Oddities

Some odd stuff has happened in Vancouver’s past. Here’s a sampling

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

From 1792 to 1899

In 1792 a Spanish exploration party in these waters taught the local native people a song called Malbrouck, and recorded in their journals that the men were singing the song as they paddled away. We know the tune as For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow!
In 1861 Col. Richard Moody of the Royal Engineers named Lulu Island in Richmond in honor of 16-year-old singer Lulu Sweet, a visiting member of a touring San Francisco musical revue.
In 1865 the first telegraph message from the outside world to arrive at Burrard Inlet told of the assassination of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.
In 1867 when newly-arrived John “Gassy Jack” Deighton arrived at Burrard Inlet he told the mill workers there they could have all the whiskey they could drink if they helped him build his saloon. The Globe went up in 24 hours.
In 1869 our first (unofficial) postmaster was hotel owner Maxie Michaud. He had walked here from Montreal.
In 1878 the Moodyville Tickler, Burrard Inlet’s first newspaper, appeared. It had a very brief, tongue-in-cheek existence. For example, the more you paid for your obituary the more glowing it became.
In 1880 the influential London Truth newspaper editorialized: “British Columbia is not worth keeping. It should never have been inhabited at all. It will never pay a red cent of interest on the money that may be sunk in it.”
In the 1880s a company of American cavalry raided an Apache village in Arizona. Among other things, they discovered a stack of Canadian Pacific Railway pamphlets advertising lots in Vancouver’s posh “Brighouse Estates”!
In 1882, when the first electricity came to B.C. (at the Moodyville sawmill on the north shore of Burrard Inlet) the mayor and council of Victoria made a special trip to see the lights turned on.
In 1883 the first locomotive arrived in Vancouver . . . on a ship! It was used for local work.
In 1884 huge, knot-free beams, 34 m (112 feet) long by 70 cm (28 inches) square were shipped to Beijing from Burrard Inlet sawmills. They’re still there, part of the Imperial Palace.
In 1886 the incorporation ceremony creating the City of Vancouver was delayed when it was realized no one had thought to bring paper to write down the details. One of the men there ran over to Tilley’s Stationery and bought a pen and some paper.
In 1886 butcher George Black organized horse races down muddy Granville Street.
In 1886 when the city’s first fire engine and its supporting equipment arrived (two months after the Great Fire), there were no horses available to pull it. For a time it had to be pulled to fires by the firefighters themselves.
In 1886 the first badges for the Vancouver City Police were made of American silver dollars, with one side smoothed down and engraved Vancouver City Police.
In 1886, with a population of about 1,000, Vancouver had three daily newspapers.
In 1889, the writer Rudyard Kipling visited Vancouver and bought land here: two lots at the southeast corner of East 11th Avenue and Fraser Street.
In 1891, when the population of Vancouver was only about 13,000, the Vancouver Opera House, built for the Canadian Pacific Railway, opened on Granville with 2,000 seats.
In 1891 world-famed actress Sarah Bernhardt appeared in Vancouver, but audience numbers fell off sharply when it was found she acted only in French.
In 1892 BC premier John Robson, after whom Robson Street is named, was visiting London, England. He got his finger caught in a cab door, infection set in, and he died.
In 1893 the exclusive Vancouver Club was formed. Shortly after its inauguration it ran into financial problems, and its china and silverware was repossessed. It was used—complete with the club’s crest—in the restaurant of the man who had supplied the stuff!
In 1894 the forerunner of the Vancouver Museum was created. The first donation was a stuffed swan.
In 1894 gold was discovered on Lulu Island.
In 1895 Burnaby hired its first law enforcer, at $2 a day, to police rowdyism, notify owners of swine running at large, and enforce the wide tire by-law for wagons. He was dismissed for lack of funds in April 1897.
In 1898, on October 15, the Nine O’Clock Gun was fired for the first time in Stanley Park . . . at noon.
In 1899, the city’s first CPR station (a tiny building) was moved from the north foot of Howe Street to No. 10 Heatley Street. CPR worker William Alberts, who had been badly injured on the job, was allowed to move into the old, unused station and use it as a rent-free residence for the rest of his life. He lived there for 50 years.

From 1900 to 1922

In 1900 the Canadian Pacific Railway financed a film to promote Canadian immigration to the west. It took two years to film because the film-makers weren’t allowed to show snow.
In 1901, on June 23, there was snow in South Vancouver.
In 1902 movie goers in Vancouver were informed they could see THE ERUPTION OF MOUNT PELEE—BY ELECTRICITY at the Electric Theatre on Cordova Street. (This was a reconstruction, in a studio, of the actual 1902 Mount Pelee disaster. The film makers used a table-top model with flour bursting out of it.)
In 1903 W.S. Holland shot and killed a timber wolf at the corner of Burnaby and Cardero Streets in the West End.
In 1905 the first auto club race around Stanley Park was held. Eleven cars started, five finished. All the finishers were Oldsmobiles.
In 1908 “Jeff, the Boxing Kangaroo” amused big crowds in Vancouver at the Pantages Theatre.
In 1909 world heavyweight boxing champ Jack Johnson fought an exhibition bout in Vancouver with boxer Victor McLaglen, who would later become an Oscar-winning movie actor.
In 1909 Vancouver took its first mechanized ambulance out for a test drive and ran over and killed an American tourist.
All the grey squirrels in Stanley Park today are the offspring of a gift of eight pairs from New York City in 1909.
In 1910 a man in Surrey was fined $10 for speeding in his 1907 Marion car. He was travelling at 12 miles per hour.
In 1910 Vancouver’s Cedar Cottage neighborhood got its name from an Interurban train stop there. The station, in turn, was named for the Cedar Cottage Brewery.
In 1910 a young English actor named William Pratt arrived in Vancouver, got work as a carpenter helping to build what became the PNE. Later he moved to Hollywood and changed his name to Boris Karloff.
In 1912 a group of Vancouver businessmen conceived a plan to build a 15-metre high dam across the Second Narrows. Port Moody, which would have been flooded, protested.
In 1912 an English revue company called Karno’s Comedians performed in Vancouver. Included in the cast: Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel.
In 1914 the mayor of Vancouver banned performances by visiting English music-hall performer Marie Lloyd. At one point in her show she had lifted her floor-length gown up two inches to reveal a watch on her ankle. The shameless hussy!
In 1917 the Province reported that BC women had now won the right to vote. The story was located deep within a report from the legislature, preceded by some news on agricultural matters.
In 1917, during a business trip to Portland, Vancouver businessman Alvo von Alvensleben was arrested. It seems British intelligence officials had sent a list of “dangerous German spies” to the U.S. Justice Department, and Alvensleben’s name topped the list!
In 1918 RAF pilot Lt. Victor Bishop crashed his little H-2 “flying boat” down onto the roof of a West End doctor. He stepped out of the plane into the upstairs hallway of the house and, with the assistance of one of the residents, walked down the stairs to the front door and outside through a gathered crowd to a waiting ambulance.
In 1919 more than two thousand pieces of Vancouver property were listed in the newspapers for sale by auction. They had been seized for non-payment of taxes, some for amounts less than $10.
In 1920, in November, construction on the Peace Arch was stopped to allow time for the concrete to set. It would not resume until June, 1921.
In 1920, in Surrey, loggers found an eagle’s nest so big it was too large for a farm wagon to haul away.
In 1920, in Port Coquitlam, a fire destroyed the firehall and half the buildings in the downtown. The fire had started in the fire chief’s kitchen above the firehall.
In 1921, Henry Green, musical director of an orchestra that became the genesis of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, skipped town, with the orchestra’s money, never to be heard from again.
The statue (erected in 1921) in front of Vancouver’s CPR station of the angel bearing a fallen soldier heavenward is an exact replica of statues in Winnipeg and Montreal.
In 1922 Joe Fortes, celebrated English Bay lifeguard, died, aged about 57. His funeral at Holy Rosary Cathedral was the most heavily attended in Vancouver history to that time, with thousands outside the packed church.
In 1922 visiting vaudeville entertainer Benny Kubelsky, performing at the (old) Orpheum Theatre, met a young Vancouver girl named Sadie Marks. They met again in Seattle in 1926 and were married. We know them better as Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone.

From 1923 to 1930

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

From 1931 to 1935

In 1931, on July 3, Canada’s first baseball game played under lights took place at Athletic Park in Vancouver.
In 1931 Vancouver International Airport opened. Cowley Crescent, a road surrounding the first terminal, was created when the airport’s designer, William Templeton, took a pencil and traced a line around a light bulb held down on the plans. You can still see that bulb-shaped road from the air today.
A party of local dignitaries was taken up in a plane on the day the airport opened to see what it looked like from the air. A well-known city alderman became airsick up there and threw up in the police chief’s hat.
Jack Kendrick, who worked as a commissionaire at the airport in the early 1990s, was born the same day it opened.
In 1931, on August 2, the Province had this startling lead to a story: “One person in every 300 in British Columbia is insane.”
In 1931, on October 10, in the depths of the Depression, West Vancouver sold 4,000 acres of land to a British syndicate for $18.75 an acre. We know that land today as British Pacific Properties.
In 1931 Vancouver’s Charlie Crane became the first blind person to attend a Canadian university when he was accepted at UBC. His achievement becomes remarkable when you learn that he was also deaf.
In Port Coquitlam a Mrs. Struthers donated a chair to serve as the May Queen’s throne. In the more than 75 years since, the only change to the chair has been the trim.
When the Burrard Bridge opened in 1932 Cedar Street disappeared. When the bridge went in, it connected to Cedar Street south of the bridge—the name Burrard was simply extended and Cedar disappeared.
In 1932, on December 8, businessman (and ex-politician) H.H. Stevens walked around Stanley Park on his 54th birthday. He would continue that birthday walk for 40 more years. His last was December 8, 1972 when he was 94.
In 1932 the M.V. Scenic began service, the only floating post office in the British Empire. She will serve to 1968, known as the Burrard Inlet T.P.O. (Travelling Post Office.)
In 1932, thanks to the Depression, construction on the CNR’s huge chateau-style hotel at Georgia and Hornby Streets came to a halt. The building stood uncompleted for five years. (We know it today as the Hotel Vancouver.)
In 1932 a 14-year-old boy named Gerald Hobbis, nicknamed ‘Cap,” traded a bunch of old magazines for his first bicycle. He repaired it in his basement and sold it for $10. Cap will become a hugely successful bicycle retailer.
In 1933, on June 9, Vancouver City Council voted to allow men to go topless on city beaches.
In 1933 Vancouver businessman Dominic Burns died. He had lived in the penthouse of the Vancouver Block on Granville Street since 1912.
In 1934 the first United Airlines flight arrived at Vancouver International Airport. For the first three years of the airport’s life, no airline company flew there.
In 1934 a 20-year-old named Foncie Pulice set up a camera on the sidewalk on Granville Street in downtown Vancouver and began taking pictures of passersby. He would continue doing that for 45 years. It is said Foncie may have taken pictures of more people—millions—than anyone else in the world.
In 1934 the Pacific National Exhibition gave away a home, the first Home Lottery. This was the first time such a significant prize had ever been awarded. The prize—which included a lot in East Vancouver and all the furnishings—was valued at more than $5,000.
In 1935, on January 21, Vancouver got 43 centimetres (17 inches) of snow, still the city’s 24-hour record for snowfall. One result: the roof of the Hastings Park Forum collapsed. There were no injuries.
In 1935, on March 28, architect Francis M. Rattenbury, who gave us the legislative buildings and the Empress Hotel in Victoria, and a provincial courthouse in Vancouver that is now our art gallery, was murdered by his wife’s 19-year-old lover, the family chauffeur.

From 1936 to 1940

In 1936, on April 25, Vancouver retailer Charles Woodward, said: “My prediction is that within 40, at the outside 50, years Vancouver will be the largest city in Canada.” Not yet.
In 1936, on July 4, a visiting cricket team from Hollywood came up to Vancouver to play a local team at Brockton Point. Included in the Hollywood team’s roster: Errol Flynn, Boris Karloff and C. Aubrey Smith.
In 1936 when the visiting Lord Mayor of London helped Vancouver celebrate its 50th birthday he presented the city with the civic mace it uses to this day. Among the other gifts the Lord Mayor brought: “. . . a sprig from a tree in the orchard where a falling apple gave Isaac Newton the idea that led to his theory of gravity.”
In 1936 we were visited by the Governor General, Lord Tweedsmuir. He was better known as writer John Buchan, the author of a best-selling mystery, twice filmed, titled The Thirty-Nine Steps.
In 1936 a group of local women, the “Flying Seven,” conducted the city’s first “fly-over.” In the fly-over the seven women—each of whom had her own plane—alternated their flights, keeping a plane aloft over the city for 24 uninterrupted hours as a demonstration of air defence.
The ceiling on the second floor of the rotunda in Vancouver City Hall, opened in 1936, was covered with gold leaf from several B.C. mines.
The Lost Lagoon fountain in Stanley Park, installed in 1936, was purchased from Chicago, a left-over from that city’s world fair.
The scene in the 1936 hit movie, Rosemarie, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, showing singing Mounties galloping in formation on horseback down a shallow stream, was shot on North Vancouver’s Seymour River. This was the first sound feature filmed here.
In 1936 Notte’s Bon Ton pastry shop, which had opened at West 14th and Granville in 1932, moved to a downtown Granville Street location. It would occupy that location for the next 65 years. (In 2001 they had to move, and may now be found at 3150 West Broadway.)
England-born Alan Young was a big hit from 1961 to 1965 in Mr. Ed, a sitcom about a talking horse. Young started in show biz in 1937 at radio CJOR in Vancouver.
In 1937 the Vancouver Sun was forced out of its 125 West Pender location by a fire. They bought the building across the street and moved in there. They were there for the next 28 years. And, even 48 years after the paper moved out, locals still call that building The Old Sun Tower.
Sliced bread came to Vancouver in 1937.
When BC premier Duff Pattullo opened the bridge named for him in 1937 he said, “It is a thing of beauty.”
In 1937 New York City-born Charles Edward Borden, who grew up in Germany, graduated from the University of California with a PhD in German Literature. He will come to Vancouver, and become the “Grandfather of B.C. archaeology.
The 1937 movie The Great Barrier was an adventure based on the CPR’s crossing of the Rocky Mountains. The locomotive used in the movie that brings the first train in was #374, the actual locomotive that came into Vancouver in 1887, and that is now in the Roundhouse in Yaletown.
On February 19, 1938 a mysterious big bang was heard in Vancouver. It woke thousands of people, yet no cause was ever found.
The Vancouver waterfront’s biggest fire was the one that destroyed Pier ‘D’ in 1938. It totally destroyed the pier. Forty years later one of the nozzles lost in the fire that day was recovered during dredging operations. Resting on a mass of melted brass it was still in the ‘open’ position, showing that whoever was using it had had to drop it and run.
In 1938 19-year-old Annabelle Mundigel was the first person to swim from Vancouver to Bowen Island. Not until years later did she reveal that she had slipped out of her bathing suit shortly after starting, handed it to her mother in a following boat, and swam the rest of the way clad only in lard. Yards from the island, she put the suit back on.
In 1938 a Vancouver Chinatown restaurant, C.K. Chop Suey, had its licence cancelled for employing two white waitresses.
The acclaimed Ballet Russe ballerina Alexandra Denisova, prominent in the late 1930s and the 1940s, was Vancouver’s Patricia Meyers, who joined the company at age 15 in 1938.
The Lions Gate Bridge opened to traffic November 14, 1938, but it was open to pedestrians on the 12th. The first “civilian” to walk across the bridge was R.F. Hearns of Caulfeild, West Vancouver.
The Teahouse at Ferguson Point in Stanley Park, a restaurant today, was built in 1938 as an officers’ mess for a military defense garrison at Ferguson Point.
In 1938 the Ford Motor Company built an assembly plant in Burnaby. During the Second World War it produced military vehicles.
In 1938 the Vancouver Art Gallery board refused to buy an Emily Carr picture, priced at $400, because, says art writer Tony Robertson, “it wasn’t art as they understood art. They were eventually persuaded it was and paid up.”
On September 10, 1939—the same day Canada declared war on Germany—German-speaking citizens pledged their loyalty to Canada at a mass meeting in Vancouver’s Moose Hall.
On October 11, 1939 Vancouver’s first public aquarium opened. Manager was an American named Ivar Haglund, who later moved to Seattle and opened a restaurant called Ivar’s Acres of Clams.
In 1939 a fellow named Kent Ford proposed a sprocket railway up Grouse Mountain. The Second World War started after construction had begun and Ford was unable to get enough steel. He continued to build his railway—with one track of steel, the other of wood. It didn’t work.
Appraised at $75,000 in 1920, Glen Brae, the William Lamont Tate mansion at 1690 Matthews, sold this Depression year for $7,500.
The Canadian premiere of Gone With The Wind was held February 16, 1940 at Vancouver’s Orpheum Theatre. Vivienne Leigh’s daughter happened to be attending a private school here, and was in the audience (unannounced, at her mother’s insistence).
On May 1, 1940 Dal Richards and his 11-piece band were booked to replace Mart Kenney at the Hotel Vancouver’s Panorama Roof ballroom. They were to be there for six weeks. They stayed 25 years. (Dal’s vocalist was an unknown 13-year-old singer named Juliette.)
The RCMP vessel St. Roch left Vancouver secretly June 23, 1940 during the Second World War to go through Canada’s Arctic waters. Her destination: Sydney, Nova Scotia. Because of the ice, the trip took two years and four months! The return trip: 86 days!
Not until June 29, 1940 with the completion of the “Big Bend” Highway—linking Revelstoke and Golden and completing the last link in the western section of the transcontinental highway—was it possible to drive across Canada within Canada.
In the 1940s peat moss was extracted from Delta’s Burns Bog by the U.S. government for the manufacture of magnesium fire bombs.
When the Empress Theatre (at Gore and Hastings) was torn down in 1940, one of the workmen noticed a flash of soft color in the debris. He reached down and picked up a tiny powderpuff. Stitched on it, in faded golden letters, was a single word: Pavlova. The famed dancer had performed at the Empress in 1910.
Much of Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano—counted by many as one of the great books of modern literature—was written when Lowry lived in a squatter’s shack at Dollarton, on the north shore of Burrard Inlet. He moved there in 1940.

From 1941 to 1946

In 1941 there was a semi-professional football team in Vancouver called the Vancouver Grizzlies!
On December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, the electric flame at the Stanley Park war memorial commemorating the Japanese-Canadian contribution during World War I was switched off. It would not be switched on again until 1985.
In Metropolitan Vancouver in 1941 four out of five homes did not have all of the following: a car, a telephone, a radio and a vacuum cleaner.
On August 9, 1942 A.E. McRae’s Hycroft mansion in Shaughnessy, built at a cost of $109,000 in 1909, was sold by the McRaes to a grateful federal government for $1. It was used as a military hospital.
On November 6, 1942 one of the lions (carved in 1908 by John Bruce) in front of the provincial courthouse (now our Art Gallery), the lion on the west side, was damaged by a bomb. The culprit was never caught.
Some of the stained glass windows at St. John’s Shaughnessy Anglican Church at Nanton and Granville Streets in Vancouver are made from shattered fragments of 11th century stained glass from England’s Canterbury Cathedral. The cathedral had been bombed during the Second World War.
Vancouver doctor Masajiro Miyazaki practiced medicine in the city until 1942. Then the Japan-born doctor was interned in the Bridge River-Lillooet area. In 1945 the town of Lillooet petitioned for his release to replace its deceased doctor.
In 1942 Saba’s, the largest retail house in Western Canada specializing in silks, experienced a riot when 500 women stampeded the store to buy 300 pairs of nylon stockings (no one was hurt).
On August 25, 1943 at rededication ceremonies in Stanley Park, the official party was driven by Frank Plant, who had driven Lord and Lady Stanley and Mayor and Mrs. Oppenheimer to the original dedication 55 years earlier! The 1889 ceremony was re-created at the same spot.
From the September 23, 1943 Province: “When Mr. and Mrs. E. R. Valleau purchased a home on Burte Street in Burnaby they proceeded to build a home. That was last February. Just the other day when Mr. J. H. Treaves purchased a lot, he discovered he owned the Valleau home. Arrangements for the transfer are being completed, and Mr. and Mrs. Valleau will soon have title to their home. They had mistakenly built their home on the adjoining piece of property.”
In 1943 Kitsilano Beach was used for rehearsing commando beach assaults.
The clubhouse of the Southlands Riding Club, incorporated in 1943, was once an abandoned fisherman’s net storage hut on Deering Island. The hut was dismantled and carried piece by piece, by members on horseback, to its present site.
On April 23, 1944 Jack Benny did his famous radio show from Vancouver. He brought his regular cast up from New York: Mary Livingstone, Phil Harris, Rochester, Dennis Day and announcer Don Wilson. What made the show particularly notable was that Mary Livingstone (real name Sadie Marks) had grown up in Vancouver.
On April 6, 1945 the town of Coevorden, the Dutch city from which Capt. George Vancouver’s family derived its name, was liberated from Nazi occupation. In a happy coincidence, April 6 is the City of Vancouver’s birthday!
On July 14th, 1945 the Province ran a story about a young blind man named Ivan Knopski who was building his own house at the corner of Main Street and East 29th Avenue. “His neighbors, as they watched him building, didn’t believe he was blind. They were sure he was boasting, that he had some sight left. But when they heard his hammer going on into the night till 11 and 12 and no lanterns around, then they knew he must be telling the truth.” [The house is no longer there.]
On November 6, 1945 Vancouver city council cancelled an order that had established separate swimming days at Crystal Pool for non-white people. The pool, the Province reported, “is now open to everyone, all the time, regardless of race, creed, or colour.”
Mayor L.D. Taylor, who died in 1946, was once briefly married to two women at the same time. [See the Daniel Francis book, L.D. Taylor and the Rise of Vancouver for details.]
On July 13, 1946 Field Marshal Viscount Alexander of Tunis, Canada’s new Governor General, became the only white man in the history of the Pacific coast to become, with full tribal rites, a native chief. While he was here, Alexander received a Kwakiutl thunderbird headdress and ceremonial blanket, and became Chief Nakupunkim.
When the parking meter came to Vancouver in 1946 the fee was 5 cents for one hour’s parking.

From 1947 to 1954

On February 1, 1947 Bob Smith made his debut as host of the CBC radio show Hot Air. Virtually all the jazz recordings Bob played were from his own collection. He would host Hot Air out of the CBC’s Vancouver studios for 35 years. Hot Air—the host today is Paul Grant—is still going, Canada’s longest-running radio program.
On May 10, 1947 Vancouver school children circulated a petition calling for an end to wartime taxes on candy. In response, the price of chocolate bars was lowered from eight cents to seven cents
Not strictly local, but irresistible. In August, 1947 a Mayne Island woman cut open a fish and found a photograph of “a beautiful woman” in the fish’s belly.
On November 14, 1947 Vancouver’s William Munavish, safecracker, became the first Canadian to be declared an habitual criminal.
In 1947, a nurse named Elizabeth Clarke, at the Vancouver Hospital for Crippled Children, loved to read stories and poems to her little charges. One young boy was excited at seeing a sparrow on the windowsill by his bed, and that inspired Ms. Clarke to write the poem Bluebird on Your Windowsill. She later set it to music and it became a huge hit, recorded by the Rhythm Pals, Doris Day, Bing Crosby and many others. Ms. Clarke donated all the proceeds to the hospital.
On September 20, 1948 singer Bing Crosby came to Vancouver to record his radio show. Before the show Crosby was made a full-blooded Indian ‘Chief.’ The Squamish tribe made him an honorary member with the title ‘Chief Thunder Voice.’
At one 1948 performance at TUTS (Theatre Under The Stars) singer Karl Norman was one of the stars of the operetta Naughty Marietta. The power failed during one of his songs! “The orchestra kept playing,” Karl says, “and I kept singing, and people from the audience lined up their cars at the back of Malkin Bowl and lit the performance with their headlights.”
In 1948 60,000 daffodil bulbs were planted along Stanley Park Causeway, a gift to the city from the Netherlands to thank Canadian soldiers for helping to liberate their country from the Nazis.
In 1948 a ‘new disc jockey’ contest was launched in Vancouver and judged by, among others, Frank Sinatra. Jennie Wong won, and began a half-hour Saturday afternoon program called Jennie’s Juke Joint on CKMO. Besides being the first Chinese-Canadian disc jockey, she was also the first female.
On August 15, 1949 radio’s Jack Cullen, who was switching stations, did his last show at CKMO and his first show at CKNW at the same time. He had taped his ’MO show earlier, did his ’NW show live.
On August 21, 1949 the biggest quake in BC’s recorded history, 8.1 on the Richter scale, occurred off the Queen Charlotte Islands. Its major force was felt to the uninhabited west of the Queen Charlotte Islands and damage was minimal. The Province reported on Page One that a clock had stopped in the home of Mrs. Laurie Sanders, Imperial Street in Burnaby.
On November 27, 1949 the Capilano River, swollen by a violent rainstorm, swept away a large section of Marine Drive, the only road link at the time to West Vancouver. Washed away as well was part of the bridge over the Capilano . . . West Vancouver would be cut off for 10 days!
On August 29, 1950 workers from a company called Eccles-Rand Limited checked out Vancouver’s first atomic bomb shelter, which their firm had built in an unidentified Shaughnessy backyard.
In January 1952 famed singer Paul Robeson, en route to a concert in Vancouver, was stopped by US border officials at Blaine. He was denied entry to Canada on political grounds. Local unions organized a free outdoor concert starring Robeson at the Peace Arch, and it attracted 25,000 people on the Canadian side, 5,000 on the U.S. side.
A 1952 Hollywood movie titled Hurricane Smith starred two Vancouver-born actors, Yvonne De Carlo and John Ireland.
In 1952 Vancouver city council approved the naming of several city streets after famous golf courses. That gave us Seigniory, Leaside, Uplands, Bonnacord, Scarboro, Bonnyvale, Brigadoon and Bobolink.
On January 6, 1953 Vancouver’s longest wet spell began. It ended 29 days later. There had been recorded rain on every one of those 29 days.
On January 16, 1953 police raided the Avon Theatre on Hastings Street, presenting Erskine Caldwell’s play Tobacco Road, and arrested the cast on charges of an indecent performance.
On June 3, 1953 the first broadcast of the brand-new TV station KVOS, in Bellingham, Washington, was a kinescope of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II the day before. For the interesting story of how the station got the kinescope, see our 1953 chronology.
On July 9, 1953 the Davis Cup tournament, the “world championship” of tennis opened at the Vancouver Lawn and Tennis Club. The club was chosen because the Japanese team insisted on playing on grass courts, and none were available in the U.S.
On September 8, 1953 Vancouver impresario Lily Laverock sent a brief (14 line) bio to the papers. “It occurred to me that I might have some small obituary notice, and to have it correct, perhaps you could file this away for future use. Best thanks to all, L.J. Laverock.” She died 16 years later: December 2, 1969.
On October 12, 1953 Vancouver’s Frank Ogden—better known these days as Dr. Tomorrow—established the Canadian light-plane altitude record by flying a Mooney M-18 Scotsman to an altitude of 19,400 feet. With a conventional internal combustion engine, he set this “impossible” record by flying up until he ran out of gas and then gliding back. “It took place,” Ogden once elaborated, “out of the Toronto Island Airport. The record has never been broken. Mainly, I suspect because most pilots are sensible enough to want 20 to 30 gallons of gas left in the tanks to get back. I flew up until I ran out of gas and glided back to the same airport.”
On December 2, 1953 the Province reported (on the front page): “Bill Stone, 525 East Keith Road, North Vancouver, got his perfect cribbage hand the hard way Tuesday night. Playing with neighbor Bob MacKay, Stone had a king, pair of aces and a four in his hand as well as two fives. So he tossed the fives into his crib. MacKay had 6-7-8-8 and a five and a jack of spades. He threw the five and jack into the crib, the five of spades was cut and thus Stone had his perfect 29 hand.”
On February 12, 1954 the first “civilian” to drive over the brand new Granville Street Bridge was the same woman who was first to drive over the second bridge when it was new in 1909. She had been widowed in between the two openings, and so had a different name . . . but both times she was at the wheel of a brand-new Cadillac!
On July 21, 1954, with landscaping on the largest quarry at the future Queen Elizabeth Park completed., Mayor Fred Hume buried a time capsule beneath Centuries Rock in the park. It is to be opened in 2054.
On August 1, 1954 cabbie Dave King, driving for B.C. Radio Cabs, was taking a young woman to West Vancouver. When the cab slowed in traffic on the Lions Gate Bridge, she jumped out and, to King’s horror, began climbing the railing. He raced over, dragged her to safety, shoved her in the car, and raced back to her West End address. The would-be suicide paid her fare, he told police later that day, and even tipped him 50 cents.
In 1954 the stuffed form of the late “No Drone, No. 5H” was presented by the Whiting family to the Langley Museum. “No Drone”was a hen from the Whiting farm in Surrey, who had set a world record in 1930 for the number of eggs laid in that one year: 357.

From 1955 to 1960

On May 10, 1955 Tommy Burns died in Vancouver at 74. He was the only Canadian to have been world heavyweight boxing champion. Four people attended his burial: a boxing fan and his wife and two grave diggers.
In December 1955 disgraced ex-police chief Walter Mulligan left Vancouver for the USA, while the commission of inquiry into his activities was still going on. He got a job as a limousine-bus dispatcher at Los Angeles airport.
Writes Tom Hawthorn: “In 1955, the Rev. E.C. Pappert flipped through a copy of the UBC student newspaper Ubyssey before pronouncing it ‘the vilest rag you can imagine.’ Of course, the student staff of the offending journal merrily adopted the clergyman’s slur as a motto. To this day, it is used as a recruitment come-on.”
October 11, 1957 Earlier this year Anglican priest Stanley Higgs had told the newspapers that general manager Cedric Tallis of the Vancouver Mounties baseball club would be in contempt of law if he pursued Sunday ball games. Sure enough, the Mounties were found guilty today and fined for playing baseball on Sunday. (On April 28, 1958 the Supreme Court of Canada would uphold B.C.’s approval of a Vancouver City Charter bylaw amendment permitting Sunday sports.)
In 1957 numbered streets came to Surrey, consecutively upward from the 49th parallel. There is a “0” (Zero) Avenue in Surrey, right on the US border. Step off into the bush on the south side of O Avenue and you’re in Washington State.
In 1957 the Quilchena Golf Course in Vancouver was opened to provide a place for Jewish golfers to play. They had been denied entry to other clubs.
On January 1, 1958 David Jones Greenlees was born in Richmond at 1:01 a.m., the city’s first baby of the year. To mark the event the city named Greenlees Street.
On December 22, 1958 a French adventurer completed a swim of the Fraser River from Prince George to New Westminster’s Pattullo Bridge. (NOTE: in December!)
In 1958 a man named Fred Steiner sold his Toronto radio store and moved to Vancouver. He opened a shop here, and called it A&B Sound. Why A&B? A&A was taken. True story.
On February 5, 1959 a girl named Jennifer Granholm was born in Vancouver. Today, she’s the Governor of Michigan.
On May 15, 1959 Vancouver’s Harry Jerome broke the world record for the 220-yard dash. The record had been set 31 years earlier by Percy Williams, also of Vancouver.
On July 15, 1959 the Deas Island Tunnel (today the George Massey Tunnel) was officially opened. When you drive through the tunnel under the Fraser River you’re driving through the lowest point on a public road in Canada. The roadbed is 20 metres below sea level.
At the official opening of the tunnel, by Queen Elizabeth II and BC premier W.A.C. Bennett, an ancient and curious ceremony occurred: the premier handed the Queen a costly pair of silver scissors, and she gave him a dime for them. The coin-for-scissors trade is an old British custom, which holds that if the giver of a cutting implement does not receive a coin in return, the friendship between the giver and the receiver will be cut.
In 1959 the Lady Alexandra, built in 1924, became a floating restaurant in Coal Harbour.
In 1959 William Dale, director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, announced that there were only two or three works of art worth the name in the gallery’s permanent collection. William Jarvis, a former National Gallery director, called the VAG’s permanent collection, excepting Emily Carr, “pitiful.”
On January 29, 1960 Donna Yee was named Miss Chinatown in the first beauty contest ever held in a Canadian Chinese community.
On May 19, 1960 a statue of Lord Stanley, after whom Stanley Park was named, was unveiled by Governor General Georges Vanier in the park . . . and thereby hangs a tale. On October 19, 1889 a letter was written (we’re not sure by whom) promising a suitable monument to commemorate the naming and dedication by Governor General Lord Stanley of Stanley Park. The city archivist, J.S. Matthews, discovered that letter in 1950, more than 60 years after it was written, and realized the promise had not been fulfilled. So he began a fund-raising campaign. It took another 10 years, but finally he raised enough money to commission the work.
On July 3, 1960 Vancouver’s first five-alarm fire, largest in the history of the VFD, occurred when fire destroyed the B.C. Forest Products plant and lumber storage facility on the south shore of False Creek. The fire covered an area equal in size to four city blocks and took many hours to put out. Every available firefighter and piece of equipment was called out, including both fire boats. Twelve firefighters were injured.
In 1960 Vancouver’s Great Northern Way was named in honor of the railway company that donated much of the land the street is on.
In 1960, during construction of the Trans-Canada Highway through the Fraser Valley, a man named Charlie Perkins stood guard over his ivy-covered fir tree, directly in the path of the new road. He had dedicated the tree to fallen comrades in World War I, and the public outcry over the possible destruction of the tree resulted in the engineers curving the road around it. That may be a unique circumstance in the construction of a national highway. You can see that curve on the Trans-Canada to this day.
In 1960 a study showed that the average person in the Vancouver area was eating 23 dozen eggs (276) a year. That has dropped considerably since then.
In 1960 the figurehead of the Empress of Japan (a ship that sailed into Vancouver harbor many times between 1891 and 1922) was rescued from its Stanley Park location, where it had been exposed to the elements for decades, and given to the Maritime Museum for safekeeping and restoration. It is now on display in the Museum. It is a much more impressive work than the fibreglass reproduction now in the Park.

From 1961 to 1965

On October, 1961 the RCMP raided Vancouver bookstores and the main library to seize copies of Henry Miller’s novel Tropic of Cancer. Today, you can buy Miller’s book at any bookstore.
By 1961 the metropolitan Vancouver population had climbed to more than 800,000, double the figure of 20 years earlier, and pushing Vancouver’s share of the population down to 46 per cent. For the first time there were more people outside the city proper than in.
Writer Sean Rossiter says 1961 was an architectural turning point for Vancouver. “The history of Vancouver architecture,” he wrote in The Greater Vancouver Book, “consists of everything before Arthur Erickson, and everything since.”
On May 30, 1962 there was a near riot at the Forum as Prime Minister John Diefenbaker addressed a rowdy crowd at an election rally. A number of Sons of Freedom Doukhobor women in the audience disrobed as a sign of protest against government policies toward the Doukhobors.
On July 30, 1962 the 7,821-kilometre-long Trans-Canada Highway, the longest national highway in the world, was opened to traffic at Rogers Pass in the Rockies. It had taken 12 years to build, and more than 3,000 km were still to be paved, but it was now possible to drive right across Canada on one highway . . . 95 years after Confederation.
On December 9, 1962 Bill Rathie was elected mayor of Vancouver, the first to have been born in the city . . . 76 years after incorporation.
In 1962 attendance at the PNE passed the one million mark for the first time. It has rarely dropped below that since.
In 1962 the Abbotsford International Air Show was born. Forty enthusiastic members of the Abbotsford Flying Club passed the hat and came up with $700 to put on the first one. Since then the show has become one of the world’s premium flying and aviation-technology extravaganzas.
On January 2, 1963 the Ubyssey, the student newspaper at UBC, was named the best college newspaper in Canada. In 1955 a local minister had denounced it as the “vilest rag” you can imagine.
In May of 1963 former Vancouver police chief Walter Mulligan, forced out of his job in 1956 through scandal, returned to Canada from the USA. He and his wife Violet retired to Oak Bay, a Victoria suburb.
In 1963 pollution coming down the Nicomekl and Serpentine Rivers put an end to oyster farming at Crescent Beach, which had flourished for decades.
In June of 1964 the Port Mann Bridge was just about to be opened. The first “civilian” to drive across the bridge was CKNW reporter Marke Raines—it was an unauthorized crossing, so he put the pedal to the metal and drove across at teeth-clenching speed.
On August 22, 1964 the Beatles hit Vancouver. There had been a delay at Customs, and at a press conference later a reporter asked the boys why it had happened. John Lennon replied: “We had to be deloused.”
In 1964 Vancouver’s Mayor Bill Rathie and Park Board Chairman George Wainborn drove the last spike in the Stanley Park miniature railway.
In 1964 the Vancouver Public Aquarium captured the first killer whale ever to be studied alive in captivity. He (yes, he) became known as “Moby Doll.” They originally thought he was a female.
In 1964 the New Westminster Museum was opened. One of its most interesting holdings is the material on New Westminster’s annual Mayday celebrations, an unbroken tradition since 1870. Check out more than 100 photographs of each year’s May Queen.
On February 15, 1965 the new Canadian flag was hoisted at 6 a.m. at Vancouver city hall. Because of the time differential, this was the first appearance of the flag in Canada after its official proclamation.
On August 16, 1965 the largest crowd in B.C. racing history turned out to watch as jockey Johnny Longden rode his 6,000th winner (Prince Scorpion) at Exhibition Park.
In 1965 politician Grace McInnis became the first woman to be a British Columbia Member of Parliament. (She continued a tradition of distinguished public service: her father, J.S. Woodsworth, was the founder of the CCF, forerunner of the NDP.)
By 1965 the funky old building at Main Street and East 15th Avenue in Vancouver, originally Postal Station C, later a federal Department of Agriculture office block, had been empty for three years. A special investigation branch of the RCMP moved in this year. The Mounties would be there until 1976. (Today, it’s Heritage Hall.)
In 1965 Whistler Resort was born. It had originally been called London Mountain, but the name was changed to Whistler, writes Constance Brissenden, “inspired by the whistler marmot that frequents its rocky outcrops.”
In 1965 the tunnel at Vancouver’s main Post Office, built to carry mail to the CPR station, was closed permanently for that purpose, having proved impractical. It will be used for storage and creepy movie scenes.
In 1965 the eight-storey Henry Angus building—home to the Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration, and known as UBC’s first “skyscraper”—opened. It was the first fully air-conditioned building on the university’s campus.
In 1965 Vancouver built its first curb ramps for wheelchair users. (Today, virtually all the sidewalks in the downtown core have sloping ramps, called curb cuts, for easy access.)
In 1965 the Great Northern Railway station, next door to the CN terminal and unused since 1962, was demolished. Using the CN station, the American railway would continue to operate a Vancouver-Seattle train service for 15 years.