1967
Above:The 1912 mansion Kanakla, now on the UBC campus and known as Cecil Green Park.
[Image: www.cecilgreenpark.ubc.ca]
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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 30 CP Air inaugurated its Vancouver-San Francisco route.
February 2 Crestbrook Forest Industries was incorporated as Crestbrook Timber. It changed to its present name three months later, on May 1.
February 17 Frederick J. Hume, mayor of New Westminster from 1933 to 1942 and of Vancouver from 1951 to 1958, died, aged 74. He was born May 2, 1892 in New Westminster. Writes Donna Jean McKinnon: “This wealthy philanthropist and nine-year mayor of New Westminster donated his salary to charity while he was mayor of Vancouver. Although he won with a 3-2 majority in an election notable for its absence of issues, Mayor Hume was particularly concerned about smog and litter—something generally assumed to have been issues of a later period. While mayor, he worked to establish low rental housing, hoping to do away with slum housing altogether. His community involvement outside civic politics included founding CJOR radio (as CFXC) in 1924, and the owning/operating of the Vancouver Canucks from 1962 until his death. More than 2,000 attended his funeral.”
March 3 Wanda Biana Selma Ziegler (née Muller), candy store chain president, died at Fort Langley, aged about 93. She was born in 1874 in Ballerstedt, Prussia. She came to Vancouver in 1911 with her husband Fritz (born in Germany) and two children. Her father was the reeve of Ballerstedt, an office passed on in the family since the 15th Century. Fritz established Ziegler Chocolate Shops here in 1921. When he died in 1923, there were three shops. Wanda became president and developed the chain to 11 Lower Mainland stores. Her son, Fritz Alfred Wilhelm (b. Feb. 12, 1902, Wittenberge, Germany) served as managing director. She retired in 1956, after 33 years, and the shops closed.
March 26 Skier Nancy Greene won the first ever Women’s World Cup. See this site and this one.
Also March 26 A big anti-Vietnam War protest was held in Vancouver. On the same day there was a “Super Human Be-In” in Stanley Park.
April 15 A big peace march was held in Vancouver.
April 28 Expo 67 began in Montreal.
April Vancouver’s millionth convention delegate arrived during Convention Week. (We’re not sure when they began the count!)
May 5 The first issue of the Georgia Straight appeared. This radical newspaper (published every two weeks at first) would stir up a great deal of attention in the following months, before the city settled down and accepted it. Here’s an excerpt from a chronology in What The Hell Happened?, a 1997 book on the Straight’s history:
“Georgia Straight’s first issue appears May 5. It costs a dime. Stories include a local art censorship bust at the Douglas Gallery, a report on the youth movement in Amsterdam, and an article from San Francisco claiming that hard drugs, capitalist head merchants, and corruption of young runaways are serious problems in Haight-Ashbury. The 12-page paper is produced out of Dan McLeod’s $30-per-month apartment at 1666 West 6th and a warehouse studio on Prior Street. On May 12, it moves into its first office at 432 Homer; later that day, Dan McLeod is taken away in a paddy wagon and jailed three hours for ‘investigation of vagrancy.’ College Printers refuses to print the second issue.”
So the Straight is nearing its 40th anniversary! Dan McLeod still heads it. It’s wonderfully ironic that McLeod—who in the paper’s earliest days fought mayor Tom Campbell and the right wing and the police and the prudes and was occasionally jailed for his pains—would in 1998 win the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award for his “contribution to journalism in B.C.” He deserved to win, but it’s astonishing that he did. In 2005 circulation of the free, ad-fat Straight is way up (100,000+ claimed), but the paper’s calmer. It still does investigative stories, wins awards, has good writers and gets scoops. McLeod leaves editing chores to others. But he started it all, and local news was forever altered because of it.
May 17 The Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame opened in the Centennial Community Centre at 6th Avenue and McBride Boulevard in New Westminster. (Trivia: someone stole the Mann Cup from the Hall in the late 1980s and returned it after the hall paid a $10,000 ransom.)
May 23 Queen Juliana of the Netherlands visited Vancouver.
June 1 The first McDonald’s restaurant in Canada opened in Richmond at 7120 No. 3 Road. It was take-out only and hamburgers cost 18 cents.
Also June 1 VanCity Credit Union introduced North America’s first daily interest savings account, known as Plan 24.
June 10 The first Miles for Millions Walk in aid of the Third World. This was a project begun by the Canadian government as a centennial project to focus attention on the needs of the millions of people in underdeveloped countries. Though government involvement ended within a year, the program would be continued by local committees whose activities were coordinated by the Ottawa-based National Walk Committee.
June 14 August Jack Khahtsahlano, a Squamish chief, died. His grandfather was the man for whom Kitsilano was named, but August Jack made a name for himself as one of the most fruitful and dignified sources of information on early native life here, thanks to his long conversations with archivist J.S. Matthews, transcribed and accessible at the archives. (They are occasionally a source of unintended humor: sometimes Matthews has him speaking in the measured tones of an English professor, elsewhere he makes him sound like Tonto.) He was born July 16, 1867 at Snauq (also spelled Sun’ahk), about where the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre is today. Around 1900 he held a potlatch to honor the receiving of his grandfather’s name some years earlier. At the feast, he gave out more than 100 blankets.
June 15 Ellen Harris, radio broadcaster, died in Vancouver, aged about 63. She was born in 1904 in Winnipeg. She came to Vancouver in 1930. From the 1920s onward she was active in children’s theatre. A prominent radio broadcaster with Morning Visit, a CBC women’s show that ran from 1944 to 1952. In the early 1950s she was involved in CBC school broadcasts. She was a president of the Vancouver Ballet Society; chair of the building committee of UBC’s International House; public relations officer for BCAA and for the Health Centre for Children for many years. From the 1950s she active in the Vancouver Zonta Club and International Zonta Club.
June 19 The first four notes of O Canada played from four huge cast aluminum airhorns atop the BC Hydro Building at Nelson and Burrard. Robert Swanson designed them. Unsuspecting pedestrians could be visibly alarmed when the horns blared out. Today they are atop Canada Place and aimed out over the water. They signal the noon hour.
June 26 Griffiths Gibson Productions began. By 1972 it will expand as Griffiths Gibson & Ramsay Productions Limited, and go on to become one of Canada’s leading commercial jingle studios. The principals were Brian Griffiths, Brian Gibson and Miles Ramsay.
June 28 Canadian Pacific unveiled its waterfront development plans.
June Vancouver businessman Harry Con published the first history of Canada written in Chinese.
July 1 Canada celebrated its 100th birthday.
Also July 1 Not local, but must be reported: Pamela Anderson was born today in Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island.
July 4 Chief Dan George of North Vancouver’s Burrard Band moved a crowd of more than 30,000 people to silence with his eloquent “Lament for Confederation” at Empire Stadium.
It began: “How long have I known you, Oh Canada? A hundred years? Yes, a hundred years. And many many seelanum [lunar months] more. And today, when you celebrate your hundred years, Oh Canada, I am sad for all the Indian people throughout the land.
“For I have known you when your forests were mine; when they gave me my meat and my clothing. I have known you in your streams and rivers where your fish flashed and danced in the sun, where the waters said come, come and eat of my abundance. I have known you in the freedom of your winds. And my spirit, like the winds, once roamed your good lands.
“But in the long hundred years since the white man came, I have seen my freedom disappear like the salmon going mysteriously out to sea. The white man’s strange customs which I could not understand pressed down upon me until I could no longer breathe . . .”
The full text is here.
July 6 Jack Harman’s statuary group, The Family, was installed outside the Pacific Press Building at 2250 Granville. The figures were elongated, Harman explained, to lend them a spiritual quality. Controversy arose over the boy in the group: he was naked. That “spiritual quality” didn’t deter the vandal who attempted one night to hacksaw away the boy’s penis. The next day an embarrassed welder insisted on being screened from public view while he repaired the damage. “The work is intended,” Harman said, “to depict the role of a newspaper in the family and the importance of the family in the community.”
July 12 The first meeting of the board of the Greater Vancouver Regional District. The GVRD is a voluntary federation of 20 municipalities and two electoral areas that make up the metropolitan area of Greater Vancouver. These communities work together through the GVRD to deliver essential services, more economically, efficiently and equitably at a regional level. It is one of 27 regional districts in British Columbia and, with more than two million residents, a little more than half the population of the province, is easily the largest.
The late Dan Campbell, minister of municipal affairs in the W.A.C. Bennett government of the early ’60s, and his deputy minister J. Everett Brown, pushed for the concept of regional government. Campbell and Brown could be considered the fathers of regional government in B.C. The regional district concept was established by the provincial government in 1965.; the first meeting of the GVRD’s board of directors was July 12, 1967.
July 15 The Vancouver Parks Foundation was formed. We also have July 16.
July 22 The roof began to go up on the Pacific Coliseum.
July 27 Mildred Valley Thornton, artist and art critic, died in Vancouver, aged about 77. “She was born,” writes Constance Brissenden, “in 1890 in Dresden, Ontario. She studied art in the US before moving to Vancouver from Saskatchewan in 1934. In the 1920s, with her two sons, she spent summers with Saskatchewan’s Plains Cree people. She created more than 300 paintings of ceremonies, dances and Native people. She was The Vancouver Sun’s art critic for 16 years to 1959 when she retired. An executive member of the Canadian Women’s Press Club; member, Vancouver Poetry Society and Canadian Authors’ Association. In 1960 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts. She wrote Indian Lives and Legends.”
July 30 Nanaimo mayor Frank Ney’s wacky inspiration bears fruit: the first Nanaimo-to-Vancouver bathtub race was held today. 212 powered bathtubs entered. See this site. Today, the race is confined to the Nanaimo region.
July Vancouver writer Chuck Davis wrote, on a scrap of paper, a sudden idea: “should do urban almanac on Vancouver.” That notion would—albeit many years later—lead to the 500-page The Vancouver Book, published in 1976 by J.J. Douglas Ltd., and, in 1997, to the 912-page The Greater Vancouver Book, published by Linkman Press.
August 21 Carrie-Ann Moss, who plays Trinity in the Matrix movies, was born in Vancouver. She would began acting at age 11.
September 27 Jack Harman’s Bannister-Landy statue was unveiled, commemorating the famous “Miracle Mile” of the 1954 British Empire Games in Vancouver, when for the first time in one race two men, Roger Bannister and John Landy, ran the mile in under four minutes. Denny Boyd, then a sports columnist at The Vancouver Sun, put Harman’s name forward for this work. Both Bannister and Lady attended the sculpture’s unveiling.
Today, the statue is at the main entrance of the Pacific National Exhibition.
September A new laboratory and classroom building opened at the still young BC Institute of Technology. BCIT had opened October 6, 1964.
October 16 A headline in The Vancouver Sun reads: “Chinese seethe over Freeway.” This was in reference to the anger in the city’s Strathcona neighborhood over plans to run a freeway through the area—many of the residents were Chinese who had lived there for decades. Wrote Taras Grescoe in The Greater Vancouver Book: “A San Francisco-based firm concluded that a waterfront freeway would best be served by levelling 600 houses in Strathcona and laying a ten-metre-high overpass over Carrall Street, in the centre of Chinatown. Immediately, protest came from every part of the city, and a crowd of 800 people gathered in City Hall to shout down the consultants’ proposals. The Chairman of the city’s planning commission resigned on the spot, and a year later, the plan was scrapped. Apparently, the spirited editorializing of the local papers in favor of cutting out civic blight with a concrete knife had influenced no one but a handful of architects.”
John Atkin, author of a book on Strathcona, has commented: “It was because of its mixture of housing and industry and the fact that it was the entry point to the city for successive waves of immigrants, that the East End name came to have a derogatory meaning. By the 1950s planners had declared it a slum for demolition, despite evidence to the contrary. By 1967, despite protests, fifteen blocks of the neighborhood had already been acquired and cleared for urban redevelopment when the city announced a freeway to downtown. Strathcona residents were horrified by plans to use the blocks in between Union and Prior for the freeway, connected via a new Georgia Viaduct to the larger network of roads that were to carve up the downtown. The outcry from the general public, community activists and professionals was loud and clear about the lack of public consultation and the amount of destruction the new roads would cause. In the end the Georgia and Dunsmuir street viaducts were the only pieces of the system to be constructed . . .”
November 14 An anonymous donation of $100,000 allowed the installation of a pipe organ in the recital hall of UBC’s Music Building, part of the Norman Mackenzie Centre for Fine Arts, which would open January 12, 1968.
November 22 We got a new arterial route when Canada Way was named, its name a tribute to Canada’s centennial. Parts of the new route had been Douglas Road.
December 1 CBUF-FM 97.7 signed on as BC’s first French-language station.
Also December 1 The Powell Street Dugout opens as a day centre for homeless men in the area.
December 12 Canada’s largest library for the visually impaired opened at UBC. The Charles Crane Library is named for the first deaf-and-blind person to attend university in Canada.
December 13 The Clifford J. Rogers, a freighter built in Montreal in 1955 for the White Pass and Yukon Railway Co. for service between Vancouver and Skagway, and sold to Greek owners in 1966 (who renamed her the Drosia), sank suddenly near Bermuda with the loss of eight crew members. She was the world’s first purpose-built container ship.
Also in 1967
The Vancouver Museum moved from its musty crowded home at the former Carnegie Library at Main and Hastings to brand new quarters in Vanier Park. Museum officials took the opportunity to create four curatorial departments: Archaeology, Ethnology, History and Natural History.
Greenpeace, now the world’s largest environmental organization, began quietly in a home in the Dunbar area, with a group calling itself the “Don’t Make a Wave Committee.”
Grandview United Church, at the northwest corner of Victoria and Venables, closed. It had opened in 1909 as a Methodist Church. On October 15, 1973 the Vancouver East Cultural Centre (the “Cultch”) will open there as a venue for music and live stage performances.
Thomas J. Campbell became mayor of Vancouver. He will hold the post to 1972. Writes Donna-Jean McKinnon: “Campbell, ‘Tom Terrific’ to the developers who couldn’t have asked for a better advocate for their interests at city hall, was an East End Vancouver boy turned prosperous. Considered a brash upstart, Campbell’s chronic absence from council didn’t stop him from promoting a freeway through Chinatown and demolition of the Carnegie Centre. He backed the construction of a luxury hotel at the entrance to Stanley Park, but it was rejected by voters. It is for his stance during the so-called Gastown Riot in the summer of 1971 that Campbell is most remembered. The so-called Battle of Maple Tree Square drew more than 1,000 people to Gastown as a protest against the illegality of marijuana. But police on horseback were called in to break it up, arresting 79 and charging 38. A later judicial inquiry criticized the action, characterizing it as a ‘police riot.’”
Back on February 14, 1929 in Chicago seven members of “Bugs” Moran’s criminal bootlegging gang were lined up against a wall in a North Side garage and shot down by members of rival Al Capone’s gang, some of whom were dressed in phony cop uniforms. The wall against which the Moran gang victims were shot was preserved, with many of the bricks being bullet-scarred. In 1967 the wall went up for auction. Vancouver businessman George Patey, who heard about the auction while listening to his car radio, was the high bidder. He had the wall, six feet high by 10 feet wide, painstakingly taken apart with each brick numbered, then shipped them to Canada. They were declared for duty as construction material at several pennies each.
Patey displayed the reconstructed wall in shopping malls, museums and galleries. In 1971, he opened a bar in Vancouver in the style of the Roaring Twenties, and installed the bricks (behind plexiglass) inside the men’s washroom. The bar closed in 1976, and the bricks were placed in storage. Then Patey began to sell them brick by brick, keeping one for a keepsake.
The Vancouver Aquarium expanded to three times its original size and became the largest public aquarium in Canada, and one of the five largest in North America. Two killer whales, Skana and Hyak, began performing for visitors under Chief Trainer Klaus Michaelis, and would do so for 13 years. See this site.
James Clavell directed a movie (which he also wrote) titled The Sweet And The Bitter. Wrote Vancouver movie historian Michael Walsh: “Intent on avenging the death of her father (Dale Ishimoto), a Japanese fishermen interned during the war, a dutiful daughter (Yoko Tani) comes to Vancouver looking for the Scots businessman (Torin Thatcher) who stole her father’s boats.” More on this site.
Richmond’s Minoru Chapel, the first church on Lulu Island (1891) was relocated and restored in Minoru Park. It will later be designated a heritage building. It is now an interdenominational chapel used mainly for weddings and funerals.
Dr. Gordon Shrum was awarded the Order of Canada.
A federal law was passed that, in effect, allowed Chinese immigrants to come to Canada under the same rules that applied to other immigrants.
Fairacres, the Ceperley Mansion at Deer Lake, became home to the Burnaby Art Gallery. See this site.
The Smith House, 5030 The Byway in West Vancouver, designed by Erickson/Massey in 1965, won the Massey Medal for Architecture.
The North Vancouver Youth Band, founded in 1939, won five first place trophies at the National Band Competition, an unprecedented achievement.
A chunk of Vancouver on the city’s south slope, overlooking the North Arm of the Fraser River and Richmond’s Lulu Island, is named Sunset by city planners. Fraserview butts up against it on the east, with the northern limit at 41st Avenue. The name Sunset was applied after the naming of the Sunset Nurseries, Sunset Park and Sunset Community Centre at 52nd Avenue.
A gift to Vancouver of Yoshino Cherry trees came from the Japanese city of Yokohama. They beautify Cambie Street between West 41st and 49th Avenues.
The Blue Horizon Hotel went up at 1225 Robson Street.
The Marpole Bridge, a low-level rail bridge over the North Arm of the Fraser River to Lulu Island, built in 1902 was damaged by a barge in 1966. It reopened this year, rebuilt with full main-line capacity, and a longer, hydraulically operated swing span. The bridge is used today by the Southern Railway of B.C.
The Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board was disbanded in 1967 and replaced by regional districts which served a coordination and planning function for groups of municipalities.
The Greater Vancouver Regional Hospital District was incorporated. It becomes responsible for hospital planning and construction in the region.
The Gladstone chapter of AHEPA (Anglo-Hellenic Educational Progressive Association), in honor of Canada’s centenary, donated a statue of the Discus Thrower to stand in the courtyard of the Centennial Museum.
Diver George Athans, Sr., who had competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics and won silver and gold medals at the 1950 Empire Games, was inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame.
Kanakla, a large handsome 1912 mansion designed by architect Samuel McClure on the UBC campus, and built by lawyer Edward P. Davis, was donated to the university by its 1967 owners, Dr. Cecil and Mrs. Ida Green. Renamed Cecil Green Park House, it became the “town and gown” meeting place for UBC.
UBC’s H.R. MacMillan Building (Forestry and Agriculture) was built this year, and dedicated to forest company executive H.R. MacMillan who contributed more than $12 million to the university. It makes efficient use of space for two small faculties, Forestry and Agriculture, each of which requires a lot of research space. Both Forestry and Agriculture have their own wings for faculty and graduate student offices and labs. They share the centre wing containing classrooms, seminar rooms, a lecture hall and the combined Forestry/Agriculture branch of the library. The building has facilities for 550 undergraduates, 120 graduate students and 46 faculty.
UBC’s “Barn,” built in 1917, was originally used as a classroom for returning World War I soldiers. It later became the horticulture facility for generations of undergraduate students in agriculture. After a long battle to save this heritage building, it was converted this year into a faculty, staff and student cafeteria. While the building’s original cost was just $5,250, the 1967 renovations cost more than $62,000.
John B. MacDonald stepped down as president of UBC (since 1962), and was succeeded by Walter Gage.
Five teaching assistants were fired by Simon Fraser University’s Board of Governors for supporting a student who had criticized a teacher at Templeton High School. The Board recanted when a howl for academic freedom erupted.
An eight-hectare site in the northeast corner of Langara golf course was purchased to provide space for a new campus to replace the crowded King Edward Centre of Vancouver Community (City) College. VCC had been established just two years earlier. Five portable classrooms had been set up on the centre’s playing field and additional offices had been squeezed into its former auditorium.
Ron Meyer of UBC’s Department of Geology wrote his BA thesis on The Evolution of Roads in the Lower Fraser Valley.
The Elks Purple Cross Fund, established by the well-known service club, provides funds to help children in need under 19 years old, regardless of the nature of disease or physical disability; race, religion, creed or color. This year the Elks founded the Deaf Detection and Development programme, to help identify as early as possible hearing impairment in children, and to assure the best possible services in hearing and speech rehabilitation.
Dick MacLean’s Greater Vancouver Greeter Guide, a digest-sized listing of clubs, restaurants, theatres and cinemas, first appeared. It will undergo various metamorphoses over the years, and eventually become Vancouver magazine.
Amphora, a quarterly published by the Alcuin Society, first appeared. It published articles on book art, book collecting, typography, private press publishing and related topics.
CGA Magazine, a monthly published in Vancouver by the Certified General Accountants’ Association of Canada, first appeared. It covered accounting matters for Canadian professional accountants and financial executives.
Democratic Commitment, a bi-monthly publication of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, first appeared.
Education Leader: News and Views on Education, a semi-monthly publication of the British Columbia School Trustees Association, first appeared. It provided information about broad curriculum and policy issues and developments, and the latest trends in education research.
Playboard: Professional Stage Magazine, a monthly publication from Arch-Way Publishers Ltd., first appeared. It reports on the local theatre scene.
WIDHH News, a quarterly publication for members of the Western Institute for the Deaf & Hard of Hearing, first appeared.
As part of the Peace River power development, the Duncan Dam was built on the Columbia River.
Sprinter Harry Jerome won gold in the 100-metre race at the Pan-American Games. He was inducted into the Canadian Amateur Athletic Hall of Fame this year.
The formal Century Gardens were installed at Burnaby’s Deer Lake Park.
Park and Tilford Distillers commissioned the Park and Tilford Gardens, at 333 Brooksbank Avenue in North Vancouver, as a Centennial Year beautification project. This small space has a native woodland garden, a rose garden, a herb collection, an oriental style garden and a greenhouse with tropical plants. During the summer months there is a very good collection of bedding plants. In December the garden is converted to a winter wonderland with more than 50,000 lights strung throughout the trees, shrubs and plants on its 1.2 hectares. Landscape horticulture students from Capilano College learn the practical side of their studies in this garden. They also help with the upkeep of the garden.
Painter and teacher W.P. Weston died, aged about 88. He was an important figure in the Vancouver education and art scene. In addition to teaching art, he joined the BC Society of Fine Arts and exhibited regularly. He was the first artist in Western Canada to be made an Associate of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art. Said art writer Ian Thom, Weston “more than any other artist, captured the awesome, lonely nature, the spirit of British Columbia.” This site has many attractive examples of his work.
Vancouver Art Gallery acting director Doris Shadbolt curated an exhibition titled The Arts of the Raven: 450 Northwest Indian Masterworks Exhibition. Says art writer Tony Robertson, “It brought the gallery international recognition, and general attention to the most important art of the region.”
Tony Emery became director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. He will hold the post for seven years.
The George Cunningham Memorial Sun Dial was created by sculptor Gerhard Class. The bronze and granite memorial, near the foot of Denman Street at English Bay, was commissioned by Cunningham Drug Stores. It commemorates the “Three Greenhorns” who settled in the West End around 1867, as well as the first drugstore built in the area in 1911.
A bronze sculpture, Florentine Door and Wall #3, was created by Frank Perry and installed in the plaza of the Queen Elizabeth Playhouse.
Joan Sutherland appeared in the Vancouver Opera Association’s production of Lucia Di Lammermoor.
George Ryga’s powerful play about the abuse of native women, The Ecstacy of Rita Joe, with Chief Dan George and Ann Mortifee, electrified Vancouver Playhouse audiences with its strong message.
Eric Nicol’s play In the Rough, originally produced in 1964 at UBC’s Freddie Wood Theatre, had been so successful the show was revived this year to tour the province as part of Canada’s centennial celebrations.
Austrian-born dancer and choreographer Anna Wyman moved to Vancouver. She will become immensely influential on the local dance scene.
Max Wyman, born in 1939 in England, came to Vancouver. He became a long-serving arts critic for The Vancouver Sun and The Province, and is an expert on dance. His books include The Royal Winnipeg Ballet: The First Forty Years; Dance Canada: An Illustrated History and Evelyn Hart: An Intimate Portrait. (He is also the fastest two-finger typist I have ever seen. It’s an awesome sight!)
Writes movie historian Michael Walsh, Canada’s first made-for-television feature was Waiting For Caroline, directed by Ron Kelly. “Pioneering the movie-of-the-week format, this NFB-CBC co-production offered bi-cultural domestic drama with a story set in both Vancouver and Quebec City.”
The Surrey Arts Centre, a very much more modest structure than it is today, was built at 13750 – 88th Avenue as a Federal Centennial project at a cost of $225,000. In 1981 it will be rebuilt by the municipality and the province at a cost of $2.1 million.
Wrote Mark Leiren-Young in The Greater Vancouver Book: “The Canadian Centennial celebration of 1967 was a milestone year for entertainment in Vancouver as everybody in the city decided to put on a show. Among the acts that played Vancouver in 1967 were Marilyn Horne, Don Ho, Petula Clark, Danny Kaye, Maureen Forrester, Wayne Newton, Victor Borge, the National Ballet of Canada, the American Ballet Theatre, The Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the New York Ballet and the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein. There were so many international acts visiting Vancouver in 1967 that the Centennial Vancouver Festival was actually criticized for having a ‘mediocre line-up’ when they announced shows including the Mermaid Theatre of London, the Sound of Music starring Dorothy Collins (a Canadian-born U.S. TV star), classical pianist Van Cliburn and the Royal Ballet featuring Rudolph Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn.”
Vancouver’s Talonbooks published its first book. Publisher Karl Siegler says that in the early days of the company staff members met once or twice a month in people’s basements to read and vote on what work to accept for publication. See this site.
New York City-born writer Crawford Kilian moved to Vancouver. He has written much since then! Kilian, a Capilano College English professor, writes on education (and on writing for the web) and has produced many science fiction novels. See this site for biographical details and this site for details on his s/f stories and novels. Google has more than 26,000 entries on him!
Writer W.P. Kinsella (William Patrick Kinsella) moved to Victoria this year. He was born in Edmonton in 1945 (we’ve also seen 1935!) and raised on a remote Alberta homestead. He now lives in White Rock. He’s most well-known as the author of Shoeless Joe, which became a terrific 1989 movie, Field of Dreams, but he has many more tales to his credit. See this site.
Writer SKY Lee (she spells her first name in caps), born in Port Alberni in 1952, came to Vancouver. Her 1990 novel Disappearing Moon Cafe, about four generations of the Wong family in Vancouver who operate the cafe of the title, received the City of Vancouver book award.
The book Along the Way: An Historical Account of Pioneering White Rock and Surrounding District in British Columbia appeared. Author Margaret A. Lang was pleased to see it reprinted in 1970.
New Westminster-born actor Raymond Burr, already famous for his Perry Mason TV series, began a new one: Ironside, as a wheelchair-bound investigator. It will be popular, will last to 1975.
Edward Gilbert Nahanee, longshoreman and Native Brotherhood of B.C. organizer, was awarded the Canada Confederation Medal for his work with native people.
Swimmer and swimming instructor Percy Norman, born March 14, 1904 in New Westminster, was posthumously inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame. He was considered Canada’s top swimming and diving coach for many years. Norman coached the 1936 Canadian Olympic and 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games swim teams, winning six medals. He was head coach of the Vancouver Amateur Swim Club at Crystal Pool from 1931 to 1955.
Hockey’s Victoria-born Lynn Patrick became general manager of the St. Louis Blues.
Thomas Reid, who helped form the Fisheries Commission in 1937, retired as chair.
Pearl Steen, women’s activist, whose list of accomplishments in a variety of organizations would fill a few pages, received Vancouver’s Good Citizen Award. See her entry in our Hall of Fame.
Shipbuilder Clarence Wallace bought the shipbuilding operations of Victoria Machinery Depot.
The Vancouver Sun items columnist Jack Wasserman was fired by the Sun for hosting a show on CJOR radio, but was rehired 18 months later.
