The Written Word
for April 15, 2001

I don’t know what it was that got me thinking. Maybe it was going down to Granville Island and remembering how that used to be an industrial stinkhole when I was a kid. Maybe that made me think of the Lonsdale Quay which used to be a shipyard, building ships of war, when I used to take the North Van ferry with my pals for a Saturday trek up Lynn Creek where we did as routine all the things that are now, for sensible safety reasons, expressly forbidden. In any event I began to realize that I’ve been around for a very long time and could remember a very different city.

I grew up in Kerrisdale before it was toney – at the top of McCleery Street where I lived was a working dairy farm owned by Baroness Van Steenwyck, a Dutch lady who, to the great fun for all the kids in the neighbourhood was visited, ca 1944, by then Princess, later Queen, Juliana.

We had street cars then – and it was better. One of the few things I think was better. Mail came twice a day, once on Saturday. You had a milkman and a breadman who came by horse drawn wagon – I kid you not – so that horse buns and their odour were part of life in the suburbs. Believe it or not, these goods were brought by horse drawn sled in the winter for in those days Vancouver had several weeks of snow … great fun for kids who would sleigh down Macdonald hill to the "flats". Or on Quilchena Golf Club (the old one at 33^rd and Pine Crescent. Or on Tolmie Hill.

We had a "Chinaman" deliver fruit and vegetables on an old Model "T" Ford truck. We didn’t think of "Chinaman" as being a pejorative … but it was because the white community thought of them as inferiors. "Japs" fished and "Hindus" (actually Sikhs) delivered wood. Most of us burned sawdust delivered by Morrow Ice and Coal (the ice was for the icebox though our family as long as I could remember had a Kelvinator Refrigerator) but sometime towards the end of the war we switched to coal with an Iron Fireman furnace. The Logo showed an "iron fireman" filling the coal hamper but it transpired that I became the fireman, loading the hamper then taking the "clinkers" out with a claw like weapon. Morrow, who delivered the coal too had a marvelous slogan – "phone to Morrow for your coal today". And, yes, we had a phone. Number was Kerrisdale 2780. If your number had a letter attached (one of my cousins, whose Dad was overseas putting the family is straitened conditions, was Kerrisdale 2389R) it meant you had a party line, sharing with three or four neighbours. And there were no dials, touch tone or otherwise – "Central" answered when you picked up the phone saying "number puleeese".

Behind our house was a woods almost two square blocks in size. It was a superb place for forts, hiding, and for playing doctor with little girls in.

My friend Denis and I used to go down to the Musqueam Reserve and fish in Tin Can Creek and Pee Wee Creek where we caught small cutthroat trout. Then, on nice days, we went to Wreck Beach for a swim becoming, I suppose, amongst the first of the nude swimmers.

We had noises too. I would lie awake in the morning and actually hear birds – hundreds of them. Robins, Stellars’ Jays, Chickadees. And, in the Fall, the fog horn at Point Atkinson and the guns of the bird shooters off Lulu Island.

We had bad things too. Like a war that so frequently brought bad news to our friends and, with Uncle Howard, killed in Italy, our family. And we had Polio, then called Infantile Paralysis which was an annual scare of huge and well remembered proportions.

I look at my city today and mourn the loss of what was such a wonderful place. Yet I don’t mourn often or for long. For life is the present viewing the future not the past. If ever you start thinking of the past more than the future your time’s about up.

I’m a long way from wanting that to happen.