse from extreme liver damage caused largely by his legendary consumption of Bell’s Single Malt Scotch Whisky,” Boyd wrote. “On that July day, Bannerman was gaunt, rickety with weight loss and his skin was yellowish. He looked like a stack of wooden pencils.”

“Drinking was never a compulsion for me,” Bannerman told Boyd, “but it was part of my lifestyle, sitting around a table after my program was over, arguing and debating. I could go through a bottle a day, a bottle-and-a-half, sometimes two bottles a day and often I wouldn’t bother to eat.”

He returned to the station as a replacement host in the 1990s, but his run at No. 1 was over.

Bannerman wrote several books, including a helpful history of BC Ferries, on whose board he would serve, as well as two well-received guides to the cruise-boat industry. His most recent book, Squandering Billions, co-authored with Dr. Don Nixdorf and published by Hancock House six years ago, examines health-care spending.

In 1974, he co-founded Bannerline Enterprises, a communications company, with his wife, Patricia, a painter and photographer. She survives him. He also leaves a brother, two sisters, and his mother.

Yippies in love: Exploring the Vancouver riot — of 40 years ago

CBC archival footage shows Yippies flooding peacefully across the border during a notorious invasion of the border town of Blaine, Wash., in 1970.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
June 23, 2011

VICTORIA

It was a warm summer night when rampaging gangs of men tore through Vancouver streets beating passersby with sticks.

Even unsuspecting women and children came under assault.

The police had a rough time of it, not the least because they perpetrated the violence.

Forty years ago this summer, some 2,000 people gathered on Gastown streets for what was billed as the Grasstown Smoke-In to peaceably protest marijuana prohibition. The night ended in what was widely regarded afterwards as a police riot. Hippies, activists and tourists fell under the truncheon as police on horseback rode through a frightened crowd. Archival footage shows police pulling men by their long hair.

The riot served as an exclamation point after many months of tension. The city’s police tried to crack down on drug use even as hordes of teenagers flocked to the city to sample mind-altering substances. The mayor, Thomas Campbell, a millionaire lawyer and property developer, did verbal battle against hippies and longhairs, Marxists and Maoists, Vietnam War draft dodgers and the Georgia Straight newspaper,. The mayor saw all of them as a threat — correctly, as it turned out — to building freeways and skyscrapers.

Particularly irksome were a band of anti-authoritarian merry pranksters who called themselves the Northern Lunatic Fringe of the Youth International Party — Yippie! for short.

It is this background that serves as the setting for a new musical, “Yippies in Love,” that opens with a preview Wednesday night at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. The gala opening on Thursday is expected to be attended by about a dozen former members of a group that operated without membership cards. Or leaders.

The script and lyrics were written by Bob Sarti, a former Vancouver Sun reporter who both covered and took part in some Yippie stunts.

A smoke-in led to a police riot in Vancouver's Gastown.

He wrote the play after interviewing old comrades, checking yellowed newspaper clippings, and surveying the CBC’s rich lode of archival footage. He said none of the Yippies regretted taking part. They feel history has absolved them.

“We were right. They were wrong,” Mr. Sarti said recently. “The bad guys were wrong. The war was wrong. Drug paranoia was wrong.”

The Vancouver Yippies lived in communal homes with such tongue-in-cheek names as The Dog House and Charlie Mansion. Combining street theatre with political activism, they tried to levitate the Main Street police station (an echo of unsuccessful attempts to do the same to the Pentagon).

A so-called Sip-In to protest the poor treatment of hippie customers at the Hudson’s Bay department store ended in smashed glass and the burning of the Stars and Stripes in a demonstration at the nearby American embassy on May 8, 1970.

The very next day, the Yippies took part in an audacious incursion across the frontier, when a crowd peaceably overwhelmed border guards at the Peace Arch and marched through the streets of Blaine, Wash. The invasion was a protest against the invasion of Cambodia and the subsequent shooting of unarmed students at Kent State University in Ohio.

During the protest, a trainload of new automobiles got pelted by rocks, causing significant damage.

The local newspaper called the foray “one of the saddest and most degrading incidents suffered by the people of this country since the Alamo.”

Two months later, the Yippies held what they called a Be-Out at Oakalla prison, knocking down a section of fence but wisely not engaging several hundred guards and police in anything other than some verbal jousting.

The Yippies also launched a newspaper (The Yellow Journal), opposed a development while campaigning to preserve as parkland a four-hectare site at the entrance to Stanley Park (today’s Devonian Harbour Park), and ran a candidate for mayor (see below).

Mr. Sarti, 68, who lives on Hornby Island, is the son of a New York City cook who volunteered to fight against fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He came to Canada as a draft resister in 1968. One of his early Sun stories was headlined, “Yippies behind rash of street actions here.”

He notes the play, with music by Bill Sample, is a drama, not a documentary, though characters and events will be familiar to those who took part four decades ago. (One wag cleverly suggests it is a comedy, just like the original production.)

Where Yippies were once vilified by city fathers, the play is an official part of the city’s quasquicentennial celebrations.

As a nod to recent events, a panel discussion will be held after Sunday’s matinee performance. It will compare the events of the early 1970s with the recent Stanley Cup riot. It is titled, “Yippies and Yahoos: What’s the Difference?”

Yippie mayoral candidate
called for repeal of law of gravity

In 1970, a young, unwed single mother on welfare ran for mayor of Vancouver as the candidate for the Northern Lunatic Fringe of the Youth International Party (Yippie!).

Betty (Zaria) Andrew, a shy, soft-spoken 23-year-old, posed for an election poster published in the underground newspaper, The Yellow Journal. She was shown holding her two-year-old son, Colin, known as Skeeter, in her lap. In her left hand, she holds a rifle, an incongruous prop in so maternal a setting.

“Unloaded,” she said. “It was to show our militancy. Not in the sense of going out to kill people, but in terms of being active.”

She campaigned on a promise to disband the police, to turn City Hall into a daycare, and to tear up downtown pavement in favour of parkland. The main plank called for a repeal of the laws of gravity “so everyone can get high.”

She opposed Thomas (Tom Terrific) Campbell, the avowed enemy of hippies and yippies who was seeking a third consecutive two-year term in the mayor’s chair.

A Globe columnist decried Mr. Campbell’s “ostrich indifference to social problems,” but the tough-talking, law-and-order advocate handily won re-election over the reformer Dr. William Gibson. An NDP-sponsored candidate finished third, while the fourth-place candidate, a namesake to the mayor though no relation, was arrested on election night on a drug charge.

The Yippie candidate garnered 848 votes in her lone foray for public office.

Her clownish campaign served as a precedent for the artist Vincent Trasov, who campaigned for mayor four years later while wearing a Mr. Peanut costume. (The artist said the Peanut surname was an acronym for Performance, Elegance, Art, Nonsense, Uniqueness and Talent.) The anthropomorphic goober took 2,685 votes.

Ms. Andrew, 64, who lives in Nelson and Vancouver, retired from the post office last year. She had been a forklift operator. Her fellow workers often elected her as a shop steward.

Mr. Campbell, 83, retired from elected office in 1972. He rarely grants interviews.

Happy 125th birthday, city of glass

We arrived in Vancouver sight unseen, lured westward by such beautiful images as this found on a $1 definitive stamp. BELOW: The plaque for Wasserman's Beat.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
April 6, 2011

VICTORIA

We pulled into Vancouver for the first time along Highway 99A, known as the Kingsway, a regal designation for a strip dedicated to car culture.

The view of motor courts and tattered used-car-lot pennants was a most unpromising glimpse of a city of such supposed beauty.

It was like being introduced to a debutante by a brash uncle in a loud sports coat.

As dusk gave way to dark, lights hovered in the distant sky to the north. It would be morning before we spotted the mountains, later still before the lit peak had a name. We were incredulous to learn the ski hill on Grouse Mountain was a short bus ride from downtown, stunned as well by the sandy beaches along the waterfront.

My family — parents in their 30s and two teenagers — arrived in the Terminal City in the summer of 1977 after a week-long, cross-continental trek by car. We had no home, no jobs. We knew no one. Like so many before and since, we arrived — almost empty-handed — in search of opportunity.

Not one of us had ever so much as seen the city, though my stamp collection included a mint copy of a recent $1 definitive, which featured the city’s apartment towers reflecting on still waters.

We found an apartment in Kitsilano and work as day labourers, my father and I, clearing debris from a building undergoing renovation. Our off days by necessity were filled with pursuits not demanding money. So, Stanley Park became a haunt, as did the old main branch of the public library, where the most popular local history book was subtitled, From Milltown to Metropolis. Frankly, coming from Montreal, it seemed more milltown what with Sweeney’s barrel company hard by downtown.

Today, as the city celebrates its 125th anniversary, Vancouver is the City of Glass, as Douglas Coupland calls it, the metropolis promised by the history book.

Happy birthday, kiddo, you don’t look a day older than 50.

Vancouver is a boom-and-bust town, but for my family it was almost all boom.

Our early days were tough. The stamp collection? Sold for groceries. But my father soon found work as a teacher and we were on our way.

Not long after we arrived, the mayor unveiled a brass plaque along the 600-block of Hornby Street. The street was to be known as Wasserman’s Beat in honour of nightclub habitué and man-about-town Jack Wasserman, who had died suddenly. A city that honoured saloon reporters was the city for me.

Mr. Wasserman got his start on the student newspaper at the University of British Columbia, which also claimed to be the training ground for the likes of Pierre Berton and Allan Fotheringham. I signed up for the Ubyssey on my second day on campus.

Two months later, a secretary ushered me into a city hall office for an interview. Jack Volrich, the slick-haired mayor of Canada’s third-largest city, the ceremonial Chain of Office dangling from around his neck, pumped the hand of one of his newest constituents, a long-haired, squeaky-voiced student reporter/urchin in torn jeans. He gave me the better part of an hour.

In retrospect, the moment captured for me the spirit of my new home — the boy reporter and the politico from the mining town of Anyox, both of us come-from-aways, reinventing ourselves in the big city.

As a teenaged reporter for a daily newspaper, an early story featured the arrival of the first Vietnamese boat people. Many had nothing at all, not even the language. Now, the anchor for the national public broadcaster canvasses the owner of a successful Vietnamese bakery for his political opinion.

People still come to the city in waves, from Asia and Latin America, from eastern Canada and the western United States. They come to live in a place of scenic wonder in an urban setting notable for its diversity and tolerance.

Who wouldn’t want to live in a city where neighbourhoods are named Fairview, Grandview and Mount Pleasant?

In time, the beauty of the Kingsway revealed itself — the wondrous neon sign JESUS — THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD, now in a museum; the 18 bungalows of the 2400 Court Motel, a throwback to a post-war era of plenty; and, especially, the dripping goodness of a deluxe chuck wagon from the old Wally’s Burger drive-in.

Thank you to those who preserved Stanley Park. Thanks to those who fought for equal rights and for good wages. Thanks to those who stopped freeways. Thanks to Don Stewart for maintaining MacLeod’s Books as a refuge of the old Vancouver, when rents were cheap and storeowners indulged their idiosyncrasies. Mostly, though, thanks for the opportunity.

Happy quasquicentennial, Vancouver. Let’s do this again on your sesquicentennial in 2036.

This magnificent neon sign now belongs to the Museum of Vancouver. It once lit the way along Kingsway in Vancouver.

Loretta Lynn's big break worthy of a plaque

Yup, coal miner's daughter Loretta Lynn got her big break after playing at a jam session in a converted chicken coop in Vancouver in 1960. She made her first recording — "I'm a Honky Tonk Girl" — with Zero Records, a  label financed by a local lumber baron.

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

VICTORIA

Vancouver turns 125 years old later this year, so the Vancouver Heritage Foundation is looking for 125 places deserving of a plaque.

Voting begins Wednesday on the group’s website.

The foundation, a charitable group, solicited online nominations in a program called “Places That Matter.”

An ad in Billboard, June 27,  1960.

Some members of the public tuned into their inner Chuck Davis — oh, we are so going to miss our avuncular Mr. Vancouver this quasquicentennial year — and suggested all kinds of worthy places.

Parks and bridges, churches and stadiums, even viaducts and corner groceries have been nominated.

One of the more intriguing suggestions is to have a plaque placed on the Granville Mall near Smithe Street to mark the site where the writer William Gibson had the inspiration that led to his coining the word “cyberspace” in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. He had peeked into an arcade, witnessing teenagers playing video games so intently that they were oblivious to their earthly circumstance.

A sports fan can support a plaque at baseball’s Nat Bailey Stadium (where a young Brooks Robinson once impaled his arm on a fence) and Oppenheimer Park (which the storied Asahi team of Japanese-Canadians called home) and the Denman Arena (where the Vancouver Millionaires won the Stanley Cup in 1915).

A music fan can support a plaque at the Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret, 109 E. Hastings St.; or the Malkin Bowl in Stanley Park; or the bump-and-grind Penthouse Cabaret, 1019 Seymour St.; or the psychedelic hangout Retinal Circus (earlier Dante’s Inferno) at 1024 Davie St.

Not to mention the supper club hot spots such as Isy’s or the Palomar or The Cave with its papier-mâché stalactites.

One of the musical suggestions stands out.

Rob Howatson, a magazine writer, nominated the former site of a Fraserview chicken coop behind a bungalow in the 2500-block of Kent Avenue, near Elliott Street.

It is a worthy site for a plaque, for it was an event here that led to the first recording of one of the greatest country music stars of all time.

Yup, Loretta Lynn, the coal miner’s daughter from Butcher Holler, Ky., had to come all the way to Vancouver for her big break.

Born into poverty, married at age 13 to a husband whom she called Doolittle but others knew as Mooney for his history of running moonshine. The couple escaped the limits of Appalachia to live in Custer, Wash., a hamlet a few miles south of the border.

On her 18th birthday, by which time she had given birth to four children and suffered two miscarriages, Loretta received from her husband a $17 Harmony guitar from Sears and Roebuck. He had in mind a singing career for his child bride.

Shy, nervous, uncertain as to her abilities and stumped on her first tryout when asked in which key she planned to sing (“I didn’t know what a key was and don’t hardly know now,” she wrote in her 1976 autobiography), Mrs. Lynn began playing small halls and taverns around Whatcom County, earning as much as $5 per session. “I thought I was a millionaire.”

A few years later, she earned a spot as one of 30 amateurs to perform on The Bar-K Jamboree, a live television show hosted by Buck Owens on KTNT (later KSTW) in Tacoma, Wash. Mrs. Lynn won the contest. Her prize was a wristwatch so cheap it broke the next day. But one of those who caught her performance on television up in Vancouver was Norman Burley, a lumber baron.

Mr. Burley’s riches allowed him to dabble in sports (for a time he owned a share of the Vancouver Mounties baseball club with Nat Bailey, the founder of White Spot restaurants) and entertainment (he financed a record label called Zero Records). Mr. Burley invited the singer to come to Vancouver.

“He said he wanted to help us by giving us a contract to make a record,” she wrote in Coal Miner’s Daughter. “He didn’t wear any red suit or black boots, but that man looked lie Santa Claus to us.”

She performed at a Fraserview dance hall named for its previous use. The Chicken Coop was owned by Irene and Clare (Mac) McGregor, according to Mr. Howatson.

“They fumigated and turned it into a club,” she told the Country Music Association last year.

“We went into that chicken house and there were a bunch of bigwigs who came in to listen to me.”

Don Grashey and Chuck Williams from the record label heard a voice reminiscent of Kitty Wells and as country as a jug of moonshine.

She remembers her wealthy patron being in attendance.

“He came over to me and said, ‘Let’s make a record.’ I said, ‘I don’t know how.’ He said, ‘I don’t either. But we’ll learn together.’ ”

She was signed and sent to Hollywood to be recorded.

The label printed some 3,500 copies of a 45-rpm (Zero No. 107) with “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” and “Whispering Sea.” She made two other releases for Zero before jumping to Decca and launching the career that would make her a superstar.

Mr. Howatson has spent seven months researching the little-known story of the makeshift dance hall. He is still seeking anecdotes and ephemera and can be reached at vancouverchickencoop@gmail.com .

A site selection committee formed by the heritage foundation, including former city councillors Gordon Price and Marguerite Ford, will be guided by the public voting, which ends on the city’s birthday on April 6.

If the Chicken Coop doesn’t get a plaque, then there’ll be “Trouble in Paradise,” as Loretta Lynn will be a “Blue Kentucky Girl” and the committee will have an appointment in “Fist City” with a “Honky Tonk Girl.”

Dressed in a black and white cowgirl's outfit, Loretta Lynn won an amateur talent contest on Buck Owens' Bar-K Jamboree on a live broadcast from Tacoma, Wash. A lumber baron in Vancouver was so enraptured by her performance that he signed her to his fledgling record label.

Muralist turns Vancouver into open-air gallery

A blank wall facing a service station along a busy street in Santiago, Cuba, became the canvas for a mural titled, "Punto de Contacto" ("Point of Contact"). It was designed and painted by Cuban and Canadian artists, including Richard Tetrault of Vancouver.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
March 8, 2011

VICTORIA

Our bus rocketed along the frantic Avenida Victoriano de Garzón when I caught a fleeting glimpse of a giant painted canoe on the side of a wall.

This classic icon of Canadiana seemed out of place overlooking a service station in Santiago, Cuba.

As it turns out, the large mural, completed earlier this year, was the collaborative effort of Cuban artists with a Canadian group calling themselves La Raza. Among them was Richard Tetrault.

In eastside Vancouver, three are three kinds of wall painting — commercial, graffito, and Tetrault.

He is a muralist responsible for dozens of projects in the city.

Where others see a boring, dreary, blank wall, he sees a canvas.

As in Cuba, he does not work alone, preferring to coordinate with those from the community in which a mural is to be situated. Local residents take part in the conjuring, the planning, and, the most fun of all, the painting.

Tourist checks out Cuban mural.

He describes the process as being “like a bunch of musicians jamming together.”

You can hardly take a stroll on the eastside without bumping into works in which he has had a hand. Life in the city is much the better for it.

A spectacular example can be found on the west-facing wall of the Orwell Hotel, a former flophouse at 456 East Hastings St., since renovated and now managed by the Vancouver Native Housing Society. The society commissioned Mr. Tetrault to be co-artistic director of a mural project to cover the 7,600-square-foot, west-facing wall.

The result, completed last summer, is “Through the Raven’s Eye,” a breathtaking landmark of aboriginal art that makes a bold statement for the neighbourhood.

To mark the centennial of Britannia High School two years ago, murals were painted on the school, on the side of an Italian bakery on Commercial Drive, and on the Adanac Bicycle Corridor, the latter including an image honouring the Militant Mothers of Raymur, who, 40 years ago, blocked the railroad tracks behind their social housing project until a pedestrian overpass was built to ensure their children could safely get to school.

At 600 Campbell Ave. in Strathcona, three walls of the Russian Hall have been decorated in colours inspired by Etruscan and Byzantine frescos. While Mr. Tetrault likes to bring art to neighbourhoods, in this case the art came to his neighbourhood. He lives with his partner, the photographer Esther Rausenberg, also a member of La Raza, less than a half-block away.

In the words of one city councillor, these murals have turned the eastside into an open-air art gallery.

Born in White Rock, Mr. Tetrault, 59, has lived in east Vancouver for more than three decades. While hitchhiking in Mexico in the mid-1970s, he found inspiration for his future works.

“I saw (Jose) Orozco murals in Guadalajara and (Diego) Rivera murals in Mexico City,” he said. “I was blown away by them. The elegance. The distinct language. It has an immediate appeal because of the beauty of the colour. They’re so thought out. That’s a beautiful thing, integrating imagery with architecture. And making it relevant.”

Mexico muralism was an expression of the strength of their ancestry, done so without words, as many remained illiterate through the 20th century.

Years later, Mr. Tetrault spent six weeks in the Cuernavaca studio of the late David Siqueiros, the third of the great muralists.

“Once that gets in your bloodstream,” he said, “it never really leaves.”

The artist has since worked in collaboration with muralists in Chile, Argentina and Cuba, where he helped complete earlier this year the Santiago mural spotted from the bus.

Titled “Punto de Contacto” (Point of Contact), the artwork includes images from the two countries, from Canadian ravens to the Cuban tocororo, a bird of the Sierra Maestra mountains.

The latter created a dilemma, as an enthusiastic Cuban artist brushed an oversize bird that dominated the wall. The bird had to be politely redone at a more appropriate scale.

That’s the thing about muralists. When they’re up against the wall, they paint it.

The west-facing wall of the renovated Orwell Hotel in Vancouver is graced by a spectacular mural composed by aboriginal artists.

Flower power on West Fourth Avenue

Lawrence Aronsen, a history professor at the University of Alberta, has written a sober-minded account of a wild era in "City of Love & Revolution: Vancouver in the Sixties." The terrific book cover was designed by noted rock poster artist Bob Masse.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 8, 2010

VANCOUVER

Once, West Fourth Avenue was home to head shops and record stores. Today, it is lined by upscale boutiques and fine-dining restaurants.

Then, tie-dye T-shirts. Now, Lululemon.

Then, hippie coffeehouses. Now, Starbucks.

Then, slow service at the Naam vegetarian restaurant. Today, slow service at the Naam vegetarian restaurant.

These days, the merchants’ association sponsors an annual Summer of Love (previously Hippie Daze), encouraging shoppers to visit the avenue with the slogan, “What a trip!”

Looks like The Man won.

It is easy to resort to cliche when looking back at the 1960s, an era easily lampooned by us 50-year-old whippersnappers.

A person lucky enough to be 21 during the Summer of Love is today aged 64, perhaps using marijuana not as a mind-altering recreation but as a pain-easing medication.

Back then, the promise of an exciting, freer way of life lured young people from the region and across the continent. They flocked to the Kitsilano neighbourhood, where large houses became crash pads. Cheap rents made it possible to live a modest life away from the shackles of 9-to-5 clock punching. The nearby beach and temperate climate encouraged a year-long summer holiday.

West Fourth became the Rainbow Road, a way station on the hippie highway.

Lawrence Aronsen, who has written City of Love & Revolution: Vancouver in the Sixties (New Star), says the hippie movement here was “an American cultural flow across the border. That’s the catalyst.”

“It’s the Baby Boomers coming of age, trying to find their identity. The hippie thing is a nice way to counter the mass consumption of the ’50s and ’60s.”

His book is a sober-minded account of a wild flowering in the city’s history — from the arrival of hippiedom and its embrace of peace and love; human be-ins and pot smoke-ins; the Gastown police riot and the appearance of the underground newspaper The Georgia Straight; a Jerry Rubin-led occupation of a campus faculty club and the Yippies’ cross-border invasion of Blaine, Wash.; the creation of a free university and the founding of Greenpeace; an anti-prison Be-Out and the formation of a squatter’s camp to stop a development at the entrance to Stanley Park; and, a general discombobulation of attitudes towards fashion and grooming and sex, the latter giving Vancouver a reputation as a Sodom of the North. Oh, and apparently the freaks and radicals were listening to groovy sounds, too.

Mr. Aronsen, a 62-year-old history professor at the University of Alberta, was born in Victoria and raised in working-class neighbourhoods in suburban Vancouver. His cultural influences were Californian. He dressed like the Beach Boys and twice hitchhiked south to surf, returning home to become “a weekend hippie.”

What would the “small-l libertarian” Lawrence Aronsen of 2010 tell the “mild-mannered Maoist revolutionary” campus radical of 1970?

“That I survived. I did some crazy things. My craziness is a kind of Canadian craziness. I knew after just two LSD trips that it’s not productive.”

Not all his contemporaries were as fortunate. Some were lost to drugs. Others never recovered from knowing they had already enjoyed the best days of their lives.

Originally, some Fourth Avenue merchants reacted to the hippies as though an alien life form had landed in their midst.

“They saw them as seedy characters,” he said, “but they didn’t see them as dangerous.”

He thinks the reaction to the tumult of the times was far more benign here than south of the border.

In Chicago, police struck hippies with billy clubs. In Vancouver, city council struck a Special Committee on Hippies.

Even the most notorious crackdown of the era, when police attacked pot smokers and bystanders in the infamous Gastown Riot of 1971, was followed the next weekend by a street party during which free hot dogs and watermelon were distributed by merchants, while police ignored public displays of pot puffing.

Confrontation with authority initiated dialogue, not violence. Dig it.


Vancouver's hippie daze recorded

It is June, 6, 1970. At the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, the audience eagerly awaits the appearance on stage of The Doors. The band is on a Roadhouse Blues Tour to support their album Morrison Hotel.

The tour manager places two microphones on the stage floor, recording the show on a Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder. The Doors are joined for four songs by blues legend Albert King, whose presence drives lead singer Jim Morrison to some unearthly vocals.

“You guys sure have a beautiful city here. You really do,” Mr. Morrison tells the crowd. “You can’t imagine how refreshing it is to come out of sewer like Los Angeles and breath some fresh air for a change.”

The band plays for two hours, a recording released last month by Rhino Records as “The Doors: Live in Vancouver, 1970.” It’s a scintillating souvenir of a single remarkable night in a tumultuous era.

A year later, the Lizard King is dead.


It ain’t the ’60s without a soundtrack

Regenerator Records of Vancouver has re-issued the hard-to-find Cool-Aid Benefit Album, featuring some of the city’s top psychedelic bands, as well as a jug band. Groove to the tunes of Mock Duck, Papa Bear’s Medicine Show, Hydro Electric Streetcar, and the Blacksnake Blues Band.



Amchitka

A year ago, Greenpeace released “Amchitka,” a two-CD live recording of the fundraising concert that launched the environmental group. It features live recordings of Phil Ochs, Joni Mitchell, and James Taylor.


Storming the Barricades

Rick McGrath, who was a rock critic and entertainment editor at The Georgia Straight, maintains a fascinating website about the characters who worked in Vancouver’s underground press. The underground newspaper, which debuted in 1967, fought in court to maintain freedom of the press. The passions ignited 40 years ago over its control remain undiminished.


Hippie hero

The cartoonist and illustrator Rand Holmes, who died at Lasqueti Island eight years ago, created hippie hero Harold Hedd, one of the more memorable fictional characters of the 1960s. Among the cognoscenti, Mr. Holmes is a peer of R. (Mr. Natural) Crumb and Gilbert (Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers) Shelton. A 328-page retrospective was released this summer by Fantagraphics Books.

Harold Hedd, from the fevered imagination and slick pen of cartoonist Rand Holmes, became a favourite feature in The Georgia Straight underground newspaper.

The heartfelt hotel: A monument to a friend of the poor, and of the arts

The Del Mar Inn is a last, lonely sentinel on the 500-block Hamilton Street in downtown Vancouver. The owner refused to sell, lest his indigent tenants be left on the street. BELOW: George Riste in his air force uniform, circa 1942.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 1, 2010

VICTORIA

George Riste, a man who found comfort in routine, checked in on the Del Mar Inn every day of the year, including Christmas.

He spent five hours daily at the downtown Vancouver hotel — handling repairs, chatting with tenants, keeping the place tidy.

The ground floor housed an art gallery, while the upper floors held 30 rooms. Most of these were occupied by loggers and fishermen who needed a home out of season, or while they collected pogey, or while they slaked a thirst that prevented them from affording fancier digs.

In a neighbourhood with its share of dives and flop houses, the Del Mar earned a reputation for cleanliness and affordability.

“Dad always believed that any room he owned,” his son said, “he’d live in it himself.”

All the surrounding properties on the block were bought by BC Hydro as the utility prepared to build a new headquarters. In time, only the Del Mar remained.

The proprietor resisted all offers, rejected every entreaty. He would not sell. If he did, where would the tenants live?

A small, hand-painted sign was placed over the entrance. It reads: “This property is not for sale and it has not been sold. Thank you. The Owner.”

A weary Hydro eventually announced it was no longer seeking Riste’s building, defeated by a stubborn man for whom principle mattered more than principal.

Today, the hotel stands alone as an original property in the 500-block of Hamilton Street. It is dwarfed by a shiny skyscraper rising behind it.

The Del Mar is a monument to a proud innkeeper who believed a city’s vibrancy depended on the success of its shopkeepers.

He had risen from prairie poverty to build a modest real-estate empire with other properties in the West End and on the North Shore. He became wealthy and so shared his good fortune by charging rents far below the market rate. He was a friend of the poor, and of the arts.

In 1990, he collaborated with the artist Kathryn Walter with whom he wrote the slogan: “Unlimited growth increases the divide”. A typographic artwork, rendered in seven inch-tall copper letters, was installed as a frieze on the building’s facade. Tourists can often be seen standing across the street debating the meaning, while pondering the circumstances. It has been called a “potent graffito.”

Mr. Riste, born to an unmarried housekeeper, was raised in Peace River, Alta.; Biggar, Sask.; and Agassiz, the farming community in the Fraser Valley. He supported the family by delivering newspapers and working as a golf caddy at the nearby Harrison Hot Springs resort, where he befriended the Hollywood star Paulette Goddard.

He enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the war, serving overseas, though he rarely discussed his wartime experiences.

After the war, he married Marjory Hicks, the daughter of the superintendent of the Dominion Experimental Farm at Agassiz. His agrologist father-in-law was later elected to Parliament in the John Diefenbaker sweep of 1958.

Mr. Riste moved to Port Alberni, where he worked at the pulp mill before moving to Vancouver in 1960. He held a number of jobs before changing his life by following the investment advice of William Nickerson, who wrote several popular get-rich guides, including How I Turned $1,000 into a Million in Real Estate — In My Spare Time.

Mr. Riste borrowed a grand from an indulgent bank manager, got a lease on the Andrew Hotel on Hornby Street, and began building a portfolio. “That was the start of his hotel business,” said his 63-year-old son Mike Riste, a noted golf historian. “We had quite a few — the Bon Accord, the Hornby, the Senator, and then the Del Mar. All under lease. Then we bought the Del Mar.”

Built in 1912, the handsome brick Edwardian building originally housed an auctioneer’s showroom at street level. This later became an art supply shop and, by the mid-1960s, the Bau-Xi gallery. It has been an art space ever since.

The hotel once was popular with passengers from the nearby bus depot, often recommended by Greyhound drivers. It no longer lets rooms by the day.

Why did Mr. Riste give his tenants a break?

“Because of his roots,” said his son. “My dad was poor. He grew up in the Depression.”
George Riste ended his daily hotel excursions three years ago after suffering a stroke and a broken hip. He died last week. He missed his his 65th wedding anniversary (on Dec. 20) and his 90th birthday (on Dec. 22) by a month.

At 2 p.m. on Thursday, the Or Gallery on the main floor of the Del Mar will play host to a celebration of the life of an “independent spirit” and an “ideal landlord” whose generous rent amounted to a subsidy for the arts.

Guests are asked to bring homemade food to share, in honour of the proprietor’s “hands-on management style.”

The son expects some might try again to buy the hotel. He would like it known that it is not for sale. Not now. Not ever.