Sunspots

D-Day, on June 6, 1944 is a date virtually everyone knows: it marked the invasion at Normandy. More than a thousand planes and gliders began dropping paratroopers into Normandy in the dark hours before dawn. The push to recapture the Nazi-occupied continent was under way….

Interurban streetcar service on the line between Vancouver and Steveston in Richmond began July 4, 1905. One of the cars that served that route from opening day—No. 1207, and still with us— was built in the BC Electric Railway’s own shops at the south end of 12th Street in New Westminster….

On August 1, 1936 the Olympic Games began in Berlin. Covering the event for The Vancouver Sun was 28-year-old Erwin Swangard. Sitting in the stands observing the activities: German Chancellor Adolf Hitler….

1940 was a nervously busy year in wartime Greater Vancouver. Local shipyards were building corvettes and minesweepers for action in the Atlantic, and converting passenger ships for wartime use. (One converted cruise ship, the Prince Robert, promptly went into service in 1940, seizing a German freighter off the coast of Mexico and bringing her to Esquimalt as a prize of war.) …

A tiny spot in Stanley Park has a long and pleasant history. Native people had been passing by for centuries, but around 1860 the Royal Engineers made a small clearing there for a survey post. A fellow named Johnny Baker, who’d married a local native girl, built a shack in the clearing and moved in with his family. He made the clearing larger, put in a little garden and started keeping pigs. …