1970

Above: North Vancouver’s Chief Dan George was named best supporting actor by New York film critics for his role as Old Lodge Skins in Little Big Man.
[Image: www.vancouverisawesome.com/courier-archive]

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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 5 Olympic skiing champion Nancy Greene Raine and Tim Raine had twin boys, Charley and Willy.

January 10 A new phenomenon in passenger aviation arose in 1970 and the Sun sent business writer Phil Hanson down to Seattle to report on it. “Almost 30 huge Boeing 747 jumbo jets,” Hanson wrote today, “painted in the colors of half a dozen world airlines line the apron at the Boeing Company’s new complex at Everett, Washington.

“These jets, first of 192 in Boeing’s order book, will trickle into airline service during the next few months to pioneer a new era in mass air travel.”

The first airline to use the 747, Pan American Airways, would introduce them January 22 on its New York to London service. A year after its launch nearly 100 of the planes were being operated by 17 airlines and the number of passengers had increased to seven million. (Air Canada would have them by the spring of 1971, CP Air by 1973.) The 747 changed air travel forever, made it affordable to millions of people who’d never flown before.

Today, the amount of fuel it gulps is too expensive and the number of 747s has gone away down. More than 100 are “parked,” unused.

By the way, Phil Hanson was one of the first Canadians to fly in a 747. Boeing flew him and a few other reporters down to Seattle in one.

January 29 Lawren Harris, Canadian artist and a member of the Group of Seven, died in Vancouver, aged 84. He was born October 23, 1885 in Brantford, Ontario. Writes art reviewer Tony Robertson: “Harris was the single most influential, important and often controversial figure in this generation. He dominated the period of the ’40s and early ’50s in Vancouver with his broad experience, curiosity, ideas, energy and enthusiasm; not the least as he moved the Vancouver Art Gallery from a largely amateur to a fully professional institution with his rigorous critical standards and vital, assertive personality.”

January 30 TCG, which had started in 1946 with one automotive replacement glass store, was incorporated under the name TCG International. Today, Apple Auto Glass (124 locations), Speedy Auto Glass (162 locations in Canada, 111 in the U.S.), and hundreds of NOVUS windshield repair and replacement franchises are among TCGI’s activities. They are also heavily into satellite and cellular phones and paging systems. TCGI operates more than 300 corporate and franchise operations in Quebec. And they have sponsored 1946 in The History of Metropolitan Vancouver.

February 10 John Davidson, botanist and conservationist, died in Vancouver, aged 91. He was born August 6, 1878 in Aberdeen, Scotland. The son of a cabinet maker, he was hired as a boy in the University of Aberdeen’s botany department. By 29, he was in charge of its botanical museum. In 1908 a lack of formal education and his class blocked his way to an assistant professorship. After a near-fatal flu/pneumonia attack in 1909, he was advised to move to a “more merciful” climate. He chose Vancouver, leaving Scotland in April 1911. Hired by Henry Esson Young, he was soon named provincial botanist. Davidson started the gardens at Essondale (now Riverview) and at UBC. “Botany John” joined UBC in 1912; he was a botany instructor and professor from 1916 to 1948. Founder, Vancouver Natural History Society (1918). Read The Vancouver Natural History Society, 1918-1933 by Jim Peacock.

February 16 David Y.H. Lui brought in his first event as an impresario: the Phakavali Dancers of Thailand. For an all-too-brief and luminescent period, Lui will import many distinguished and exciting dance companies.

February 25 John Wallace deBeque Farris, crown prosecutor and attorney general, died in Vancouver, aged 91. Writes Constance Brissenden: “He was born December 3, 1878 in White’s Cove, New Brunswick. He attended Acadia U. and U. of Pennsylvania. He came to Vancouver in 1903 as the city’s first Crown prosecutor, aged 24. He took more appeals to the British Privy Council than any other Canadian. He was elected MLA for Vancouver in 1917 and continued in that office to 1924. Farris was Attorney General and Minister of Labour (1917-1922) and was called to the Senate in 1937. He counselled major corporations but also defended society’s outsiders, such as a group of Chinese charged with gaming. The imposing Liberal senator was called a radical by his opponents, ‘a term which pleased him.’”

February A strike began at the two major Vancouver dailies, The Vancouver Sun and The Province. A daily newspaper called The Vancouver Express appeared, and would be published from February 21 to May 12. It ceased publication when the strike ended. Copies of the Express are on microfilm on the 5th floor of the Vancouver Public Library.

Marc Edge’s 2001 book Pacific Press has fascinating details on the birth (and death) of the Express. On Page 148: A Province staffer, Mike Tytherleigh, who had newspaper production experience, suggested to the striking workers that they start their own newspaper, to be published three times a week and to end publication when the strike was over. “Together with Sun reporters Barry Band and Barry Broadfoot,” Edge writes, “Tytherleigh cooked up a plan over his kitchen table.”

Tytherleigh: “At the union meeting I suggested—why don’t we start our own newspaper? Having worked with offset printing at the ill-fated Times [CD: a short-lived 1964 newspaper], I knew how easy it was to produce a paper. Later in the week I was called to a meeting of the union bosses, including the poobah from New York, to discuss the feasibility. I said there was no need for a discussion because we were well under way with a planned, 12-page paper to be published on the Saturday.”

There’s lots more in Edge’s book.

March CFMI-FM 101.1 signed on, identifying itself as “FM-One” with an automated rock/country hybrid and Sunday programming of international/ethnic music.

April 7 Jana Jorgenson, an 18-year old Centennial High School student from Coquitlam, won the Miss Teen Canada contest.

April 30 The first CP Rail computer-commanded coal train from Alberta reached Delta’s new Roberts Bank superport. Westshore Terminals Ltd. used to have a brief history of the project at this site. It read: “The first two dredges dropped their buckets into the muddy waters of Roberts Bank on July 2, 1968 to begin work on a bold megaproject for Canada. Their mission was to create a 20 hectare (50 acre) man-made island for use as a multi-cargo superport.

“The reclamation project for the National Harbours Board (the predecessor to the Vancouver Port Corporation and Vancouver Port Authority) had followed a 1966 draft master plan from engineering consultants Swan Wooster for a superport some five kilometres into the Strait of Georgia and connected by a reclaimed causeway.

“The first customer was Kaiser Coal, (later Kaiser Resources Ltd., B.C. Coal and Westar Mining), which had developed a new coal mine at Sparwood in southeastern B.C. and entered a partnership agreement with Japanese Steel Mills to operate a deep-sea dry bulk terminal at Roberts Bank.

“The first ship to sail from Westshore was the Snow White which left for Japan on May 4, 1970 with 24,289 tonnes of metallurgical coal. Westshore Terminals, as it was known, was officially opened by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and B.C. Premier W.A.C. Bennett on June 15, 1970.”

See an interesting aerial photo of Roberts Bank here.

April High-tech guru Tod Maffin was born in Vancouver. His company MindfulEye “reads” financial items on the Internet every day (up to 500,000 pieces), then reports back to subscribers what others are saying about the subject the subscriber is interested in. He was described by the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business as “one of Canada’s most influential futurists.” See this site.

May 9 Fred Deeley, Sr., motorcycle dealer, died in Vancouver, aged about 89. He was born in 1881 in Bromsgrove, England. After 10 years in business in England, he first visited B.C. in 1913, representing Birmingham Small Arms, manufacturer of BSA motorcycles. He bought out BSA and in 1914 opened Fred Deeley Ltd. in a 12-foot-wide store at 1075 Granville. In 1916 Deeley acquired a Harley-Davidson franchise, becoming its second oldest dealership. By 1925 he owned a motorcycle shop, bicycle shop, and one of Canada’s larger car dealerships. The company included son Fred, Jr. and grandson Trev (b. 1920) of Trev Deeley Motorcycles. Biography: Motorcycle Millionaire, by Trev Deeley. Deeley Harley-Davidson has sponsored 1917 in The History of Metropolitan Vancouver.

June 15 Westshore Terminals was officially opened by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and B.C. Premier W.A.C. Bennett. See the April 30 item on Westshore.

August 8 Writer/broadcaster Bob Mackin, Jr. was born. One of his works is Goals and Dreams: A Celebration of Canadian Women’s Soccer.

August 14 “Marijuana,” wrote Province reporter Maurice Chenier on Page One, “is alive and well and growing in the Vancouver area, thank you. On Thursday The Province checked out a tip from a young person who claimed that growing the illegal plant is very popular in the Vancouver area. ‘You’ll find a lot of pot—potted or otherwise—growing in the University of B.C. area, in Stanley Park, and up on Burnaby Mountain at the back of Simon Fraser University,’ said the unidentified tipster. ‘The increased police hassle in the last few years,’ he continued, ‘has forced some of us to grow it wherever we can. Some grow the stuff as potted plants and others use out-of-the-way fields. I hear there’s a bumper crop this year. There’s so much around that you can easily say Vancouver’s gone to pot’.” Chenier and photographer Ken Allen went out looking, found marijuana in a dozen spots. (As far as we know, the first reference to “marihuana” in a Vancouver newspaper was a March 5, 1937 Province item about a dead man with the stuff in his stomach.)

September 18 Guitarist Jimi Hendrix died in London, England at age 27. Hendrix had a direct, if brief, connection to Vancouver. One of the city’s more prominent black citizens in the 1940s was Tennessee-born Zenora Hendrix, called Nora. She was Jimi’s grandmother. Her son, Al (Jimi’s father), was born in Vancouver in 1919. (Incidentally, Al’s father, Bertram, once worked as a steward at the Quilchena Golf Club.) Nora Hendrix—who was of Cherokee Indian descent and died in 1985 at age 100 years—was married to Ross Hendrix, who worked as a stage hand. They lived from 1942 to 1952 in a small house at 827 East Georgia. In 1949, aged about seven, Jimi Hendrix lived very briefly with his grandmother at that East Georgia home.

There is a good, brief biography of Jimi Hendrix at this site. And see the October 1 entry below.

September 24 George Wootton, principal of still very young Douglas College, spoke to the college’s charter students from the ice rink of Queen’s Park arena. Classes for the college’s first 1,600 students were temporarily held at high school in the evenings. In late October and early November, classes were transferred to the college’s three campus sites: a remodelled warehouse on Minoru Boulevard near the Westminster Highway in Richmond, a 6.4-hectare campus with 10 portable buildings at 92nd Avenue and 140th Street in Surrey, and a 3.2-hectare campus with 13 portable units at McBride and Eighth Avenue in New Westminster. These portable campuses earned Douglas College the name “trailer park university.”

The college offered courses in three program areas: career and vocational training leading to a certificate or diploma, academic studies for university-bound students, and community-oriented courses, including skills upgrading.

In 1972, Douglas College’s first 175 graduates would receive their two-year diplomas in a ceremony at the Royal City Curling Club in New Westminster.

Fall A $1.5-million Student Activity Centre was completed at BCIT. It included a cafeteria, a gymnasium, and several other recreational facilities.

October 1 Vancouver city archivist James Skitt Matthews died in Vancouver, aged 91. We lost a giant when Major Matthews died. The city of Vancouver owes a huge debt to the Major: he and his wife Emily started the city’s archives in 1933. For more than three decades he relentlessly and tirelessly amassed photographs, artifacts, books, newspapers, magazines, civic records, diaries and more. You can see it all at the City Archives.

This web site and my forthcoming book, not to mention all the post-1933 books on local history, rely heavily on the work the Major did.

Donna Jean McKinnon, who once worked at the Archives, wrote for The Greater Vancouver Book an appreciation of the man. It begins: “Major J. S. Matthews, adventurer, innovator, and first archivist of the city of Vancouver was born September 7, 1878 in Wales. He was a natural archivist, keeping meticulous track of his activities and of those around him who he thought were making an impact on society.

“It was a short step for him to start collecting general historical material from others in Vancouver. As the collection grew, he developed his own cataloguing systems, in the end amassing more than 500,000 photographs and hundreds of civic records and personal papers . . .”

Read the entire article here.

Also October 1 Jimi Hendrix was mourned at his Seattle funeral and wake and was buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Renton, Washington.

October 5 In Quebec, FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) terrorists in Montreal kidnapped British trade commissioner James Cross, and the “October Crisis” began. On October 16 the Pierre Trudeau government will impose the War Measures Act. On October 17 the FLQ will murder Pierre Laporte, Quebec’s vice premier and minister of labor. See this site for more.

UBC’s student newspaper, The Ubyssey, printed statements and commentary suppressed by other papers fearful of reprisals under the War Measures Act.

October 9 The brand-new Vancouver Canucks played their first regular season NHL game. They played the Los Angeles Kings in the Pacific Coliseum and came out at the wrong end of a 3-1 score. General manager Bud Poile blamed it on the players’ nervousness. Still, Toronto-born defenceman Barry Wilkins, 23, scored one for the Canucks’ 15,062 paying fans, and Vancouver’s first NHL game was history. (Tickets ran from $3.50 to $6.40.) The team’s first captain, their second pick in the expansion draft, was Orland Kurtenbach (who later coached the Canucks). Their fourth pick was defenseman Pat Quinn (who would take over the team in 1987). The first coach was Hal Laycoe and G.M. was Norman (Bud) Poile. Incidentally, the Canucks were admitted to the league along with the Buffalo Sabres at an expansion fee of $6 million, three times what the cost had been when six teams joined in 1967. The original applicants balked at the price and the franchise was purchased by Minneapolis entrepreneur Tom Scallen.

See this site.

October 13 The Langara campus of Vancouver Community College, consisting of a five-storey library block and a three-storey instructional block, had been completed in September. The move to the Langara campus was marked by a “great trek” today. About 3,000 students, teachers, and administrators walked or drove from the old King Edward Centre at Oak Street and 12th Avenue to the new campus at 100 West 49th Avenue. The trek was led by Vancouver mayor Tom Campbell, the provincial education minister Donald Brothers, and Langara’s student council president, and included the Vancouver Firemen’s Band. (Langara would not become a separate, independent college until April 1, 1994.)

October 23 “In 1970,” writes Zoltán Simon on this site, “the Hungarian organizations of British Columbia persuaded the cities and municipalities of Vancouver, North Vancouver and West Vancouver to declare October 23, the anniversary of the 1956 Revolution, as Hungarian Day. History is on the side of the angels: since last year, the same day has become a national holiday in Hungary too. The sacrifice of the thousands who gave their lives for freedom is acknowledged on a plaque in Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Park (1989) and in Burnaby’s Forest Lawn Memorial Park (1986).”

Also in October Vancouver City Police and hostel dwellers from Jericho clashed on West 4th Avenue.

Also in October Unrest continued at Simon Fraser University as the censure of the university by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), which had been imposed in May, 1968 for “interference in academic affairs by the Board of Governors”, but lifted in November, 1968, was reinstated. The beef this time: seven faculty members were dismissed from the political science, sociology and anthropology department, described by one observer as “a madcap collection of brilliant New Left academics.”

November 3 Vancouver City Council approved the sale of land for multi-purpose development in Champlain Heights, the last large undeveloped tract in Vancouver.

December 29 North Vancouver’s Chief Dan George was named best supporting actor by New York film critics for his role as Old Lodge Skins in Little Big Man. (“Sometimes the magic doesn’t work.”) That terrific performance, funny and warm and dignified, also earned him an Oscar nomination.

Also in 1970

The Abbotsford Air Show, a success from its beginning in 1962, officially became Canada’s National Air Show. That first event in 1962 attracted 15,000 spectators. In recent years an average of between 250,000 and 300,000 have turned out during the show’s three-day run at Abbotsford International Airport, 80 kilometres east of Vancouver in the Fraser Valley.

Eatons built a new store in Pacific Centre at the southwest corner of Georgia and Granville, having moved up from their previous location on West Hastings (the building now known as Harbour Centre.) The new store’s stark white and mostly windowless facade garnered much criticism. A year later Pacific Centre will connect the Eatons store to The Bay, kitty corner across Granville, with an underground shopping network.

1970 was the common expiry date for leases along False Creek’s south shore. (The city had purchased the 85-acre property from the province, which had in turn promptly sold it to the city for $400,000 and a city-owned site in Burnaby the province wanted for Simon Fraser University.) The decades-long tenure of many industries on the Creek ended. Now the debate over the future of False Creek would begin.

Boating News, a monthly publication covering commercial and pleasure boating, first appeared.

The first part of BC Ferries’ “stretch and lift” program began. Four of its major vessels were cut down the middle so that 84-foot midsections could be “spliced” in. Similar operations had been performed on smaller boats, but this was the first time BC Ferries’ larger ships were subject to such extensive alterations. The fleet was now at 24 ships.

The Lady Alexandra, built in 1924 for the Union Steamship Company, had since 1959 been a floating restaurant in Coal Harbour. She was extensively redesigned this year. In 1972 she would be towed to Redonda Beach, California, to become a gambling hall. She was later storm-damaged and was scrapped in 1980.

Graybeard, an ocean racer/cruiser designed by Vancouver marine architect Peter Hatfield and owner Lol Killam, began her racing career under the flag of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club. She won the Swiftsure Lightship and Victoria-Maui races this year. “Graybeards,” by the way, is the name given to huge waves which circle Antarctica, occasionally capsizing freighters.

A Canadian-born Seattle businessman, Stan McDonald, who had made a modest start in the cruise ship business in 1962 (the year of the Seattle World’s Fair), and had built the business up since then, acquired the 20,000-ton Island Princess. Gary Bannerman, who has written extensively on the cruise ship trade, says the ship was “majestic” by 1970 standards. “P&O responded,” Bannerman continues, “by purchasing a 17,000-ton Scandinavian vessel, and called her Spirit of London (subsequently renamed Sun Princess), the first purpose-built cruise ship ever to enter the fleet. Holland America, the historic Dutch firm, and the super-luxury fleet of Royal Viking Line came next and now new ships seemed to arrive every year.”

B.C.’s Attorney General began licensing gaming conducted by charitable and religious groups and at fairs and exhibitions.

Along the Way: An Historical Account of Pioneering White Rock and Surrounding District in British Columbia by Margaret A. Lang, which had first appeared in 1967, went into a second edition.

Audrey Thomas’ first novel, Mrs. Blood, appeared.

Vancouver writer George Payerle produced a short, experimental novel, his first, The Afterpeople.

Horizons, a corten steel sculpture by Gerhard Class, was installed at 888 S.E. Marine Drive, the address for the Wilkinson Steel Co., celebrating its 60th anniversary.

Artist Paul Rand, a landscape painter and a commercial artist for most of his working life, died, aged about 74. “His pictures,” Tony Robertson has written, “have a strong and dramatic sense of regional identity and their own very distinctive clear and clean style. Rand wanted to make painting accessible to ordinary people, using recognizable images presented in an easily understood manner. He also painted people at work in a style reminiscent of the social realism of the Mexican muralists . . .”

Bill Millerd became artistic and managing director of the Arts Club Theatre. He’s still there after 35 years!

Norbert Vesak launched his Western Dance Theatre. Writes Max Wyman: “Lynn Seymour came back to dance with him as a guest; hopes grew for the establishment of Canada’s fourth major dance company. But the pressures on Vesak—organizational, financial, negative commentary on his artistic judgment—became intolerable, and the company closed midway through its second season. The day after the close-down, Vesak was invited to make The Ecstasy of Rita Joe for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. It became one of that company’s most popular ballets. Vesak later resettled in California and developed a busy international career as choreographer and director.”

Morley Wiseman established Ballet Horizons in 1970. There is a good article on Wiseman and his company in the February 26, 1971 issue of Ubyssey, which can be accessed on the paper’s web site. The company would last until 1974.

Devon, England-born Timothy Oke, a meteorological expert, who came to Canada in 1963, came to UBC to teach. Oke, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Canadian Geographic Society, has written extensively on local climate. His books include The Climate of Vancouver (1976) and Vancouver and its Region (1992). See this site.

The Fraser Valley Regional Library, covering an area of 4,000 square miles, extending from Richmond to Hope, from Port Coquitlam to Agassiz, and from the international border to the mountains north of the Fraser River, now operated two bookmobiles, each carrying 2,000 volumes and serving 206 stops every two weeks.

In 1970 the entire book publishing industry in British Columbia earned $350,000 in sales.

The building at 6450 Deer Lake Avenue in Burnaby, built in the 1940s as a retreat for Benedictine monks, became the James Cowan Theatre, named for a Burnaby arts patron. The theatre is part of Burnaby’s Shadbolt Centre for the Arts.

A 147-bed extended-care facility budgeted at $2.3 million was approved for Burnaby Hospital.

A cross-Canada survey showed that nearly 50 per cent of the movie theatres being used in 1948 were out of service by 1970.

Windsor-born artist Carl Chaplin, about 24, arrived in Vancouver and became established as a freelance artist and illustrator. His apocalyptic paintings of major world cities being atom-bombed would make an impact, and a painting of a baby seal with a seal hunter reflected in its eyes would be a huge seller.

Richard Loney began singing O Canada at Canucks games.

Writes architectural historian Dr. Harold Kalman, “Around 1970 builders developed a new model for mass-market housing, which maximized floor area and site coverage at an attractive price. Principal living and sleeping spaces were located on the second floor, with utility rooms, garage, and often an ‘in-law suite’ on the ground floor, and no basement. The type may have originated in Richmond, where the high water table encouraged living high above the damp ground. The ‘Vancouver Specials,’ as they quickly became known, spread like wildfire throughout the Lower Mainland. They nearly as quickly achieved widespread unpopularity among architects and aesthetes, who channelled their reaction to the threat they posed into denouncement of their boring flat fronts, boxy shapes, and low-sloped roofs as ugly.” Kalman cites the 6100 and 6200 blocks of Elgin and Ross Streets in Vancouver as good locations to see them.

The Old Spaghetti Factory opened on Water Street in 1970, and its funky ambience drew big crowds to the area. That was good for the Gastown area.

Peter Fox and John Fluevog went into partnership in a new Gastown boutique called Fox and Fluevog Shoes. It will become hugely successful.

A new parish hall was built at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic church on Slocan Street.

The striking Sikh Gurdwara (Temple) at 8000 Ross Street, designed by the architectural firm Erickson/Massey, was finished. See 1969 for more information.

The Charles Crane Memorial Library at UBC, using dedicated volunteers, began recording talking textbooks and background materials for blind and sight-impaired students.

Oakalla Prison Farm was renamed the Lower Mainland Regional Correctional Centre.

Greenpeace was born. This entry is based on a web site from Rex Weyler, who has written a book on the group. See this site.

“In 1969, a few days after the United States detonated a one-megaton nuclear weapon at Amchitka Island in the Alaskan Aleutians, the Don’t Make A Wave Committee had been organized in a Vancouver living room. The participants were a small number of people who thought such weapons should not be allowed to make waves through the oceans or atmospheres of the world ever again.

“Committee members included Paul Cote, then a UBC law student; Bill Darnell, a field worker for the federal government’s Company of Young Canadians; Terry Simmons, a member of the Sierra Club studying at Simon Fraser University, and two older men, James Bohlen and Irving Stowe. Bohlen and Stowe had left the United States to protest the Vietnam War as well as the nuclear buildup. Bohlen had once designed rocket engines. Stowe was a Quaker and a lawyer. They talked and argued.

“One of the arguments was whether to concentrate the committee’s efforts in protesting against another Amchitka test planned for the fall of 1971, or to expand their efforts to fight against all threats to the environment.

“As he left one meeting, Stowe, a gnome-like man in his late fifties, said ‘Peace.’ It was the traditional greeting or farewell of those involved in the peace activist movement. ‘Make it a green peace,’ said Darnell, the youngster from the CYC.”

That was the inspiration for the group’s new name: Greenpeace.

Alberta Co-op’s poultry processing plant located in Port Coquitlam, marking the start of the Kingsway Avenue industrial park development. The operation processes 25,000 chickens in an eight-hour day.

Thomas Davis Coldicutt died. He was born in England in 1879, came to Canada from Birmingham in 1900 to take part in the Klondike gold rush. Instead, he stayed in Victoria, where he was a ship’s navigator till 1904, then moved to New Westminster. Four years later he moved again, to east Burnaby, where he is remembered by Coldicutt Street. Beginning in 1909 he was a councillor, getting into real estate in 1912. He donated 222 acres for Central Park, and secured the money to build Kingsway. In 1912 he bought a home in Crescent Beach; in 1932 he bought 500 acres there, and built homes, a villa with lodges, a stable and tennis courts. These are today’s Ocean Ridge townhouses.

Journalist Alan Morley, 65, retired. Morley was born in Vancouver (August 15, 1905) but grew up in Armstrong and Penticton. He put himself through UBC in the early 1930s writing for The Vancouver Sun. He wrote for 21 other newspapers before returning to the Sun in 1957. He was with them until his retirement. He wrote the admirable history Vancouver, From Milltown to Metropolis, published in 1961.

Alexander Saba died in Vancouver, aged about 89. He was born c. April 7, 1881 in Beirut, Lebanon. In November 1903, with his older brother Michael (born c. 1861 in Beirut, Lebanon, died July 10, 1955), they opened Saba Brothers, silk merchants. Two years later, the store moved to the 500 block Granville. Mike retired in 1921, selling his shares to Alex. By 1940, Saba’s was the largest retail house in Western Canada specializing in silks. Although hit by shortages in WWII, the business survived. In 1942, there was a riot when 500 women stampeded the store to buy 300 pairs of nylon stockings (no one was hurt). In 1947, the company built a new five-storey $250,000 store at 622 Granville. In 1954 they opened a Victoria outlet. Alex’s three sons, Edgar, Clarence and Arnold, later managed the business.

Maple Ridge’s Debbie Brill, 17, won gold in the high jump at the 1970 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh. There were many more medals to come.

Sprinter Harry Jerome, who had won bronze in the 1964 Olympic Games, and gold in the 1966 Commonwealth Games and 1967 Pan-American games, received the Order of Canada.

Badminton champion Eileen Underhill (née George) and her husband Jack, another champion in the sport, are inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame, the first husband-and-wife team to be so honored. Read about them here.

Writer Ethel Wilson, 82, was awarded the Order of Canada Medal of Service.

The liner Oronsay was quarantined on arrival in Vancouver with typhoid among passengers.

Much of the Point Grey peninsula is occupied by the University of British Columbia, but there remains a great deal of forest. There were attempts during the 1960s to plan large housing developments there, but the locals protested. One resident, Iva Mann, had been working to keep the area forested since 1951. “Her efforts began,” Kerry Gold wrote in The Greater Vancouver Book, “when a white dogwood at the rear of her property was cut down during one of the government’s many subdivision attempts. Mann couldn’t save the tree, but the incident was pivotal in sparking her environmental interest. By 1970 she was working with a residents group called the Regional Park Committee and B.C. Outdoor Recreation, transforming the old logging skid trails into suitable hiking trails. The idea was to make the forested area accessible, and therefore desirable, to the public.” It would take many more years, but Pacific Spirit Regional Park would finally be announced December 1988, by Premier Bill Vander Zalm.

A plebiscite late this year on incorporation in Lions Bay drew more than the requisite 60 per cent majority vote from the 250 residents. Lions Bay would officially become a village municipality in the spring of 1971.

A fire that destroyed a Lions Bay village home prompted the Lions Bay Property Owners’ Association to acquire a fire truck (staffed by the village’s newly created Volunteer Fire Department).

A count of seagulls taken this year by the Vancouver Natural History Society recorded more than 20,000 of seven species. In his book The Birds of Vancouver, John Rodgers wrote that four other species can be seen from time to time. “Gulls cannot dive,” Rodgers wrote. “They swim rapidly, but rarely for long distances. They are web-footed and long of wing, and in the air they are effortless and graceful. By far the most numerous in this area is the glaucous-winged gull, known by its clean white head, pale grey mantle, yellowish bill with a red spot, the white spots on the edges of the four-and-a-half-foot wingspan, flesh-colored legs, and its strident voice. Our only resident gull, it is a species of the Pacific northwest and its only breeding areas in Canada are in British Columbia. Glaucous-wings invade city gardens and garbage dumps for food, and they scavenge on the beaches for anything that looks appetizing. They steal the catches of diving birds and have been known to kill and eat baby ducklings. Those mottled-greyish gulls with black bills seen with the glaucous-wings are first-year birds and do not reach maturity for three years.”