North Shore

Publisher Peter Speck recalls childhood days and stomping grounds

SILVER SPECKULATIONS

. WHEN I was about 10 years
of age my parents bought a

house in Norgete Park, on

Cottonwood Crescent.

We moved there from
Dundarave, where they had rented a
house on the waterfront for many
years, I remember that the house
that we lived in had come up for
sale: the landlord, Dr. Schiller,
wanted $4,900 for it.

My father wanted to buy it, but
my mother was adamant that she
wanted a new house. I heard them
argue late into the night: “And,
Alan,” [heard her say, “Everyone
knows that you get rheumatism if
you live too close to the sea!”

She won the argument. They
paid $7,800 for a brand-new house
in Norgate Park, just south of
Marine Drive and Tatlow, and we
moved.

It was culture shock of a major
magnitude for me. In retrospect, a
lot of the newcomers to the North
Shore come from much further than
another place on the North Shore,
and have to learn a new language
and new customs to boot.

But to me the move was very

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Porcelain Lid.

traumatic —~ more so since I was
still trying to make the transition
from being a litde French-Canadian
boy from Montreal to being a West
Van Anglo.

I felt like [ was being transplant-
ed from West Vancouver against
my will and my earnest pleadings.
West Van was my life. It was
where I knew people. where [ had
gone to school, where [ knew the
bus drivers, and where my parents
breakfasted in a glassed-in veran-
dah overlooking
Burrard Inlet, and
where sunlight off the
sea dappled the ceiling
while [ ate the top off
my father’s soft-
boiled egg.

Why, I was so
local that I even got
the occasional ride to
Pauline Johnson
school from Charlie
Hailstone, the West
Van police chief of
the time, That was a big deal for a
small boy from Montreal.

Norgate Park, well, it was raw in
1950.

Norman Hullah built ali 500
houses on a piece of reclaimed land
that had been cleared as a possible
airstrip during the war. The land
was comprised of river boulders,
gravel and sand, and the only green
to be seen were thousands of smal!
alders. The place was flatter than a
plate. Still is.

Most people who came to
Norgate Park — and they came
almost all at once —- were from
someplace else, and it took awhile
for us kids from everywhere to coa-
lesce. We had no neighborhood, if
you know what I mean. I missed
West Vancouver and could not
understand why my parents had
moved.

To further my misery, I was a
timid child and my new lot was
pretty scary. To the wesi of Norgate
Park was the Indian Reserve. In
those days it was a tough, danger-

64

ous place. Ehad to go up the
Chicken Walk to Capilano School,
as did many of the Indian kids, but
when it came to playing together
we tended to only do so in the no-
man’s land that divided the Reserve
and Norgate Park. with the odd
small foray one way or the other.

However, that deesn’t mean we
never got into trouble. | remember
one day when { ended up in the cop
shop with Peter and Kenny Baker
and some other kids from both

The move was very traumatic —
More so since I was still trying to make
the transition from being a little
French-Canadian boy from Montreal

to being a West Van Anglo. 99

neighborhoods after we trashed an
old truck that sat in a white saw-
dust-filled building that stood
behind the old Riverside Iron shop
(in case that confuses you, it’s
where Color- Your-World sits now).
We must have been 1! or 12 then.

To the east of us, things were
even more dangerous. The Wartime
Houses began at Pemberton
Avenue. When I was a kid, you
didn’t mess around with people
who lived in the Wartime Houses.

That district, several hundred
almost identical houses. was built
as quick accommodation for the
thousands of shipyard workers who
came from all over to work at
Burrard Drydock during the heyday
of shipbuilding that marked the
Second World War.

Most of the homes were con-
structed in the early 1940s. Tiny
two-, three- and four-room homes,
cheaply built and crowded together,
many heated by oil stoves in the
kitchen. They extended from
Pemberton Avenue east to Lower

Lower Level, Park Royal South 926-9891

ories

Feli Avenue, and trom the boom
ofthe sand hills near (7th almost
all the way south to the water.

That was a tougher place than
the reserve. Many of the workers
were itinerants, who had moved
around a Jot. There was a great deal
of drinking and crime.

In many of the lite boxes both
parents worked — that is, when
there were (wo parents — and
many of the kids spent their time on
the street. Most of them had also
come from other places,
but many had lived in
the Houses for a few
years and they had had
much more time to form
alliances.

Tough guys like
Buster Moberg came
from there. It was the
day of zoot suits and
bicycle chains, ip
knives and hot rods,
gang rumbles, lemon
gin and the Capilano
Restaurant, outside of which Ray
Thibeault ended his short tife by
driving into a telephone pole, and
across from which you could buy
ice-picks for 25 cents from an ice-
vending machine. They were one of
the favorite murder weapons of the
day.

But I digress. That restaurant, at
Marine and Lloyd, was not the
famous Tomahawk Grill, the cur-
rent incarnation. In those days it
was a semi-drive-in on Marine
Drive at Phillip, nestled between

trees, It has since been moved just
south on Phillip, and is run by
Chuck “amberlain, son of the
founder, and it is still a famous
restaurant.

The Wartime Houses were a
really frightening neighborhood, at
least to me. But little by little. a
fuzziness developed around the
edges.

Safeway’s Bob Smith lived in
the Houses, but he also went to
Capilano School, and he lived right
on Pemberton Avenue, so I could
visit him without being too scared.

Together we met Mrs. Simpson,
a red-head who lived in the 1200
block of Pemberton Avenue, in a
small concrete block house. She
owned a horse, which we were only
too happy to look after by taking it
down to the sult flats at the foot of
Pemberton to graze. We also man-
aged a ride every now and then (if
we got lucky).

She was kind of pretty (the red
head, not the horse), and sort of
lonely, and she let us know that sheva
knew that her horse wasn’t the only
thing about her that interested us
teenage boys. It seemed like a big
deal at the time.

So the Norgate kids were the
newest of the new kids, and fear
was normal when we rode our bikes
too far abroad. But life went on and
we had our good days, too. There
was a slough between Norgate and

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