INSIGHTS

Friday, September 27, 1991 - North Shore News - 7
AN HE SC SE ED

JEST COLUMNIST ©

Sate

The Inn of the Smiling Crab

LIVING IN Lynn Valley means there’s a definite lack of
local entertainment, like a neighborhood pub you can walk

to.

No one seems to know why.
Ivs as if the vast population with
its healthy income, stacked into
the steep, misty hillsides, is serv-
ing out a penance for things that
went before.

At least that’s my theory. All
things considered, it makes sense.

Lynn Valley, on the map, orig-
inated as a kind of bump on the
road to the tall Douglas Firs
growing in Lynn Canyon.

These were uniquely mutated —
a big grove of the straightest,
tallest trees to be found anywhere
in the British Empire, or in the
world for that matter. They sup-
plied the great fleets of the Royal
Navy with tali masts.

The Valley slumbered on. By
the late 1950s the only glimmer of
light through the gloomy, rain-
shrouded pines was the Cedar V
Theatre. It was shaped like a
giant, gunmetal Quonset hut and
showed what were possibly third

By Syd Stone
Contributing Writer

or fourth run movies of the day.

But amazingly, in a town as big
as North Vancouver was even
back then, this singular place held
the movie monopoly. Thus it at-
tracted a crowd from outlying
districts.

Conceivably all this fraritic, un-
supervised, hormonally-charged
youth activity caused the area to
become biologically radioactive,
which accounts for the vast hive
of teens around the Lynn Valley
7-Eleven today.

Perhaps the
tested.

It's also my theory that this
swarming confluence around the
Cedar V accounts for the forma-
tion of the Lynn Valley Smiling
Crab Society (LVSCS)
primordial youth gang dedicated

soil should be

— it

YOU SAID IT!

WITH THE news of an upcoming
election fresn out, the North Shore
News telephone survey crew went to
work polling locai residents with two

election questions.

We asked 406 peopie if they intend
to vote in the upcoming provincial
election. Over 370 responded ‘‘yes"
(92.1%), while only 17 responded
“*no" (4.2%). An additional 15 did not
know if they would vote and 14

refused to answer.

Respondents were also asked which
party they would vote for. The
greatest response at this point in the
voting game was ‘“‘don't know” at
39.6%. And 35% showed sensitivity
to the question by answering in so

many words,
business.”

‘‘None of your

Socreds were out front with 13.6%
with Horseshoe Bay and British
Properties areas showing the most
enthusiasm for the party. The NDP
was not far behitid with a 9.6% vote
of confidence. Liberals ranked 1.9%
and the Greens netted a .3% vote.

to protecting the Valley.

They had their own logo. They
made it a point of honor to be
from the Valley, when other,
more normal people who lived
there at the time always said they
were from somewhere else.

However, their members were
not normal people. They were
tough and crazy. They had names
like Smub, Yahoo, Scooper and
Custom,

Smub earned his name from ex-
tinguishing a cigarette on the
forehead of a Burnaby resident
who'd come with company to
question LVSCS authority,  ig-
niting a furious battle. At the
same time talented and intelligent
artisis, musicians, poets and the
like were tolerated as associate
members.

There were mounting casualties.
Over time, some succumbed to
hard drugs and spent time in jail.
or died.

One witness recounts the terri-
fying image of Chuckie, a tiny,
frail, asthmatic licutenant, riding
atop the shoulders of a six-foot-

seven giant, waving his fist and
giving the assembled LVSCS a
motivational speech.

He later rose up in the ranks of
the younger Ant Hill Mob. He,
too, died, tragically and suddenly,
of an asthma attack. The grief
and outrage of combined alumni
was such that the Coach House
motor inn had to be renovated
afterward.

When I moved up to Lynn
Valley as a member of a local
band, | met many of these people
before they started dropping like
flies, or drifting off.

One thing always impressed me.
They were all terrifically bright.
Yet cach one was simultaneously
confounded by his own primal,
inexhaustible urgings.

They were all cursed with the
same feral genius. Yet, as the
self-appointed guardians of early
Lynn Valley, they had nowhere
worthwhile to direct it,

AL one point I remember think-
ing it was almost as if, on some
rain-shrouded night in the early
1950s, an alien spacecraft had

slowly passed over Lynn Valley
and bathed the darkened houses in
some experimental, mutating ray.
It made the Lynn Valley Smiling
Crab Society wild and brilliant.
And extinct.

The Valley sleeps on, brooding
and poetic. It’s still only a mail
amid the trees and the sound of
the buses as they hiss down the
wet road late at night.

There are currently no applica-
tions under consideration by the
district for a Lynn Valley
neighborhood pub.

Puzzled officials say they can’t
quite understand it, citing only the
possible difficulty of obtaining
land in this rambling area. {t’s as
if responsible businessmen balk at
extending limited entertainment
privileges to a population chat
lives down the legend of being far
too bright and self-destructive for
its own good, or anyone else's.

One imagines, like a Stephen
King novel, a building rearing up
out of the ground one night, its
sign emblazoned, The Inn of the
Smiling Crab...

PSAC asking government to respect rights

or fess than 3%. A raise of 3%,
for example, in the first year is
insignificant. If the government
truly wanted to cut spending and
clean up the economy then it

Dear Editor:

Re: Brian Swarbrick,
“Unionism a suspect activity in
the 1990s.””

While I respect Mr. Swarbrick’s
right to express his opinion, I take
strong exception to his comments
regarding civil servants and the
Public Service Alliance of Canada
(PSAC).

The membership of the PSAC
are quite simply asking for the
government to respect our rights
to free collective bargaining and
to stop breaking their own laws.

Mr. Swarbrick seems to have
missed the point in this dispute.
We are not on strike for a specific
wage or other non-monetary de-
mands in our contract. We are on
strike because our employer, the
federal government, absolutcly
refuses to discuss any issues other
than their position of a wage
freeze for three years of 0%, 3%

and 3%.

We quite simply want the fed-
eral government to come back to
the table and negotiaie.

Our membership does not want
to be on strike. We are however,
being forced to strike by a com-
pletely unreasonable employer,
who ultimately has the legislative
authority to put us back to work
with absolutely nothing.

| am also affronted by Mr.
Swarbrick’s comments regarding
civil servants, who he says are in-
expressibly lazy, downright stupid
and practically impossible to fire.

As a columnist he has a respon-
sibility to the readers of your
paper and ! believe he has abro-
gated that responsibility by
spreading lies and inaccurate
beliefs about public servants.
When Mr. Swarbrick equates civil
servants with laziness and stupidi-
ty, he fails to consider that civil

servants are a microcosm of ordi-
nary Canadians who have fami-
lies, homes with mortgages, go to
church and take the occasional!
vacation if they can afford to do

so.

Mr. Swarbrick considers civil
servants to be the most sclf-in-
dulgent element of the Canadian
labor force and should tighten
their belts. Members of the PSAC
have been tightening their belts
since 1980 when the infamous
Liberal 6 & 5 legislation rolled
salaries back for the largest of our
groups, clerical support staff,
which, by the way, is also our
largest female dominant group.

The rest of Canada has not
followed.

Since 1984, these people have
consistently settled for less than
inflation. A clerical worker at the
third level is currently receiving
$25,481 per annum before deduc-

tions. Deductions include Income
Tax, Medical, Pension (6%), Pen-
sion Indexing (1%), CPP, UIC,
Disability insurance, Death
Benefit and Union Dues. That
leaves a take-home pay of approx-
imately $600 bi-weckly.

A final consideration for Mr.
Swarbrick to ponder is that it is
not the membership of the PSAC
who set the policies and regula-
tions of how this government
operates. We merely do the bid-
ding of senior managers, bureau-
crats and politicians who create
those policies and regulations.
There are 20 large volumes cover-
ing every conceivable aspect of
how the Federal Public Service
operates (personnel management
manuals).

The strike is not about money.
ft is about rights. Of the total
federal budget ($157 billion), the
PSAC wage package is $5 billion,

would look inward to its own
departments.

The current legislation does not
provide for whistle-blowing by
federal public servants; if we do
we can be fired. If we, as public
servants, did not have to fear for
our jobs and could express our
concerns about inefficiencies that
currently take place under this
administration, significant reduc-
tions in federal spending would
occur through resulting public
pressure and cries for accountabil-
ity from our politicians and senior
bureaucrats,

Dave Walker
Area Coordinator,
North/West Vancouver & Grain

Elevators