Eve Lazarus
Muriel “Capi” Wylie Blanchet of Vancouver Island died in 1961 without ever knowing what an incredible success her book would become.
Capi’s story is part of the “Legendary Women” chapter in Sensational Victoria.
Capi Blanchet was found dead in 1961, slumped over her typewriter while writing a sequel to The Curve of Time.
Kiyoko Tanaka-Goto may not be the first person who springs to mind for women’s history month, but she was brave and entrepreneurial and succeeded at a time when there were few opportunities for women, especially ones who weren’t white.
Kiyoko Tanaka-Goto was an enterprising Japanese woman who was born in Tokyo and came to Canada in 1916 as a 19-year-old picture bride.
The Vancouver Police Museum’s Kristin Hardie solved the mystery of this ca.1940 photo. The women police officers on patrol are Bessie Say and Jeanette Heathorn.
This great Foncie photo of two women police officers ran in Sensational Vancouver, in a chapter called “Lurancy Harris’s Beat.” Lurancy was the first female police officer in Canada when she was hired along with Minnie Millar by the Vancouver Police Department in 1912, and one of my favourite historical characters.
This is an excerpt from Sensational Vancouver:
A reporter once asked Phyllis Munday if she’d ever been really frightened during all her years of climbing mountains. “Thunderstorms,” she told him. “I hated thunderstorms.”
What she didn’t mention was the time she saved husband Don Munday’s life from a grizzly bear by charging at it with an ice axe; when she regularly carted 60 pounds of backpack over flood swollen creeks; the times she had to avoid quicksand and avalanches and plunges into hidden crevasses.
Because May is Asian Heritage Month it seems fitting to run a story about Joy Kogawa. The following is an excerpt from the Legendary Women chapter in Sensational Vancouver.
Joy Kogawa’s childhood house is a modest wood-framed bungalow in South Vancouver. There’s really nothing architecturally significant about it except that it’s one of the few original houses that remain in the neighbourhood.
Rena Del Pieve Gobbi came under fire last week for using discarded gravestones to hold up her garden.
The garden is at Commercial and Powell, wedged in between the Maple Leaf Storage and the train tracks. Since 2001, Rena, an artist and documentary film-maker, has lived at the Artist Resource Centre which is just across from the garden.
Lurancy Harris and Minnie Millar became the first two women police officers in Canada when they were hired by the VPD in 1912
The following is an excerpt from Sensational Vancouver.
Joins VPD:
Lurancy Harris was a 48-year-old seamstress from Nova Scotia had moved to Vancouver in 1911 and rented a small apartment on Robson at Howe.
Most people have heard of Harry Jerome. His name adorns recreation centres and his statue is in Stanley Park. At one time he was the fastest man alive, setting a total of seven world records. In 1970 he was made an officer of the Order of Canada. Fewer people remember his sister Valerie, yet she is just as amazing.
