Jack Cash

Jack Cash, Photographer

by Eve Lazarus on March 7, 2020

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.

Jack Cash at Empire Pool UBC, 1955. NVMA # 10432

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. With the formidable Gwen as his mother, it’s not surprising that Jack also went into the newspaper business. He got his start as a staff photographer for the Vancouver Sun in the 1930s.

Jack Cash’s photo of his mother’s Trend House appeared in the August 1960 issue of Western Homes and Living. Courtesy NVMA

Lived in North Vancouver:

Jack, was born in 1918 and spent much of his life in North Vancouver, which makes him a great subject for the North Vancouver Museum and Archives latest exhibit. Through the Lens of Jack Cash, 1939-1970 opened this week at the Community History Centre in Lynn Valley, and comes on the heels of Women and Wartime, which is fitting because Jack started work for Burrard Dry Docks in 1939, first as an assistant pipefitter, and then as shipbuilding increased during the war years, as the official staff photographer.

Commercial photographer:

Sam Frederick, the Archives & Community Engagement Intern, has put together a display that covers his work as a commercial photographer for the logging, shipping and building industries, as a landscape photographer and as an architectural photographer for Western Homes and Living. The photos of a farmer holding a chicken and a phone operator from 1956 are from the period he worked as a photographer for James Lovick Advertising Agency. There are photos of his Marine Drive studio, which he opened that year. It was a former butcher’s shop with a walk-in freezer that Jack used as his darkroom. He had a portrait shooting studio in the centre, and sold cameras and photography equipment up front.

Sam Frederick sorts through the Jack Cash Collection at NVMA. Cash’s photos line the top of the book shelf. Eve Lazarus photo

The Columbian:

In 1967, Jack and his wife Elva bought a 70-foot mission ship from the Anglican Church. They called it the Columbian and outfitted it with four passenger staterooms and two lounges and chartered trips to coastal resorts between Victoria and Alaska. “When I heard the Columbian was for sale, I mortgaged everything I had to buy it,” Jack told a Times Colonist reporter in November 1968.

Jack died in 2005. His obituary says: “Jack most recently celebrated his 87^th birthday in his unique style by riding a Honda Gold Wing motorcycle.”

Page from Jack Cash’s customer log book, 1954. Courtesy NVMA

Gwen Cash and the Trend House

Tags Gwen Cash, Jack Cash, James Lovick Advertising Agency, North Vancouver Museum and Archives, the Columbian, Trend House

Foncie’s North Vancouver Connection

by Eve Lazarus on May 28, 2016

When Foncie Pulice was 21 in 1934, he quit house painting and went to work for Joe Iaci and his street photography company Kandid Kamera.

Foncie, to my knowledge, never crossed the bridge or took the ferry to North Vancouver—at least not for his work. He did capture many of our most colourful citizens. A street photographer who worked mostly on Hastings and Granville Streets, he photographed people out shopping, going to a show, or on their way to work.

He created over 15 million images with his home made camera.

Janet Turner has curated a small exhibition at the Community History Centre in Lynn Valley from photos from the collection.

Foncie photos aren’t dated unless the recipient writes on the back, so the time period is mostly a good guess, but that’s part of the fun.

Gertie Wepsala:

Gertie Wepsala was a Canadian Olympic Ski Champion. She married Al Beaton, a Sports Hall of Famer for the Canadian Olympic Basketball team in 1940 and 1941. Al helped develop Grouse Mountain Resorts and built the world’s first double chairlift from the top of Skyline Drive. He later managed Grouse Mountain. Both he and Gertie qualified for the Olympics, but the games were cancelled during the war years.

The Fromme Sisters:

There’s a photo of the three Fromme sisters—Vera, Julia and Margaret—spending a day on the town; one of a young Walter Draycott, and another of his friend Tom Menzies, the curator at the Museum of Vancouver in the ‘40s.

Like the Fromme family, Draycott was a North Vancouver pioneer, he has a street named after him, and his statue sits in the little square at the corner of Lynn Valley Road and Mountain Highway.

Walter Draycott. Eve Lazarus photo, 2016

Marie Desimone:

Marie Desimone, a shipyard worker is captured on the way to catch the ferry to work at the Burrard Dry Dock.

Bette and Bob Booth:

Bette Booth is photographed with her husband Bob, an architect who built his own West Coast modern home near Capilano River. Bob worked on both the Burrard Dry Dock and Westminster Abbey in Mission.

Jack Cash, a prolific photographer himself, and son of the formidable Gwen Cash, who appears in Sensational Victoria, is shown in a photo with his oldest son and wife Aileen (Binns).

Jennie and Eva Conroy:

Eva and her sister Jennie Conroy are photographed shortly before Jennie’s murder in 1944.

When Foncie retired in November of 1979 he told a Province reporter that when he started as a 20-year-old back in 1934 there were six companies in Vancouver. Street photography, he said, really started to take off during the war. “At one time, I was taking 4,000 to 5,000 pictures every day,” he told the reporter.

Millions of photos were thrown out. “I’d keep them for a year, then throw them out. I realize now I should have saved them but it’s too late.”

Foncie Pulice died in 2003 at the age of 88.

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