Bill Lillard, baseball player (1918-2009)

Bill Lillard (left) poses at Seals Stadium in San Francisco with Ernie Raimondi (seated) and Dom DiMaggio (right).

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
July 10, 2009

Bill Lillard enchanted Toronto baseball fans with his derring-do on the bases and horrified them with his unpredictable fielding at shortstop.

Mr. Lillard hit just two home runs in two seasons with baseball’s Toronto Maple Leafs. One of those came in a game on May 20, 1941, when he smacked a two-run homer against the Rochester Red Wings at Maple Leaf Stadium. Later in the game, his older brother, Gene Lillard, matched the feat for the visitors with a two-run shot of his own.

Both brothers played in the major leagues, Bill with the Philadelphia Athletics and Gene with the Chicago Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals.

Bill Lillard was born on a California lemon and walnut ranch, the youngest of three sons. His father, the ranch foreman, later served as a county judge for a quarter-century.

The boy followed his older brother into professional baseball, making his debut with the Tucson (Ariz.) Cowboys in 1937. He was promoted to the San Francisco Seals, where his teammates included such notables as playing manager Lefty O’Doul and outfielder Dom DiMaggio (obituary, May 9).

In 1938, Mr. Lillard boasted a sterling .335 batting average in 278 at-bats for the Seals in what would be his finest season.

The Seals sold him to the Athletics that summer for $35,000.

He played in 80 games over two seasons with the parent club, recording a .244 average.

In 1939, he led the International League by starting 50 double plays while playing with the minor-league Baltimore Orioles.

The 5-foot-10, 170-pound infielder made a favourable early impression when assigned to Toronto in 1940.

“The new shortstopper shaped up very nicely,” the Toronto Star reported, “displaying much speed and making a hit with the fans by his rapid fire work on double plays.”
Later assessments would describe his fielding as “jittery.” Mr. Lillard committed an average of an error every other game, displaying the weakness that would prevent him from enjoying a lengthy career in the majors.

After the United States entered the Second World War, Mr. Lillard took a hiatus from baseball to work in an airplane manufacturing plant. He later served with the 1st Cavalry Division of the U.S. Army in the Pacific Theatre, where he contracted hookworm, jaundice, malaria, and dengue fever.

“I was in reconnaissance and operated miles behind enemy lines most of the time for two years,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir. “Then I was wounded by a mortar shell and was in hospitals from April 9 to Dec. 23, 1945, when I finally got out of the service.”

He returned to baseball for three seasons at war’s end.

Mr. Lillard also played in the minors for the Baltimore Orioles, Hollywood Stars, San Diego Padres, Jersey City Giants, Minneapolis Millers, and Fort Worth (Tex.) Cats.

After leaving the game in the middle of the 1948 season, he worked in the postal service for 32 years until retiring in 1980.

He was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Santa Barbara (Calif.) Athletic Round Table in 1973.

Mr. Lillard shared the given names but not the nickname of a prominent professional bowler, who was known as Bill (Mumbles) Lillard for his habit of talking to himself during a match.

Only the most ardent of fans knew baseball’s Mr. Lillard refused to wear his eyeglasses when on the diamond, an explanation perhaps for his many errors.

William Beverly Lillard was born on Jan. 10, 1918, at Goleta, Calif. He died on June 9 at San Luis Obispo, Calif. He was 91. He leaves his wife of 69 years, the former Sarah Marie Wright, known as Sally. He also leaves two daughters, four grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by older brothers Lawrence and Gene, the latter whom died in 1991, aged 77.

Globe campaign in Victoria

The Globe and Mail canvasses for readers in the wake of the Victoria Times Colonist's decision to suspend Monday publication.

Even Monday Magazine doesn't publish on Monday.

Where there's a bug, there's his blog

The actor Victor Kilian in undated portrait. His grandson, North Vancouver writer Crawford Kilian, is seen below.

By Tom Hawthorn

Special to The Globe and Mail
July 8, 2009

VICTORIA

First came the Chicken Little reports. Then came the predictable lull, a hushed period of post-hysteria updates. Now we know the chicken was just under the weather. It’s his pal, Porky, who’s sicker than a dog.

Through it all, for the past four years, Crawford Kilian has dutifully monitored reports from around the world, posting regularly to his blog on pandemic influenza.

The blog is called H5N1, which is the official name for avian flu. These days, his reports more often cite H1N1, the swine flu. If you followed his blog earlier this week, perhaps prompted by his Twitter feed (@crof), you’d have been linked to stories from Spain (832 cases, six “grave”), Brazil (905 cases), Tasmania (first death), and Jamaica (first death). You’d also be able to read a 16-page plan by the American College of Emergency Physicians to cope with this fall’s expected surge in cases.

He sent alerts about three deaths in Canada, 231 cases in Thailand, 11 sick students in South Africa, not to mention the secretary-general of the United Nations calling for a billion-dollar fund to help poor countries fight the infection.

Perhaps the most disconcerting report concerned hospital staff in Argentina (“now the epicenter of the world”) refusing to help treat a stricken three-year-old girl in Entre Rios province.


The blogger seems indefatigable, though recent events are starting to tire him out.

“It has run me ragged the last 10, 12 weeks,” he said. “The news has come in so fast and furious.”

The flubloggia (the cyber community of influenza obsessives) finds redemption of sorts in the current cascade of bad news following the anticlimax of the avian flu scare.

“We knew we were cranks,” Mr. Kilian said. “We were making a huge fuss about and spending a lot of time on a non-existent pandemic.”

Now, Mr. Kilian reports on Argentina coping with a surge of demand on its medical resources. In Canada, the reaction to the spring outbreak of swine flu is just a dress rehearsal for what’s coming this fall.

Mr. Kilian is doing his part in keeping the public informed. At 68, he likely has some resistance to the illness having lived through influenza pandemics in 1957 and 1968.

The flu blog is one of 16 he maintains, though admittedly some are “cobweb sites” with irregular postings. A prolific writer, the retired college instructor has published novels, historical fantasies, a critique of the education system, a thriller set in Antarctica (admiring critics called it a “chiller”), and a terrific history of pioneering black settlement in British Columbia (“Go Do Some Great Thing,” reissued last fall in a revised edition by Commodore Books). Self-Counsel Press will be issuing his latest book in September, titled, “Write Your Non-Fiction Book Online.”

He has yet to publish in print what may be his most compelling tale — life as a Red Diaper baby in the midst of a Red scare.

Born in Manhattan in 1941, he graduated from Columbia University with an English degree, then completed a comfortable two-year tour of duty as a clerk in the U.S. Army before becoming a technical writer at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, Calif. In 1966, Mr. Kilian saw on the cover of the radical magazine Ramparts a photograph of the man who drilled him, Master Sergeant Donald Duncan, “one of the coolest guys I’d ever met in the army.” The cover line read, simply, “I quit!” with the tease, “The whole thing was a lie!” The decorated sergeant wears a green beret. The next year, Mr. Kilian abandoned the Bay Area in the midst of the Summer of Love to start a new life in Vancouver. Though he had fulfilled his military obligation stateside, he’d had enough of the Vietnam War, as had the sergeant who trained him.

Mr. Kilian soon after became a college instructor and, 40 years later, retired as the last original hire from what is now Capilano University. (“I know not only where all the bodies are buried,” he quips, “but I buried them.”)

In 1980, Canadian Weekend magazine predicted Mr. Kilian would be a household name as a writer by the end of the decade. That did not happen, though the author has never stopped writing. Perhaps he has been making up for an unhappy period in which his family’s politics led to exile.

Mr. KIlian is a rare person who can say “I owe my existence to Hitler.” His parents met at a rally of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.

Their son was named for a family friend, the magazine illustrator Will Crawford. The artist spent time with Mr. Kilian’s grandfather at Free Acres, an experimental community in New Jersey whose free-thinking residents were dismissed by critics as “freakers.” The actor James Cagney, also a family friend, lived for a time in the utopian settlement.

Victor Kilian and Mr. Cagney were vaudeville partners, both later taking roles in motion pictures, Mr. Kilian more often than not playing a dastardly villain. Family lore has Mr. Kilian taking a misplaced punch in the head from John Wayne during the filming of a fight scene for “Reap the Wild Wind.” Mr. Kilian eventually lost sight in the eye, though at the time Mr. Wayne felt aggrieved because his punch failed to drop the rival actor.

Victor Kilian and his namesake son, an actor and screenwriter, both belonged to the Communist Party, the son once escorting the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune on a fundraising tour of New England in support of the Spanish Republic.

The senior Kilion was ordered to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He refused to name names and was blacklisted, as was Victor Kilian Jr., who moved his family to Mexico City. Young Crawford attended bullfights and remembers buying a cavalry sabre at the thieves’ market, an idyll somewhat circumscribed by fear a slip could cost his mother her job as a school teacher, which provided the family’s income in the wake of the blacklist.

It was in Mexico that he befriended the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who became a mentor. Mr. Trumbo won an Academy Award under an alias before effectively breaking the blacklist by being named as the writer for Spartacus in 1960.

Mr. Kilian’s grandfather later capped his career as a character actor by portraying the grandfather on the “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” television series. He was the Fernwood Flasher. In 1979, the veteran actor was murdered during a burglary at his luxury apartment in the Hollywood Hills.

His relatives’ misplaced devotion to the Soviet Union caused untold disruption for a son and grandson.

“I’ve seen my FBI file,” Mr. Kilian said, “which is all blacked out.”

The anonymous moles noted the young man did not attend Communist Party functions.

“I thought Communists were a bunch of old farts. Who wanted to hang out with them?”

Almost 20 years ago, Mr. Kilian wrote a memoir titled, “Growing Up Blacklisted.” It remains unpublished, a rare bit of Kiliania not to be printed, though he has included it in a digitized essay collection.

He remembers his father, a radio operator in the merchant marine during the war, operating a ham radio.He got postcards from fellow operators from half a world away.

Mr. Kilian does not receive much snail mail from correspondents, but he does conduct a page survey. His H5N1 blog averages 1,668 visits per day. Someday soon, the page will inform visitor No. 1,500,000, an audience eager for the latest information on a pandemic yet to have shown its full force.

Study of plants and people leads to Order

Nancy Turner photographed in her yard by Deddeda Stemler.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
July 6, 2009

VICTORIA

Nancy Turner’s yard is a riot of native plants — camas and saskatoon berries, salmonberries and thimbleberries, wild gingers and rattlesnake plantain.

She is a scientist and so knows these plants also as Camassia leichtlinii and Amelanchier alnifolia, Rubus spectabilis and Rubus parviflorus, Asarum caudatum and Goodyera oblongifolia.

She knows, too, these have other names in other languages (the Sto:lo, for instance, know the sweet thimbleberry as t’qwem) as well as a history and many different roles in indigenous cultures. This she has made her life’s work, not nearly complete after more than four decades of study, and for which she now has been named to the Order of Canada.

Among all the thousands of accomplished personages to have been named to the Order, the Victoria professor is a rare ethnobotanist.

“I was pretty surprised,” she said of the award call from Ottawa. “Really overwhelmed. Oh my goodness, there are so many people I’ve worked with who should be a part of it.”

Her research has taken her to the isolated northern coast, where she has harvested seaweed with the Gitga’at of Hartley Bay, south of Prince Rupert, and into meadows with the Tsartlip of Brentwood Bay, a long amble from the wildflowers of her own Saanich home.

She watches preparations as elders lead the harvest of wild vegetables, or boil bulbs into a salve, or burn seeds for ceremonial purposes. The elders share with her their knowledge in the understanding it will be preserved for future generations.

Thus, an ancient oral tradition finds its way into the classroom, the plant lore and agricultural customs of the indigenous peoples of British Columbia pressed into textbooks like a fallen leaf.

Her research has led to a rather dramatic reinterpretation of life in this land and on these waters before the arrival of Europeans. The people here were not merely hunter-gatherers, but farmers, even if the practice went unrecognized by new arrivals who acknowledged only straight rows of crops “like Farmer McGregor’s garden.”

Ms. Turner, 62, can hardly remember a time in her life when she was not fascinated by plants.

Born in Berkeley, Calif., to a scientific family, she lived in Montana before arriving in Victoria at age 5. Her paternal grandfather, James W. Chapman, helped her build her first plant press. (He was an expert in ant taxonomy. The title of a 1963 paper: “Some new and interesting Philippine ants.” His knowledge of the archipelago’s hill country helped him and his wife flee Japanese occupation forces during the war, though they were eventually captured and interned, recounted by the duo in a memoir titled, “Escape to the Hills.”)

By age 9, she belonged to a junior natural history society and had fallen under the spell of Freeman King, a local naturalist whose name now graces a park with centuries-old forests, where once licorice fern was used to ease stomach troubles.

In Grade 12, she knew she wanted to be an ethnobotanist. A science degree at the University of Victoria was followed by a doctorate at the University of British Columbia and untold excursions into the bush.

A fan of wild berries, the one that causes a pause is the soapberry.

“If you were to pop one in your mouth, you’d say, ‘Bleeaghhh!’,” she said in a voice betraying sour experience. “Very juicy but quite bitter.”

The traditional preparation includes mixing the crushed berries with water before whipping the concoction with a salal branch, or bare hand. “It gets stiff and frothy with a pink colour.” The result, which has the consistency of beaten egg whites, is mixed with strawberries, or apple juice.

“A lot of elders I work with recall it with fondness and nostalgia.” She contemplated her own sampling of the delicacy. “It is an acquired taste,” she pronounced.

The lessons learned in the field taught her the first peoples practiced a form of kincentric ecology in which all living things, even plants, were regarded as a kindred relation. They developed a permaculture.

“It wasn’t random plucking,” she said of the harvesting of foods. “It was a system built up over hundreds of years.

“Their practices enhanced the habitat, so it was most productive.”

Ms. Turner, a professor in the University of Victoria’s school of environmental studies, has seen these traditions carried out on Princess Royal Island, a short boat ride from Hartley Bay, whose residents earned the province’s gratitude for their brave and selfless rescue of the passengers aboard a foundering ferry.

The community continues to worry about the effect of leaking diesel oil from the sunken boat on the harvest of oysters and seaweed.

Ms. Turner only recently returned to the city after a three-month stay at Pierre Berton’s old cabin in Dawson City, where her husband, Robert, an author, worked on a book about Yukon sternwheelers. She laboured on her own project about the passing of plant knowledge through the millennia, a “huge jigsaw puzzle” of a book.

The telephone call from Ottawa revealing her latest honour came with a caveat — she was to keep the news to herself until a formal announcement on Canada Day. Some 2,000-kilometres from her garden, surrounded by wild rose and kinnikinnick, whose berries can be fried in grease and whose leaves make a dandy tea and can be used as a smoking mixture, it was an easy secret to keep.

King of Diamonds

By Tom Hawthorn
Douglas: Victoria's Business Magazine
July 2009


Long, narrow boxes containing a ready-to-assemble batting cage lean against a wall. Other boxes litter the floor. Someone has stretched a bundle of greyish cloth across the cardboard, like a bath mat put out to air.

The press box at Royal Athletic Stadium looks like moving day at a frat house.

Holding a chair overhead as he searches for a clear spot amid the debris is Darren Parker. He finds a spot, collapses into the chair, exhales. Before a question is asked, he leans forward to deliver his pitch. Parker, 38, has a boyish demeanor, expressed by a quick smile and a salesman’s eagerness to share with you good news before clinching the sale. With his slicked hair, all he needs is a sharp office suit to look like a character from Mad Men.

A few steps below the press box, the front office staff of the Victoria Seals baseball team are holding a brainstorming session at a round table. Their meeting can be overheard by anyone stepping into the V-shaped room at the top of the rear of the grandstand at the corner of Caledonia and Vancouver. At the reception desk, a plastic candy dish shaped like an oversized plastic baseball offers treats for those who drop by. The space is separated by room dividers. Even Parker, the president and co-owner of the team, does not have a private office, which is how we ended up in the messy press box. We are a long way from baseball’s major leagues.

The Seals are the latest sporting entry to compete for entertainment dollars in the capital city. Parker is certain residents will greet his expansion team with enthusiasm.

“Victoria is a baseball town,” he insists, “without a baseball team.”


It was six weeks before Opening Day. Much still needed to be done. A diamond-shaped infield had been cut from the Royal Athletic Park lawn, but a city crew had yet to build a pitching mound, or install home plate. The outfield needed a fence lest right field be a cow pasture as long as a city block.

A $400,000 US scoreboard was on order from Daktronics, a manufacturer based in South Dakota that this season alone placed new boards — sorry, “integrated baseball systems” — in a half-dozen major-league parks. They’re also responsible for the displays at GM Place and BC Place. The purchase excites Parker. “It offers full video capability! We can show players’ headshots!” He could hardly have been more excited had he just signed a slugger. Parker sees the outfield display as “part of the entertainment package” and “an important part of the baseball experience.” Left unsaid is its role in offering sponsors as a state-of-the-art way of reaching the paying customers.

The to-do list was daunting. Parker is negotiating with a local former major leaguer he wants to hire as a coach. The team is looking for host families with whom the athletes will board. There were sponsors to find and tickets to sell.

Some of the typical sporting advertisers are aboard — McDonald’s and Coca-Cola — as well as some of the more prominent local companies in B.C. Hydro, Thrifty Foods and Vancouver Island Breweries. A downtown budget hotel — Best Western Carlton Plaza — will be playing host to visiting teams in exchange for signage at the park. In a tourist town, summer accommodation is pricy.

A baseball team’s debut brings with it a lineup of one-time expenditures. A check has to be done for possible copyrights on the selected name; a logo needs to be created and colours chosen; after which letter head, business cards and souvenirs can be printed and manufactured. “I’m writing a lot of cheques,” Parker says. About a million dollars will be spent to get the team on the field for its inaugural campaign.

A lot of tickets will have to be sold to cover those expenses. The top ticket at Royal Athletic Park costs $16 with general admission set at $12. Seniors get a $2 reduction on all tickets, while children under six enjoy free admission. A pair of season tickets in the grandstand cost $1,080. The Seals enjoyed early success selling “Eight is Enough” packages of tickets for $80, redeemable for any game.

With 44 home dates, the team seeks an average attendance of about 2,000. The greater the number of customers the more revenue the club will enjoy from its share of concession sales in the city-owned ball park. “It’s up to us to get bums in seats,” he says. The Seals will add to revenues through souvenir sales. A month before Opening Day, the cub offered just two options — a ball cap at $19.95 and a toque at $14.95. (And if there’s a summertime demand for toques, one suspects attendance figures will be on the low side.)

While Parker is confident the Seals would be a success on the field as well as at the gate, longtime fans recall the checkered history of minor professional baseball on Vancouver Island. The Tyees went out of business in 1954 after nine seasons. The Mussels folded in 1980 after three seasons. The most recent entry, the Capitals, appeared in 2003 as part of the Canadian Baseball League, a venture in which the league owned all eight clubs. Jeff Mallett, who grew up in Victoria before making a fortune as president of the online outfit Yahoo!, signed the cheques for a league in which the great pitcher Ferguson Jenkins, the only Canadian in the Baseball Hall of Fame, served as commissioner. The Capitals lasted just 35 games before the entire league shut down, as Mallett closed his wallet. The final indignity was an auction of the league’s possessions a few months later. Even today you can buy a Victoria Capitals souvenir blue-and-white baseball on eBay for $7.99 US.

If you’re keeping score at home, that’s one, two, three strikes.

One observer who thinks the Seals can succeed is John Meldrum, an assistant professor at the University of Victoria with an expertise in sports marketing. Minor baseball retains a homey reputation unbesmirched by steroids, questionable sponsors (remember Enron Field?), and aloof athletes. The Seals do not have much competition for sports dollars in the summer and a family can attend a game for about the same cost as an outing to the movies.

On the other hand, the Seals are starting from scratch.

“They’re new and anything new is tough to sell,” he said. “There isn’t a league history, or anything like that to connect them to the community.”

Victoria also has a reputation for being a walk-up town. Tickets are bought as a last-minute decision. This is also a city in which there are many outdoor attractions to be enjoyed on a glorious summer day.

Meldrum, 43, who counts old Tiger Stadium in Detroit as his favourite baseball park, thinks the club has a winner in its flex-pack of eight tickets. “You get a better price,” he said, “and you go to the game when you want.”

Parker himself believes he can succeed because the game is in his blood.

“I grew up around the ballpark,” he said. “It was my babysitter and my playground.”

He was just a boy when his father bought his first baseball team. Russell Parker was one of 13 children born to a family at Moosomin, Sask., 225 kilometres east of Regina on the Manitoba border. As a boy, Russ played catcher and second base at a time when the prairies were a baseball hotbed. In summer, such National Hockey League stars as Gordie Howe and Terry Sawchuk traded lace-up sweaters for baseball flannels.

Russ Parker came to Calgary as a young man. He sold typewriters and office supplies, soon opening his own business, Calgary Copier. He and his wife were joined by a single employee. The oil boom created a demand for photocopy machines and the Parkers built a family fortune on black gold, only in their case it was toner, not oil. The company had 130 employees when he sold in 1989.

In 1977, Parker launched the Calgary Cardinals, an expansion team at the lower levels of minor baseball. Seven years later, he spent $1 million for the Salt Lake City Gulls, a franchise in the Pacific Coast League, a Triple-A circuit just one level below the major leagues. He moved the team to Calgary, where the Cannons became a model of smart marketing. The team spent money to improve the city-owned ball park, making more pleasurable the experience for the ticket-buying public.

If he wasn’t in class, little Darren Parker could be found at Foothills Stadium. He was a bat boy, an usher, a vendor. The proximity to young pro athletes provided some unexpected lessons. He learned to better catch and throw, as well as how to “swear in Spanish and English,” he said with a laugh. Marketing became his forte.

“You need to offer more than just a sporting event,” he said. “We’re able to make it more of a carnival atmosphere. That’s the key, getting them to leave the ball park with a smile on their face.” Win or lose.

The product on the field is important, but with the players lacking in familiarity, not to mention with lesser skill than can be seen on any game on television, it is the experience of attending a ball game that will lure the crowd.

“The sights. The sounds. The smells. The hot dogs. The onions. The Coppertone in the stands.”

Baseball’s leisurely pace (surely you mean “boring”? — ed.) allows for built-in promotions at the beginning and middle of all nine innings. On Sundays, children will run the bases after the game with Seamore the Seal mascot. Midway games will be available behind the stands, allowing children to test their skill at throwing a baseball. Rare is the child able to sit through a game’s umpteenth pitching change. All sorts of tomfoolery can take place. In Calgary, Conehead Day was popular. “You want to preserve the integrity of the game,” Parker said, “but you also want to do something off the wall.”

The Seals are an expansion franchise in the Golden Baseball League, an independent circuit now in its fifth season. The league, based at Dublin, Calif., was founded by Dave Kaval, who conjured the league as part of a class project while attending the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The league originally owned all the teams while accepting investment from the likes of game-show host Pat Sajak.

Now, the league sells franchises to businessmen such as the Parkers. (“It was like communism,” Darren Parker said of the league’s origins. “In theory it makes sense, but the reality is something else.”) This season, the league has teams in three countries (Canada, the United States and Mexico), two provinces (Alberta and B.C.) and three states (Utah, Nevada, and California). None of the players in the 10-team league are the property of any major-league clubs. Many are undrafted American college players, or young Latin Americans whose skills went unnoticed by birddog scouts.

The league enforces a salary cap, so Parker has $84,000 US to divvy among 22 players for four months of play. That’s chump change to the likes of New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez, who will make $33 million US this season, a payday $203,703.70 for each of 162 games. A-Rod earned the Seals’ season payroll by about midway through the third inning of Opening Day.

Every Golden team seems to sign at least one former big leaguer, including even former stars deluded enough to think they have a chance to climb back up baseball’s ladder to what the players call The Show. Rickey Henderson, known as The Man of Steal for his record-breaking base thefts, played for the San Diego Surf Dawgs back in 2005. The former stars are a draw both at home and on the road. Earlier this year, the Seals signed pitcher Jose Lima, who spent 13 seasons in the majors with five teams. It is possible the Seals’ biggest drawing card will be manager Darrell Evans, who hit 414 homers in the bigs. Safe to say none of the Seals will ever wind up with his credentials.

Not that the Golden league has failed to produce prospects. One of the more unlikely journeys was taken by Scott Richmond, a Vancouver-born right-handed pitcher who was undrafted. He spent three years as a shipyard labourer, got signed by Edmonton of the Golden league, worked his way up until at last making his debut with the Toronto Blue Jays last July a month before his 29th birthday. That’s the kind of story the league will promote to lure fans into the park. You never know which kid will actually prove to have the right stuff.

On closer inspection, the grey cloth stretched out in the press box turned out to be the mascot’s costume. Soaked in sweat after a promotional event, it needed to be aired out. To Parker’s horror, the whiskered head had been placed on the shelf in front of the window, where it was on display. He placed the head out of sight. A mascot depends on mystique.

The success of the franchise will depend on such attention to detail. Is the food good? Is the park a friendly venue for families? Do sponsors get full value for their money? Will Victoria’s notoriously finicky ticket buyers become reliable fans?

The Parker family believes if you market it, they will come.

Vancouver's archivists keeping it reel

Bing Crosby drives a bulldozer.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
July 2, 2009

It is a sunny day in Stanley Park. At the head of the causeway, two magnificent concrete lions guard the entrance to the Lions Gate Bridge. A single automobile travels northbound on an otherwise empty bridge.

That’s right. A lone car on the bridge deck. At midday.

Boy, Vancouver has really changed.

The city archives has just posted online 150 films from their vault — actually, a walk-in freezer. The library of moving images capture a lost era — a 1928 polo match, a costume party at a mansion, a barnstorming daredevil showing off stunts in the skies overhead. A minute-long newsreel salvaged from a time capsule shows Bing Crosby atop a bulldozer, scraping away dirt on the eastside to make way for a community centre.

The clips from films, newsreels and home movies bring to life a city and a way of life otherwise relegated to fading memory.

The archives are better known for their holdings of documents and still photographs. A collection of donated moving images — fragile and always in danger of deteriorating — could only be viewed on site. Now, the public can view the films without leaving the comfort of their home, or office.

The staff suspects a media-savvy public will respond well to historical films.

“We expect to experience history the same way we experience today,” said city archivist Leslie Mobbs.

Mr. Mobbs knows many think of the archives as a dusty repository located in a semi-underground bunker in Vanier Park. Dust, of course, is the archivist’s enemy. As is oxygen. As is the grease we all carry on our fingertips. The wonder of the Internet permits a mass audience to enjoy once what was the purview of historians and other specialists.

Sue Bigelow is the archive’s digital conservator. She was hired in 1985 at a time when the archives boasted not a single computer. The donated films, many of which had been scavenged from attics and basements, slowly decayed. Acetate film emitted acedic acid. Film warped and shrank, until sprocket holes no longer fit.

A few years ago, the archives began a trailblazing project in preservation, storing the films in a freezer at minus-18 degrees C.

The films, sent to a company in Kentucky that specializes in digitization, are irresistible in their voyeuristic insight into a city where history matters only until the developer’s next brainstorm.

So, we can watch a fire at one of the sawmills that once lined the waterfront; a horse and cart delivering milk in Shaugnessy; a display of fire hoses in a barely recognizable False Creek; a Great War ace taking off from a float plane at the long-forgotten Jericho Beach air base; the demolition of old Granville Street Bridge.

A parade sponsored by Spencer’s Department store has a hallucinatory air to it, as the storybook and fairy-tale themed floats include marchers with oversized heads and outlandish garb. The procession ends with Santa Claus arriving aboard a ship-shaped float before climbing a ladder to greet the cheering throngs below from a balcony.

A 1964 film shot on Kodachrome captures the city’s neon brilliance at night along Granville Street’s Theatre Row. (“Mary Poppins” was playing at the Strand.) Now, even Kodachrome’s days are numbered.

Perhaps Ms. Bigelow’s favourite is a one-minute, 52-second silent film of the house and gardens at a private home at Trimble and West Second in Point Grey. Taken by an unknown amateur, likely a member of the household, the film records extensive flowered grounds and a massive greenhouse. (Not to mention boys tossing kittens atop an unhappy pet rabbit.)

This is Aberthau, a mansion designed in 1909 by the architect Samuel Maclure in his preferred Tudor Revival style. Originally built for James Rear, a life insurance executive, the home was purchased by Col. Victor Spencer, the son of the founder of a department store chain. The colonel provided its current Welsh name, which means “a place filled with light.”

The film was shot in 1932, after the family had acquired surrounding properties for a tennis court and other amenities. The grounds covered nearly six acres. It is a glimpse at a lost way of life. During the Second World War, the home was used as an air force officers’ mess. In 1974, the Vancouver park board converted it into a recreational centre. The Spencer name, once so prominent, is remembered now only by old-timers. Today, even the notion of a department store seems hopelessly old fashioned.

Some months back, the archives obtained a time capsule when the old Sunset Community Centre was razed.

The stainless steel capsule had been soldered at one end. Ms. Bigelow was reluctant to use too much heat to open the shell, lest the unknown contents inside were damaged.

Over several weeks, she slowly worked at the casing with a Dremel saw, leaving a one-inch seal for an official opening.

One of the prizes inside was a newsreel film. Alas, it had been shot on nitrate film, a volatile, flammable and dangerous product. Good thing she hadn’t used a soldering iron, or the interior could have been reduced to ashes. Special permits were needed to send the film across the border.

The 95-second newsreel produced in 1948 by Canadian Paramount News shows the singer Bing Crosby receiving a key to the city before piloting a bulldozer in a ceremonial sod-turning.

“Bing should feel as at home on this plodding machine as he would on one of his own horses,” announcer Winston Barron pronounces in a stentorian tone. “The crowd loves every minute of it!”

The archivists also found inside the time capsule a letter, dated 1949. It captures some of the anxiety of the age.

“Some people today refer to this as the start of the Atomic Age,” the letter states. “You who open this will know whether or not our scientists, after successfully splitting the atom developed Atomic Power for the benefit of all mankind or — Heaven forbid — permitted its use in the destruction of present-day civilization.”

Ms. Bigelow, the conservator, does not pay too much attention to the written word on what she handles.

“I don’t read it,” she said. “I just make it last.”

She thought of the fascinating material that passes through her hands. The condition is duly noted, but the contents, however fascinating, all too often go unobserved.

“If I sat around reading stuff, she said, a wistful tone to her voice, “I’d get nothing done.”

His job barely begun, Obama already fodder for the classroom

Daniel Reeve photographed by Deddeda Stemler.

By Tom Hawthorn

Special to The Globe and Mail
June 29, 2009

VICTORIA

Daniel Reeve teaches a college class where each day's lessons are ripped from the headlines. Or 140-character Twitter posts.

Mr. Reeve has just completed a four-session, 10-hour lecture series on "The Rise of Barack Obama: From Humble Beginnings to the First 100 Days."

The United States president is barely through a tenth of a first term in the Oval Office and he's already fodder for the classroom.

The criminology and political science teacher included in each class a memorable Obama oration - his inauguration speech; his red-states, blue-states speech to the Democratic convention five years ago; his troubleshooting more-perfect-union speech on race relations; and the New Hampshire "Yes We Can" primary speech, soon after mashed into a music video by will.i.am.

The best political orator in a generation offers stiff competition for a lecturer interested in holding a classroom's attention. "It's hard to follow him, let me tell ya," Mr. Reeve said.

His solution: Throw it back to the class. Ask the students their reaction to a speech.

Mr. Reeve considers Mr. Obama to be the most important politician in Canada since the retirement of Pierre Trudeau. He sees the charismatic president as a political game changer, as his march to the White House destroyed one myth (a negative message trumps a positive one) after another (the young don't vote).

Mr. Obama is a phenomenon.

"He gained in one year what politicians struggle for in their entire career," he said.

Mr. Reeve, 38, who was born in Toronto and raised in British Columbia, has spent time on the hustings himself. He got thwacked as an NDP standard bearer (a.k.a. sacrificial lamb) in West Vancouver-Capilano in the 1996 provincial election. He has had better fortune as a campaign organizer, having helped elect Dean Fortin mayor of Victoria last fall.

He also had a stint as a ministerial assistant to health minister Corky Evans, a populist whom he found to be "much smarter than anyone ever gave him credit."

Mr. Reeve spent the past two years glued to his television, becoming best friends, he joked, with Anderson Cooper of CNN and Jon Stewart of The Daily Show.

His Camosun College lectures included an examination of the unsuccessful Republican campaign, including one topic certain to stir the classroom.

"As soon as you raised Sarah Palin," he said, "everyone got fired up."

The Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee did not have admirers in the class.

"In this class, in Victoria, in this context, everyone thought Sarah Palin was a joke."

The teacher insists his lectures avoided becoming a "love-in," maintaining a rigorous academic standard, though he confesses that "Obama could walk on water in this town and no one would bat an eye."

He anticipates reviving the lecture series this fall.

Mr. Reeve sees parallels between Mr. Obama and one of his Democratic predecessors - one who, incidentally, also came to office at a time of economic uncertainty.

The saviour of American-style capitalism was celebrated in his day with shelves full of souvenirs - buttons, badges, medals, hand fans, lucky coins, calendar pads, mantelpiece clocks celebrating him as the captain of the ship of state. To this day, Franklin D. Roosevelt product continues to slip off the presses - witness Conrad Black's epic doorstopper biography.

The inauguration of the current president has been greeted with a similar outpouring of commemorative plates and plaques, not to mention other tchotchkes, as well as such ephemera as newspaper supplements.

Nor is Mr. Reeve alone in studying a president yet to have time to create a legacy.

Last year, Andrew Wender taught a course at the University of Victoria called "Obama or McCain: American Presidential Politics, Canada and the World." The American-born professor's class attracted 160 students - about a third were members of the public who signed up through Continuing Studies.

In a time of tough economics, Obama 101 is a growth industry.

The discovery of Michael Jackson

Since the global media cartel demands that all newspaper stories contain a reference to Michael Jackson, here's mine.

Back in the 1960s, a British Columbia-based soul band called Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers was signed to a recording contract by Berry Gordy, the mogul of Motown. The band included a guitarist from Edmonton named Tommy Chong, who would later team up with Cheech Marin as the stoned comedy duo Cheech & Chong.

Mr. Chong co-wrote the band's first hit, a ballad about interracial love titled, "Does Your Mama Know About Me," which was covered by the Supremes.

Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers had a Top-30 hit with the number, driving sales of their eponymous debut album, the cover of which was photographed with Vancouver's futuristic Bayshore Hotel as a backdrop.

In 1968, the Vancouver group was a headlining act in a 10-day revue show at the Regal theatre in Chicago. Among the supporting performers was a family act from nearby Gary, Ind. Mr. Taylor took one look at the dancing lead singer and saw in him a pint-sized James Brown.

He called Mr. Gordy in Detroit and urged him to sign the family. Mr. Taylor then produced their Motown debut album. In Motown's mythmaking, the lead singer of the Supremes was credited with discovering the group, so the album was titled, Diana Ross Presents The Jackson 5.