1931
Above: The US-Canada border at the Pacific Highway crossing as seen in 1921
[Image: Wikipedia (Postcard postmarked 1921)
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You’ll note that these years include events listed under “Also in . . .” These are events for which we don’t have a specific date. If YOU know the specific date of an event shown there, please notify us . . . and cite the source! Many thanks!
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January 10 The Province headlined New Record for Number of Autos. “Motor tourist travel into British Columbia from United States,” the report read, “showed a big increase in 1930 over 1929, according to reports from the Greater Vancouver Publicity Bureau.”(The bureau was a forerunner of Tourism Vancouver.)
“Entering British Columbia through the ports of Pacific Highway, Douglas and Huntington,” the story continued, “came 128,856 cars, carrying a total of 417,581 passengers. This was an increase of more than 7,000 cars and more than 26,000 passengers over the previous year . . . It is estimated that the auto tourist makes an average stay here of three days. In more prosperous years it was figured each one spent $30 a day in the country. But even with the spending figure of the visitors decreased, British Columbia’s tourist trade in 1930 from the dollars-and-cents standpoint, was an important and flourishing one.”
Also January 10 Lt.-Gov. Robert Bruce officially opened the old Hastings Mill Store Museum at its location in Pioneer Park, north foot of Alma. The store was one of the very few buildings in Vancouver to survive the Great Fire of 1886. Today it’s a museum on summer weekends, operated by the Native Daughters of British Columbia.
January 23 World-famed ballerina Anna Pavlova, who had so thrilled Vancouver audiences in 1910 and in two subsequent visits, died in a bedroom of the Hôtel des Indes in The Hague in the early hours of January 23. She was nine days short of her 50th birthday. Pneumonia.
January Work began by the CPR on a tunnel under downtown Vancouver to keep the railway’s trains off the city’s streets. The tunnel will open in 1932.
February 11 Vic Stephens was born. He will become leader of the B.C. Conservative Party from 1969 to 1971.
February 19 Henry Ogle Bell-Irving died at age 75. He was the first of a battalion of Bell-Irvings who figure prominently in our history. H.O. was born January 26, 1856 in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, came to Canada at 27 as a surveying engineer for the CPR. He was briefly an architect in pre-fire Vancouver, then opened a general store in Gastown. By 1891 he was into the canning business, and that made his fortune: he became Canada’s largest exporter of canned salmon. We owe some of our knowledge of the early look of this area from his accomplished amateur watercolors. He left half of his own paintings to the provincial archives.
February 22 Pianist/composer Sergei Rachmaninoff performed in Vancouver. The large audience included: Mrs. B.T. Rogers, Miss Margaret Rogers, Mrs. Jan Cherniavsky, Mr. and Mrs. J. Edge Malkin, Dr. and Mrs. W.L. Coulthard, the Misses Coulthard, Mr. and Mrs. J.V. Clyne . . . (One of the “Misses Coulthard” would have been composer Jean, 23, who had begun writing music at age 9.) Visit this site.
Also February 22 This appeared in the Province’s joke column:
“Congratulations, my boy!”
“But you just said that I flunked out of medical school.”
“Ah, but think of the lives you have saved.”
February 23 Opera singer Dame Nellie Melba died in Sydney, Australia.
February Harvey Hadden, philanthropist, died in London, Eng., aged 79. A wealthy Englishman (he was a Nottingham textile merchant, big in hosiery), born in Nottingham September 29, 1851, he first visited Vancouver in 1891, became a major property owner here before 1913. He was said to have made more than $1 million on his real estate holdings. He owned the Birks site, then at the northeast corner of Hastings and Granville. He once bought 160 acres in Capilano Canyon, sight unseen, from architect S.M. Eveleigh. He built Hadden Hall there in 1903, “a sort of Garden of Eden in the forest,” with attractive gardens with piped-in water for fountains and pools. He sold the property in 1926; it is now Capilano Golf and Country Club. Hadden Park at Kitsilano Beach, popular today as an “off-leash” park for dog owners, is on land purchased by Hadden from the CPR (in either 1928 or 1929) and donated to the city. In his will, he bequeathed $500,000 to Vancouver parks. In 1957, parks at Georgia, Adanac, Woodland and McLean were purchased with his bequest.
Incidentally, when Vancouver’s Maritime Museum was proposed in 1957, its location would have conflicted with a covenant demanded by Hadden that no construction be permitted on the land he had donated. Officials got around that by building the museum on fill.
Hadden is well remembered in Nottingham. There is a stadium named for him there.
March 3 The US Congress officially adopted its national anthem: The Star-Spangled Banner.
March 11 Koichiro Sanmiya, entrepreneur, died in Vancouver aged about 51. He was born c. 1880 in Sendai, Japan. Sanmiya arrived in Vancouver in 1907. He owned the Strand Hotel restaurant, and established K. Sanmiya Co. (importer/exporter of Japanese goods) and Canada Daily Newspaper, a Japanese-language paper published until 1921. In the 1920s he started the Vancouver Malt and Sake Co., and was issued the only distiller’s license in B.C. He sponsored the Asahi baseball team. Sanmiya was a founder and president of the Canadian Japanese Association (Nipponjin Kai, now the Japanese Canadian Association). He sold war bonds to finance the war memorial to Japanese-Canadian soldiers in Stanley Park, donated April 9, 1920.
March 18 The Province ran an article that showed that life in the Pen was, gee, sort of swell. The headline: MEN REMADE IN B.C. PENITENTIARY. Writer Doris Milligan began her tour in Warden C. E. Edgett’s office: “Through opened windows (barred though they are) comes the cheerful sound of men at work.” It seems all the furniture in the office was made by the inmates. “This swivel chair included. And that hatrack with its brass finishing. Yes, and that bronze coal box, too. Splendid work, isn’t it?” Edgett tells Ms. Milligan that “there’s not a convict in the penitentiary but would leave there in an instant if given the opportunity. But he will tell you also that most of them become interested and even happy in their work . . . ”.
Hi Ho, Hi Ho …
Also March 18 The electric shaver was introduced to the world.
March 19 The Franciscan Sisters of the Atonement began a Mission to Japanese residents of Steveston, and ran a nursery, a Sunday School, and English classes. (When the Steveston Japanese who were interned at Greenwood during World War II left, the Mission went with them.)
April 17 CKNW newscaster Mauri Hesketh was born.
April Rachel Goldbloom, philanthropist, died in Vancouver aged about 66. She was born in New York c. 1865. She married William Goldbloom in 1882 and moved from New York to Fort Garry. Nell, their daughter, was the first Jewish girl born in Winnipeg. In the mid-1900s, they moved to Vancouver, and their home at 540 Burrard became the centre of Jewish community life, with almost every Jewish organization of that time said to have started there. The Hadassah’s second Vancouver chapter was named for her during her lifetime. She was described as a “one-woman philanthropic organization.” See the book Pioneers, Pedlars, and Prayer Shawls by Cyril E. Leonoff.
May 1 The first tenants moved into the Royal Bank Building at Hastings and Granville. The official opening will be June 5.
May 11 Blanche Macdonald was born in Faust, Alberta. A terrific and inspiring woman, she would open a modeling agency in Vancouver 1960, but that was almost a sideline. Proud of the mixed French-Canadian and First Nations blood in her veins, she would become CEO of the Native Communications Society of B.C., and be involved all through her too-brief life in furthering native causes.
May 16 Alexander Mitchell, the first farmer in Greater Vancouver, died on Mitchell Island aged 84. He was born May 8, 1847 in Masham County, Que. Mitchell arrived in B.C. in April 1877; his wife and two small children arrived shortly after. He settled in Moodyville, later took out squatter’s rights as a pioneer resident of Richmond’s small Mitchell Island, named for him. He was active in municipal politics, and represented South Vancouver’s Ward 3 as councillor. He was secretary of the school board and later a councillor for Richmond’s Ward 5. He promoted the Fraser Street bridge. His first two wives died, but his third wife survived him.
May 23 Lorne Parton, journalist, was born in New Westminster. He will become a Province reporter and columnist in 1952.
May 24 West Vancouver celebrated its second May Day and crowned its first May Queen—a tradition until 1973. Thereafter the celebration— renamed Community Days, and without May Queens—would be held in June.
May 29 The first annual convention of BC fire chiefs was held in the Hotel Vancouver.
June 8 The Royal Bank opened what was then its main branch at the northeast corner of Granville and Hastings. Its main banking hall is still one of the great rooms in the city.
June 24 William John Brewer, the first reeve of South Vancouver, died in Vancouver aged about 90. He was born c. 1841 in Truro, Cornwall, Eng. Brewer arrived in the Vancouver area in 1870 after living in Australia. In 1884 he purchased 10.5 hectares in the Cedar Cottage district. He moved to the South Vancouver area after the great fire of 1886 destroyed his Granville Street business. He was elected a Ward 4 alderman in 1889, and elected the first reeve of the new municipality of South Vancouver on April 30, 1892.
June 25 Dugald Campbell Patterson, Burnaby pioneer, died in Vancouver, aged 71. He was born January 2, 1860 in the village of Partick, Scotland, now a suburb of Glasgow. In 1884, aged 24, he came to Canada. By 1894 he had settled in the newly formed municipality of Burnaby where he built a pioneer homestead and farm on what is now the northeast section of Central Park. Patterson was a civil engineer and worked for Armstrong, Morrison & Balfour. In 1903 he established Vulcan Iron Works of New Westminster. He co-founded Burnaby’s Central Park, was the first postmaster of Edmonds in 1909, was elected a school trustee in 1912 and developed a plan to preserve ravines for parks. Patterson Avenue and Patterson Skytrain station in Burnaby are named for him. In 1891 he married Frances Mabel Webb of Victoria. They raised seven children. Patterson House, once the family home, is designated a heritage building in Burnaby. (Raymond Reitsma).
July 1 The cornerstone was laid for St. Andrews Wesley Church at 1012 Nelson in Vancouver. It’s a heritage building today.
July 3 Canada’s first baseball game played under lights took place today at Athletic Park in Vancouver.
July 12 The Crescent Hotel in White Rock was selling fresh crab salad for 50 cents.
July 22 Opening of the Vancouver Airport and Seaplane Harbour. Premier Simon Fraser Tolmie officiated, and a crowd of 55,000 people turned up for the four-day opening ceremonies. The complex covered 192 hectares (474 acres).
Aubrey Roberts, aviation editor for the Province, reported that “Vancouver this week celebrates an important and a memorable occasion—official opening of the $600,000 first unit of her airport, which, because of the city’s geographical position at the gateway to the Orient, is destined to play an increasingly effective role in international and interempire communication.”
One of the features of the Vancouver Airport and Seaplane Harbour that most delights visiting airmen, Roberts wrote, “is the combination of facilities for land planes and sea aircraft—an asset which many other cities seek in vain.”
A great Vancouver story tells of how William Templeton, the airport’s first manager, saved thousands of dollars by laughingly declining the services of an American design firm and doing the job himself for about $14. One reminder of his 1931 work: Cowley Crescent, which circles the first terminal: Templeton laid a light bulb down on the plans and traced around it with a pencil. That’s why Cowley looks the way it does. You can just make out the shape of Cowley Crescent in the photo. (Templeton had shown initiative before: with his brother and a cousin to help, he built and flew a home-made biplane at Minoru Park race-track on April 28, 1911, our first local plane.) His tireless promotion got the airport off to a strong start.
A present-day writer, Sean Rossiter, who writes frequently on aviation, says “Unofficial airport statistics for its first year show the overwhelming majority of passengers, 2,652, were there to embark on sightseeing flights. (Another 536 arrived there from other points on 309 incoming flights.)”
309 incoming flights! That’s nearly one a day!
One of our favorite stories about the opening: a group of local dignitaries was taken up in a plane for a celebratory flight over the area. One passenger, a prominent alderman, became violently airsick and threw up in the police chief’s hat.
(A nice coincidence: Jack Kendrick, who worked as a commissionaire at the airport in the early 1990s, was born the same day it opened.)
August 1 John William Fordham-Johnson became Lieutenant Governor, succeeding Robert Bruce. He will serve to 1936. See this site.
August 2 There is what the Province calls a “Communist demonstration” near the Cambie Street Grounds.
Also August 2 From the same paper, one of the more compelling leads we’ve ever seen: “One person in every 300 in British Columbia is insane.”
August 15 The official opening of the Kitsilano salt-water swimming pool, the largest of its kind in North America. The pool was 200 by 60 metres [660 x 200 feet], cost $50,000 to build, and was greeted in perfect weather by a crowd of 5,000 who waited impatiently for the inevitable opening speeches before diving in.
August 23 Sanford Johnston Crowe, contractor, died in Vancouver aged 63. He was born February 14, 1868 in Truro, NS, moved to Vancouver in 1888. He became a contractor (Crowe and Wilson, 1890). Crowe retired in 1909, was elected alderman (1909-15). He was Vice president of the Vancouver Exhibition Association. He was elected Vancouver’s second Member of Parliament in 1917, joining Vancouver’s sole MP, H.H. Stevens. Crowe was appointed to the Senate in 1921. Crowe Street is named for him.
August 28 Former world heavyweight boxing champ Jack Dempsey was on one of his “comeback tours” when he boxed three men in two-round exhibitions at the old Vancouver Arena, at Georgia and Denman.
Summer (From Squatting in Vancouver referring to 1931) “About 1,000 homeless people occupied four east-end hobo jungles. One jungle bordered Prior street, close to Campbell avenue and the Canadian National Railway yards. Another existed under the Georgia street viaduct, a third was located on the harbour at the end of Dunlevy avenue, and the fourth was situated at the Great Northern Railway sidings. Shacks were built from boxes, boards and old cars.”
September 25 TV commentator Barbara Walters was born.
October 5 The Vancouver Art Gallery opened on West Georgia, a few blocks west of its current location, in a 1911 art deco building. Sculptor Charles Marega was commissioned to create large busts of Michelangelo and DaVinci to flank the entrance, and a frieze of medallions showing famous artists. (When the gallery moved to its present location in 1983 and the old building was demolished, researcher Peggy Imredy discovered, the busts and medallions were discarded and sent to a garbage dump. Luckily word got out, and they were rescued. The busts now rest in a secure location with a private collector in the Fraser Valley. The medallions are in gallery storage.) Today, the VAG is the fifth largest gallery in the country and holds the world’s largest collection of works by Emily Carr.
October 10 West Vancouver agreed to sell 4,000 acres to a syndicate called British Pacific Properties for $75,000, about $18.75 an acre. It’s worth a tad more today. (The syndicate was financed with Guinness Brewing money.)
October A plebiscite in North Vancouver City approved sale of beer by the glass.
Also October Strikers at Fraser Mills, protesting repeated wage roll backs, were dispersed by mounted police charges.
November 5 The first Annual Provincial Ploughing Match was held under the auspices of the Delta Farmers’ Institute at A.D. Paterson’s farm near Ladner. There was a Horseshoe Pitching contest (Ladner vs Langley Prairie) for the David Spencer Shield. The Banquet and Entertainment cost $1.
November 8 In the Province, on Page 10, was a commentary on Adolf Hitler and his appeal to Germany’s disenchanted youth. World War Two was still eight years in the future.
November 9 Future judge Stu Leggatt was born.
November 10 Writer Alice Munro was born.
November 22 Hugh Boyd, Richmond’s first reeve (mayor), died in Bangor, Ireland aged about 89. He was born in 1842 in County Down, Ire., came to B.C. in 1862, lured by the Cariboo Gold Rush. He failed to find gold. With Alexander Kilgour, Boyd bought Section 19 on Sea Island on March 7, 1865. He was elected Richmond reeve in 1880, served to 1886. He left for Ireland in 1887 to live near Belfast. His farm was purchased by the Mackie brothers in 1890. Boyd crisscrossed the Pacific Ocean 12 times after his retirement. Richmond was named in honor of the Yorkshire birthplace of his wife Mary, nee McColl.
December 11 Statute of Westminster, granting legal and political independence to Commonwealth countries.
December 15 John Fraser, future Member of Parliament, was born.
December 16 Elizabeth “Betsy” Flaherty, a buyer for Spencer’s department store, got her flying license. Born c. 1878, she was about 53, making her the oldest female pilot in Canada. She would be a passenger on Trans-Canada Airlines’ first cross-Canada flight in 1937, and when the “Flying Seven,” an all-woman flying club, began in 1936 she was a charter member.
December 23 Future B.C. Lions coach Vic Rapp was born. While with the Lions, Rapp will win Coach of the Year honors in 1977.
December 31 Politician and broadcaster Rafe Mair was born.
December Greater Vancouver residents form the Common Good Cooperative Society to engage in a “war against poverty.” A self-help society, it operated a store, grew food on vacant land, and helped many through the worst of the Depression. The Credit Union movement in B.C. is an offshoot of the society.
Also in 1931
The entrance fee at Vancouver Golf Club had been $100, dues $6 a month. The dues were reduced during the Depression to $1 a month and 20 cents each time you played. Caddies earned about 75 cents for four hours work.
Burnaby’s first Year and Reference Book was published, and Burnaby was extolled in it as the “twentieth largest place in Canada.”
The Vancouver Fire Department’s Fire Dispatch Office opened at West 20th Avenue and Cambie Street.
A group of native “squatters” in Stanley Park, with one exception, lost their appeals against eviction. (The city had launched legal proceedings in 1921.) They were allowed to remain in their homes for a fee of a dollar-a-month until they were finally evicted this year. The Vancouver Fire Department burned down their homes. The Cummings family at Brockton Point had refused to take part in the legal proceedings, upset they had not been consulted when the land had been turned into a park. The Parks Board agreed to let the family stay for a $5-a-month fee. They lived there until their deaths. (Agnes Cummings would die in 1953 at age 69, and Tim Cummings died in 1958 at age 77.)
The Community Chest began in Vancouver, modeled after the Vancouver Jewish Community Chest.
Vancouver’s Charlie Crane became the first blind person to attend a Canadian university when he was accepted this year at UBC. His achievement becomes doubly remarkable when you learn that he was also deaf. He willed his private collection of more than 10,000 volumes of Braille books to UBC. After his death in 1965, those books became the foundation of the university’s Charles Crane Memorial Library. His remarkable life is recalled in The Crane Story, by Laurie Bellefontaine.
Band leader Mart Kenney, who began his career in the late 1920s with the CJOR Radio Orchestra and with Len Chamberlain at the Hotel Vancouver, formed a group called Mart Kenney and the Western Gentlemen for a one-off engagement at the Alexandra Ballroom in Vancouver. The rest is, as they say, history. (“I was the Bryan Adams of 1944,” Kenney once said). In March, 2000 to mark his 90th birthday, Kenney would release a new CD of original music to mark his nearly 70 years in showbiz. For more on this remarkable music-maker, see this site.
St. Augustine’s Church in Kitsilano was built.
The Ubyssey, the student newspaper at UBC, was shut down over a censorship issue, and printed a fake funeral notice. The memorial read: “Sacred to the memory of Free Speech.”
The City of Vancouver granted the Crippled Children’s Hospital Society 3.4 acres of land between 59th and 60th Avenues and Manitoba and Columbia Streets.
The Rotary Club joined with IODE (Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire) to begin the Vancouver Preventorium for kids exposed to TB. This was the forerunner of Sunny Hill Hospital.
The British Columbia Catholic, a weekly, began publishing.
The Langley Advance began publishing.
Mount Seymour’s first ski mountaineering hut was built.
Curling was introduced to the Forum. The arena’s 10 sheets of curling ice made it the biggest curling rink in the world at the time. By 1932, the Vancouver Club would affiliate with the Forum.
The English Bay bathhouse was built.
The UBC golf clubhouse opened at 2545 Blanca. Today, it has Canada’s only provincial golf museum, housing classic clubs, old trophies and prints from early days of golf. There is a library and archives, with more than 1,200 books and 100 volumes of clippings and photos. Video footage of great B.C. golf moments, including Ben Hogan in 1967 Masters.
The B.C. government took over the sale of liquor.
The Kitsilano Boys’ Band, under the direction of Arthur Delamont, won first place at the Toronto Exposition.
Jimmy Cunningham, stonemason, was named master stonemason for the Vancouver Parks Board with a special task: to secure Stanley Park’s shores. Jimmy was born in 1878 on the Isle of Bute, Scotland. He came here in 1910, served in WWI with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He worked extensively as a stonemason, with work at UBC, at Vancouver homes, pools at Lumberman’s Arch, 2nd and Kitsilano beaches, the Empress Hotel and the Banff Springs Hotel. In 1917, he had begun work on the Stanley Park seawall.
Percy Norman became the head coach of the Vancouver Amateur Swim Club at Crystal Pool.
The Vancouver Police Department got a new armored car, built in Vancouver.
Victoria-born William John “Torchy” Peden, 26, won Vancouver’s first six-day bicycle race. A “flame-haired youth who led the pack like a torch,” he was famed during the Depression as “a six-day immortal” bicycle racer.
Actor John Qualen, born December 8, 1899 in Vancouver, appeared in Street Scene, his first movie. He would go on to perform in more than 140 films. His father, pastor of First Scandinavian Church (Lutheran) on Prior Street from 1898-1900, was against his son’s acting career. If his name doesn’t ring a bell, his face certainly would . . . if we could find a picture. See this site.
Dan Sewell arrived in Horseshoe Bay and opened a marina. Very few families lived in Horseshoe Bay year round at the time.
The park surrounding the Peace Arch was enlarged to 40 acres, a project made possible with the help of school children from Washington State and British Columbia who donated their pennies, nickels and dimes to the project.
James Skitt Matthews, 53, became the city’s unofficial archivist, will become the official one in 1933. His methods were chaotic, his research was occasionally shaky, and his temper was terrible, but Vancouver’s first city archivist amassed a body of work on the city’s past that is quite simply titanic. We owe him an unpayable debt. His second wife, Emily, helped him in his tireless efforts to collect city memorabilia and reminiscences.
Winnipeg-born Jim Coleman, 20, who will become the doyen of Canadian sports writers, got his first job with the Winnipeg Tribune.
Vancouver won the McKechnie Cup (rugby).
Louis D. Taylor, mayor of Vancouver from 1910 to 1911, and again in 1915, and again from 1925 to 1928, was elected yet again. This stretch, which lasted to 1934, would be his last.
The Earl of Bessborough became Governor General, succeeding Viscount Willingdon.
Margaret Ormsby, born in Quesnel in 1909, earned an MA in history at UBC. She will go on to become “the doyenne of British Columbia history.” She “legitimized the study of British Columbia history as a scholarly endeavor.”
Citizenship was granted to Japanese in Canada. They could not yet, however—with a very few exceptions—vote. The exceptions were survivors of the Japanese-Canadian soldiers who had fought for Canada in WWI, but only 80 out of the more than 200 soldiers were still living.
The Orpheum Circuit management finally accepted the decline and fall of vaudeville and sold Vancouver’s Orpheum Theatre outright to the burgeoning movie house chain Famous Players. Vaudeville could still be enjoyed for a few more years in Vancouver, mainly at the Beacon Theatre on Hastings, but its glory days were over.
Only a year after the Marine Building opened, its owners were willing to sell it to the city for its new city hall for about the same as, and maybe even a little less than, it had cost them to build. But that deal fell through.
George Burrows began to supervise Vancouver’s beaches and pools. He would hold that job to 1971! A cairn donated by lifeguards and dedicated to Burrows is near the bathhouse at Kitsilano Beach.
Jessie Columbia Hall (née Greer) became president of the Burrard Women’s Conservative Club. Her father was Sam Greer. See 1891.
Alexander Duncan McRae, Vancouver soldier and businessman, became a senator.
Colored comics in the Province included Rock-Age Roy, Harold Teen, Smitty, Gasoline Alley, Little Orphan Annie and The Gumps.
Alfred Butts devised a word game he first called Lexico, but that we know today as Scrabble.
W.S. MacGregor was president of the Vancouver Real Estate Board.
Oscar Orr became city prosecutor for Vancouver.
Mayne D. Hamilton, a banker, became president of the Vancouver Board of Trade.
The book Spanish Explorers of the British Columbia Coast by Dr. W.N. Sage, head of history at UBC, appeared. (From a 1936 booklet quoting Sage: “Vancouver . . . had come around the Cape of Good Hope and had crossed the International Date Line without taking off a day.” If this is correct, Vancouver’s date of June 21, 1792 for his meeting with the Spaniards, for example, was actually on June 22. And he would have entered Burrard Inlet on June 12th, not 13th.)
The newly-created Vancouver Town Planning Commission published a short pamphlet for high-school students, describing its goal and methods. “The idea of planning is to prevent waste; it is a scientific attempt to direct the growth of the various components, residential, industrial and business, that go to make up a city along sane, and as far as can be foreseen, permanent lines.”
C.E. Edgett became Vancouver’s police chief, succeeding W. J. Bingham. Edgett will serve to 1933. He’s the same man cited in the March 18 story above when he was warden of the B.C. Penitentiary.
Harold Merilees, “Vancouver’s first great ad man,” moved from Spencer’s Department Store—where he had worked since 1925—to the B.C. Electric Railway Company, and eventually became the firm’s manager of public information.
B.C. labor leader Jack Munro was born in Lethbridge, Alberta. The only son of Scottish immigrants, Munro was raised on a relief farm near Calgary and came to work in Nelson, B.C. as a mechanic in the early 1950s.
St. Andrews’ Church, at Richards and Georgia, which had been built in 1889, was torn down.
In Port Coquitlam a Mrs. Struthers donated a chair to serve as the May Queen’s throne. In the more than seventy years since, the only change to the chair has been the trim.
A brand-new Chrysler Straight Eight sedan was going for $1,950 f.o.b. Detroit.
