Eve Lazarus
Jack Cash (1918-2005) started as a Vancouver Sun photographer in the 1930s. He spent most of his life in North Vancouver and went on to have an amazing career.
I first heard about Jack Cash when I was researching his mother Gwen Cash, who when she went to work for Walter Nichol at the Vancouver Daily Province in 1917, became one of the first female news reporter in the country.
It wasn’t easy getting a seat at the West Vancouver Library last Wednesday night. The West Van Historical Society presented Local Voices: Shooting the North Shore with Ralph Bower, retired Vancouver Sun photographer and Mike Wakefield, who also recently retired from a 35-year photography career with the North Shore News.
The place was packed.
About six years ago, I was doing some research for my book Sensational Vancouver and took a tour of Strathcona with James Johnstone. I was excited to meet Paul Yee, a historian who now lives in Toronto, and has written several brilliant books which include Salt Water City, Tales from Gold Mountain, and most recently, A Superior Man (see Paul’s website for a full list).
There is a chapter in Sensational Vancouver called West Coast Modern which explains the connections between artists and architects and the West Coast Modern movement in Vancouver.
Last week I wrote about Selwyn Pullan’s photography exhibition currently on display at the West Vancouver Museum. I focused on his shots of West Coast Modern houses now almost all obliterated from the landscape.
I finally got a chance to drop by the West Vancouver Museum yesterday to check out the latest exhibition on the photography of Selwyn Pullan. Assistant curator Kiriko Watanabe has done an amazing job, not only pulling out some of Selwyn’s most interesting work, but also displaying the cameras that he used to shoot them with.
On May 26, 1896, 143 people crammed onto Streetcar No. 16 to cross the Point Ellice Bridge. It was Queen Victoria’s birthday and they were on their way to attend the celebrations at Macaulay Point Park in Esquimalt. They never made it.
The middle span of the bridge collapsed under the weight and the streetcar plunged into the Upper Harbour landing on its right side.
I had the pleasure of chatting with Bob Cain this week and discovering his beautiful photographs.
Bob grew up in Marpole, at a time when a swing bridge joined Marpole to Sea Island (it was dismantled in 1957 after the Oak Street Bridge opened).
“Marpole was a small town like Kerrisdale and Kitsilano,” he says.
City archivist Heather Gordon says the recent donation of a whopping two million negatives from the Sun and Province (Postmedia) photo library is the largest photographic collection that Vancouver Archives has ever received. It’s also one of the most important.
“The Sun and Province photographers were everywhere, documenting everything, so their work is an extraordinarily valuable source of information about Vancouver particularly between 1970 and 1995,” she says.
