Some odd stuff has happened in Vancouver's past. Here's a sampling (click to view):

· 1792 to 1899
· 1900 to 1922
· 1923 to 1930
· 1931 to 1935
· 1936 to 1940
· 1941 to 1946
· 1947 to 1954
· 1955 to 1960
· 1961 to 1965

From 1923 to 1930

For more details on these items see the Chronology for the year cited.

  • In 1923, on July 27, the first sitting US president to visit Canada, Warren Harding, came to Vancouver. 50,000 of us turned out to hear him speak in Stanley Park. Exactly one week later Harding died in San Francisco.
  • In 1923 Colony Grebegga Valdessa, a two year old cow at Colony Farm at Essondale, the mental hospital, set a world record for milk production for her age group: 28,371 pounds of milk in one year, about 78 pounds a day.
  • Local newspapers reported that the Point Grey wireless station had picked up mysterious signals from the planet Mars. It was believed the Martians were attempting to contact us.
  • In 1924 Lansdowne Track in Richmond opened, named for a former Governor General. The peat bog on which the track was built acted like a sponge and horses ran slower at high tide.
  • In 1925, on January 8, a man was attacked by a shark in the First Narrows.
  • In 1925 a Vancouver branch of the Ku Klux Klan, the racist organization that had originated in the southern USA, used the Tait Mansion in Shaughnessy as their headquarters. Rent was $150 a month. Today that building is the children’s hospice, Canuck Place.
  • In 1925 movie superstar Rudolph Valentino judged a tango competition in Vancouver.
  • One of the minor performers in the 1925 Lon Chaney movie treatment of Phantom of the Opera was Vancouver choreographer Aida Broadbent.
  • In 1925 Arthur ‘Sparks’ Holstead, who had been granted a licence to operate a 10-watt radio station, CFDC, in Nanaimo in1923 brought the station's transmitter to Vancouver in a suitcase, and went on the air. We know it today as CKWX.
  • The first seaplane flight from Montreal to Vancouver occurred in 1925. It took eight days.
  • In 1926 baseball's Babe Ruth hammed it up on stage in Vancouver during a personal appearance tour of North America. He posed as a batter, with Vancouver mayor L.D. Taylor crouching behind him as catcher, and the city’s chief of police umpiring.
  • In 1926 the Joe Fortes Memorial Drinking Fountain was placed in Alexandra Park, much of the cost being raised from pennies donated by local school children—hundreds of whom had been taught to swim by Joe.
  • In 1927 a Wurlitzer pipe organ, with thirteen sets of pipes, was shipped from the Wurlitzer factory in North Tonawanda, New York, to Vancouver for use in the brand-new Orpheum Theatre. It’s still there, the only pipe organ in Canada still in the theatre in which it was originally installed.
  • In 1927, on October 17, the business magazine Journal of Commerce ran an editorial against the building of skyscrapers in Vancouver.
  • In 1928, on January 1st, 16-year-old Ivy Granstrom made her first entry into the chilly waters of English Bay in the Polar Bear Swim. Ms. Granstrom, blind from birth, will go on to appear at 77 consecutive Polar Bear events.
  • In 1928, on March 1st, Capt. W.D. “Davey” Jones, the first man appointed to fire the Nine O’Clock Gun, died . . . at 9 p.m.
  • In 1928, alderman J. DeGraves of the street naming committee recommended to the Town Planning Commission that Union Street be changed to Adanac, which is “Canada” spelled backwards. Done.
  • In 1929 Jones Tent & Awning of Vancouver began to manufacture, for the first time in Canada, Venetian blinds.
  • In 1929 Charles Lindbergh, visiting Seattle, refused an invitation from Vancouver mayor L.D. Taylor to fly into Vancouver because, said Lindbergh, “your airport isn’t fit to land on.” That embarrassed Vancouver, and prompted the push to build one that was.
  • In 1929 the New Westminster Exhibition was opened by a British politician named Winston Churchill. The 55-year-old Churchill was not yet Prime Minister.
  • In 1930 the Barnet Lumber Mill in Burnaby was the largest in the world.
  • In 1930 Vancouver got its first shipment of “Lillybet” dolls, modelled after five-year-old Princess Elizabeth—who is Queen Elizabeth II today.
  • ) In 1930 a world record for egg-laying was set by “No Drone, No. 5H,” a hen from the Whiting farm in Surrey. She had laid 357 eggs in 365 days. “No Drone” was preserved for posterity and her stuffed form put on display at the World Poultry Congress in Rome.
  • In 1930 more than 200 skeletons were found in Vancouver’s Marpole Midden. See our 1889 chronology for more on the midden.

1931 to 1935 »