Every Place Has a Story

Remembering Joe Fortes

the_title()

Joe Fortes arrived in Vancouver in 1885 and quickly became one of the city’s most loved citizens. As our first official lifeguard and Beach Avenue resident, he saved dozens of lives.

Joe Fortes
Courtesy City of Vancouver Archives Bu P111

This story is excerpted from: Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History.

Joe Fortes:

In 1904 Joe Fortes was living in a sweet little cottage at the foot of Gilford, right by where the Sylvia Hotel is today. When he heard that the city wanted to rid the water side of homes, he got permission from the mayor to put his home on skids and move it three blocks down the beach to the foot of Bidwell.

Two decades earlier Joseph Seraphim Fortes jumped ship in Burrard Inlet and decided to settle in Vancouver. He was a porter for a time, but after Vancouver burned to the ground in 1886, he started to teach kids to swim in English Bay—hundreds and hundreds of them. Twenty-nine is the official number of lives he saved, but the unofficial number is estimated to be closer to a hundred.

Joe Fortes
Joe diving in the water at English Bay in 1906. Courtesy Vancouver Archives 677-591
Joe’s Beach Avenue Cottage:

Joe lived in his little cottage by the water until his death on February 4, 1922. He was 57.

Instead of moving his former home across the street to Alexandra Park where it could become a repository for black history in Vancouver, for Joe Fortes, and for the houses that once dotted the water side of Beach Avenue, we burned it to the ground—the standard practice for demolition in the ‘20s.

Joe Fortes

“Our friend Joe’s” funeral was held at Holy Rosary Cathedral, and it was the most heavily attended in the history of Vancouver with thousands of people spilling outside the packed church.

In 1927, the people of Vancouver–many of them children–raised $5,000 (the equivalent of about $70,000 today) to build a memorial fountain in his honour. The fountain was sculpted by Charles Marega, one of the most interesting and prolific artists that you’ve probably never heard of, and inscribed with the words “little children loved him.”

Joe Fortes
Courtesy City of Vancouver Archives 99-2685, 1932

Joe’s legend continues to carry on almost a century after his death.

Joe has a seafood restaurant named after him, and a library. In 1986, the Vancouver Historical Society named him “Citizen of the Century,” and in February 2013 he was honoured with a stamp on the 150th anniversary of his birth.

Related: A superb National Film Board animation short about Joe produced in 2002

 

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

Black History Month: Valerie Jerome

the_title()

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.

The following is an excerpt from Sensational Vancouver’s Legendary Women chapter.

In November 2012 friends and former students of Valerie Jerome dedicated a bench in her honour
In November 2012 friends and former students of Valerie Jerome dedicated a bench in her honour

Valerie Jerome had just turned seven when she moved with her family from Winnipeg to North Vancouver. Along with her sister Carolyn, 10, and brothers Harry, 11 and Barton, 6, they moved in across the road from Ridgeway Elementary.

Valerie still vividly remembers her first day at that school.

“It seemed like every kid in the school was lined up with rocks,” she says. “I can still remember the feeling of the first rock that hit my back as we ran.”

Valerie Jerome
Lyon Place, North Vancouver

Valerie doesn’t like to think much about those days, but every February, for more than a decade, she drove across the bridge from Vancouver, returned to her old elementary school and talked to the kids about those early days for Black History month.

She started by pointing to the house on Lyons Place where they lived, and where in 1953, fire broke out during the middle of the night when the sawdust burner caught fire. Valerie was sent to ask a neighbour to call the fire department, not because she was the oldest—she wasn’t—but because she was the whitest.

The family were left out on the street while the neighbours watched from behind their curtains.

“Nobody came out to help us. My mother was pregnant with my youngest sister and we finally got a cab to the Salvation Army Hall on Lonsdale,” says Valerie. The family spent the night on chairs on the sidewalk.

In 1954 the Jeromes bought a small rancher on East 17th near their next school Sutherland Junior Secondary. Valerie worked in the school cafeteria at lunch time, rather than sit alone at a table or go home.

Valerie Jerome
704 East 17th Avenue, North Vancouver

The year she turned 15 everything changed. She set Canadian records at the 1959 Canadian Track and Field National Championships in her running events, broke her age group record for long jump, and helped her team win the relay. She won bronze at the Pan American games in Chicago, and the following year, she joined her brother Harry to represent Canada at the Summer Olympics in Rome.

The media of the day called them the “dusky brother and sister athletes.”

Harry and Valerie Jerome
Harry and Valerie Jerome at the airport. SFU Special Collections photo

“After I had been to the Olympics I was invited to eat with everybody,” she says. “We had a little bit of celebrity and somehow our brown skins turned white.”

The City of North Vancouver held a dance in their honour and gave them $500 each to spend.

 

Sport made everything bearable, she says.

“When the stopwatch gave you a great time, it didn’t matter what colour you were.”

Harry died from a brain aneurysm in 1982. He was 42.

Valerie went to university, became a teacher and taught in Vancouver for 35 years. She spent three decades as a track and field official. Valerie ran in eight elections for the Green Party, federally, provincially and civically. She did all that without any expectation of being elected, but as a way of getting green ideas out. “Nobody was talking about the environment at all in those days,” she says. Her son, Stuart Parker, led the BC Green Party from 1993 to 2000.

In November 2010 dozen of her former students gathered in Stanley Park to see a bench dedicated in her honour. It sits in Stanley Park right next to the statue of her brother Harry.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

Recognizing Black History: The Canada Post Stamps

the_title()

Nora Hendrix and Fielding William Spotts

From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

In February 2014, Canada Post came out with two stamps in recognition of Black History Month. One shows Hogan’s Alley, the unofficial name for an area near Union and Main Streets and home to much of Vancouver’s early black community. The other is of Nora Hendrix and Fielding William Spotts.

The photo of Spotts was taken in 1935, and it shows the 75-year-old  standing outside his home at 217 ½ Prior Street in Hogan’s Alley, which would be bulldozed out of existence our decades later to make way for the Georgia Viaduct.

On the stamp, Spotts stands next to a young Nora Hendrix, who lived to be 100, spent much of her life in Strathcona and become famous for her grandson, rocker Jimi Hendrix. According to the city directory of  1930, Spotts ran a shoe shine business at 724 Main Street.

Rosemary Brown was Canada’s first Black female member of a provincial legislature and the first woman to run for leadership of a federal political party. She received a stamp in 2009

This was the sixth year that Canada Post produced a stamp for Black History Month—Rosemary Brown was first up in 2009, and it was the first time the stamp focussed on a place instead of a person.

I was curious how Canada Post chose these images, so I called media relations. Turns out it’s quite a process. A committee of 12 selects the subject matter. Our one representative from Vancouver in 2014 was artist Ken Lum. He joined a panel of designers, philatelists (stamp collectors), curators, and curiously, Toronto economist David Foot who wrote Boom Bust & Echo.

Joe Fortes
Joe Fortes, legendary Vancouver lifeguard, received a stamp in his honour in 2013

I also wondered who buys stamps these days. Turns out while not many of us mail letters, there’s still a large worldwide demand for stamps. Canada Post churns out about 50 different stamps every year.

You can suggest your own stamp. It takes about two years from inception to find its way to an envelope.

Eleanor Collins, Canada’ first lady of jazz, 2022

Stamps for 2022 include Queen Elizabeth, Calla lilies, Vancouver’s Elsie McGill for the Canadian’s in flight series, and music legend Eleanor Collins who is 102 and lives in Surrey, BC.

© Eve Lazarus, 2022