Eve Lazarus
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.
On February 26, 1947 Vancouver Police officers Charles Boyes and Oliver Ledingham were murdered in a shootout at False Creek Flats.
This story is from Blood, Sweat, and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance
During the 1940s, many of Vancouver’s young men aged between 13 and 18 were recruited into “hoodlum gangs.” The youth were good at steering clear of police, members were rarely identified, and their crimes became increasingly serious.
Tony Antonias, a New Westminster resident and former Aussie started as a copywriter at radio station CKNW in 1955. He stayed there for the next 40 years—to the day.
While CKNW creative director, Tony wrote the famous Woodward’s $1.49 day jingle on February 17, 1958.
As Tony told me a few years back, the jingle came about almost by accident after he hit the key on a new typewriter and it made a loud ding.
In July 2016, several large cardboard boxes filled with photographs, clippings, forensic samples, and case notes pre-dating 1950, and thought to be thrown out decades ago, were discovered in a garage on Gabriola Island. They form the basis of Blood, Sweat, and Fear: the story of Inspector Vance, Vancouver’s first forensic investigator.
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.
For my last post of 2017, I have compiled a list of my favourite history blogs. To make the list, the blog had to written by an individual and have a strong Metro Vancouver flavor.
In alphabetical order: 1. A Most Agreeable Place
Lana Okerlund, a Vancouver book editor and writer, has put together this quirky little blog about bookstores past and present.
The thing about the Kingsgate Mall at Broadway and Kingsway is you either love it or you hate it. It’s weird or wonderful, strange or quaint, creepy or quirky, but it rarely goes unnoticed.
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
The cupola (a replica of the one that used to top King Edward School before the fire) has turned the mall into a landmark, but I can’t imagine calling it a destination by any stretch of the imagination.
Vancouver received its first parking meters on November 12, 1946. The fee was five cents an hour.
For the first 30 years, police had responsibility for checking the meters, and I bet that assignment was the equivalent of standing in the corner with a dunce cap. Parking meter enforcement was transferred to a civilian force in 1976, and the rates ranged between 10 and 40 cents an hour.
